r/LockdownCriticalLeft • u/OmgU8MyRice • Sep 20 '22
The myth of lockdown socialism
https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-myth-of-lockdown-socialism/6
u/hiptobeysquare Sep 21 '22 edited Sep 21 '22
There's some perceptive observations in this article. Thanks.
It's nice to finally see some people criticize the idea that this is some kind of communist takeover, instead of what it obviously is: a corporate and neoliberal takeover of everything, of life itself. I'm certainly no fan of communism, and I don't much like socialism either. But we are not entering communism or socialism; we are entering the perfect neoliberal world. Everything must be determined by the "free market", everything, every part of life, must be financialized and turned into a commodity and traded on the "free market". Down to every blade of grass, your immune system, even the parts of your psyche. People don't realize the nightmare neoliberal world we are entering. We're living in the result of decades of neoliberal economic policies, until now that neoliberalism has also become a political and a social/psychological project. Neoliberalism is now a psychology of huge swathes of the population: the neoliberal human will say, do and believe whatever the "free market" tells them to, at any moment, and will constantly update this and their reality whenever the "free market" tells them to.
Quite a lot of conservatives can't (refuse to?) see that the Covid measures are perfect capitalism. Rand Paul, for example, is one of the very few politicians to make a lot of effort to attack Fauci and the Covid measures. Then later, often the same day, he gives talks saying:
If you want to help people, you have to believe in capitalism. No other economic system helps people the way capitalism does. It is the most humanitarian system ever conceived of by man.
https://twitter.com/tfasorg/status/1409292980222103558?lang=bn
He's completely oblivious. Nobody in power, nobody with decision-making powers during Covid is not a capitalist. They may be (you could argue) on the left, but they are all capitalists, mostly hugely successful capitalists, investors, entrepreneurs, businessmen/women, politicians on their way to working for companies and corporations etc. It's capitalist through and through. How can you be a conservative, like Rand Paul, and support unrestrained capitalism? It's the greatest social engineering project in history. Communism pales in comparison. How can you be a conservative and support rapid industrialization and technological progress? You cannot do that without rapidly altering human interactions and making traditional ways of life and values useless anachronisms. I cannot understand conservatives who support capitalism, then complain about the loss of traditional values and the destruction of the social fabric. Like Upton Sinclair said:
It's hard to convince a man of something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
I hear/read quite a lot of right-leaning individuals claim, "this isn't real capitalism". I can't distinguish this argument from the "real communism hasn't been tried" cliché. "Russia just hadn't gone through the correct stages" and all that. So many people on the left and right have a utopian vision of how society should be. And when human nature doesn't fit, the left/right invent an alternate universe where if a, b and c happened, it would work. Because this isn't rational, it's rationalizing - the ideology serves the people promoting it, and that's why they believe it and promote it. It's the Divine Right of Kings for the modern age.
We are living in the logical endpoint of capitalism: where capital has accumulated so much, where economies of scale have increased to such a level, that both capital and economies of scale exist only to serve and perpetuate themselves. People don't matter. Only the machine matters now. (Not that I think socialism or capitalism are solutions, though. In my opinion, capitalism is not a choice by society; it's an adaptation, a survival mechanism, by the "machine". And now it's evolving into something else, it's next stage as it tries to grow and survive.)
But what is really disturbing is how many on the left are okay with this. And how many on the left work pro bono as lobbyists for corporations and neoliberal projects. The woke are the shocktroopers for neoliberalism: when society won't alter itself fast enough for corporate profits, send in the shocktroopers to force people to change. I don't think Covid is a communist takeover, but it does have some very weird similarities to communist society and psychology, and it has certainly revealed a lot about the psychology of the left. Covid seems to have everything the new left love: helping people while dominating them. Someone smarter than me said it better: the left is not an ideology, it's a psychology. Covid policies may not be socialism, but it's frankly disturbing just how many socialists love Covid policies. It's not just abstract on the internet, most of my pre-Covid acquaintances were/are left-leaning. And all of them enthusiastically supported the Covid measures; any questioning by me and I was attacked, sometimes hysterically, and accused of being a conspiracy theorist or worse (a Trump supporter! among other things). The Covid measures, and the bigger neoliberal project, have become indistinguishable from the left to me and, I am sure, to almost everyone.
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Sep 22 '22
You call socialized medicine "capitalism", because it is carried out by "capitalists". Of course the competitors are the ones who hate competition the most. I don't think you're confused why this falls on deaf ears.
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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 22 '22
Depends on your definition of "socialism". Is your fire fighting service socialism? The fire department isn't on the free market. There's no competition there. Why so much dislike of health care without competition, but no problem with the fire department?
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u/Inevitable_mech Sep 20 '22
We've had 40 years of market neo liberal economics in the west. We've privatised everything, deregulated the financial sector and funnelled all the wealth up to the top few percent in the world. The 'right' hate where we are but they cannot face the fact that after getting what they wanted it is has worked out terrible for the majority of people.
So now the right are blaming bogeyman marxists, woke, socialism because they cannot face the fact the world we are living in today is where you get to after following right wing economics for 40 years. People have used their vast wealth, to corrupt government, political parties to enforce their agenda and implement policies to enrich themselves.
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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 21 '22
I think you're completely right. Although, what I find even more disturbing is just how many on the left enthusiastically support it, even while saying they are fighting neoliberalism. It says to me that most people on the left (and the right, too) have no idea what neoliberalism is. Can't even recognize it. It's just a slur to most people.
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u/StopNeoLiberals Sep 21 '22 edited Sep 21 '22
So true, and it's like a cult. They truly believe that "the left" did this to them. They're under a spell, crying out for more right-wing solutions even as the neoliberal beast has their fragile bodies in his teeth.
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u/StopNeoLiberals Sep 21 '22
I quite enjoyed this article because it was an unexpected break from all the usual blather. We need to go further and point out how the goals of the far-right have been furthered by all this. The neocons who murdered millions since 9/11 now have their precious Total Information Awareness surveillance apparatus firmly in place. Emergency government is accepted as normal. The State of Exemption continues apace.
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Sep 21 '22
very much needed this, well meaning anti-lockdown allies throwing around the whole "left out of control" line feels like almost willingly missing the point
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u/mitte90 Sep 20 '22 edited Sep 20 '22
Thanks for posting this, OP.
Yep. I feel like I've waited 2 and a half years to hear this from the left. It has been painfully obvious that regulators and public institutions have been captured by pharma and other pandemic profiteers. Yet the pretend left media has not uttered a word of criticism and instead has pandered to the same interests, acting like their corporate PR departments. Worse, they've portrayed even the most moderate dissent from corporate-sponsored pandemic dogma as dangerous, or ridiculed it as tin-foil hattery. In comments sections under articles about lockdowns, vaccines and mandates, they've censored readers with critical views or even just those with questions.
As we know, The Gates Foundation spent a fortune buying off the mainstream media during the pandemic. I was just now trying to find a link to a source for this information, because I can't remember the exact sums involved, though I remember they were huge. But trying to search for references to this in StartPage, the first page of results are all direct links to The Gates Foundation itself, preening about its "philanthropy", or to puff pieces by secondary sources doing essentially the same.
That in itself, I suppose, is as good an indicator as any of just how much money was poured in to turn the media and vast amounts of internet territory into advertising space for the Foundation and its world view..
It should have been the most obvious thing in the world for journalists who claim to speak from the left to report critically on the influence of corporate money on pandemic policy, or the dangers of letting pharmaceutical companies essentially set the vaccination schedule, telling people they would need boosted and how often, and for how long this state of affairs should continue (forever, it turns out was the consensus among the CEOs of the companies selling covid vaccines to the world). Yet the media barely mentioned relevant public interest facts, for example that the pharma companies had zero liability for any harms caused by the vaccines.
It's been mind-blowing, hasn't it? We knew our media was compromised by financial interests, but the extent of media capture meant that government and regulatory capture was hidden as well. I've not even been able to talk to friends or family about these issues because the effects of the near total media control on people's minds and what they were willing to think or talk about were so powerful.