The most striking aspect of the corona pandemic has been the inequality of information, which follows naturally from the inequality of everything else. Most Working Class people are too busy flogging their bodies and souls to pursue a balanced education in the ever-accelerating fund of scientific discovery. This belongs to all humanity but is kept the preserve of the few precisely because of the power it conveys. Some will find on the Internet the virtual equivalent of the bloke down the pub. Rumours abound and fact is half-digested.
In the absence of previous experience and relevant theory the ‘citizen’ – elevated from serf in recognition of the agency we suddenly all have – has to rely on experts, really no more than political appointees, for advice, which is then filtered through the politicians with their political agendas.
We recall Professor David Knutt, one of the most accomplished academics who ever worked for a government, being fired simply for writing an article in the Lancet that contradicted the government’s implausible justification for its drugs policy, a cascade of learned folk resigned in disgust. Capitalism cannot provide us with accurate information any more than it can provide us with clean air and water when it is more lucrative to pollute it.
We are left with stark choices: to trust the hapless buffoons who somehow found themselves in government; to scream for them to exert more coercion on our fellows; to follow the herd in an orgy of virtue-signalling, or to inform ourselves, trust our own judgement and work in practical solidarity and mutual aid networks formed of trusted affinity groups. The recent flirtation with Jeremy Corbyn has left many people still harbouring the delusion that politicians can solve problems in the real world, or that any utilitarian solutions could emerge from under the vast burden of capital accumulation and hierarchical power.
The U.K.’s health minister Matt Hancock has no relevant qualifications whatsoever; he’s a disaster going somewhere to happen. An economist at the bank of England in 2005 he was given responsibility for the housing market, two years before the housing market took out the global banking system. Never mind, the wealth of the global elite has increased steadily year on year ever since, as ours has fallen in like measure. His latest task of overseeing the pillage of public health resources having been superseded, he has been elbowed to the sidelines by the grandstanding pfeffle.
Above all we must approach this as a Class for ourselves, social distancing is a control measure aimed at the poor. Don’t be deluded the rich are cooking their own dinner or cleaning their own shithouses, they are well insulated, they don’t have to go to the shops or the factory and they won’t run out of bog roll. They don’t have to sit on public transport for hours to work in districts where they cannot afford to live. Etc. Etc. It was the rich who spread this so fast, with their pointless ‘business travel’, cruises, annual skiing trips and ‘exotic’ holidays in other people’s misery.
They now feign concern for elderly and infirm members of our Class after years of slaughtering them in droves through poverty and neglect, but what they are actually terrified of is the collapse of the power structure, the house of cards on which they perch their idle arses. As of this morning there have been 7 confirmed cases in the whole of Dorset, I’ve been told not to go to my local boozer but must make a thirty-five mile round trip daily to work in a factory in the next county – where there are 87 cases – or I won’t get paid. Adjusted for population that’s at least four times the risk. We hear the World Health Organisation – a failure in terms if ever there was one – praise the Chinese state for its diligence in basically quarantining people at gunpoint. For the life of me I can’t see a qualitative difference between dying of a disease or getting shot by the cops, neither seems healthy to me.
The Agenda of the liberal-bourgeois-military-industrial state is to preserve the status quo, to maintain the hierarchy of power relations hitherto enforced by property, capital and debt. Everything else, including the death toll, is a secondary consideration to the likes of Boris de pfeffle Johnson, whose career as an amusing after-dinner speaker got interrupted by a spell as Prime Minister. Be ruthless in rejecting notions of national unity across the classes. In the long run we’re all dead, as Keynes put it, but that doesn’t mean we have any commonality of interest in the interim. The money economy is not our problem and we’ll not lift a finger to save it. People don’t need jobs or money, they need food, clothes and shelter, care, education, opportunities for recreation and personal growth. All these things are supplied by the Working Class – it’s time to cut out the middle man.
This isn’t a truce in the Class War, it’s a second front. The explicit strategy of disaster capitalism is to exploit every crisis to increase their class’ domination over ours, it is a sad fact that we must meet this challenge head-on, or we will all lose in the long run. It would be a tragedy if nothing good came out of all this misery. The state is very weak now, if we push hard enough it will break, and we will be free. Betrayed by our institutions and abandoned by our rulers, we have nowhere to place our faith but in ourselves and each other. Just like in 1936, we can take on the external threat and the internal one at the same time. We the Working Class are ultimately responsible for everything that ever was or will be. Don’t be afraid of ruins!
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