EH here. This is a series of edited transcripts from Left Lockdown Sceptic's panel contributions to their meeting in North London on September 18th. The first is a Marxist analysis by Victor Conti, the second a radical feminist perspective by Emily Garcia, and the third a critique of contemporary Western medicine regarding immunity by Dr Jenny Goodman.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Contributions from 18 September, part 1: A Marxist analysis
Victor Conti
First up, here’s Victor Conti’s discussion of the lockdown and the biosecurity regime as a reorientation of the body to the state and capital in a new phase of capitalist development.
Left and right lockdown scepticism
VC: [… responding to the discussion so far…] I think it is important that we don’t abandon the idea of the left overall, even though it’s sometimes tempting to imagine yourself as simply no longer on the left because you have so little in common with another person on the left. It can also seem to be the case that the left is so supportive of the new order that there is no practical difference anymore between left and right on either side. I do think there is a strong case for collaboration and building bridges, that left-right is not necessarily the dividing line in the mass anti-lockdown movement, and also the left has always had to be pragmatic and practical to achieve what it wants to do. So I’m not saying that collaboration shouldn’t happen. There should be joint platforms and joint organisation. But I think it is important that the anti-lockdown left have a position too, because there are there are differences between the left and the right wing libertarian anti-lockdown approach.
The first difference is of a kind of theoretical nature: it’s the right-wing idea that the pandemic, the lockdown and everything that has followed represents some kind of monumental cock-up, that it’s a mistake that we’ve made, or perhaps an example of convergent opportunism, and so it’s possible to correct it, to reverse it, rather than understanding these events in historical and economic terms – as the left is better equipped to do.
The right also tend to see this as part of a wider culture war. And, for me, that relates to the second difference we have with the right wing libertarian freedom movement, which is how representative the right can ever be of the wider freedom movement. When I look at the makeup of the day-to-day, anti-lockdown sentiment, it’s not made up of well-off and well-educated conservatives, it’s made up of working class people from a very ethnically diverse background – and it is primarily the young who are actively resisting this.
And the working class is opposed to these measures. Even though you have this sense of a blanket support, where all the polls will say not only did the vast majority of the public support the lockdown, but they actually more of it, they want more punishment, if you dig beneath the surface just a little bit in any conversation – you will find that actually, it is probably the small minority that are in favour of this in a kind of ‘bought-in’ way.
(And unfortunately, those people are exactly the woke left, the woke middle class left who were quite important in supporting Corbyn, as people here have commented. In my mind the best analogy for this is 1984 and what the ‘outer party’ have to do to their brains in order to exist. The inner party know what’s going on, they know that this this is a fascist regime, and they’re bought into it because they’re winning from it. And that’s, in this analogy, that’s Davos, Amazon and all the rest. It’s the ‘outer party’ who must live in terrible conditions, they must bend their minds around this to actively support what’s happening. And I think that describes the Labour Party and a lot of the left: they know it doesn’t make sense, but they’re forcing themselves to make it make sense.)
So the right can’t really represent the freedom movement and, with some important and honourable exceptions, the right doesn’t have a concept of history in the way that the left does. And I think that’s a major difference because ultimately, only the left is capable of understanding what I’m just going to refer to as the Covid regime – the biosecurity state, whatever you want to call it – in historical terms. And I think as has been pointed out, the left has done this work in terms of theory.
When I started reading Giorgio Agamben I realised that there was an amazing parallels with his concepts and what we are dealing with, such as Homo Sacer, the person who is sacred but who is also allowed to be killed at the same time, along with his work on the idea of a state of exception: a state of emergency that begins in certain circumstances but grows to become more and more all pervasive, especially in the world after 9/11.
And if you look at work of Roberto Esposito, another Italian political theorist of a kind of post-Marxist orientation, which I would strongly recommend even though he, unlike Agamben, has not opposed lockdown or the pandemic restrictions … If you read Esposito’s Immunitas, which takes the immune system for its central theme, you will see this uncannily familiar processing of history as something fundamentally very simple, which is what is the relationship of the human body to the political state – and to capital.
And let’s be clear, the left has forgotten the fact that the state is in fact the embodiment of the rule of capital in a global capitalist society. Much of the left thinks the state is somehow the worker’s defence against capital, but it’s just not the case. Instead, let’s just think of the state and capital was one, which helps with this kind of theorization.
Digital enclosure: a comparison with the Industrial Revolution
To understand what is going on you need to look back to the Industrial Revolution, because the change that’s happening is really a reorientation of the body to capital, via the state, which is necessary in order for the capitalist system to achieve its perceived next level of technical progress.
In the industrial revolution, we needed to mass migrate the rural population into the cities in order to work in difficult unsanitary conditions without sufficient food supplies. So you had phenomena like parliamentary enclosure, which was designed to remove long held ancestral rights to land and the ability to farm and be self sufficient. That was an early factor in depopulating the countryside.
And then finally, by the end, in the white heat of the Industrial Revolution, as Marx records in Volume One of Capital [see chapter 10] there were people known as ‘flesh agents’ whose role was to effectively complete the job by rounding up impoverished men, women and children from the countryside and herding them into the cities where most of them would die – as average life expectancy in cities fell from around 40 or 50, to just 17.
Living standards did not recover to the peak at which they achieved in the mid 18th century, probably until the early 20th century. That was how damaging this reorientation of capitalism was, and what is happening now. You might call it some kind of digital enclosure. Certainly there are the elements of a mass fall in living standards (suddenly, to be privileged in the world is to be a member of the Zoomocracy, where your privilege is to be locked in your own home so you’re not exposed to the virus). We’ve also seen a re-justification and re-emergence of the worst kinds of racism and imperial aggression, with the imposition of lockdowns on countries that had no economic basis to sustain that kind of pressure on the economy, in which millions of additional children, as Unicef acknowledges. This, like in the industrial revolution, is the heavy cost of a new stage in capitalism.
Long capitalism, lockdown as a deflationary measure, machine-wreckers
I want to finish with the questions I think emerge out this. Firstly, what is really happening to capitalism in this process? One part of me thinks this might be a kind of state stabilisation of the system, a solidification of the capitalist system, similar to that was what was achieved by the period of you know, absolute monarchy in early modern Europe, where the instability of feudalism was corralled into a much more stable political structure. So, is this the form for a kind of ‘long capitalism’ that it will exist in the hundreds of years potentially?
Or is this simply a symptom of continued economic instability? There’s a good recent article by Fabio Vighi which, among other things, analyses the lockdown in purely monetary, financial terms. Essentially, the world economy was on the brink of – as we started to see in in 2020 – a major economic crash. The usual problem: indebtedness of the major world economies was unsustainable, and there were bubbles being created on the basis of that debt. What the system needed at that point was a huge injection of what was known as liquidity (what that really means is printing money and giving it to banks to pay their debts).
And that’s what happened simultaneously with the move towards lockdowns – and actually justified by it even through the truth is perhaps the other way around. As Vighi points out, between September 2019 and March 2020 the Fed injected nine trillion dollars, or 40% of US GDP, into the financial system. The European Central Bank also started injecting 20 billion euros a month into the financial markets in September 2019, and now has a €1.85 trillion ‘pandemic emergency purchase program’, known as PEPP, extending until 2022.
These interventions were justified on the basis of an economic crisis caused by the lockdown. But perhaps what happened is actually the other way around: the system was in a deep crisis by late 2019. Finally the thing that we’d held off since 2008 was about to hit, the cash machines were finally about to run out of money, capitalism was on the verge of collapse. In order to inject trillions of dollars into the world economy, we lock the system down in order to exert what technically is a deflationary pressure by stopping anyone from buying anything. Collapsing living standards was a way to stop the risk that you create when you inject a trillion dollars into the economy, which is Weimar Germany-style hyperinflation, which then destroys the value you created. The whole lockdown could be seen as a deflationary measure.
If that is the case, and again, these are just different interpretations, then we can expect more instability, because no fix is ever enough. And that idea, in some sense, gives me hope, because this might not be the kind of long capitalism – hundreds and hundreds of years of some kind of stable system – it might be something quite different.
To finish, I feel like we’re at the stage in this movement of almost the status of Luddites or the machine breaking movement in the 18th century. We definitely know what we’re against. The question is, what are we really for? What is the positive programme? I think we can agree on things like principles like equality, democracy, bodily autonomy, as things that we can all kind of unite around.
And we must urgently debate and talk about the role of the state. I believe that leftist theory needs a major renovation in this in this respect. For so many it seems to be a blind spot, because it’s our belief that the state is somehow different to capitalism, and better than it, that’s kind of got us into this mess.
I hope that we can talk about some of those questions.
Source: Left Lockdown Sceptics
***
Contributions from 18 Sept, part 2: Joining Left Lockdown Sceptics
Emily Garcia
Next up, here is radical feminist Emily Garcia’s contribution on why she joined Left Lockdown Sceptics and a radical feminist perspective on the freedom movement.
Joining Left Lockdown Sceptics
EG: I joined Left Lockdown Sceptics in Feb this year after I submitted an article ‘Germ Theory Extremism in a Post Covid World: Some Holistic Health and Feminist Perspectives’ and was invited to join the supporters group.
My previous involvement in politics has been in the women’s movement. I identify as a radical feminist, so I have ideological points of divergence from Marxism in that I would tend to see the ownership of female bodies and control and appropriation of female reproductive capacities and labour by the male sex class as the original and primary form of exploitation, out of which patriarchy and the capitalist system emerged. I like American feminist writer and academic Marilyn French’s definition of patriarchy as: ‘institutionalised male dominance guaranteed by a set of interlocking structures that perpetuate the authority of an elite group of men over all humans and grant all men power and authority over women of their same class.’
Although second wave radical feminism or the women’s liberation movement largely rejected male political framings, it did emerge out of the left, and from Marxist understandings of disparate class interests and class hierarchy.
I appreciate that this group is open to a plurality of perspectives, in which we obviously converge in our opposition to the new normals and the desire for a fairer, and more equal society. I am grateful to have been welcomed into this community of intelligent, courageous and heart centredness individuals. I feel like I learn a lot from our discussions and reading articles shared in the group and published on the site.
My reaction to lockdowns
David asked me to share a bit on feminist perspectives, and my activism around this. I feel I should preface this by saying that I’ve contributed very little to the pro Freedom movement compared to other speakers today or likely many in the audience.
My reaction to the announcement of the first Lockdown was an immediate hard no, principally because of my beliefs around health & Germ Theory, as well as a strong disinclination to take orders from Boris Johnson or any other man in government! The diagnosis of my chronic illness some years previously started me on a journey of searching outside conventional medicine for things that could help, because there was almost nothing on offer within it. I have gone to quite extreme efforts on my healing path, and yet none of the things I’ve done have ever involved controlling the behaviour of others or impinging on their wellbeing in any way. This whole paradigm of continuing to take no personal responsibility for one’s health and immunity, but instead attempt to obsessively control the movements, behaviours and bodies of strangers remains completely alien and horrifying to me.
I don’t really have an explanation as to why, for many people, actions of personal responsibility and self care towards better health and immunity is almost the only step too far in protecting against serious consequences from respiratory infections. Surely cutting down on smoking, drinking, being less sedentary, eating less of the dead, processed, profiting promoting but health depleting shelf stable foods of industrial capitalism and so on should be there in the toolkit above steamrolling children’s right to education, vulnerable elderly people’s right to human touch and contact, small business owners right to retain their livelihood and so on.
I suspect maybe deep unconscious fears and contempt for anything health promoting that exists outside the ‘medical system’ of the patriarchal industrial capitalism, including the power and intelligence of Mother Nature and the wisdom of the body, is a factor. And in my opinion and experience sadly, almost anything genuinely health promoting or restorative does exist outside this system of disease management.
Rewinding to the 23 March 2020 when I received the Stay at home order by text message, I went into a Chicken Little panicked state. It was obvious to me that we had entered into a new phase of overt tyranny by the state and there would be no coming back from it, at least without the fight of our lives.
I had a definite sense that I needed to set clear boundaries and refuse to comply from the very beginning to withstand the attacks on my sense of self and sense of truth and reality. I‘ve reluctantly worn a mask & put chemicals on my hands on only one occasion- to see my elderly relative in a care home- but haven’t taken a PCR test, given my contact details to any establishment or been injected.
I have friends and loved ones who have continued travelling, socialising, protesting, and meet-up and conference organising throughout the restrictions who have failed to catch any symptoms or have anyone they know get ill after contact with them. So they have either been very lucky or the Germ Theory Extremist measures serve no helpful purpose. And I know which theory I’m incline to favour.
The feminist movement’s response
A few months after the onset of quarantining of the healthy, I started connecting with feminist friends from the anti sex self ID movement who were having serious questions about what was going on. We created online spaces to discuss the issues, which gradually morphed into activism focused on raising feminist concerns with what’s going on including conferences, meetings, articles, YouTube show discussions and speaking out at feminist events like Standing For Women’s Speakers Corner meetings.
Although the number of ‘new normal questioning’ feminists is slowly growing, we are sadly still minority voice in that community. There has been mainly a resounding silence from radical or socialist feminist journalists, academics, authors and campaigners, with a sprinkling of real enthusiasm for Covid fascism and just the occasional dissenting voice. The outspoken critics are almost always grassroots women, usually from lower socio economic bands and mostly without wider platforms or influence.
Lockdown and new normal’s harms to women & girls
All this despite the clearly catastrophic harms to women and girls that lockdowns and other elements of the draconian response have engendered.
If radical feminists oppose structures and systems of power that uphold and further male dominance, then shouldn’t we de facto be objecting to a massive expansion in that power over our lives? If we understand the number one means by which females are oppressed and subordinated is economic impoverishment, how can we support public health policies that have systematically immiserated hundreds of millions of women and girls globally?
If we fight against gendered coercive control and psychological abuse in interpersonal relationships, why are the same tactics used by abusive husbands and pimps the world over a-ok when perpetrated by the state?
And if we really believe ‘my body, my choice,’ where is the outrage over vaccine mandates or ‘no jab, no job’ policies starting with the largely working class female workforce of care home carers?
Women have however stepped up
Whilst the feminist response to the global medical-techno totalitarian push is as disappointing as the rest of radical or progressive political corners, I do want to give credit to the important role that women have played in the UK pushback. Off the top of my head, I can think of Liz Evans who founded Medical Freedom Alliance, the 3 mum team campaign group ‘Us For Them’ who advocate for school children, Silkie Carlo Director of Big Brother Watch, Louise Creffield of Save Our Rights, Fiona the UK founder of Stand in The Park, the many women involved in the HART group, Cheska of Outreach Worldwide, Jo Rogers of Lawyers For Liberty, Helen Gray of the Cake and Liberty blog and campaign, Fiona Diamond of Oracle Films, Debbie Hicks of Stop New Normal currently facing a court case for filming hospitals last year, Karen Dodd of The Freedom Hub network and Rise Up conferences, Samantha Goody of Freedom Education, Nickita Starck campaigning for women’s agency giving birth with When Push Comes To Shove. And I’m sure there are many others I’ve omitted from the list.
And I will end my contribution on that positive note. Thankfully many women do understand there is ‘nothing in this’ for us, our children or grandchildren, and will continue to fight for freedoms on behalf of the younger generations that we birth and nurture.
***
Contributions from 18 September, part 3: The politics of immunity
Jenny Goodman
Now, we publish an edited transcript of Dr. Jenny Goodman’s contribution on the politics of immunity, the Medical Freedom movement and the difference between medicine that works and vaccines that drive profits for Big Pharma…
JG: Thank you. I’ll start by telling you who I am, how I came to be here and my interest in the politics of immunity. How I came to be here is, I met Eli on a demonstration about six months ago now, in April, shortly after talking with people in the Medical Freedom movement about how I was an ‘old lefty’ and felt kind of lonely in those networks. They suggested I meet Eli, so that’s how I heard about this group.
I was booked to be somewhere else today: the ‘How the light gets in’ festival organised by the Institute of Arts and Ideas. I was looking forward to hearing Laura Dodsworth speak on her book A State of Fear.
Then I heard that the festival had introduced a compulsory lateral flow test. So she and Professor Frank Furedi pulled out in a fury. Then I got the email, which decided for me, that this meeting is where I’m meant to be … that I have been waiting exactly 18 months for this.
Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Is for me like ‘Where were you when Johnson announced the lockdown on the 23rd of March 2020?’ It was 8pm. I had a bad back, I was strapped on my back listening to the radio, had just been speaking to a friend in my choir. She said, Well, it’s alright, we can do it online now. And I said, No, no, no, you can’t you can’t do choir online.’ When we spoke a week later she said ‘I’m terrified.’ I said, ‘So am I, but not of the virus. I’m scared of fascism.’ Because I could smell it. I smelt a rat. My radar was ‘on alert’. Maybe because I was a Marxist before I was born! My parents were in the old Communist Party. So I understood it from the start.
Fast-forwarding to today. We need to ask why this vaccine is a socialist issue. After all, big pharma involvement in the NHS is not new. When I finished medical school, 40 years ago, we were constantly being invited to drug lunches. But though they were advertising to us, they weren’t in charge of the curriculum. They weren’t funding the medical school. In fact, we learnt at medical school about infectious disease in childhood declining. How from the end of the 19th century, to the middle of the 20th, measles, scarlet fever, mumps, diphtheria, all plummeted.
We were taught it had nothing to do with vaccination, but the improvement in sanitation, and housing, and nutrition, access to fresh air and more space to live in. After I qualified though, I could see the drug companies’ power increasing. I could see that while conventional medicine was brilliant for emergencies, it was useless with looking at causes and prevention of chronic disease. It became clear that the real pandemics of cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes, autoimmune disease, are linked with all the childhood vaccinations we’ve all had. They’re linked with pollution and with the junk that we eat instead of food. If the government really gave a shit about the health of the public, they would have done something about that.
So 21 years ago, I discovered ecological medicine, involving no drugs at all but use of nutrition, diet, finding the environmental pollutants that are in people’s system have been making them ill. Teaching them how to avoid and expel toxins. My book, Staying Alive in Toxic Times is both self help and politics. Health is about empowerment. But I’m sick of telling people what vitamins to take, and more excited about educating people on why they’re ill in the first place. Two of the speakers today, maybe a third of my age, both have long term, chronic diseases. This was unheard of when I was your age. Our health has been under attack by capitalism for many decades.
So when lockdown began, and the pandemic response, it was in continuity with what’s been going on for decades, which is profit. Ways to get really healthy are at odds. If we all learn how to eat really well, if we campaigned for fresh unpolluted air, there’d be no profit in it for Big Pharma.
So it is about profit, and it is about power. When the pandemic began 18 months ago, I began hearing from colleagues in New York, in Spain, and China, in hospitals all around the world saying, this is really bad. We’ve not seen anything like this before, but ventilation isn’t working. It kills people. I noticed Boris Johnson wasn’t ventilated, just given oxygen.
But it was a whole year before the mainstream medics accepted that. The reality is that ventilation doesn’t work; Oxygen does. Intravenous vitamin D and C, high dose zinc – all save lives. And the long-used anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine saves lives – even if Trump also mentioned that. It’s been in use for decades, like Ivermectin which is saving lives throughout India. But the patent’s run out, there’s no profit in it. All over the world, colleagues are finding out what works, that Covid is a treatable illness. And the sole justification given for the rollout of these appalling lethal experimental jabs is that we have no other way to treat it. In other words, treatments are not profitable.
Though I don’t do acute medicine, I have been preventing it. Of my hundreds of patients to have had COVID, one was on steroids for severe asthma and the other had multiple sclerosis. The treatment is simple: high dose vitamin C. This was researched by Linus Pauling back into the 70s, who was helping people with cancer — but you can’t access that research easily anymore. Vitamin D’s efficacy has also been known for decades, but if you have to live in doors and get no sunshine like people in care homes who were never taken out in sunshine and who had a diet low in vitamin C and zinc, crowded together; of course they were going to go.
But vulnerability is not set in stone. When we consider terrain versus virus; infectious illness has 5% to do with transmission, and 95% to do with your immune system. It is possible to strengthen the immune system. But not profitable, it is through self help. And Big Pharma doesn’t like it. The vast amount of information, much of it published in peer reviewed journals and then retracted or suppressed is telling us we don’t need these vaccines.
The Medical Freedom movement is underpinned by medical professionals appalled at what is going on, who were not anti-vaccine. Most happily vaccinated their patients and their children, before this past year seeing ingredients lists which include substances that cause anaphylaxis reactions to swallowing them not even from injecting them.
In fact, I have been anti vaccine ever since I started in practice and saw toddlers regressing into the most appalling autism. Saw teenagers in wheelchairs after the bloody HPV jab, which does not prevent cervical cancer (unlike the safe, profit free ways to prevent cervical cancer, which were taught when I was in medical school but aren’t taught anymore). I’ve seen vaccines become the main profit stream for pharma now, greater than psychiatric drugs (as they’ve run out of new mental illnesses to invent). Prozac did its thing. There are no new antibiotics – although we need them – as there’d be no profit because by definition, they’d have to be given very rarely.
At the beginning of all this, I resisted conspiracy theories. After all, Jews have always been the victims of conspiracy theories. But over the past 18 months I decided this: capitalism is a conspiracy. A conspiracy of the rich to rob the poor. What we are seeing now is capitalism with the gloves off, no holds barred, no pretty face. This is where it’s going. It’s going to be killing our children. And I am so happy to finally heard the beginnings of a Marxist analysis of what’s going on, because that’s what I’ve been needing since March 2020.
Source: Left Lockdown Sceptics
No comments:
Post a Comment