The compulsory mass capitalist vaccination
Defining the current phase of the pandemic as “phase three of the pandemic” makes no sense. According to the survey of the pandemic curve based on the “apparent magnitude”, everyone tells us that we are in the middle or towards the end of the second Sars-Cov-2 way of pandemic, which probably after the exit from this phase, it is probable (but not sure) the restart of a third phase wave of the epidemiological and pandemic curve in the months to come.
Conversely, if we assume the principle of the difference between “apparent magnitude” and that of “absolute magnitude” or if we simply move the observation point out of the earth and place it on another place or planet into the universe place, we should conclude that there is no continuity solution between phase one, phase two and phase three. The pandemic curve is unique, through a wave of oscillation without breaks and stops, of which we neither know the beginning, nor can we foresee its end. We can establish the causes, which are all endogenous to man’s relationship with nature used as a capital commodity, as a primary natural mains of production, devastated by the relations of capitalist production and by the intensification of the race to capitalist accumulation that is short-circuiting in its systemic crisis of overproduction and by the historical tendency of the fall down of the surplus value rail.
So what defines the current pandemic in “phases”, which we remember is the second largest of the capitalism imperialist epoch, that jumps to the human species (after a sequence of dangerous and deadly signs that have been growing at least since the 1960s last and then decidedly closer to the beginning of the new century – aids, sars, mers, swine, zica, ebola, and many sub-derivatives of the coronavirus etc.), but preceded by other pandemics that remained confined to the animal species.
We must remember the bovine plague of the 90s of the nineteenth century (the first pandemic of the imperialist era), which in addition to causing the killing of more than 5 million cattles that spread from the Horn of Africa to Zambia and then down to the South Africa, in addition it caused death for the starvation of about one third of the population of Ethiopia and Tanzania, the carcasses of oxen, but also of buffaloes, giraffes and wildebeest caused the “birth” of the tzé-tzé fly carrier of lethal malarial fevers for humans. Here, too, the theory of how it is widespread has two versions: either from Cecil Rhodes’ industrial livestock farms in South Africa, or from the import of Indian cattles by Italian imperialism in its war campaign against Somalia.
Let’s leave the epidemiology behind and turn our attention to the phases of the political management of the pandemic crisis by the capitalism impersonal forces and by the governments that represent and defend their needs (which is the other part of capital’s reaction policy to the its structural crisis of capitalist accumulation).
Capitalism, in its anarchic and unstoppable race towards the accumulation of capital value, has always entrusted to science, technology and politics the possibility of resolving the social, class, race and gender and nature contradictions that this movement continuously arouses.
Phase 1
Phase 1 is the “surprise” phase of the unpreparedness of global capitalist governance for the return of the systemic crisis in the form of the crisis of nature through the virus. A return that immediately highlighted the contradictions between nature and capitalist accumulation, between the health of the species and the means of production for the profit. All governments have underestimated, hidden the rising alarm (from China to the rich and fat West) because ” .. the demands for security, a prosperous economy and public health rarely go together … “ , explains Laura Spinney in his book “ 1918 The Spanish Flu – the pandemic that changed the world“. At this stage, governments had to run for cover, after the messages “Bergamo is running”, “Milan does not stop” or “we trust in the spontaneous herd immunity” launched by the Confindustria of Bergamo, Zingaretti and Boris Johnson (just few examples). After it was criminally claimed that it was just a simple “seasonal flu”, they had to apply the only possible governance to prevent rage from hospitals of nurses, health personnel, doctors, and then spontaneous strikes in factories and logistics in the north Italy (the same dynamics occurred in the United States of America in the period April-May 2020) and spread to the rest of the society, precisely highlighting the irreconcilability conflict between profit and health. There is no point in assuming that the US has behaved differently. There, also, the lockdowns have been applied in various states, sharpening conflicts between the constitutional power of the federal government and the governors, in a growing of social polarization and social conflicts of which January 6 is one of the results. It is the phase of lockdowns also in productive activities, unwillingly considered necessary and applied also by the masters of the capitalist steam. Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen in Germany have stopped (so much the automotive supply chain was blocked by the Chinese lockdown). The same thing did Ford, GM, FCA, Tesla in North America. In Italy we saw how it ended up with the typical circumvention of the ATECO codes, but without ever blocking strategic production, first of all that of the heavy military industry and the steel industry.
Phase 2
Phase 2. It is the moment of the resumption of capitalist governance and the resumption of the subsumption of health under profit, of the defense of human health as an exchange value of the commodity work force. Governance applied by governments has tried to “convince” – but the capacity for conviction is determined by the absence of a resumption of widespread class antagonism, hampered by a scarce self-activity of the without any reserves proletariat, which where vice versa emerges, for example again the US, making this governance really complicated – that the key to the problem has been found, that capitalist governance is able to protect the general health. This governance, while spreading the message, according to the “apparent magnitude” of the pandemic, that we had come out of pandemic phase 1 wave, it threw out the management rules based on the “epidemiological” thresholds. We must admit that very often, too often, this governance has turned out to be the best possible in the proletarian camp. Based on the thresholds of empty or occupied seats into the hospitals, on the occupation of emergency rooms, facilitated by the “luck” that the self-modified virus is causing, although highly more infectious, people with severe symptoms either recover sooner or die significantly in less days. Thus hospital beds do not become overwhelmed. It is the phase in which, however, the protection of health definitively assumes the character of the protection of the labor force commodity, which translates into the total subsumption of life at the time of realization of the capitalistic value. You must just work! The school only opens to allow children to be parked, so the parents are “free” to produce capitalistic value and profit. Life is limited to this relation. If the lockdowns of “phase 1” represented a quite uprising of the contradiction between nature of the capitalistic accumulation, and between health and the profit and the general feeling that the health should come before the profit, in “phase 2” the lock downs, the curfew after 10pm and everything else is a decidedly anti-proletarian business and in line with the need of the impersonal capital to centralize the state in an increasingly authoritarian, anti-proletarian version and to regulate society to the dictatorship need for profit and world capitalist competition, for the tendency to defend the national interests across borders. The time of life is restricted and is functional only to the time of work, on Saturday everything closes and on Sunday it does too. During the holidays we remain closed at home, the visits are limited. Because if capitalist relations of production are not subverted, if the rhythms of production, the productivity must increase to recover from the losses caused by greater competitiveness, then the system continues to greatly expose human health to the pandemic. But this is a legitimate, calculated and admissible risk by the capitalistic society. But we (as human capitalistic being) must minimize the risk, minimize the time of the social life. Life is production of capitalist value and that’s it.
It is also the phase in which mistakes are also “admitted”, that public health systems should be improved, safeguarded, strengthened (always then postponed this passage in time, that is, do not do it), spreading a false narrative: the death would essentially be for the disruption of the public health systems. Such a false statement and convenient to avoid the other narrative, the antagonistic, anti-capitalist, communist one that even some sectors of bourgeois critical science are beginning to affirm and which recalls the devastation of nature caused by the hyper-productivism of man and a reproduction of the commodity workforce based on an increasingly disease-carrying diet, and an unbreathable air, contaminated water in highly industrialized geographies according to the model of the “old economy” and that of the digital and “green” new economy. Certainly the disruption of public health systems attacked in the West by the long neoliberal cycle of attack on welfare has weighed and is weighing, but no more than the other general conditions that undermine human health and caused by the reaction of the impersonal needs of capital to its crisis that pollute the environment, the food and the nature world in general.
It has been said, even on the leftist naively, ” you see Germany which has a more advanced public health and welfare state, where the ratio of hospital beds to citizens is higher, there have been fewer deaths.“, but it should be added in the so-called phase 1 only. Because, in fact, today the daily deaths in Germany for several weeks are double those in Italy and it is not and I do not think that Germany has closed hospitals and fired medical personnel in the last three months. So how do we deal with this explanation? Where does this partial ascertainment of why people die of covid19 end up, compared to the real protection of the health of the human community, the “capitalist governance” based on the welfare state and DPCM protocols? Basically it is the phase of the “Production Consume and Die” Decree, aka DPCM. To invoke more respect for the covid protocols, should begin by declaring the violation of the lockdowns, curfews by the the working class and by the “without reserve” proletarians, that additional life time cannot be subtracted for profit functionality. Forcing less productivity, reducing rhythms and workloads, requires breaking the social curfew regime. Even during the second imperialist slaughterhouse, where millions of proletarians slaughtered for the imperialist interest, the curfew and the lights out was imposed as “protection” from bombing from above. It was the way as in the imperialist war the general interest and functional protection is applied to continue the imperialist war, that is to carry out the slaughter of proletarian lives and not only for the interests of the national imperialist masters. Today the lockdown and the DPCM is taking on the same function.
Being afraid that saying it straight and round could make us appear or slip to the tail of the intolerance of the small owners, owners of the places of capitalist gentrification and nightlife, we begin to consider the other side of the coin, that not saying it leads us to stay at the tail of the subsumption of the needs of big capital.
Phase 3: mandatory mass capitalist vaccination
We are in phase 3 of the pandemic. But how are we not in phase 2 yet? Yes, we are abundantly in phase 3, because the capitalist governance of the pandemic is not enough for it to give the subsumption of the defense of human health as a mere commodity of labor, so some social cost for its reproduction must also be considered, pending of better solutions. The vaccine and capitalist mass vaccination represent just that, submission to the supreme general interest which is the accumulation of value for profit.
Not only is this the phase to greatly enrich the large monopoly drug industry.
It is the logical conclusion of the reassertion of the general interest of capitalism that calls for stronger submission. Well, if health care system is to be strengthened, today it is being strengthened as a health care in wartime. Outside there is the war on the pandemic (i.e. the fact that lockdowns can only be partial and contingent) and the risk is there – because it is not with detailed measures that capitalism can defeat the virus, and therefore we need a health system of war. All medical personnel must be vaccinated. In essential production workplaces, vaccination should also be mandatory. And those who refuse should be fired, placed on conscription lists, made public mockery as an enemy of the supreme general interest (that is, his majesty the capital). It is of little importance here to establish that Big Pharma’s long hand is behind mass vaccination. This is not the problem. Behind there is the long hand that in the name of the supreme interest, the following reasoning already applies. “It doesn’t matter if this vaccine is only 60%, 70% or 80% effective, what matters is that if there is a chance all we have to to do it”. That is, it does not matter if 100, 200, 300 million people or a few billion people die in the war on the war fronts, we just have to look at the people who will be saved. It is the introduction of this concept. It is the strengthening of the placebo that bourgeois science, bourgeois technology and bourgeois politics would be able to solve the general and structural problems of this collapsing society, without attacking the root causes of the pandemic that lies in the capitalist devastation of nature. This capitalist vaccination is the affirmation that it is not important to verify and follow the safety protocols, which bourgeois medical science itself had already defined through WHO (and which in any case has always caused deaths among either populations in the global South or among the prisons population during tests on human guinea pigs), what does it matter if the test on a sample of 44 thousand people is not representative on a population of 100 million let alone billions of people . There is a chance even if only 10% that the vaccine really has a useful effect, it must be imposed on everyone!
And again, what does it matter that the nurse who is compulsorily vaccinated does not stay a few days (about 3 weeks) away from the front line in the hospital, but must immediately return to the wards to do his job even up to 12 hours a day in case of emergency.
Because you know, it would be common sense that he did not, it is already scientifically established by the vaccine manufacturers themselves, that only after the second booster, to be done no earlier than two or three weeks, could theoretically the vaccine give the virus immunity. These gentlemen, powerful, bourgeois, rulers and servants of capital are not even able to fulfill the obligation of mass capitalist vaccination that has a minimum of common sense in its application. This capitalist vaccination is identical to the experiment carried out on the troops of the First World War where the soldiers were made to wear a light metal armor, which was supposed to protect the soldiers on the assault, in the name of the Savoy, from the machine guns of the Austrian and German enemy trenches. This compulsory mass capitalist vaccination takes on more the contours of a capitalist mass experimentation of the vaccine on the proletarian skin.
Invoking a mass but “class” vaccination as an alternative makes little sense, it would only mean strengthening our willingness, the willingness of the proletarians, to take any risk as long as we are protected as a commodity and not as human beings. In the United States, where the logic and phases of vaccination of the population have been defined for some time, at least since July (go to the Johns Hopkins University website) and it will be precisely the proletariat – that of essential productions -, after healthcare personnel and the elderly, to be vaccinated, thus unleashing the last frontier of competition between proletarians, widely conveyed by the lobbying pressures of various corporations, all of which, they insist that their workers, because their commodity production is, are essential, therefore their workforce must be vaccinated before others. Just as the observation that traditional vaccines (and this is not a traditional vaccine) are not recommended, or have risk percentages, is worthless when administered to individuals with particular chronic diseases (and in the United States we know the percentage of people with chronic problems such as diabetes, liver problems, pancreas, etc.), let alone if the vaccine in question could be, of which we know little about its long-term consequences.
Just as believing that it would serve to eliminate the so-called intellectual property on drug patents and thus allow the oppressed and imperialist dominated countries to produce the vaccine at low cost in poor countries, is a distortion of what ownership of capitalist means of production is.
This contains not only the formula of the so-called vaccine, but the know-how, the technology useful for dissecting DNA strands and the technological and scientific competence to equip and produce such technologies, plus the technical-scientific training that is required to handle one and the other. The public patent of the vaccine will arrive, let’s be sure, but it will be like receiving a large lego package for the reproduction of the empire state building but without the assembly instructions.
In short, capitalist mandatory vaccination is the further affirmation that the capitalist war health welfare is the only way to protect human health, and not reacting to it does not favor the defense of class interests, it hinders the resumption of a its antagonism independent of capital. This has nothing to do with being “no-vax” or “pro-vax”, it has nothing to do with being a “denier” or not of the pandemic. The pandemic exists, it exists and it does not stop, the capitalist system is unable to fight it if it is itself. Conversely, it would make sense to reason and reflect critically on science and therefore to social service and not to profit, because this is completely lacking. What role could this science and scientific research make sense? It is certainly not in the production of other anti-covid19 vaccines, perhaps Russian, Chinese or Cuban brands. Rather, a scientific research would be needed (currently not very functional to the interests of capitalist accumulation) that would truly investigate the disease covid19, of which we know very little, and about what could be the negative and possibly chronic effects on health in a long term, for all those millions of positive (98%) apparently cured, as suggested Stefano Liguoro in his blog.
If we do not currently have the class strength to initiate real insubordination to the overall governance policy of the pandemic, because this cannot be given by the voluntarism of some political vanguard, at least the clear, intransigent denunciation of the governance of the pandemic government (which includes lockdown, curfew, DPCM and mandatory mass vaccination), should always be reiterated every where and every when it comes to the defense of health, especially the health of workers.
At the same time hindering, fighting the compulsory mass capitalist vaccination for covid19 is indispensable!