In truth, the pandemic hasn’t created anything new in the way humans organize themselves. On the contrary, it has revealed the tremendous failings and fissures in the current arrangement we live and labour under. And the anti-vax movement was born of a betrayal of public trust that arrangement. How could anyone expect a capitalist system to respond in any humane way to a global pandemic when it cannot even mitigate the worst effects of climate change or ecological destruction? How can anyone expect it to garner trust from the public when it has betrayed that trust over and over again, and then lied about it?
The stark truth is that the dominant capitalist system of the world today has addressed this latest catastrophe in the only way it knows how. It has implemented public health measures, but not without throwing tons of money toward corporations while shafting the working class, including front line workers. It has created vaccines, but not without remaining true to its mandate of capital accumulation for the ruling classes, which means barbaric patent laws that pad the pockets of corrupt pharmaceutical executives while adversely impacting the global south, most of which has yet to see even the first dose of the vaccine. Lockdowns without universal basic income, rent control or social safety nets. Vaccine mandates without public transparency and access to universal healthcare. All of this has facilitated the rise of the anti-mask, anti-lockdown and anti-vax movements.
On the left, we need to do a better job at understanding the economic and political conditions, disenfranchisement and alienation that gave rise to the spread of far-right conspiracies. We need to look at the long legacy of betrayal by government, military and corporate entities that has encouraged anti-science attitudes and cynicism to grow so easily throughout society. We need to learn from public health systems that do not put profit first, like Cuba and Vietnam. We cannot let corporations or governments off the hook for their crimes. And we need to continue the hard work of building solidarity, the ironclad law of the left, spreading the message that a better world is indeed possible without the predation of capitalism. But we need to push back against those who spread misinformation, even if we are accused of being ‘gatekeepers,’ and especially when it has such an adverse impact on the working poor, people of colour, and the marginalized of the world. That last part is the most difficult of all, but unless we do that, everything else we do will be useless.
Excerpted: ‘A Time of Plague in an Era of Corruption, Mistrust and Irrationality’
Counterpunch.org