We live in a time of multiple overlapping crises – war, poverty, environmental devastation, chronic illness. They have a common root – the hegemony of capital – but they have so far failed (at least in the United States) to generate a common response. Not only is there no coherent overall response; there is also, as we shall see, conflict of political direction between advocates focusing on one or other of the particular crises. This inescapably weakens any project seeking to go beyond capitalist rule. 

　　The hegemony of capital is embodied in the power of big corporations and of the organizations in which they come together, such as the World Economic Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations. It is at the same time personified in the activity of mega-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. 

　　Above all, the hegemony of capital is reflected in the “common sense” – shared understanding or lack of understanding – of the population as it faces the various dimensions of an overarching crisis. Can the people – the working-class majority and its allies – go beyond such “common sense” to recognize capital’s key role in shaping each of these dimensions? 

　　At first glance, the links are clear enough. Capital, in its perpetual expansionist thrust, inevitably depletes resources, tramples on biodiversity, and sparks potentially armed clashes not only among competitors but also with whatever political forces – movements or regimes – threaten its global dominance. More fundamentally, it rests on an inherent relationship of exploitation which seeks to depress wages and, via the capitalist state, blocks most policies that would alleviate the social damage – especially poverty – inflicted by its routine functioning. 

　　Along with war, poverty, and environmental devastation, the phenomenon of chronic ill health, although steadily increasing since the 1960s,Footnote1 has been brought into sudden prominence since 2020 by the global spread of SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as the Covid-19 pandemic. But the terms in which this crisis has been recognized have been controversial. The dominant narrative, reflecting the interests of the medical/pharmaceutical-industrial complex, spins the massive scale of casualties by fixating on a particular virus in isolation from the conditions that determine its lethality. The narrative creates a climate of fear, which enables its capitalist backers and their bureaucratic emissaries to impose unprecedented levels of social control while at the same time fostering a literally captive market – by banning certain drugs and then mandating injections – for remedies produced by their own companies and protected from widespread critical scrutiny by a blanket of corporate and governmental censorship. 

　　The dominant response to Covid-19 represented a continuation of long-established assumptions about how to deal with illness, focusing on a single offending pathogen rather than on the entirety of the human organism.Footnote15 Confronted with a new viral threat, instead of encouraging the emergency adaptation of available remedies (including non-patented drugs and vitamins) that could enhance natural immunities, the authorities repressed such efforts.Footnote16 For the first nine months of the pandemic (which was proclaimed in March 2020), the only “accepted” response short of hospitalization was quarantine. Hospital treatment was then often too late and typically involved the use of ventilators which was itself dangerous (Green and Fazi Citation2023, 129–134). All hope was made to hinge on the arrival of newly developed “vaccines,” which finally appeared in December.Footnote17 

　　The immediate basis for this official response is a predilection for the latest innovations, but underlying that orientation was, on one hand, a general unwillingness to envisage any system-wide anti-contagion strategy (whether the highly focused lockdowns decreed in ChinaFootnote18 or the consistent anti-lockdown approaches implemented in Sweden and NicaraguaFootnote19) and on the other, persistent financial pressure on the part of enterprises seeking new marketable products. The prevalent approach, instead, was one that stoked an undifferentiated panic about human contact – especially damaging both for children and for the terminally ill – and caused severe neglect of other health conditions, contributing to “excess deaths” outstripping the death-toll of Covid itself.Footnote20 

　　The resulting chaos served to reinforce the typically mandatory imposition of the drug and vaccination agenda of Big Pharma. The inoculations imposed against Covid-19 in the US are more accurately described not as vaccines but as experimental gene therapy Footnote21 – gene therapy, in that they manipulate the patient’s entire immune response; experimental, in that they were initially implemented under Emergency Use Authorization, with the necessary data on long-term effects not yet obtained. Some of the consequences were nonetheless apparent, however, from Pfizer’s own internal trials, whose findings the company sought – ultimately without success – to keep secret for the next 75 years. Notable among these were the dangers posed by the jab to pregnant women, many of whom suffered miscarriages, while those who later gave birth had toxins in their breast-milk.Footnote22 

　　Remarkably, such exposés are missing not only from the corporate-liberal media but also from progressive outlets. They fall under the taboo which the government imposed on all the major social-media platforms, in an effort to sustain the legitimacy of its vaccination protocols, despite the now acknowledged facts (1) that the immunizing effect of the Covid jabs is short-term (a few months), (2) that they do not prevent transmission of the virus, and (3) that their adverse side-effects include, among other things, a non-negligible incidence of heart-damage. Whatever temporary protective effect the jabs may have had on vulnerable patients during the most severe early stages of Covid-19, it has been clear all along that in the case of young and healthy individuals, the “vaccine” poses a greater danger of injury than does the virus itself.Footnote23 

　　]Universal vaccination mandates, then, may result in severe harm being done at least to certain individuals.Footnote24 There cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach in such matters. Taking that approach violates the principle of informed consent. This core principle, enshrined in 1947 at the Nuremberg trials (in response to Nazi medical experimentation in concentration camps), is a constant in the arguments put forward by dissident doctors.Footnote25 It leads directly, however, to a political emphasis on personal freedom, which, in the US context, is seen as entailing opposition to “big government.” 

　　This is the point on which many critics of vaccine orthodoxy are drawn to the Right. Polemicizing against officially decreed medical interventions blends into attacking the social role of government more generally. This in turn encourages denialism in relation to the climate crisis.Footnote26 The assertion that, as individuals, we should be able to decide what can or cannot be injected into our own bodies is seen as implying, by the same token, an entitlement on the part of private corporations to engage without restriction, on land and sea, in whatever extractive or polluting operations they may choose.Footnote27 

　　This politically perverse conflation rests on a profound indifference to the complexity that pervades both biological and ecological reality. The species-interactions and patterns of mutual dependence that characterize biodiversity find a parallel in the amazingly intricate processes of cellular memory and messaging within the individual human body that create the basis for natural immunities.Footnote28 Just as recourse to vaccination – especially in its mRNA form – can disrupt the body’s own protective mechanisms, so the massive extraction and burning of fossil fuels, along with the attempt to mastermind agricultural production through genetic manipulation and toxins, is injecting catastrophic imbalances into the ecosphere, undermining human health and ultimately threatening our survival. 

　　Those who resist such an understanding – denying the parallel between macro and micro levels of complexity – are intent on challenging the control exercised by global elites over both public health mandates and environmental policy. What gives this stance a grain of merit is that it mixes its anti-government rhetoric with an attack on corporate/governmental collusion. The reality is that the more strategic-minded sectors of the capitalist class do indeed recognize that environmental breakdown is dangerous. Operating especially through the World Economic Forum (WEF) but also now through United Nations agencies, they then become the targets of right-wing attacks casting aspersions on the presence of China in WEF meetings and insinuating that the WEF’s environmental agenda is “communist.” 

　　The problem with the elite environmental agenda, however, is not that it recognizes the need to impose drastic measures on the economy, but rather that it remains constrained in its choice of measures by the priorities of capital – for example, precluding the option of reshaping urban space on the basis of more collective models of social organization. The right-wing critique uses the “communist” epithet to attack the globalizing elites,Footnote29 but at the same time (from the opposite direction) invokes the well-deserved unpopularity of those elites in an attempt to discredit socialism, which it falsely accuses them – as well as the Democratic Party – of embracing. 

　　In whatever way the elites evolve (or are characterized), what remains true is that their current priorities and fears are in response to the global eruption of mass protest that took place in the years since the 2008 meltdown (van der Pijl Citation2022, 45–46). This included, among other expressions, the Occupy Movement in the US and the Arab Spring (both in 2011), the Black Lives Matter movement in the US (which took off in 2014 but reached epic proportions in 2020), and the Yellow Vest movement in France (2018). As Kees van der Pijl reminds us (Citation2022, 58), the period immediately preceding the pandemic was one of intense international consultations among elites including simulations of contagion and lockdown, seeking eventually to “restore discipline within the population through a fear-based information warfare campaign.” 

　　In addition to the suppression of dissenting views on public health, a key offshoot of official policies was the shrinking of public space, as an increasing portion of both occupational activity and social interaction came to be carried out under conditions of physical isolation. Although the progression along this scale is not linear, it has nonetheless begun to normalize new practices in which, for example, political or professional meetings are conducted remotely. This has the advantage of reducing reliance on travel, but on the other hand it hampers spontaneity, facilitates surveillance, and makes it easier for whoever is hosting the meeting to “mute” any unwelcome intervention. 

　　We are living through “a biopolitical seizure of power” (van der Pijl Citation2022, 29) – a strategic alternative to fascism in which people, through fear for their health, are induced in effect to police themselves, thereby reducing the elites’ reliance on armed repression. The resultant heightened level of control is a response to all the public demonstrations of discontent. Underlying that discontent is a collapse in the capacity of established governing structures to meet people’s needs in the face of environmental breakdown – with its fires, floods, droughts, heat waves, and crop failures – and the related intensification of global power struggles among contending regimes and between oppressors and oppressed. 

　　The role of the economic regime perpetuating this scenario – the regime of capital – eludes the understanding of a majority of its victims but is implicitly recognized by its protagonists (the transnational capitalist class) in terms of a common design on their part to hold onto what they have, come what may. 

　　If the global majority is to recover a measure of well-being, it will have to evolve into a political force in its own right. To do this, it will have to transcend its internal divisions and see the interconnections among all the crucial issues. Understanding the Covid experience has become key to integrating the health issue into this synthesis. 

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Deng Panyi 

　　From: Policy Futures in Education 2024, Vol. 22(8) 1533–1539 (2024-7-31)