COVID-19: A Market of up to 23 Billion US Dollars
A guest article by Michael Pröbsting, International Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT)
A guest article by Michael Pröbsting, International Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT)
This edition of Covid Superstars is by special request from a reader, although the Professor was already on the hit list.
For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this state of affairs is not an aberration or a mistake, but simply the extreme manifestation of the West’s direction of travel since its very beginning in Greek and Roman city-states. Agamben was the first to call out the cruelty and absurdity of lockdown as a response to coronavirus.
As a lockdown sceptic, over the last few months I have experienced the kind of treatment at the hands of my lockdown lefty ‘friends’ they previously reserved for online rants at the alt-right Twitterati. As I shared these upsetting experiences it became clear that others had suffered the same kind of abuse from people they had previously considered ‘comrades’. This led to my interest in the psychology driving the left lockdowners’ bullying of socialist lockdown sceptics and widespread denial of debate.
One of the small but not insignificant groups on the Marxist left is Counterfire, an organisation that came about in 2013 following a split from the Socialist Workers Party.
A curious paradox is that public attacks on prominent lockdown sceptics and scientists critical of government pandemic policy have intensified in inverse proportion to the welcome fall in covid infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
Despite three national lockdowns in England and similar restrictions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland for nearly a whole year, we are allegedly still in the midst of a public health emergency. One academic who has been visible throughout on numerous TV programmes is Professor Susan Michie.
From the start, it has been clear that lockdowns are a policy which have devastating impacts on the poor. In the West, the poor have been on the receiving end of the suppression of rights to education, work, and a dignified life.