The Plague

The Plague There is no one pushing a cart through the streets and calling for people to “bring out the dead,” but there might as well be. Shops are closed. Foot and automobile traffic has thinned to that of small towns in rural areas. Fourteenth century Europe relied on religion: prayer, self-flagellation, pogroms against Jews, and similar effective measures. Twenty-first century United States, United Kingdom and the like relied on the equivalent approach; just updated to fit with what passes for culture in the cybernetic order of crumbling global capital and imperialism. Mass quarantines, called ‘lock downs’ by Big Media and governments, pointless protective gear like face masks for walking outside, hoarding toilet paper, cocktail napkins, dinner napkins, and other paper products (to ward off viruses?), shuttering of almost all commercial enterprises, but interestingly no ordered protective measures of vulnerable populations. The apparatuses of state promote such irrationalism. Who says there are ‘rational actors’ under global capital? Making It Real Compared to What Eugene McDaniels (1966) Compared to What. Thoughtful interlocutors might ask a few questions. Here are some. Global Big Media are devoting much time and space to the global epidemic of the latest coronavirus, which they call COVID-19 (hereinafter The Plague). Why is there is no comparative information regarding similar flu-like diseases from year to year? For example, the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control) estimates that last flu season (2018-19) there were 14 to 22 thousand deaths from flu. The US National Vital Statistics Report (Vol. 24 No.9 June 24, 2019) records over 55,000 died from flu-pneumonia in the United States in 2017. As of the end of May 2020, the United States reports a little over 100 thousand deaths. In 1957 116 thousand dead in a United States with slightly more than half the current population. Back then, hardly anybody noticed. Elvis was the newest and greatest musical star displacing Frank Sinatra. Cars had tail fins. The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, and Henry Aaron hit 44 home runs. That was news. Flu wasn’t. Then and now almost all deaths are co-morbid, meaning that those who died also had life threatening diseases or potentiating diseases, like lung cancer, emphysema, severe cardiovascular disease, and occupational diseases like black lung, silicosis, mesothelioma, etc. Just taking the United States with about a hundred thousand deaths yields a mortality rate of about 30 deaths per hundred thousand. This is compared to about 6 for people killing each other (homicide, approaching a post-WWII low), 15.5 from suicide, between 11 to 12 for traffic fatalities, and 7.3 from Alzheimer’s; not to mention the big three: Cardiovascular 198.8, Cancer 183.9, and accidents 52.2 including (?) medical error (National Vital Statistics). Another question pertains to morbidity, or how many people are sick from COVID? A related question is how many are infected, but not sick, which is the rate of infection. There is no easy answer, especially from official counting agencies like the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for at least two reasons. Test kits for TV are unreliable, registering many false positives. Secondly, much testing measures antibodies (disease fighting cells produced by our bodies) and antibodies are not specific for The Plague. They are generated for a spectrum of related virus infections like other kinds of flu. Another test identifies traces of virus RNA which may or may not be a sign of a viable, disease causing virus, and is easily contaminated. In other words the RNA test is too sensitive. Even so, take testing results for the US State of Wisconsin, which is a median sized state and has many other representative demographics for the country as a whole. With extensive testing the infection rate is between 5 and 10 percent. Wisconsin has 550 deaths at the end of May. It might go to 580, which makes for easier arithmetic, as the state’s population is 5.8 million. With a 5 percent infection rate, that means an infection-fatality rate of .16-.17 percent—i.e., the number of people infected who die, about the same as annual flu. Among other problems, therefore, is that morbidity reports for other kinds of flu have disappeared, as they are swallowed by The Plague. Worse yet for getting a perspective on deaths is that the CDC protocol for identifying cause of death heavily favors COVID as a cause, no matter what other conditions may be present: car accident, could be COVID; gunshot wound, could be COVID; lung cancer, could be COVID—you get the picture. That means that deaths are inflated, and maybe inflated a lot. The same goes for Great Britain. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Britain and the United States lead the word in Plague deaths. Even more telling are data from Euro MOMO (European Monitoring of Excess Mortality). It shows that in Europe excess mortality is lower throughout Europe than in the previous two years, 2018 and 2019. The data are collected from national reports on a weekly basis so this year at week 20 can be compared to previous years. Moreover, the only country reporting excess mortality is Italy, and even there, it is not in the highest category. So, there is no reliable information for morbidity or mortality. Nonetheless un-sick people are quarantined. What about sick people? What happens to them? In the capitalist countries of the West, as opposed to the capitalist counties of the non-West like Japan and Korea (the southern region), hospital accommodations are becoming too scarce for non-Plague patients. In fact hospitals are closing floors and laying off personnel, because elective procedures have been curtailed. Officials are talking publicly about triage—you know, let the old and sickest die. Why? No money there. That brings up another fanciful phenomenon of The Plague: nursing homes, and related extended care facilities. In the United States about half of Plague deaths are in nursing homes. There are two reasons. First like Willy Sutton who robbed banks because that’s where the money was, people die in nursing homes because they are old and sick, mostly. Second, because the UK and US completely botched their public health responses, and second because, especially in the United States, nursing homes are money makers for so-called health care providers from giant corporations to local leeches. The result is low levels of sanitation, underpaid and understaffed personnel, and a rentier mentality by owners who rely on the fixed-pricing of Medicare and Medicaid for the bulk of their revenue. Fixed reimbursement means cutting every conceivable expense so that they barely pass state inspections. Third-and-a-half questions: why the hype and why is the hype global? Set those aside for a moment while our interlocutors ponder a fourth question. There should also be a few questions about governments’ responses. A common one is to close schools—primary, secondary, and post-secondary. But such questions suggest a pause to the interrogation. Instead, consider the consequences or the most likely consequences of closings and lockdowns. The likely consequences raise the issue of guilt. Oh, not religious guilt, either of the Christian kind or the Jewish kind. Of the Christian kind, Bob Dylan put it best: “Look out kid, it’s something you did. Don’t know when, but you’re doing it again” (Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965). Of the Jewish kind, Dylan again: “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin' me on’ God say, ‘No.’ Abe say, What?’ God say, ‘You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin' you better run’ Well Abe says, ‘Where you want this killin' done?’ God says. Out on Highway 61.’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965). No, the kind of guilt operative here is Stalinist guilt, as in that one is responsible for the consequences of what one does whether intended or not. In Anglo-American law it is the doctrine of strict liability, often exemplified by the parable of someone who brings a lion into the village. Granted, you did not mean for the lion to eat Joe the Blacksmith, but . . . . The consequences of quarantines of the un-sick and shuttering of commerce and public facilities are to put an end to civic life. Moreover, under the system of capital, consequences, intended or not, offer opportunities. Shutting down civic life, interrupting person to person, face to face interaction has led to virtual interaction. After the interlude above, return to online schools. Sometimes the magic works and sometimes in doesn’t. Online higher education can be as or more effective in certain disciplines and for certain courses. For others, it is nonsense. For example, studio and laboratory courses need studios and laboratories. It should be obvious, but not to higher education administrators, apparently. Basic language courses can be done online, but their effectiveness is limited largely by students’ dedication, which tends to be low for undergraduates taking language as general education requirements. Lecture-discussion courses can be as or more effective online, where students cannot easily fool themselves into thinking that showing up is good enough, and teachers can evade critical analysis of students’ work by giving them often very flexible points for “attendance” and “participation.” The point for teachers is to raise their teaching evaluation scores by giving high grades. Higher education teachers put themselves in a dither by trying to replicate the classroom or lecture hall. They could write the lectures, embed videos, audios, and graphics, but that requires something new and different. I’ll let the reader fill in what is new and different for faculty members. In primary and secondary education, online schooling verges on an oxymoron. Once children leave home, school becomes the primary venue for socialization. That is the point. Children need to be in school for their education. They require real, live, in-person interaction. Socialized adults can do without it, but only at great cost to civic life. By the way, kids don’t get The Plague. In Wisconsin USA there have 0 (zero, zilch, none) deaths from The Plague for kids under age 10, and only 1 percent of cases for teenagers (10-19). They don’t get sick from the latest COVID. Why then not continue with schooling in session, and test the adults (teachers and other staff) frequently, like every week? People need the Agora. That is why they were built. Without the Agora society becomes a prison with individualized cells. The mayor of Chicago has threatened arrest and criminal prosecution for those who venture outside for any non-essential (as defined by the mayor) activities. Similar so-called stay-at-home orders have been issued by mayors and governors around the world. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA cops are arresting people for being out without an acceptable (to copthink) rationale. In the arguably most racially segregated US city, guess where the cops are doing this, and guess who (color) is arrested. More than one guess is not allowed. Where Milwaukee is located, Wisconsin, the governor has closed state parks, because, you know, trees spread The Virus. New Zealand authorizes police invasions of private homes to check whether people are violating the un-sick quarantine of small groups. Militias, gendarmerie, and armies have been mobilized to fight a virus . . . with rifles and machine guns! Doubtless that would prove an effective medical tactic. Shoot those viruses in their tracks. No prisoners taken, death on sight. Is there not something beyond even the absurd in all this? Rational approaches quarantine the sick, test people to find if they are infected, close only those venues where here are vulnerable populations, and take special care including testing to those confined in prisons, concentration camps (called detention centers in the United States), and refugee camps. Rational approaches, however, seem confined to Asia, especially China and South Korea. Officials and public relations flacks make many pronouncements, but believing what such personages say is a fool’s errand without observing what they, and more importantly, those they represent, do. It’s the doing that counts. What are authorities and apparatuses doing? In Germany in the 1930s, everyone knew that Jews and Gypsies were an infection in the body of the people. In 2020 in the West (a vague ontology at best) everyone knows that The Plague is deadly and to be evaded at all costs, especially the costs of freedom, critical thought, dissent, and all those other liberal attributes, or so we have been told. Quick, give up going outside your house, socializing with friends and acquaintances; else you die a horrible death. Of course the people who do die of The Plague, or any other flu for that matter, are already dangerously sick from other diseases. What are the authorities doing about this other than clamping down on social contact and forbidding civic life? So-called health providers in the United States are making a bundle by jacking up prices for basic diagnostics (COVID-19 test kits that are unreliable), in-patient hospitalizations, and last but not least, Big Pharma charging 50 to 100 times the cost of treatment drugs, all the while positioning itself for monopolizing any vaccine they might foist off as preventive. In sum, big business is acting to take advantage of profit opportunities that they otherwise do not have because of their inefficient, ineffective, and over priced commodities, incompetent management, and which are now scrounging money from government to offset their otherwise unmarketable products and services. In the United States the health care industry (the word itself, ‘industry’, is a dead giveaway) now competes with defense industries (another risible sobriquet) for waste and theft. All that is to be expected, especially in the center of cowboy capitalism. The organs of Wall Street, Washington DC, City of London, et al. publish alarmist figures of mass death, although not for imperialist wars all over the globe. “Lockdowns” and other police state measures are lauded, depicted as normal, and decried as too tardy. Like the Germans under the Nazis, people think they are free. Even more so, they hasten to comply with authoritarian, nonsensical orders. Stay six feet apart. Do not leave home. Wear masks. Avoid public places, most of which are closed anyway. People are afraid of dying from the plague, which was appropriate in the fourteenth century, sixteenth century, or even eighteenth century, but in the twenty-first century there is no plague, except global fascism. All the while the US government has handed over 2 trillion dollars to Wall Street in the form of government bonds, which means that the 2 trillion actually hands over 4 trillion, because the Wall Street banks and brokerages make money from the bonds they hold. The paltry (an aggrandizement) $1,200 to ever adult citizen (resident?) is not even a drop in the bucket. Maybe it’s a virus-carrying aerosol droplet. The plutocrats and their employees in the US government should be the ones wearing masks as they are the ones holding up the stagecoach. Most of Big Media throughout the world continue to pound away at scare stories, citing various medical and non-medical authorities who mainly espouse personal opinions about the current flu pandemic. What makes it a pandemic and not a mere epidemic is that it is global. That is to be expected in the age of global travel. Of course that is a new meaning invented by WHO when it was trying to peddle flu vaccines for annuals and special outbreaks that never materialized and more recently CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) a Bill Gates brainchild. Pandemic used to refer to epidemics that overwhelmed caregivers, which could have been a valid worry at the beginning of The Plague, but a few months in, hospital corridors rang with echoes of deserted beds. So far, there is nothing to see here except the most concerted public relations campaign since 9/11 and the post WWII Red Scare. You Don’t Need a Weatherman Yes, it’s Dylan again, and the Weather Underground—Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Gold, et al. Experts populate the talking shows of Big Media, infect (anti) social media, and are transmitted beyond any protective social distance. The responsible ones (MDs with lofty sounding titles and affiliation of various medical institutions) merely make claims about things they do not know. Not only do they not know, no one can know. For example, a prepublication article put out March 30, 2020 reports on a case study of transmission of COVID-19 within two family households. 2 Li C, Ji F, Wang L, Wang L, Hao J, Dai M, et al. Asymptomatic and human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in a 2-family cluster, Xuzhou, China. Emerg Infect Dis. 2020 Jul [date cited]. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2607.200718 The information reported in the article is from a single case study in China. It represents the state of medical and epidemiological knowledge as of March 30. Nonetheless, celebrity experts assert all kinds of phony information about transmission, rate of infection, virulence of the virus, and a host of other things they do not and cannot know. They masquerade as weathermen telling us which way the wind blows. Governments and their organs, Big Media, trot out these charlatans to buttress actions and policies that can have no relevance for stemming the COVID-19 epidemic, any other flu epidemic, or for that matter any health emergency. Moreover, with a few national exceptions, the same narrative, same acts, and same policies are promulgated throughout the world—quarantines, business and school closings, restrictions on public gatherings, and all manner of anti-social initiatives, which are backed up by the armed force of the state. Inquiring minds might wonder whether they have stepped into an episode of the infamous Twilight Zone television program of the 1950s and 60s (1959-1964). Wonder they should, because the driving forces and persons behind this Kafkaesque production remain opaque, shrouded from public scrutiny despite their coming from public policies, and executed by public apparatuses. In fact, other than extended close conduct with infected persons (e.g., within households), there is no evidence of how the virus is transmitted—which should make one wonder the purpose of “stay-at-home” orders. To date no one knows how The Plague spreads, this one or any other flu epidemic. The same applies to other places of congregative living such as group homes and residential facilities of all kinds where anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people are housed together. There are plenty of these in the United States for adults, as children seem immune or resistant to the disease. Here are some more comparisons that Big Media is so chary about providing. Back to Wisconsin with its recorded deaths of 550, this compares to four other similarly populous states (countries): Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, and Singapore. Here are the respective death numbers: Denmark 568, El Salvador 42, Finland 314, and Singapore 23. Curious, is it not? These four countries and Wisconsin also used a variety of strategies from full mass arrest (lockdown) to minor restrictions. Full lockdown did not result in the lowest deaths. The same pattern prevails globally. There is little correlation between degree of restriction and number of deaths. Half the deaths in Wisconsin are residents of nursing homes, in the United States nursing homes Plague deaths range from 20 percent in New York to 80 percent in Minneapolis (Kaiser Family Foundation). The same range seems to apply globally. Wisconsin, the United States, and most other countries did nothing to protect confined and vulnerable populations, and shockingly enough, it is among those that most deaths occur. Rational, post-Enlightenment, scientific thought ponders observables and not angels on pin heads. Explanations for observables, called ‘theories’ by the more esoteric minded, limit discourse to those observables and leave out the opaque; maybe reserve it for later when more knowledge is gained. The semi-secret plans and goals of those who devised and implemented the current epidemic scheme remain hidden. Nonetheless, like electrons, they can be known by their effects. The effects are those acts and policies of states. In the United States they are: killing small businesses and supporting big businesses and Wall Street, restricting education, restricting social interaction, rationing necessities like medical supplies and treatment, employing isolating communication like virtual and internet media, readying armed forces to quell and contain public protests, delaying elections, allowing retailers of food and other supplies to sell out to hoarding, pumping up fear, ineffective protective gear promoted as fetishes and fashion statements, etc. Consequences of the effects in the previous paragraph ensure diminished effectiveness of popular demands and concerted actions, along with the strengthening of an absurdist rendition of public, social life. When social reality is represented as absurd, popular agency is neutralized. Why now and why so uniform throughout the world? Where do such acts and policies not prevail? Last but not least, who gains and who loses? We may not know what the global ruling class is up to, but we can be sure it does not benefit us. Our percipient interlocutor asks why are people dying from flu. People have always died from flu, especially the Spanish flu after WWI. Current flus are different. Their proximate cause of death is pulmonary—i.e., they die from pneumonia or other respiratory failures, not the flu itself. Who dies? People who are sick, old, and poor—just as they always have. Why are these facts and comparisons not published? What is the purpose of the induced panic? Why has the panic led to police state measures throughout the world? These last few questions raise others. After WWII, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death in the world. It is a disease of poverty. In the late 1940s and early 1950s several antibiotics were found to be effective treatments. They were not patented. At the same time polio was a major scourge. In 1955 the Salk vaccine, which prevents polio, was administered free of charge in most school districts in the United States. In the Reagan-Thatcher era (basically the 1980s) concern for the public good gave way to privatization. The air traffic controllers’ strike (1981) in the United States, and the coal strike in Britain (1984-5) marked the transition. Other public goods soon followed. Public schools, once the mainstay of the republic, were derided as failures, and privatization was promoted. Even the US military was privatized. Armies gave way to mercenaries such as Blackwater, then Xe, and currently Academi (as of 2011)—not coincidentally started by Erik Prince, brother of the US Secretary of Education, whose fortunes were founded on a ponzi scheme. Navies turned into privateers, and intelligence was contracted out to the like of Booze Allen Hamilton, former employer of Edward Snowden. Liberation movements of the 1960s and early 1970s were perverted into identity politics, in which statuses replaced class as primary political affiliations. Some call this shift neoliberalism, which is probably as good as any other name. By the 1990s neoliberalism became the new world order. When the financial crisis of 2007-8 hit the global system, Wall Street and the City of London—along with other world centers of capital—were infused with public wealth by the states in which those centers resided. The banks were saved. The people paid for it. In April 2020 the US Treasury was effectively handed over to another Black, this time Black Rock, the largest money management company in the world, and favored by political luminaries like the Bush family and Henry Kissinger. The people who run such operations are those 389 people who control the wealth of the world, according to Peter Phillips in his book, Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018). They are not the owners. They work for them, but they are not ordinary employees, not exactly burger flippers. They have their own wealth, just not in the league of the owners. More importantly, however, they are the managers. They make the decisions. What did they decide relevant to The Plague? They decided that sick people are a vast and expansive network whose needs could be exploited for profit. As a result, they stripped the assets of care provision. And as another result, there aren’t enough. There are not enough accurate and reliable tests—actually, probably none. There are not enough doctors and nurses. There are enough treatment effective medicines, but they come from the wrong countries (China and Cuba) or are too common to be profitable like quinine derivative anti-malarial drugs. Triage is employed. Tens of thousands of US residents will die, because there aren’t enough. The same happened last year, and probably will again next year, no matter which flu is around. Everyone else is under house arrest. It’s just what the doctor ordered. Unpromulgated by Big Media information from epidemiology and virology supports inferences that COVID 19 (CoV2 or any name you choose) is typical of coronaviruses which are endemic and potentiate annual influenzas, common colds, and other diseases of winter and spring, is not more lethal, is not more virulent, and might even prove milder than most new flu epidemics that sweep the world every ten to fifteen years or so. And yet, Big Media, as stenographers of state apparatuses under the control of the global ruling class’s executive apparatus (US intel-military apparatus), have promoted The Plague as a Really Big Scare. Under the aegis of Big Media and US apparatuses (including WHO and its employers, Big Pharma, et al), much of the First and Second World (Third World doesn’t count) is under house arrest. Also World 1 and 2 face a toilet paper shortage—horrors! Conclusion: It worked! Global populations can be totally controlled by promoting a Really Big Scare. They will not revolt or even question. They will obey. Great news! No worries! Rob them blind and they will thank us for it. There are, of course, some collateral benefits too. Governments shovel scads of money into the pockets of the ruling class and their top managers. The demes are removed from even the pretense of democratic rule by delaying elections or making the voting process too scary for anyone to take the risk (e.g., Wisconsin April 7, 2020). Mirrors and Tsuris About the time of the neoliberal triumph various pundits—witting or unwitting mouthpieces for the ruling class—were assuring everyone that liberal democracy had triumphed everywhere, the whole project looked like a colony of moths had lunched on a favorite woolen coat. Therefore, let us look at a distant mirror. 2020 begins to look more and more like 1348. By the mid-fourteenth century the world system of feudalism was decaying rapidly. Much tsuris ensued. It was a period of global cooling, hence famines and disease. Wars became more widespread, mobile, and long lasting—e.g., the Hundred Years War. Picking a time to be alive, the fourteenth century would probably not top the list for most people. In her book by that name (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, 1978), Barbara Tuchman argued that her contemporary twentieth century was a distant mirror, in effect; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were rampant. Tuchman compared the aftermath of the Plague (Black Death—more on this irony later) to the aftermath of WWI. Before quoting, I note her psychologism, especially national psychologism, misses a crucial point—namely, that material conditions determine psychology, and not the other way around. Nonetheless, Tuchman makes a thought provoking point. “Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. . . . To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man (123).” If that be so, then perhaps The Plague of 2020 is the end of modern man. Consider the modern condition. Before postmodernism’s perversions, modernists took a quizzical, if not downright querulous approach to the relations among nature, people, and those among people (aka social relations). Here Albert Camus has the resident physician of Oran, Rieux speaking with Rambert, a journalist trapped in the city by the quarantine. Rambert: “’But damn it doctor, can’t you see it’s a matter of common human feeling? Or don’t you realize what this sort of separation means to people who are fond of each other?’ Rieux was silent for a moment, the he said he understood it perfectly. . . . Only the law was the law, plague had broken out, and he could only do what had to be done. . . . ‘No’ Rambert said bitterly, ‘you can’t understand. You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.’ The doctor glanced up at the statue of the Republic, then said he did not know if he was using the language of reason, but he knew he was using the language of the facts as everybody could see them—which wasn’t necessarily the same thing. [The Plague, Trans., Stuart Gilbert, Modern Library College Edition, (1948) 79-80] Of course “the facts as everybody could see them” are massaged, if not manufactured out of whole cloth when it comes to The Plague, where the stricken are counted according to tests that do not work and heart attacks, cancers, and occupational diseases are counted as deaths due to the virus, in some cases without any tests at all. The only reason that prevails is the ‘raison d’état, which serves in its tortuous and complicated ways, the global ruling class. The current plague has helped lay bare many realities of modern society, not least is the irrational behavior of officials, media, and the masses. Modern man has been succeeded by irrational man. Granted, its emergence was promoted by postmodernism, but that scurrilous intellectual and artistic trend could not account for the run on toilet paper, people wearing bandit masks (in case they plan to hold up a stagecoach), closing of public parks, arresting people playing basketball, closing self serve delicatessen counters while displaying fresh produce as usual, etc. Even the 9/11 terror had a certain rationality, despite the fact that it was based on fairy tales about the incident. After just two decades, the twenty-first century makes the previous one look halcyon. Instead of two centralized mass slaughters, the twenty-first century has myriad genocidal conflagrations spread across the world. Plagues are not rare either. Polio persists despite the possibilities of its eradication at the beginning of the century. In the impoverished and extracted parts of the globe—e.g., central Africa, South Asia, and so on—tropical, preventable diseases kill tens of millions every year, and life spans remain those of the Neolithic. Were it not for their convenience for global capital, the standard of living in the Third World would equal that of the Second World. Moreover, Second World countries labor under constant threat of invasions and sanctions from the lords of the world in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, etc. In the fourteenth century the feudal mode of production based on bound labor, serfdom, gave way to the kernel of modern capital—wage labor. In the twenty-first century human labor has been supplanted with cybernetically controlled robotic labor. It is the result of a long term trend, which signals the end of the global system of capital. Before the fourteenth century, the feudal order was dominated by status—i.e., birth or blood and one’s position in a status defined structure anchored by control of land. Modern relations supplanted status relations with class relations, the essence of which was that of the employer-employee relationship. Marx called the bourgeois mode of production. Marx and Engels captured it succinctly in their Manifesto of 1848. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Ch. 1). The mode of production, which determined modern man, was continually ephemeral. Modernity proper, the consciousness based on the new system of social relations, characteristically sought the foundations of the ephemeral—from Einstein, to Freud, to Marx, to Picasso—modern consciousness tried to grasp the essentials. Postmodernism made fun of the attempt. The ridiculous movement found its origins in France and its exponents in the pseudo-intellectuals and phony artistes of America (the United States of), where they turned politics into psycho-sexual-color-identity denials of material reality—the essence of postmodernism. Change the relations of production, and all social relations change. In the fourteenth century, the serf-lord relation gave way to the employer-employee relation—class relations. What is today’s relation? Is it between owner and robot? But that is not a social relation, as the worker is not human, and cannot therefore produce value, and the owner of capital cannot, consequently, reap a profit. The current social relations are based on a fiction: owner-robot. Increasingly capital is fictive capital, a capital without value. Billionaires can boast of great wealth, but theirs are sand castles, ready to crumble and melt away at the next tide of the affairs of men. Fiction, of course, is not irrational. It is non-rational. It is art, not mechanics. But fiction has already been “deconstructed” by the postmodernists so that fiction no longer has artistic value. Irrational man has no safe shore, no succor from the storm, and so it and they buy toilet paper Black Death Surprisingly, Big Media in the United States have found that Black Americans are dying at a higher rate than White Americans from The Plague. Who would have thought? Maybe they did not get the memo. Big Media seems oblivious. Why, after all, would there be a racial discrepancy? Is the virus racially prejudiced? What a wonder. Must be kind of like why cops disproportionately kill Black people (Glen Ford calls it “The Blue Plague and Black Death” https://www.blackagendareport.com/blue-plague-and-black-death), and why Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, and why Black people pay more for everything from housing, to transportation, to food, clothing, and medical care. It is a real puzzler. In the fourteenth century it was called the Black Death, because bubonic plague, the first and most common kind, produced dark buboes filled with blood and pus. Actually the buboes were lymph nodes overwhelmed by plague bacteria. They weren’t really black, but dark purple. The term did not refer to victims’ natural skin color, which had a far different significance then than it does now. Of course Black Americans (US variety) die quicker, are sicker, and generally have shorter lives than White Americans, because, you know, White supremacy. White supremacy is a congenital disorder of the US body politic, exhibiting symptoms of endemic, systematic, structural racism. Black people are its main, most numerous victims, but other non-Whites are stricken as well. Under the US system of status segmentation, Black Americans are not dissimilar to the Dalit (Untouchables) of India. The Black segment gets the worst of everything, although maybe in competition with the original peoples of the continent on their reservations (concentration camps) and urban ghettos. The US cultural and historical tradition of White supremacy comes from the later seventeenth century when two developments shaped US social structure: King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion. Interested readers should research these, as full backgrounds are too cumbersome to include. Nonetheless, the upshot of both, which occurred around 1676, is the genocide of Native Americans and transgenerational slavery of Black Americans. A telling point is that until laws and court decisions in the seventeenth century British colonies of North America, people originally from Africa and paupers from England had the same legal status. They were bound laborers. By roughly 1700 Black Americans had the privilege of trans-generational slavery (racial slavery defined by law), whereas English paupers were slaves for one generation only. Indians, of course, were best eliminated with extreme prejudice, which later was called ‘genocide’. Not that the Black people didn’t also enjoy the benefit of genocide, because their original cultures were deliberately destroyed, but their lives were relatively preserved, because as slaves they became valuable property. Black Americans have a dual consciousness, as WEB Dubois explained, because they are members of both a status (Black) and class—working or middle but never upper. With the dual status they get to die faster and in greater numbers, with one informative exception. In the middle nineteenth century the railroad builders used Irish and Chinese workers, because Black slaves were too valuable to die building the rails. In the United States today Black ghettos and Indian reservations have a much higher morbidity and mortality rate than White parts of the country. Doubtless much of this has to do with environmental racism. Non-Whites live in toxic, unhealthy environments. Ghettos and reservations have higher social toxicity with more suicides, homicides, higher rates of drug addiction, and so on. Of course poor Whites do too, and those populations exhibit the same population health conditions. The physical environments are more toxic including air, land, and water pollution from heavy metals from lead to uranium to organic toxins from industrial dumping. People who are born and grow up in such environments are more likely to develop chronic non-infectious diseases like cardiovascular disease and emphysema, and they are more susceptible to infectious disease like The Plague. Generally ghetto dwellers have much poorer health, not because of some inherited characteristic, but because of their social and physical environments. They get sick more and more easily, and they die earlier. Infant mortality is higher and so is maternal mortality, both of which are excellent indices of poverty and general health. In other words, the Black Death is rampant among them. Instructive too, is that the foregoing US cultural history is replicated within different cultural histories in other countries. The relevant point in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that similar social structures prevail according to particular cultural histories. For example, in Mitteleuropa fascist societies segment statuses according to relatively recent national origins, much like they did in their interwar fascist regimes in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and so on, but with different categories. Currently, these segmentations target recent immigrants from the territories of the Middle East and Africa as part of the global war on strategic and resource rich geographies. How different it is from the European colonialism of the first wave (15th to 17th centuries) and second wave (18th and 19th centuries), or maybe not so different. In any case, in the United States and throughout the world non-White people, corresponding with lower class, die first, more prolifically, and generally count for less all across the world. Whiteness is the unmarked, dominant status identity. That is the Black Death in the twenty-first century. The United States is the main enforcer of that reality along with all the other manufactured realities of global capital. 2025: Looking Backward Unlike Edward Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), there is no utopia. In retrospect, it was all so easy. The world system was collapsing. Global capital could no longer generate profits. It was all coming to a grinding halt. All that was needed was a personalized existential scare. Of course, it was only another flu; nothing really out of the ordinary. Every year, influenzas kill a few million people in world, like culling the herd, getting rid of the old, sick, and, of course, redundant. All that was necessary was that the pharma-industrial complex pass the word through its agent, the World Health Organization (WHO), that this year’s flu (2019-20), denominated the catchy name, COVID-19, sort of like a new model smart phone, was different from all other flus in the past. It was more contagious, more virulent, and more lethal. People had to stop what they were doing, no work, no school, no assemblies to petition the government. Orders from presidents, governors, and prime ministers enforced separation. Their publicity organs of Big Media continually trumpeted scares, laced with heart rending personal interest profiles of otherwise healthy young adults dying of it. They did not mention that such cases were rare as consciences among aldermen. That great modern invention, (anti) social media, offered echo chambers so that the more people tried to find out what was happening, the more scared they became, and therefore the more obedient Luckily, the rodeo clown was succeeded by the Alzheimer-afflicted in the White House. Clowns, after all, are so unpredictable. Now the orders from Wall Street can be articulated by a leader who cannot remember his own name. The leader of the free world (translation: the countries that follow orders) no longer has to do anything but read from the teleprompter in his ever briefer public appearances. No one noticed any difference. The more attentive had been so diligent. They worried and agitated against nuclear war, sought solutions to climate change, and other global threats. Once again Bob Dylan: "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line know what any of it is worth." "No reason to get excited", the thief, he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late". All along the watchtower, princes kept the view While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl. (All Along the Watch Tower, 1967) So much for manning the watch tower. A microscopic virus causing a not very unusual influenza was all that was needed. The ruling class was saved. That is the only thing that really matters. The world system, now that the system of global capital had been shattered, could be remade. A new state—to steal a phrase from Antonio Salazar (1889-1970) of Portugal—could be built. On the other hand, Salazar’s version of fascism was of the liberal variety, akin to readers of the New York Times. The twenty-first century new state will be made of sterner stuff. The New State will not be a return to normal. Of course, there never was a ‘normal’. For the last 50 years there has been a boiling of frogs . . . and we are the frogs. Americans (of the United States variety) became so frightened that “Blacks, Communists, and Hippies,” would take over after 1968 that they sided with the Chicago cops who brutalized their children in Chicago in August. The Chicago pigs were vindicated, and the rulers knew just what to do. Just scare them, and everything will be OK. We stay in control. We don’t have to fear the people, because we can make them more afraid of themselves. Maybe not a new strategy—it had always worked in the past. (Remember Adolph and the infection of the German people—the Jews?). Nonetheless, Chicago 1968 served as a useful reminder. Now in 2025, 1968 was a lifetime ago for those in middle age. Just as kids then, looked on as “the whole world was watching.” The kids revolted then, following Camus advice: “Je me révolte, donc nous sommes.” The water has been heating since then. It became too late. The Donald built The Wall. He said it was to keep Them out. It kept us in. They closed the borders after the pseudo election of 2020. People need papers. At first they called them vaccination certificates. They were what that poseur, Michel Foucault, called biopolitics papers. They were not so very different from the yellow stars and passports with the “JUDEN” stamp on them. The Vopos stopped anyone on the street and demanded their papers. They even looked like the Vopos (Volkspolizei) from the DDR during the Cold War. They were supposed to be scary to those in the West. They were supposed to represent the bugbear, Communist dictatorship. Of course Victor Grossman told a different story in his memoir, A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee (2019). He was 50 in 1968, living in the East. For him, the Vopos were just cops; the Stasi helped protect the people from the CIA and MI6. Star Wars and Hunger Games modeled their gendarmerie on them. There was a wall back then too, but in the West, people were told it was to keep people in. The propaganda was that people had to “escape” to the West. It wasn’t. It was to try to regulate the spies from the West. That is just the thing with walls. They work both ways, and what the authorities tell us is usually the opposite of the way they really work. Most people believed. They believed that last election was real. They believed that if they got The V, they would die. After WWII, life was hard. Things were rationed, and not just toilet paper. People in the West thought it was because of the “Communist Dictatorship” (CD), but they gave money to help starving Western Europe—Britain, France, Italy. They forgot that it was the east that was devastated by the Wehrmacht. They forgot it was the Red Army that saved them from the camps. That was the way the ground was prepared. Even in 1968 when the kids revolted, they believed in the CD so instead they formed the New Left, because the Old Left, the commies, were just a bunch of benighted oldsters taking orders from Moscow, dupes and useful idiots. Of course the Old Left knew better too. The kids didn’t know how to organize. They imagined themselves as heroes, revolution as romance. The Old and New scorned each other, and lost the benefit of consultation, collaboration, and cooperation. There was no revolution, televised or not. Revolutions need both—discipline and romance. Then there were the lost decades. Dylan got religion, and lost touch with what he had known, written about, and played. Young people felt left behind, their parents, the kids of 1968 seemed more interested in other things. Let them be raised by television, which was a big mistake in many ways. They didn’t just cut their hair. They cut themselves off from the real revolt. Instead they revolted against their parents, went for Reagan and Rambo. Thought they knew something, as young people always do. What they did not do was question and wonder why. If they went to college, they got tempted by the Foucaults and the Lacans, the Lyotards, the Baudrillards, the Deleuzes, and the like. They learned that so-called grand narratives, which were the explanations of underlying realities, were not to be trusted. They learned that such grand narratives were false because they had been enunciated by men and women, instead of gender-neutral beings. But they did not learn that postmodernism was just a warmed over nihilism that served the Nazis so well. Almost all business is conducted online. Theaters have disappeared, except for boutique houses catering to the 1 percent. The same goes for restaurants where the plebs (99 percent) order electronically and serve themselves. There are no wait staff. Children still go to primary and secondary school, but only for three hours a day. The rest is online. Colleges are mostly online except for a few laboratories and studios, but the top tier institutions continue as they always have. All those jobs in what used to be called the service industries have been shifted to guards and enforcement. There are a lot more cops. Everyone must have certificates of need to use public transportation so the few private vehicles are largely chauffeur driven. All kinds of socializing is virtual, and the birth rate has fallen dramatically. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore Duke Ellington (music) and Bob Russell 1942 Of course 2025 is speculative, but the trends are clear. Using The Plague as an excuse, the state has tightened controls and divided the public with ubiquitous surveillance and policing. Civic life is becoming virtual. The anti-social media regulate society much better than the Gestapo ever could. It was all brought to a head because people were made to fear death if they got a bad cold or flu. State instruments like WHO and CDC fed propaganda to Big Media who, as usual, broadcast without checking or questioning. Publics throughout the world, but especially in the centers of capital, complied, consented, and became complicit in their own imprisonment. They turned inward and against each other. The media report doctored (literally) data, manipulated statistics, promote fear, highlight rare personal interest stories without background (why did the otherwise healthy 30 year old die when he caught COVID? Maybe it was an undiagnosed pulmonary aneurism that burst). Testing and test kits and methods are not consistent, the population is not scientifically, randomly sampled, and therefore nobody knows who has been exposed, who has contracted the disease, how many have gotten sick, how many who are sick have sought reportable medical care, and so on. Nobody knows how many COVID attributed deaths are genuine measures of mortality of the disease, or how many are due to pressure from CDC and like agencies to predispose reportage as COVID, because that is how the death certificates are structured. Nobody knows and nobody in Big Media asks. Those who do ask are relegated to such alternative media sites as Off Guardian and Greanville Post. “There is something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mister Jones?” Yes, it’s Bob Dylan again from Ballad of a Thin Man (1965). The Irrational mind of the twenty-first century First World reverts to magical thinking and authoritarian obedience. Might be worse than getting sick, in fact it most undoubtedly is. Nonetheless, The Plague has consumed us. We fear and tremble as if it were the end of the world. So, I don’t get around much anymore. But then, there is no place to go. Addendum: America Invades Itself, from Lockdown to Curfew to Martial Law In the last days of May 2020 police riots broke out across the United States and an undeclared martial law was imposed. As people in cities throughout the land marched and demonstrated in protest against police murdering civilians especially Black men, police agents provocateurs vandalized properties, set fires, and fired random gunshot to precipitate what turned out to be police riots in cities throughout the land. State officials declared curfews enforced by armed police, and gendarmerie threatened crowds with live, lethal ammunition along with internationally banned poison gas, and other crowd control measures. The occasion was a police murder of a Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. It was not an unusual occurrence, but it was exacerbated by months of house arrest, and unemployment not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The sequence was as follows: incident, protest, solidarity protests, provocations, curfews, military occupation. When policies, practices, institutions, and organizations do not function in furtherance of their stated goals, rarely is it the case that they are just failures or conducted by incompetent leaders. Instead, the most like reason is that stated goals are a ruse. To find the real goals, observe the effects. The lockdowns, mass house arrests, and the like imposed for the declared purpose of containing a contagious viral infection, are medical nonsense. The notion of quarantining healthy populations but exposing confined and vulnerable populations has never been done. It has never been contemplated by governments or health authorities, and is nonsensical. The wise inquirer looks to what such practices did accomplish instead of claims about what it was supposed to accomplish. It did two things in entailed another. First, it instilled a fear. Second, it controlled crowds. Third, it made people practice compliance drills. Most likely, those were its real goals all along. It was a trial run for total police states. Led by the United States, the experiment was a rousing success. Once it proved its worth, the real repressive regime was imposed first in the United States with other countries sure to follow, just as they followed the lockdown strategy. More to come in following chapters. 17