An invitation to the COVID Conscious community to stop trusting the same class (bourgeois) who are responsible of eugenics.
Voting is not harm reduction. direct action is.
https://maskupactup.substack.com/p/an-invitation-to-the-covid-conscious-e53
“Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world.
It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.
Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.
The tone struck by what we think of as official sources sets the stage for the broader social response.
This rhetoric comes from a variety of places — heads of state, government agencies, individual experts, think tanks, and other entities imbued with a sense of authority. These are voices that we are socialized to pay attention to. When they speak, they easily garner media attention. A news outlet that ignores or disputes these sources loses access to them and invites flak, thereby harming their ability to sell more news. These voices are generally in the room when policies are crafted — or crafting the policies themselves. What “the experts” say matters, and the particular experts being promoted by governments and corporations have steadily coalesced around rhetoric that minimizes the public health threat of the virus.
Pandemic public policy has been both shaped by and indicative of the official rhetoric of whoever happens to be in charge. It has reflected the recommendations of experts — those experts which had been chosen by the ruling government. In places governed by more liberal tendencies, curfews and cloth mask mandates lasted longer, instilling an implicit message that, unlike those science-denying conservatives, the liberals were “following the science.” This meant that, when these half-measures were rescinded, it seemed obvious that now people could feel safe putting themselves at risk.
Throughout the pandemic, media attention has been focused on reproducing official rhetoric through op-eds and interviews. The experts promoted above all have always been selected based on their proximity to power, both in terms of their official appointment and their rhetorical line. As governments and agencies solidified their pandemic-minimization rhetoric and policies, individuals who championed that line became even more appealing. The lure of manufactured conflict allowed media companies to profit by highlighting astroturfed, unpopular movements protesting all forms of public health policy. Depending on their particular cultural bent, news corporations could position themselves either as “freedom-fighters,” standing up to the government tyranny of half-baked precautionary measures, or as “champions of reason,” pushing back against misinformation and science denial.” Let Them Eat Plague! – The Red Clarion
“The bourgeois government is incentivized to allow mass deaths and disablement
because the medical industrial complex—pharmaceutical industry, healthcare conglomerates, insurance companies, etc—is just as capable of extracting profit from our disabled bodies as industry is from our labor.
This is the money model of disablement—a concept first articulated by Marta Russell—in action. Russel explains that “…persons who do not offer a body which will enhance profitmaking as laborers are used to shore up US capitalism by other means.” This is organized abandonment, a term coined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which is “the deliberate manipulation and disproportionate dispossession of resources from Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and poor communities, rendering them more vulnerable to adverse health.”
Disabled people, i.e. people “who are deemed to be surplus[,] are rendered excess by the systems of capitalist production and have been consequently framed as a drain or burden on society. But the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. In this way, those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital.
This rather hypocritical stance–the surplus are at once nothing and everything to capitalism–is an essential contradiction. Liat Ben-Moshe identifies this characteristic through the intersection of disability and incarceration: ‘Surplus populations are spun into gold. Disability is commodified through [a] matrix of incarceration (prisons, hospitals, nursing homes).’ Jasbir Puar, in The Right to Maim: ‘Debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves… Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable.’”
We must expose the government’s inactions to protect the people from COVID-19 as extractive abandonment—purposefully leaving us scrambling for basic resources necessary for survival, so that when we inevitably become sicker and sicker the healthcare industry can profit off our disabled bodies.
We must recognize our humanity, recognize that a better world is possible, and that in order for us to get what we deserve—a life free from the shackles of fascist capitalist imperialism—we must “do what must be done” and do so “by any means necessary.” People’s Health Education Program
#MaskUp #WearAMask #CovidRealist #CovidIsAirbone #LongCovid #YallMasking #DisabledLiberation #DisabilityJustice
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