The COVID Consensus

I can´t stop linking to this rather obvious Communist front group...

Note the irony that Max Blumenthal (who seems to be pro-Chinese) is also anti-lockdown, while the dogmato-sectoid-Trotskyite World Socialist Web Site (linked to elsewhere) is anti-Chinese...except on lockdowns, where it recommends that all the world follows China´s so-called Zero COVID policy! 

OK, I admit I was a left-watcher in my sadly misspent youth. 

That being said, Blumenthal´s and Stavroula Pabst´s article *is* a good criticism of the lockdowns and the pro-lockdown "left". The lockdowns have hit the working class and the Global South particularly hard, while being used to "lockdown" democratic debate in the Western nations. Critics have been branded "Nazis" or "fascists". Blumenthal hints at the left´s middle class social composition as the explanation for their (indeed bizarre) support for what amounts to a bourgeois-imperialist (by their own definitions) global emergency. Note also that this supposedly "woke" left supports measures that increase domestic violence against women, mental health problems among youth and young adults, and more IMF control over "BIPOC" nations in the Third World. 

A quote from the essay:

>>>For many among the urban laptop class, including a large swath of the hyper-online Western left which still clamors for national school closures and demands lockdowns in the face of a handful of new cases (while crudely painting critics of official Covid policy as Nazis), quarantine orders merely enforced an already sedentary lifestyle that revolves around Zoom meetings, ordered food and Amazon deliveries. The restrictions further eliminated tedious commutes to work while providing those able to work remotely with the satisfying sense that staying home was a bold act of social solidarity.  

>>>Under this spectacular arrangement, which assumed individual behavior could slow down or contribute to the spread of a virus, isolation was framed as a moral choice that led many of those willingly confined to their homes to fear or vilify a working class that frequently provided them with vital services. And while non-pharmaceutical interventions have generally proven futile against COVID-19, the stentorian demands to socially distance and attendant shaming of those who fail to obey has done little more than generate hostility between friends, families, and communities.

>>>“Lockdowns are a luxury of the rich,” Bhattacharya said, “and affect a certain class of people at the expense of others. A lockdown doesn’t mean all of society stops and we all sit in cages alone while we wait for the fires to go away. The poor and working class, many of them vulnerable and older, are asked to risk themselves, while another class of people stays at home protected.”

>>>This was particularly true in the Global South, where class divisions are clearly drawn and most people live dangerously close to the poverty line.

I said this before: I expected the "new 1914" of the left to be something dramatic, say a "military bloc" with the US army as they bomb the hell out of rogue Trump supporters marching on some state capital. I couldn´t imagine in my wildest fantasy that it would be uncritical support for misguided lockdowns (and even more misguided vaccine mandates?) during a flu pandemic...

The dialectic works in mysterious ways.  

Flattening the curve or flattening the global poor?