Okay. So I saw this article by Christian Parenti while looking for something else at The GrayZone, skimmed some of it, and decided it'd be interesting to read and debate with. I'll be reading it and responding to it bit-by-bit. "How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy" Maybe you'll all have learned something by the time we're done:
Lovely.
It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.
I suppose that I should put my cards on the table. I believe that the virus is real from personal experience. (I've even had COVID.) I believe that it is a highly contagious, airborne respiratory virus that kills about one-percent of the people who get sick from it. I get the feeling that it would kill many more people without medical intervention. (I was double-vaxxed at the time. I've since had a third shot. I had a fever for two days along with aches that lasted two or three days longer. Since having COVID I don't know if the intense fatigue I feel after a day at my non-demanding job is from "long covid" or the product of my new longer commute.) Given this reality, I sometimes feel that the talk about "freedom" and the resistance to government/state authority is misplaced and somewhat childish. Which is not to say that individual freedom and the need to be cautious about empowering the state to regulate our lives aren't important topics. Just that some of the people "resisting" justifiable pandemic regulations sound like right-wing libertarians.
For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
I hope Parenti keeps in mind the overworked frontline healthcare workers, the expenses of caring for hospitalized Covid patients, the service workers and factory workers exposed to covid and public abuse from covid-deniers/anti-maskers. If lockdowns hurt some members of the working class, so too do the "keep the economy going whatever the costs" policies that he appears to champion. Parenti needs to explain how else to deal with a viral pandemic other than quarantines and lockdowns. The deathrates in places that have embraced his anti-lockdown, anti-mask views are far higher than the rates in places that the "Lockdown Left" would approve of. And I think the words "unprecedented levels of repression" are a little overblown.
Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]
Formatting. I have left out the twitter embeds from Parenti's article and I decided not to copy and paste his endnotes. Parenti needs to address the reality that a LOT of the anti-mask/anti-vaccine/anti-reality protesters ARE liars and grifters and fascists. This is undeniable. Are there some people on the Left who are guilty of the close-mindedness and latent authoritarianism that Parenti accuses them of? Certainly. But let's be honest about the fact that neither side of this debate is immaculate. Finally, I loathe the habit of people to needlessly sneer about the character of their opponents. (Yes! I do often loathe myself! Thank's for asking.) Should I use the fact that Parenti's opposition to lockdowns is mirrored by capitalists and right-wing politicians to call him "the self-described Marxist" the way he just did with Chomsky's professed anarcho-syndicalism? Whatever Chomsky has said about the pandemic, he isn't an ideological fraudster.
In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” [3] But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.
There he goes again with that childishness. Jacobin is a genuine left-wing, pro-worker magazine. Just because people disagree with you it doesn't make them evil. I don't know who Doug Henwood is but I sympathize with Marcetic's position on vaccines and public transit. I do this while acknowledge legitimate fears of recently developed vaccines and the reality that the vaccines do not render people immune to the virus. But should I accuse Parenti of wanting to make hospital workers drop dead from exhaustion and/or covid itself? Because vaccines certainly lower the impact of covid on infected persons. And they do greatly diminish the time when an infected person remains contagious. Vaccinated people's immune systems have an easier, quicker time of eradicating the virus which means they have less time to infect other people. This is no place for uninvestigated demands for total personal freedom. This is about adult-level, cost-benefit analysis. Covid doesn't care about you as an individual, or your freedom, or your values.
Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real, are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself.” [4] This is, as the late Alex Cockburn once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”
That quote from Benjamin Bratton started off okay, but did spiral off into incoherence. But I don't know who Bratton is and I don't know how representative he is of the pro-reality Left. I also feel it's important to mention that while Alexander Cockburn wrote a lot of valuable stuff he was also a denier of global warming. (Perhaps Cockburn just wanted to see the people of Bangladesh drown?)
Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach. [5]
I wouldn't know. Haven't read it. I'm going to deal with whatever Parenti actually says and quotes in this essay. Not going to do any extra reading.
When activist left influencers did stray from the official line, it was to occasionally harumph about how school closure would be ok if we just had “free childcare for all.” That argument is so flimsy one wants to respond with: “Yes, and let’s call these new socialist childcare centers: public schools!”
I don't know how anyone could say they support school closures so long as the children could congregate in childcare centres instead. That would be silly. But speaking of schools and teachers and children, ... some teachers don't want to get the vaccines. Other teachers don't want to teach in crowded, unventilated classrooms. Which group is the betrayers of the working class? Would Parenti object to being characterized as someone who wants teachers and children to get infected, sick and perhaps die?
All of this unmasks the Lockdown Left’s blue-city provincialism. Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited and faith-based as any group of small-town “deplorables” might be. If you don’t agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are very obviously insane. End of story. For this set, Covid vaccines have become a fetish, a talisman to wave against the specter of “contagion”; while lockdowns and censorship are treated as purely technical, apolitical interventions. Prominent left intellectuals have embraced the weaponization of solidarity and made it into a lifestyle via their obsessive masking, scolding, and hiding. They pretend to care for society while actually applauding deeply anti-social and scientifically ungrounded policies like the indefinite shuttering of schools.
Yes. And we also sip lattes and eat avocado toast. Do leftists look down on anti-maskers/anti-vaxxer pandemic deniers? I certainly have contempt for most of them. For reasons that I've discussed on numerous occasions. Are there leftists or progressives who unjustly despise everyone who is an unpolished, blue-collar type? Yes. It's a problem. Much of what Parenti writes beginning with "For this set" is stupid garbage however. Parenti clearly thinks that believing in the existence of the virus is optional. It isn't. Covid vaccines aren't a fetish. They're a means to reduce the severity of an infection and keep people from having to go to the emergency room or dying. As I stated above, they reduce the time that people are infected thereby reducing infection rates. What are their long-term risks? I don't know. Perhaps there aren't going to be any. But we know what covid is. A highly contagious airborne respiratory virus that has killed tens of thousands of Canadians and perhaps a million US-Americans. Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions in a society. Making a fetish of your individual right to spread a deadly virus isn't how a functioning adult mind would respond to this situation. If Parenti wants to come up with a leftist political/solidarity-inducing REALISTIC way to fight the pandemic he's welcome to offer one. His petulant yammering isn't helping. It isn't "obsessive masking." Masks work fuck-face. We aren't "hiding" you moron! Social distancing and isolation are age-old, proven ways to prevent the spread of contagions. Regions that more closely followed the recommended responses to covid have had far lower infection and death rates than those that did not. This is an unavoidable reality. Parenti would do well to read this blast of good sense from Eve Ottenberg. He needs to smarten the fuck up.
The only thing I'll give him credit for is the gripe against indefinite school closures. Were I in power I would have spent the money to hire more teachers and TA's and to pay to rent closed movie theatres and other such places, and paid for the improved ventilation of existing classrooms to get children back in school safely. The choice isn't between the half-assed, profit-worshipping pandemic policies that warrant complaint and Parenti's (along with the disproportionately right-wing, racist protest movement) nitwit denialism. (I'm pretty disgusted with Parenti's smears and insults so I'm responding in kind.)
All of this is contingent upon the status of Lockdown Leftists as relatively privileged laptop workers who can operate from the comfort of home, dependent on anonymous “frontline workers” ferrying food and Amazon packages to their doorstep. Prior to the pandemic quarantines, many left intellectuals already lived as if they were on lockdown. I know this because I am part of that class.
Hey Parenti! Enough with the bullshit! I'm a "Lockdown Leftist" and, unlike you, I'm genuinely working class. I'm working in close quarters with others and riding public transit on crowded buses and subways. I wouldn't doubt that there are MILLIONS of working class North Americans who are disgusted with your stupid calls to reject age-old, no-brainer responses to contagious viruses. Perhaps it's your privileged status that has allowed you to escape the consequences of your ridiculous delusions!
Never mind that we are in the tightest labor market in 40 years and should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions. Instead, most of the left – including some trade unions – has supported measures that divide, distract, and intimidate the working class. It is a tragic and disturbing spectacle.
Here we go! Now the ONLY THING that is standing between Parenti's fetishized working class and their inevitable revolutionary triumph is the "Lockdown Left." It isn't Parenti's advocacy of clearly wrong-headed policies based on his silly childish desire to pretend that the virus doesn't exist that is dividing and distracting the working class. It's the people who accept reality and who recommend actions to mitigate it.
The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability. This leftwing self-harm will have deleterious consequences for years to come. Indeed, the situation is worse than a mere political fumble. The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere.
Socialists, the "Lockdown Left" only want to bully workers? Either that or save them from a deadly virus. "Covid hysteria"????? Um, Earth to Christian Parenti; conservative estimates of covid deaths in the USA are over 900,000. Most of them poorer US-Americans. And, I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people are dead because they embraced the same childishness, the same denial of reality and of human vulnerability, that you are espousing here. As I skim past the latter parts of this Parenti's piece I notice citations and mentions of studies. Perhaps there's some genuine science behind what appear to be very blinkered views. Somethow I doubt it though. Given the poor quality of what I've read so far.
For instance, Parenti is again claiming that the "Lockdown Left" are siding with the capitalists, conveniently forgetting that it's the capitalists who want everyone to get back to work. The "petit-bourgeoise" small business owners who want people back in their shops and restaurants and crowded, stuffy kitchens. One could easily turn Parenti's condemnations right back around at him. There are plenty of members of the working class who would have liked to have been spared the idiocies that Parenti is spewing here.
Even as politicians climb down from two years of pandemic overreach, the left continues to demand more covid repression and does nothing to oppose punitive vaccine mandates that have driven many thousands of workers out of their jobs – almost 3,000 public workers in NYC alone. For example, my union – the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) representing faculty and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) and run by a self-consciously “left” clique – continues to demand that all CUNY workers submit to vaccination even as the administration had long ago settled into a workable “vax or test” system.
"OVERREACH" ?!? You stupid fuck! Canada's response was half-assed. The USA's was 1/4-assed. Alberta and Saskatchewan are insanely pursuing 1/5th-assed measures. 15% of the population with the worst deathrates in the country. Patients had to be airlifted to the hospitals of less insanely run provinces. This is a reality that Parenti continually fails to address. The virus is real. The virus doesn't care about socialism or freedom or revolution or the working class. The places that practice what Parenti preaches have the worst results in this pandemic.
Now, with regards to vaccine mandates as a job requirement, again, I'm sympathetic to people being leery about vaccines. (Not because of microchips or any other stupid theory. For gawd's sake!!! If Bill Gates wants to inject us with microchips he could find some less conspicuous way to do it rather than fake a pandemic ... that isn't even fake ... jeeziz kriste!) But vaccines make you less infectious overall and infectious overall for a shorter amount of time. The pandemic isn't a plot conconcted by the One-Percent. It's a societal crisis. It's a public healthcare crisis. And 85% of us have been vaccinated at least once. It really isn't that big a deal. Most of the people protesting this are blathering the same stupid nonsense as Parenti is. (I really hope Parenti eventually brings forward some actual argument rather than smears and accuastions that could easily be turned against him.)
Worse yet, the PSC seems not to realize that its crusade may invite lawsuits that could fatally undermine the ironclad protections of academic tenure. If the union were to prevail against dissident members in court, their victory would, in effect, reduce tenure to merely another form of routinely breakable contract. University administrators across the country, eager to degrade and casualize academic labor, know this and will be watching with anticipation.
Okay. Decent point. Academic tenure is an important principle. But so is the pandemic and the resultant public health crisis. If you're working with the public there have to be safeguards. Perhaps anti-masker/anti-vaxxer nutjob professors can agree to work remotely. Or from behind plexiglass and far from their students. I'm leery of accommodating delusional imbeciles.
At John Jay College, where I work, the PSC demands vaccination policies – take the jab or be fired – even as a staggering 44% of the non-teaching staff remained unvaccinated as of late February 2022. [6] And the union remains obtusely fixated on vaccines despite the fact that not even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains that vaccines stop or reduce Covid transmission. Director Rochelle Walensky volunteered this fact during an August 5, 2021 interview with Wolf Blitzer. [7] These days, the Lockdown Left still clings to the vaccine myth.
Whereas Parenti clings to the myth that the virus doesn't exist or is an employer plot. Or that the places that have followed policies based on stupidity such as his haven't suffered for it. As well, the scientific consensus is that vaccinated people are contagious for a shorter period of time. Of course, I've long argued that I'd be fine allowing stupid people to refuse vaccinations (obviously I'm not talking about people who might have a genuine medical reason ... whatever it might be ... here) so long as they agree to get treated as the nuisances that they are if they come crawling to an emergency ward as a consequence of their stupidity and arrogance. Which includes being put to the back of the line and not forcing hospitals to cancel surgeries to deal with obnoxious, anti-vaxx cry-babies.
Covid repression portrays itself as apolitical and purely “scientific.” Sadly, most leftists accept this canard. But class war from above is always masked as “merely technical.” Proponents of the War on Drugs never described their open-ended campaign of domestic repression and surveillance as a war on workers and the poor. Likewise, proponents of the War on Terror never described their campaign of forever wars as a permanent assault on the Global South and a war to maintain American hegemony. The left saw through those concoctions. We opposed drug testing not because we were in favor of sharing the road with stoned truck drivers, but rather because we saw the political utility and inherent value in workers having autonomy from coercion by bosses. Alas, the War on Covid, has (at least temporarily) erased our side’s analytic capacities. For large parts of the left it is still March 2020.
Parenti is really in love with hyperbole and smears. Does he think speed limits, seat belts, anti-smoking regulations, etc., are intolerable assaults on his individual freedoms? Or does he accept SOME limitations on individual freedoms for the public good? What about state regulations for polluting business? How does he describe those and the process from which they came? And for gawd's sake! The fight against the pandemic is not the same thing as the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. To even suggest that is absurd. The War on Covid is against a virus that has overwhelmed healthcare systems .... it would have been much worse without the "Covid repression" that Parenti is screeching about. And while there are arguments to be had about vaccine mandates for some jobs (and I'd probably be more open to discuss that issue with someone other than a ranting, spittle-flecked maniac like Christian Parenti) that is not the same thing as testing workers to see if they smoke pot in their spare time.
Arguing reason against Covid hysteria is like attempting to put out a magnesium fire using water. But I will try anyway.
Please do. It would be a nice change from the smears and hyperbole and the nauseating self-righteousness.
Theory of the crime
Here is my theory of the crime: a reckless smash and grab operation by Big Pharma, assisted by our totally captured public health agencies, has been allowed to run unchecked, like a cytokine storm of bad policy, because of the unique political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election in which mass Trump Derangement Syndrome short-circuited the critical faculties of almost the entire journalistic class and Democratic Party ecosystem, including the so-called movement left – that milieu of nonprofits, trade unions, pressure groups, and alternative media personalities.
Not off to a good start Parenti. You're completely ignoring the central fact of the reality of the virus. The consequences of which I've seen with my own eyes. And all my other senses too since I had it.
Dating back to the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976, a corrupt symbiosis between industry and the regulators has fueled a dynamic of pandemic-hyping moral panic. [8] In the pre-Trump era these would-be moral panics had limited traction because the critical capacities of journalists and politicians were intact enough to thwart the worst excesses of the pharmaceutical-public health “pandemic industrial complex.” [9] But the fear created by Trump destroyed that capacity for correction.
More garbage. Trump on covid was bad in the same way that Jason Kenney, Scott Moe, Doug Ford, etc., are bad. (Has Parenti EVER questioned why he sounds so much like a far-right politician or conspiracy theorist?) It's true that many viscerally anti-Trump journalists debased themselves by calling Ivermectin "horse de-wormer" when it is also made for human use. But I don't think there had ever been a US President spewing such absolute, Parenti-level nonsense as Trump. But this is all beside the point. We KNOW that people have died. I've seen the videos and photos of former anti-maskers/vaxxers dying in hospitals. We've heard from the exhausted healthcare workers. The pandemic is a real thing. Not a conspiracy. All analysis has to start from that fact and Parenti's doesn't.
While it is the mainstream media and the Democratic Party that drive Covid hysteria and the ensuing biosecurity state of emergency, the activist left bears responsibility for not opposing the repression, and even for cheering it on. It is also worth noting that Republican opposition to the Covid lockdowns was relatively ineffective because a dysfunctional Trump administration was incapable of controlling its own Covid Taskforce, and thus enabled technocratic administrators like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx to hijack White House policy. [10]
In other words, without a dysfunctional Trump administration, things would have been even worse. If Parenti can identify any other means of combatting a contagion other than quarantines and vaccinations he's welcome to do so. [I just did some checking to see if Parenti has ever written about the opioid crisis which has supposedly killed tens of thousands of people. A defender of Big Pharma could rail against this campaign of oppression against people seeking relief from chronic, excrutiating pain in much the same way that Parenti rails against the pandemic response. It appears that he hasn't. But he does believe that Global Warming is a crisis. As I said at the top, Alexander Cockburn used to see global warming as a Trojan Horse for all sorts of nefarious state-capitalist assaults on freedom.]
This has ended up getting pretty long. Since Parenti's essay is apparently in two parts, with the first part what I've just covered and the second part seems to be about the science behind his screed, I'll post this now and deal with the rest of it in a subsequent post. Again though, I'm completely unimpressed with it so far. I've posted my own thoughts about the plausible roots of some of the covid-deniers/protesters, but also how they're easily demolished by the reality of the virus and its consequences. So far all that Parenti has done is repeat the same shallow arguments and combined them with his leftist ideology to paint anyone advocating the official line on the pandemic as being an enemy of the working class. While doing so he fails to address that it is the working class being forced to work in close quarters in often unventilated environments. That it is the working class that has borne a disproportionate brunt of the deaths in this pandemic. That is is the employer class that is pushing for "business as usual." And that the places that have embraced his "contrarian" views on the pandemic which have the highest infection and death rates.
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