Although it his now rumoured that nurses will get 2%, the pay offer proves once and for all that the government isn’t locking us down to protect the NHS – it is using support for the NHS to justify an assault on workers’ rights. In reply, NHS workers should join the public in mass civil disobedience.
There is a nationwide stampede to get the covid jag. Critical voices are routinely blocked by fact checkers on the net. Any criticism is denounced as being from anti-vax conspiracy theorists. Those who opposing mass vaccination or show vaccine hesitancy are abused for being selfish or dangerous. The government are pushing forward with the idea of a vaccination passport, after months of denying they intended to introduce one. The pro-vaccine propaganda is reaching a crescendo.
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.
