MILENA RAMPOLDI “Most leftists have become victims of their trust in the State during the pandemic”: Michael Schneider on the ongoing “transnational biopolitical seizure of power”

 Milena Rampoldi, ProMosaik, 2/1/2022
Translated by Lena Bloch

On the subject of coronavirus and the relationship between medicine and totalitarianism, I spoke with Prof. Michael Schneider (born 1943). Schneider is a writer and committed socialist, known among other things to this day from his time in the student movement, as the author of “Neurose und Klassenkampf” [“Neurosis and Class Struggle”. Engl. ‘Neurosis and Civilization : a Marxist/freudian Synthesis’, Seabury Press 1976] and as the founder of the first Socialist Street Theater in West Berlin. He stands out for his sharp criticism of the status quo, and thus also by criticism of the prevailing “covid-variants” narrative, which contains many elements that are not only political but also neurotic. But it changed and became somewhat different. Power today is different. And totalitarianism today is different.

In this Covid era, the connection between medicine, power and totalitarianism escapes the minds of so many, why is that?

The fact that the connection between medicine, power, and totalitarianism escapes the minds of so many is primarily because of the very nature of this new narrative, which is highly sophisticated and effective in its mass-psychological impact: That Sars-Cov-2 is a killer virus threatening all humanity, against which “we are at war,” as the French president proclaimed in April 2020.

In times of war and crisis, there is almost always seems to be  a unity of purpose between the State and the citizens. In the permanent “war against Corona” and its ever-new “dangerous variants,” things are now similar to Orwell's ‘1984,’ where people are constantly mobilized and incited  into fictitious wars against new enemies that no one ever gets to see. Even more sophisticated, indeed of almost sadistic genius (in the sense of psychological warfare) is the narrative (concocted by U.S. intelligence agencies and think tanks) of an invisible, treacherous enemy who can strike anytime, anywhere, and who can lurk inside any of us, inside your neighbor, your work colleague, even inside your dearest relatives, and even more so inside yourself.

Particularly insidious is the postulate of the “asymptomatically sick person" who, as a “super-spreader", endangers everyone else, fueling the suspicion of everyone against everyone and leading to a complete reversal of the presumption of innocence: In the fight against the invisible enemy, all people are not potentially healthy, but potentially sick. Every person is a suspected case that has not yet been checked and is a potential danger and must prove his or her innocence by means of rapid tests or vaccinations. If he/she fails to do so, removal and restrictions are permissible self-defense measures of society.

This narrative is new and so successful not least because it takes into its service above all collective ideals such as solidarity, responsibility towards fellow human beings, etc., which are dear to the left in particular. That is why its treacherous nature is not recognized by most leftists, social democrats and left-wing socialists, especially since they have just now, in the covid crisis, become the victims of their faith in the State: The fact that, after thirty years of neoliberal privatization and austerity policies (also and especially in the health sector), the hitherto weak State is now suddenly taking the reins and, as it seems, making the health of its citizens the top maxim of its actions, is seen by them as proof of the regained ethical dimension of politics. But why should the otherwise unscrupulous ruling elites have had suddenly decided to stop the global profit machine in the face of a pathogen that almost exclusively affects the "unproductive," the over-80s? 

John Melhuish Strudwick, A Golden Thread, 1885

 

How different is power in these times from power in the traditional sense?

Unlike traditional dictatorships and totalitarian systems, most of which are or were organized along nation-states’ lines (which by no means precluded alliances between them - think of the fascist Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan) and which eliminated their political opponents or deported them into camps, this time we are dealing with a transnational biopolitical seizure of power that “begins at the level of global governance and cuts deeply into the sovereignty of the individual,” as Kees van der Pijl, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, has pointed out in his brilliant study, ‘States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check’ (Clarity Press 2021). “The imposition of a State of Emergency in virtually the entire world was first and foremost a political move, demonstrably long in the making and coordinated in a series of transnational think tanks and supranational organizations such as the WHO and the World Bank. On their advice and explicit instructions, governments have put their populations in a stranglehold. After all, what is at stake is the survival of the existing social order, which has been run down socially, economically and environmentally.”

However, the program being implemented in the slipstream of the "pandemic," the so-called “Great Reset” (as the programmatic paper by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret reads) has nothing to do with health. Rather, it is about maintaining the power of the oligarchy, the transnational ruling class centered around a new power bloc of intelligence agencies, IT giants and media conglomerates.

After the 2008 world financial crisis, this transnational oligarchy found itself threatened by the unrest in the  population, rising in opposition in many countries, demanding a strict re-regulation of the unstable world financial system and a correction of the absurd inequalities that have generated the capitalist system, especially as it becomes less and less able to contain the growing mass unemployment in Southern European and Arab countries. In this context, we should recall, among other things, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in the U.S. and Europe, the initially very successful election campaign of the democratic-socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who was able to mobilize large sections of U.S. youth; the Black Lives Matter movement and the Yellow Vests movement in France, which led to a state crisis; but also the serious unrest in India and the struggles of the Chileans for a new democratic constitution, carried by huge demonstrations. For many governments in trouble as a result of the unrest and uprisings, the "pandemic" came just in time to bring political protest movements and social life to a standstill by means of lockdowns.

What are the main themes of your essay “The PanCorona Box and its Hidden Secret”*?

The political-economic developments outlined here that led to the global seizure of power of the transnational oligarchy - form a cornerstone of my essay. But first I analyze the political and media "shock strategy" (Naomi Klein), with which the populations were put into permanent fear of the alleged "killer virus" Sars-Cov-2, and the infamous propagandistic methods, with which this permanent mode of fear and panic is in rewind again and again: through test hysteria, manipulated statistics, infection and death figures without reference data and through the systematic use of compliant medical "experts" - while critical physicians, virologists, immunologists, etc., who are not aware of the fact that Sars-Cov-2 is a "killer virus", who publicly denounce the vaccination of the population with the novel, hardly tested mRNA vaccines, are exposed to unparalleled political-media attacks and are often persecuted and prevented from practicing their profession.

My other topic: the vaccination campaign, which is becoming increasingly irrational and absurd. Although the federal German government has to admit that more and more vaccinated people are filling up the hospitals and intensive care units - which means that the initial vaccination strategy has obviously failed - it can't think of anything else than its daily repeated “Keep up the good work!” And thus it propagates on all channels the necessity of the mass “Refreshing- and/or - booster vaccination” and the soon to be introduced vaccination mandates - which, to the gleeful joy of the Big Pharma and vaccine industry, will most likely amount to subscription of the entire population to ongoing vaccination. They do not seem to be bothered by the fact that mass vaccination and the compulsory Vaccine Passport for every citizen is the gateway to a totalitarian surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff) the likes of which the world has never seen before.

How important is an interdisciplinary approach for the purpose of better understanding our historical covid crisis?

I think an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the historical covid crisis is urgently needed. Not only does it affect all aspects of our lives, but in its slipstream, unnoticed by most scientists and public intellectuals or denied out of opportunism, a radical transformation of society and its entire mode of production is taking place. Industrialization 4.0, led by the big IT giants, will not only lead to the ruin of the retail trade and small and medium-sized businesses, whose previous market shares are already visibly being transferred to Amazon and other online retail chains; the progressive automation via digitalization and AI (artificial intelligence) will lead to mass unemployment of unprecedented proportions. Anticipating this, Schwab's "Great Reset" considers the introduction of a basic universal income (by no means unconditional) in connection with the abolition of cash and the worldwide introduction of digital money to be indispensable - which would ultimately mean that the recipient of digital money will be completely in the hands of the central banks.

It is truly grotesque: While the excited public dispute has been revolving for months around the pros and cons of vaccination and the "pandemic of the unvaccinated", who are blamed for the new virus variant "Omicron," behind the scenes the course is being set for a totalitarian control and surveillance state, with which the Orwellian one looks like a technically backward precursor.

As the French proverb says, "A nation of sheep will get a government of wolves."

What in "Neurosis and Class Struggle" is still relevant today and why?

My book "Neurosis and Class Struggle" was published at the height of the student movement of 1968. The fact that it became an international bestseller is due to my attempt to link Marxism and psychoanalysis together, instead of viewing them - as was common in the prevailing political camp thinking of the time - as methodologically and ideologically irreconcilable opposites and antipodes. At that time, I was primarily concerned with the synopsis of the political, economic, and mass-psychological active forces of capitalist society and with the "psychopathology of its everyday and working life" as well as its pathological consumerism - something that has not changed too much to this day. A similarly syncretic and interdisciplinary approach with a wide-angle lens on the epochal upheaval going on in the name and shadow of the covid crisis (which is (mis)understood as a "health crisis" and therefore also leads only to monocausal medical and pseudo-medical solutions) would be urgently needed today.

Hijack, „Pandemonium“, 2020

 

Why are psychology and history indispensable today as never before to create a new true democracy from below and to get out of the "winter’s tale" we are (almost) all stuck in?

Unfortunately, the predominant academic psychology today is completely under the spell of a positivistically narrowed concept of science; empirical research is reduced primarily to statistical surveys. Psychology and history have not been thought together for a long time, a mass and class psychology and sociopathology based on historical materialism (as I have outlined in "Neurosis and Class Struggle") has long been banned from the courses offered. Yet the covid crisis in particular shows how much current politics is determined by highly paid sociopaths like the current Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, (whom Oskar Lafontaine aptly etched as a "covid howling buoy"). As long as such people have the trust of the German majority population, a democratic all-round renewal, even a real democracy from below, is not to be expected.

And yet, even in lousy times like these, Brecht's motto applies: "As it is, it will not remain!"

*This essay will be published by Sodenkamp & Lenz (Berlin) in the forthcoming anthology: Almuth Bruder-Bezzel, Klaus-Jürgen Bruder & Jürgen Günther (eds.): ‘Corona. Die Inszenierung einer Krise’ [Corona. The Staging of a Crisis].