The Capitalist “Great Reset” and the Descent Into Techno-Tyranny

By Rainer Shea

Republished from the author’s blog.

Covid-19 has brought about the era of biopolitics, an era that will continue for the foreseeable future. This is because the virus is far from being defeated; a resurgence of it is likely to happen this fall, and the neoliberal world’s refusal to sacrifice business for public health is sure to perpetuate the pandemic for as long as neoliberalism exists. Biopolitics is also here to stay because we’ve reached a point in the climate crisis where global weather patterns are much more compatible with viruses than they used to be. More viruses are going to appear in the coming years with increasing ferocity, while will necessitate an irreversible series of changes to how society functions.

What kinds of changes do multinational corporations and their partnered governments want to enact in response to this permanent crisis? Whatever they end up doing, the narratives of biopolitics are what will be used to sell it to the masses; we’ll be told that all of the corporatocracy’s measures are for our own safety, and that anyone who objects to these measures is working in the service of an enemy power.

This is at least how biopolitics is taking shape within the core imperialist countries. Preoccupied with an escalating cold war against China, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and the other countries in the NATO empire are stirring up anti-Chinese sentiment by falsely blaming China for the pandemic. The economic isolationism from China that these countries are increasingly embracing goes along with their desire for what they call a “great reset” to their economic systems, where the initial damages to corporate profit from the pandemic are compensated for by a new approach to ordering how their societies work.

The first part of this “great reset” is the use of biopolitics to justify a growing amount of corporate censorship. In this last week alone, Venezuelan regime change operatives have blacklisted several anti-imperialist media outlets so that they can no longer be used as sources on Wikipedia, Twitter has deleted 170,000 accounts for “spreading narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” and Facebook has added misleading labels on Russian and Chinese media outlets about these outlets being “state controlled.” All these geopolitically motivated actions are reflective of big tech’s recent trend of openly working with governments to censor “dangerous” material related to the pandemic; because of the precedent this trend has set, suppressing dissent is now easier than ever.

Such is the deceptive nature of the narrative about the tech industry acting as an unambiguous force for good during the “great reset.” There’s been talk in the media and in elite circles about big tech needing to radically restructure how it manages online information; for example, a recent article on the “great reset” from the World Economic Forum says that “The use of digital technology during the COVID-19 crisis offers clear lessons: focus on the safety of essential organizations; protect work-from-home capabilities; and target mistrust broadly to enable specific crisis-relevant tech.”

The article was talking about mistrust as it relates to digital tools, but the same kind of language is what’s also being used in the effort to preserve trust in military, media, intelligence, and law enforcement institutions. The solution to this kind of mistrust is evidently to remove online content deemed to be “misinformation.”

Other statements about the “great reset” that are being put forth by the Western capitalist intelligentsia have to do with adapting the global economic system to the challenges it’s facing. This month, managing director of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva made a statement saying that “From the perspective of the IMF, we have seen a massive injection of fiscal stimulus to help countries deal with this crisis, and to shift gears for growth to return. It is of paramount importance that this growth should lead to a greener, smarter, fairer world in the future.”

What does this mean? Given that the IMF’s historic and current role is to advance profits for multinational corporations, it means a campaign to expand the roles of green capitalism and the high-tech sector. Mega-corporations like Amazon, which have lately been seeking to rebrand themselves as environmentally friendly while investing in newly profitable “green” technologies, stand to profit from this aspect of the “great reset.” Amazon in particular will have a significant role to play in this reordering of global capitalism, since it’s one of the companies that’s big enough to survive the 2020 economic crash.

These monopolies that stand to profit from the crisis-the Silicon Valley giants, the Wall Street entities, the pharmaceutical companies-see the growing unrest from the increasingly impoverished lower classes, and they seek to make the “great reset” into a project for restoring order. Last year, the U.S. government organization the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence layed out a plan for creating an AI-driven mass surveillance system which far surpasses the spying apparatus of any other country. This plan, which has been gaining a more traction during the pandemic, would fulfill a truly dystopian vision of a surveillance society.

The NSCAI believes that in order to “address the national security and defense needs of the United States,” the country will need to replace its traditional infrastructure with “smart cities.” These urban centers, a document from the organization says, will consist of self-driving electric cars, shopping that’s done exclusively online, and an integration of everyday devices into the Internet.

The goal of this, aside from providing an opportunity for big tech to sell their “green” and AI-driven products, is to expand the opportunities for state surveillance. The NSCAI says that “streets carpeted with cameras is good infrastructure for smart cities,” and the “internet of things” that it envisions will no doubt be used to give the intelligence agencies more opportunities for monitoring people’s everyday activities; if the CIA can already listen to people through smart TVs, they’ll be able to do a lot more when the smart cities come.

The NSCAI explicitly praises the potentials for helping law enforcement that all these new technologies will provide, stating that “police are making convictions based on phone calls monitored with iFlyTek’s voice-recognition technology” and that “police departments are using [AI] facial recognition tech to assist in everything from catching traffic law violators to resolving murder cases.” You can imagine what such a drastic expansion of these surveillance tools will mean for political organizers who represent the “dangerous” ideas that are now being censored so heavily.

If you think this kind of future is only a far-fetched idea, look at the changes that have already been made during the pandemic. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt met with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo about integrating the company’s technologies into the city, about which Schmidt explained: “The first priorities of what we’re trying to do are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband…We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.”

Additionally, after partnering with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Cuomo said that we’re at “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms.” Since Gates’ long-term plans involve the creation of a “digital immunity proof” that tracks people in relation to diseases, surveillance capitalism looms over this partnership as well.

As Pepe Escobar explained in April, the next tool for social control may be universal basic income:

You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism — in deep crisis since at least 2008 — is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded. But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment…Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead…Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form of insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.

In the U.S., it’s unlikely that poor and working people will even get this meager version of economic relief. The Republican Party’s only plans for now are increased austerity and continued corporate bailouts, along with whatever privatizations and deregulations they can manage. So it makes sense that the U.S. is where the police state is planned to be made the most extensive and intrusive; they’ll try to use brutal repression and intensive surveillance to keep us from rising up. In the imperial core, techno-tyranny is what biopolitics will inevitably lead to.

Ruling-Class Fears of an Inevitable Communist Resurgence in the U.S.

By Rainer Shea

Republished from Rainer’s blog.

The more the popular backlash against neoliberalism develops, the more apparent it becomes that American society is heading towards a resurgence in pro-communist sentiments and organizing. The current presence of this Red revival is hard to see on the surface, since Bernie Sanders’ FDR liberalism is still the main American political faction that’s associated with the term “socialism.” But as the class struggle continues, an actual manifestation of socialism and communism will begin to enter the mainstream.

The rise of communism in a highly unequal, post-recession American economy will be inevitable because whenever discontent grows around the miseries of capitalism, communism enters the conversation to some degree. There’s a lasting power to an idea that’s based in an irrefutable analysis of how capitalism perpetuates oppression and inequity, and that presents a tried and proven solution to capitalism.

From my perspective as a fairly well learned Marxist-Leninist, the only reason why not all poor and working class people embrace this idea is because of how good capitalism is at marketing “solutions” which reinforce the current system. Over 40% of Americans now favor socialism over capitalism, but the first political strain they encounter that associates itself with the word “socialist” isn’t Leninism, Juche, or Maoism. It’s Bernie Sanders’ vision for a capitalist welfare state that continues the American imperialist project under a vaguely “socialist” banner. One doesn’t encounter actual socialism until they enter the somewhat fringe realm of anti-capitalist organizing, and they aren’t willing to embrace factions like Marxism-Leninism until they’ve unlearned the propaganda about the existing socialist states.

Yet the more these disaffected people grope for answers to our capitalist crisis, the more accessible communism becomes. “People are willing to listen and they ask what socialism is,” the American Marxist leader Gloria La Riva said in 2016. “This year we have seen the fog of anti-communism being lifted from the minds of many, after more than 70 years of exclusion.” The factor behind this cultural shift in communism’s favor wasn’t so much that Sanders had brought socialist terminology into the mainstream, but that widespread angst over inequality had led many people to question old narratives.

Again, it was inevitable that this opening for communism would appear in the 21st century, because our neoliberal order was designed from the start to create major contradictions within capitalism. The last half-century’s paradigm of privatization, austerity, deregulation, and regressive taxation has been possible only through thoroughly dismantling the centers of social cohesion and pro-labor organizing. The crushing of unions throughout this time, precipitated by the decades-long American campaign to suppress and malign communists, pushed the left to the margins during the 1980s and onward. In the 90s, the Democratic Party was turned solidly towards a corporatist agenda, correlating with the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent weakening of the global socialist movement.

It was because Western society had committed itself to growing highly unequal that this post-Cold War capitalist triumph would soon be undone. The income gap in America has since risen to its highest level ever recorded, and the eight richest people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population.

The latter statistic relates to the development of neoliberalism in the other core imperialist countries, and in the Third World countries where the U.S./NATO empire has carried out neo-colonialism. This extreme global inequality is why poor and working class people in Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Lebanon, Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina have been protesting against neoliberalism during the last year. It’s why anti-austerity protesters in France have been sustaining civil disobedience efforts since October of 2018. Despite the relative apathy of Americans so far, there’s also been a vast uptick in American strikes during the last two years. After decades of declining living standards, the backlash from the masses is growing.

In America and abroad, the capitalist power establishment is responding to this social discontent by trying to divert its energy away from class struggle. The efforts from Washington to turn the Lebanon protests into an anti-Hezbollah campaign are an example of how bourgeois propaganda is seeking to distract people from actually moving towards revolution. Something similar has happened in Hong Kong, where the recent protests that have gained traction because of economic discontent have been turned into violent anti-communist demonstrations by relentless U.S. propaganda and organizational manipulation.

This is how the capitalist state has long strangled the emergence of an effective class revolt: co-optation, infiltration of movement leadership, and narrative management. During the era of the Black Panthers, which is arguably the last time communism entered the American mainstream, the government went so far as to assassinate the Black Panther Party’s leaders. The capitalists will do anything necessary to safeguard against a revolution, including mass executions of communists like the ones that took place under Pinochet.

In recent years, the ruling class has been waging a war on dissent in response to the last decade’s rise of class consciousness and online alternative media platforms. There have been unprecedented censorship measures from tech companies, the U.S. government has been forcing outlets like RT to register as foreign agencies, and an atmosphere of McCarthyism has re-emerged amid paranoia about foreign agents and “Russian propaganda.” In the last year, the president of Veterans for Peace has been violently arrested for aiding anti-imperialist protesters at the Venezuelan embassy, and the anti-imperialist journalist Max Blumenthal has been detained on false charges. These attacks on dissent, as well as the anti-BDS laws and the campaign to prosecute Julian Assange for exposing government crimes, show how the system will respond when communism gains further prominence.

BDS, the journalism of WikiLeaks, the efforts of anti-war activists, and the other recent sources of opposition to global capitalism and imperialism represent seeds for the coming Red surge. While communism and its staunch anti-imperialist principles aren’t supported by everyone involved with these anti-establishment strains, there’s a potential for a lot more people to join the efforts of the most committed class insurrectionists. This is why the political and media class recently made a hysterical effort to vilify Cuba, and why Trump vowed in his second state of the union address to defeat socialism in Venezuela and elsewhere. There’s more cause for ruling class alarm the more that class consciousness advances around the globe.

At least among the liberal capitalists, there’s a desire to return society to its post-Cold War state so that the neoliberal order will become stabilized again; this is what the Bloomberg/Biden faction of the Democratic Party is frantically trying to accomplish by beating back at the populist Sanders faction. But the center was never meant to hold, because neoliberalism is designed to perpetuate a cycle of increasing inequality and inequality leads to instability. Some individual capitalists seek to reverse this process of inequality by adopting Sanders’ vision for a welfare state, but the capitalist class is overall determined to preserve the neoliberal order.

They’re determined to preserve neoliberalism because it’s the system that’s for so long allowed the corporatocracy to produce meaningful profits. Neoliberalism was adopted because capitalism was experiencing a recession during the 1970s, when the welfare state was last in a dominant form. Since then, neoliberalism has bought the capitalist class four decades of stability.

Yet in accordance with Marx’ prediction about capitalism being destined to consume itself, that orderly period is now on the verge of ending. The looming economic crash could be the catalyst that makes anti-capitalist civil unrest break out not just in France and much of the Third World, but throughout the rest of the imperial core. Welfare statists like Sanders won’t be able to turn this collapse around; the political future of the capitalist world is fascism, where the state cracks down in a desperate attempt to prevent revolution.

The more traction that communism gains, the more the capitalist class will resemble Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist Brazilian president whose state of mind Eric Nepomuceno recently described as follows: “The basic mission of the Brazilian right-wing extremist [Bolsonaro] is to give final combat to a communism that he detects, hiding everywhere even in his fridge every time he looks for cold water, and that makes him sleep very few hours every night, and always with a gun on his bedside table.”