The Isocracy Network

It can be expected that many in the anti-vaccination corner not to be particularly well-informed in matters of virology, genomics, molecular modelling, epidemiology, and associated disciplines. To be fair, most of us who are not engaged in these disciplines on a professional basis are not particularly well-informed, but at least we have the sense to understand that we are not experts. Alas, if one communicates mainstream scientific opinion one often gets the response "do your research" from people who wouldn't be able to tell you which antibody chain is first to respond to an antigen [1], let alone an ability to determine what constitutes quality peer-reviewed research compared to those that can be generously described as "dubious".

Nevertheless, one is surprised when one's interlocutor on such matters claims to be a professor at a university. Subsequent information reveals that they're actually an associate professor of psychology at a polytechnic. Polytechnics of course perform an extremely valuable role in the training and teaching of practical skills, but let's not pretend that they're research institutions. I shall be kind enough not to mention their name or the institution that they belong to, but I will raise some of the matters of interest which concur with the sort of things that one comes to expect from those opposed to vaccinations.

Even with the global economic downturn due to the pandemic, there is a revived interest in workers' cooperatives as an alternative business structure. A great deal of the interest is simply factual. A summary of research [1] from Virginie Perotin of Leeds University Business School takes into account material from the past two decades and from across North and South America and Europe comes to the conclusion that productivity, employment, and employee well-being is typically improved in cooperatives than conventional businesses and that workers' cooperatives are more resilient. Whilst it is true that workers' cooperatives are a relatively small part of the global economy, they do raise some very interesting questions with regard to political economy: are workers' cooperatives a variation on capitalism, a type of socialism, or something else entirely? Do they represent some transitional state of affairs, and could society as a whole operate as one or many workers' cooperatives?

One must be careful to specify that that, in terms of political economy, that workers' cooperatives rather than cooperatives in general, are meant here. Cooperatives could mean consumer cooperatives, where consumer goods are purchased in bulk and then sold at lower than usual rates, or commodity or retailer cooperatives where businesses do the same. Another common misapprehension is that workers' cooperatives are limited in size or are only effective in a limited number of industries. With regards to size one needed only point towards organisations like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain and John Lewis Partnership in the UK, both of which have some 80,000 worker-owners. With regards to the variety of industries, one can refer to Scott Bader Commonwealth, composites and specialty polymer plastics. Danobat Group, sheet metal. Fagor Arrasate Group, machine tools. Isthmus, engineering and manufacturing. Earthworker, solar and heat pump hot water manufacturing. Motion Twin, video game studio, Swann-Morton, surgical equipment, Renew Development, construction, etc.

There are many good arguments and plenty of historical evidence of why any suggestion of a parliamentary road to abolishing the State, even in an advanced liberal democracy, is extremely unlikely. There is the argument that parliament is innately a bourgeois parliament that excludes substantive reform which is won by extra-parliamentary means. Then there's the argument that parliament will corrupt and weaken any who attempt reform. Finally, there are arguments that any threats to it will result in violence by the ruling class to protect their privileges. These arguments have a degree of legitimacy, however, they are not the point of this discussion. Rather, it is the identification of the special privileges embodied in law that create economic classes and thus a State. In doing so one can, at least in a pro-forma sense, map out what changes would be required to abolish the State through such a means.

In the first instance, it is necessary to differentiate between "the State" and "government". Many anarchists, like most people, have conflated and confused the two, but there is much to be gained by making a distinction. Bookchin [1] notes that whilst all states have governments, not all governments are states. "A government is a set of organized and responsible institutions that are minimally an active system of social and economic administration. They handle the problems of living in an orderly fashion. A government may be a dictatorship; it may be a monarchy or a republican state, but it may also be a libertarian formation of some kind". Proudhon, the first person who identified politically as an anarchist, argued: "Anarchy is... a form of government or constitution in which public and private consciousness, formed through the development of science and law, is alone sufficient to maintain order and guarantee all liberties."[2] Etymologically the two differ; governance means "to steer" (from the ancient Hellenic "kybernan"), whereas anarchy, rather than the early modern English usage of "disorder", means to have no archon, or ruler, i.e., "no ruler", not "no rules". In contrast the state is from the Latin, "stare", "to stand", where we also have such terms as "estate".

Markets do not exist in a vacuum — they are a product of rules and social order. Markets function only because governments have created a system of institutions and rules that allow them to work. The free market works optimally only within the framework of rules created by government. Government created property titles, courts, police, money, and taxation — all of which are necessary in order for markets to function optimally. Without this governmental backdrop, markets could not exist, much less function efficiently.

The Origins of Money

The classical economic narrative of the origin of money, found in works such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Carl Menger’sOn the Origins of Money, assumes that people originally traded directly through barter and gradually adopted precious metals as a medium of exchange for the sake of convenience. Gold eventually became the universal medium of exchange because it had an inherent value. Eventually, banks developed as warehouses for people to store gold in and "dollar bills" were issued as warehouse receipts for the gold on store at the bank. Indeed, the term dollar originally designated a specific amount of gold. Over time, people began trading the warehouse receipts themselves in place of the gold. And this was the origin of paper money. While this narrative is quite elegant and seems to be a logically satisfying explanation of the origin of money, archeological evidence and anthropological research have thoroughly disproven this theory. In reality, the earliest forms of money were government-issued and credit-based currencies, not commodity-based mediums of exchange emerging spontaneously from market consensus. While the term dollar did originally designate a certain amount of gold, the “dollar bill” was not actually a warehouse receipt. In reality, the “dollar bill” was just a promissory note representing a credit valued at the amount of a dollar of gold. It was never actually backed by gold.

The baby-boom generation is ending its lap in the human race, and the Fridays-for-future generation is beginning its run. Generational shifts of power are symbolized by the image of passing the torch, but now what the older has to pass on to the younger seems not a torch but a time bomb, a legacy of crises. Industrial production without responsibility has placed the environment in a situation where entire species are experiencing extinction. The economic system increasingly sees a growing gap in wealth and income between the poor to the rich.

To find a way out of the disaster, we need to look at how we got into it, the historical context. The economic and social system of capitalism shapes our times and shapes us. It is a system based on power, the ability of one group to dominate another – the owner of industry dominate workers, the owners of land dominate the renters, the rich countries dominate poor countries. The political system, even with the window-dressing of parliamentary democracy, is designed to keep participation to a minimum and to protect this system of dominance from change. To understand the effects of this, let’s review a bit of history.

The experience of last year [1, 2, 3] suggested quite strongly in favour of elimination as a strategy for SARS-Cov-2, rather than a suppression strategy. After the experiences of the original and alpha strains of SARS-Cov-2, it should be quite clear by the numbers that "go hard, go fast" is a successful approach. It means restricting movement and interaction between people (the virus doesn't move, people do), putting up strong fences to demarcate an area and block the potential entry of the infected.

The results speak for themselves; from Australian states like Victoria, which remarkably reached elimination from high numbers, Western Australia, and Tasmania, to countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, and China. The strategy of trying to achieve zero cases was a proven success, with the three aforementioned countries having the lowest case numbers per capita in the developed world. As a grim irony to those who recommended that a policy of suppression in fear of the economic damage that an elimination strategy would cause, the numbers do not lie; those countries and regions that adopted an elimination strategy were able to recover quickly and more completely and there suffered less economic damage than those which did not [4].

Establishment journalists and politicians are despairingly asking: Why did we fail in our well-meaning efforts to help the Afghan people? What were our mistakes? But they ignore their first mistake: creating the Taliban.

The USA’s attempts to dominate Afghanistan and its resources began 40 years ago when Jimmy Carter in one of his last acts as president approved a CIA plan to overthrow the Afghan government. That government was no more dictatorial than others in the region, and it was implementing most of the humanitarian programs the USA later claimed it wanted to do: Women had equal rights and access to education, the country had freedom of religion and a well-functioning healthcare system. The rural infrastructure was being improved, and the standard of living was increasing. But the government was communist, and that meant it had to go, no matter how many people had to die.

Image by Eric Lobbecke. This has been said: Gladys Berejiklian is a danger to the people of New South Wales, the rest of Australia, and even New Zealand. Every single case of coronavirus, the highly infectious Delta and Delta Plus variants, originates from New South Wales substantially aided by the policies lead by that state government. New Zealand previously had less than ten cases a day since April last year, using a 7-day rolling average; then, a case crossed the ditch [1] from New South Wales, and now they have 66 a day, and the total number of active infections has grown from 36 at the beginning of August to 651. Victoria, too, had a 5-cases a day at the beginning of August (again using the rolling average of the previous week), now it's up to 81, again with origins from New South Wales [2]. Whilst they have been largely spared, due to successful and rapid implementation of strong movement restrictions (popularly, but somewhat incorrectly, described as "lockdowns"), the few cases in South Australia and Queensland also owe their origins to New South Wales.

Public health policy has public health results. The outbreak in Victoria resulted from a policy that allowed some cross-border movement, and the same applied in New Zealand. Pity, however, New South Wales which is an absolute train-wreck and getting much worse. With a weekly rolling average of 24 cases at the end of June, a lackadaisical approach to suppressing the outbreak has led the state to experience a rolling average of over a thousand cases a day, with the worst yet to come. Extraordinarily, even as the state recorded the worst-case figures [3] for an Australian state since the pandemic began, the Premier announced "We are going to show the way in Australia as to how you can live with COVID", a remark that will leave a bitter taste for the friends and family of the six patients who died in the same daily reporting period. "Living with COVID" is, of course, a euphemism to mean "dying with COVID" as words have their opposite meaning when political marketing pitches are made against reality. A few days later, as NSW recorded another 1164 cases, the Premier said she didn't understand why some states and territories were unhappy with the national plan to end lockdowns once 80% of the eligible population had been vaccinated, referring to reaching the "magic 70 percent and 80 percent [4].

The sudden fall of Afghanistan into the hands of the Taliban may have shocked establishment experts [1], but are certainly no surprise to those expert critics who for decades have criticised the corruption, the lack of strength in civil institutions, and the disparity between what Western governments told us and what reality was like on the ground [2]. That reality is approximately 175,000 dead, mainly Afghan national military and police, Taliban and other opposition fighters, and civilians. One could add an additional 67,000 for the Pakistani side of The Durand Line [3], a British imperialist invention that divides the indigenous Pashtuns and is treated with complete contempt by those on both sides of the border; all quite a remarkable achievement by the US after spending 2.261 trillion dollars on consolidating a military presence in a country of less the 40 million. Certainly, a windfall for those capitalists who invested in the war machine; returns on the top five defense contractors from 2001 to now have a return 50% greater than the general stock market [4].

The fall of Afghanistan has occurred under Biden, as the United States had agreed under Trump to withdraw its troops whilst the Taliban agreed not to allow al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups to operate under their areas [5]. Hand-waving their behaviour in the past, their gross violations of human rights and especially those against women, establishment experts tried to tell the world then, and continue to do so now, that the Taliban of 2020 are fundamentally different [6] from the Taliban of the 1990s. This is not entirely true; they are certainly more pragmatic in their international relations, and certainly more mercurial in public relations, but their ideology is the same, and their behaviour is the same. At the time of writing, the Taliban are going door-to-door searching for people who either worked for NATO or the Republic [7]. Whilst one would be happy to be wrong, we can certainly expect that horrific facts of the new Taliban rule will come out soon.

A few days ago, the SARS-CoV-19 virus reached two hundred million cases, with over four million dead. We know these numbers are almost certainly under-estimations based on data collection limits and comparisons of death rates from previous years. It is with the benefit of hindsight that we now realise that the entire year of 2020 was, in fact, "the first wave" of increasing infections which did not peak until early January 2021 at close to 840,000 new cases a day, and its nadir in mid-February at a mere 400,000. Since then we have witnessed the rise of the new and more contagious and deadly Delta variant which peaked at the end of April with 875,000 new cases as it overwhelmed India. That peak declined to a low of around 300,000 new daily cases in mid-June, only to rise again as the variant spread to densely populated regions in South-East Asia; at the time of writing the daily new case numbers are at 688,000 and are on an upwards trajectory.