While just 10 countries have used 75 percent of jabs so far, around 130 countries have not seen a single vaccination, according to the UN. Of 175 million vaccines administered, only about eight million have gone to South America’s 430 million population and two million to Africa’s 1.3 billion population.
https://socialistrevolution.org/permanent-pandemic-mutations-market-failures-and-zero-covid/ March 3, 2021
About $100bn of public money has gone towards coronavirus vaccine development, there is no good reason why private companies should make a killing from these medicines. Rather, these vaccines should be distributed to the entire world, free of charge, and quickly—before even more virulent variants develop, so that some normality can truly, finally, resume.
The profiteering, vaccine nationalism, and hoarding that pose the biggest obstacles to ending this pandemic flow directly from the rotten capitalist system.
The experience of this public health disaster will lead more and more people to draw the conclusion that this system is incompatible with a safe and healthy future for humanity. These lessons will weigh heavily on the minds of the working class during the stormy period we are entering.
We Marxists must be ready with a revolutionary program and party to chart a new course.
Reflections on Naomi Klein’s Pandemic Shock Doctrine
Daniel Møller Ølgaard https://www.e-ir.info/2020/09/15/reflections-on-naomi-kleins-pandemic-shock-doctrine/
It should also be analysed as a symptom of a necropolitical turn in the social-, political-, and economic organisation of our world, the aim of which defines and divides populations in order to decide who must be protected and, more importantly, who can be sacrificed in the process.
it becomes obvious that digital capitalism and its associated mode of production relies on the physical, cultural and social division between consumers of digital commodities, and the countless couriers, moderators, miners and assembly line workers which produce our technological devices and digital commodities.
power embodied by surveillance capitalism is partly exercised through the biopolitical governance of individual consumers in affluent countries, surveillance capitalism relies just as much on the exercise of a necropolitical form of power that reduces people (or workers) to precarious conditions of life in places such as the Congolese lithium mine or the Chinese assembly line.
Put differently, the Pandemic Shock Doctrine – and digital capitalism more widely – does not simply substitute measures of violence and oppression with a biopolitics whose technologies of control aims at ensuring the health of populations. Rather, the emergence of digital capitalism represents the relocation of violence and oppression away from the centre of Western knowledge-based economies and towards its (postcolonial) frontiers.