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02-08-2021: An iron curtain has descended across South-East Queensland, Australia’s “Sunshine State”. Deputy Premier Steven Miles announced the extension of a three-day lockdown to eight days,[1] which could be extended further on a whim. 11 Local Government Areas stretching from the Gold Coast in the south to the Sunshine Coast in the north have been condemned to lockdowns, with stay-at-home orders in place, workplaces shuttered, and most small and medium-sized businesses threatened with state prosecution for opening. Facemask mandate rules arguably now cross the line of child abuse, with all students from Year 7 to Year 12[2] somehow being required to mask up, expressly restricting oxygen flows and risking nausea, dizziness and worse side-effects. This is allegedly in response to a 17-year-old student who attends Indooroopilly High School in the west of Brisbane, “testing positive” to Covid-19.[3]
Propaganda “pandemic”
The notion that society is faced with a deadly plague which can be spread by healthy people with no symptoms is farcical. At best, the SARS-CoV-2 virus – if it exists at all – presents virtually no risk to people of working age, and none at all to young people, let alone school children. Covid-19 is a pseudo pandemic[4] which is fuelled by a corporate media barrage so intense it has swindled legions of the most highly educated professionals in many fields. Relentless propaganda from politicians and Big Tech dominated social media has created societal conditions where logical fallacies are repeated often simply to avoid the ominous threat of social opprobrium or outright ostracism. In many cases, workers have little choice but to go along with the Covid narrative just to remain in employment. Other workers in areas deemed “non-essential” have been thrown out of work or stood down without pay.
The claims that some high school student contracted Covid which risks an “outbreak” of the “highly infectious Delta variant” are little more than a tissue of lies. As are the claims that lockdowns, facemasks and Covid vaccines “work” to help contain a virulent disease. Such prattle is only part of the ideology of lockdown fascism, which at its roots has origins which are economic and political, rather than scientific and medical. Lockdowns are a component of “The Great Reset”, where capitalism self-inflicts partial economic destruction in a (vain) attempt to restart itself after more than a decade of flatlining stagnation. The “Global Financial Crisis” (which was not global at all, given that the People’s Republic of China was barely affected) in 2008 was the “third slump” which set the stage for Western economic contraction and the subsequent drive to imperialist wars of regime change in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and many other countries. During the 2010s, workers’ wages in the West barely increased at all, leading even some employer associations into calling for wage increases! This is the background which point to some of the real and underlying reasons for “Covid” lockdowns from 2020 onwards.
Political fight in the balance
Despite having launched lockdown fascism early in 2020 and having all the resources of the state and government behind it, the ruling classes internationally do not have it their own way. In fact, the Australian ruling class is politically losing the Covid agenda, replicating the situation in many countries in Europe and the United States of America (USA). One could reasonably claim that the lockdown extension in Queensland was but an act of political retaliation against the working masses. Just one week prior, some 20 000 people had marched through the streets of Brisbane, as part of “Worldwide Rallies for Freedom”. They were joined by at least 40 000 in Sydney and Melbourne,[5] which were under strict lockdowns at the time. Tens of thousands of people in each of the major population centres on the Eastern Seaboard represents mass rejection of the entire narrative of Covid hysteria and the overtly political repression which is used to enforce it. Lockdowns, facemasks, Covid vaccines, tracking and tracing, state and national border shutdowns, the throwing of millions of workers out of work, the driving of medium and small businesses into bankruptcy, the ludicrous list of ever-changing rules and restrictions on social, family and even intimate partner life – all of it is intolerable.
The political fightback against lockdown domination is now so widespread that the ruling class is responding with more outrageous actions – more lockdowns, more “variant” propaganda, and more repression. In New South Wales, Australian soldiers are being used to enforce Covid lockdowns. In Brisbane on the morning of August 2, police blocked off access to the CBD to prevent a snap protest against lockdowns from going ahead. Those who attempted to walk to the rallying point at the Botanical Gardens were turned away, some with fines for exceeding the 10-kilometre travel limit. Protestors made a tactical retreat to New Farm Park, only to be again dispersed by a heavy police presence. This is evidence that the massive scale of the July 24 anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane represented a “tipping point” in the political fight between the anti-lockdown movement and the forces of capitalist state repression. The anti-lockdown movement now has the upper hand, partially because it is the living refutation of every one of the government’s Covid lies.
The sheer determination of the anti-lockdown protestors is something to behold. In a certain way, the anti-lockdown movement confirms one of the central tenets of Marxism: that the working-class will at a certain point be compelled to defend themselves against the despotic terror of capitalist rule, irrespective of their current political views and beliefs. To be sure, the anti-lockdown movement also contains a large contingent of small business owners wedded to various forms of nationalism. Nonetheless, in practice they are resisting the dire encroachments of finance capital, which only offers a future of political tyranny and economic collapse. This is why leftists need to work side-by-side with all sections of the anti-lockdown movement even if some of them regard themselves as “right-wing”. Real revolutionaries must find a way to forge a workers’ vanguard party through the mass movement which must ultimately pose the question of socialism or lockdown barbarism.
WORKERS LEAGUE
E: workersleague@redfireonline.com
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-02/queensland-coronavirus-new-cases-update-lockdown-brisbane-school/100341828 (02-08-2021)
[2] https://www.qld.gov.au/health/conditions/health-alerts/coronavirus-covid-19/current-status/public-health-directions/restrictions-impacted-areas (02-08-2021)
[3] https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/indooroopilly-state-school-closes-after-student-tests-positive-for-covid-19-20210730-p58e9x.html (02-08-2021)
[4] https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/29/pseudopandemic/ (02-08-2021)
[5] https://www.instagram.com/p/CRs–eUNfA_/ (02-08-2021)
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