The Central Bankers' Long Covid: An Incurable Condition
By Fabio Vighi (Professor of Critical Theory & Italian at Cardiff University, UK)
A free translation of: One., From the freedom forge. Voluntary for the: One. And for every living-feeling-thinking-fellow human being with a sense of honor and conscience and sincerity.
Central bankers' long covid: an incurable condition
A sheep spends its entire life afraid of the wolf, but in the end it is eaten by the shepherd. (Popular saying)
By now, it should be clear that COVID-19 is essentially a symptom of the rampage of finance capital. In a broader sense, it is a symptom of a world that is no longer able to reproduce through profit from human labor and therefore relies on a compensatory logic of permanent money doping. While the structural shrinkage of the work-based economy is inflating the financial sector, its volatility can only be contained through global emergencies, mass propaganda and tyranny through biosecurity. How can we break out of this vicious circle?
Since the third industrial revolution (microelectronics in the 1980s), automated capitalism has been preoccupied with abolishing wage labor as its own substance. The point at which there is no turning back has passed. Due to the escalating technological progress, capital is increasingly powerless in the face of its task of squeezing the surplus value out of the labor force. With the unleashing of artificial intelligence, this truly becomes an impossible task - game over.
This means that the foundations of our world no longer lie in the socially necessary work that is contained in goods such as cars, telephones or toothpaste. Rather, they lie in highly inflammatory, debt-leveraged speculation on financial stocks such as stocks, bonds, futures and, above all, derivatives, the value of which is evidenced for an indefinite period. Only the religious belief that the bulk of these assets create value prevents us from seeing the yawning abyss beneath our feet. And when our faith fades, Divine Providence intervenes by putting us into collective hypnosis with apocalyptic stories of contagion and the associated stories of salvation.
But reality is persistent and keeps knocking on our door. As the financial tumor spreads in the social body, capital decides to unleash its Leviathan doppelganger, a vampire who feeds on global emergencies and business models anchored in digital technology and has the potential to secure all life on earth . The signs point to a storm, a “soft dictatorship” is already staring at us. Today resistance means defending the inviolable dimension of human dignity, which is a non-negotiable starting point for building an alternative social project. There is still time, but we need critical awareness, courage and a collective awakening.
Pandexit in the land of the unicorns
How close are we to the pandemic? The following excerpt from a recent Bloomberg article gives the most likely answer: “For anyone hoping to see light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel in the next three to six months, scientists have bad news: Make yourself up Expect more of what we've been through.
To decipher this statement, let us assume that our future is marked by the following events: 1. Central banks will continue to create excessive amounts of money, the main purpose of which is to inflate financial markets; 2. The contagion narrative (or similar) will continue to hypnotize entire populations, at least until the digital health passport is fully implemented; 3. Liberal democracies are being dismantled and finally replaced by regimes based on a digitized panopticon, a metaverse of control technologies that are legitimized by deafening emergency noise.
Too gloomy? Not when you consider that the health crisis roller coaster (closings followed by partial openings alternating with new closings by mini-waves) is starting to look more like a global role-playing game, with actors passing the buck to make sure that the emergency spirit continues to circulate, albeit in a weakened form. The reason for this depressing scenario is simple: Without the virus that justifies the monetary policy stimulus, the indebted financial sector would collapse overnight. At the same time, however, rising inflation combined with bottlenecks in the supply chain (especially for microchips) threatens a devastating recession.
This dilemma seems insurmountable, which is why the elites cannot give up the emergency narrative. From their point of view, the only way out seems to be the controlled destruction of the real economy and its liberal infrastructure while financial stocks continue to be artificially inflated. The latter includes cynical tricks of financial greenwashing like investing in ESG securities, an environmentally camouflaged loophole to legitimize further debt expansion. With all due respect for the Greta Thunbergs in our midst, this has nothing to do with saving the planet.
Rather, we are witnessing the accelerating dissolution of liberal capitalism, which is now obsolete. The outlook is objectively depressing. Global financial and geopolitical interests are secured through massive data gathering, blockchain ledgers, and slavery through digital apps touted as an empowering innovation. At the core of our predicament lies in the ruthless evolutionary logic of a socio-economic system that, in order to survive, is ready to sacrifice its democratic framework and adopt a monetary regime supported by in-house science and technology, media propaganda and disaster narrative, accompanied by a disgusting pseudo-human philanthropic capitalism.
By appealing to our personal guilt for “destroying the planet”, the coming climate lockdowns are the ideal continuation of the Covid restrictions. If Virus was the creepy starter, a generous helping of the ideology of the carbon footprint mixed with energy scarcity is served as the main meal. One at a time, we are persuaded that our negative influence on the planet must be punished. First scared and regulated by the virus and now ashamed because we have harmed Mother Earth, we have already internalized the environmental command: Our natural right to life must be earned by adhering to ecological dictates imposed by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank and by technocratic governments to be ratified with their police force. This is capitalist realism in its most cynical form.
The introduction of the digital health pass (which was ridiculed as a conspiracy theory just a year ago!) Is a critical point. The identification of the masses is crucial if the elites want to win our trust in an increasingly centralized power structure that is being sold as an opportunity for emancipation . After crossing the rubicon of digital identity, the crackdown is likely to continue smoothly and gradually, as in Noam Chomsky's famous anecdote: if we throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately come out with one giant leap; if, on the other hand, we immerse it in lukewarm water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will not notice anything and will even enjoy it; until he, weakened and unable to react, is finally boiled to death.
However, the above prediction needs to be contextualized in a conflicting and extremely uncertain scenario. First, there are now signs (albeit heavily censored) of real popular resistance to the Pandemic Psycho-Operation and the Great Reset in general. Second, seem
the elites have reached a dead end and therefore do not know how to proceed, as the decision of several countries to de-escalate the health emergency shows. It is worth reiterating that the riddle is basically economic: how do you deal with extreme financial volatility while retaining capital and privileges? The global financial system is a huge pyramid scheme. If those who run it were to lose control of the creation of liquidity, the resulting explosion would disrupt the entire socio-economic fabric. At the same time, a recession would deprive politicians of any credibility. For this reason, the only viable plan of the elites seems to be to synchronize the controlled destruction of the economy (collapse of the global supply chain resulting in “everything shortages”) with the construction of a global digital infrastructure for technocratic takeover. Timing is of the essence.
Emergency addiction
With a view to a possible recession, the financial analyst Mauro Bottarelli summarized the logic of the communication vessels of the pandemic economy as follows: "A semi-permanent health emergency is preferable to a vertical market crash that would turn the memory of 2008 into a stroll." As I tried to reconstruct in a recent article, the "pandemic" was a lifeboat exposed to a drowning economy. Strictly speaking, it is a monetary event aimed at extending the lifespan of our financially driven and terminally ill mode of production. With the help of the virus, capitalism tries to reproduce itself by simulating conditions that no longer exist.
Here is a summary of Covid's economic logic. The September 2019 bailout for the financial sector - which was on the verge of nervous breakdown again after eleven happy years of quantitative easing - included an unprecedented expansion of monetary incentives: the creation of trillions of dollars with the Federal Reserve's magic wand. Injecting this excessive amount of money into Wall Street was only possible by turning off Main Street's engine. From the short-sighted capitalist mole's point of view, there was no alternative. Computer money that was created in the form of digital bytes must not encroach on local economic cycles, as this would trigger an inflationary tsunami à la Weimar in the 1920s (which ushered in the Third Reich), only much more catastrophic for a stagnant and global one networked economy.
The (cautious) resumption of credit-based transactions in the real economy has inevitably led to an increase in inflation and thus further impoverishment locally. The purchasing power of wages and salaries has been weakened, as has income and savings. It is worth remembering that commercial banks stand at the crossroads between the magical world of central bank digital money and the emergency wasteland inhabited by most mortals. Hence, any wild expansion of central bank reserves (money created out of nothing) triggers price inflation as soon as commercial banks inject cash (i.e. debt) into society.
The purpose of the “pandemic” was to accelerate the pre-existing macro trend of monetary expansion while postponing inflationary damage. In line with the Federal Reserve, the world's central bankers have created oceans of liquidity and thus devalued their currencies to the detriment of the population. As this goes on, the transnational turbo-capital of the elite in the financial world continues to expand, absorbing the small and medium-sized businesses that it has suppressed and destroyed. In other words, there is no free lunch (for us). The central bank's money printing machine only works for the 0,0001% - with the help of a virus or a global threat of equal scope.
For now, it looks like central bankers are indulging in the fine art of procrastination. The Fed Executive Board will meet again in early November 2021, with the start of tapering (reduction in monetary policy incentives) announced for December. But how will the elites deal with zero interest rates and direct deficit financing in the face of deflation in the Covid bubble? More specifically, what new “unforeseen event” or “divine intervention” will bail you out? Will it be aliens? A cyber terrorist attack on the banking system? A tsunami in the Atlantic? War Games in Southeast Asia? Another war on terror? The shopping list is long.
In the meantime, citizens find themselves in an overwhelming dilemma. If credit is to be made available to businesses, central banks need to curb inflation, which the only way they can do it is by withdrawing credit! Runaway inflation can only be avoided by containing the disruptive effects of excessive money creation, that is, by bringing the working society to its knees. Most of us are cornered between essential goods price inflation and the deflationary outflow of liquidity from lost income and the erosion of savings. And in a stagnant economy where inflation is getting out of hand, any suppressed business transaction is diverted into financial assets.
One tool that prevents liquidity from reaching the real economy is the Federal Reserve's Overnight Reverse Repo Facility (RRP). As it continues to flood the financial markets with freshly printed money, the Fed is wiping up any excess money it pumps into Wall Street thanks to the reverse repo facility. A zero-sum game of give and take: At night, financial players deposit their excess liquidity with the Federal Reserve, which delivers the same government bonds and mortgage-backed securities as collateral that it takes from the market during its daytime QE purchases. In August 2021, the Fed's use of the RRP exceeded $ 1 trillion, prompting the Open Market Committee (FOMC) to double the RRP limit to $ 23 billion from September 2021, 160.
So here's the elephant in the room: How can the Fed's “taper” be reconciled with reverse repos on this astronomical scale? Is the long-awaited reduction in monetary stimulus even possible in the face of a global financial bubble fueled by interest-free borrowing and structural borrowing? But how can central bankers continue to expand their balance sheets at the same time when the double plague of stagnation and rising inflation (stagflation) is just around the corner?
The logic of this monetary policy mechanism is perverse. The solipsistic “insane dance” of finance capital has gotten out of hand well beyond its usual craziness, and the day of reckoning is drawing near. Can a Devastating Recession be Avoided? Today's political response seems to mobilize the old wisdom that "extreme times require extreme measures", which translates to: no crime against humanity can be ruled out if the systemic implosion is so persistently denied. Isn't that what history has always taught us?
The crisis we are experiencing is not an epidemiological crisis. First and foremost, it is about getting to grips with the potentially catastrophic financial burden of toxic risks and the associated inflation management. Suffice it to say that central bankers fail to raise interest rates to 2%, whereas in the 1970s they were raised to 20% to fight inflation. However, as Covid notes, financial acrobatics to this extent only works under the guise of emergency: blockades, lockdowns, restrictions, etc. The cover-up has two goals: 1. to hide the sinking of the Titanic (financially driven “work society”); 2. Coordinate the implementation of a colossal monetary reset based on economic depression and centralized control over people's lives.
Digital fascism
The consequences of emergency capitalism are clearly biopolitical. They concern the management of a human surplus, which becomes superfluous for a largely automated, highly financed and imploding reproductive model. That is why the virus, vaccine and Covid pass are the holy trinity of social engineering. The "virus passports" are designed to train the masses in using electronic wallets that control access to public services and personal livelihoods. The dispossessed and laid-off masses, along with those who disobey regulations, are the first to be disciplined by digitized poverty management systems directly monitored by monopoly capital. The plan is to turn human behavior into tokens and push it onto blockchain ledgers controlled by algorithms. And the spread of global fear is the perfect ideological tool to drive us to that result.
As public debates are silenced by censorship and intimidation, we are escorted into a biotechno-capitalist dystopia, the infernal nature of which is likely to unfold in full with the next global crisis. This would justify the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDC), which, in the words of Agustin Carstens (General Director of the Bank for International Settlements), “have absolute control over the rules and regulations governing the use of this central bank debt [i.e. money], and we will have the technology to make this happen. Digital cash in connection with digital identity is an abbreviation for high-tech monetary serfdom that will first be extended to the unemployed (e.g. UBI recipients) and possibly to most of us. When Larry Fink (CEO of BlackRock) says that "markets prefer totalitarian governments to democracies," we'd better believe him.
The separation of the population on the basis of vaccination status is an epochal achievement typical of totalitarian regimes. If the resistance is broken, a compulsory digital ID will be introduced, which records the “virtue” of our behavior and regulates our access to society. Covid was the ideal Trojan horse for this breakthrough. A global system of digital identification based on blockchain technology has long been planned by the ID2020 alliance, backed by giants such as Accenture, Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, MasterCard, IBM, Facebook and Bill Gates' ubiquitous GAVI. From here, the transition to monetary control should be relatively smooth. CBDCs would not only allow central banks to keep track of every transaction, but most importantly, block access to liquidity for any reason deemed legitimate. The “Digitization of Life” project also provides for an “Internet Passport” with which - subject to regular checks - people who are considered unworthy can be excluded from the Internet. If social creditworthiness falls below a certain level, finding a job, traveling, or obtaining credit depends on willingness to undergo “rehabilitation programs”. Presumably there will be a black market for the outcasts.
A cornerstone of historical fascism was state-controlled industry, which, however, remained privately owned. It is amazing that, despite the overwhelming evidence of systematic revolving doors between the public and private sectors, most public intellectuals have not yet realized that we are headed towards that goal. The Italian writer Ennio Flaiano once said that the fascist movement consists of two groups: the fascists and the anti-fascists. Today, when most self-proclaimed anti-fascists tacitly or enthusiastically support the medically motivated authoritarian turn, this paradox matters more than ever.
From conspiracy theory to successful paranoia
The epistemology of conspiracy theory defines much of today's propaganda as the rhetoric of exclusion. The a priori rejection of “paranoid thinking” makes the official narrative appear as the sole bearer of truth, regardless of empirical verification. As Ole Bjerg argues, “the real pathology arises on the side of the mainstream reactions to the so-called conspiracy theorists […] in the form of an epistemic state of emergency that threatens to undermine the functioning of public debate and intellectual criticism” [i] Mit In other words, paranoia qualifies the position of those modern torquemadas, whose inquisition tribunals silence any “heretical” thinking that dares to deviate from the dogmas of emergency capitalism. The blanket accusation of the “paranoid Covid deniers” and “anti-Vaxxers” is not only symptomatic of the dissolution of the democratic bond, but above all of a top-down infection with ideological diseases that still exist on such a global scale never existed.
As Jacques Lacan argued in the 1960s, capitalist power works by disappearing, by making itself secret and invisible, and thereby obscuring not only its authority but also its powerlessness. In capitalism everything seems to work spontaneously, as if no one was giving orders or obeying them, just following their spontaneous wishes: “What stands out and what no one seems to see is that the master signifier through the fact that the clouds of Powerlessness was revealed, only appears more invulnerable [...] Where is he? How can it be named? How can it be located - besides its murderous effects, of course? ”[Ii] Should this lead us to add Lacan to the army of maddened conspiracy theorists? While the traditional gentleman relies on symbolic authority, the capitalist gentleman delegates his authority to the intangible objectivity of his modus operandi. As neoliberalism has made abundantly clear, rule is officially abandoned, but at the same time reasserted in its abandoned form, for example as “leadership”. And Lacan is saying that this stratagem opens the space for deeper, more insidious forms of manipulation.
Just like the corporate-controlled mainstream media, many Lacanians today love to ridicule “conspiracy theorists”. Typically they do this by quoting Lacan's motto that “there is no such thing as a Great Other” - so ultimately no one can start a conspiracy behind the scenes. Or, to quote from a recently published article by Slavoj Žižek: “There is no need to invent pandemics and weather disasters, as the system produces them itself”. But these arguments miss the mark, because they overlook how power works precisely by occupying the ontological inconsistency of the great other and manipulating it in its favor. In other words, if there is an unconscious, conspiracy and manipulation are inevitable. The success of any power structure depends on its ability to weaponize the self-contradicting status of its sensory universe against the neurotic masses.
For all his Hegelianism, Žižek overlooks the speculative character of (capitalist) power: Systemic contradictions are the basis and the lifeblood of any power structure. The elementary speculative ruse of power consists in making ontological inconsistency a condition of possibility. This is clearly evident in the “authoritarian turn” of contemporary capitalism, which is based on the ideological use of emergency situations. Ultimately, these emergencies are real only in that they are capitalist emergencies that are timed in to advance the interests of capital. The assumption that they escape or will undermine the existing power structure ignores the extent to which they are already working for capitalist power. My reading of Covid as a product of financial volatility is in line with this speculative stance: pandemic contingency is a capitalist necessity, and as such it has been supported from the start by a vast ideological apparatus.
The rhetoric of exclusion that enlivens public discourse on Covid can be described by what Lacan, borrowing from Freud, described as "successful paranoia" which "might as well seem to constitute the closure of science" [iii] in essence "Closure" refers to the positivist belief in scientific objectivity based on the rejection (isolation) of the "subject of the unconscious" as a source of questions, doubts and errors. In the context of Lacan's discourse theory, successful paranoia corresponds to a hyper-efficient belief system backed up by the “strange copulation between capitalism and science”. [The power of what is one-sidedly touted today as “real science” (so real that it forbids doubt, forbids debate, and encourages censorship) is akin to the power of a new religion, as Lacan warned in 1974: “Science is about to become itself to put religion itself in the place of religion, and it is even more despotic, blunt and obscurantistic ”[v]. And capitalism relies on science and technology as well as healthcare, one of the most profitable businesses in the world.
The “science” we have to follow is being hijacked by the financial elites and their political cronies, acting as a barrier to the awareness that “our world” is crumbling. Real science, which continues to operate behind the thick curtain of censorship, would never impose dictatorial mandates such as those still in place in democratic countries around the world. The blind belief in the “Covid science” thus betrays the desperate desire to cling to capitalist power, including its authoritarian mutation. Yet the history of scientific progress shows that science is essentially a discourse that focuses on what it lacks. All great scientific advances are based on a principle of inadequacy: the awareness that truth as the cause of knowledge is ontologically absent. Or, to quote Lacan: “Il n'y a de cause que de ce qui cloche” (“There is only one cause in what doesn't work”) [vi] That is the science for which it is to fight worth it.
While the driving conditions of the system (the value-adding relationship between capital and labor) no longer work, the Covid bait once again allows capitalism to expose any serious investigation of its structural illness and its ongoing transformation. The Clinic of Neurosis shows us how much the average neurotic desires a master whose job it is to reassure him that his world is on solid foundations. Neurotics often hang so desperately on their power structure that they become perverts to ensure its functioning - like a masochist who eagerly extends the whip to his dominatrix. Perversion works like an order to enjoy the balance of power, and contemporary subjects often willingly submit to power in a desperate attempt to consolidate it. Unfortunately, the conservative structures of neurosis and perversion are often shared by “progressive minds” (including liberal and radical leftists) whose commitment is limited to virtue or participation in conspiracy-based shame games.
And yet all is not lost. Despite the inexorable convergence of science and capitalism in creating a watertight belief system that rules out dissent, our successfully paranoid universe will fail to totalize its structure. Paradoxically, the current persecution of humanity is perhaps the best chance for radical resistance to the coming regime of capitalist accumulation and its relentless emergency extortion.
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Translation into German mother tongue by: andre. For information, skills acquisition and further training in the private sector. The private distribution for private and non-commercial use is expressly desired. As always and everywhere, the following also applies here:
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