mind reader

Dear friends,

Today I have been contemplating burnout.

Workers under contemporary fast capitalism are, like machines, left on piles of scrap amidst declining or decimated mental health and physical health – their only solace, that they briefly increased the stock price of their company. The intemperate nature of capitalist “reimagining” requires us to constantly reconfigure, redeploy, transmute, terraform, juxtapose, and so on regardless of our “job title”. I mean this in the sense that wave after wave of fast atmospheric shifts hit workers, demanding change, conformity, complicity and acceptance of new undermining and destabilising conditions in the system, just for us to subsist. Here is one of the most essential contradictions for workers under capitalism: consent is required for participation in wage-slavery, wage-slavery is required for capitalism, capitalism is indifferent to which wage-slave offers their consent, consent is mandatory.

Time was, before capitalism was violently and brutally globalised, that with access to adequate knowledge, skills, and physical locale, a select group of humans could opt-out of participation in capitalism. Through living in nations under different regimes, through “going into the wild”, or other radical forms of resistance, the alternative to capitalism was, essentially – at least in depictions, “being wild”. Hegemonic constructions of civilisation and civility, then, naturally arose from this false construct – those who lived in relation to land and place were less intelligent, less civil, they were less. Indeed, a large focus of cultural production, particularly in the 1940s, was around colonising, gentrifying, and capturing the imaginary that anyone not engaged in fulsome capitalist participation was utterly undesirable (thereby justifying genocides):

Bingo, bangle, bungle, I‘m so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go
Don’t want no jailhouse, shotgun, fish-hooks, golf clubs, I got my spears
So, no matter how they coax him (Yep!)
I’ll stay right here (Hillard & Sigman, 1947)

But, what does “living in the wild” even mean for burnout, Aidan? Firstly, let’s be clear, that living in the wild is a capitalist construct. The notion that nothing exists outside of capitalism, capitalist realism, has emerged in recent years as a way of understanding the ontology of labour-servitude that is enforced by our contemporary socio-economy. But notions of “wildness”, “civility” and “barbarism” are equally constructs designed to lead us to this eventuality. Historiography shows us that most of the world did not, in fact, at least in the last 3,000 years, live “in the wild” in the sense of Tarzan. But rather that sophisticated communities of social, economic, and essential care under a wide variety of political and social organisation systems proliferated.

European colonial thinking began placing these systems of organisation on hierarchical ladders at around the same time as the politics of race relations came on to the scene – a repugnant, but “useful”, tool for the morally unencumbered capitalist slave merchant – to profile intelligence, civility, “usefulness” and other outlandish, racist, and unscientific notions which have been discredited time and again. Though, that doesn’t stop Trump and Vance, Dutton, or Sunak, etc. from deploying variously racist, sexist, and vile divisive rhetorics. By using these tools, and through the continued manufacturing of history, we have arrived hard and fast – like a car fully slamming the break on after a 100mph race, at capitalist realism. Alternatives, in this world, are not only impossible, but they are fiction. As are the versions of “wild” life we see portrayed by capitalist and corporate media. Imbued with political messaging which demands there is no alternative to capitalism but barbarism, terrorism, violence, and death. In spite of the fact that alternative systems continue to exist and work – today.

So, burnout, what do? Burnout is a direct consequence of the intensified exploitation of workers, felt by knowledge workers and labourers alike, under late capitalism. As demands for productivity and efficiency continually increase, workers are pushed to their mental and physical limits, extracting maximum surplus value until they can no longer function effectively. Like the shipping containers in the desert filled with outmoded robots in I, Robot (anyone else remember this vividly?), workers are worked fast and hard until they retire or cease to function for other reasons (i.e., mental health). Capitalism throughout remains utterly indifferent to the reasons, of course, unless “enough workers” become a “real” problem. Theoretically, this process mirrors Marx’s concept of the reserve army of labour, but in addition to unemployment/underemployment, it also creates a cycle of burnout/replacement. Our socio-economic model treats workers as disposable resources. Not an investment, not even in the materials sense (qua. raw materials) where outmoded raw materials are still used for other purposes. Instead, humans and their labour become indistinguishable from the tools of production which have been replaced in the race for “bigger”, “more” and “better”.

Literally, capitalism demands using us up and discarding us when we can no longer meet the ever-escalating demands of the market. Even when an entire workforce or industry collapses, the bro on wall street could not care less, and so the system marches on. In the specific realm of knowledge work, this exploitation takes on yet another insidious form, as the boundaries between work and personal life blur, and workers are expected to be constantly available and productive – such that the equation of work for your leisure time has been replaced with work for work – or just die [1].

But hey, this is a cheery topic, why stop here?

The status quo, enacted through the mass weight of hegemony, gives us further insight into how burnout is normalised – even valorised – and perpetuated in society. The dominant capitalist ideology promotes a culture of overwork and self-sacrifice, framing burnout as a personal failure rather than a systemic issue. Indeed, “soft” burnout (or perhaps the CEO’s pretend burnout) is vastly different from the true psychology of burnout – but nonetheless the colonisation of words by capitalist hegemons rolls on. Work culture as cultural hegemony, naturally, serves to maintain the status quo. Here workers are ever forestalled from realising collective exploitation – with individualist answers offered to systemic issues by capitalists’ EAPs. Of course, we know from Gramsci, this also forestalls creative problem solving, future thinking, creativity broadly, and most importantly organising against this extractive and deadly system – together, the only way to collective liberation [2].

Adding to the mix, here, the role of traditional intellectuals offers us an interesting, if equally grim, analytical point. If we presume that traditional intellectuals are, largely, educated, critical thinkers, and somewhat autonomous under the proviso of capitalist loyalty, then we see a double stab of capitalist against prole, or rather against petit-bourgeois. Despite their potential for critical thinking, traditional intellectuals have become complicit even in their own exploitation and expropriation. The promise of social mobility and professional success acts as a form of consent and leads workers to accept and even embrace the conditions that lead to their burnout. The simultaneous acts of valorising work, espousing capital, and accepting the conditions that allow humans to be discarded because of individualist tendencies is a vicious and contradictory cycle – but no longer a contradiction of gloves-off capitalism, but rather one of “faced” human exploitation (as in there are actual perpetrators of sociopathy who think this shit is all fine and dandy, and worse, get off on creating conditions which burn colleagues out).

And what is suggested as the antidote to all this? Well naturally “self-care”. You’re bourgeois enough to have burnt out, so you must be bourgeois enough to have a spa day – that’ll fix ten years of expropriation of your labour, yeah? Yeah. But this, too, as with all things in our realist capitalist hellscape is commodified. What began, in pockets at least, as a radical act of resistance against systemic oppression has been twisted into a profitable industry that additionally burdens the worker with individualist notions of care, commercialised versions of wellbeing, and responsibility not with the capitalist and sociopathic micromanager creating the conditions of suffering, but again, with the “defective worker”.

This perversion of self-care serves a dual purpose for the capitalist class. First, it creates new markets for products and services aimed at “alleviating” the very stress and burnout that capitalism itself engenders, and has come to value. Second, and more cunningly, but with regular monotony, it diverts attention and energy away from collective action and systemic change. After all, why organise a union when you can buy another subscription to a different mindfulness app?

And while I’m on a roll, this wouldn’t be the blog it is without mention of technology’s role in all this. We have discussed ad nauseam, dear friends, how the potential of technology as a liberating force has been forever rewritten by capitalism into a sophisticated system of control and exploitation. Since there have been “tools of production” there have been techniques, modes, and models of worker exploitation matching the increased technology of the machinery to ensure control, subordination and solidification of class/race/gender hierarchies. The laptop and smartphone, introduced and marketed as tools of “freedom” and “flexibility” have become the digital shackles of the 21st century proletariat (okay, even I roll my eyes a little here, but the sentence sounded cool). With the hegemon perpetually valorising the degradation of boundaries between work and personal life, the 24/7 access to technology has all but obliterated “leisure”, in spite of what the ALP would have you believe after watering down the Greens’ legislation [3].

Stemming from technology use, remote work, here, touted as a remedy for work-life balance, has only intensified the extraction of surplus value from workers – particularly so in the case of precarious knowledge workers, shift workers, and other casualised and insecure workers. The home, in Marx’s day, a refuge from the demands of wage labour servitude, has been colonised by capital, and does not rest. Indeed, growing subjugation to invasive digital surveillance under the guise of “productivity monitoring” seals the deal.

As I wrote about open source LLMs and AI as a potential panacea to corporate AI-fanatic bullshit, this techno-dystopian reality is not an aberration but the logical conclusion of capitalism’s relentless drive for “efficiency” and “profit”. The question we need ask ourselves, as always, is “for who?” because I can tell you, my friends, it is not for me – and it is not you.

As we stand amidst the smouldering ruins of the 40-hour workweek, gasping for air in the acrid smoke of burnout, it is ever clear that tinkering around the edges of capitalism is insufficient. Liberal reform as led to liberal increases in work suffocation, choking on our own fumes, so to speak, as the planet burns. We need a radical reimagining of work itself, one that challenges the very foundations of the wage-labour paradigm that has defined capitalism since its inception.

Between growing calls for universal basic income, reduced working hours, and workplace democracy, I see only more ways for capital to incorporate, inculcate, and colonise. What about labour for the common good? What about care as a natural and native part of what we do as humans? What about sharing-economies at small scales, or just living in right relation with the land? These are utterly foreign, despicable, and insufferable qualities to capitalism and its capitalists. But these ideas, and more from smarter people than I, are amongst our only hopes for a society where burnout is a relic of a bygone era, rather than an individual issue for “someone else” as we compete for means of survival in late capitalism.

What a fucking world, friends.

I had a whole tirade about how AI could have been leveraged, but wasn’t, to liberate more of us, but that’s really a story for another day. In the meanwhile I hope wherever you are isn’t quite so grim, and you’re not as surrounded by burnt out people.

Much love and with solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/05/pwc-to-start-tracking-working-locations-of-all-its-uk-employees https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells-workforce-refused-to-return-to-the-office/

[2] Gramsci, A. (with Bordiga, A., & Tasca, A.). (1977). Selections from political writings (1910-1920) (Q. Hoare & J. Mathews, Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart.

[3] https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/workplace-laws/legislation-changes/closing-loopholes/right-to-disconnect

Dear friends,

The ALP has announced new legislature being developed to ban young people from social media at an arbitrary age [1]. This differs from existing laws which, on paper, limit what younger people can see and do on social media. The alleged basis of this particular movement is, alongside other attacks on the youth such as phone bans, “protecting the children”. If I had created a more sophisticated blogging engine I may have inserted the gif of Helen Lovejoy screaming: “won’t somebody please think of the children” at this juncture, but you’ll just have to use your imagination.

There are a litany of problems which arise from this new law. Not least of which is for adults, who will also, obviously, be subjected to “age verification” to use social media. Let’s start here. Meta has long held the policy that Facebook, Instagram and other social properties they own should represent a real human. This is partly to combat bots, and partly because it plays well with the marketing of these platforms as “real” [2]. However, adding age verification, regardless of the mechanism, seriously increases the chances of invasive advertising profiling. Even if Meta, for example, have nothing to do with the verification process, as in they are subject to a TRUE or FALSE return from an (external) government verification process, they are still able to corroborate more personal details about you, and what do Meta, X, Snapchat and ByteDance want? Data … about you! That’s their -real- product.

But the problems don’t end here. Aside from issues of encouraging increasingly lax parenting and how much of a role should the government have in raising children... How might this answer change when the government is increasingly neofascist? How about when children meet the arbitrary age the government has decided is ‘okay’ for them to engage with social media, and they have had absolutely no preparation for this hyper-online world? Certainly young people are not being educated about the role and place of social media, the internet, and technology’s role in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, increasingly this is deliberately mystified by the back-to-basics bullshit peddled by the ALP and LNP. We have gone from a Millennial generation of “digital natives” (an assertion so thin it barely existed in the first place) to a Gen Z who could be legitimately convinced that the internet is run by wizards.

A surefire way to ensure the population is incapable of analytical thinking, critical analysis, and transformative thinking is to focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of everything else. Do people actually believe our primary and secondary education system is designed to bring “intelligence”? And now that the federal government has direct control over school curriculum, again, and has spent years stripping anything resembling “thinking” from the curriculum, they’re moving on to domination of higher education (again) [3]. Between the states focus on phone bans, and now a federal focus on attempting to block kids form social media, we are seeing two simultaneous backslides in education, privacy, and the agenda of informed and agentive citizenry.

So, this bill heralds the beginning of verified identities online, the end of anonymity (from advertisers in particular), and another wave of young humans who have been deliberately abstracted from the tools and means of production through a third rate education. A great start to the day. But let’s also look briefly at some of the political manoeuvres going on under the hood here.

Malinauskas, one of the most authoritarian right-wing conservative M.P.s ever to grace this state’s grotesque parliament, has had a hard-on for controlling children and young people since he seized office from his, startlingly, more ‘liberal’ predecessor. He has already ideated and/or enacted legislation that requires ISPs and social media to have a duty of care for young people using their services (an enforcement impossibility of magnificent scale), empty attempts to curb deepfakes [4], increased parental control over young people by making them guardians of online accounts, forced more burnt out Autistic people into toxic work environments [5], oh and of course most importantly brought back the “Adelaide 500” (bread and circuses). It will surprise no one, then, that, alongside Albanese interest in making Malinauskas the next P.M. he is drawing on reports and research commissioned, influenced and funded by Malinauskas for this latest federal legislation.

This move comes in the global context of nanny-state crackdowns on encrypted private messaging (of course, politicians are exempted from this, their messages must be private, yours however are public property) and fundamentally technology-breaking legislation from this country [6], age verification laws emerging in the US [7], increasing website blocking in ways that only inconvenience and delay legitimate users [8], and blocking adult websites in, purportedly, “free” nations [9]. Criminals, felons (including, yes, that presidential candidate), and ethically disgusting people are not inhibited by these technologies. Indeed even most average users need spend only a few minutes searching for ways to bypass verification and censorship technology. If it is this easy to bypass, what is really happening? Of course it feeds capitalist rhetorics. Moreover, imagine the scene in schools where a handful of technologically more literate students are able to bypass verification and use social media tools to harass students who aren’t so empowered, this is the reality we are rapidly heading towards. What about when a foreign company refuses to implement age-verification due to technical impossibility? Will all of Australia loose access to the social web like Texas lost access to adult websites?

You and me, dear reader, may be amongst the last who had an opportunity to understand contemporary technology in a real way. As with all technologies which have come before, once the capitalists secure their mode for extracting maximum profit from it, the technology itself must become mystified else risk its use for liberatory ends. In a few weeks I have a journal paper coming out about how LLMs have been deliberately mystified and labelled as “Artificial Intelligence” for what is really a collection of data, relatively simple algorithms, some filters and many hours of human labour. This is an example of this kind of capitalist obfuscation of technology and ideas. They, the 1%, want us to be mystified, confused, and unawares of the power, potential and workings of technology. A tale as old as time, without control of the means of production, the capitalist class is nothing – indeed, they are nothing but a leech, and without control they are unable to -leech-.

If we accept this lens, that capitalism is deliberately stripping anything resembling agency and thinking skills right from birth, we can see why successive global governments are undermining the quality and nature of education, shifting problems and blame to drive division, and inventing solutions to problems which result only in pain for the workers and further accumulation for the capitalists. This age verification move in Australia is another in a long line of terrible decisions from a government more interested in driving capitalist profits than working for the people. It is a nanny state move which takes responsibility away from parents who should be championing the fostering of curious and analytical engagement the world, towards an ever intensified “know nothing; work for crumbs of leisure” system which the government -deeply- knows is what they are perpetuating and obscenely benefiting from.

The ALP, and increasingly Liberal party in coalition – yes the new Labor-Liberal coalition (huh, an LLC), are bringing fascism just as they brought neoliberalism to this country. And the brains behind the operation, if you could even call them that, are capitalist bootlickers to the extreme.

Its a sick society we’re living in, folks. I wonder what hell-trip is next for our exciting instalments.

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/09/social-media-age-limits-to-go-before-parliament-ahead-of-next-election-albanese-says

[2] https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/inauthentic-behavior/

[3] https://www.canberra.edu.au/about-uc/media/media-releases/2024/september/the-honourable-bill-shorten-mp-announced-as-the-next-university-of-canberra-vice-chancellor-and-president

[4] https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/sa-government-to-tackle-deepfakes

[5] https://employcare.com.au/what-does-autism-works-mean-for-people-with-autism-in-sa/ not to mention they are -paying employers- for the ‘inconvenience’ of ‘dealing with’ an Autistic person, could. he. get. more. offensive.

[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46463029 https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-impact/ https://www.csoonline.com/article/2154094/chat-apps-end-to-end-encryption-threatened-by-eu-legislation.html https://www.gbnews.com/tech/signal-encryption-russia-venezuela-whatsapp-ban

[7] https://www.theverge.com/23721306/online-age-verification-privacy-laws-child-safety

[8] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/

[9] https://www.newsweek.com/porn-access-blocked-million-americans-1856686

Dear friends,

Today I ingested some media – what a gross way to say it – about the role and nature of the differential, challenged, and surmountable problems of COVID-19 management, from the early days. Here’s a topic I never thought I’d spend serious time with in an analytical sense, but why not, here we are, and this is basically a variety show. My political spidey sense started tingling, however, the minute that the public health response was rendered as inseparable from perceptions of (government) mandates and the rampant politicisation of a still deadly virus and disease. No, I won’t share what exactly I was engaged with, but you can safely assume that it was a U.S. targeted piece of media.

To be honest, and this will give you a clue to the inner workings of my brain – who knew we’d be getting intimate, I also “ingested”, if I must, several videos about trains, in particular how South Australia in what could only be considered as a massively anti-working class move removed metro and regional rail lines in favour of highways – but that’s a topic for another day. Okay, digression, let’s get back to politicisation, because that’s the overarching theme of our project here – class, race, gender, and their interstices with the exploitative economic model which grips and terrorises the world.

To set the context, which unless you were born in 2024 you’re likely partially familiar with, we know that “public health” both as an area of practice and an academic discipline, was thrown sharply into “public” view in very late 2019 and exponentially so through 2020. Importantly, public health never goes away, like medicine, public health deals with the health of people (and sometimes non-human animals) often in a more “administrative” (though this is painting public health in a very limited light) sense than medicine itself (i.e., as compared to primary and allied healthcare). In this way, public health can be encompass anything from a ‘health response’, preventative measure, educative strategy, policy creator and enforcer, analyser of broader health landscapes, modeller of impact of health on other parts of our lives, and so on. One of the primary activities of, for example, public health officers is the design, research, development and evaluation of health promotion strategies – literally campaigns to educate the “public” about “health”.

Okay, ground rules established. People who work in public health, then, range from sociologists and epidemiologists through to educators and services and wellness coordinators. There are also, in most European colonised countries at least, government bodies, members of government, cabinet and ministry, and legislators who are also “public health people” though, with any role involving politics, are less likely to respond to bona fide -health- and more likely to trend towards capital-imbued populism; not to mention lack any background in the discipline or its history. So – as I’m going about my day listening to podcasts – when someone says:

“I don’t think anyone will ever trust a public health response again”

I, naturally, feel a little prickly – and, like our spider-bitten friend, begin to burst out in a rash, fever and vomiting, wait … no, hang on.

Hopefully, dear reader, we can agree that the response to COVID-19 was weak at best. This is not because public health advice was incorrect, modelling was inaccurate, healthcare workers didn’t try, or any other trumpian nonsense. Rather, the COVID-19 response was weak because of the political apparatus both in terms of hegemonic enforcement (vis. media) and actual measures taken to prevent spread of the virus (vis. a public health response) were manipulated by politicians to seem palatable… to the capitalist class.

In the U.S. context a great deal of these measures were further watered down because of the political administration at the time, and the general denial and skepticism which ensures that moronic politicians find their way to power. However, in the final analysis, we cannot demarcate this as a U.S. specific occurrence. Rather, it is “always on display” in the overclocked context of highly emotive political drama which is essentialised in the republican vs democrat politics of that country. Indeed, this theatre provides us an important window to see, again, the anti-worker nature of capitalism and the ways in which political society serve as a meagre and momentary distraction in a constant race to the bottom. Irrespective of the purported political alignment of a ruling party in the anglosphere, the commitment to capitalism and capital come above all else.

If you cast your mind back to what we have collectively deemed a dark time in our history, you’ll recall after the first wave of lockdowns, a rapid “realisation” – particularly perpetuated by the media to which everyone was glued at the time – that “essential” services would need to operate to ensure human health. While, arguably, this is correct in that humans require food, water, and so on, it was also dually driven by the indissoluble connection between decision makers and capitalism. It wasn’t long before shops reopened and lockdowns “ended”. Frequently in spite of public health advice. And, importantly, out the window went lockdowns, social distancing, and other disease prevention measures as soon as the capitalist class had secured vaccinations and, on their sociopathic priority list, shot up the need to ensure micromanagement, slave labour, and most importantly, a better-lined pocket [1]. An embodiment of: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”, - sent via Twitter from inside my fortress bunker stocked with hundreds of COVID-19 vaccines and enough supplies and wealth for a nation.

But to fully trace the connection of capital, disease, and public health across global political movements we should also look at two other key features (briefly, my brain is tired): corporate greed generally (see also price gouging) and specific exploitation of health emergencies for their own benefit. This included multiple attempts to improve corporate public image (not naming anyone, Pfizer) or influence policy decisions in their favour (not looking at you, Woolworths) at the expense of public health interest – or, let me say that clearly for those in the back – at the -expense of human life-. Because above all else, capitalism is a murderous, treacherous, and deeply inequitable system of economic organisation [2]. We also need to consider how the “periphery”, or rather working-class elsewhere as a whole, i.e., we need to be cognisant of how globally work, health, and life intersect to continually and deeply disadvantage workers and intersectionally marginalised folks [3]. I could also spend time here considering the role of pharmaceutical industry, how drugs for a very wide range of very preventable diseases are ludicrously unattainable in majority countries around the globe [4] but, again, topic for another day.

Indeed, if we analyse political behaviour during and what some now call “post” pandemic, the fundamental rule has been: maintain economic stability. The human, animal, and environmental cost of this is something we feel in all quarters. And stability is, obviously, an oxymoron -for the working class-, whose existence is multiply exploited at the convenience of the capitalist and politician to ensure obscene growth of the mostly male billionaire class [5] and their unhinged rants about returning to the office, eating less avocado toast, and just getting over the sniffles (that may well have killed multiple people in your family).

So, sufficiently argued, or at the very least researched on pubmed, it seems that the public health humans are largely on my anti-capitalist bandwagon. Except, just like academia, public health is largely an organ of traditional intellectualism. The enforcement of which continually demands reintegration into extroverted and robust capitalist espousals in order to remain in the “intellectual” strata. Here, in spite of supposed “free speech”, “boundless progress” and “human capital” we can once again place capitalism into the antagonist role in our screenplay. The public health response to COVID-19 was, yes, sloppy, often weak, and changed frequently – but so do our understandings of science, medicine, health practices, and social life. This does not make it “less scientific”, or less meaningful or important to ensuring human life.

Moreover, because of climate change, we are now seeing such a new prevalence of disease, environmental instability, and rampant exploitation that the empty argument of “capitalism brought human progress” authentically rings hollow for many more than it used to, specifically amidst the European colonial diaspora qua globalised working class. The facile “for balance ensure to note that capitalism has created all human progress” rhetoric of the 1930s has even infected most of the LLMs now, which renders them dead to me – and useless for any liberatory project. Them alongside ‘innovators’ and other capitalist sycophants, there never ceases to be a fresh supply of boot-lickers. Golly what a world when your AI synthesised top box search results are straight up propaganda, too. It’s no wonder working people actually believe capitalism is their saviour.

We are now living in a world where the media has successfully poisoned the majority of humans against safe responses to health events, and capitalism has once again won out against humanity, ethics, and life. While podcasters certainly should not amplify this scepticism it is not overly surprising that they do so [6].

The public health worker of the future has an unenviable job of knowing just how bad things are, but must, now more than ever before, languish in a de-professionalised, undermined and fundamentally gutted infrastructure because, for a brief moment, it was deemed anti-capital. Though, speaking to my public health university students, I think this has always been well-known, except by those vanguards of capital from inside those organisations through which the propaganda flows. Sick fuckers that they are justifying loss of human life for capital’s continual expansion.

A rambling post for a rambling afternoon.

Your comrade,

Aidan.

[1] i.e., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543589/ c.f. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7765415/

[2] i.e., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9765138/

[3] one illustration https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41285-022-00179-3

[4] https://socialistrevolution.org/pandemics-profiteering-and-big-pharma-how-capitalism-plagues-public-health/

[5] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity

[6] If you’re really still wondering, no, I absolutely do not engage with right-wing commentary in audio form, this was from a soft-left social commentary podcast, and no I still won’t name it.