mind reader

Dear friends,

Healthcare in South Australia is deeply broken. This has lasted through successive governments, and is only getting worse. Commentary from those involved in service delivery, from administrative officers through medical staff, are in a mixed state of frustration and despair, or a dwindling placebo state of euphoric optimism. But there are deep mechanisms driving the divestment from healthcare across the board, and these are supported in a bipartisan fashion by the ALP and LNP both at a state and federal level. A brief detour through the immediate past premiership is required to understand the context of the situation in South Australia, which mirrors, as often the case, a microcosm of the attitude towards health and human services at a national and, frankly, international level.

From as early as 2019 there have been obvious and systemic issues in South Australia’s public health system specifically relating to ambulance ramping. Ramping, i.e. when an ambulance sits on the ED ramp instead of offloading a patient to a bed or care, is not a new or uncommon issue in health systems, and persistent ramping is likely indicative of a deeper issue, and – you guessed it – most likely a funding issue. Here is the crux of the situation, either a conservative government lacks interest or appropriate pressure to invest in a health system, or they are fundamentally opposed to providing care for public patients. In South Australia the latter is almost certainly the case. Indeed, the South Australian LNP came under fire for their handling of ramping [1], such that the ALP practically won the last election on campaign promises to fix the health system and ramping crisis.

Unsurprisingly, the right-wing ALP in South Australia has made practically (read: literally) no progress in solving this, not following up on campaign promises, and continually shifting money around between health services to, purportedly, “address these issues” [2]. Moreover, in a propagandist’s wet dream, the ALP’s state health minister plastered over election promises to “fix ramping” with layers of gaslighting so deep that a single flame would’ve engulfed the entire state in a fireball [3]. The lived reality of emergency wait times of over 10 hours is such a horror that even after personally experiencing it, it still beggars belief that this is our reality. The state is one minor health crisis away from total collapse – and not just collapse of the health system, but the economic ‘power’ (i.e., labour power) utterly failing. In our Marxian tradition, this could be considered a threat to capitalism’s longevity. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, it isn’t. Typically in a para-socialised healthcare state, more attention would be needed to ensure a healthy workforce. However, we can see a deep and looming contradiction emerge here worthy of our analysis today. That is, the marriage fascism and capitalism and an abandonment of existing capitalists for viral success – but first let’s take a few steps back in time.

Let’s imagine, for example, that a pandemic were to erupt in Adelaide – Tandanya, in early 2020 that in full effect crippled the working capacity of those infected. Each person who contracts the pandemic infects one to five others, and the incubation is around a week. The long-term effects of this pandemic include cognitive inhibition and respiratory issues which last over six months, and while not routinely fatal to younger and healthier people, the condition causes rapid rises in morbidity amongst those with a “co-morbidity”. The only way to attain relief from the symptoms of this pandemic is a course of anti-virals – but these are scarcely available. While vaccines are under rapid development, most of the population refuse to participate in trials, and progress of vaccination is slow – requiring multiple “shots”. Our emergency services, particularly first responders, are overwhelmed and due to a lack of nurses and doctors who are able to treat the pandemic due to cross-contamination concerns very quickly become a major problem. Pre-2019 this might have seemed like a lunatics’ brainchild – obviously today we know it is reality. Now, with the increasing emergence of antibiotic resistant disease, the proliferation of anti-vax media, and due to factory farming and other inhumane animal agriculture conditions this is much more of a reality.

In this world we are rapidly collectively forgetting that there were substantial disruptions to major chunks of workforce, not to mention hundreds of thousands of deaths. With the current social conditions, constant political undermining of health promotion strategies, and underfunding of our public health system, this became a crisis of -capital- incredibly rapidly and while, then, was mitigated through incredible collective public health responses. Imagine a new pandemic now? How much mitigation would be enacted today? What about with a second Trump presidency?

This is a reality. It has been our shared reality for almost four years. Governments, political figures, pop culture icons, and so on have systemically undermined public health responses to serious diseases to the point that downplaying the serious nature of underfunding of medical systems the world over is the least of our collective concerns. So, why in allegedly capitalist nations is this not perceived as more of a problem for “line must go up” capitalism? Ultimately, the false machinery of capital is now so robust it does not truly require a human workforce – such is the layering of abstraction. To understand this further there are multiple parts to the answer, but it’s worth tackling two important features – first, that investment in healthcare is not sexy, second, that the capitalist class, particularly in Australia, is so disinterested in the future, or even futurism, that they earnestly believe that while there may be short term suffering, there will be long-term gain enough for them to comfortably die in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Quite literally they happily sit in: “some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make” [4]. So, let’s dive a little deeper.

Around the world birthrate has become an increasing obsession of governments, capitalists, and data scientists alike. Inextricably connected to the metastasisation of capitalism as the global mode of production (brought by force of brutal colonial extractivism), infinite growth demands breeding above replacement for exploitation to be a continued success [5]. At this point in human history, degrowth movements are simultaneously viewed as “radical and reckless” and “impossible” – quite literally advocates for stabilising, or reducing the population are shunned either because capitalist propaganda grips the majority, or because turning back from endless growth would demand radical changes in lifestyle that people are not willing to endure [6]. Quite literally for capitalism to survive – just like a cancer – it must continue to have a supply of people – healthy cells – to attack and control. The host must survive for capitalism to survive – it is, after all, an ideology, and there’s no ideology on a dead planet.

Here, we can see a major issue for investment in healthcare – beside the near complete disinterest of capitalists in your welfare – we either: (1) need massive investment in preventative healthcare systems for the younger and typically healthier portion of society, (2) need huge influxes of migrants to continue growing the economy and dually to support an aging “native” population [7], or (3) radical investment in aged and end of life care to support aging populations where younger people simply do not exist to support the elderly and dying. The latter of these is an extremely difficult situation, but is, at least in affluent nations who have benefited from decades of expropriation, the most likely to be the reality. This will require cannibalisation of young to support the old – fitting with contemporary narratives about boomers as the last generation of successful exploiters, and incredibly congruent with the militant individualist politics of the neoliberal capitalist world.

Why invest in any form of healthcare when you are paid exorbitant salaries as politicians, representatives, business owners, CEOs, and so on? These “leaders” have extracted the labour value of countless others and set themselves up for a safe, healthy and comfortable lifestyle. Moreover, such a robustly anti-human system capitalism has created, that fluctuations in workforce due to health issues are hardly an issue. Even when they are, capitalists are so bloated with stolen value that a sustained drain on their empires could take decades to be felt. What does it matter if the rest of the state, country or world is on fire for these people? Even when their own children will suffer the affects of climate change, they will, by and large, be long gone. This contradiction shows an interesting paradox in capital by the capitalists themselves.

Capitalism requires human hosts. Like a virus, it transmutes our ontology, but it does this differentially. Those who “lead” capitalism (1%), the concrete form of this is arguably long absent in modern times, have inherently accepted expropriation and exploitation as “natural” and required for their way of life. They simply don’t care about your health or welfare. In addition, a large part of of the capitalist project requires propaganda – marketing to convince you to betray your own interests. In this sense, your manager is not a capitalist, they are a class traitor and propagandist for the capitalist. The 99%, then, require either (the threat of) violent means of enforcement or, better for the capitalist, complicity in their own oppression. The latter is about breeding class-treachery (believing you could be a 1%-er), and is what enables your manager to be a sociopath, bootlicker, and guard-dog of capitalist “production”, having the behaviour accepted by those “above”.

In contemporary capitalism, the capitalist class are less interested in ensuring the longevity of capitalism as ideology, as the survival of capital “so far” has created, for them, great wealth, comfort and opportunity. They aren’t interested enough in maintaining capitalism that they relinquish (even some of) their privilege. In 2024, after years of populism the world over, we have seen clear demonstrations of this lack of interest in reproduction of capital, and lack of interest in ensuring human survival. Quite literally the capitalist class is non-human. Either masking this through vagaries of promises that technology will solve the problem of carbon emissions and aging workforces, or a more grounded “I’ll be fine, personally” rhetoric. Neither particularly matters, they just don’t care about you.

So, investment in health care? Why? Your taxes pay your politicians’ retirement schemes – in Australia the only retirement plan that continues to pay a salary after retirement. Invest in aged care? Maybe, if it is personally beneficial to the capitalist and class-treacherous political class. But even this is a stretch. Moreover, with the success of right-wing propaganda post-COVID-19, investment in healthcare is such a low priority that until it happens to -you- most people are not cognisant of the massive powder keg waiting to be lit. But, if you’re a capitalist, you’ll be fine anyway. After all, the traditional intellectual class (i.e., doctors) is amidst the most class-treacherous of all, willing to serve the capitalist to the death in the hope that their own life may be spared. Yikes.

We face a bleak future – and the implications of just how ravaged our planet, people, and culture are by capitalism rests only just below the surface. If you, like me, feel that we are facing a global surge of fascism as a response to this, let alone surging brutal right-wing populism, ecological collapse, belligerent class-traitors, deep unequal systemic oppression, and a litany of other social issues, then we need to collectively look at every single instance of capital’s contradictions and challenge them. The solution isn’t fascism, it is a configuration of socialism – and this requires intelligent activist -praxis-. By highlighting the intersection of capital and, for example, health service provision, we can start to see how fundamentally anti-human (anti-ecology, anti- anything) the values required to sustain capitalism are. From here, maybe, we can start to see new ways emerging – such as mutual aid, community development, self-determination and so on.

A better future feels years away, and the fascist turn is already upon us. Every time someone with privilege decrees it is “too hard” to change and goes back to their station rather than persevering for a socially transformative way forward we slide further into complacency and subservience to capitalism. A capitalism that has long betrayed humanity, ecology, economy, and happiness. Now, so desperate is capital to persevere that it will gladly marry fascism and jump to a whole new class of capitalists to ensure its cancerous future amongst an even stupider and more oppressed proletariat. But don’t worry, the existing capitalists will still be wealthy enough not to care.

That’s not a future I want, and I’d wager it’s not the one you want either. So, let’s keep bridging theory and practice – and creating a better way forward, together.

In sadness and solidarity,

Aidan.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/adelaide-breakfast/steven-marshall/13338676

[2] https://www.indaily.com.au/news/2023/12/06/sa-hits-new-ambulance-ramping-record

[3] https://www.indaily.com.au/opinion/2023/03/24/labor-does-a-burnout-on-its-ramping-promise

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiKuxfcSrEU

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7834459/; https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2022_wpp_key-messages.pdf

[6] not to mention a requisite that people come together globally to ensure that resources, capabilities, and collectivism actually leads to success: https://doi.org/10.1108/JES-05-2022-0299

[7] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/policy-issues/migration.html

Dear friends,

We’re living in a strange world of technological “innovation” on the world wide web. After Web 2.0, the utter garbage fire that is Web 3.0 [1], and successive failed attempts to capitalise on “content creation” we have found ourselves in a race to the bottom with tracking, ads, and “dark patterns” [2]. The latter of these, a dark pattern, is an interface design choice that benefits the company at the expense of the user's experience. Not a surprise, but just another layer in the process of seeking to extract value from internet resources.

A fundamental tenet of capitalism is a necessity for the “line to go up” – be this nett profit, stock price, human suffering, it matters not – the reportable metric drives the mode of production in contemporary capital, and the cost to humanity is never more than a brief afterthought. For this one rule to rule them all, “endless profit”, the 99% suffer. This ranges from the minutiae of daily life – small interactions conditioned by a deeper ontic capitalist frame, through to industrial relations, politics and so on. So infectious is the virus of capitalism that even the values of the anglosphere, and much of the rest of the world, are derived from its panoply of distorted anti-nature cancers. But let’s dial it back for a second.

The internet in 2024 is already a surveillance engine. Between global megacorps whose interest is tracking you from brief glimpse of advertisement through to sale and government actors who track online activities to “predict” “crime”, the infrastructure of an open, free internet, hard won from the net’s early days as a military project, are now used in full scale as a tool primarily for surveillance, secondarily for lock-in, and tertiary as a provider of entertainment (or, as Marx might have suggested – opioids). While information from human sources still exists on the internet, and, indeed, the proliferation of access to information has never been richer, there is also mass disinformation, propaganda, and, aforementioned, dark patterns.

Engagement is the name of the game – and engagement demands surveillance and clever tracking of users. Some people argue that they have nothing to hide [3] but as discussed previously, we are living with the biggest growth of fascist overthrow of -democracy- since the 1930s. Alleged democracy free of war with fascism is not even a centenarian, and yet the very nations interested in fighting authoritarianism have become the fascists themselves. A dark turn, and this is mirrored in microcosm across the “productions” of humanity. If we accept that the role of education, media, and hegemony [4] is to assert capitalism as an ontological mode of production (i.e., deeper than just “what we do”, but actually “how we are, how we relate, and who we value”) then the values required under capitalism require some examination.

We’ve talked about profit, we’ve discussed exploitation and expropriation, particularly at the intersections, in the colony and on the “fringe” – so let us assume we have one umbrella value: we make profit for the 1%. The rest falls under this umbrella, and the inevitability of fascist turns under capital become obvious – if profit is the motive, not human sanity (not to mention human happiness), if vainglorious benefit for the 1% is the motive, not the continued survival of our planet and all the ecosystems that make it, we see that capitalism is fundamentally anti-human. Its only interest is the accumulation of profit, this comes at cost, as we have explored elsewhere. So one way in to this, methodologically speaking, is to examine the outputs and products of capitalism to identify the manifestation of these values.

Okay, that was one heck of a digression.

My argument boils down to this: capitalism demands outsized profit at mass expense to human life, the planet, and your flourishing. And if you’re flourishing, then you’re a capitalist, benefiting from someone else’s expropriated labour.

We can see this manifest in the movement from a relatively free and open internet, which valued information sharing, and still harboured dark cesspits of criminal and morally vile behaviour, to a contemporary reality where the good, the former, is replaced with an oligopoly of tech-dictators, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk (though, he is at least undoing himself), Cook, Nadella, and so on. The interest is in tracking, targeting, profiling and personally identifying as much as possible about each user. The content is secondary to this – anything that yields “engagement” and keeps people on the platform drives the line up. This ranges from social media, to computer operating systems.

The user experience of the modern internet is one of being followed. From the mundane search for a dog collar, through to the invasive slightly-too-slow-swipe-away from an IBS treatment advertisment, your internet is coloured by ghosts of previous interests – accidental or otherwise. Some of these tracking patterns we notice, others we don’t. The more nefarious are usually part of the latter. The fingerprinting and tracking of users, even through consumer level privacy protections (VPNs, custom DNS, Tor, and so on), is so sophisticated and constantly evolving that it is impossible to understand the differential scope of the technologies on any given day.

More troubling still is that corporate technology providers are championing these fingerprinting, tracking, and dark pattern approaches to ensure they keep their users. In an almost fiefdom-model of marketplaces [c.f. 5] these companies seek ever more ingenious (evil, but ingenious nonetheless) methods for identifying and following users. We are practically in an era of having a personal tracker following our every move, with more steps each day to ensure deeper and more significant surveillance of our lives. Governments are not far behind, and rogue agencies acting, allegedly, on behalf of nation-states actively participate in the process of furthering surveillance of citizens. After all, what good is an anti-terrorist agency if it can’t track your shopping habits.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to shake tails – to prevent tracking – to get rid of personalised suggestions. It is next to impossible to shake more serious tailing, and you likely wouldn’t know if you were being tailed unless you were a Keanu level Matrix hacker. If you’re looking to escape the tracking – even at the most basic level – then you are amongst a very small minority, and fortunately, for most of the benign tracking methods installing a few Firefox extensions is all you need. I’ve been using a combination of container tabs and cookie auto delete for many moons now, and on my “personal computer” the number of dog collar adverts I see has significantly reduced. Though I’m still not sure why Instagram thinks I have IBS, take the hint Instagram?

Unfortunately the answer is not to install a few extensions and hope for the best. As mentioned these tracking technologies are increasingly complex and ingenious, and complacency because you installed a cookie-blocker is not a go. Moreover, if more people start protecting themselves, more effort is put into persistent tracking beyond cookies. We need a fairer, better way of sharing knowledge and content – of trading and building “economies” and a -collective- way to create a better way together. Being aware is a good step, protecting yourself as much as possible is a great start, but we need a systemic change before we fall off the cliff into the ocean of 1984 – and we’re already teetering.

Food for thought, I guess. Your comrade,

Aidan.

[1] https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/ftc-study-finds-dark-patterns-used-by-a-majority-of-subscription-apps-and-websites/

[3] https://aidan.cornelius-bell.com/idea/6/

[4] https://aidan.cornelius-bell.com/idea/7/

[5] Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. The Bodley Head.

Dear friends,

Another day in hell. In the last fortnight we have seen: the ALP eject an elected member over their relatively limp anti-genocide stance [1], the rapid increase in cost of education visas [2], the taxation of higher degrees by research [3], and many policy and party platform transformations to reconfigure the once upon a time centrist party as the firmly right wing player.

Where does the fascism start? If we momentarily set aside the deliberately genocidal and narcissistic behaviour of the Australian Government and its ALP rulers, we have just as recently borne witness to the systematic decimation of higher education – in the long run. Education in this country is government controlled. Allegedly public schools and universities are run for the public interest. In reality this has always been the hegemony’s interest. While higher education, in particular, has been seen as a relative bastion of liberal thought, over the past 30 years in Australia, there has been an acceleration towards corporatised, privatised, and conservative thought and decision making.

Importantly, the “liberal thought” of higher education in Australia has always been a centrist, socially and economically conservative, and static status quo. This enabled higher education institutions to avoid neoliberalism longer than other institutions, not because they were special, but because in this country they were already functioning under managerialist, cost-saving, and conservative models. This was brought by the ALP in decades past, unlike how neoliberalism arrived in the rest of the world [4]. The intensification of crack-downs on research funding for the arts, humanities, social sciences, and, frankly, anything the conservative Minister for Education doesn’t like was a hallmark of the Liberal-National coalition. While this intervention was allegedly reversed relatively early in the ALP’s most recent term in government, these two most recent developments only show a re-commitment to the rapid deskilling of the working class due to ripple affects.

As recently as last week the NTEU, the union for higher education, and CAPA, the peak body for postgraduate students, called for raising the wage of research students to the minimum wage. Currently, Australian postgraduate research students are paid approximately $30,000 per year – tax free. This approximately $14 per hour wage is supposed to enable transformative science, radical thought, new frontiers in social transformation, and to up-skill workers for the next generation of higher education - as well as covering the cost of living. Instead, the government has decided to tax this stipend, in addition to preventing more than 7.5 hours of work per week (or 30% of the stipend, whichever comes first).

Australian higher education has long been wholly dependent on international students to sustain itself. Importantly, while this is financially irresponsible, this is the status quo in higher education. For domestic students to be educated, the university sector requires international student enrolments, this is because of the exorbitant fees. In another regressive decision from the past week, the ALP has also announced the almost doubling of the international study visa cost. This deters international students from Australian institutions, and even those who are currently enrolled may reconsider returning for study in 2025.

Atop funding cuts, massive indexation on study debt for domestic students, previous policy which continues to influence study flows towards “professions”, and other tax disincentives for institutions, donors, and so on, the financial situation of most universities is now dire. After a massive downturn during COVID-19 lockdowns, the sector has been incredibly slow to recover. With these latest developments amounting to punching down by government on higher education and students simultaneously.

Okay – this brings us to fascism.

There has been a clear repositioning of the ALP from the so called centre-left party, connected integrally to unions, to occupying the centre-right, and now the right – and, as illustrated above, completely disconnected from the worker. We have seen the Liberal-National Coalition progress further to the extreme right, and their ‘retreat’ or continued loss of popularity with the majority populous. Now, drawing on their tactics, the ALP seeks to reposition itself as the party for the capitalists – millenials, boomers, never mind, this is distinctively class warfare. From a prime minister with a massive housing portfolio, who could expect pro-renter housing policy? From a foreign minister with an ongoing relationship with Israel, who could expect anti-genocidal policy? The bourgeois hegemony of the ALP now rivals the Howard era in contemptibility.

Recent propaganda from the ALP’s MPs and candidates indicates copying the LNP’s homework directly. Investment in churches, increased funding in private schools, reducing tax (for the 1%), individualist claims in individualist times. Inwardly, past the propaganda, is a continued and deeply economically conservative party whose financial interests lie with property developers, investors, corporate CEOs, and other plutocrats. Socially, the ALP stands on the side of genocide, so I do not believe I need to say more about their positionality.

With this divestment from even a ‘liberal’ centrist educational system, which I will at this juncture point out continues in its hegemonic control by the government from preschool through graduate education, we are now seeing the ALP stamp their mark as the anti-intellectual part of the country. A populist movement not seen in left-wing (populist) politics in the anglosphere. Indeed, the right gut and disfigure education the world over, and when it talks like a duck, acts like a duck, and makes regressive policy decisions like a duck, it’s probably a duck – sorry, fascist. With higher education being on the chopping block it is a matter of time before the future of this country becomes increasingly narrow and devastatingly less class-conscious. The latter was already fading away beyond belief, particularly given the dire state of a corrupt, narcissistic, profiteering, yet underfunded and radically unequal, higher education system. The future does not look bright.

We need an education system that fosters class consciousness. We need a curriculum, from preschool to higher education, that enables positive social transformation. We need more equality, acceptance, and communal spirit to push back the ravages of unchecked neoliberal capitalism. Instead, we are seeing an increasingly desperate focus by governments and political figures on the de-skilling and anti-intellectualising of the populous and constant undermining of those in vague positions to be able to create a better future together. Such is the rise of global fascism.

We can but hope for a French-style left-jerk in the next election, but the Murdoch press are so hellbent on authoritarianism that they still back the LNP in the face of a “nuclear overlord”. The Greens as the last remaining centre-left party in Australia are in dire straits. The rhetoric that the Greens are the ‘radical left’ is so ingrained in the populous by the ALP, LNP, and Murdoch monopoly, that the average citizen still thinks the ALP represents a centrist position. This is patently untrue – fascism is here, and it wears red (again).

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/06/fatima-payman-quits-labor-party-palestine-voters-base

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/07/international-student-cap-visa-fees-increase-albanese-government

[3] https://www.campusreview.com.au/2024/07/taxing-part-time-postgrad-study-strange-punitive-measure/

[4] Humphrys, E. (2019). How Labour built neoliberalism: Australia’s accord, the labour movement and the neoliberal project. Brill.