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Sotiris Mitralexis | The Press Project

Instead of being a time of unity and solidarity, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a time of disunity, a time for deepening Greece’s divisions after a decade of crisis — on a spectrum ranging from politics to religion, and more importantly on the public discourse on religion. The present article offers a perspective on recent developments — by (a) looking into how the Greek government weaponized science in the public square, by (b) examining the stance of the Orthodox Church of Greece, by (c) indicatively surveying ‘COVID-19 and religion’ developments that would not be covered by the latter, and last but not least by (d) discussing the discrepancy between these two areas of inquiry in an attempt to explain it.

Weaponizing Science: ‘Respectable citizens’ versus ‘the Sprayed Ones’

Discussing the pandemic and religion in Greece necessarily passes through the country’s conceptualisation of ‘science and religion’ — and, arguably, the commencement of this fierce public debate in February 2020, even before either the institutional Orthodox Church of Greece or the religious ‘facts on the ground’ could provide any indication on how the ‘Church and COVID-19’ saga would unfold in practice, acts as an indication for how this conceptualisation preceded actual events. However, before embarking on an examination of the role of religion in this story, it is important to set the conceptual stage as far as science is concerned. It would be anything but controversial to note that, across a number of countries, European and otherwise, the tendency of governments to legitimise emergency measures by reassuring the public that they are ‘simply following the science’ effected a certain confluence of politics and science, much to the detriment of science’s authority as an essentially apolitical practice of strictly following the scientific method. However, Greece’s case was a rather extreme one (in tandem with the extremity of its particular COVID-19 measures in an EU context, at least as measured by the COVID-19 Government Response Tracker by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government); not only did the government feel the need to justify its every action or omission as having been dictated by ‘the scientists’ —something that the very medical scientists sitting at the governmental expert’s panel have at times publicly refuted—, but every political disagreement with particular governmental measures were touted as a fruit of science-denying conspiracy theories. This science-undermining political strategy negated the very possibility of scientific counter-proposals to the handling of the crisis, since these had to be conspiracy theories (of which, of course, Greece also had ample quantities), or else an apolitically scientific government would have taken them into account: for example, Stanford University’s Professor John P. A. Ioannidis (who was at some point professor and department chair at the University of Ioannina, Greece, and thus has an audience in the country) was explicitly named an ‘enemy of the people’ and a ‘conspiracy theorist’ (ψεκασμένος=sprayed one) by government-friendly media.

As it happens, Greece has a peculiar vocabulary for ‘conspiracy theorists’, one more akin to ‘tin foil hat enthusiasts’. Following an international trend (with the proper temporal delay for the arrival of trends in Greece), discussions on ‘chemtrails’ —αεροψεκασμοί— made their appearance in the farthest fringes of Greek public discourse in the early 2000s; the über-minuscule number of people actually claiming that chemicals are being used on the population via condensation trails, i.e. that ‘they’ [it’s always an impersonal ‘they’] ‘are spraying us’ via chemtrails, «μας ψεκάζουνε», were henceforth pejoratively named ‘the sprayed ones’, «ψεκασμένοι», or «ψέκες» more recently, in abbreviated form. (Interestingly, the ‘chemtrails’ conspiracy theories entered parliamentary debates: a Parliamentary Question to cabinet ministers on ‘mysterious chemtrails’ was submitted by an MP in November 2010. That MP, Makis Voridis, is today the Minister of the Interior in Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ government, occupying one of the top cabinet positions).Ψεκασμένοι, ‘the sprayed ones’ is a much more frequently used phrase than συνωμοσιολόγοι, ‘conspiracy theorists’ in Greece, as a Google search would readily indicate.

The issue here is that this terminology (again, the equivalent of ‘tin foil hats’ or ‘believers in reptilians’) has been officially used by the Greek government against the Greek people, or at least ‘some’ of them — rather than against a minuscule minority of actual believers in the most far-fetched conspiracy theories imaginable. None other than Greece’s Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, used the word on 31 October 2020, in one of his ever-more frequent TV ‘addresses to the nation’, lambasting the ‘few sprayed ones’ who criticise ‘scientists’: ‘let us leave the scientists out of any controversy whatsoever … legitimate political criticism is to be limited to politicians’.

The flagrant irony here, of course, is that the Greek government’s version of ‘trusting the Science’ acted as precisely one of the main agents of undermining science’s credibility in Greece’s public sphere at large. I am not referring here to the question of internal coherence in exclaiming that any government follows ‘the Science’ in the singular, with a capital S and in a purportedly apolitical way (or to the political reactions that such a claim of apolitical governance would engender ipso facto): after all, were there to be a singular Science which would be apolitically followed to the letter by responsible governments, then no variations in the handling of the crisis whatsoever would be encountered among the ‘responsible countries’, something which is countered by as simple observations of reality as the COVID-19 Government Response Tracker by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, which points to Greece as one of the strictest EU countries as far as governmental COVID-19 measures are concerned. Rather than that, I am referring —purely indicatively, and among an archipelago of examples— to the Tsiodras-Lytras study scandal. On 1 December 2021, Greece’s PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis claimed, from the Hellenic Parliament’s podium, that the existence or inexistence of an adequate number of Intensive Care Units does not make any difference whatsoever to the survival prospects of intubated COVID-19 patients in need of admission to an ICU; Just a spare bed and an intubation would perfectly suffice. ‘We have no indication whatsoever to that effect. I don’t have any indication whatsoever! Should the Opposition have any proofs to the contrary, we’re looking forward to receiving them’. However, as the Greek people would haplessly come to know post eventum, the office of the Greek prime minister had been notified in advance of his parliamentary address of a then forthcoming study by Professors S. Tsiodras and Th. Lytras —Prof. Sotiris Tsiodras being the equivalent Greece’s Anthony Fauci, and for all intents and purposes the government-picked ‘face’ of Greece’s management of the COVID-19 crisis for 2020 and a sizable portion of 2021—, published on 13 December 2021 in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, which provided proof of precisely the opposite claim to the one defended by Greece’s prime minister on the parliament’s podium. A prosecutor’s investigation has been ordered on the scandal. The political —and, indirectly, governmental— backlash on the two scientists, ‘Greece’s Fauci’ Prof. Tsiodras and Prof. Lytras, for undermining the PM’s claims has been too grim to describe; let it suffice to quote a 2 January 2022 twitter comment by Prof. Lytras apropos of both the published paper and the hype surrounding the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’: ‘I’m grateful we tried… #DontLookUp #μελετη_τσιοδρα’.

Other examples include official statements, on 31 March 2020, that face masks are not only unnecessary, but potentially dangerous as well; later, this was turned into mandatory masks in all indoors and outdoors spaces under penalty of a EUR 300 fine. Disagreeing with the former statement was criticised by government-friendly media as ‘unscientific’ in April 2020; disagreeing with the latter is criticized as ‘unscientific’ ever since. That this enforced confluence, to the point of identification, of governmental decisions and a purported singular, never-changing Science acts to the detriment of popular confidence in the scientific method should need no further explanation. Indeed, it has been pointed out by Greece’s independent media platform The Press Project that this usurpation of the voice of a singular Science by a government in a bipartisan political stage, with every criticism being labelled as the shrieks of the conspiracy-theorising ‘sprayed ones’, points to the ‘discourse on the sprayed ones as the hegemonic discourse of power’ that, in practice, undermines the authority of the scientific method in the name of the political game.

This context acts as a crucial backdrop in understanding the nuances of the ‘Church and COVID-19’ as a ‘religion and science’ debate in Greece; how this was played out, and why the situation is indeed more complex than initially imagined. There is no two-dimensional spectrum of ‘accepting’ or ‘rejecting’ scientific evidence; rather than that, there is a two-year-long political weaponization of the authority of science (which, indeed, undermines the authority of the scientific method on a long-term basis), there are the problems, tensions, and polarisations that this engenders, and of course, on the fringes, there’s also a tiny yet merry minority of actual anti-science conspiracy theorists allegedly discovering microchips in COVID-19 vaccines. However, mistaking the latter atomic-particle-sized minority with Greece’s complex debate at large would play into the hand of a rather dangerous game.

Institutional Religion and Religion ‘in the Field’: COVID-19, the Orthodox Church of Greece, and Dissenting Voices

The Greek public square and discourse is perpetually characterised by a tense relationship with the Orthodox Church of Greece. On the one hand, Greece regularly appears in surveys (from the Pew Research Center to Greece’s DiaNEOsis) as having one of the highest EU scores in ‘believing in God’, ‘trusting the Church as an institution’, ‘deeming religion as important’ — while seven out of ten Greeks will readily reject statements such as ‘when science and religion disagree, religion is right’ (p. 77, B10.3). The flip side of this coin is that the Church’s prominence, impact, influence, and power engenders frictions and a certain discontent; for example, there is hardly a time in which demands of a France-style separation of Church and State are not present in Greece’s public discourse (which are not always characterised by a firm grip on facts by either side, as the utterly chaotic 2018/19 debate on proposed Church-State relations reforms so aptly demonstrated). Greeks relish in firmly believing that there is a Greek exceptionalism in Church-State relations, in which every other Western country has a full Church-State separation, in which religion is hermetically banished from the public square, from politics, and from finances, while Greece, woefully, ‘finds herself still in the Middle Ages’ by not having achieved this. The problem, of course, in framing the question in such a way is that it becomes virtually impossible to successfully propose a political solution of a Greek Church-State separation based on European precedents and best practices, as it would ‘never be enough’ if it’s not French laïcité; the practical outcome of this is that nothing ever changes and the status quo is most successfully defended by those that purport to undermine it. And while Greece does not have as tight economic Church-State ties as other EU countries, e.g. the de facto capital of the European Union, Belgium, where the federal government pays the salaries and pensions of a number of religions’ clergy, municipalities pay for the upkeep of churches and provinces pay for larger buildings such as cathedrals, its Church-State relations are indeed close-knit: article 3 of Greece’s constitution describes the Eastern Orthodox Church as ‘the prevailing religion in Greece’, the salaries of a very sizable part of the clergy (~9.500, plus about half a thousand unsalaried clergy) are paid by the state (yet the state offers no other types of direct financial assistance, in contrast, for example, to Germany), the commencement of a new parliamentary cycle after national elections is blessed by the Church in the parliament building, the religion course at school is predominantly Orthodox, etc. And, of course, Greece houses the monastic community of Mount Athos in the peninsula of Chalkidiki, ‘a self-governed part of the Greek State’ of ‘ancient privileged status’ according to article 105 of Greece’s constitution. (It is interesting to note that although this peninsula is inhabited by monks leaving ‘the world’ in order to die after a life of prayer and solitude in Athos’ monasteries and hermitages, the COVID-19 situation in Mount Athos and the health status of monks regularly preoccupies the Greek media cycle during the pandemic, with abbots of Athonite monasteries accusing other monks as not being vaccinated and so on.)

In this chaotic setting, it is important to distinguish between the institutional church’s stance vis-à-vis the pandemic and further anecdotal evidence, duly explaining both. That is, in order for a proper critical assessment of the situation in Greece to be feasible, certain important distinctions need to be made: individual pronouncements and activities of this or that low- or higher-ranking cleric are of course to be taken into account, as anecdotal evidence of facts on the ground, in order for the big picture to emerge. However, in assessing the stance of the Orthodox Church of Greece during the pandemic as an official, institutional body wielding a degree of social power and impact, one has to look at those having the authority to represent it. Who has the authority to represent the Church of Greece as an institutional, official body? The Holy Synod of 80+ bishops as a body and its official resolutions and decisions, the more versatile, 12-member ‘Permanent Holy Synod’, and the Archbishop of Greece, who stricto sensu is not Greece’s primate but merely the chairman of the Synod and who was in line with the Synod’s decisions throughout the pandemic (something which, by the way, was not the case during the 2018/2019 political turmoil on proposed reforms in Church-State relations; there, the Synod and the Archbishop seemed to be of different minds, the former opposing the reform, the latter endorsing it. The Synod won this battle, the Archbishop’s proposal was rejected, and the Archbishop was subsequently called to act as a mere representative of the decision-making body — the Synod). This being the case, the stance of the Orthodox Church of Greece throughout the pandemic is to be located in the texts, decisions, resolutions, announcements and responses of the Holy Synod as a body, as well as of the Permanent Holy Synod and the Archbishop of Athens.

Thus, on the Church and the pandemic in Greece, a brief timeline would be in order here:

*

Schrödinger’s church?

In assessing the situation at large, one would be safe to say that, in spite of occasional bumps in the road, the Orthodox Church of Greece as an institution has been one of the government’s strongest allies in securing an acceptance rate for the government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis and in rolling out the vaccination programme; at the time of writing this, Greece’s fully vaccinated amount to 66,3% of the population, while the EU/EEA average is 68.7%. Many factors contribute to this, perhaps the main one being that, together with its influence on Greek society, Greece’s Orthodox Church is also in a very close relationship with the state apparatus in the context of a Church-State separation that leaves much to be desired; in many primarily indirect rather than institutional ways, it can be seen as part of the state apparatus as things currently stand, a reality which the Greek state relishes in making good use of. Not every government is meant by ‘state apparatus’, of course; the conservative New Democracy, Greece’s governing party, represents the reinstatement of the ancien régime after the failed experiment of SYRIZA’s 2015–2019 ‘government of the left’ following PM Alexis Tsipras’ spectacular U-turn after the 2015 referendum. When the SYRIZA government unsuccessfully attempted to reform Church-State relations in 2018/19 (with what was a very well-thought and coherent plan, but was not recognised as such from either side, partly due to the chaotic state of any slice of the Greek public’s overview of the specifics of Church-State relations), it faced religio-political sanctions from hell by bishops, clergy, and faithful, in spite of the Archbishop’s desire to follow through with the proposed reforms. The simple act of hypothetically imagining the Church’s reaction (particularly under a different Archbishop) to these same 2020/21 COVID-19 health measures, restrictions, and worship bans, were these to have been put forth by the previous SYRIZA government instead of the current ruling party, is a veritable nightmare. However, New Democracy’s PM Mitsotakis has proven that the weaponization of Greece’s media and the weaponization of Greek scientists do not in any way fall short of the weaponization of the Church in the battle against COVID-19.

At the same time, it is often reported that the Orthodox Church in Greece forms an impediment to countering COVID-19 and completing the roll-out of the vaccines. How is this to be explained?

There are several factors at play here. And some of them indeed describe a reality. Other factors do not. To begin with the easy part, sometimes it’s just sloppy reporting: for example, last July Politico ran a piece entitled ‘Science vs. religion as Greek priests lead the anti-vax movement: with COVID-19 cases on the rise, influential clerics are urging people not to get vaccinated’. The piece is first and foremost about priest Vasileios Voloudakis, who is described as ‘prominent’, ‘influential’, having ‘a lot of supporters’; this description of one of Greece’s about 10.000 low-rank clerics, whom I had to google in order to find out that his existence is indeed an established fact (and also to find out an array of rather colourful pronouncements of his on any conceivable topic throughout the years), may seem to be somewhat economical with the truth among those in the know. Furthermore, Metropolitan bishop Seraphim of Kythera is credited as ‘one of the country’s most powerful clerics’, failing to mention that he was one of the two bishops summoned by the Synod to be chastised for disobeying the body’s decision on matters pandemic (the other being Metropolitan bishop of Aetolia and Acarnania Kosmas, who had refused to get vaccinated against the virus and who died of COVID-19 in January 2022). The irony here, of course, is that Kythera is one of the tiniest dioceses in Greece (and nobody really knows why and how it is a jurisdictionally distinct diocese), with nominally 3.000 inhabitants; the country’s most powerful clerics usually have a different background — or audience. But that was the easy part.

On more serious matters, a distinction needs to be made which often eludes the overview of observers. Greece has a minority of various and disparate Old-Calendarist groups or ‘Genuine Orthodox Christians’ (Γ.Ο.Χ. — Γνήσιοι Ορθόδοξοι Χριστιανοί), usually at odds with one another and differing in acronymical ways as far as their official titles are concerned, in a manner often reminding an outsider of the difference between the pythonesque ‘Judea People’s Front’, the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ and the ‘Judean Popular Front’. ‘Old-Calendarist’ does not here entail the mere adherence to the ‘Old’, Julian calendar (as this is either way the case with numerous canonical Orthodox churches: the churches of Russia, Jerusalem, Greece’s Mount Athos monastic communities, etc.), but the separation, rupture and schism from the official Orthodox Church following its early 20th century adoption of the revised Julian calendar, in the context of Greece’s division between royalists and republicans at the time.

While suffering in numbers and impact, Old-Calendarist groups are particularly active in conservative and ultra-conservative public demonstrations in Greece’s streets or over the internet — including, for example, the demonstrations against the Prespes Agreement on North Macedonia in recent years. The vast majority of media articles featuring photos of clergy demonstrating against coronavirus restrictions or against COVID-19 vaccines depict clerics not belonging to the official Orthodox Church of Greece and sporting stereotypically Old-Calendarist-groups attire (such as the one in this article here, among many others); editors are usually unaware of the distinction.

Thus, while the activity of the various Old-Calendarist groups falls very well within the subject of ‘Greece and religion’ or ‘COVID-19 and religion in Greece’ as a religious minority, it would be erroneous to include them in the ‘Greece’s Orthodox Church and the pandemic’ bundle. And this activity is, indeed, excitingly convenient in the context of a particular narrative: who is it that could voice second thoughts to the handling of the pandemic, given that this handling is allegedly apolitical and solely dictated by a singular Science? It cannot be respectable citizens in the context of a democratic process. And while ‘the sprayed ones’ provide a handy starting point for media-managing this, it does not provide an explanation in the way that a proper scapegoat would. However, ‘religious fanatics’ and ‘obscurantists’ trying to take us ‘back into the Middle Ages’ because they ‘deny Science’ due to their ‘faith’ in the context of a ‘perennial battle between Science and Religion’: that would be truly impeccable. Thus, fringe Old-Calendarist fanatics (presented by the media as priests of the Orthodox Church of Greece) do not merely form part of a dissenting crowd; they characterise the crowd and a representative thereof — better still, they are the crowd’s leaders, according to the narrative.

It is in no way the fact, however, that there are no Orthodox Church of Greece clerics (or Greek citizens at large, for that matter) who publicly oppose either coronavirus restrictions and measures or COVID-19 vaccines or both, calling upon their flocks to act accordingly. And the situation in monasteries is by definition a lot more complicated, given the very nature of these establishments as promised places of exit from ‘the (secular) world’, while a certain amount of friction with their local overarching ecclesiastical authorities is often to be observed. Again, however, the reader would be imprudent to draw a distinction between the ‘official Church line’ versus ‘everything/everyone else’ (from individual bishops to monasteries, parishes, grassroots clergy) in which the former supports public health measures and the vaccination programme whereas the latter reject or undermine it.

It is simply impossible to have reliable, quantifiable data on who does/says what on the ground, as far as percentages are concerned. If the present author’s day-to-day observations hold any value as ‘empirical data’, the overwhelming, vast even, majority of Athenian parishes surveyed adhere to the state-designated health measures to a tee, from social distances to face masks and disinfecting agents. However, in a country of about 10.000 active parishes, exceptions of COVID-denying or anti-vaccine priests and flocks cannot but by definition numerous in absolute numbers, most probably in a way proportional to the same tendencies in the general population — even if bishops such as the Metropolitan Bishop of Dodoni go as far as to claim that ‘vaccine-denying and COVID-denying priests should be hanged’, in a somewhat unrestrained bout of enthusiasm live on government-friendly ΣΚΑΪ TV, since ‘by opposing COVID-19 vaccines they exclude themselves from the Church and become minions of Satan’. In any case, however, these exceptions to the rule enforced by the institutional church (sans hanging, hopefully) appear augmented in Greece’s conservative government-friendly media, finding an unexpected ally in voices of the Greek Left often keen to identify an obscurantist ecclesial counter-example to an Enlightened progressivist cause. Not to put too fine a point on it, from September 2021 to the time of writing this I have struggled to single out three or four instances of ΣΚΑΪ TV’s news (usually presented by Sia Kosioni, ΣΚΑΪ TV’s main anchorwoman who —to put this into Greece’s media-political perspective— is also the spouse of the mayor of Athens, who in turn is the nephew of the prime minister, the son of the former minister of foreign affairs Dora Bakoyannis, the grandson of the late prime minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis and the cousin of the prime minister’s Chief of Staff) that would not include a story on ‘anti-vaccine priests spreading outrageous lies’ (3/12/21), on ‘COVID-denying priests in a battle against the vaccines’ (16/9/21), on Metropolitan bishops informing the audience that ‘COVID-denying/anti-vaccine priests are heretics’ (6/11/21), on a ‘priest attacking a schoolmaster for wearing face masks’ (14/09/2021), on ‘priests having been spotted without masks’ and so on. By regularly watching the news, one gets the impression that the country is under an anti-vaccine mass insurgency spearheaded by hundreds of combative science-denying priests in COVID-infected cassocks. By visiting 50 or 100 random Athenian parishes, one gets a very different picture, according to which state-dictated measures are adhered to in the vast majority of cases, exceptions notwithstanding. Thus, perspective is everything: there are anti-vaccine priests in Greece; the question is whether these are more in number than anti-vaccine Greeks, proportionally to the population; an educated guess would highly doubt that. And, as far as exceptions are concerned, their politico-religious dimension might induce a certain hilarity at times: for example, the Metropolitan bishop of Zakynthos wrote a letter to the PM on 4 January 2022 complaining to him that one of the governing party’s parliamentarians, MP Aktypis, is politically courting the very anti-vaccine priests and monks that the bishop is trying to contain…

After all is said and done, however, one has to somehow account for the reality that there are some priests that defy the decisions of the state-friendly Church’s governing body — and even a minority in a population of about 10.000 priests can prove to be quite a substantial number indeed. How is this to be explained, given that the Church of Greece is usually thought to be a tight and strict hierarchical structure with a top-down flow of decisions rather than an anarchist collective in which the governing body’s decisions may not amount to much? The Orthodox Church is not ‘Schrödinger’s cat’: we cannot be content with the explanation that it is at once tightly top-down hierarchical and anything-goes, or to resort to conspiracy theories implying that the Church desires to appear as if it defends the state’s policy vis-à-vis the pandemic while in actuality is intends to undermine it. One might have to look for the answer in this seeming discrepancy by taking into account certain class considerations. The pandemic brought with it a blitzkrieg of radical changes to social life and life in general, as well as a number of vaccines developed in hitherto unforeseen speed, with which the entire population has to be vaccinated — together with the government’s claim that it is simply, and apolitically, following the science, a claim with which reality has not proven to be very kind, as the Tsiodras-Lytras scandal so aptly demonstrated. To think that this violent situation would not engender dissenting voices in the population would be an apolitical folly: we become happily polarised in much less challenging settings, with the halo effect entailing a change in our opinions and perspective even when the issue is whether we find a politically-charged feline aesthetically pleasing. In the case of the pandemic and its class consideration, dissenting citizens from, say, the upper middle class, or higher still, have a voice of their own in the public square in order to articulate their dissent, and require no collective, or communal, way to do so. However, claiming the same for the working class would not be factually correct. It would not be oversimplistic to state that there are only roughly two kinds of institutional communities (apart from political parties) where working-class people throughout Greece, and particularly in Greece’s provinces beyond the all-consuming capital of Athens, may join their voices with the voices of others: the local church, when pious citizens are concerned, and football clubs usually belonging to Greece’s oligarchs, when sports fans are concerned. Football clubs can be political at times, but analysing coronavirus measures and the state of vaccines wasn’t quite their thing; all of Greece’s parliamentary parties support the COVID-19 vaccination programme (perhaps apart from the far-right ‘Greek Solution’, which tries to play it both ways); thus, the only kinds of local communities where the minority of dissenting citizens could bundle up (from sceptics, to groups that suffer financially from COVID-19 restrictions, to proper conspiracy theories) would be those local churches and parishes where a priest would be willing to lead them and to take on the microphone; a minority of priests, in a country with a minority of dissenters, if we are to judge from Greece’s full vaccination percentages being roughly equivalent to the EU/EEA average. To put it otherwise: the only community that’s already there and could, under certain circumstances, give voice to dissenters without it needing to be set up ad hoc (as has been the case with various organisations calling for anti-COVID demonstrations etc.) would be a local church in which there’s a priest of similar opinions. Perhaps this offers some kind of preliminary explanation as to why clerics are indeed visible in the anti-COVID and anti-vaccine crowd in spite of the fact that the official Church of Greece via its governing body so staunchly defends COVID-19 health measures and the vaccination programme: reality is not always as simple and as one-dimensional as we would like it to be.

Sometime in the future, the pandemic will be a thing of the past. Yet the divisions sowed by the handling of the crisis —on top of a decade of financial crisis— will persevere within Greek society. One could argue that, during the pandemic, Greece’s media, Greece’s scientists and Greece’s ‘prevailing religion’, the Orthodox Church, faced the danger of becoming weaponized as servants of political power, or ancillae potestatis, in the name of a common and noble cause: public health. After the pandemic recedes and leaves us with its bitter memories, one way for Greeks to heal the divisions inflicted upon them would be to re-articulate certain realities of foundational importance: the centrality of the freedom of the press, the integrity of the scientific method as a scientific rather than political enterprise in the bipartisan arena, and the liberation of the Church from the claws of the state — as an accurate description of a Greek Church-State separation would have it.

*Sotiris Mitralexis’ article has been published as mέta Working Paper 11 EN 2022 by the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation: https://metacpc.org/en/mwp11/, DOI: 10.55405/mwp11en. An earlier and considerably shorter version was published on 7 February 2022 by Eurozine, titled ‘Insurgent Orthodoxy? COVID-19 and the Greek Church’ (eurozine.com/insurgent-orthodoxy). Dr Sotiris Mitralexis is mέta’s Academic Director. Sotiris is Visiting Professor at IOCS Cambridge, Templeton Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at the University of Winchester. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin, a doctorate in political science and international relations from the University of the Peloponnese, a doctorate in theology/religious studies from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and a degree in classics from the University of Athens. Sotiris has been Seeger Fellow at Princeton University, Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Visiting Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge, Visiting Fellow at the University of Erfurt, Teaching Fellow at the University of Athens and Bogazici University, as well as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Istanbul Sehir University. His publications include the monograph Ever-Moving Repose (Cascade, 2017) and, inter alia, the edited volumes Ludwig Wittgenstein Between Analytic Philosophy and Apophaticism (CSP, 2015), Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher (Cascade, 2017), Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event (James Clarke & Co, 2018), Between Being and Time (Fortress, 2019) and Slavoj Žižek and Christianity (Routledge, 2019), as well as books in Greek.

Paul Tyson

In Australia it is typically seen as morally appropriate for both State and Federal Governments to recommend COVID vaccination population targets, and for citizens, institutions and businesses to ‘do the right thing’ and support such targets. Thus, in the name of Public Safety morality, State and Federal governments offer enticing ‘return to more normal’ incentives to encourage vaccination, and impose serious exclusions on the “vaccine hesitant” until they get the jab. There is an obvious moral logic to this in the context of the global COVID pandemic. However, making vaccination functionally mandatory for some workers who will lose their jobs if they do not get the jab, and some university students who will be unable to go on campus if they are not vaccinated, raises a range of more complex moral issues than the idea of simply ‘doing the right thing.’ Questions about the meaning of consent, and the morality of ‘out-grouping’ arise. This paper explores those questions in the context of what C S Lewis calls “government in the name of science.” Such government is a post-liberal-democratic form of executive, communications and commercial power, which entails serious moral perils. “Public Heath” has become considerably more morally complex than a simple binary opposing good scientific ‘public safety’ to bad ‘anti-vaxxer’ conspiracies. This topic impinges on post-capitalist categories of power as illustrated in the tacit capture of the political process to a technocratic oligarchic synergy between States and Corporations.

It is one thing to provide incentives for inoculations and disincentives for the lack thereof, and quite a different thing to tread the sometimes delicate line between consent and coercion. The usual arguments about the morality of getting vaccinated go along these lines. Out of regard for the wellbeing of my community, and particularly the most physically vulnerable in my community, a moral person will do all they can to not cause harm to others. If my getting vaccinated improves the overall health outcomes of the vulnerable through higher herd resilience to COVID, then vaccination is the right thing to do for the greater good. This ‘right thing’ may curtail my own personal freedoms and may even involve personal risk as regards vaccination side effects, but the moral person will put their own convenience and risks as secondary to the good of the herd and the interests of the vulnerable. Hence those who refuse to get vaccinated show a lack of proper moral responsibility in the choice they make to be unvaccinated.

Whilst I fully agree with the basic idea expressed above that concern for the vulnerable characterises human morality, there is one practical problem and a range of moral problems with the above argument as a justification for the use of ‘carrots and sticks’ (coffee and unemployment) to increase vaccination rates.

The practical problem is that being vaccinated does not necessarily prevent you from getting or transmitting COVID [1]. Vaccination is clearly a means whereby the person vaccinated can reasonably expect to be less vulnerable to serious health risks after they have contracted COVID. Yet due to the constantly evolving nature of the virus, new strains can make targeted vaccinations ineffective as means of preventing initial infection and transmission. A detailed analysis of how much or how little being vaccinated impacts on the infection rates and transmission of different highly contagious COVID strains is outside the scope of this paper. The only point being made here is that it is not an open and shut case that a small minority of unvaccinated people in a population pose an appreciable risk to the resilience of the population as a whole when it comes to simply catching COVID.

The set of moral problems I wish to unpack concern confused moral thinking about coercion and consent.

Consent is always needed for vaccinations

In order to receive a COVID vaccination, one must give consent in writing, or consent must be given on one’s behalf by some-one who is legally responsible for you. That is, COVID vaccinations cannot be mandated as compulsory by our governments or administered to anyone against their will. Imagine the police restraining people so that medics could vaccinate them against their will. This would be an outrage because one’s body is considered one’s own property – not the State’s property – in an inalienable manner. Things that directly concern one’s body are of direct significance to one’s person, and are the final responsibility of that person and of no-one else. Consent, then, is an integral dynamic of vaccination. Government policies that advise and promote vaccination as a public health recommendation cannot side-step consent.

Consent is not a consequentialist moral category

It is important to grasp that consent is not what moral philosophers understand as a consequentialist category. That is, consent is not deemed to be genuine or valid on the basis of a ‘good’ outcome that results from consent. Consent is a deontological moral category that is valid or invalid on the basis of the integrity of the act of consent itself, rather than on what happens as a result of that act. So even if there are different types of consequences for different sorts of consent, it is not the consequences of those consents that make the consent a valid moral act or not, it is the integrity of the act of consent itself that makes it morally valid or not.

Any consequentialist argument about why one should get vaccinated or not can be assessed on consequentialist grounds, but those potential outcomes in themselves have no bearing on the validity or invalidity of any given citizen’s consent. Consent is either free and voluntary, or it is not consent – whatever the outcome.

We do not have an open consequentialist debate about the demographics of vaccination

We do not have an open debating arena in which to argue the consequentialist merits or not of vaccination for different demographic risk groups. This is because government policy is a total population policy, and in the pursuit of that blanket policy the government allows no other stance into the domain of public debate. In consequentialist terms, it arguably makes sense for old and vulnerable Australians to get vaccinated, but not necessarily for younger and fit Australians to get vaccinated.

If one is young and fit, a consequentialist analysis of the personal risks of getting myocarditis from the vaccine compared with the health risks of getting COVID, may reasonably give a professional athlete – like Novak Djokovic – good reason not to get vaccinated. In that context, getting the virus and acquiring natural immunity may well be a more sensible consequentialist analysis of what a good course of action would be. That is, individual consequentialist personal health concerns are also significant (in consequentialist terms) moral issues. I use the word ‘moral’ here because where a health outcome of not dying is what makes a certain action ‘good’, this is a utilitarian framework of moral reasoning where physical health is considered the ‘good’ that is being pursued. Here, both actions (vaccinating the old and vulnerable, and the young and fit refusing to be vaccinated) are moral for the same basic reason. If one wishes to say that sacrificing a comparatively small number of young and fit individual’s health and lives to make it somehow safer for the old and vulnerable, that is no longer a simple consequentialist argument, that is an argument maintaining that the young and fit should choose altruism and self-sacrifice for the sake of the physical health of the old and the unhealthy. But an argument about sacrificial altruism is not a consequentialist argument. It is a deontological stance that argues that some people who (consequentially) do not wish to suffer or die for the herd would be expected to do so regardless of the (utilitarian) bad consequences to themselves.

Moral complexity is not the same as moral confusion

In any real moral context both consequentialist and deontological choices will confront each one of us, but moral clarity is actively reduced if consequentialist considerations are assumed to define deontological acts, or the other way around. Where a degree of moral excellence is achieved – as Aristotle well grasped – this is done without the safety net of only one right answer, as each context is in some manner unique. This is why government policy should be constructed with moral aims in mind by our politicians, but always delivered with moral humility. Authoritarian moral hubris imposed on citizens by political power, requiring totalizing conformity to only one right moral opinion (all moral people will get vaccinated), is an affront to the moral dignity of each individual as regards their inalienable ownership of their own body, and a negation of the proper freedoms of consent and decision-making incumbent upon adult citizens of a liberal democracy.

Consent is incompatible with coercion

To be morally clear, consent in any context is only a genuine consent if it is un-coerced. Coercion can be subtle, and it can be deliberately orchestrated so as to give the person who will give or withhold consent the strong impression that they have no real choice. Gaining a deontological consent via consequentialist incentives and threats is a form of philosophical abuse where an intrinsic freedom is traded off against effectively forced outcomes imposed by those in a position of superior power. Here the powerful in effect ‘buy’ the consent of the relatively powerless, but it is not a free or real consent that they have bought. Where incentives, threats, out-grouping, unemployment, and the political abuse of police power accompany a request for ‘consent’, coercion is present and has tainted the moral integrity of the act of consent.

Consent is incompatible with inequalities in power and knowledge

Consent is an inherently egalitarian category, which applies only between parties that are deemed equal in dignity, maturity and understanding. Relations of proper consent cannot be meaningful when there are imposed inequalities between the vulnerable and the powerful, and where the discourse of valid knowledge is controlled by only one party. A context where free citizens are made coercively vulnerable (threats of job loss etc.) and treated as incapable of discriminating between truth and lies (where authoritative State aligned experts very carefully present only one reasonable interpretation of the truth) is a context where citizens are functionally required to trust the powerful and believe the experts, whatever their own evaluations and judgements may be. Claims that not trusting and not believing, in such a context, are immoral, display the signatures of moralizing coercion. A genuinely un-coerced consent cannot be conducted where there is a structural power and knowledge inequality built into the relationship between the State and the citizen. A genuinely un-coerced consent cannot be achieved if compliance with an unquestionable State-endorsed ‘recommendation’ requiring ‘consent’ is deemed to be ‘good’, and any publicly expressed disagreement with the validity of that ‘recommendation’ is deemed to be ‘bad’ (and can put one at risk of being charged with incitement) and a risk to public health. These sort of moralizing power-and-information inequality dynamics, backed up by heavy policing power, are structurally coercive.

Consent implies the genuine freedom to withhold consent

It is crucial that in any consent context, the free and un-coerced capacity to not consent is genuine. For people who – for whatever reason – do not consent to have a COVID vaccine, their un-coerced freedom not to be vaccinated must be upheld if consent itself is to be considered a genuine reality in this context. If non vaccinated citizens are being: pressured into being vaccinated by the threat of unemployment, public exclusion, and the restriction of movement and association; if the unvaccinated are placed in an inherently unequal power relationship between the State and a citizen, as backed up by the strong exertion of police powers and the deliberate intimidation and even arrest or deportation of perceived or real dissenters to government recommendations; if there is a moralistic and patronizing presumption of maturity and truth on behalf of the government, implying immorality and sub-adult ignorance in those who do not accept government ‘recommendations’ – then all the signatures of coercion and grooming are at play and only very determined people who do not consent will remain un-coerced. But such a context makes a mockery of the very idea of consent.

Can consent be legitimately traded for public safety in an emergency?

The logic of heavy incentives and threats in order to persuade nearly all Australians to be COVID vaccinated is trading meaningful and uncoerced consent for public safety. The idea here is that the free and uncoerced consent of each citizen is less important than public health. There is merit to this stance if it is judged that our governments have a higher responsibility to preserve what Giorgio Agamben calls our “bare life” than to treat us as political beings whose participatory consent is the basis of the authority of the government. But, the question of whether the people want their government to override the free consent of each citizen in response to public health recommendations is nullified under the conditions of extraordinary emergency powers. Declaring those powers determines that consent has been traded for public safety. For short-term extreme conditions of profound danger such a trade-off may well be morally incumbent upon a government, but the normalization of emergency powers and the excessively pre-emptive and civically controlling use of those powers in any extended time frame, does not fit the description of governmental morality.

Let us now move into more subtle terrain; the terrain of nomenclature. Language is a moral context too.

The nomenclature of ‘vaccination hesitancy’ is coercively loaded

The nomenclature of ‘vaccination hesitancy’ as I have heard it used implies that whilst ‘anti-vaxxers’ are a lunatic and immoral fringe who are happy to risk the death of us all for the sake of some supposed individual ‘right’ to adhere to their own irrational fears of government and science, the ‘vaccine hesitant’ can be morally distinguished from anti-vaxxers because they have ‘not yet’ freely chosen to consent to being vaccinated. That is, all reasonable (or potentially reasonable) people who have not been vaccinated, are defined by this nomenclature as in reality undecided. This so-called hesitancy is an obstacle that the government is determined (for its citizen’s safety) to overcome, and the ignorant and morally uncertain will overcome these irrational fears and anti-common-good vacillations by a concerted information campaign of State authorized facts, and by good and wise (State aligned) exhortations from trusted public figures that address the irrational fears, immoral temptations, and scientific ignorance of the ‘vaccine hesitant’. That is, the term ‘vaccination hesitancy’ implies that one cannot have decided not to be vaccinated for good reasons, and that with just a bit more pressure of the right sort, nearly everyone ‘not yet vaccinated’ can be ‘persuaded’ to freely consent to being vaccinated in line with the government’s policy objectives. That is, this is a coercive nomenclature that morally loads vaccination as good, properly informed and responsible, and the choice not to be vaccinated as bad, ignorant and irresponsible; this is not a nomenclature compatible with genuine consent, which includes the dignified and free option for genuine non-consent.

The confusion of a public health policy stance with the One Truth

The nomenclature of ‘vaccination hesitancy’ – where the ‘not yet vaccinated’ are vacillating about doing the right thing – also implies that only One True judgement about rationality, morality and scientific knowledge exists. The One Truth is that everyone who does not have an authorized medical exemption should get vaccinated. Further, current government policy effectively owns, and carefully guards, that One Truth, in the interest of public safety. Further, this One Truth entails that any citizen who disagrees with their government about its public health policies is not entitled to disagree because the government is simply right and any disagreement is a threat to public safety. The government has high-powered supporting specialists who endorse this One Truth, which proves that it is true, even though any high profile person, specialist or otherwise, who does not support this One Truth will be silenced, arrested or put in jail – ask Zoe Buhler and Monica Smit – or deported – ask Novak Djokovic.

There is a highly concerted and very successful attempt by the government to control public discourse on the safety, efficacy and necessity of almost everyone being vaccinated, and no free and open public dissent with that One True stance is permitted. To question the government’s ‘recommendations’ and to in anyway even potentially give succour to the ‘vaccine hesitant’ to not get vaccinated, is considered to be a threat to public health and an act of criminal incitement against the State that is acting to uphold public health under the sweeping emergency powers it has given itself to ensure public safety. Here public safety justifies the complete curtailment of any free and public expression of dissent, and yet somehow, we are still expected to give our free ‘consent’ to the only right option the government will permit.

I myself am double jab vaccinated, but any informed and responsible citizen of a liberal secular democracy should be highly suspicious of the claim from our government/s to embody the sole rational, moral and scientific truth. This is not how the politics of free and responsible citizens, who authorize democratic governments, and whom democratic governments are meant to serve, is meant to work.

Nineteenth century representative liberal democracies were premised on the functional dismissal of the absolute and divine right of kings to rule, and a new theory of political validity was embraced where parliament drew its authority from the will of discursively and decisionally active citizens. There are good reasons why more authoritarian forms of government were replaced with discursive and citizen authorizing forms of government. Reason is complex and, in liberal democracies, openly and rigorously debated. In liberal democracies, morality is organic, divulged to an individual level as much as possible, and admits of plural right options rather than being centralized and imposed by governments. Science is a complex, unfolding, and time-sensitive human knowledge activity, often subject to financial and political capture, and seldom simply ‘right’ for all time. Scientific knowledge and its always complex technological application are the best we can do at the time using various quantification, observation and modelling methodologies. Rapidly developed new technologies will invariably have unknown implications which will only become well understood over time. Science and Technology never has all the answers, and both are always subject to revision on the basis of openly debated interpretation and the free availability of anomalous evidence and further theorizing. Science requires a fearless openness to truth. Science requires constructive disagreement in the search for truth. Science is not promoted by a rigid conformism to a single right doctrine. This is why Soviet science was so hampered when intellectuals were required to only produce knowledge aligned with the moral and political doctrines of the USSR.

In the context of a State mandated One Truth that all citizens are required to consent to, it feels like the State is trying to reassert a divine right to absolute rule over its subjects. This is not the politics of decisionally active, freely dissenting and discursively open liberal democratic politics.

Government by Science

In 1958 the famous writer C.S. Lewis made this comment in The Observer:

“I dread government in the name of science.” This, he saw, would lead to the suspension of proper political processes and the tyrannical enforcement of “the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent.” Here is his prophetic glimpse in to our times:

… the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.

When ‘science’ is the means of silencing political dissent, we have lost the meaning of politics.

Political power and narrative control

A recent example of the determination of Australian political actors to politicize and punish any opposition to the One Truth of authorized public health policy is illustrated by the decision of the Australian government to revoke Novak Djokovic’s visa to play tennis at the 2022 Australian Open. Without any actual evidence that I am aware of, Djokovic’s visa was cancelled on the Ministerial assertion that non-vaccinated Australians would claim Djokovic as a hero of anti-vaccination resistance to government public health ‘recommendations’ and his very presence at the Australian Open might encourage protests against vaccination policies that would pose a risk to public safety. Unproven conjecture was, apparently, sufficient reason for our courts to decide that revoking Mr Djokovic’s visa was within the Immigration Minister’s expansive lawful powers. When it comes to Mr Djokovic himself, it seems reasonable to presume that this professional athlete who has natural immunity from COVID as a result of having had the virus, must have his own medical science reservations for not being vaccinated. The potential myocarditis side-effect from COVID vaccines for young fit individuals – the very category least likely to have serious health threats from getting COVID – might be why. But I have no awareness of Mr Djokovic ever making his own reasons public. Clearly, the tennis player is not free to not be vaccinated if he wants to enter Australia to play tennis in the Australian (vaccinated only) Open.

There is only one scientific and political narrative of truth that the Australian authorities will allow. That singularity is not itself a scientific, moral or rational stance. Clearly the Australian government deported Mr Djokovic as an assertion of controlling power over the people of Australia. The Australian government requires that all visitors accept the same narratives that Australians must affirm, which is that all reasonable and admirable people freely choose to get vaccinated. Public figures must conform to its recommended moral template because the government wants as near total conformity of ordinary citizens as it can produce. These heavy handed public acts of power carry the clear message to the Australian public: conformity with government ‘recommendations’ is morally required.

Making anti-vaxxers into lepers

Where the government only provides One True and Good position for citizens to consent to, there is no good choice not to consent. For once one has decided to not get vaccinated one has – so our government authorities deem – decided to be irrational and immoral. Such immoral and irrational people are a threat to public safety, and they deserve to be punished for their immorality and irrationality with unemployment in some professions, exclusion from many public venues, and restrictions of movement and association (heavy punishments indeed), and it is all on their own heads. Most distressingly, the unvaccinated have been close to criminalized. At the very least, they are put in a place where they will be treated as dangerous criminals and risk heavy fines and being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon if they covertly seek to indulge in ordinary social activities, like sitting down to a coffee with a friend at a coffee shop. In this manner those who do not ‘freely’ consent to follow government vaccination ‘recommendations’ are made lepers in our society and are treated as an immoral and public health menace.

When vaccination refusal results in one being made into a leper, there is no meaningful capacity to freely withhold consent in this context. Genuine consent is an illusion in this context.

Where to from here?

Having pointed out that coercion and the absence of genuine consent is entailed in current government policies, recommendations, mandates, nomenclature, and State to public communications, this is not to say that the public health objectives themselves are inherently problematic; only that the State’s treatment of those who chose not to consent to vaccination is a profound abuse of the very idea of consent. Let me unpack this a bit.

The government has vaccination percentage targets so that once these targets are reached, public safety restrictions of movement and association can be lifted. Lifting socially and economically constrictive public safety mandates is an intelligent and reasonable policy. However, it is the way carrots and sticks are used to realize the publicized trigger for a change in policy direction, and the way in which those who choose not to get vaccinated are punished, makes scapegoats out of the unvaccinated in order that the government can both change direction, and save face, so that it is always only doing what is in our public health interests.

A high percentage of Australians are now vaccinated. At this point our governments are strategically moving from lockdowns and travel restrictions to living with the virus without lockdowns and border closures. The unvaccinated are now a small percentage of the entire population and will not make much difference to our medical capacity to deal with high rates of COVID infection. At this point, dropping carrots and sticks would be unlikely to make much difference in our ability to live with the virus. A proper appreciation of the nature of consent as it relates to one’s own body would imply that consent should not be ‘encouraged’ by carrots and sticks in the first place. Be that as it may, strong State and institutional ‘encouragements’ have succeeded in their aims, and at this point we should drop carrots and sticks for vaccination, and allow those who chose not to be vaccinated to move and participate in public life like every vaccinated citizen can. This would entirely neutralize anti-vax and anti-lockdown issues politically. To do otherwise is maintain a political outclass for scapegoating and unbending executive power demonstration purposes, and to remove consent as a meaningful category as regards each free citizen’s right and responsibility to determine the affairs that directly affect their own bodies and persons.

Do we believe in consent or not?

Do we believe in genuine consent when it comes to each individual Australian making a meaningful decision to get COVID vaccinated or not? If we do not, then the government should mandate COVID vaccinations and ensure 100% community vaccination is implemented (minus the vanishingly small number of medically authorized unvaccinated people). Here all citizens would be treated equally, as the cattle or as the children of the State. We would be forced to be safe, for our own good. But if the government is not prepared to force all Australians to be vaccinated whether they consent or not, then genuine consent – including the free ability to withhold consent – should be upheld, whatever public health recommendations government policy is pursuing. But to want it both ways – to make vaccination functionally mandated whilst upholding the fiction of freely chosen consent – is oppressive and dishonest no matter why anyone might refuse to give their consent to being COVID vaccinated.

What does it all mean?

Public health is a valid concern of governments. Exercising emergency powers in the face of extraordinary public safety threats are warranted. Internationally, Australia has very low population percentage deaths from COVID, which is a genuine good. Vaccination percentage targets of some form are a sensible strategy for moving from lockdown and isolation to living with the virus. The above can all be gratefully acknowledge, and yet it remains the case that consent requires freedom from coercion and citizens should not be treated like the cattle of the State. Significantly, the restrictive pursuit of public safety should be done with as light a touch as possible, and the recovery of normal civic freedoms, for all, should be pursued as respectfully and quickly as possible. The moralistic out-grouping of non-conforming non-vaccinated minorities is inherently divisive of Australian society, which is always a bad thing.

States of emergency present governments with a political temptation. Under emergency powers governments finally obtain unhampered executive control over something, and they hope they can take political credit for acting swiftly and strongly on behalf of citizens. These temptations need to be resisted firmly by our governments. If instead of hubristically (and impossibly) asserting total control, things are allowed to be more fluid and less decisive, and if more than one objective (safety and citizen dignity) are complexly pursued at the same time, the outcome will be more civically moral than what we have seen thus far. It seems more than likely that in an enthusiasm to pursue public safety as aspiring state-of-emergency heroes, our governments have used heavy handed police powers, they have promoted minority out-grouping in a systematic and inherently alienating manner, they have often violently crushed citizen initiated expression of political dissent, and, of course, they have made a mockery of uncoerced consent when it comes to being vaccinated. Surely it is time to evaluate and re-calibrate how we respond to the civic dignities of all Australians in a state of emergency context.

Conclusion

Extraordinary emergency and police powers have been brought to bear on individuals and groups deemed by the Victorian state government to be inciting any public kick-back against draconian and extended lockdown and curfew measures in Victoria. The use of armoured vehicles, pepper spray and rubber bullets on unarmed and non-violent “freedom protestors” in Melbourne has shocked not only many Australians, but many onlookers around the world. In Queensland the introduction of ‘no jab no entry’ exclusions for unvaccinated citizens to many public venues in December 2021 has created two classes of citizens with heavy restrictions on movement, entry and employment for unvaccinated Queenslanders. In some New South Wales lockdown areas the army was used to check that citizens were observing lockdown requirements. In Melbourne the total police isolation of residential flats defined as hotspots – housing, among others, refugees who have fled police/military terror – made prisoners of entire communities. These measures marks a new dynamic in State-Citizen relations in Australia.

This new normal goes beyond State mandated public health directives and extends to ‘voluntary’ extraordinary safety measures being introduced. Many state-run institutions (such as the University of Queensland, where I work) and non-state-run institutions (such as the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane) have made vaccination an employment requirement, with UQ also requiring all people who come onto campus (students, cleaners, admin staff, security staff, tradesmen etc.) to be vaccinated.

Does the carefully controlled ‘objective science’ of public health genuinely justify these very heavy handed uses of extraordinary emergency powers by our governments? Does public health justify these exclusionary workplace and social access measures towards the unvaccinated by our governments and many of our businesses and large institutions? Does the end (“public safety”) justify the means (suspension of normal civic dignities and life and the moralistic out-grouping of those citizens who do not follow government “recommendations”)? Are heavy penalties, strong incentives and highly controlled and moralistic public narratives of trusted ‘information’ (with only ‘correct’ information being allowable) appropriate means of pursuing public safety, in a global pandemic, in a liberal democracy?

The moral dynamics involved in COVID vaccinations are much larger, much more complex, much more distressing than a simplistic narrative of “do the right thing” and get vaccinated. Of course, there are some nutters in the anti-vax camp. On the other hand, there are far more passive and moralistic conformists in the ‘get vaccinated’ camp, who are happy to outgroup those who resist government carrots and sticks. At present passive conformism and what Paul Virilio called “the administration of fear” are far more pressing moral and political problems that non-conformist nuttery. We need to open up serious moral and serious political thinking about the politics of bio-security in our times. The unvaccinated are the canary in the coal mine of a new era of totalizing executive power. We would be very foolish to silence and ignore them.  

[1] See Catherine M. Brown, DVM; Johanna Vostok, MPH; Hillary Johnson, MHS; Meagan Burns, MPH; Radhika Gharpure, DVM; Samira Sami, DrPH; Rebecca T. Sabo, MPH; Noemi Hall, PhD; Anne Foreman, PhD; Petra L. Schubert, MPH; Glen R. Gallagher, PhD; Timelia Fink; Lawrence C. Madoff, MD; Stacey B. Gabriel, PhD; Bronwyn MacInnis, PhD; Daniel J. Park, PhD; Katherine J. Siddle, PhD; Vaira Harik, MS; Deirdre Arvidson, MSN; Taylor Brock-Fisher, MSc; Molly Dunn, DVM; Amanda Kearns; A. Scott Laney, PhD, “Outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Including COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections, Associated with Large Public Gatherings — Barnstable County, Massachusetts, July 2021” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA), August 6, 2021 / 70(31);1059-1062. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm7031e2_w  This report notes that in Massachusetts where the general population vaccination percentage was (at the time of the study) 69%, COVID infections resulting from public events showed that 74% of infections were in fully vaccinated people. That is, the “break-out” infection rate (the proportion of vaccinated people who became infected) was roughly equal to the population vaccination percentage. Correspondingly, the proportion of unvaccinated people who became infected was roughly the same as the proportion of unvaccinated people in the larger population. That is, being vaccinated did not seem to show up as making you less likely to become infected than an unvaccinated person in this empirical study. See also, Carlos Franco-Paredes, “Transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 among fully vaccinated individuals” The Lancet, Vol. 22, Issue 1, p16, 1 January 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00768-4  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00768-4/fulltext A big part of the problem is that the virus keeps evolving. Ontario Province statistics indicate that double dose vaccines that provide good and yet diminishing over time protection against getting Delta provide no appreciable protection against getting Omicron. See Sarah A. Buchan, Hannah Chung, Kevin A. Brown, Peter C. Austin, Deshayne B. Fell, Jonathan B. Gubbay, Sharifa Nasreen, Kevin L. Schwartz, Maria E. Sundaram, Mina Tadrous, Kumanan Wilson, Sarah E. Wilson, Jeffrey C. Kwong, “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against Omicron or Delta infection.” MedRxi, BMJ Yale, 1 January 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565v1 We also know that in Australia our Aged Care Facilities require full vaccination from all staff, most residents are also fully vaccinated, and all people who entre must be fully vaccinated, and yet people in aged care homes still die from COVID. Of course, I am in no manner advocating that these precautions should not be taken for our aged care facilities, and I understand that catastrophic mortalities in that sector would result from failing to take as careful safety precautions as possible for the old and frail. Yet clearly, transmission of the virus is not assured simply because one is fully vaccinated.

[After the Oligarchy] Hello everybody, this is After the Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Professor Robin Hahnel.

Robin Hahnel is a professor of economics in the United States, co-founder with Michael Albert of the post-capitalist model known as Participatory Economics (Parecon), and author of many books.

Today’s conversation is in association with  mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. This is Part B of the first in a series of interviews with Professor Robin Hahnel [link to the previous part of this interview, 1A] about participatory economics, and in particular his latest book Democratic Economic Planning published in 2021. It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book, so I recommend you familiarize yourself with participatory economics to understand what we’re talking about.

The discussion will also continue on the forum of participatoryeconomy.org.

Okay so the next question, staying on consumption, is about excessive consumption and the possibilities of this in participatory economy. So, firstly on the side of consumer councils, since consumer federations organize consumption – for example through shopping centres and online shops – consumer federations will decide how to present and, in general, ‘market’ goods and services. Will there be any incentive to oversell? For example, to convince people to buy things they don’t need or want.

[Robin Hahnel] Okay so I warned you before that you had picked the two things that I am the least … well, are my least favourite subjects.

[AO] Well your intellectual honesty is always appreciated – that’s how we like to do things here. But just whatever comes to mind is good enough.

I’ll give you my best answer, but I’ll preface it by saying that I don’t shop right. I don’t go shopping, I hate shopping. I have always found somebody else who will do the shopping for me. The only thing I enjoy shopping for is … I cook and I go into stores and I shop for food. [But not] clothes, [nor] anything else. There was a time when I would go into bookstores but now we don’t read books anymore, they’re all online. So I am not a shopper.

And at one point, there were three female students in one of my classes and we had done a little section on participatory economics. And they came in during office hours, three of them together it was like a delegation, and they came in and they said ‘well, Professor Hahnel, there are a lot of things we really do like about what you’re proposing here. But there’s one thing we just don’t like: you don’t seem to understand the pleasures of malling it.’ And at first I didn’t even understand what the word [was], I didn’t know what they were what they meant when they said ‘mall’. And they meant going to a mall and seeing and being seen, and spending four hours, you know, after school or after work at the mall. And that they were basically telling me some of us really like that, and we just want to know whether we’re going to be able to do that in a participatory economy.

And I had to say ‘well your dream is my nightmare’. I mean the fact that I would be trapped in a mall for five hours is sort of the worst thing that could ever happen to me. And so I’m going to admit to you that anybody who enjoys the pleasure of shopping, at least this person who designed this economy did not have you in mind. Because it’s the farthest thing from my mind.

But I do just think that structurally, almost by accident, I was concerned with the perverse incentive for sellers to lie to people about how good their products are. And that’s a huge feature of capitalism. I thought well, why don’t we reverse who is in charge of explaining to people what the properties of different options are? Why don’t we put the consumer federations, why don’t we assign them that role? Rather than put producers in the situation where they’re constantly trying to convince somebody to buy something, [where] they’re over-selling the value to the consumer. Let’s get the incentives right.

So the proposal was … I mean, people do need to find out about products. Now, at this point I don’t know how they do it because now everybody’s buying online. Nobody goes to the malls anymore. But at the time we were originally writing this, we said well we can still have malls. I mean, I was trying to get my poor students, I was trying to convince them to support participatory economics, it was shameless. That’s what I was trying to tell them. You can still go to the mall, but the mall is going to be run by your consumer federation. And they’re going to have all sorts of things that are new things on display there. And maybe you can impulse buy, if you want to impulse buy. Or you can just go and see it.

I know that in Cuba they did set up … they weren’t shopping malls, but they would periodically put on sort of a big show where they would display items that were going to be new items that were going to become available. And they would put them on show, and people would visit, and that’s how they would become aware of what was going to soon become available, if they wanted to find out what was coming.

So our suggestion has been that that should be the approach. And then the question is well if it’s the consumer federations that are in charge of … first of all, the consumer federations are going to have their own research and development units that are responsible to them for doing research into new consumer products. Why don’t we want the consumers to be in charge of looking into new consumer products instead of having the producers be the ones that are doing all that research? So we essentially said let’s reverse who’s in charge of that research. Let’s reverse the whole question of who is in charge of presenting and showing people what is available, A.K.A. advertising.

My father was a miserable employee in the advertising industry, so I grew up very aware that there are two supposed purposes of advertising: one is a legitimate public service, which is making accurate information about product availabilities and capabilities available to the public; and the other is tricking them into buying things they really don’t want. So the goal here is … we do have a legitimate service that needs to be provided, and that is information. But we want to do it in a way that we don’t have a terribly perverse incentive about who’s in charge of it and what their motivations will inevitably be.

[AO] It is a very interesting move, and I think very sensible to try to eliminate that perverse incentive by an institutional measure rather than the classic ‘well, workers in the future won’t use pernicious advertising tactics because they’ll be lovely future socialist workers acting in solidarity’. And that the consumer federations would be in charge of that, I think is a very good idea.

And, in general, I imagine that it would eliminate the worst excesses. I’m just wondering within that context would there be any incentive for consumer federations to oversell. I mean, I suppose the thing that first enters my mind is that you’d say ‘oversell to whom?’. Because they would really, for the most part, be overselling to themselves in a way.

[RH] Right. That’s why I don’t think you’re wrong to worry about whether there’s still going to be some perverse [incentive]. What I would claim is I think this proposal about switching who’s in charge of this over to the consumers federation from the producers, that should take care of the bulk of the perverse incentive. I don’t want to claim that there might not still be some, but I think that takes care of the bulk of it.

But I completely agree with your sentiment that what socialists have done in the past is whenever we get into a situation where some somebody says ‘well, won’t this bad thing happen?’ our answer is ‘no, it’s only capitalists who do bad things’. And once it’s the workers who are in charge they won’t want to do these bad things. Well yeah, but I think it is reasonable to … in a participatory economy anything that increases the social benefit to social cost ratio in one way or another makes life more pleasant or better for the workers’ council. So I think it’s a very reasonable question to keep asking whether or not we have created an incentive for them to do something that would have that effect. Anything that would have that effect it’s very important to worry about, and I don’t want to dismiss it on the grounds that ‘oh, but these are workers, they’re not capitalists, they wouldn’t do that’. And I think that’s a fundamental methodological difference between how I and some of us have gone about you know trying to design a better system from the way that a lot of people who say ‘I really like socialism’ have gone about it.

[AO] Yes, absolutely. I mean, the way I think about it is that it’s all about institutions. There are nuances, but really taking the long view of human society it’s almost like institutions are a glass and humans are the water. We’re quite malleable. We see that in capitalism where so many of us – for example as consumers – we don’t want to participate in all sorts of destructive activities. But because the personal narrow institutional interest is misaligned with our personal preferences these toxic behaviours happen anyway. Because we’re trying to go against the grain of the institutions, as it were, and there’s no reason to imagine that that won’t also happen in a future society.

There’s another question about this issue. It’s about the worker council side. So worker councils will have a strong incentive to convince consumers to purchase their products, because this contributes to their social benefit score. What scope is there for worker councils to use behaviour modification techniques, A.K.A. advertising, to this end? Even though consumer federations sell products to consumers and provide consumers product information, could worker councils still have a significant effect?

[RH] I’m thinking out loud here a little bit. Sometimes worker councils are selling to others worker councils, and sometimes worker councils are selling to actual consumers. And here’s where I’m thinking out loud: very few people worry about whether one business is hoodwinking another business.

[AO] Yes.

[RH] And I wonder … I mean, I don’t know enough about the advertising industry to know. You would get the impression, the popular impression if you take the popular mindset on this, you would assume that 80 to 90 percent of advertising budgets are ones where it’s a capitalist company that’s selling to consumers, and that’s where all their advertising is going. On the other hand, if what they’re doing is selling to other businesses they don’t bother advertising because they just can’t hoodwink them. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but we do tend to think of the consumer as being uniquely manipulable, uniquely the actor who can be potentially manipulated. So, the thinking out loud part of this is: is this a problem that’s really unique to protecting consumers from this kind of predatory advertising? Or is it a general problem of anybody selling to anybody, even if one business is selling to another business. In our case, one worker council do another worker council.

[AO] Can I intervene just for momentarily? Yeah, actually that’s a very good point, I didn’t even think about that. I think there definitely is advertising directed at other businesses. I imagine that this is very much the case. It doesn’t necessarily take the same form, although sometimes it does. I mean, I know I switch on the radio and there are always advertisements saying ‘if you want to improve this or that in your business, go with this insurer, this IT system, or this security system or this …’

[RH] That’s true.

[AO] And there is, I imagine, a huge amount of money [in it] because of the nature of businesses. You know, when businesses tend to buy things they tend to buy big. But then it probably also happens in other ways which consumers aren’t exposed to. It’s a very good point, I suppose you’d say that it’s almost up to the worker federations to protect themselves from that. I’m not sure actually, but if you want to jump in …

[RH] Yeah I’m not sure either. I mean, I’m trying to recall what we said about advertising.

[AO] I mean I suppose to begin with, if we split this into the production and the consumption side, the question to ask … I mean, I’m trying to play devil’s advocate and ask these difficult questions, but really the question to ask is when consumer federations are providing information directly to consumers – you could imagine something like Amazon, for example, being run by consumer federations.

[RH] There should be no conflict of interest there. Because the consumer federation is basically governed by the consumers who it represents. And we can actually generalize that. If the information about quality and characteristics of products is being provided by whoever the people who are the users or consumers of that are, then you’ve eliminated the perverse incentive for the producers to oversell. And I was thinking entirely in terms of ‘oh the buyers are always consumer federations’, and that’s why I wanted to empower the consumer federations as the ones that are providing that information. We’re not going to leave that to the producers to do that. But there is a similar situation that you have, you have situations where some producers are buying from other producers. I mean the analogy would be if you have automobile making companies buying steel from steel making companies, you want the automobile making companies to be providing information about the quality of the steel and the nature of the steel products to the automobile companies. You don’t want the steel companies to be doing that.

[AO] To move the consumption side out of the way, what I was getting at is one would ask why if there were this high quality information being provided – and to be more concrete, we could imagine that there would be something like an Amazon, for example, provided by consumer federations, where consumers would be provided with high quality information; in the book you talk about Consumer Report and Nader’s Raiders; there would be people whose job it would be to test products to see how the reality measures up to whatever the producer councils have told them – so the question would be then, even if worker councils wanted to over-hype their products and tell consumers lies, why would consumers want to or be inclined to listen to them in the first place?

[RH] Why don’t we disempower the workers’ councils from being able to directly … they’re not the ones that should be providing information about their products. I think the proposal amounts to that we want to institutionally protect the users from manipulation.

So, we have a workers’ council making steel and they say ‘but we really do have this interesting steel product, and it’s innovative, it’s a little different from the others, our steel is a little different than the steel that you’re getting from these other steel-making workers’ councils’. Well, they would basically have to make that case. Instead of going out and advertising in … I suppose there are going to be journals that are read by car-making companies, about whether we should be buying this kind of steel or that kind of steel. Instead of that allowing them to be their self-advertisers, I think the idea is you want them to provide their information to an agency that represents the interests of all who might be using it, rather than they just simply try to directly access those people themselves.

It’s the direct access to the buyer of your product that I think we want to substitute a different process for. We want to substitute a filter. We’ve got to provide a means by which workers’ councils can describe their products, and the advantage of their products to somebody. But I think we want to basically have this intermediary, so that we eliminate what is the manipulative part of advertising from the ‘it’s really just information’ part. So then we empower the intermediary to hear the case from the workers’ council and then write up the description in Amazon, or provide the information in some sort of malls and displays, run the malls and displays where this stuff gets [sold].

As I said in the beginning, I only go food shopping and I really am only interested in the meat section and I actually don’t pay for high quality meat because I can find meat I really like and I love getting it at low prices. So I am just not the person who ever thinks of any of these things.

[AO] No, it’s good, it’s interesting. And what you said there is a very interesting, concise way, to summarize the issue. The problem being that direct connection between the producer and the consumer, whether that consumer is another workers’ council or that consumer is an actual consumer.

[RH] In this regard, there’s one thing that I did think was a very helpful suggestion that we made. Which is that right now if you buy something from a capitalist firm and it’s not up to snuff, it’s not what it was supposed to be, then you an individual consumer have to battle with that company about taking it back, reimbursing you. I mean and then we get into some companies who will advertise themselves as great companies by saying ‘oh, if the consumer isn’t satisfied we always take it back’ which usually turns out to be actually a misrepresentation. They just say they do that, but in fact they don’t.

One of the things we suggested that’s a structural change in this dynamic – because there the problem is it’s a very unequal power dynamic, you have an individual consumer who’s not satisfied, they’d have to personally take the time and energy to go and hassle with the company to take it back, give them a rebate, replace it, etc. I like the idea that consumers can just turn all of that over to their federation. So anybody that gets delivery of something that they’re not satisfied with, they just give it back to the federation and then the consumer federation on a more equal power footing argues with the producers federation about whether this was below standard, this was not what it was supposed to be.

So I like the idea that in any disputes over whether or not something was, in truth, what it was supposed to be, I like to have that settled between roughly equally powerful groups. And as a person, I would love to be able to turn all of that over to my consumer federation. I’m not happy with this, I just hand it to them and a week later they tell me what the resolution is. I would trust them to do a better job of representing my interest than my own, and then I don’t have to take the time to do it. So one of the functions of these federations is to relieve individuals in particular unequal power situations from the inevitable hassles of something wasn’t what somebody thought it was going to be.

[AO] Absolutely, I mean there’s one word which illustrates this in the society that we live in and that’s ‘Apple’. I just think it’s funny that we say that we live in a consumerist society, but it’s also a society where consumers have very little power. So we as consumers run around buying huge quantities of goods and services, but when it comes down to it we actually don’t have much power at all.

I mentioned Apple because you know they’re notorious for being one of the wealthiest companies, and in many ways producing great products, but also in other ways really screwing over consumers. You can’t replace the battery, you can’t replace the screen, you know nothing, you can’t see the source code for anything, everything’s proprietary, they have their own cable for everything.

And as consumers we’re faced with a kind of game theoretic nightmare. I mean, you go into those kind of dynamics in great detail when you’re discussing the Pollution Demand Revealing Mechanism (PDRM), but it’s the same kind of situation where nobody wants to be the first person to go after Apple and try to do something about it. So essentially it doesn’t happen.

[RH] That’s right. Whoever puts in the time and energy to call them out is doing a tremendous service to everybody else, but there’s a perverse incentive not to do that. I mean, I think at some point – I’m not sure it got into the book or not – but I always was impressed with ‘every company mouths the slogan “the consumer is always correct” with equal insincerity’.

[AO] Yeah absolutely, so true. So, some more questions about consumerism. Parecon involves the buying and selling of consumer goods and services, albeit in a very different context. To what extent do you think that conspicuous consumption will persist?

[RH] Yeah, we can throw the degrowth movement in here too.

[AO] And the other question, we can put the two of them together: to what extent do you think that habits of just throwing goods away and buying a new one will persist? How can Parecon counter these tendencies? And maybe if you could explain what conspicuous consumption is for people who haven’t encountered that phrase.

[RH] Well ‘conspicuous consumption’ was a phrase that Thorstein Veblen came up with. And he is definitely one of my favourite economists of all time. The reason he is one of my favourite economists is he was very sensitive to how it was that what people wanted and didn’t want was very influenced by the institutions in which you … When you put people down in one set of institutions, they want and don’t want certain kinds of things; you put them down in a different set of institutions, and you’d be very, very, surprised at just how different people’s preferences are. So, the whole idea that institutions can bias and warp the kinds of preferences that people come to have – which has been an important part of my theoretical economics work dating back to my graduate school days – it really just comes from an insight our of Thorstein Veblen.

But he got very concrete about it. He was writing in the in the robber baron era of American capitalism, and what he realized was that many people were just consuming things to demonstrate, to achieve, status in society. That it was almost better to overpay for something, because if you overpaid for it you had demonstrated your status in society as a higher wealth, higher income, person. So it wasn’t really that you wanted that good. It’s that buying that good was a way of … So that’s what he meant by ‘conspicuous consumption’. You weren’t consuming the thing because it had any real use value for you, or utility for you. The utility it had for you was it conferred status on you compared to other people.

Now, I think that’s a very important concept. I think that’s a very important. So the real question reduces to, in a participatory, in a healthy society, how would people go about achieving status in the eyes of others. Well, certainly in a socialist society, our vision isn’t that you would achieve status as being a higher income person or a person with greater wealth. So, part of what we’re proposing is changing society from the way that you impress other people with yourself as a human being because you’re wealthier and you can consume more. That was a crazy, terrible, way that people achieved this goal under capitalism. And we’re going to eliminate that. We’re not going to have these huge differences in income and wealth.

So then, I think in part what the socialist vision is – and this is vision – are people going to really not care what other people think of them anymore? No, I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I don’t think that’s in the human gene, you know that’s not in our DNA. So people are going to care. But then the question is, well, how would you go about trying to win esteem? And our goal as socialists we want to create a society in which the way you try to earn the respect and the esteem of others is that you’ve done things that are socially valuable. In essence it’s sort of substituting one whole way for humans to earn the respect of others for what was really a kind of … What was brilliant about Veblen was he managed to write about it to make you understand what a sick, absurd, way it was that people were going about trying to win the respect and esteem of other human beings.

And that’s that that comes into play when we’re talking about incentives to innovate. And we can come back to this in terms of, well, there are no patents anymore so why would anybody try to innovate? Well but innovators are doing something that’s socially valuable. So if you have a society that has moved away from I’m going to be respected by others because of my conspicuous consumption, instead, to a society where if I want to be respected by others one way I could do it is if I happen to come up with a new innovation that’s socially valuable, then people will know that and that’s how it will get respect. So, I think that’s part of what we’re imagining here.

And that also to the extent that that has happened, that has implications, for instance, whether are we going to have to reward people beyond their sacrifices and efforts if they happen to come up with innovations. Well if what people are getting respect from others for is the innovations they come up with, then you don’t have to give them extra consumption for that. On the other hand, if that’s not sufficient, if we haven’t achieved in the evolution of the socialist economy enough of that to satisfy people, and we’re not getting enough innovation, well then what I argue is you may discover that you would have to resort to what I would argue is an unfair system of material rewards for innovators. Because we haven’t achieved the point where simply recognition for having come up with a social[ly valuable innovation] is the direct reward of esteem and respect. We still have to substitute this material reward in order to induce enough innovation.

And there has been so much concern with how the old cloggy centrally planned socialist economies failed in terms of stimulating innovation, that I know this is a huge concern that a lot of people have. Is what you’re proposing something that would be sufficiently innovative, Or would we once again lapse into just very low rates of innovation? And that’s what I’ve said, the hope is that we now have gotten out of the crazy Veblen situation, that he just did such a brilliant job of making fun of, and we’ve moved on to a system where direct respect and esteem and appreciation for innovation … But if we haven’t, there is a fallback. But I just think that fallback is something that should be decided through a democratic political process, How much of that do we still have to do? The whole question of do we have to do it at all I think should be part of a democratic debate. If people are feeling like maybe we need to do a little bit of it, then that’s the way it should be handled. But the goal should always be that we’re moving away from that.

[AO] Definitely. I intend to get into innovation in detail. But before we do that, it is very interesting to think about what the material basis of conspicuous consumption is, as we know it. I’m sure there will be some kind of conspicuous consumption forever, so to speak, I mean even in hunter-gatherer societies there’s always some element of this. But it’s of a completely different character. And it’s interesting to wonder how much conspicuous consumption is even possible in a society where incomes and wealth are radically egalitarian. Can that even be sustained? And particularly in a culture where you don’t have a mass brainwashing by producers to create preferences and personalities which pursue that. I guess I’m thinking about how conspicuous consumption arises in that context, and I’m not sure where it can actually get a foothold.

[RH] If income and wealth is very egalitarian, I think that’s the major institutional barrier to the growth of the actually psychologically sick behaviour of conspicuous consumption. That’s the big institutional barrier. And the predictable degree of income and wealth inequality in a participatory economy has got to be lower than any other model of socialism that I’m aware of. So, I think that, in some sense, if there’s any economic proposal that is immune to this problem, this would be the most likely. What you’re saying is well being the most immune doesn’t mean you’re entirely immune and I wouldn’t dispute that.

[AO] Well, look, bringing this back to engineering, in engineering there’s no such thing as zero. Don’t know what that is. It’s always 0.000 or something, so I’m not interested in zero, I’m not interested in perfection, it’s about dealing with the largest problems and then you can make the refinements once you are lucky enough to get there.

What about the matter of a disposable culture, a throwaway culture? You know, fast fashion. And it doesn’t matter if I don’t get this repaired. People don’t repair things anymore, because why bother getting repaired because that costs as much as it does to get a brand new version.

[RH] My answer to that is if we incorporate all the externalities – which is a huge, huge, part of what we’ve proposed, and proposed very concrete mechanisms for how to estimate their magnitude and how to get them included into the social costs that everybody has to take into account – that’s essentially my answer to that. That’s incredibly inefficient because somebody has not incorporated the costs of the throwaway and the cleanup. And I think if you take care of the externalities that basically is the solution to that.

At some point we should take the conversation in the direction of … Because over-consumption and the degrowth phenomenon, they are related to one another, as is the throwaway stuff.

[AO] There’s a question about that. I’ve broken them into sections. If you want to make some preliminary comments that’s fine, but there’s an ecology section and there’s a whole part about how can a participatory economy facilitate a zero growth or a degrowth economy versus, say, a market which has a growth imperative. But I just wanted to say don’t worry, we will absolutely get there.

[RH] Then good, proceed along your agenda and we’ll get to it. That’s fine.

Here’s the thing I’ll throw in. I envision that in a participatory economy material standards of living will continue to rise at a healthy rate forever for the human beings living in this. And there’s a certain interpretation and presentation of degrowth that assumes that is environmentally impossible, and I think they are absolutely crazy, they are absolutely wrong, there is no reason that we … I do not believe we have to preach to the world you are just going to have to accept no significant rise in material standards of living for humanity, because unless you accept that the environment will be destroyed.

I’m just going to throw out there that I am proposing that if we have a participatory economy, people will enjoy a nice healthy rise in the average material standard of living for human beings. And because the income distribution will be more egalitarian than ever, that rise will be something that everybody enjoys. That we do not have to accept the fact that our living state, our economic living standards, will no longer continue to increase. But anyway we will can come back to that

[AO] That’s a very enticing assertion, and that’s an incentive for viewers to hang on until we get to that and discuss and reveal the arguments for that.

[RH] That’s right. It doesn’t have to be doom. I am not preaching doom and gloom.  Only if we don’t wake up and do something sensible. But not because it’s inevitable we’ll have to accept it. Go ahead.

[AO] There’s another question about consumption, and that is about consumer federations competing with each other. The question is: is there competition between consumer federations? Hoarding information, for example, or trying to attract members with higher effort ratings. And if consumer federations are pushing to sell all their merchandise, does that mean that, say, shopping centres will be competing for customers or online shops will be competing for customers?

[RH] I honestly don’t see a problem here. Let’s just go back through them one by one.

[AO] Is there competition between consumer federations, so for example …

[RH] To get members with higher effort ratings.

[AO] Yes, that was one.

[RH] Okay, well the consumer federations are geographically based. So a consumer federation would be, what, maybe 10,000 people, maybe 3,000 families. And they are in a geographical area. So they don’t compete for members, their members are fixed by the fact that they live in that neighbourhood.

I also don’t know what advantage it would be to a consumer federation to have people with higher effort ratings, to the federation itself. I think there will be differences in the average effort rating of different consumer federations, and that does in fact mean that all the residents of that consumer … Suppose you’re in a consumer federation where the average effort rating is five percent lower than the national average. Well, then the social value of the goods that everybody in that neighbourhood is going to be consuming is going to be five percent less than the national average. Now, supposedly that’s fair because their effort ratings were five percent less and they basically made the choice that they wanted to be more leisurely about things and cared less about what they had to consume. But that’s the way it works, and so I don’t see a real problem there.

I can’t see what the advantage to a consumer federation would be of recruiting high effort members. I guess you could say, well, a high effort member might have a nicer house on the block and then the whole neighbourhood and the whole street is a little nicer. But differences in effort ratings and income are going to be small enough so we’re really not worried about is my neighbourhood a ghetto versus walled estates. There aren’t going to be neighbourhoods with walled estates and neighbourhoods with ghettos. So, I honestly don’t think that’s a problem

[AO] Yeah, if the variations in effort ratings are relatively small then there isn’t much of an issue there.

If you have if you have 10,000 people living in a neighbourhood council, and maybe half of them have jobs, those 5,000 people are working in different workers’ councils. So it’s not like we’ll have a workers’ council with a low effort rating and everybody in the neighbourhood works there. So if people in one consumer council ended up with an average effort rating five percent below some other neighbourhood consumption council, that would have been the outcome of people in both places working in hundreds of different worker councils and it just turned out that in the neighbourhood there was a five percent difference in the average effort rating. Everybody is working in very different workplaces.

[AO] Okay, really that issue is more of an issue about the effort rating income calculation distribution process.

[RH] Yeah. Between worker councils and within worker councils, exactly. That’s where there really is a serious issue. I mean, that’s where the discussion needs to be because that issue does require attention.

[AO] Yes and we’ll get there. And then also statistical effects, that will deal with a lot of the issue there when you’re looking at significant populations.

And just on that last point of, for example, shopping centres competing with one another. They all want to clear their products, their goods and services, so would there be competition between different consumer federations running, say, shopping centres in different areas of a city, or so anything like that?

[RH] I mean, quite honestly I just never shop

[AO] I didn’t think you’re going to say that.

[RH] I don’t even shop online. I don’t even I don’t even shop on Amazon. I mean, I have six children and three grandchildren, when birthdays come around then I have to have somebody show me how to go on Amazon and get something shipped someplace.

Look what I always imagined was that there’s all these goods that the people in a neighbourhood consumption council have put in our proposals that have been approved. We’re going to be consuming these things during the year. Well, there has to be a distribution centre. I always imagine there’ll be a distribution centre some place in the neighbourhood or close to the neighbourhood where all this stuff gets sent when they go to pick it up.

[AO] Can I intervene on that for clarification? So, would you say then that – because this this was a question I was going to ask, but I thought maybe it’s not worth asking – that most consumption at the household level would occur locally?

[RH] Why would you want to go to a distribution centre that is a 40-mile drive instead of the one that’s closest to you. We might have some items where the distribution centre is covering five neighbourhood councils – the warehouse and the place you go to pick them up. I mean, think of it now, we have grocery stores, and then we have corner markets, and then we have malls. And you go to those different places to get different categories of goods. So in that sense, I think we would still have different sizes for different categories of goods’ actual physical distribution centres. But I always imagine those as being run by the consumer councils.

[AO] If I understand it correctly, the annual plan establishes more or less the consumption schedule for the year but …

[RH] The annual plan doesn’t say how the goods that are produced actually get to the people who end up using them during the year. So what we’re talking about is ‘but then how does that happen?’, and my honest answer is I don’t give a shit. That was my honest answer but it’s a reasonable question to ask. And so my second honest answer is well ask somebody else, that can’t be that hard to work out. So now you’ve asked me well could that work out, and I’m just sort of thinking out loud. But yeah they go to distribution centres and people go to pick them up.

The more complicated thing is in my mind is what if people during the year start to pick up different amounts of things than what they were pre-approved for? And then how do you make those adjustments? Now, that I took upon myself as a serious question that somebody’s got to try to provide a serious answer to. But the short answer always was I just imagine that the consumer councils and their federations are managing what I just think of as distribution centres, where different things are sent and the people who’ve been authorized to consume that stuff are going and picking it up as conveniently as possible.

All this was written before [COVID] … Everybody is so afraid, you can’t go into a store, and Uber is dropping off your food, and if Uber won’t do it, Safeway will do it for you for a small charge. I mean, we’re living in a whole new world about how people are picking things up, and, I don’t know, maybe it’s a better world, maybe it’s a worse world, but I’m the person that never shopped, I don’t know.

[AO] So can I just clarify for my own benefit, it was my understanding that consumers would, at the point of actually obtaining the good or the service that they had put in their request for, when they actually come to realize that request, they would need to pay for that on the spot out of their income.

[RH] Right.

[AO] So I’m just asking, you don’t think then that there will be much price competition between, for example … I might have put in a request during the year to my consumer council, but then I see that maybe on the other side of the city, or something like that, the thing that I wanted is being sold there at maybe a slightly lower price. Because they’re trying to clear things, and you know it’s an imperfect …

[RH] I don’t think that’s the problem. You’re not going to find a better price at a different location.

But this is a situation that that will arise. I put in my consumption request and it was approved, but during the year I end up doing something different. And that means that for some items, when I go in and I get them and they charge me on my swipe card, I pick up more of some items than I was approved for and I pick up less of other items than I was approved for. So there is a real question of how do we adjust for that. And the really big question is do we adjust the prices in that case or not? And if so, why and how? And I actually do write a decent amount about that in Democratic Economic Planning.

In the best of all worlds, when you pick up less of an item and I pick up more of an item from our own distribution centre they cancel each other out. We’ll be charged different amounts [than planned in our proposals]. And that will basically mean that in your bank account you have maybe overspent what you were allocated, you’ve either done a little borrowing. Or you’ve actually saved some.

And I do talk about the borrowing and the saving. And the saving is easy. Anytime somebody’s purchases end up being well wait a minute you didn’t buy everything you were you were authorized for, then you’ve saved and it just goes into an account.

On the other hand, the borrowing isn’t a problem unless it gets to the point where there’s no credible way you are actually going to pay back all that borrowing by consuming less in the future than you’re authorized for during that year, than your income. And then we have to talk about well what banks – although, in our case I think it’s more like credit unions – their real job is to basically just monitor, and see whether or not somebody who is spending more than their allocated income year after year after year, and it’s gotten to the point where it’s very obvious that this is not something they’re going to be able to repay, then what do you do about that? And that’s where I think credit unions with their standard monitoring of that kind of behaviour have to come in.

But basically the system is certainly flexible enough so that: people will change their minds during the year, when they do change their minds then basically that will amount to they will either borrow or save as compared to using exactly their income for the year. That’s okay, we can take care of what I would call bad faith borrowing. In any system that allows borrowing, you have to have some mechanism or institution that is take that is monitoring borrowing to see whether it’s bad faith or good faith borrowing. And then there has to be somebody that steps in and does something about it, and brings it to a halt. But I don’t think that’s rocket science.

And the tricky part is in the end we have to have the actual matching of the supply and the demand. And do we use price adjustments to do that? Here’s the other thing that I think is a policy issue that would have to be discussed and debated, if we run into a situation where on average people have picked up during the year more than the collective order was. Well, then we’re going to have an aggregate shortage of the thing, and should people who have ordered a certain amount get priority over people who are just coming in and now saying I want more of that than I actually had in my proposal? And essentially you can use price adjustments to take care of this or you can use well but they put in the proposal, so if we’re going to run out of shoes then they get the shoes, and you have to wait because you actually didn’t put in a proposal for that many shoes. So there’s sort of two different ways of taking care of it and there are pros and cons to both I suppose.

[AO] There are. I mean we will go into that at another time, but I think there is certainly one advantage. Effectively one is a rationing … well, I suppose it’s all rationing really, but one is a typical what’s called ‘rationing’ system.

[RH] Right, one is rationing, and the other is you make the price adjustments and we traditionally don’t call that ‘rationing’.

[AO] Yeah, which is funny. It is this funny thing of, well, what do you think rationing is? Rationing is when there’s a certain amount and you have a way to decide who gets it and who doesn’t get it. Which is the hilarious thing, that people think that in a market society or in capitalism, there’s no rationing. But of course, that’s what money is.

[RH] Right. When you put a price on something that I can’t afford, guess what? You’ve just rationed me out of it.

[AO] This is a complete aside but, when people foam at the mouth about the ‘social credit’ system in China … now, I’m not an uncritical defender of China, that’s not what I’m getting at. But people talk about how the social credit system is so dystopian, and you’re not allowed to do certain things depending on the way you behave or what you think. And I just think, hmm, there’s a ‘social credit’ system… there’s some kind of score attributed to you depending on the way that you behave which determines what you’re allowed to do and not allowed to do.

[RH] Oh right, I know what you’re talking about now, yes.

[AO] Yeah, money. Yes, we have a social credit system.

But that point you’re making, though, about underwriting. I mean, from what I read about finance, it seems that like you said it’s not rocket science. It seems to be that the hardest part is actually making sure that it is done and that it’s not a situation where criminals take over and make sure that there’s no underwriting at all, and turn finance into a total scam. But the principles of underwriting, the way to do it is not that complicated. When you’re talking about good and bad faith borrowing.

[RH] Right, so good and bad faith borrowing. One of my daughters works for a credit union, and she’s worked in the collections department, and she’s worked in the loans department. And there are members of the credit union that are extended credit and then it turns out well they just can’t pay it. And sometimes it’s an accident, and sometimes there’s an easy way to fix it in terms of oh well you’re going to pay it back but it’s going to be over a longer period of time, we’re going to give you an extension of time.

The first step that has to be taken is well we’re not going to let you do that again next year. When you defaulted on a car loan from your credit union, then you don’t get to do it again the next year. And it isn’t rocket science to have people in the credit union to figure that one out, and know who we have to stop from continuing this. Basically a dishonest representation of their intentions or a totally unrealistic ability for them to assess their own situation. It can be malevolent or it can just be irresponsible, but we have systems where people, actual employees of a workplace, know how to go about this.

[AO] Yes absolutely. I mean life and finance are lot simpler when it is not just a giant scam.

[RH] I really don’t think that if Donald Trump had had to apply to participatory economy credit unions for the kind of credit that he has accumulated, I do not think he would have gotten away with all of the shenanigans he has through his entire business life.

[AO] Indeed. I just want to say one thing I meant to say about the rationing. I think one argument in favour of that, where people who had entered a certain good or service into their consumption proposal in advance, is that it would encourage people to be more accurate in their proposal.

[RH] Yes. If the solution was that people who had it in the proposal get priority over people who didn’t, yeah that that would provide an incentive for trying to be more careful about your actual proposal. It would also disadvantage me because I know that I would be very lackadaisical about putting my proposal in. And when I got there and they said ‘but you didn’t actually ask for this and this person did and therefore you’re going to have to wait’, I would be the first one to be told I’d have to wait. And I would decide that’s okay because I just don’t want to take the time to think too much about my annual consumption proposal anyway. Take last year and add five percent for everything because I think I’m going to have a higher effort rating – that would be the way I’d do it.

[AO] Your distaste for shopping and consumption would persist even in …

[RH] … even that context, yes.

[AO] Okay, so we can leave the questions there. You’ll be happy to know that there’s only one question left about shopping, so the torture will end after that. You’ve given me so much of your time, so I’m really grateful. It’s been a wonderful discussion, and we will continue this.

[RH] Sounds good to me. Alrighty, have a good evening.

[AO] That’s the end of Part B of my first interview with Professor Robin Hahnel about participatory economics and his latest book Democratic Economic Planning. Stay tuned for our upcoming second interview.

And as always I want to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

That’s all for now. The only viable future for humanity is one After the Oligarchy

The first patent-free COVID-19 vaccine, CORBEVAX (wiki), constitutes proof that patent-free vaccines was anything but a ‘crazy idea’.

Republishing from The Conversation:

The world now has a new COVID-19 vaccine in its arsenal, and at a fraction of the cost per dose.

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen over 314 million infections and over 5.5 million deaths worldwide. Approximately 60 percent of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But there is still a glaring and alarming gap in global access to these vaccines. As a virologist who has followed this pandemic closely, I contend that this vaccine inequity should be of grave concern to everyone.

If the world has learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that viruses do not need a passport. And yet approximately 77 percent of people in high- and upper-middle-income countries have received at least one dose of the vaccine — and only 10 percent in low-income countries. Wealthy countries are giving boosters, and even fourth doses, while first and second doses are not available to many worldwide.

But there is hope that a new vaccine called CORBEVAX will help close this vaccination gap.

How does the CORBEVAX vaccine work?

All COVID-19 vaccines teach the immune system how to recognize the virus and prepare the body to mount an attack. The CORBEVAX vaccine is a protein subunit vaccine. It uses a harmless piece of the spike protein from the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 to stimulate and prepare the immune system for future encounters with the virus.

Unlike the three vaccines approved in the U.S. —  Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines and Johnson & Johnson’s viral vector vaccine, which provide the body instructions on how to produce the spike protein — CORBEVAX delivers the spike protein to the body directly. Like those other approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, CORBEVAX also requires two doses.

How was CORBEVAX developed?

CORBEVAX was developed by the co-directors of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, Drs. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez.

During the 2003 SARS outbreak, these researchers created a similar type of vaccine by inserting the genetic information for a portion of the SARS virus spike protein into yeast to produce large amounts of the protein. After isolating the virus spike protein from the yeast and adding an adjuvant, which helps trigger an immune response, the vaccine was ready for use.

The first SARS epidemic was short-lived, and there was little need for Bottazzi and Hotez’s vaccine — until the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in 2019. So they dusted off their vaccine and updated the spike protein to match that of SARS-CoV-2, creating the CORBEVAX vaccine.

A large U.S.-based clinical trial found the vaccine to be safe, well tolerated and over 90 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. The vaccine received emergency use authorization in India, and other developing countries are expected to follow.

Interestingly, the group at Baylor was not able to drum up interest or funding in the U.S. for their vaccine. Instead, newer technologies such as mRNA vaccines raced ahead, even though Bottazzi and Hotez’s vaccine design was more advanced, thanks to their previous work during the 2003 SARS and 2012 MERS outbreaks.

A vaccine built for the world

Protein subunit vaccines have an advantage over mRNA vaccines in that they can be readily produced using well-established recombinant DNA technology that is relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to scale up. A similar protein recombinant technology that’s been around for 40 years has been used for the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which is available for use in 170 countries, and the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine.

This vaccine can be produced at a much larger scale because appropriate manufacturing facilities are already available. Also key to global access is that CORBEVAX can be stored in a regular refrigerator. Therefore, it is possible to produce millions of doses rapidly and distribute them relatively easily. In comparison, producing mRNA vaccines is more expensive and complicated because they are based on newer technologies, rely on highly skilled workers and often require ultralow temperatures for storage and transport.

Another major difference is that the CORBEVAX vaccine was developed with global vaccine access in mind. The goal was to make a low-cost, easy-to-produce and -transport vaccine using a well-tested and safe method. Key to this, the researchers were not concerned with intellectual property or financial benefit. The vaccine was produced without significant public funding; the US$7 million needed for development was provided by philanthropists.

COBREVAX is currently licensed patent-free to Biological E. Limited (BioE), India’s largest vaccine maker, which plans to manufacture at least 100 million doses per month starting in February 2022. This patent-free arrangement means that other low- and middle-income countries can produce and distribute this cheap, stable and relatively easy-to-scale vaccine locally.

Combined, this means that CORBEVAX is one of the cheapest vaccines currently available. How well it works against the omicron variant is under investigation. However, the CORBEVAX story can be used as a model to address vaccine inequity when it is necessary to vaccinate the world population — against COVID-19 and other diseases on the horizon.

The necessity of vaccine equity

There are many reasons global access to vaccines is inequitable. For example, the governments of wealthy nations purchase vaccines in advance, which limits supply. While developing countries do have vaccine production capacity, low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America still need to be able to afford the cost of placing orders.

The Indian government has ordered 300 million doses of CORBEVAX, and BioE plans to produce more than 1 billion shots for people in developing countries. For context, the U.S. and other G7 nations have pledged to donate over 1.3 billion doses of COVID vaccines, yet only 591 million doses have been shipped. These numbers mean that if BioE is able to produce 1.3 billion doses of CORBEVAX as planned, this vaccine will reach more people than those vaccinated by what’s been donated and shipped by the wealthiest nations.

As the omicron variant has shown, new variants can spread across the world quickly and are much more likely to develop in unvaccinated people and continue to emerge as long as global vaccination rates remain low. It is unlikely that boosters will end this pandemic. Rather, developing globally accessible vaccines like CORBEVAX represent an important first step in vaccinating the world and ending this pandemic.

Maureen Ferran is an associate professor of biology at Rochester Institute of Technology.

In May 2021, Dr Els Torreele (UCL) had published with TheOtherSchool an introduction to what was a possibility back then, and is a reality right now:

The production of medicines and vaccines is largely left to the hands a profit-seeking private sector, despite the vital importance of public health, as well as massive public investments in underlying research. Why do covid-19 vaccines belong to private pharmaceutical companies, and not the people? Els Torreele, a world-renowned researcher and advocate for social justice and health rights, shares how we can do medical innovation by working together and sharing knowledge rather than privatizing it. She advocates for the best possible treatments available for everyone.

On Tuesday the 8th of February at 6pm GMT (=8pm Athens time), Michael Albert will deliver a lecture, followed by Q&A, entitled ‘A Vision for 21st Century Leftism’.

The talk will be hosted by the Trinity College Dublin Metaphysical Society and is co-sponsored by mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, and Real Utopia.

You are cordially invited to join!

Topic: A Vision for 21st Century Leftism

Time: Feb 8, 2022 06:00 PM Dublin

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/98689520918?pwd=SUVRU3FlZjNXT1hWVDdDV2h5MlhkQT09

Meeting ID: 986 8952 0918

Passcode: 315113

Antara Haldar | Project Syndicate

The stakes in the case of National Federation of Independent Businesses vs. OSHA were extraordinarily high. At issue when the US Supreme Court ruled on the legality of the Biden administration’s workplace vaccine mandate was not just the future course of the pandemic but also the judiciary’s own relevance and credibility.

The coronavirus is everywhere: in the air, on surfaces, in our respiratory tracts, and, over the past week, at the US Supreme Court. On January 10, key elements of US President Joe Biden’s controversial “vaccine-or-test” mandate provisionally went into force, requiring that all workers at companies with more than 100 employees be vaccinated or tested regularly for COVID-19. With roughly 84 million Americans affected by the mandate, all eyes were on the Supreme Court, which on January 13 struck down the measure.

With the support of a massive body of scientific evidence, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) argued in favor of the mandate, emphasizing that workers “face a grave danger … in the workplace.” But the National Federation of Independent Businesses and 27 states (all Republican-controlled) contended that the vaccine is an “invasive, irrevocable, forced medical procedure” that should not be imposed en masse.

Although the technical question before the Court was whether OSHA has legitimate authority to enforce the mandate, the justices also considered whether COVID-19 does indeed pose a threat distinctive to the workplace. Yet, with only 62% of Americans vaccinated, the stakes were – and are – much bigger than these questions imply. At issue is whether the 38% of Americans who refuse to get the vaccine should be permitted to imperil the majority’s ability to earn a livelihood without facing unnecessary risks to their safety. And even this broader framing still doesn’t address the risks imposed by the unvaccinated on health-care workers, parents, separated families, patients in need of non-COVID-related treatments, and all the children whose development has been disrupted or derailed.

Despite the unprecedentedly rapid development of effective vaccines, the pandemic has entered its third year and is still raging, owing to mask hesitancy, global vaccine apartheid, and, crucially, vaccine refusal. Its persistence is due not to a failure of science but to a failure of our other institutions, starting with the rule of law.

Specifically, a dubious legal theory is to blame. Many legal scholars continue to take pride in a highly formal interpretation of the rule of law as something that is resolutely neutral and amoral, even as it fails spectacularly in helping us confront the most urgent challenges of the day. The pandemic is a paradigmatic case: We are stuck with a dithering legal system that stands by and watches as the toll of preventable deaths continues to rise, and whose moral authority and relevance are increasingly at risk as a result.

The problem lies in a conception of law that is rooted largely in legal positivism, the leading school of jurisprudential thought, whose most stringent interpretation argues that law derives its authority from “pedigree” (where it comes from) irrespective of morality (whether the law is “good” or “bad”). In reality, however, this amounts to an excuse not to commit to an account of collective welfare and instead defer to individual choice.

Even if this perspective was acceptable in the midst of a surging pandemic, it would be deeply flawed. The rule of law is an intricately intertwined, mutually reinforcing combination of formal rules and social norms. It lives in, and functions through, its participants’ collective moral consciousness. The role of courts, then, is not merely to apply formal rules but also to shape social norms and, when necessary, act as a society’s conscience. A close analogy would be a parent exercising her judgment by intervening in a sibling squabble.

This is not to suggest that “the law is what the judge ate for breakfast.” Rather, scholarly research in law and psychology, and breakthroughs in the cognitive sciences, show that law is a fundamentally social institution, and that individuals respond powerfully to cues provided by institutions of authority (what psychologists call “evoking”), particularly when the cues embody a strong moral position.

The positivist position fundamentally misses this point. It ignores the fact that the historically warring nations of Europe have been stitched together within a largely integrated bloc through the jurisprudence of the EU Court of Justice. Similarly, the Indian Supreme Court’s 2018 landmark judgment decriminalizing homosexuality has played a significant role in changing norms in that country.

The US Supreme Court had a chance both to do the right thing and to make history, by helping to end this protracted – and increasingly preventable – pandemic and enriching the rule of law in the process. The United States – and indeed the world – needed a decision with the moral force of Brown v. Board of Education, not more of the grubby cynicism that we saw in Trump v. Hawaii (the “Muslim ban” case).

The Court could, and should, have taken a stand on vaccines, especially considering that it has already been doing so with respect to the “right to life” in other contexts. Fetuses are, for example, far more ambiguous instances of “life” than the workers affected by the mandate, who are clearly moral agents. And the Court has ruled against the choice to end even one’s own life in the context of euthanasia.

Legal judgments are about trade-offs, and in this case there was a clear choice between collective safety or a misguided notion of personal freedom (as the philosopher Peter Singer has argued). While large employers like Citigroup and United Airlines have gone so far as to impose a “no jab, no job” policy, the OSHA mandate took a much more moderate approach to creating a secure work environment.

Moreover, even if the case before the Court had not been open and shut, the common good ought to have been the tie breaker. But instead, the court’s vote was for individual liberty at all costs: the core, if hidden, value of legal positivism. The circus surrounding Novak Djokovic, the anti-vaccine tennis star who was recently detained by Australian border agents, is just a microcosm of the confusion that will now be unleashed by the decision striking down Biden’s workplace mandate. With hospitalization rates breaking records and the US death toll approaching one million, the Court has missed a major opportunity to exercise guardianship over a divided polity, and to assert its relevance and moral authority.

Shifting a 68,000-person social networking company toward the theoretical metaverse has caused internal disruption and uncertainty.

Sheera Frenkel, Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac | NY Times

The Instagram engineer had already packed his bags for a December vacation when his boss pulled him into a virtual meeting to talk about job goals for 2022.

Their conversation soon took an unexpected turn. Forget the goals, his boss told him. To succeed at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, his boss said, he should instead apply to a new position in the burgeoning augmented reality and virtual reality teams. That’s where the company needed people, he said.

The engineer, who had worked at Instagram for more than three years and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, was taken aback by essentially having to reapply for a job. He said he hadn’t decided what to do.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of the company formerly known as Facebook, has upended his company ever since he announced in October that he was betting on the so-called metaverse. Under this idea, his company — renamed Meta — would introduce people to shared virtual worlds and experiences across different software and hardware platforms.

Since then, Meta has pursued a sweeping transformation, current and former employees said. It has created thousands of new jobs in the labs that make hardware and software for the metaverse. Managers have urged employees who worked on social networking products to apply for those augmented reality and virtual reality roles. The company has poached metaverse engineers from rivals including Microsoft and Apple. And it has officially rebranded some products, like its Oculus virtual-reality headsets, with the Meta name.

The moves amount to some of the most drastic changes at the Silicon Valley company since 2012, when Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had to shift its social network away from desktop computers and toward mobile devices. The company restructured, focusing its energy and resources on making mobile-friendly versions of its products. The makeover was hugely successful, leading to years of growth.

But changing the company’s course now is far more challenging. Meta has more than 68,000 employees, more than 14 times its size in 2012. Its market value has risen by more than eight times over that period to $840 billion. Its business is entrenched in online advertising and social networking. And while the shift may give Meta a head start on the internet’s next phase, the metaverse remains a largely theoretical concept — unlike the 2012 move to mobile, when smartphones were already widely used.

In October, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, said he was betting the company’s future on the so-called metaverse.
In October, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, said he was betting the company’s future on the so-called metaverse.Credit…Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The result has been internal disruption, according to nine current and former Meta employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. While some workers were excited about Meta’s pivot, others questioned whether the company was hurtling into a new product without fixing issues such as misinformation and extremism on its social platforms. Workers were expected to adopt a positive attitude toward innovation or leave, one employee said, and some who disagreed with the new mission have departed.

What the metaverse focus means for the company’s existing social networking products like Facebook and Instagram remains in flux, two employees said. At Facebook and Instagram, some teams have shrunk over the last four months, they said, adding that they expected their budgets for the second half of 2022 to be smaller than in previous years.

A spokesman for Meta, which reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday, said building for the metaverse was not the company’s only priority. He added that there hadn’t been significant job cuts to existing teams because of the new direction.

Adam Draper, a managing director of Boost VC, a venture capital firm that invests in companies focused on “sci-fi technology,” said Meta’s new bet was well timed.

“There will be entire economies and countries built digitally through VR/web3, and we are just scratching the surface,” he said, using terms to describe next-generation technologies for building the metaverse. He noted that Meta was in the lead with virtual reality because of products like its Oculus headsets, adding, “This is the sci-fi future, and Meta made the bold move to make it a reality.”

Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse started in its top ranks. In September, Mike Schroepfer, the long-serving chief technology officer, said he would step down by the end of 2022. In his place, Mr. Zuckerberg appointed Andrew Bosworth, known as Boz, who has for the past few years led development on products like the Oculus headsets and Ray Ban Stories smart glasses.

Mr. Zuckerberg showed off his idea of the metaverse in October, with his digital avatar playing cards with the avatars of others — plus a robot — in the virtual world.
Mr. Zuckerberg showed off his idea of the metaverse in October, with his digital avatar playing cards with the avatars of others — plus a robot — in the virtual world.Credit…Meta, via Shutterstock

Mr. Bosworth’s ascendancy was a sign to insiders that Mr. Zuckerberg was taking virtual reality and the metaverse seriously. The two had met at Harvard in an artificial intelligence class, when Mr. Zuckerberg was a student and Mr. Bosworth was a teacher’s assistant. They kept in touch after Mr. Zuckerberg dropped out of the university. Eventually, Mr. Bosworth moved to Silicon Valley to work for Mr. Zuckerberg.

Mr. Zuckerberg has since turned to Mr. Bosworth for major initiatives. In 2012, Mr. Bosworth was given the task of building out Facebook’s mobile advertising products. After management issues at the Oculus virtual reality division, Mr. Zuckerberg dispatched Mr. Bosworth in August 2017 to take over the initiative. The virtual reality business was later rebranded Reality Labs.

In October, the company said it would create 10,000 metaverse-related jobs in the European Union over the next five years. That same month, Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was changing Facebook’s name to Meta and pledged billions of dollars to the effort.

Reality Labs is now at the forefront of the company’s shift to the metaverse, employees said. Workers in products, engineering and research have been encouraged to apply to new roles there, they said, while others have been elevated from their jobs in social networking divisions to lead the same functions with a metaverse emphasis.

Of the more than 3,000 open jobs listed on Meta’s website, more than 24 percent are for roles in augmented or virtual reality. The jobs are in cities including Seattle, Shanghai and Zurich. One job listing for a “gameplay engineering manager” for Horizon, the company’s free virtual reality game, said the candidate’s responsibilities would include imagining new ways to experience concerts and conventions.

Internal recruitment for the metaverse ramped up late last year, three Meta engineers said, with their managers mentioning job openings on metaverse-related teams in December and January. Others who didn’t get on board with the new mission left. One former employee said he had resigned after feeling that his work on Instagram would no longer be of value to the company; another said they did not think Meta was best placed for creating the metaverse and was searching for a job at a competitor.

What Is the Metaverse, and Why Does It Matter?

The origins. The word “metaverse” describes a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the one in which we live. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel “Ready Player One.”

An expanding universe. The metaverse appears to have gained momentum during the online-everything shift of the pandemic. The term today refers to a variety of experiences, environments and assets that exist in the virtual space.

Some examples. Video games in which players can build their own worlds have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. If you own a non-fungible token, virtual-reality headset or some cryptocurrency, you’re also part of the metaversal experience.

How big Tech is shifting. Facebook staked its claim to the metaverse last year, after shipping 10 million of its virtual-reality headsets and announcing it had renamed itself Meta. Google, Microsoft and Apple have all been working on metaverse-related technology.

The future. Many people in tech believe the metaverse will herald an era in which our virtual lives will play as important a role as our physical realities. Some experts warn that it could still turn out to be a fad or even dangerous.

Meta also lured away dozens of employees from companies like Microsoft and Apple, two people with knowledge of the moves said. In particular, Meta hired from those companies’ divisions that worked on augmented reality products, like Microsoft’s Hololens and Apple’s secretive augmented reality glasses project.

Representatives for Microsoft and Apple declined to comment. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal previously reported on some of the personnel moves.

Meta’s employees have been asked to contribute to the change in other ways. In November, they were asked to sign up for Project Aria, an effort to test some new augmented reality glasses, according to an internal memo that was reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees could “earn points and win swag” by wearing the glasses and gathering data through the device’s cameras and sensors, the memo said. To reduce people’s privacy concerns about being filmed with the glasses, employees were asked to wear a T-shirt identifying themselves as a “research participant” and were told not to view or listen to the raw data captured by the glasses, according to the memo.

An attendee at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January using the Oculus headset, which has been rebranded Meta.
An attendee at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January using the Oculus headset, which has been rebranded Meta.Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Employees have also been able to sign up to test the Oculus Quest headsets and to use them for meetings in Horizon Workrooms, the company’s virtual reality work-conferencing space.

Meta is working on other wearable tech products, including a smartwatch with health and fitness tracking capabilities, said two people with knowledge of the project. The Information reported earlier on the smartwatch. Ray Ban Stories, the smart glasses that people can use to capture video, are a steppingstone to making more people comfortable with putting smart tech on their bodies, they said.

In a companywide meeting days after Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was going all in on the metaverse, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, took questions from employees about the change.

She said she was “excited” about the metaverse’s possibilities and told attendees to imagine the endless opportunities that would be available to people around the world, two employees who listened to the virtual meeting said.

Many employees showed their enthusiasm using heart emojis. But in one private chat for engineers, which was reviewed by The Times, one employee wrote: “Who is the elephant in the room who is going to ask how all of it works? Not it.”

Sheera Frenkel is a prize-winning technology reporter based in San Francisco. In 2021, she and Cecilia Kang published, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.” @sheeraf

Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. @MikeIsaac • Facebook

Ryan Mac is a technology reporter focused on corporate accountability across the global tech industry. He won a 2020 George Polk award for his coverage of Facebook and is based in Los Angeles. @RMac18

John Naughton | The Guardian

Facebook’s plans to build a $10bn virtual reality world were ridiculed yet the rest of Silicon Valley has serious FOMO and is piling in

Once upon a time, a very long time ago – until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise – the term “metaverse” was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How come? Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media, announced that he was changing its name to Meta and would henceforth be devoting all his efforts – plus $10bn (£7bn) and thousands of engineers – to building a parallel universe called the metaverse.

And then, because the tech industry and the media that chronicle its doings are basically herds of mimetic sheep, the metaverse was suddenly the newest new thing. This was news to Neal Stephenson, the writer who actually invented the term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash. “Since there seems to be growing confusion on this,” he tweeted, “I have nothing to do with anything that FB is up to involving the metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they’re using a term I coined in Snow Crash. There has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.”

In a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair, Stephenson modestly said of Snow Crash that he was “just making shit up”. If so, some shit. The book is not just a great read, but eerily prescient. It’s set in a US where the government has more or less disintegrated and where everything is run by corporations that function like principalities in medieval Europe. The CIA has merged with the Library of Congress to become the CIC, a for-profit outfit that knows everything (Palantir, anyone?)

The novel opens with an unforgettable car chase in which the main character, Hiro Protagonist, who works for the mafia’s pizza delivery conglomerate, races desperately to deliver a pizza on time (Deliveroo?). Failure to deliver within 30 minutes of an order being placed earns you a death sentence. So the chase is a life-and-death struggle as Hiro races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and faces the anger of the mob. And this was written in the early 1990s.

 Zuck is surrounded by the reality-distortion field created by vast wealth

But the really intriguing thing about the new obsession with metaverse(s) is that it seems to have missed the point that the future envisaged in Stephenson’s novel is a deeply, deeply dystopian one. His metaverse is a vision of how a virtual-reality-based internet, resembling a massively multiplayer online game, might evolve. Like many multiplayer games, it’s populated by user-controlled avatars, as well as system demons. And status in this virtual world is a function of two things: access to restricted environments such as the Black Sun, an exclusive metaverse club, and technical acumen, which is often demonstrated by the sophistication of one’s avatar.

The irony of this metaphor being solemnly valorised by the boss of a powerful tech corporation seems to be lost on the industry. The original video in which Zuckerberg shows himself in the metaverse defies parody. “Imagine,” he burbles, “you put on your glasses or headset and you’re instantly in your home space [sic]. There’s part of your physical home recreated virtually. It has things that are only possible virtually and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful.” It goes on like this for 11 minutes. Do keep a sick bag handy in case you decide to have a look.

If it were a spoof, you’d give it full marks, but apparently it’s intended to be serious. And because Zuck is surrounded by the reality-distortion field created by vast wealth, other apparently rational tech moguls are scrambling to pay homage to his fantasy. The other day, for example, Microsoft, hitherto a serious computer company, laid out nearly $70bn of shareholders’ money to buy computer gaming company Activision Blizzard. Various rationalisations have been proposed for this splurge. The logical one is that computer gaming is a huge industry in which Microsoft already has a significant presence. Owning Activision, which makes some of the most popular titles, including Call of Duty and Candy Crush Saga, would make it an even bigger player. QED.

But there is another, more intriguing interpretation, which is that Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, has caught the metaverse bug. For one thing, metaverses are, by Stephenson’s definition, basically immersive virtual-reality environments and the games industry specialises in creating just such environments. For another, Nadella has been heard burbling about his desire to create an “enterprise metaverse”. At which prospect, fevered visions loom – of avatars of tech moguls in pinstripe suits and chinos stalking one another in virtual boardrooms, doing battle with lightsabers. And then one realises that such folk have no need of a parallel universe, meta or otherwise. They already live in one.

What I’ve been reading

Environmental alarm call
Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality? is an unmissable New Yorker profile of writer Kim Stanley Robinson by Joshua Rothman.

Learning to love oneself
On Not Hating the Body is a truly extraordinary essay on body hatred in the journal Liberties by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Mentioned in dispatches
Dan Wang’s letter from China is always a memorable annual event; his 2021 missive continues the tradition.

The tech world has been overtaken by the seductive idea of a virtual utopia, but what’s on offer looks more like a late-capitalist technocratic nightmare.

Keza MacDonald | The Guardian

I have spent large portions of my life in virtual worlds. I’ve played video games since I was six; as a millennial, I’ve lived online since adolescence; and I’ve been reporting on games and gaming culture for 16 years. I have been to Iceland for an annual gathering of the players of EVE Online, an online spaceship game whose virtual politics, friendships and rivalries are as real as anything that exists outside its digital universe. I’ve seen companies make millions, then billions from selling virtual clothes and items to players eager to decorate their virtual selves. I’ve encountered people who met in digital worlds and got married in the real one, who have formed some of their most significant relationships and had meaningful life experiences in, well … people used to call it cyberspace, but the current buzzword is “the metaverse”.

Ask 50 people what the metaverse means, right now, and you’ll get 50 different answers. If a metaverse is where the real and virtual worlds collide, then Instagram is a metaverse: you create an avatar, curate your image, and use it to interact with other people. What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that it’s worth money. Epic Games and the recently rebranded Facebook are investing billions a year in this idea. When Microsoft bought video game publisher Activision for $70bn last week, it was described as “a bet on the metaverse”.

The tech world seems to be leaning towards some kind of early 00s conception of wearing a VR headset and haptic suit and driving a flying car towards your perfect pretend mansion in a soothingly sanitised alternate reality, where you can have anything you want as long as you can pay for it. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s now-infamous presentation of the future of his company, with its bland cartoonish avatars and emptily pleasant environments. It is the future as envisioned by someone with precious little imagination.

I do not deny that some people want this vision. Ready Player One was a runaway hit. But the metaverse as envisioned by the people currently investing in it – by tech billionaires such as Zuckerberg and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, by techbro hucksters selling astonishingly ugly generative-art NFTs and using words like “cryptoverse” – can only be described as spiritually bereft. It holds no interest for me.

Virtual worlds can be incredibly liberating. The promise of cyberspace, right back to its inception, has been that it makes us all equal, allowing us to be judged not by our physical presentation or limitations, but by what’s inside our heads, by how we want to be seen. The dream is of a virtual place where the hierarchies and limitations of the real world fall away, where the nerdy dweeb can be the hero, where the impoverished and bored can get away from their reality and live somewhere more exciting, more rewarding.

Anyone who is marginalised in the real world, though, knows that this is not how things go down. Virtual worlds are not inherently any better than the real one. Worker exploitation exists in them – look at World of Warcraft, in which Venezuelans farm currency to sell to first-world players, or Roblox, in which young game developers have put in long hours on unregulated projects for little reward. Misogyny and homophobia exist in them, too – ask anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to sound female on voice chat while playing a multiplayer shooter, or be non-gender-conforming on Twitch. As for racism, well – it is alive and well, and seemingly emboldened, in the digital world.

Ready Player One envisioned a metaverse based on what one nerd thought was cool in the 80s, which is depressingly close to what’s happening now.
Ready Player One envisioned a metaverse based on what one nerd thought was cool in the 80s, which is depressingly close to what’s happening now. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

The idea that a metaverse will magically solve any of these problems is a total fantasy. All that they really do is reflect the people that make them and spend time in them. Unfortunately, nothing I have experienced in any virtual world makes me feel good about the idea of the metaverse – because it is being constructed by people to whom the problems of the real world are mostly invisible. Unless companies put immense efforts into dismantling prejudices and unconscious biases, they are thoughtlessly replicated in whatever they create. Nobody has yet found a way to effectively moderate anywhere online to keep it free from abuse and toxicity and manipulation by bad actors. Given what’s happened with Facebook, do you trust Meta with this responsibility? Do you trust Microsoft with it?

The NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer – it’s eroding my faith in humanity

And what will the metaverse look like? Who gets to decide? Outside the sanitised aesthetic of the Zuckerverse (and old virtual-world standby Second Life), the main artistic references we currently have are either the gaudiness of Fortnite or Roblox or the no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare that is VRChat. Then there are the seemingly endless runs of vapid NFT art, many of which are tied to their own promised metaverses, drawing in their buyers with the promise of community. Every time I see a newly minted set of images (well, links to images) go up for sale I’m like, really? ANOTHER series of rad skulls? It is all just so powerfully adolescent, and yet apparently, they continually sell out. These are currently the people determining what the future might look like. It is depressing.

I would feel better about the idea of the metaverse if it wasn’t currently dominated by companies and disaster capitalists trying to figure out a way to make more money as the real world’s resources are dwindling. The metaverse as envisioned by these people, by the tech giants, is not some promising new frontier for humanity. It is another place to spend money on things, except in this place the empty promise that buying stuff will make you happy is left even more exposed by the fact that the things in question do not physically exist.

More Than Gamers is one of many sets of NFTs tied to planned ‘metaverses’. What’s the betting most of them never materialise?
More Than Gamers is one of many sets of NFTs tied to planned ‘metaverses’. What’s the betting most of them never materialise? Photograph: morethangamersnft.io

As far as I can work out, the idea is to take the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme – to make you want things you absolutely don’t need. The problem is not that I think this won’t work. The problem is that I think it will. The current NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer, and honestly it is eroding my faith in humanity. What gaping deficiency are we living with that makes us feel the need to spend serious money on tokens that prove ownership of a procedurally generated image, just to feel part of something? This is all happening, of course, while the Earth continues to heat up, and at enormous environmental cost. I can’t help but wonder if these giant companies are so intent on selling us and the markets on the idea of a virtual future in order to distract us all from what they are doing to the real one.

I have seen what virtual worlds can do for people. I have spent my entire adult life reporting on them, and what people do in them and the meaning that they find there. So the fact that I’m now the one standing here saying that we don’t want this, feels significant. Meta has patented technology that could track what you look at and how your body moves in virtual reality in order to target ads at you. Is that the future of video games and all the other virtual places where we spend time – to have our attention continually tracked and monetised, even more so than it is in real life?

The virtual worlds of games and the early internet used to be an escape from the inequalities and injustices of the real one. To see the tendrils of big tech and social media extending towards the places that have been a refuge for me and millions of others is disturbing. I don’t trust these people with the future. The more I hear about the metaverse, the less I want to do with it.

The Crypto Syllabus

“Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman.”

Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in Yanis Varoufakis, the prominent economist, politician, and public intellectual, who is also former Greek finance minister. Yanis was kind enough to grant us an extensive interview, which provides a panoramic (and, at times, rather critical) view of what is going at the intersection of money, macroeconomics, and the digital.

~ Evgeny Morozov

In the early 2010s, before your stint in the Greek government, you worked as economist-in-residence for Valve, a prominent gaming company. In what ways were your skills as an economics expert in game theory useful for dissecting the economics of virtual worlds? And, in turn, what kinds of insights, if any, on the inner workings of the real economy did you gain through that experience?

Ten years ago, the metaverse was already up and running within gaming communities. Valve’s games had already spawned economies so large that Valve was both excited and spooked. Some digital assets that had previously been distributed for free (via the game’s drops) began to trade for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, well before anyone had thought of NFTs.

What if the prices of these spontaneously lucrative items and activities were to crash? That was what kept the people at Valve awake at night. You can see this from the email with which I was approached: ‘I have been following your blog for a while… Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments, when it occurred to me “this is Germany and Greece”, a thought that wouldn’t have occurred to me without having followed your blog’.

My reasons for getting involved were many. One was the prospect of studying an economy as an omniscient researcher: Since I would have access to the full data set in real time, I did not need statistics! Another was the lure of playing ‘god’; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ‘real’ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens. Another objective was to forge empirically supported narratives that transcend the border separating the ‘real’ from the digital economies.

What did I learn back then? The key insight was that observed behaviour utterly demolished some key neoliberal fantasies: Barter does not give way to sound money, in the form of some digital gold simulacrum. (Nb. We established that various goods/items vie for dominance as numeraires, without ever dominating.) Selflessness is always present (evidenced by substantial doubly anonymous gifting). Social relations emerge (even in these faceless digital worlds) which then ‘infect’ prices and quantities in a manner that bears little connection to the neoliberal view of exchange values formed in a political and moral vacuum.

Today, a decade later, it is clear that gaming communities like the one I studied at Valve have been operating as fully-fledged metaverses (to use Zuckerberg’s term). Gamers were drawn to them by the game but, once ‘inside’, they stayed to live out a large part of their life, making friends, producing goods for sale, consuming entertainment, debating, etc. Zuckerberg’s ambition is to insert his billions of Facebook non-gamer users into a Steam-like digital social economy – complete with a top-down platform currency that he controls. How can I resist the parallelism with a digital fiefdom in which Zuckerberg dreams of being the techno-lord?

NFTs are all the rage these days. Their rapid rise can be traced to CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based computer game that took off in 2017. There are now also many gamers who oppose NFTs and the rather problematic ideas of ownership that they embed. Was something like NFTs already on the horizon during your time at Valve? Do you think that NFTs will change our ideas about ownership, scarcity, and remuneration in ways that might be of help to the broader progressive project? This, at any rate, is the belief of some advocating for Web3.

Hats in TF2! Team Fortress 2 (or TF2) players were obsessed with digital hats. Initially part of free drops, some hats that were discontinued later became collectibles. Players began bartering within the game (e.g. I will give you two laser guns for this one hat of yours). Then, when the demand for some hat rose sufficiently, the players would step out of the game, meet up on eBay, trade the hat for (sometimes) thousands of dollars, before, finally, returning to the game where the vendor would hand the hat over to the buyer. Note the unbelievable levels of trust between strangers this transaction involved: the vendor could have walked away with both the money and the hat. Valve decided to reduce the need for so much trust, cut eBay out, and make a neat profit too by creating trading rooms within the game (i.e. create an in-game market for digital items owned and supervised by Valve).

NFTs differ in two respects from digital assets like the hats in TF2: The blockchain cuts out the company (e.g. Valve). And it allows the digital asset to emigrate from the game/realm that spawned it to any other digital realm.

Do I think that NFTs have subversive potential? Let’s see. In a digital environment, NFTs are like all other commodities. They reflect the triumph of exchange value (with which capitalism trounced experiential or use value) within a metaverse (Valve-like or Zuckerberg-style). In that sense, NFTs offer nothing new within digital worlds, except perhaps that they turbocharge the ideology of capitalism (exchange value rules supreme). In the analogue world, NFTs have value only to the extent that bragging rights offer utility to those who care for them. Even though in so doing, they force outfits like Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which used to monopolise the trade in bragging rights) to change their ways, NFTs in no way subverts the structure of property rights creating and underpinning the oligarchy’s exorbitant power over the many.

So, no, I see little radical potential from NFTs. Having said that, a good, future, liberal techno-communist society may find ways of using them as part of a broad network of technologies helping us keep records of our identities, property, etc.

As long as we do not have these mechanical slaves catering for humanity as a whole (and not just producing commodities owned by the 1% of the 1%), the idea that people must now play like robots to earn a living so as to be human in their spare time is, indeed, the apotheosis of misanthropy.

Much has been made of the fact that in some countries of the Global South (e.g. the Philippines) blockchain-based games like Axie Infinity are creating a parallel economy, allowing players to redeem virtual tokens – their value has recently skyrocketed – in fiat money. The founder of Reddit, for one, has recently argued that all future games will follow this play-to-earn model, adding that ‘90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time’. What are we to make of this? Is it yet another dystopia of global capitalism? Or is it a minor improvement from sweatshop labor, perhaps, the consequence of the global pandemic keeping many people stuck at home playing games?

When I worked with Valve, ten years ago, there were thousands of young people in China, in Kazakhstan, and elsewhere making a mint out of providing services to members of Valve’s gaming communities. Gifted players made good money paid by other players keen to watch them play. So, there is nothing new to the idea of a parallel economy that allows people in poorer countries or regions to earn as they play, or from offering in-game services.

Was that a good or a bad thing? Of course, it was good for a young person in Shenzhen who managed to earn $60k a year designing digital hats on his PC – instead of destroying his body in a sweatshop. The question, however, is: Could all workers in Shenzhen (and beyond) be rescued from sweatshops by migrating to a metaverse? The answer is: Not before we have robots working for all of us so that we can reproduce the material conditions of our lives. As long as we do not have these mechanical slaves catering for humanity as a whole (and not just producing commodities owned by the 1% of the 1%), the idea that people must now play like robots to earn a living so as to be human in their spare time is, indeed, the apotheosis of misanthropy.

One of your critiques of Bitcoin as a currency (which you clearly state it is not and cannot be) is that it limits policy space available, such that, when there is a pandemic, it won’t be possible to increase the money supply. I suppose this also covers ‘printing money’, with all of the perverse consequences of QE that you yourself have documented elsewhere. Wouldn’t the Bitcoin maximalists be at least coherent in arguing that this inability to print money is a feature, not a bug, of the system?

When ‘Bitcoin maximalists’, as you call them, wax lyrical about the inability to print money (and celebrate this inability as Bitcoin’s feature, rather than its bug), they are being terribly unoriginal – banal, I dare say. Capitalism nearly died in 1929, and tens of millions did die in the war that ensued, because of this toxic fallacy that underpinned the Gold Standard then and Bitcoin now. Which fallacy? The fallacy of composition, as John Maynard Keynes called it.

Its essence is a tendency to extrapolate from the personal realm to the macroeconomic one. To say that if something is good for me – if a practice is sound at the level of my family, business, etc. – it must also be good for the state, government, humanity at large. For example, yes, parsimony is a good thing for me, personally. If I can’t make ends meet, I need to tighten my belt; otherwise, I shall sink more and more into debt. However, the exact opposite holds for a macroeconomy: If, in the midst of a recession, the government tries to tighten its belt as a means of eliminating its budget deficit, then public expenditure will decline at a time of falling private expenditure. And since the sum of private and public expenditure equals aggregate income, the government will be – inadvertently – magnifying the recession and, yes, its own deficit (as government revenues fall). This is an example of one thing (belt-tightening) being good at the micro-level and catastrophic at the macro level.

Similarly with gold, Bitcoin, and all other ‘things’ of exchange value: If you have gold, it is good for you if its supply is limited, fixed if possible. Same with Bitcoin, silver, dollars. (Nb. It is why the rich and powerful traditionally opposed expansionary monetary policy, crying ‘hyperinflation’ at the drop of a hat.) So, yes, if you are invested in Bitcoin, or for some reason you are elated every time its dollar exchange rate rises, you have every reason to think that its algorithmically fixed supply is a good thing, a feature. But, there is a price for that: A fixed money supply translates into a deflationary dynamic which, in a system prone to under-employing its people and under-investing in things society needs (i.e. capitalism), is a catastrophe in the making.

The Gold Standard is, indeed, a great source of insight into how dangerously primitive Bitcoin maximalist thinking is. Suppose Bitcoin were to take over from fiat currencies. What would banks do? They would lend in Bitcoin, of course. This means that overdraft facilities would emerge allowing lenders to buy goods and services with Bitcoins that do not yet exist. What would governments do? At moments of stress, they would have to issue units of account linked to Bitcoin (as they did under the Gold Exchange Standard during the interwar period). All this private and public liquidity would cause a boom period before, inevitably, the crash comes. And then, with millions of people wrecked, governments and banks would have to abandon Bitcoin. In short, just like gold, Bitcoin is eminently… abandonable (once it has done enormous damage). Put differently, either Bitcoin will never take over from fiat money or, if it does, it will cause huge unnecessary pain (before being abandoned).

To believe that you can fix money, or that you can fix the state, is to demonstrate a devastating innocence regarding the larger exploitative system with which they are integrated.

What about other crypto-currencies, though, which do allow for very sophisticated operations and incentive structures, including algorithmically programmed demurrage? Would they be closer to being defined as currencies?

No, that will not work either. The problem with Bitcoin is not just its fixed supply. It is the presumption that the rate of change of the money supply can be predicted and foreshadowed within any algorithm. That the money supply can be de-politicised. So, it is not a question of how sophisticated and complex the algorithm is. It is, rather, that a purely political, unknowable, process can never, ever, be captured by an algorithm. It cannot and, therefore, it should not.

Because of the growing interest in Ethereum, there has been a strange resurgence of interest in mechanism design and game theory among the crypto-community; some papers on crypto-economics proudly cite Leonid Hurwicz and Oskar Lange. If one studies this nascent discipline a bit closer, however, one is struck by its choice of focus: microeconomics is everywhere but macroeconomics – save for some Austrian critiques of fiat money – is nowhere, not even in the orthodox Samuelson version.

You put your finger on the nail. This is, again, the fallacy of composition: imagining that what works for you must work for society at large; that what makes sense in the micro-world makes sense in the macro one too. Crypto-enthusiasts with strong views on money, in this sense, fall under the category of people best described by Keynes as ‘resembling Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world’. Keynes was referring to classical economists who thought of money as a commodity, as a thing. The crypto-monetarists are repeating the same conceptual error.

Yanis Varoufakis speaking in Moscow, 2015 – source

From the very early days – i.e. the early 2010s – you have been arguing that ‘blockchain is a fantastic solution to the problem we have not yet discovered. But it is not the solution to the problem of money’. But are we that ignorant? One could say that the blockchain, as a project inspired by the cypherpunk ideology, has always been a solution to the problem of the state: it promises to take the state out of domains as diverse as law (with the rise of smart contracts) or arts funding (with the fractionalization of ownership through NFTs) or, most obviously, central banking (with its critique of fiat money).

To think that Bitcoin can solve the problem of money, or the problem of the state, is to misunderstand what money is or what states do. Every exploitative socio-economic system is predicated on what the minority running it can make the rest do for them (who does what to whom, as Lenin famously put it). Money and the state are epiphenomena of this system. To believe that you can fix money, or that you can fix the state, is to demonstrate a devastating innocence regarding the larger exploitative system with which they are integrated. No smart contract can, for example, subvert the labour contracts that underpin society’s layered patterns of exploitation. No NFT can change an art world where art is a commodity within a universe of commodified people and things. No central bank can serve the interests of the people so long as it is independent of the demos. Yes, blockchain will be useful in societies liberated from the patterned extractive power of the few. However, blockchain will not liberate us. Indeed, any digital service, currency, or good that is built on it within the present system will simply reproduce the present system’s legitimacy.

Assuming you are still upbeat about the blockchain, how do you reconcile this anti-statist bias with what you see as its potential in an emancipated society? What does that potential consist of exactly? Even if one assumes there’s some value in both game theory and mechanism design, what use are they to the progressive project stripped of any macro perspective?

My answer lies in my sci-fi novel, Another Now (in particular, Chapter 6). In it, I present a blueprint of a post-capitalist, non-exploitative social economy. Blockchain features there as a technology used both by central banks and local communities to create a public, distributed ledger for two things: Money, of course. And title leases for properties in a County’s commercial zone (which are on a perpetual auction, the proceeds of which are used to maintain and expand the County’s social zone). From this, you can see that I consider blockchain, and Ethereum-style mechanisms, as technologies that will prove extremely useful once private property in the means of production ends. But, on their own, these technologies will not liberate us from the extractive power of the few.

You have described yourself as an ‘erratic Marxist’, pointing out that you do have strong libertarian tendencies. In Italy, where I’ve been living for quite some time now, there’s, of course, this long-running tradition of Autonomous Marxism, which shares many of these beliefs. It has always been critical of the state and state bureaucracy, with its rigid, centralized ways of organizing society. Now, it seems there is a new promising solution to this age-old problem: DAOs, short for decentralized autonomous organizations, which promise to put transparent algorithmic rules in place of the Weberian charismatic leaders. Do you find anything of value in such new institutional forms? Or do they smack of the same technocratic credo – with its belief that political problems can be solved by designing clever mechanisms and incentives – that they claim to be attacking?

Karl Marx was erratic. He changed his mind all the time, infuriating his friends and comrades. He wrote furious repudiations of his earlier ideas. And he could not stand those who called themselves… Marxist (e.g. famously saying ‘If they are Marxists, I am not’). So, I described myself as an ‘erratic Marxist’ to signify two things: That I am not dogmatic. And, that I am at odds with those ‘official’ Marxists who seek personal power from a dogmatic custodianship of Marx’s thinking. In fact, I went one step beyond, referring to myself as a ‘libertarian Marxist’ – a self-description that was immediately derided by several libertarians and most Marxists. My reason? Like the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain and the Autonomous Marxists of Italy that you mentioned, I fail to see how one can genuinely cherish freedom and tolerate capitalism. And also: how one could be both illiberal and left-wing.

On the question of DAOs, I must say that I look at them with sympathy. But, again, as with my attitude to the blockchain, I am convinced that these are tools that will very much come in handy once a broad internationalist movement overthrows the oligarchy’s property rights over the means of production (including the cloud servers!). As I try to outline in my Another Now, a digital anarcho-syndicalist future society will use many of these DAO-like tools. But, and this is a gigantic but, DAO-like tools will not bring about this new society in which DAO-like tools are useful. (Nb. We can already see how DAOs are being usurped by regressives and real estate moguls in the United States.)

Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman.

Observing the crypto space from the sidelines, I get the impression that it has allowed many of the old neoliberal policy ideas to come back. I’m thinking especially about the use of market-based instruments in fighting climate change: all of a sudden, the blockchain promises to revive many of the ideas related to natural ecosystem services, while the rise of often anonymous activist organizations like KlimaDAO has helped boost what was once a languishing market in carbon emissions. As a result, the reputation of the market as a problem-solving device has been restored, even if temporarily. How should progressives react to such developments? Are these crypto-projects, which promise to reverse climate change via finance, occupying the empty activist space that should have been filled by central banks before they got somewhat sidetracked by the advice they are getting from BlackRock? What should the central banks be doing about this green-tech-finance axis?

Precisely my point. In the name of liberating us from moguls, states, and even climate change, crypto zealots are turbocharging the ideology of commodification (i.e. neoliberalism). What should we do? The only thing that will work is: To take over parliaments so as to legislate a corporate law that ends tradeable shares, and introduces the one-share-one-employee principle in its stead. To take over central banks and make them issue digital currencies on a distributed ledger that makes basic income possible. To take over governments and implement personal ownership of our data. In short, no algorithm will remove the need for a genuine revolution.

One of the interesting consequences of the ongoing currency crisis in Turkey has been the growing popularity of stablecoins such as Tether among the Turkish population. This is even more remarkable given that Tether has been rumored to have problems of its own, which many in the crypto community expect to explode sooner or later. Erdoğan’s hands seem to be tied, as Turkish cities brim with ads for crypto services, which are genuinely popular with the local population. You’ve spoken, somewhat dismissively, about stablecoins in the past but how do you see them changing the dynamics of a currency crisis like the one in Turkey? How should the government be reacting to them, if at all?

Bitcoin was, as I claimed earlier, the digital-algorithmic reincarnation of the Gold Standard – supported by the same vacuous arguments and the same underlying oligarchic motives. Stablecoins are yet another reincarnation of yet another primitive, failed idea: the so-called currency board.

The idea behind the Gold Standard was that national currencies gained credibility because their state/central bank gave up the right to print money at will. By fixing the exchange rate of a national currency to the price of gold (e.g. $35 for one ounce of gold), and freely allowing two-way convertibility, it was common knowledge that, if the authorities printed money in total value exceeding the value of the gold in the central bank’s vaults, at some point people holding paper money would demand gold that the central bank did not have.

A currency board (e.g. the system underpinning Bulgaria’s national currency today) is similar in that the central bank fixes the national currency’s exchange rate to equal the average price of a basket of hard currencies. Again, as long as there are no capital controls and the national currency is fully convertible to the hard currencies in the currency board, if the central bank prints more money than is equivalent (under the fixed exchange rate) to its foreign currency reserves, it risks a run on its reserves. As with the Gold Standard, currency boards have proven fragile – at the sign of economic crisis, war, or other types of stress, they are abandoned.

A stablecoin is a currency board with the difference that it applies to a stateless digital currency (like Tether), not a national currency. This means that there is no state to legislate that the system administrators honour the fixed exchange rate; that they not create stablecoins in excess of the value of their reserves, cash them in, and do a runner. In other words, in addition to the inherent instability of currency boards, stablecoins are ripe for fraud.

In conclusion, the fact that stablecoins or Bitcoin itself acquire the aura of saviours in countries hit by inflation, like Turkey, is nothing more than a measure of the desperation of the people: they will clutch at straws. Stablecoins offer Turks no respite from inflation that buying euros or dollars cannot offer. So, why buy Tether instead of dollars or euros? Why rely on the shadowy characters running a private currency board? Only because the latter deploy good marketing to exploit desperate people.

What do you make of China’s recent efforts to rein in both its FinTech market and the crypto industry, as well as to accelerate the development of the e-yuan? Are they an example for Europe and the US to emulate? And if so, what are the elements worth borrowing?

I am immensely impressed by these moves, especially when looked at as a package. The Chinese authorities are, at once: (1) deflating the real estate bubble (by taking down Evergrande, blow-by-blow); (2) aiming to reduce aggregate investment from 50% to 30% of GDP as a precondition for boosting the wage share of GDP; (3) ending the oppressive tutoring system for pupils that crushes young souls without helping nurture creative thinking; (4) sponsoring sci-fi writing and game design; (5) restricting the power of Big Tech; and, last but certainly not least, (6) bringing the digital yuan online.

That last move, the digital yuan, constitutes a revolution: when fully-fledged, it will equip every resident in China, but also anyone from around the world who wants to trade with China, with a digital wallet – a basic digital bank account. In one move, therefore, the commercial banks will have been ‘dis-intermediated’; or, in plain English, they will have lost their monopoly over the payments system. This is genuinely a radical break from finance as we have known it. And, yes, it is one that we should emulate in Europe and in the United States – which is, of course, why Wall Street and the rest of the West’s financiers will do their best to stop it, preferring to blow up the world rather than allow themselves to be… dis-intermediated.

Are you familiar with the plans for the ‘digital dollar’ advanced by the likes of Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova, which, in essence, insist on the need to build a democratically accountable CBDC? How likely do you think the Fed is to implement something like this, especially given how much opposition – including from the crypto industry – there was for Omarova’s nomination to the Biden administration? We have also recently heard from Congressman Tom Emmer, who, while proclaiming that Washington should be building crypto with ‘American characteristics’, wants to prohibit the Fed from any experiments with a CBDC. One of Emmer’s stated reasons for such action was to ‘maintain dollar dominance’.  What do you think is behind such proclamations? Do they mean we are likely to see Facebook’s earlier efforts to launch its own stablecoin – now called (ironically) Diem – given an official stamp of approval?

The situation sounds complex but it is very, very simple. Most dollars, pounds, euros, and yen are already digital. The digitisation of money is not the issue. The issue is the monopoly of the payments system. Today, you use digital money (phone apps or plastic cards) to buy a cup of coffee at your local Starbucks. But, to do so, you first need an account with a commercial bank. In other words, to grant you access to digital fiat money, the state forces you to fall into the embrace of the commercial banks.

So, today, the state guarantees a monopoly over payments to commercial banks. And that is only one gift to the oligarchy. A second, even greater gift, is that only commercial banks are allowed to have an account with the central bank. So, when a recession hits, and the central bank decides to stimulate the economy, the central bank lowers the interest rate of the overdraft it grants commercial bankers – who then exploit this to profit from arbitrage (by lending the money on to customers at a higher interest rate). And when the recession gets even worse (as has been the case since 2008 and now with the pandemic), the central bank prints digital dollars or euros and credits them directly into the accounts the commercial banks have with the central bank. This is the definition of exorbitant privilege!

So, this is why Wall Street prefers to see the world explode, time end, or Armageddon arrives, rather than allow the Fed to proceed with the digital dollar: because a digital dollar would mean that every resident in the US, and anyone beyond US borders trading with Americans, will be granted a digital wallet. That would be detrimental to the power of commercial banks. First, because people would no longer be obliged to open a bank account with them (think of all the lost fees!). Secondly, because there will no longer exist a rationale as to why the Fed or the ECB, etc., cannot – when they think they must stimulate the economy – drop helicopter money on everyone. Why credit dollars only to the accounts commercial banks keep at the Fed and not credit the people’s digital wallets directly? Indeed, why give money to commercial banks at all?

Yanis Varoufakis in Barcelona, 2015 – source

One of the persistent critiques of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is their immense energy use, which, on the surface, seems like the price to pay for not trusting the state as the arbiter of truth/provider of trust. The solution proposed by the Ethereum Foundation has been to shift from today’s energy-intensive mechanism of Proof of Work to the less environmentally damaging Proof of Stake. Yet, the latter, once you look closely at the details, solves the energy problem by making the entire system more plutocratic, because, in essence, it runs on the principle ‘one dollar (or ether) = one vote’. What makes this crypto-plutocracy tolerable to many of its advocates is their jaded view of today’s financial system, which they see as even more plutocratic and hell-bent on appropriating even more of the bailout money. How does one answer such critiques?

The environmental costs of crypto are very large, undoubtedly. But, even if there existed a magic wand whose waiving would make blockchain run on zero watts, crypto currencies would remain more of a problem than a solution – for reasons I explained above. In brief, within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman. This is why, in opposing the crypto enthusiasts, I never even bother to mention their environmental repercussions.

If one looks closely at some of the influential crypto projects, they feature a bizarre mix of ideologies. There’s, for example, a very ambitious project called Cosmos – it bills itself as ‘the Internet of blockchains’ – which is set up as a cooperative, an institutional form dear to the heart of many leftists. Yet its co-founder and CEO is a big believer in ‘free banking’, an ideology espoused by many libertarians in the US. Do you think the left has been too slow to make sense of the crypto/digital currency space? It seems that even on an earlier set of issues before crypto – complementary and alternative currencies, for example – there seems to be no coherent leftist position, so that today they can be easily appropriated by the crypto start-ups pushing the tokenization of everything…

The Left, radicals, progressives, etc. have either refused to acknowledge the genuine ingenuity of blockchain or have fallen for it. We seem to have forgotten how Marx and Engels had the nous and the ability, on the one hand, to admire and celebrate the technological and scientific wonders of their era and, on the other hand, grasp that these potentially liberating technologies were bound to enslave the many if they became instrumentalised by the very few. The two Germans believed in the emancipatory potential of the steam engine and of electromagnetism. But, they never believed that society would be liberated by the steam engine and/or electromagnetism. Liberation required a political movement that first overthrows the bourgeoisie and only then presses these magnificent technologies into the service of the many. This seems to me an excellent way of approaching today’s potentially liberating technologies, including blockchain.

You are acquainted with Michel Feher, the Belgian activist-philosopher. I don’t know if you’ve read his Rated Agency, but it does capture many arguments advanced by those who see something politically significant – something to be used by progressive forces – in the structural transformation of global finance associated not only with the rise of crypto but also with the popularity of day-trading apps like Robinhood. At least on the surface, the latter do allow retail investors to pool their efforts together and engage in financial activism that was previously available only to hedge funds (Feher himself had an interesting interpretation of the GameStop saga). I can see this logic working for coordinating divestment campaigns. Yet, apart from crowdfunding for, say, micro-municipal bonds, I can’t yet see a more proactive deployment of such power – except, perhaps, when driven by the desire to ‘stick it’ to the hedge fund industry and spoil their carefully engineered shorting of stocks like GameStop. How do you see this landscape? Is there much value in getting the left to proactively develop some capacities that would allow it to ‘move’ markets?

In Chapter 6 of my Another Now, I imagined how capitalism fell to a variety of techno-rebels who used a mix of financial engineering, worldwide consumer boycotts, and conventional industrial strikes/activism. A year later, I remember receiving calls from US journalists asking me: ‘Are your Crowdshorters in action?’ I was very amused to hear them talk of the Crowdshorters as if they were a real techno-rebel group. Of course, what occasioned the journalists’ questions was the GameStop mini-rebellion that saw millions of small-stake investors take on a couple of vile hedge funds, using the Robinhood platform. So, clearly, I am mightily excited by the idea of a techno-rebellion. If you want to see how I imagine it, on days when hope trumps pessimism, that chapter is my long answer.

I anticipate an almighty struggle for the right to a digital ECB wallet that will bring back memories of the struggle for universal franchise.

You’ve argued against depoliticizing money, which also explains, at least in part, your critical stance on Bitcoin. There have been plans, as you well know, for the digital euro. It would probably be more political than Bitcoin, as it would have a direct connection to the ECB. But as long as the ECB remains seen as a technocratic and apolitical institution, so would the digital euro. You’ve written and spoken extensively about it in the past but what would it mean, in practical terms, to politicize an institution such as the ECB? Stated more broadly, what would keeping the ‘political’ dimension of money in the picture imply in terms of practical politics?

European bankers loathe the idea of a digital euro just as vigorously as Wall Street bankers hate the idea of a digital dollar. It would end their monopoly over payments and make it hard to justify the exclusive umbilical cord connecting them to the printing presses of central banks (see above). What makes the Eurozone special is that it features no Eurozone Treasury, no common debt, no federal decision-making body. This is, lest we forget, a design feature of the Eurozone, one that Europe’s oligarchy adores. Come to think of it, the non-existence of any government with a capacity to transfer substantial wealth from financiers and corporates to the many (not even the German one can do this) is any oligarchy’s wet dream. Why would they want to spoil this triumph either by creating a democratically elected federal government or a digital euro?

But here is an interesting thought: The peoples of Europe have failed to push for a federal democracy in Europe. However, the Chinese central bank digital currency may prove harder to ignore: If a Dutch or German firm that trades with China can acquire a digital wallet from the Chinese central bank, they will most certainly use it. That means that the euro’s dominance will be challenged even within Europe. So, the pressure on the ECB to create a digital euro is enormous. But so is the oligarchy’s counter-pressure to ensure that, even if a digital euro is created, the people of Europe should not be allowed a digital euro wallet with the ECB. In this sense, I anticipate an almighty struggle for the right to a digital ECB wallet that will bring back memories of the struggle for universal franchise.

What do you make of what is going on in El Salvador? Not only has it made Bitcoin legal tender (shortly after announcing the Chivo Wallet with some money placed in it to incentivize use) but it will also be issuing the so-called Volcano Bonds, which have attracted their share of controversy. Is there a way to look at these bonds as a tactic that expands El Salvador’s options in negotiating with the IMF? Based on your own experience negotiating with that institution, do you think they stand any chance of success?

It is a preposterous stunt. For the life of me I cannot even begin to answer those who say to me: ‘Had you, Yanis, adopted Bitcoin back in 2015, all of the Greek people’s problems would have gone away!’ Why would they? The poor of Greece or of El Salvador would have no way to get their hands on Bitcoin anyway. Then the only beneficiaries would be Bitcoin hoarders (of whom very few live in El Salvador or Greece), who suddenly benefit from a spike in Bitcoin demand and from being able to spend their stash in El Salvador without the cost of converting them to dollars. The only poor El Salvadorians who may gain something are the expats sending money home in the form of remittances – people who are, now, fleeced by Western Union and the like.

On Volcano Bonds, this is a dangerous development. A government is inviting speculators to buy cryptocurrency backed by an impoverished state. Early Bitcoin enthusiasts were motivated, partly, by a loathing of governments that took on unsustainable debt – before indulging domestically in financial repression and austerity – in order to be able to extend-and-pretend their debt. The worry was that, at some point, Wall Street and other grubby conventional financiers would start building similar pyramids on… Bitcoin. And, the ultimate fear was that the state would join in. Well, Volcano Bonds are making this nightmare a reality, allowing speculators to speculate on a cryptocurrency using an impoverished sovereign state as backup.

More generally, and lest we forget, El Salvador’s public debt is in dollars, and thus impervious to whether Bitcoin is made legal tender or not. Making Bitcoin legal tender just adds enormous costs on small businesses, and ensures that those who do accept Bitcoin effectively exit the domestic fiscal system – leading to a substantial loss of fiscal space for the government, a development that increases its long term dollar debt burden.

As for the argument that, by adopting Bitcoin, Bitcoin will flood into the country thus boosting investment and giving the government more degrees of freedom vis-à-vis the IMF, again I cannot see the logic here. Bitcoin business moved into the Baltics, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere because of low costs, low taxes, and negligible regulation of their activities. They did not care if the local corner store is forced by law to accept Bitcoin. (In any case, most of these businesses are ultimately using Bitcoin to earn large amounts of… dollars!).

In view of the above, I cannot see why anyone would think that, in making Bitcoin legal tender, the El Salvador government is improving its bargaining position vis-à-vis the IMF. The fact that the IMF is utterly opposed to Bitcoin being granted legal tender status in El Salvador, as well as to its president’s Volcano Bonds, does not mean that the IMF is worried that its bargaining power vis-à-vis the El Salvador government is weakened. Quite the opposite: They predict that the Bitcoin experiment will deplete the El Salvador government’s fiscal space, boost the IMF’s power over El Salvador, but, at the same time, put more pressure on the IMF to commit more bailout funds to a failed El Salvador. After the recent IMF fiasco of huge bailouts to the radically right-wing Macri government in Argentina, it is not something the IMF folks cherish.

You have claimed, in an interview, that there are feudalistic elements to Bitcoin, for there is no democratic mechanism to determine who gets how many Bitcoins, thus favoring the early adopters. Interestingly, you contract feudalism to democracy here rather than to capitalism. Because if you think about capitalist competition – but also all the shady stuff that Marxists tend to lump under ‘primitive accumulation’ – one can easily argue that there’s nothing non-capitalist in what you describe: those who moved in early got the largest share of the pie, while crypto-mining, as it exists today, favors those with larger capital expenditures. Why describe this system as ‘feudalist’ when ‘capitalist’ would do just as well?

Assets, by themselves, are neither feudalist nor capitalist. Whether we are talking about gold, cucumbers, or Bitcoin, assets are assets – end of story. What makes an asset feudal or capitalist or socialist is the manner in which it interacts with a society’s social relations of production, the pattern of property rights it shores up, etc. My point, when referring to Bitcoin’s early adopters as a crypto-aristocracy, as crypto-lords, was that, when an asset like Bitcoin (whose exchange value is built on engineered scarcity) is embedded in any oligarchic exploitative system (capitalism, kleptocracy, techno-feudalism, etc.), it acquires the basic character of the (pre-capitalist) feudal order: a small minority are empowered to collect rents in proportion to the chunks of the asset that they began with. To recap, Bitcoin is neither feudalist nor capitalist per se. It is simply oligarchic.

Yanis Varoufakis in London, 2017 – source

Recently, you’ve taken up the theme of ‘techno-feudalism’, pointing out that capitalism is no longer what it once was. If I understand your thesis correctly, what makes the current system ‘feudal’ is that A) markets are no longer key to the making of profits (e.g. the QE experience suggests as much), while B) tech platforms have amassed immense political power, which is unprecedented in capitalism. Is it a correct summary of your argument?  Are there other important dimensions to ‘techno-feudalism’ that this summary doesn’t capture?

The question is this: Is capitalism undergoing one more of its many metamorphoses, thus warranting nothing more than a new epithet, e.g. rentier capitalism, platform capitalism, hyper-capitalism or xxxxx-capitalism? Or are we witnessing a qualitative transformation of capitalism into a brand new exploitative mode of production? I think the latter. Moreover, this is not just a theoretical issue. If I am right, grasping the radicality of this transformation is crucial to opposing this new systemic exploitation.

Puzzlement is, of course, an understandable reaction to my claim – which needs a great deal of explanation and substantiation. Unable to offer it here in full (Nb. I am dedicating my next book to the subject), here is a flavour:

Capitalism is everywhere we look. Capital is accumulating rapidly and beating labour over the head everywhere and in cruel new ways. So, how come I argue that this is no longer capitalism – but, rather, something worse and distinct? Let me begin by reminding our readers that back in the 1780s, feudalism was everywhere and feudal lords were stronger than ever. However, surreptitiously, capitalism was already infecting feudalism’s roots and a new ruling class (the bourgeoisie) was in the process of taking over.

My claim is that, similarly today, capitalism – like feudalism in the 1780s – is being usurped by a far more exploitative and very distinct new extractive/exploitative system (which I call techno-feudalism), one that is arriving complete with a new ruling class.

Critics of my thesis will point out, correctly, that capitalism has undergone many transformations – from its early competitive phase, to monopoly-oligopoly capitalism (1910–onwards), its Bretton-Woods period (during which finance was kept on a leash with capital controls, etc.), financialised capitalism (from 1980–onwards) and, more recently, rentier capitalism. All these capitalisms were distinct and interestingly different from one another. BUT, they were each a version of capitalism.

What makes a system capitalist? The answer is: It is a system driven by private profits (Nb. not rents) extracted within markets. (To compare and contrast, feudalism was driven by rents extracted outside of markets.) Has that changed? I believe so. What has replaced profit on the one hand and markets on the other? My answer: Central bank money has replaced private profit (as the system’s main fuel and lubricant) and digital fiefdoms/platforms have become the realm in which value and capital are extracted from the majority by a tiny oligarchy.

Let me explain this in greater detail:

Hypothesis 1: Central bank money replaced private profits as the system’s driver

Profitability no longer drives the system-as-a-whole, even though it remains the be-all and end-all for individual entrepreneurs. Consider what happened in London on August 12, 2020. It was the day markets learned that the British economy shrank disastrously – and by far more than analysts had expected (more than 20% of national income had been lost in the first seven months of 2020). Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: ‘Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us to buy shares. Time to buy shares!’

This is just one of countless manifestations of a new global reality: In the United States and all over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares – whose prices are thus decoupled from profits. The new barons, as a result, expand their fiefs, courtesy of state money, even if they never earn a dime of profit! Moreover, they dictate terms on the supposed Sovereign – the central banks that keep them ‘liquid’. While the Fed, for example, prides itself over its power and independence, it is today utterly powerless to stop that which it started in 2008: printing money on behalf of bankers and corporates. Even if the Fed suspects that, in keeping the corporate barons liquid, it is precipitating inflation, it knows that ending the money printing will bring the house down. The terror of causing a bad debt and bankruptcy avalanche makes the Fed a hostage to its own decision to print and ensures that it will continue printing to keep the barons liquid. This has never happened before. Powerful central banks, which today keep the system going singlehandedly, have never wielded so little power. Only under feudalism did the Sovereign feel similarly subservient to its barons, while remaining responsible for keeping the whole edifice together.

Hypothesis 2: Digital platforms are replacing markets

Amazon.com, Facebook, etc. are not markets. As you enter them, you leave capitalism behind. Within these platforms, one algorithm (belonging to one person or to very few persons) decides what is on sale, who sees which commodity is available, and how much rent the owner of the platform will keep from the profits of vassal-capitalists allowed to trade within the platform. In short, more and more economic activity is shifting from markets to digital fiefs. And that’s not all.

During the 20th century, and up to this day, workers in large capitalist oligopolistic firms (like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, or General Motors) received approximately 80% of the company’s income. Big Tech’s workers do not even collect 1% of their employer’s revenues. This is because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of us! For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free (often enthusiastically), adding to Big Tech’s capital stock (that is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps). And, moreover, this capital takes a new, far more powerful form (see below, where I talk about command capital).

At the same time, firms operating in normal capitalist markets – outside Big Tech and Big Finance – see their profitability collapse anyway, their dependence on central bank money grow exponentially, and their ownership be gobbled up by private equity and SPACs. Ergo, as feudal social relations of production were on the wane (and replaced by capitalist social relations) in the 1780s, today it is capitalist social relations of production that are being replaced by what I call technofeudal social relations.

Summing up:

Capital is getting stronger but capitalism is dying. A new system is taking over in which a new ruling class owns and runs both the state money that lubricates it (instead of profits) and the new non-market realms in which the very, very few make the many work on their behalf. Capitalist profits (in the sense of the entrepreneurial profits as understood by Adam Smith and Marx) are disappearing, while new forms of rent are accumulating in the accounts of the new techno-lords in control of both the state and the digital fiefs, in which unwaged or precarious work is performed by the masses – who begin to resemble techno-peasants.

A common refrain in arguments about the rise of techno-feudalism is that tech platforms are just passive rentiers who are deriving immense profits from user data for which they pay very little. To put this in the most extreme way possible, these are lazy, mostly immaterial rentiers, who, having amassed a lot of IP, are now resting on their laurels. This reading also informs many of the enthusiastic accounts of Web3, which promise to share data wealth with the users who generated it. Yet, if one looks at the balance sheets and earnings statements of these firms, a different picture emerges: they actually invest more – rather than less – in material and tangible assets than non-tech firms (and more than they themselves did a decade ago), all while incurring immense R&D and capital expenditures (e.g. Amazon’s for 2020 was over $40 billion; Alphabet’s was almost $30 billion). This seems to fit rather well with the view of these firms as capitalist enterprises that, while controlling some markets, still compete in others (Google, Facebook, and Amazon in advertising; Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba in cloud computing and AI services). Aren’t we running the risk of minimizing the really-existing capitalist dynamics of this tech economy when we emphasize those related to feudalism?

I agree with you in this sense: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al. invest massively and are nothing like the lazy aristocrats of the original feudal era. But that does not mean that their investment is part of a standard capitalist dynamic. Techno-feudalism is not merely feudalism with gadgets. It is simultaneously much more advanced than capitalism and reminiscent of feudalism.

Let me be more precise. The massive investment of Big Tech that you mention is crucial. Not just because of its size but, primarily, because of what it produces: a new form of capital that I call command capital. What is command capital?

Standard capital comprises produced means of production. Command capital, in contrast, comprises produced means of organising the means of industrial production. Its owners can extract huge new value without owning the means of industrial production; merely by owning the privatised informational networks that embody command capital.

Command capital, to be more precise, lives on privately owned networks/platforms and has the potential to command those who do not own it to do two things: Train the machines/algorithms on which it lives to (A) direct our consumption patterns; and (B) directly manufacture even more command capital on behalf of its owners (e.g. posting stuff on Facebook, a form of labour de-commodification).

In more abstract terms: Standard capital allows capitalists to amass surplus exchange value. Command capital, in contrast, allows techno-lords (i.e. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al.) to amass surplus command value. Command value? Yes: Any digital commodity has command value to the extent that its buyer can use it to convert expressive everyday human activity into the capacity to train an algorithm to do two things: (A) make us buy stuff, and (B) make us produce command capital for free and for their benefit.

In the language of Marx’s political economy, the magnitude of command value contained in any digital commodity is determined by the sum of: the surplus value of the commodities it makes us buy (see A above) + the labour time socially/technically necessary for us to produce a unit of command capital (under B above), to be appropriated instantly by the techno-lords.

In summary, what Bezos, Musk, et al. are accomplishing through their massive investments cannot be understood in terms of either feudalism or capitalism.

If I am right, by continuing to call this new environment… capitalism, we would miss the opportunity to appreciate the radically different, and new, processes determining our lives in the here and now. Techno-feudalism, I think, comes much closer to capturing this brave (albeit, dystopic) new world.

Yanis Varoufakis is a member of Greece’s Parliament and parliamentary leader of MeRA25, the Greek political party belonging to DiEM25 – Europe’s first transnational paneuropean movement. Previously, he served as Greece’s Finance Minister during the first six months of 2015.

Varoufakis read mathematics and economics at the Universities of Essex and Birmingham and subsequently taught economics at the Universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Sydney, Glasgow, Texas and Athens where he still holds a Chair in Political Economy and Economic Theory. He is also Honorary Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance at the University of Torino, Visiting Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London, and Doctor of the University Honoris Causa at University of Sussex.

He is the author of a number of best-selling books, including Another Now: A novel (Penguin UK & Melville House US),  Adults in the Room: My struggle against Europe’s Deep Establishment (London: Bodley Head, 2017); Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A brief history of capitalism (London: Bodley Head, 2017), And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability (London: Bodley Head and NY: Nation Books, 2016); and The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2011, 2015). His academic books include Economic Indeterminacy (London: Routledge, 2014); Foundations of Economics (London: Routledge, 1998); and Rational Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

In his own words, Varoufakis was “thrust onto the public scene by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis”. In January 2015 he was elected to Greece’s Parliament with the largest majority in the country and served as Greece’s Finance Minister (January to July 2015). During his term he experienced first hand the authoritarian inefficiency of the European Union’s institutions and had to negotiate with the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Varoufakis resigned the finance ministry when he refused to sign a loan agreement that perpetuated Greece’s debt-deflationary cycle.

In February 2016 Varoufakis co-founded DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement – Europe’s first transnational movement. In March 2018 DiEM25 founded MeRA25, its Greek political party. Led by Varoufakis, MeRA25 entered Parliament with nine MPs in the July 2019 General Election.

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