- metadata: - source: https://compactmag.com/article/totalitarianism-as-care - people: [[Alex Gutentag]] > Please support independent journalism by [subscribing](https://compactmag.com/subscribe) to [Compact Mag](https://compactmag.com/about/) --- # Totalitarianism as 'Care' | Compact Mag The biomedical regime that emerged in the wake of the Covid pandemic rested on a simple moral imperative: “protect the vulnerable.” Doing so required us to stay inside, wear the mask, and get vaccinated, regardless of the price in bodily integrity and autonomy. The cultural and social unity behind this rationale, the unanimous endorsement of the regime from antifa to multinational corporations, was impressive. In Germany, for example, more than 150 major companies spontaneously [changed their logos and brand slogans](https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article235503422/Dann-geh-doch-zum-Impfen-150-Marken-aendern-Slogans-fuer-Impfkampagne.html) in support of the vaccine campaign. BMW celebrated “the joy of getting vaccinated.” “Vaccinate—I’m loving it,” emoted McDonald’s, while Nespresso went with “Get vaccinated. What else?” Political parties, university public-relations departments, media pundits, nongovernmental organizations, Trotskyist groups, you name it—all played their part in the mass-vaccination campaign by telling us (in a gentle way, of course) to get vaccinated—or else. Since the early days of the pandemic, the terms “vulnerability,” “solidarity,” and “care,” already in circulation among performatively compassionate anti-Trump leftists, were consolidated into a new discursive currency, as a novel “specific type of political rationality,” as [Michel Foucault described the logic of control societies](https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/f/foucault81.pdf). This isn’t surprising, given that the left, notwithstanding its protestations and permanent-outsider pose, has seized the commanding heights, especially over the past two and a half years. The rhetoric of “vulnerability” and “care” bullied the masses into accepting a string of human- and civil-rights violations, such as being imprisoned in our own homes, the oxymoronic “social distancing,” masking, and, above all, mandated vaccinations unprecedented in their severity and global scale. Yet the left’s pretense of “protecting the vulnerable” is not only politically and socially corrosive. It also rests, _philosophically_, on an indefensible and authoritarian rationale. The exclusive attention given to the abstract framework of “vulnerability” and “solidarity,” “community” and “care”—always “for others,” never for oneself—served to disguise the loss of income and psychological damage caused by large-scale civil-rights suspensions. Where once the left would have fought for workers’ rights, it now threw up its fearful hands and stayed at home. It was the vaccine mandates, job losses, and the inability to travel, even within one’s country of residence (a rule in place in parts of Australia and Canada until recently), that caused the most blatant harm to working people. Vaccine mandates were the most intrusive of these social operations—literally, because they demanded the direct surrender of one’s personal autonomy and bodily integrity, which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. What was more remarkable than the campaign itself, which took different forms from nation to nation, was the readiness with which people submitted themselves to a violation of their freedom as civil and legal subjects. “The left’s pretense of ‘protecting the vulnerable’ … rests, philosophically, on an indefensible and authoritarian rationale.” Viewed in the larger context of the state of the individual subject in late neoliberal societies, this is perhaps not so surprising. For decades, the conditions of labor and life have been pointing toward the disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens. In an increasingly claustrophobic labor market, under often dehumanizing working conditions, work life has become a constant self-sacrifice, a walk of shame. Ever-more-absurd efforts are demanded of workers to prove themselves worthy of even having a job. Mass self-flagellation sessions at workplaces, universities, and schools—anti-racism workshops, LGBTQ language-policing, “climate-consciousness” trainings, all imposed from above—have become firmly entrenched rituals. No wonder, then, that a recent [_Lancet_ study](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00278-3/fulltext) of 10,000 adolescents and young adults revealed that more than half felt “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” about climate change. The idea of vulnerability as a guiding political principle of the left goes back to the birth of social-democratic and labor parties in the early 20th century. It was the working class that needed protection from the cruel vicissitudes of the market, as capitalism necessarily produces a superfluous reserve army of labor. But since the emergence of the neoliberal consensus in the 1970s, a remarkable shift has taken place in vulnerability discourse. It is no longer the working class in its confrontation with capital, but specific identity groups, the racially marginalized and the sexually excluded, who became “vulnerable subjects.” The left’s language of care and protection came to serve the political rationality of the ruling class, from whose ideological and material aims it became indistinguishable. In this way, “vulnerability” became a powerful weapon in the armory of the professional-managerial class that dominates the neoliberal era. What really cemented the PMC left’s rise to power, however, was a more fundamental epistemic shift. The left and its foremost intellectuals, usually busy declaring everything to be a “social construct,” suddenly proclaimed the novel coronavirus to be a “natural phenomenon,” a “challenge by uncontrollable natural forces,” as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas put it. Moreover, in the rhetoric of progressives ranging from Green politicians in Germany to [American pundits](https://www.pressherald.com/2021/07/19/carl-golden-fauci-can-defeat-the-virus-but-not-the-conspiracy-theories/), the virus was to be seen as a self-acting agent with its own subjective intent, motives, even political agenda. This fetishistic inversion—ascribing autonomous powers to a lifeless thing—legitimated technocratic solutions like lockdowns and the feverishly promoted mass vaccinations, no matter the social costs. Moreover, turning the virus into an intentional agent shifted the blame for suicides and domestic violence, the loss of income, and extreme police violence against protesters, away from the politicians and bureaucrats, and onto “nature.” A pathogen, like any “natural” phenomenon, is only as severe as the social response to it. If the response, justified as an “objective constraint” of the virus, is more lethal than the cause, then we are dealing with a disastrous fallacy. Yet with this logic, the left had a free pass to vilify critics of the measures as “irrational” allies of the virus. The left thus consolidated its own discursive power by managing the epistemological shift toward regarding everything (race, gender) as a “social construct”—_except for the virus_. With this fundamental departure from its critical (Marxist) history in place, the left could further undermine its original mission to protect vulnerable _workers_. For while the PMC drew no material benefits from lockdowns and vaccination mandates per se, urban professionals very much used these measures in the ideological struggle against the working class, assuming the role of the proletariat’s martinets. For this to work, “vulnerability” in the PMC’s imagination had to be shifted from vulnerable groups in the precise sense (the elderly, children, precarious service workers, etc.) to an undifferentiated whole under constant attack from the enemies of civil society, which happened to be the professionals’ own political enemies. This move conveniently enabled the identification of the “fight against the virus” with the “fight against fascism,” conflating questions of medical hygiene with those of “social hygiene.” The vocal denunciation of critics of the biopolitical security state as “right-wingers,” conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and so on was only legible, and consequential, against the backdrop of this conflation, for it put the question of the defeat of the virus on par with the victory of the left. Instrumentalizing the virus into a matter of political life and death for the left justified the abolition of civil rights, a necessary blood sacrifice for power. Of course, “protecting the vulnerable” by destroying livelihoods and lives was always a self-contradictory proposition. It is also, more strikingly, self-defeating on its own philosophical—that is, logical and moral—terms. The argument against forced vaccinations on logical and moral grounds is therefore perhaps even more salient, because it goes beyond the question of political motive and tells us more about the _transhistorical_ rationale of state civil-rights violations. For again, the disenfranchisement of ordinary people is a transhistorical objective for power elites, especially in modern capitalist democracies, and can’t be limited to the _cui bono_\-question alone. “The left’s language of care and protection came to serve the political rationality of the ruling class.” Remember that vaccination passports and “Covid certificates” were required to take part in social life in most European states, sometimes even only to board public transport, sit in a coffee shop, or visit libraries. Remember, too, that as recently as April, the German Bundestag voted on a general vaccine mandate for every resident aged 60 and over, after the Social Democrats’ and Greens’ proposal for forced vaccinations for everyone aged 18 and over was rejected. The ballot was preceded by weeks of heated debate in the Bundestag, which was solely based on moral, or rather amoral, considerations. The 23-year-old Green Member of Bundestag Emilia Fester, better known for her TikTok dances than any meaningful political intervention, represented the vaccine authoritarians’ point of view in a viral rant accusing “the unvaccinated” for her missed club nights and birthday parties: > We were ready to sacrifice our freedoms for the lives of other people, \[to\] protect vulnerable groups, because that is _our_ solidarity. … Your individual freedom ends where collective freedom begins! Your individual decision to not get vaccinated impacts my life, it impacts the lives of millions in the German Federal Republic. It is not mandated vaccination that is the imposition, but _no_ mandated vaccination—an imposition for the solidarity-based majority. … Getting vaccinated can no longer be an individual decision! In the event, her party failed to garner the necessary majority for vaccine mandates only because a competing, and no less authoritarian, proposal for “vaccination registers” from the Christian Democrats won the day—and not because of broad parliamentary opposition to the proto-fascist implications of her argument. Set aside questions about the vaccines’ efficacy and side effects and the liability-waivers granted to the manufacturers by governments the world over. The more fundamental problem with Covid vaccine mandates is the moral one, precisely because governments, corporate employers, NGOs, and other centers of power invoked moral claims about “protection of others” and general social responsibility to justify these measures: Our freedom and bodily integrity, the argument went, end where the freedom and bodily integrity of others are at stake. Even as the pandemic recedes, this paradigm will become even more dominant for the consolidation of left-wing elite power in the coming years. After all, the paradigm’s rhetorical elements—“care,” “responsibility for others,” and so on—apply just as well to the climate “emergency” as to the novel coronavirus. So it is worth considering the full implications. Consider a recent, and rather striking, example. In an essay titled “Living with the Virus: Politics of Care in the Pandemic,” Sabine Hark, a Berlin-based gender-studies professor, [argues](https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/mit-dem-virus-leben-politiken-der-sorge-in-der-pandemie/) that “the central argument for the corona vaccination is the vulnerability and the well-being of others. The insistence on one’s own bodily integrity consequently finds its limit where the refusal of vaccination threatens the health and life of others.” Published in _Geschichte der Gegenwart_ (“History of the Present”)—a Swiss journal for academe that went all in for biopolitical social segregation during Covid—Hark’s essay is representative of the new authoritarian character of the educated class. In it, she praises Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, an enemy of the working class if there ever was one, and the not-so-democratic Prussian state for spearheading vaccination mandates in the 19th century: “Vaccination against smallpox was compulsory by law; the corresponding vaccination law came into force on April 8, 1874. Bismarck had pushed it through against resistance. Prussia was thus an international pioneer.” Whatever the merits of Bismarckian public health, the fact is that the smallpox and polio vaccines can’t be easily classed with the mRNA-based vaccines against Covid, which take intrusiveness to a whole new level, without, in fact, preventing contagion. But the crucial point lies in the moral imposition itself: _Give up your bodily integrity to protect the bodily integrity of others!_ What follows from this demand? Start with the logical implication. The imperative—to sacrifice one’s own bodily integrity and autonomy for the sake of others—leads to an infinite regress. If I give up my bodily integrity for the sake of others’, then others could be equally asked to give up their bodily integrity to protect that of still other people. And these next are likewise asked to give up their bodily integrity for that of others, and on and on until all have given up their bodily integrity, with no backstop, as it were, of bodily integrity remaining. In other words: If I give up my physical autonomy, who will guarantee yours? If I need to take one in the face in order to protect yours, you might need to take one yourself to protect the next person. This further implies two things: first, that the people you were asked to sacrifice your bodily integrity for could never be identified—you will never be shown a person you have allegedly helped to survive; and second, that nobody is, ultimately, protected. And that is exactly the whole point of the Covid vaccination campaign. But let us hypothetically assume you could identify this “other” you are asked to protect (say, people of weaker bodily constitution). We know that comorbidities are a prevalent factor in Covid-19 deaths. Let us say person A is unlucky enough to be suffering from [three comorbidities](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8677356/) with the following fatality rates: chronic respiratory disease (associated with 6.41 percent of patient deaths, according to one study), immune-related disease (3.85 percent), and nontraumatic cerebral infarction (3.85 percent). But Person B is only suffering from hypertension (associated with 42.31 percent of deaths, a much higher rate). We are left with yet another infinite regress, similar to the infinite regress of “oppressed groups”: Is somebody with three comorbidities more vulnerable than a person with only one or two comorbidities, if the one with only one or two comorbidities has a more serious condition than the one with three comorbidities? How are we ever going to decide who is more vulnerable, whom we must protect? And that is exactly the point. The logical outcome of this conundrum would be to say that we simply need to vaccinate _everybody_. But then, who exactly comprises the “vulnerable” groups benefiting from the violation of my bodily integrity? This logic is not unwelcomed by the authorities, because it diffuses “vulnerable” groups to mean an unspecified whole. At the same time, those who fear needles or otherwise find the risk of side effects intolerable, not to speak of the “vaccine hesitant” among the poor, migrants, and racial minorities, are just told to “get on with it already.” “Urban professionals very much used these measures in the ideological struggle against the working class, assuming the role of the proletariat’s martinets.” But while government officials and health institutions embrace this illogic, they are blind to its consequences: For when everyone is vaccinated, everyone’s autonomy will have been violated, including that of the vulnerable groups, which, in this context, mysteriously never applies to racial minorities. In consequence, either there is general physical autonomy for each and every single individual, implying mutual respect for one’s physical boundaries, or there is none. The violation of physical boundaries, irrespective of whether one allows it to happen or not, is never in the interest of the “vulnerable,” because the protection of bodily integrity itself is already the best guarantee for the protection of “others,” as well as oneself: It is, in fact, the only guarantee of physical protection for everyone. This becomes even more apparent in the Covid case when we consider that the vaccinated can be infected and can infect others and, therefore, potentially hurt them. In this sense, the logical framework of Covid mass vaccinations in the name of “vulnerability” is self-defeating. But the “care” paradigm is also self-contradictory in a moral sense. For the infinite regress of using the interests of “other people” to delegitimize one’s own interests doesn’t protect the people it feigns to protect. On the contrary, it hurts them. For if I am asked to refrain from insisting on my physical autonomy, then how can I, as a political, moral, and physical subject, protect the physical autonomy of others? If I can’t defend myself, how can I defend the next person? Insisting on my civil rights is exactly what puts me in the position of fighting for the rights of others. Powerlessness is a terrible place from which to fight power. “Social responsibility” can’t be meaningfully maintained by someone whose civil rights are undermined. In sum, the claim to “protect the vulnerable” is the more or less direct demand to yield to political disenfranchisement under the guise of the honorable project of care. Universal political disenfranchisement, however, doesn’t get any better by calling it “solidarity.” The left’s political project of “protecting the vulnerable” is nothing short of window-dressing authoritarianism. Finally, pay attention to the language that vaccination campaigners use. According to Hark, there is an even “bigger” incentive for us to be voluntarily stripped of our rights: We must give up our rights to serve the greater good. The real reason, then, we must comply with the state’s mass-vaccination program, is that it will make us happy—complying is tantamount to the “happiness of contributing to something bigger than ourselves,” to something “that is ‘not me.’” Such total negation of the self in the name of a Big Other is, of course, a hallmark of fascist and totalitarian regimes. It’s how such regimes pervert the concept of solidarity, twisting it to mean the state or corporate authorities shattering the individual for the sake of the collective, rather than the good of the individual being secured by genuine collective action. “The paradigm’s rhetorical elements—‘care,’ ‘responsibility for others,’ and so on—apply just as well to the climate ‘emergency’ as to the novel coronavirus.” As Hannah Arendt argued, what counts solely and absolutely in totalitarian societies is the ideal of the cause, against which individual lives appear merely as insignificant outgrowths—one can then easily disavow individuals on the basis of “serving the greater good.” And as early as 1990, the German Marxist political critic Wolfgang Pohrt reminded us, “The rabble \[_Pöbel_\] is to be eliminated as a power factor. One can then simply ignore it.” The vaccination campaign’s psychological blackmail—“protecting the vulnerable for the greater good”—has been as crucial to its success as it has been harmful to democracy. It has obscured the fact that Covid measures have harmed the “vulnerable” groups they feign to protect: children, the lonely elderly, the poor, and so on. Furthermore, a civil right is a value in itself. The right to bodily integrity, the right to access my own bank account, the right to privacy, and the like are the best protection for one’s mental, spiritual, and physical health. Hence, the left’s efforts to legitimate disenfranchisement in the name of “protection” and even “health” precisely undermine the logic of protection, the morality of  true care. In 1979, Foucault argued, “The link between the rationalization and the abuse of political power is obvious. And one need by no means wait for the emergence of bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the existence of these relations. The problem then, however, is knowing what to do with such an obvious given.” As is often the case, the answer to his theoretical question can only ever be determined in practice. ###### Related Articles