The Economy of Permanent Emergency

An interview with Professor Fabio Vighi: Full article

This may be the most vital article you read about Covid. Italian writer/philosopher, Fabio Vighi, provides a quasi-total account of why the ‘pandemic’ was launched. It’s not about your health; it’s about what you thought was your wealth.

Coming up on three decades ago, in the early years of writing my weekly column for the Irish Times, I fell into writing on a theme that might have been described as a critique of contemporary economics. I was not an ‘expert’: my sole formal qualification in economics was a pass in a Leaving Cert paper that, being doubtful if I had enough subjects to scrape through, I took at the last minute on the basis that, having plumped for Latin rather than Economics, I had sat with one ear cocked through numerous ‘free’ classes sleepily listening to half my class being rather reluctantly schooled in concepts like supply and demand, inflation and recession. I found it more interesting than Latin but did not like the teacher. A ‘C’ allowed me to pass my Leaving Cert and escape from the horror of education.

I was probably not the only person in the world in the early 1990s who was beginning to think there was something wrong about the way we had slipped into thinking about economics, but I was certainly the only one writing about it in the Ireland of the time. The conventional economics-related arguments occurred between those calling for more ‘rationalisation’ — by which they meant greater profits — and those who saw public spending as an instrument of ‘redistribution,’ a kind of necessary governmental ‘humanitarianism’ to counteract the laws of markets. I thought both positions missed the obvious: the primary purpose of economics was to construct a model of human transactions that served the human need to live and coexist in functional and comfortable material interrelationships.  

This intention had seemed to become lost in a discussion in which there prevailed a notion that economics was about defending a ‘realistic’ view of work and production in which human beings had become a problem rather than the central beneficiaries. For a couple of years, but especially through 1993, I wrote persistently about this, regularly incurring the condescension of the economic establishment of the time. I wrote about the ‘downsizings’ and closures of industries, the starving out of essential and previously valued public services, the escalating obsession with increasing profit at all costs, the true meanings of wealth and poverty, the skewed conventional concepts of transaction costs, the persistent valourisation of global ‘values’ (what I called ‘the struggle against placelessness’), and the recurrent question: ‘Where’s the money going to come from?’

Much of the publicly-expressed thinking of that time seemed to presume a purpose for economics in which human beings were increasingly to be regarded as a drain on capital resources, an impediment to profitability, and therefore to future growth. In a narrow viewfinder, this seemed to make sense; but zooming out it emerged as contradicting the very purpose of having any theory of economics that was not the law of the jungle. I was moderately well-versed in the work Marx and the by then unfashionable Keynes, and rudimentarily so in the then ascendant neoliberal theories of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. More and more, it seemed to me that these discussions were not just morally awry, but recklessly skirting over hard and rational factors concerning the viability of the economic system itself.It had also begun to dawn on me that there was something odd in the way people calling themselves economists were leading us to think about the purpose of economy and, by extension, money. It was as if the subject, ‘Economics,’ had, by mutual consent of the discoursers, become indistinguishable from mere accountancy, reducing every argument to a puzzle about how to reduce the cost of human involvment in economic equations.

This, remember, was long before the concept of ‘artificial intelligence’ was heard in public discourse. Although there were occasional desultory discussions about ‘the future of work’, or the coming ascendancy of technology, it seemed  that the discussion was set upon tramlines of thought that skirted around the central problem: that the earth just happened to be peopled by people, and the sole point of economy was to make available a system that would enable them to provide for themselves in an effective and efficient fashion. More and more it became clear to me that the system, as it was, wanted drastically for some concept of long-term sustainability that, if factored into the formulae of economics, might serve to prevent what seemed to me a coming moment of terminal disaster. No one else seemed to notice this, the field dividing — more or less evenly — between those who saw that the ‘rationalisation’ of economic processes as a no-brainer, and those who pleaded for a kind of leniency for the affected human collateral — while still accepting that the elimination of labour was more or less inevitable. Each of the two dominating logics seemed plausible in its way, and together they seemed to point to — at best — an outcome in which humans were to be either ‘condemned’ to endless leisure or ‘tolerated’ within the processes of future economy as something analogous to the practice of folly-construction in times of depression or what was called ‘famine’ — the gratuitous involving of the superfluous by reason of mercy and compassion. This seemed to me to be at once inadequate and potentially lethal, leading to the comprehensive obsolescence of humanity coming to seem like a self-evident and inevitable consequence of ‘rational’ decisions arrived at within systems which had allegedly existed for no purpose other than the overall betterment of human beings. To the great merriment of the establishment economists, I would sometimes recall what seemed to me to have been the ‘perfect’ economy: my grandmother’s farm in which she produced her own livestock, vegetables, milk, bread, butter, eggs, jam and spring water, and ‘imported’ things she couldn’t produce by swapping trays of eggs for them at the back door of the travelling shop from Elphin on a Saturday night, winter and summer. I had also grown up in a house where the ethic of a connection between work and survival was implicitly understood as central to human existence, for reasons of self-sustenance, identity, dignity and meaning. Both contexts had imbued on me a sense of an intimate connection between work and human existence, all but incapable of disconnection without enormous cost.

Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, had cautioned against the day when the understandings concerning the relationship between work and capital might lead to the human race handing to a tiny minority of its number the control over the very means by which humanity might continue to prosper or even survive. There are many problematic elements within the Marxian canon, but this is not one of them. A central virtue of Marx’s philosophy centres on a warning that accumulative notions of capital give rise to cultures in which it will seem axiomatic that technology ought to be venerated, even at the cost of human flourishing. It was for this reason that Marx believed socialism would become a necessary recourse of humanity, in the cause of self-protection, but this theory, as we know, proved to have its own difficulties.

I did not at the time have any sense of what form the disaster might take. Nor did I stumble on any satisfactory encapsulation of the problem. I excavated and expanded some of these ideas for an article published here last year in tribute to the late philosopher, technologist and lifelong Marxist, Mike Cooley, in which I wrote:

Work in Crisis: Part 2

That moment we are facing is, essentially, the final and irreversible looting by the Combine of the resources of the world’s workplace, in the sense that the purpose is to appropriate the benefits of the creative capacities of the human populace, to ensconce all remaining humanly-developed skills in technology so that they will in future belong to the Combine . . . , thus disinheriting and disenfranchising the world’s working population of any claim to a dividend of the fruits of the onset of what is called Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Some months later, in November last, I elaborated on these thoughts, glancing back to the last great wave of human obsolescence with the production line more than a century before:

Now we have reached a new and not dissimilar frontier in the working life of mankind, albeit with even more far-reaching consequences. The last revolution saw the end of individuated skills; this one sees the end of direct human involvement in the processes of production. It is, in other words, the end of work as we have known it, a moment which ought rightly to prompt the most earnest soul-searching concerning the sources of sustenance and meaning in human existence, and how these might be perpetuated by some new stratagem. In a genuine democracy, this moment would already have given rise to a discussion as to the nature of the termination dividend accruing to the many human beings to be rendered obsolescent by the change, and the cultural adjustments requiring to be made to ensure the continuing contentedness and harmony of the species. Instead, we have an attempted global takeover by the world’s richest interests and proposals for minimal UBI-with-strings-attached, hive cities and couch-potato culture for the young, ‘comfort care’ for the old, and a growing movement to extend rights to the robots who will carry on operating what we used to call society.

Back in 1993, I had no idea what form the denouement might be likely to take, but I knew it was coming. As the global economy — and escalatingly after the meltdown of 2008  — became more like a roulette table than the clearing house of the world’s life and work, I admit that I had no sense of how it might end. By 2008, the issue was the escalating debt of virtually every economy in the world, as the capital system created more and more Toytown money ex nihilo out of credit and pushed it ahead as though with a snow plough. In recent times, the unsustainablity of this debt had seemed to be heading us for a new and possibly terminal catastrophe, and yet almost no one seemed to think so. I remember one morning having a conversation over breakfast in the house of a friend with that friend’s accountant, with whom I got into a minor argument about whether central banks could just keep on printing money. He said, ‘Yes, no problem!.’ I said: ‘Are you having a laugh?’ I left early, having warned my friend to find himself a new accountant.

About three months ago, my attention was drawn to a series of remarkable articles by an Italian-born academic, philosopher and writer called Fabio Vighi — Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University — who had written about the connections between the ‘pandemic’ and the world monetary system. Having for many months been trying to reconcile the various strands of knowledge into a coherent explanation of the ‘pandemic’ that was neither health-related nor utterly, arbitrarily evil, I read several of these essays with a growing sense of being buried alive under a tremendous dropping of pennies. 

I had been talking and writing in general terms about lockdown as some kind of attempt to deprive the world’s working population of any kind of equity in the coming shift to AI, a development that would in effect impoverish the vast majority of humanity into some likely calamitous future. But Vighi’s analysis went further, linking those recent thoughts to the thoughts I was having 30 years before.

Vighi touched on the mounting debt problem that was overwhelming the world’s economies, but did not dwell on it in the manner of most other critical commentators. He went deeper, to the root causes, which he saw as residing in a structural flaw within the capitalist system — signalled and named as far back as the mid-nineteenth century by Karl Marx. The structural flaw is something like this: that, due to the explosion of technological capacity becoming available to employers, there has long been in train a collapse of the role of labour in modern economies, which have accordingly shifted their weight on to financial trading — in effect gambling — as a means of keeping the capitalist system alive. In principle this is a terminal condition, because the need within such a financialised economy to constantly increase the size of the money system would in the long run invite disaster, with some of the artificially generated money for fuelling the financial system — quantitative easing, ‘helicopter money’ — leaking into what is left of the ‘real’ economy, sparking hyperinflation, the collapse of currencies globally and, in short order, the total implosion of the system.

This, says Professor Vighi, is the reason for the ‘pandemic.’ It was launched not because of any threat to human health, but in an attempt to protect the existing system, in which the financial ascendancy is totally invested. For a long time, the economic and monetary systems, originally designed to facilitate and further human enterprise and trade, have seemed to the ‘elites’ to be solely their playthings. A secondary motivation was to exploit this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to effect a wealth-grab by the world’s financial controllers.

In an August 2021 article, A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation, Professor Vighi sets out the clues he spotted even in advance of the early 2020 signs of something stirring in Wuhan. More than clues, they offered clear-cut signs that the world economy was ‘on the verge of another colossal meltdown’. ‘In 2019,’ he outlined, ‘world economy was plagued by the same sickness that had caused the 2008 credit crunch. It was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many public companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. “Zombie companies” (with year-on-year low profitability, falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflow, and highly leveraged balance sheet) were rising everywhere. The repo market meltdown of September 2019 must be placed within this fragile economic context.’

Observing the Covid narrative rollout in early 2020, he worked backwards in an attempt to fit into the emerging picture some of the events he had noted in late 2019, which increasingly seemed to be remarkably germane. In the record of the second half of 2019, he found a trail of intriguing and peculiar developments which had attracted little attention in the mainstream media but seemed to bespeak some kind of simmering sense of crisis among the top financial and political players:

In June 2019, in its Annual Economic Report, the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the ‘Central Bank of all central banks’, warned of ‘overheating’ in the leveraged loan market. As Vighi would put it, ‘the belly of the financial industry [was] once again full of junk.’

In August 2019, the BIS issued a working paper calling for ‘unconventional monetary policy measures’ to ‘insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions’. This would involve central banks taking on the role of lending to companies during what was signposted as a ‘coming crisis.’

In that same month, BlackRock Inc.,the world’s most powerful investment fund (managing around $7 trillion in stock and bond funds), issued a white paper titled Dealing with the next downturn, ‘instructing’ the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity into the financial system to prevent ‘a dramatic downturn.’  The white paper recommended that central banks find ways to put money directly into the hands of public and private spenders — while avoiding hyperinflation.

Later that month, G7 central bankers met in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to discuss BlackRock’s paper along with urgent measures to prevent the looming meltdown.

In September 2019, repo rates shot suddenly from two per cent to 10.5 per cent. ‘Repos’ are short-term collateralised loans, the main source of funding for traders in high-risk markets, especially derivatives. A lack of liquidity in the repo market can have a devastating domino effect on all major financial sectors.

In September 2019 also, the Federal Reserve began pumping hundreds of billions of dollars per week into Wall Street, executing BlackRock’s ‘going direct’ plan.

Later that month, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13887, establishing a National Influenza Vaccine Task Force with the aim of developing a five-year national plan ‘to promote the use of more agile and scalable vaccine manufacturing technologies and to accelerate development of vaccines that protect against many or all influenza viruses.’ This was proposed as a means of  counteracting ‘an influenza pandemic,’ which, ‘unlike seasonal influenza […] has the potential to spread rapidly around the globe, infect higher numbers of people, and cause high rates of illness and death in populations that lack prior immunity.’

In October 2019, a global zoonotic pandemic was simulated during Event 201 in New York, a strategic exercise coordinated by the Johns Hopkins Biosecurity Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In January 2020, the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting took place in Davos, Switzerland, where both the economy and vaccinations were discussed.

A week later, China put Wuhan and other cities of the Hubei province in lockdown.

On March 11th, 2020, the WHO’s director general declared Covid-19 a pandemic.

In March 2020 the Federal Reserve hired BlackRock to manage the bailout package in response to the ‘COVID-19 crisis.’

He began to construct what he felt was a more appropriate ‘reverse causality’ — the possibility that, rather than the pandemic having created an economic crisis, it happened the other way around: a threatened implosion of the financial system in late 2019 had ‘inspired’ the faking of a pandemic. The pumping in of what he calls ‘monetary doping,’ using ‘fictitious money’ under cover of Covid, helped the disintegrating markets to recover somewhat. But, in what he describe as ‘a sadistic stroke of genius’, the orchestrators of the plandemic, ‘in order to sort out Wall Street, switched off the engine of Main Street.’ As a result, the financial elite has grown richer and more powerful while the economy on the ground has been decimated. From the viewpoint of the perpetrators, he says, this is a form of ‘creative destruction’: the destruction of a system of production that was no longer working, but enabling capitalism to recreate itself at a higher technological level.

This, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the true context for the ‘pandemic’. The lockdowns were necessary to allow central banks to flood their economies with freshly-printed money, while insulating what remained of the ‘real economy’ from the effects of the helicopter money, which was essential to keeping the financial economy afloat but keeping hyperinflation at bay. The BIS stepped in, with a view to ‘insulating’ the real economy from the turbulence arising from the ‘helicopter money’ — a form of quantitative easing that extends beyond banks to businesses and other vulnerable entities.

The role of ‘vaccination’ is primarily about the initial step of ‘vaccine passports’ on the road to full biometric ID systems to operate the digital currency that will replace the now all but redundant array of existing currencies and reduce whole populations to a form of neo-feudal mendicancy. Out of these initiatives others are planned to flow: some form of the Klaus Schwab-sponsored ‘Great Reset’; the transhumanist agenda, morphing into posthmanism; and, more immediately and prosaically, Universal Basic Income and digital wallets; conditional use of money, subject to social credit system controls and, in effect, a centralised ‘tap’ that can be shut off the instant someone crosses an unapproved line. By the elites’ plan, says Vighi, we are headed for a neo-feudal, top-down society, with tight monetary control translating into even tighter social and political control. Ultimately, totalitarianism becomes the ‘rational’ solution, drawing the whole package together, and will be especially ‘essential’ for the moment when the people realise what in fact has been happening.

Professor Vighi, I know, has many related ideas about other aspects of what is happening, but rarely strays beyond the frame of his essential argument. He does so in part to keep the lines of his thesis clean, in part to avoid feeding the frenzies of the Gates-funded ‘fact-checkers.’ As to his primary argument, he presents it in his writings as something self-evident, which to a high degree — once you know what you’re looking for — it is. He describes it in purely factual terms. What he says he says definitively: This is this; it’s not something else.  

He repeatedly credits the inspiration of the American financial commentator, John Titus, who on his YouTube channel Best Evidence has tracked and underlined some of these events and linked them to the instability of the debt-based global monetary system. Titus, he relates,  identified from autumn 2019 a radical change in the Federal Exchange’s monetary policy, both in the massive injecting of cash into the economic system and, in doing so, ‘going direct’ to some 3,000 American banks, which in turn started to pass this money on to their customers in the form of loans.

Fabio Vighi: ‘BlackRock were giving marching orders to the Fed. This is very important. People underestimate how powerful BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street — the three big investment funds — are. So the Fed executed the plan exactly like BlackRock told them to, in September 2019, when the Repo crisis broke out in Wall Street. And that meant going direct, that meant this new kind of monetary policy, where you don’t just create reserves, but you give them directly — to the banks in this case. And the Treasury, and the state, to an extent. But mostly to the banks. And as they said in that document, the risk was hyperinflation, which is something they don’t want. They don’t want people to go hungry, basically, because that becomes unmanageable. That will cause social upheaval, civil wars, and God knows what else.’

Lockdown was the preferred instrument to reduce the risk of hyperinflation. The economy needed not merely to be insulated, but to be disabled. As long as the core of the business sector remained intact — even if in an induced coma — the threat of an implosion in the real economy remained. In this context, paradoxically, lower levels of inflation were useful, reducing demand even while the economy was on life support. The chief instrument of the takedown, then, was the judicious use of inflation to burn the business sector out of existence, while avoiding the conflagration of hyperinflation that would have set the entire global economy on fire.

FV: ‘There was too much money in the system for something like this not to happen. And I think that they realised that it would be much more convenient for them to control the accident rather than let it happen as a kind of black swan event, because that would have been much more difficult to manage. But if they could control it, they could influence the whole situation and make it work for them, which I think is what is happening now, because now they are playing with a weapon that they have at their disposal, which is inflation. Not hyperinflation, but inflation, which impoverishes a society; we know that because our money has less and less value intrinsically with inflation. They are now forced to say that inflation is not transitory — it’s here to stay. And what I think they want to avoid with these lockdowns is inflationary spikes — (in which) all of a sudden we get potential runaway inflation, or maybe even hyperinflation. But they are using inflation at the same time.’

But Professor Vighi’s argument is not primarily concerned with these essentially symptomatic elements of the problem. He broadens out from the Titus analysis into his own conception of the deeper structural issue, of which the superficial instability of the global economy is a collateral symptom. His economics are essentially left-field. He started out studying philosophy and humanities in Italy, and then got into psychoanalysis, studying Freud and Lacan. He became interested in political economy, especially from a Marxist perspective, zeroing in on Marx’s Critique of Value, an area of close study in some European countries, especially Germany, but not so much in the Anglo-Saxon world. This discipline focusses on the shrinking of real economic life due to mechanisation, an issue that Marx anticipated, though not its pace or timings. Vighi is, in economic terms, a fundamentalist: his thinking traces things back to the beginning of economy. In this respect he expands radically on the Titus analysis, which focuses on the role of debt in destabilising money systems.

Vighi’s central point is that our economies have ceased to be ‘real’ economies because they are not built around human labour. His objection to the financialisation of markets and economies is not an aesthetic or even a moral one: He says that a fully financialised economy cannot work without enormous elements of compulsion. The idea that has prevailed within economic thought for decades that you don’t have to make people work if you can make money work is an illusion of the capitalist elites, he believes, because of a kind of law-of-diminishing-returns effect that afflicts re-investment in technology. By employing more technology and eliminating labour, the system limits its own capacity to create new surplus value, and consequently also profits. Financial systems only appear to generate dramatically more profit than labour processes: in reality, what is generated is not real wealth, but ‘fictitious money’ —  a ‘trick of circulation’ in Marx’s phrase.

The recent drift of economy into financialisation, he insists, is no longer sustainable.

FV: ‘Not in capitalism. It’s not sustainable because, in capitalism, the real economic value comes from work, comes from investments in work. So capital has to invest into wage labour in order to produce surplus value, which is then converted into profits when the commodities that are produced are sold on the market. This is the one thing that I would go back to again and again in Marx. I think this is where he was right. I don’t care about the politics — I have no time for that kind of thing — but I think that the Critique of Value in Marx is still the fundamental theory that needs to be kept in mind. Because in capitalism you create profits only when capital is invested into value-producing labour. And labour produces value only when it’s capital that invests in it. So in the financial sector, we don’t have real value. We have fictitious value, which is value that comes from the future — money-creating-money. But that sort of “Magic tree” value is not real value.’

He does not believe that the ‘real economy can be saved, at least not in the present conditions. He believes capitalism will eventually self-destruct, but may have some lives in it still. It is, he says, a ‘self-revolutionising’ medium. But to continue serving its own needs for survival, it will become more and more authoritarian.

JW: ‘How much of a problem is the debt-based money generation associated with modern fiat currencies? Were there options within this model?’

FV: ‘It’s difficult to say. This is all uncharted territory, in many ways, when you think about monetary issues, because there might be different ways of organising the distribution of fiat money, even of introducing a kind of currency that is not related to debt, or a kind of interest-free currency even. But I think we need to start with what we have, and what we have is capitalism, and capitalism works precisely like it is working now. All right: It’s clearly not working any longer — that’s the fundamental point. Up until a few years ago, the basis of the economy was the real economy, and the financial sector was a kind of appendage, very much linked to how the real economy was doing. You know: the stocks were growing if there was a real growth in the real economy. Now it’s literally the other way around, so the basis of our economies is speculation. It’s this kind of hot-air balloon. It is not real, it’s pure speculation, often totally toxic, with no real basis at all in our world. It’s pure speculating for the sake of speculating, mostly based on debt-leveraging, so it’s all debt that is put into action, and sold, and then you get derivatives, and all kinds of speculations — it’s a crazy world. But that’s the basis. And the real economy is now the appendage.’

JW: ‘And the debt just gets bigger and we push it ahead of us like snow. . .’

FV: ‘That tells you that the economy is not able to produce wealth any longer, because it needs to make more debts in order to try and produce some wealth. But this debt is running into the future. We cannot stop. We keep borrowing from the future, more and more.  That’s not sustainable. Or, it’s only sustainable through these paradoxical measures that we’re adopting now, with lockdowns and restrictions, this kind of opening and closing of society. They can’t (fully) open society now. They can’t.So they need to open it for a little bit, see how it goes, and then close it again. Because otherwise inflation would just skyrocket — what they call the overheating of the economy. They wouldn’t be able to sustain it. They’ve created so much fake money up there, so much helicopter money, they’ve thrown so much money into the financial sector that the moment that money leaks into the real economy, which it does . . . (He shrugs).’

This raises the ominous possibility that the recent ‘opening up’ of the economies of both Ireland and the UK bespeaks some kind of controlled, limited experiment to observe how economies are likely to react to the sudden combination of pent-up demand with relatively lavish amounts of ready cash and issues of diminishing goods due to vax mandates and supply-chain issues. Once again, we are to be the canaries in the coalmine.

 FV: ‘The counter-argument is: that money stays in the financial sector, it doesn’t come down, which is a lie. We know that it is a lie especially now, after the Fed’s new monetary policy where they give the money directly to the banks. The banks, of course, lend money into the economy, and that immediately creates inflation. The inflation we see now is not purely the product of supply chains — it’s also that, but it’s mostly the product of this massive money that’s been thrown into the system, and it’s now coming down like an avalanche into our world.’

JW: ‘By your analysis, the shift away from human labour is the fundamental issue. It ought to be possible to fix that, but the system itself refuses to pursue certain options. Politics and financial power are entering into an arrangement to fix things on behalf of the system and the people don’t count?’

FV: ‘Absolutely not. It’s all about those guys who want to keep their privileges. They don’t want to let go of what they have, fundamentally. They want to reproduce the system as it is, whatever it costs, whatever it takes to do it. And I think what it takes to do it now is to slowly but gradually impoverish people more and more, and control them by authoritarian means. There’s no other way that they can keep the financial sector going as it is without impoverishing people. And they do that through inflation. Inflation kind of comes inevitably, and it’s something that by definition devalues money, and therefore impoverishes people, particularly the middle classes, which are now becoming the working classes. It used to be that the working classes were working up to become middle classes, and now it looks like the middle classes have no other option but to become impoverished, and to me that’s inevitable. It’s not something that you can change without neo-Keynesian policies of state spending, and those haven’t worked. And neo-liberal policies of austerity — that clearly doesn’t work either.

‘What we’ve seen clearly over the years is the shrinking of the economies. That is something that you can describe clearly; the shrinking of economies all over the world. Even the Chinese economy is shrinking. And that is a trajectory that, to me, is simply unstoppable.  And it’s because of this holy alliance between capital and technology, which again you cannot avoid, because capitalism is about competition between different actors. So everybody wants the latest technology to be more competitive on the market. But the use of technology overall — taking the total mass of profits — it has a negative impact on the total mass of value produced by the global economy. The point is that in the total mass of profits, obviously some businesses win over others, but overall there a shrinking of the mass of profits, and that I think is inevitable because of this phenomenon we call automation. Because it’s based on work, and human work is becoming more and more redundant, because of automation, machines, et cetera.

‘Keynes talked a lot about technological automation. He knew it. He knew that this was happening sooner or later. And that’s what we’re seeing today. If you go to the supermarket — there used to be 50 people working there, and now there’s three people, four people. You can do everything with machines. And those people were creating value. Right? They were throwing value into the system, they were throwing wealth. And now, with machines working, you create less and less value, because machines don’t get salaries and they don’t go to the supermarket to buy stuff. And Marx himself kind of intuited that, but he couldn’t predict how fast it would move. The third industrial revolution (the digital wave  of technology that began in the 1980s)and  now the fourth industrial revolution — it will be game over in a sense for this traditional type of capitalism in the liberal context. And I think capitalism will have to reproduce itself by authoritarian means.’

JW: ‘Some off-mainstream commentators have been saying from the beginning that the small and medium-sized enterprises were being deliberately attacked — that it wasn’t merely collateral damage. At first it seemed incredible, but gradually it came to seem indisputable: They were actually targeting businesses with a view to driving them out of the marketplace.’ 

FV: ‘I think this is one way of reducing whatever is left of the real economy to some kind of debris that they can control more easily. But they’re playing a very clever game, because they still give people some money to survive. And then, once they lose their business, they will be reduced to some form of unemployment maybe “underemployment”, you know, there are different kinds of unemployment. And at that point they will accept the bit of charity that they get from governments — the UBI thing, or whatever.  And they will come with some conditions: “You can only spend what we tell you to spend”;  “You cannot buy cigarettes, you have to buy something essential.” Things like that. And that will be easier to do the moment you get rid of physical money, the moment you introduce digital currencies, which they are doing as well. There are a number of things that all point in the same direction, basically.’

JW: ‘How do you see it playing out? Timings, rollout, how will it register?’

FV: ‘It’s quite unpredictable. I thought that by now they would have stopped with this pandemic crap, you know. I thought that they would have realised that it’s not viable any longer for them. But clearly they want to milk it as much as they can, right? They want to bring out all these variants and so on. But they’re also testing the waters, as it were, to see if it still works, and if people get scared and they take five, six vaccines, and they can carry on as long as they want with it. And, in the meantime — and this is the key point — they are impoverishing people. In the meantime, they are taking things away from people, more and more. Like, Italy’s a rich country in terms of wealth. It’s got a huge public debt, but people are rich, especially in the north of Italy. And they are getting impoverished, little by little, gradually, month by month. Inflation is devaluing their money. And more and more people are being thrown into poverty. It’s the metaphor of the (boiling) frog, right? You raise the temperature little by little, and people don’t even realise, then they die.’

JW: ‘Have you any sense of a timeframe?’

VF: ‘I think that this will come down pretty soon. When people get . . . Today I went to buy something for my kids  — a takeaway — and the price had almost doubled from the last time I went, and soon people won’t be able to afford it. Of course they can always indebt themselves, and more debt, more debt, in order to sustain a certain lifestyle. But soon they realise it will be counter-productive and they shouldn’t do it and they will start doing different things.’

JW: ‘It will be a shocking thing for people who have bought into the official narrative to wake up one morning and find that all their savings have either disappeared or reduced to next to nothing. Do you think that aside from the inflationary aspect we could have things like bail-ins or could the currency be wiped out and set at zero?’

FV: ‘Yes I think that is definitely on the cards. They are actually saying this themselves. What’s the name of the British guy (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak) — he’s released a video where he is talking about  Central Bank digital currencies. They’re working on it and they want to do it, and in China they already have digital currency in place.   And that will give them huge control, and once they get rid of physical cash, they will have total control over people.  So they definitely want to do it, but whether they will be able to do it I am not so sure, because people will realise, will smell a rat.  One way they can do it is by taxing the use of physical cash, for example. It’s easy to do actually: You start to say that if you use physical cash you will have to pay five per cent extra, or whatever, and then people will use digital all the time. I think even today, only 20 per cent of all economic value is physical cash, and the rest is digital cash so it’s not a huge effort for them to get rid of it. With blockchain technology they could easily introduce digital currency. But then again – maybe things like barter will come back  - or local currencies or physical currencies recreated in a different way.’

Yes. Already, some people are beginning to organise and plan for a kind of parallel economy.  At no point did our ‘democratic’ systems offer us the possibility of a discussion about ways of avoiding this — perhaps reconstructing  the working world for the benefit of the people, for those who labour, redefining the concept of stakeholder to include the citizen as shareholder in the means of production, with a right to a dividend of the produce of the system that has supplanted human labour, et cetera. We have been conditioned into thinking of the system as impersonal and eternal (if flawed and prone to occasional collapse), whereas in a democracy it ought to be in some sense structurally and, as though to an AGM of shareholders, answerable to ‘the people’. It is interesting that, right now, this is the last thing on anyone’s mind, as we struggle to recover even our most fundamental rights from governments we had assumed were comprised of our representatives, but in the past two years have left us in no doubt as to the error of such an assumption.

The moment we’re arrived at now — the AI moment — has been signalled for, more or less, a century, so we’ve had plenty of time to get our ideas straight. Yet, aside from a brief explosion of discussion back in the 1980s about ‘the future of work’, we seem to have assumed it would look after itself. Yet, the questions it raises are surely the core of Marxian concern: the ownership of the means of production, a matter concerning which leftists generally seem to have fallen silent.  It has seemed to me that, regardless of ideology, democratic communities ought to have long been examining this question from all angles, with a view to formulating a new kind of society in which the ‘human quotient’ might find a new way of existing in the absence, generally speaking, of paid work.

It may well be that such a society is impossible, but we surely had a responsibility to try, if not for our own sake, then for the sake of those to whom we might bequeath the world on departing it. Yet, from the 1990s onwards — under the influence of low interest rates and consequent manufactured prosperity — this discussion has been more or less abandoned outside of academia, where it was pursued in largely a token manner. It might well be observed that, in principle, democratic societies — even if Marx had never existed — ought to be talking about how to redistribute the dividend of the AI moment to their ‘shareholders’, which is to say their citizens. It might be postulated, for example, that the chief concern would be along the lines of contriving something like a ‘redistribution of dignity’ (and probably other elements, like creativity, nurturing, meaning etc.) with a view to an initial framing of the necessary discussion. But nothing of the kind has occurred — leaving behind what one might well conclude is a deliberately cultivated lacuna. 

Now we’re being driven into the terminus and not a thought in any head. The result is that the human population faces a Hobson’s choice: totalitarianism or chaos. By the rule of might-is-right, we may end up with the former, albeit incorporating an ironic mix of capitalist, neo-feudalist and communist elements. This situation is largely a failure of the democratic/political system to insist upon the appropriate issues being tabled and thrashed out. Now, it may be too late.

The idea that the development of technology should be privately owned appears to be anathema — unthinkable — in our culture. To suggest that it ought to be owned by the people causes an involuntary shudder to pass through the (cultivated) ‘liberal’ physique. Yet, most ‘liberals’ are cool as ice with something far, far worse.

JW: ‘Don’t we need to find ways of reclaiming our economic systems and give their fruits back to the people as a whole, notwithstanding that we might no longer be contributing our labour?’

FV: ‘I agree with you. In that sense it would make sense to have ownership of the means of production — if we can go back to the real economy, the distribution of real goods. But in that case we need to step out of the capitalist mentality, and also deflate completely the financial system. We need to eliminate the financial speculations, because they wouldn’t work in this context — in a context where there are people who collectively own the means of production, and agree on a certain redistribution — not based on work any longer. The problem with socialism was that it was a narrative based on work. So to me, socialism was state capitalism, almost — very similar in many ways. But now we are out of that narrative, we know that work can be done by machines mostly, we need to find a way to justify people’s existence outside work. So, you mentioned dignity . . . There’s other type of work that people can do: helping other people, what we call voluntary work, mentoring the young, creative work, intellectual work. Why not base the society on that kind of work rather than on work that is done for profits, which is not working any longer? I mean, that’s the problem. It’s not like there are revolutionary armies outside trying to destroy the system. No, the system is imploding, the system is shrinking.  People need to realise that this work society is imploding. I think we are in denial at the moment, and maybe the financialisation of the economy is the worse part of denial in that respect.’

JW: ‘Universal Basic Income, set apart from the social credit tyranny, might have had some merits — freeing people up to do more creative and inventive things with their lives. But here, combined with surveillance and social credit regimes, it will become an instrument of tyranny.’

FV: ‘If you take it out of the context, yes, it has merit, because it helps people to survive and it gives people also an option to think about the world, you know? Because potentially you’ve got time to organise, you’ve got time to do other things. And that in itself is a positive thing, absolutely. But it still is a symptom, I think, of this shrinking economy that we’re talking about — the real economy. So I think in the long term, when most people will be on UBI, or whatever, it will need to be administered with very sophisticated technology, and by authoritarian means. There’s no other way. This is the direction the whole thing is moving in.’

JW: ‘Given the logic at play — the fragility of the system, the fact that the system is controlled by its own mega beneficiaries, the relative ignorance of most people about the workings of monetary and economic systems, the bought-off state of modern media — the most ‘plausible’ ‘solution’ became what in another light might have been the most unthinkable. It’s bizarre.’

FV: ‘People are always telling me, “But c’mon, it’s not in capitalism’s interest to lock down society.” People haven’t realised that capitalism is not consumerism any longer. It’s not about work and consumption. It’s more and more about finance. It’s an ultra-financialised capitalism that we’re talking about. The disparity between the value produced in the financial sector with regard to the real economy, or the retail economy, is already huge. And I think we come to a point where, let’s say, the economy cannot manage itself with its own tools. It needs some kind of extra tool, like global emergencies, or, you know, this sort of authoritarian turn, which is likely to become totalitarian, even though it might still call itself democracy, you know, with some thinly-disguised definition, but in truth it’s obviously totalitarian.’

Is he suggesting that ‘emergencies’ could become an enduring tool of economic policy, that the totalitarianism that has visited Western societies over the past two years is not merely a temporary device to manage a lockdown but a permanent state of existence? He is. If we wish our societies to continue as conventional capitalist economies, the only way of doing this, within the present system, is to accompany the maintenance of a constant state of emergency with forms of social control that prevent the populace from rattling too much the chains that are necessary to making this kind of system work. For certain, the foundations of a long-form totalitarianism, together with elements of a biosecurity state — including our acquiescence in it — have been established. Much of the donkey-work has been done: the blueprint, infrastructure, paraphernalia, habits, are in place to be activated at any time in response to a similar or different ‘emergency’. We, the people, are primed, programmed and ready to be herded and driven once again.

FV: ‘There’s no way that we can go back to a different kind of capitalism. For me this is inertia, almost. It’s a kind of evolutionary trajectory within capitalism that is slowly killing the system because the system is shrinking in terms of its capacity to produce real value for the people. But it can try to survive by kicking the can down the road for a bit longer. But it needs this sort of totalitarian means.’

JW:  ‘How do the “emergency” and “totalitarian” elements combine? Does this “new model of economy” need both elements in unison?’

FV: ‘I think the emergency brings in totalitarianism. It legitimises the totalitarian measures. We can see that now — how it changes people’s mindframes straightaway. People are going, “Oh yeah, but they’re right: if it save lives . . . we need to go with the totalitarianism.” People are saying it in the streets already!’

A handful of years back, when we were still free to travel, my wife and I were at Dublin Airport one morning to catch a flight to the United States. New machines had been in place for some time, to ‘assist’ passengers in checking themselves in, but now there were machines to check in your baggage as well. At some of these machines, there were people in airline uniforms helping passsengers to negotiate the new system. With their help, you could carry out the full process yourself and then deposit your tagged bags at a desk in a corner of the check-in lounge. There were still people behind the check-in counters, for those who were unable to figure out the machines, and also for those whose bags had failed the weight test or some such. It struck me that we were moving closer to a moment when there would be nobody behind any of the counters, just people milling around in front carrying out the airline’s work for it (while still paying the market price of an air ticket). My first thought was, “Progress!” or some such. My second thought was that there was a problem here, not at first sight for the airline, but for the society, which went something like this: Since the people inside the counter would also become, at other moments, the people standing outside other counters, the net outcome was not a saving of costs but a shrivelling of total economic activity. To put it another way: If you eliminate the people behind the counters, you eliminate also the counters, which is tantamount to eliminating the economies they cumulatively comprise. This, I think, is close to illustrating Fabio Vighi’s concept of the ‘structural problem’. It is also essentially what I was writing about 30 years ago, though I did not put it so succinctly.

FV: ‘That’s why they want to give people some money. People will want to consume a little, anyway. The only solution is that they throw some money at us — this UBI thing, which will become truly universal, I think, especially with digital currencies, and will allow them to control this money that they give to people to consume a little, and that will in a sense keep the system going for a bit longer, allowing people to have some money, even if they don’t work any longer. I think they have to be very artful to synchronise this because if they impoverish people too quickly, people will react violently. You can see that from history. It’s inevitable. When they have nothing to eat, they will start riots and revolutions. So they’d want to avoid that, of course. So that’s why the UBI thing can help them to at least give people the illusion that they’re free, somehow, when they’re not, any longer. You know, when they have something to eat et cetera. And also they said it themselves: You’ll have nothing but you’ll be happy.’

Within the logic of the system, and the interests and scruples of its — in effect — proprietors, there was ‘no alternative.’ Outside of that logic, the alternative was a radical one: tell the people what the problem was, set in place a plan to replace the system at a chosen moment, in accordance with democratic principles, acknowledging that human beings have jointly-held interests and equities in the economic and monetary systems that grew out of the totality of human endeavour and ingenuity through time, and commence a democratic discussion as to how this might be managed to create a genuinely new kind of world — in particular, though not exclusively, tackling the vexed question of how to bequeath to the people their just entitlement of a ‘dividend’ from the final onset of the AI economy, which would in effect put the entire species into a largely involuntary retirement. This would have posed many taxing problems, not all of them economic. There would be, for example, the problem of how to ‘reinvent’ human cultures and societies for an age in which the meaning and dignity of human existence was no longer bound up with paid work. This might have involved something along the lines of what I have called a ‘redistribution of dignity,’ so as to valourise activities of the human that are currently deemed to be ‘social,’ ‘voluntary,’ or ‘recreational.’ Professor Vighi agrees with this analysis but, I suspect, thinks it impractical and naïve to imagine that the ‘proprietors’ of the system as presently constituted, were ever going to hand it over to the people out of the goodness of their hearts.

FV: ‘I read what you said about the redistribution of (dignity). Well, first of all capitalism was never really about redistribution. It was for a bit, under social democratic conditions, but it was only thirty years, more or less. The whole history was never really about (that). It was about greed and making money, and profiting.’

What is happening, then — definitively — has nothing to do with your health. It has to do with what you may have thought of as your wealth. It is, in effect, an attempted plundering of the world’s financial resources with a view to commandeering the hard assets later, for a song — in effect, retaining most or all of the real value of the world’s economies but transferring them from the billions of the world’s working populations to the comparatively miniscule cadre of self-appointed ‘owners and controllers’ of a system that, although having osmotically deviated from democratic principles and understandings, is still — in principle, morality, truth and correctness — the property of the human race as a whole, for to say otherwise would be to say that democracy is and has always been a sham. The implications are staggering, ominous and unparalleled by anything in human history before.

We seem to be moving towards a kind of serviced slavery. But how long can that last — the ‘serviced’ element, I mean? Things change. For the initial period, yes, as the new oligarchs sneakily rub their hands in glee at the idea of getting away with it, the people may find themselves indulged, and the atmosphere may be, for a time, more Huxlean that Orwellian. But then, ever so slowly, the temperature may change. The oligarchs, controlling pubic opinion as much as everything else, may be able to impose on the public mind, and in the minds of its constituent members, a sense of individual uselessness, then of superfluousness, then of pointlessness. Gradually we may move towards a kind of constructive culture of self-liquidation. In five years, ten years, the oligarchs may ask: Why are we paying these people to just sit around guzzling beer and stuffing their faces with pizza?

But this will perhaps be matched on the other side of the line by a belated awakening to the trick that has been pulled.

FV: ‘I’m sure there will be revolutions, changes. I’m sure people will become aware. And also because we have the technological means now to live at higher standards. So people will start asking questions: Why are we under this control society? Where they control everything we spend? Or they control everything?

‘If you throw into the mix the climate change thing, the control society becomes pretty obvious, the carbon footprint and all the rest of it. It’s going to be easy. I think the climate narrative is an even better one than this one to control people, because it’s really something that hits people in the heart: “We are destroying the planet!” So people sacrifice, you see, willingly almost. So they have a few weapons at their disposal. The pandemic is an obvious one, but the climate change one is better in the long run. Or a mixture of the two, some kind of deadly overlap of virus and climate that will keep people quiet and scared. But it’s all done, I think, to keep this system in place for a bit longer, for as much longer as they can.’

JW: ‘How do you see the role of the political classes in all this?’

FV: ‘I think the people who are in power, they know that they have to do it. I think they really were given orders by . . . I think we underestimate how hierarchical the system is, and how politics is totally overwhelmed, totally in the hands of the financial people. So they either say yes or they’re out. You know, it’s as simple as that, and then it’s a matter of their careers, their lives, their money and everything else. So they end up saying yes. The moment you stand in the way, you’re out. They destroy you, one way or another —politically, of course, but maybe also personally. I don’t really have much faith in politics as it is now. Whether it’s left or right, to be honest, doesn’t make a difference, But I have to say that the right — unfortunately from my point of view — at least they’ve been a bit more vocal about these issues, And maybe religion has a place here — I don’t know. But then you think about the Catholic Church, you think about the pope — right?’

JW: ‘Yes. Religion or spirituality are languages of that dimension of the human being and the human community concerning its deeper dimension, and there is no other language for this, really, that is effective. It is very problematic when you have the pope and all these guys coming out on the wrong side of history.’

FV: ‘That’s the worst kind of thing that can happen to any kind of of spirituality — like at the moment, with the Pope in with them. But that doesn’t matter as spirituality can develop in different ways outside of the official channels and so on, and it can connect with even more material things like growing one’s own vegetables, developing some kind of parallel economy, parallel society.’

In all of this, the left has gone AWOL, abandoning its core base (and all questions pertaining to the welfare thereof) in favour of a new client-set under the rubric of ‘cultural Marxism’ (an unhelpful moniker, generally speaking). This desertion has seemed to culminate in the Time of Covid, with left-liberals (the Woke and SJW elements in particular, though not exclusively) essentially rowing in with ‘The Man’ — that legendary figure of hippie lore who sought to control and own everyone. One result of all this is that the blue-collar worker of myth has had to go shopping for advocacy of his interests, and has ended up on the far side of the traditional ideological divide. Even more bizarrely, in some leftist quarters there is this daft idea that they should support the Covid tyranny on the basis of the alleged racing certainty that it will bring down the capitalist system.

FV: ‘It’s madness. I can’t explain it. Well, I can, in many ways. There’s the liberal left and . . . what can you say? I’ve given up on them a long time ago. They are totally part of power, so what can you do with them? Nothing. The more radical left I’m disappointed by, to an extent, because they should see through this: that it serves a quite different purpose than pandemic, et cetera. But for some reason, because of this narrative of solidarity the system has abused, they’re falling for it. They think that the system is doing something good in terms of solidarity! With the vaccines, et cetera. I think that’s how they were co-opted. And I think the system knows that it needs the left [in order] to do all this. It needs that kind of leftist mindset of solidarity, collectiveness, collectivity, et cetera. And it very cleverly co-opted the left into it. Because it wouldn’t have worked, I think, unless these notions of solidarity were part of the game. That’s why we get all these philanthropists around. And people love the philanthropists  — they do good for everybody else!! (Laughs).’

JW: ‘Is it fear-based?’

FV: ‘I don’t think it’s fear-based, I think it’s ideological, I know some radical leftists really believe that this will be the end of capitalism and the beginning of some kind of communism. I don’t know what kind of communism they have in mind. But they kind of think, secretly at least, “Well this will break capitalism finally,” which is so naïve, because capitalism is actually so resourced . . . I think capitalism has organised this precisely to avoid implosion, so it can carry on, maybe another ten years, maybe 50 years, maybe even a century, by different means. It’s not the end of capitalism. Some of them — I think a minority — thought like that, and the others — most of them were in the system, the liberals. And the others like (Slavoj) Žižek and so on . . . I think, naïvete — this naïve sense of solidarity. I don’t know how they can put together the system and solidarity! I just don’t know how!’

JW: ‘A couple of decades back, the left appeared to locate a new client base, the so-called minorities who have the protection of what is called cultural Marxism. Almost immediately, their old base — the working class — was stigmatised as white and reactionary. Suddenly the blue-collar base of the old left was the enemy. Amazing how these forces converged to make this happen just prior to this moment.’

FV: ‘Yes. And identity politics is a wonderful instrument of distraction. That’s what I’ve always thought about it. You talk about it and it becomes the main purpose of any kind of struggle, and you forget that there are causes that are much deeper and much more important for . . . everybody, in fact, for the collective. And those are totally removed from any discussion. The left has given up on questioning these things that we are questioning here, for a long time: like the purpose of work, like the means of production — things like that are totally out. They’ve been out for a while, unfortunately. And I think it’s been quite easy to co-opt the left, through promoting this cultural or identity type of Marxism, Woke stuff. This works perfectly for the system.’

JW:  ‘And then there was the astonishing phenomenon whereby Covid seemed to manifest almost from the beginning in full ideological raiment, designed to repel some and, perhaps as a consequence of this reaction, draw others to its side. The first respiratory virus in history to break populations down between left and right . . .’

FV: ‘Absolutely. In America it was particularly like that, with the Trump thing. I was writing a book for an American publisher in 2020, already under contract et cetera, and I used some of my stuff on Covid in the book. I have a chapter on it. And, all of a sudden . . .  censorship! I couldn’t do that because it was politically insensitive! Because, in America, if you say something like this then you’re with Trump. And the liberal press let that happen. So it totally polarised in political terms, But, again, this is part of the ideology we’re talking about, because people don’t see the real issue. They think it’s some bad guys versus some good guys.’

JW: ‘It seems to be set up so that people who opposed the narrative would come across as “right wing” or “far right”, and this caused a ricochet by which people on the left decided that, if that was the case, they would support the narrative. We were all totally played.’

FV: ‘I think initially it had a lot to do with that. Because it came down to the idea that wearing the mask was the right thing to do for the left and the wrong thing for the right. Same with vaccines. Everything became polarised in political terms.’

JW:  ‘And now people have become quite crazed: left-liberals calling for vax mandates, soft-pedalling on mandatory medical experiments, eugenics, et cetera.’

FV: ‘My God! This is what really pisses me off more than anything: that these guys are ready to protest on behalf of bears in the Arctic — about anything really — but they turn around and, when it comes to these kinds of discrimination we’re seeing today, they pretend they’re not there. Or they are in favour of them!’

JW: ‘Or drag out their boxes of semantic rationalisations. Like apartheid suddenly means something other than discriminatory treatment — skin colour is not comparable to vaccination status, because you “choose” to be unvaxed!’

FV: ‘It’s incredible. In Italy it’s so bad at the moment. I was there a few weeks ago and it really is incredible, and it’s getting worse and worse: You cannot have a coffee standing up without your vaccination card. It’s properly authoritarian. It’s dystopian, and yet people are going with it, and they’re turning against each other, fighting this horizontal war against each other.’

JW: ‘Have you been surprised by the responses of the public to this?’

FV: ‘Yes. In academia, I tell you, I’m invisible. I can’t speak to anybody. I’m waiting for the vice-chancellor to call me and to be accountable for what I’m saying. It will come, because all my colleagues, even the closest colleagues, don’t talk to me any longer! I’ve lost friends over this. I thought they were good friends, but clearly . . . And also I can’t really talk to “normal people” at all, because they just turn around and . . . I try, little by little, to say a few things: “Well, maybe you should question, you know, this and that?” But no — they’re totally blinded by the official narrative.

‘It is, psychologically speaking, a form of hypnosis — mass hypnosis. And what do you do? You create little networks. I’ve been in touch with loads of people from everywhere. We talk about this and that. You create something that maybe is the basis for something to come, and then you write something because you feel like that’s the only weapon you’ve got. What else can you do?’

JW: ‘Maybe a lot of people are more scared that you’re going to be right than that you’re going to be wrong . . . ‘

FV: ‘Absolutely. They’re scared of their own thinking! They’re scared of their own understanding of the situation. I think they’ve repressed a kind of knowledge that they know is there, but they don’t want to have to face it, because they don’t have a Plan B. They don’t have anything else apart from their belief in this system, and if this system falls apart, then they’re completely lost. So I think it comes from a deep sense of anxiety, which causes a refusal to think.’

JW: ‘What, if anything, might trigger a change?’

FV:  ‘Who knows? But I’m always thinking that maybe some piece of news . . . Sometimes it takes very little to turn people against such things. Something that comes out of the system, because the system is not perfect — we know that. They make mistakes all the time as well. They try not to, but . . . So maybe capitalising on some kind of mistake that they would make. My effort now is to try to be as clear as possible in what I say, because I want people to get the causal connections — the connections from an imploding society to the pandemic simulation, and all the rest. But I agree with you that people will struggle to admit it to themselves that this is real, even if they understand it logically. Even if you give them the figures, even if you give them the evidence.’

JW: ‘The media, of course, is completely corrupt . . .’

FV: ‘I have had a little bit of faith that there could be a kind of journalistic . . . somewhere . . . but now that’s being destroyed completely. When I see mainstream media, it’s just . . . they’ve just sold themselves totally.’

JW: ‘Despite knowing what I know, I sometimes find it hard to believe this is happening. Nothing in my life up to 2020 had prepared me for what I’ve witnessed.’

FV: ‘Yes, It’s been a shock also for me. Those who are pulling the strings . . . you know that notion of “the banality of evil”? I think it’s very much like that. They’re doing their jobs. They don’t really question it too much. And what they care about is that the system can continue, that it can reproduce itself. Then they go home to their families and they’re nice people et cetera. But in the meantime they’re destroying everything.

‘I don’t think they have full control over it, because things can happen. But to me they are moving in that direction quite quickly now. And things can happen quite quickly in history — now, in the next ten years. What’s scary for me is that this is still heresy for most people. This is madness for most people, because people still believe that we live in a certain type of economy, they believe in institutions, they think that institutions are free, they believe that the media are free and pluralistic. They don’t realise that the economic power, the financial power, has taken control of everything. Whatever we can think of, it’s controlled by them. So I think the first step is to make people aware, more and more, that these things are happening, and to think counter-intuitively, because you need to think now in these counter-intuitive terms to understand what is going on.‘

JW: ‘I think the idea that this whole scam has been so cunning has given people the idea that they are dealing with supernatural levels ointelligence. Yet, there’s no denying that there is an enormous ingenuity about the whole thing, at a dark level, which has scared people into thinking that these people are omnipotent.  I’m interested that you say they are not as smart as people think they are.’

FV: ‘No. I don’t think they are. Because we began to think of them as some kind of spectre, like in some James Bond movie, but they’re not. I think we need to think in systemic terms: It’s the system that is attempting to introduce its own conditions but through different means. And these guys are enabling it. These guys are functionaries, they’re bureaucrats of capitalism, of the system. And they will find ways to make it work, regardless of the consequences. So, to me, what really matters for them is that the system continues. And they will try to manage the consequences. They will try and do what they can. But then again you can’t really predict, because first of all they are not that intelligent, they don’t have a a super intelligence that we don’t have! And, also, it’s just a few of them, and more and more of the majority of the people will be in these difficult conditions and they will need to stick together.’

JW: ‘In a sense — not a moral sense, but within the logic of the system as it was functioning and the options they saw as viable — they didn’t have any choices?’

FV: ‘In a sense, yes. Because the other choice would be to be prepared to move out of this system and create a new one. But I don’t think that was ever for them a possibility. If you look at their faces, they are quite desperate, themselves. They don’t have a Plan B. I think they know that the main plan is going to be painful for most people. They’re trying to manage it somehow. But it’s not going to work, and at some level they must know.’

JW: ‘It’s also possible they have no idea what’s going to happen?’

FV: ‘No. They don’t. They can’t really control the effects that this will have on people. They’re trying to do that [to control things]. They’re lying all the time, through ideology and all the rest of it.  But you can’t . . . I don’t think you can totalise the system completely. It doesn’t work, because there’s always something that you can’t control in people. In psychoanalysis, which is where I come from in a sense, it’s the unconscious. The unconscious cannot be brought under control. There’s something within each of us that is totally uncontrollable — even for us, even for our own consciousness. We don’t know what it is, but we cannot control it. And that, I think, is also true socially. And that’s where our freedom, you know . . .  this hope for freedom . . . comes from, because there’s something that they cannot control. So in a sense I’m optimistic, but there has to be come kind of critique, some collective awareness of what’s going on — this needs to grow.’

JW: ‘In one of your essays you make a chilling observation: “No crime against humanity can be ruled out when systematic implosion is so stubbornly denied.”’ 

FV: ‘I tell you, Why not? I mean, these guys do not . . . Eugenics? Malthusian narratives? They’ve been in there for a long time! They’d be very happy if the world population was reduced, because they know we’re going towards a world where less and less people are needed to produce wealth, and more and more people would need to be given the money to consume, if they are alive. So I really believe that. Why not? We’ve seen it in history before. So why are people surprised? Do they think that those guys care? Really?’

JW: ‘It’s interesting that you’ve been the one to push this analysis, not being an economist per se. Economists in general have been silent about or complicit with Covid. But nor have they spoken about the “shrinkage” problem.’

FV: ‘Economists only think about the surface. I studied economy for a little bit and then I got so fed up because all I was taught was through this logic of supply and demand, et cetera — the very surface of economy, not about how value is produced: the big questions that you ask as a child even, Why can’t they just print money and give it to us, Daddy? And when I asked that question to my father, he didn’t really know how to answer it. He mentioned something about inflation, but I didn’t quite get it. These things are not studied. They don’t really teach you this stuff. So economists end up being very technical, but miss the big picture. So you need somebody like a philosopher, somebody that can zoom out and look at the whole thing.’

JW:  ‘Where would you place yourself in terms of your preferences in terms of outcomes? Are you a “Marxist”?’

FV: ‘It’s so difficult to say, because now everything has been destroyed, in a sense, and I think now it’s a matter of creating some kind of popular alliance. I don’t care whether it’s left or right. I’ve been speaking to people on the right in Germany — they got in touch with me. They were from the AFD (Alternative für Deutschland). They got in touch with me and said, “Can we have a chat?” And they were really nice people and I thought, “Why shouldn’t I talk to them, just because I am a leftist and they are right-wing?” I don’t care about that any longer. We need to build some kind of alliance, whether it is leftist or rightist — forget about those traditional categories. I don’t think they work any longer in our context. There are people who are really trying to destroy us, or limit our capacity to flourish as human beings, and that’s all that matters. So to me it’s really about creating some kind of popular alliance, without those political captions of the past. I think that’s the first step.’

JW: ‘Do you think these people can be brought down without permanently destroying the fabric of civilisation?’

FV: ‘Wow That’s a big question! I’d love to see that at some point, but I don’t think that maybe, in my lifetime, I will see it!  But I’d like to see a radical change in the way things are. It’s the sheer imbalance in wealth that determines control and power, and the power structures and so on. So it would need to be brought down at some point. But it’s difficult to see that. I mean, it’s difficult to see any kind of revolutionary movement, or . . . I think that the only way for something to happen is if people develop some kind of parallel way of living together, parallel societies or . . . even if it’s only small communities to start with. Something can grow from there.’

We know not how this is going to land. The immediate future may be in some kind of parallel economy, supporting a parallel society: people going back to basics to provide their own needs, independently of government, banks, monetary systems or conventional supply chains. As with the airport analogy, we need to understand that by maximising profitability the financial conspirators attack the very root of their own fabulous wealth. In this moment — this moment alone — they have the optimal situation: All the money in the world, and the world as it more or less was until the day before yesterday. But, if they ‘succeed’ in the present endeavour, by the day after tomorrow this will have started to change, and the world will have begun to shrivel, and they and their money within it. It is possible that they are even more stupid than the most optimistic have allowed themselves to believe: that they have not paused to imagine what a world without people, without life, might be like. What would money be for? Could they eat it? They not merely saw furiously at the branch they are sitting on, but have forgotten that, when they are finished, there will be nobody to keep even the saw sharp for them to continue their hobby of sawing off their own supports.

JW: ‘It is the system that has failed, not humans, not their work. Human work can still create the value that humans need to survive. So, if our heads are not kicked in by the Gestapo, we might contrive our societies again from the ground up, based on our own needs, and leave “their” system to wither on the vine.’

FV: ‘Exactly that. Because it would lose . . . They can have all the financial power they want, but they need the people as well. They need the people to work for them, to buy their stuff. If people refuse to do that, because they’re doing something else — they’re producing their own goods for their own use, without all the waste and the excess — then they [the conspirators'] would be lost, absolutely! And I think that that’s maybe the most realistic way that some kind of opposition to this system can grow, because I can see it already developing quite quickly through networks. You can do it socially in different parts of the world when small communities can get together, through technology, and develop similar strategies.’

JW: ‘Its already happening. I have been going to meetings all around the country with 50 or so people in the room talking about growing vegetables and getting clean water et cetera.’

FV: ‘So the mindset is already there to do it. If the people are prepared to do it, I think there is some hope there. It comes from that sense of humanity, and that spirit, and people need to rediscover some kind of spirit, some kind of spiritual togetherness and sense of community. That’s why I have always been sympathetic towards religions, because they have that inner strength that brings people together. And that’s what is needed, because these guys are psychopaths. They are on their own — they don’t care about this because they are self-sufficient.’

If Fabio Vighi is correct — and there are vast swathes of evidence to indicate that he is — what we face here is, without doubt, the greatest, most amoral crime in all history. For it would mean not only that the people have been deceived to an end that bears no semblance of benefit or profit to the common good of humanity, but that the deception — enduring over two horrendous years — has been perpetrated to dispossess the human race in virtually its entirety under the subterfuge of protecting its well-being. Even more devastating is the realisation that, if this is what has occurred, it has been — and continues to be — effected with the cooperation and connivance of the ‘people’s representatives’ — the political classes, those elected by the people to protect their welfare and defend them from harm, as well as the supposedly democratic media who claimed the role of watchdogs over the people’s interests and well-being, the police forces and judiciaries paid for from the public purse, and with the collusion also of most of those who had purported to be the advocates and defenders of an ethical economics since Adam was a boy.

How many of the human actors implicated in this immense and lengthy deception might or could have known what they were doing is a matter, for the moment, of conjecture. It is hard to accept that, even if many of them did not realise at the beginning — being bamboozled like the public in general by the misdirecting story of pandemic — they did not, at some point along the way, begin to realise that something dark and nefarious was afoot. All of them, however, whether knowingly or not, must now come to terms with the fact that they have been engaged for two years with the criminal usurpation of the world at the expense of its billions of inhabitants to the benefit of a tiny cadre of evil and remorseless robber barons.

This has been a long article and yet we have not gone into many details that relate to its content and resonate within it in relation to what has been happening since the spring of 2020. Much of Professor Vighi’s primary analysis resonates with what we know of the misuse of the PCR text to generates Covid ‘cases’; with the clearly calculated and industialised falsification of mortality; with the frenetic urgency and malevolence that attended the purveying of alleged ‘vaccination’ long after herd immunity had been achieved; with the principles of groupthink defined by Irving Janis and of mass formation by Gustave Le Bon; with the global use of behavioural psychology to impose mass formation/hypnosis as an aid to social indoctrination and control; with the witness of hundreds of doctors, scientists and, occasionally, economic commentators (such as the German writer Ernst Wolff). Above all, Professor Vighi’s analysis renders crystal-clear the context and reasons for ‘measures’ that made no other sense: face masks, social distancing, the censoring of dissident voices — and dovetails with much, if not all, of the analysis of commentators who have placed these recent events in a broader historical frame. It is the most complete and manifestly irrefutable account of the ‘pandemic’ I have encountered to date.

You can read Fabio Vighi’s brilliant essays via this link to the Philosophical Salon:

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/author/fabiovighi/