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Syringe needles can be seen in front of a screen showing the name of the new COVID-19 variant. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

Slavoj Žižek

The Omicron variant is quickly spreading across the world. It comes with 30 mutations and spreads much faster than other variants, making it uncertain if the vaccines we have now will work against it. What I found distressing is that such defensive moves as travel bans were the only reaction, or at least the strongest reaction, to the specter of a new disaster. As Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist in South Africa put it, “There was no word of support that they’re going to offer to African countries to help them control the pandemic and particularly no mention of addressing this vaccine inequity that we have been warning about all year and [of which] we are now seeing the consequences play out.”

The spread of the Omicron variant was facilitated by a trio of scandalous neglect. First, the huge gap between vaccination rates in the developed world and in the developing world is likely to blame for the occurrence of the Omicron variant. Second, pharmaceutical companies have benefited greatly from huge sums of public funding for research and development. However, when these companies were solicited to allow free licensing of the vaccines, they all refused to do so, thus preventing many poorer countries from producing them. Finally, even in the developed countries themselves, pandemic nationalism soon prevailed over a serious coordination of efforts.

In all three cases, developed countries failed to pursue their own publicly proclaimed goals and are now paying the price — like a boomerang, the catastrophe we tried to contain in the Third World comes back to haunt us.

Nineteen-century German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi wrote: “La vérité en la repoussant, on l’embrasse” — that is, “in repelling the truth, one embraces it.” But does the opposite hold as well? In embracing the truth, does one repel it?

This is exactly what is happening today. “Truth” — in our case, the urgent need for global cooperation — is repelled by superficially embracing the need for green action, for collaboration to fight the pandemic. This can be seen in the case of the Glasgow conference, with its declarative “blah blah blah” and very little in terms of precise obligations.

This mechanism was already described in 1937 by George Orwell in “The Road to Wigan Pier”:

“We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed. [. . .] But unfortunately, you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctions away. [. . .] The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. [. . .] I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person.”

Orwell’s point was that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the opposite — that is, prevent the change from really occurring. Today’s academic leftists who criticize capitalist cultural imperialism are, in reality, horrified at the idea that their field of study would come crashing down. And the same goes for our fight against the pandemic and global warming. Swap out “class-distinctions” for “global warming and the pandemic” in the above passage from Orwell, and you have our current reality.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote that the disease would deal a mortal blow to capitalism, referencing the final scene of Tarantino’s “Kill Bill 2” where Beatrix disables the evil Bill and strikes him with the “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.” My point was that the coronavirus epidemic is a kind of “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” attack on the global capitalist system — a signal that we cannot go on the way we were up until now, a signal that a radical change is needed.

Many people laughed at me afterward, saying that capitalism not only contained the crisis but even exploited it to strengthen itself. I still think I was right. In these last few years, global capitalism changed so radically that some scholars, like Yanis Varoufakis or Jodi Dean, no longer call the new emerging order “capitalism” but “corporate neo-feudalism.” The pandemic gave a boost to this new corporate order, with new feudal lords like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg increasingly controlling the common spaces of our communication and exchange.

The pessimistic conclusion that imposes itself is that even stronger shocks and crises will be needed to awaken us. Neoliberal capitalism is already dying, so the forthcoming battle will not be the one between neoliberalism and its beyond, but the one between two forms of this beyond: corporate neo-feudalism which promises protective bubbles — like the “metaverse” — against threats, and the rude awakening which will compel us to invent new forms of solidarity.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]