Things like mortality rising higher than births in some parts of the country, antibiotic resistance creeping up, disability claims rising, sickness absence climbing…
— tern (@1goodtern) December 9, 2025
This recent post on the Twitter/X, which if true, might lead one to believe that such pandemic panic contributes to the geoeconomic panic infecting the world today.
Seeing as there has been an acceleration in the geopolitical and geoeconomic breakdown in recent years, largely emanating from the world’s heart of neoliberal capitalism in the US, as well as its (also neoliberal capitalist) vassals and proxies, how much of a role did/does the pandemic play? While that might be impossible to quantify, if we subscribe to the theory that bellicosity derives, at least in part, from crises of capitalism, then if COVID-19 is causing or is contributing to crises of capitalism, then there is likely to be a connection.
Evidence of COVID-19 Contribution to Crises of Capitalism
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic the US-led “West” was already in the midst of a productivity crisis.
Source: Michael Roberts’ Blog.
COVID has only served to deepen it. A November brief from npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine highlights the following:
…microeconomic impacts, which are estimated at an average annual burden of $1 trillion globally and $9000 per patient in the USA, with some individuals covering substantial out-of-pocket expenses. Annual lost earnings in the USA alone are estimated at approximately $170 billion. Long COVID was associated with increased unemployment, financial distress, and work impairment for up to three years post-infection.
Multiple other studies in the past year show how the pandemic has hammered productivity. See here, here, here.
Additionally, the pandemic might have deepened what is described as a birth rate crisis in advanced economies. While declining birth rates can have ecological benefits, they cause alarm among the capitalist class due to negative effects on economic growth.
While many of these economic trends were already present before the pandemic, COVID-19 accelerated them—or at least accelerated the fear of them. Similarly, while many of the billionaires now driving the US policies in response to these crises were already psychopaths, COVID further broke their brains—if not the virus itself then fear of what it meant for their power.
Evidence that Increased Belligerence Is Result of Crises of Capitalism, Which Are Worsened by COVID-19
If one subscribes to the view that capitalist expansion (i.e., the neverending need for growth) will eventually lead to attempts at empire building in order to facilitate such expansion, then the argument is that the US-led “West” needs to do something to kickstart another growth and profitability wave. From economist Michael Roberts:
This ‘golden era’ came to an end in the 1970s, when the profitability of capital fell sharply (according to Marx’s law) and the major economies suffered the first simultaneous slump in 1974-75, followed in 1980-2 with a deep manufacturing slump. Keynesian economics was exposed as a failure and economics returned to the neoclassical idea of free markets, free flow of trade and capital, deregulation of state interference and ownership of industry and finance, and the crushing of labour organisations. Profitability was (modestly) restored in the major economies and globalisation became the mantra; in effect the expansion of imperialist exploitation of the periphery under the guise of international trade and capital flows.
But again, Marx’s law of profitability exerted its gravitational pull and from the turn of the millennium, the major economies experienced a fall in the profitability of their productive sectors. Only a credit-fuelled boom in finance, real estate and other unproductive sectors disguised that underlying crisis of profitability for a while (the blue line below shows the profitability of US productive sectors and the red line, the overall profitability).
Source: BEA NIPA tables, author calculation
But eventually this culminated in the global financial collapse, the Euro debt crisis and the Long Depression; further enhanced by the impact of the pandemic slump of 2020. European capital has been left in tatters. And US hegemony now faced a new economic rival, China, after its stupendous rise in manufacturing, trade, and more recently technology, unaffected by economic crises in the West.
This is arguably what we are seeing playing out in conflicts across the globe today as the US uses its empire in an attempt to open up new markets. Why is the US trying regime change in Venezuela?
Trump said back in 2023 that it’s about the oil. And here’s the current Director of National Intelligence back in 2019:
Oil lobbyists have “unprecedented access” to Trump’s administration—meanwhile Pence/Bolton continue their crusade for regime change in Venezuela, the world’s richest oil reserves. The height of swamp politics. #PeopleBeforeProfits #ServiceBeforeSelf https://t.co/jlbip5u8tV
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) April 4, 2019
And it’s not just oil. Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado who argues for the bombing of her home country recently told the Miami Business Forum the following:
“For the U.S., we will turn this criminal hub into a security shield in the heart of the Americas. We will open Venezuela for foreign investment, I am talking about a 1.7 trillion dollar opportunity, not only in oil and gas, … but also in mining, in gold, in infrastructure, power. We will open markets, we will have security for foreign investment, and a massive privatization program that is waiting for you”.
Why does the US and its European vassals want to dismantle the Russian Federation? A major driver has always been to relive the heyday 1990s when the US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country with devastating results (the number of Russians living in poverty jumped from two million to sixty million in just a few years and life expectancy plummeted among other catastrophes).
There are, of course, other reasons, but those too have to do with crises of capitalism wrapped up in the pandemic. At the time Project Ukraine became a war, the EU had been in a prolonged (largely self-inflicted) economic crisis for years. The bloc’s emergency 750 billion euro COVID recovery program was supposed to stitch the union back up again, but it has underwhelmed, and instead much of the bloc elite have turned to war in a desperate bid for economic growth and to keep the union train on the tracks. That is summarized here by Wolfgang Streeck:
A possible solution for the coming fiscal crisis of an EU warfare state might be member states allowing the Union to issue its own debt—which would, however, also require changes in the Treaties. It is fair to assume that von der Leyen’s out-of-thin-air fiscal commitments in the context of the Ukrainian war were, and are, aimed exactly at getting member states to grant the EU this right to incur debt, constitutive for a modern state. Indeed, that right has long been demanded by advocates of European supranational centralization and integration. An EU borrowing capacity would give member states access, outside of national state budgets and therefore invisible to national voters, to the favorite medicine of underfunded capitalist states, public debt. Keeping national contributions to the European Union low by allowing the Union to debt-finance part of its expenses would amount to another, more advanced, form of political level-shifting.
Fascist Solutions in Silicon Valley
Back in the US, during the early days of COVID the seeds were planted for the new imperial strategy we’re seeing today. Marc Andreessen, the billionaire who co-founded the venture capital firm a16z and, before that, played a role in the invention of the modern web browser, was a driving force behind the elite Signal group chats that began to look for solutions to their problems back in 2020. According to Semafor, those chats included other billionaires and members of companies that now play dominant roles in America’s efforts to remake the country and the world into technomonarchies.
The chats were filled with billionaire grievances—that they were being underappreciated and shackled—and conviction that they knew the best way forward for humanity. As Semafor notes, “The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new [Silicon Valley] conservative consensus.”1 They were reportedly most concerned with “power.”
That makes sense if you subscribe to the teachings of monarchist pundit Curtis Yarvin who was reportedly lionized in the Andreessen-led Signal chats. Here’s Quinn Slobodian on Yarvin’s vision for the future:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
We are now seeing ongoing attempts to create this vision—whether in Gaza, guarding the billionaire pet project in Honduras, “Freedom Cities” in the US, the embrace of the UAE in yet another genocide, or in the deepening of an American political economic system which guarantees profits for the monopolistic weapons and tech surveillance sectors through endless war at home and abroad.
Again much of these symptoms were already present in the US, but why did the pandemic produce this concerted effort from the Silicon Valley and other billionaires to double down? They were, after all, already billionaires who already control much of what passes as social planning in the US. These chats took place even before their arch nemesis Lina Khan began modest efforts at the Federal Trade Commission to rein in Silicon Valley and other billionaire rapaciousness. What were they so fearful of?
What was evident to us all back when the powers that be still cared about the pandemic was presumably also evident to them. They saw the US struggling with shortages, unable to even produce personal protective equipment, and it scared them. It drove home the point that the US global position was weakening. Now, the lords of Silicon Valley and finance might be chiefly responsible for that development, but in their telling it’s because they haven’t been given enough power. One only needs to take a look at Andreessen’s April 2020 screed titled “It’s Time to Build”, which became something of a rallying cry for the technomonarchists, for a glimpse into this mindset. Whether they really believe it or it’s just opportunistic power-grabbing matters little; what does is that so far they have been successful, which is bad news for everyone, including them.
The second obvious factor would likely be the growth crisis mentioned above and how COVID had the potential to make it worse. They were also horrified by what they saw as power shifting to the peasants via more generous, albeit temporary, safety net benefits and work-from-home policies. Tim Gurner might be Australian, but I believe he provided one of the more candid omissions of the billionaires’ views in this clip:
Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” https://t.co/lcX3CCxGuj pic.twitter.com/f9HK2YZRRE
— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) September 12, 2023
Of course, these billionaire fears played the major role in the “return to normalcy” (for the peasants) push. But Andreessen and friends didn’t stop pushing there. They are part of a larger plan.
Edward Ongweso Jr. looks past all the bubble talk at how AI is integral to the US plan of securing hegemonic primacy in the 21st century—regardless of whether the bubble bursts or not. The whole piece is well worth a read, but here a few key pieces:
…“the final act of a three-act play” of US imperial management, featuring an evolution from “dollar diplomacy” to “oil diplomacy” to “compute diplomacy” centered around deploying our state apparatus and capital to preserve global hegemony…
…the United States could manufacture a “sovereignty crisis” with some hysteria about compromised datacenters and Chinese chips—the only cure, then, is the American option: US-made chips (Nvidia), US-controlled cloud architecture (Microsoft/Amazon), US-controlled financing (BlackRock, Emirati investment firm MGX), and so on.
…What political vehicle will meet the task for building this new order? One candidate is the burgeoning coalition that we can describe as the Compute Axis: 1) Silicon Valley and its capital-intensive dream of building God out of sand; 2) Trump and his brigands—concerned with transactional relationships, deregulation, and imperial plunder; 3) the sovereign capital of Gulf sovereigns.
There’s certainly no guarantee it’ll work, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try. In the meantime, what does it mean for the peasants? The tech bro takeover must continue “because China…”
Picture CCP-controlled Chinese AI running the world. How does that make you feel? https://t.co/yxQZ9es5MB
— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) February 6, 2025
To “win”, America just must turn over all — as opposed to the large majority— of its capital allocation decisions to a bunch of billionaires chiefly concerned with cementing their grip on power. That’s always the common theme. In order to “build” to “win” there must be no regulations, and AI must be supported to the moon. These policies are already teed up for Democrats 2028 in the form of “abundance,” which when you really boil it down is just the flip side to same coin that is Trump’s current all-in AI approach: the technomonarchists must be given everything they need and want and they will deliver us to their idea of victory.
Despite the current tech-friendly reign, Silicon Valley titans are still having a rough go of it. And the great irony is that they’re accelerating America’s demise:
Isn’t one of the most obvious features of China’s success that it’s built on capacity to discipline its capitalist firms – including the “inevitable chiselers in their ranks.” Brings to mind this observation from FDR, seemingly lost to Western posterity. https://t.co/IAzOdHlbtK https://t.co/8QCfeZHE3q pic.twitter.com/U8GJ4SoOpA
— Nikhil Pal Singh (@nikhil_palsingh) November 30, 2025
What the recent events from Venezuela to Gaza to the streets of the US demonstrate, however, is that unless decision-making power is taken away from the techmonarchists, the world is in for a whole lot more hurt—both at home and abroad. We likely would have gotten to this breakdown point regardless, but the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than serving as moment for reflection, cooperation, and as Andreessen put it, an opportunity to “build,” tragically became a moment of acceleration with US and Western elites doubling down on nearly all dystopian fronts. As they face more setbacks, why would the next response be any different?
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Notes
- I would disagree with the “Silicon Valley conservative consensus” label. Conservative or liberal makes little difference to them. Their underlying concern is amassing more money, power, and decision-making capabilities in these here United States of America, the greatest democracy evah. We see they’ve already laid the groundwork for a continuation of their control with Democrats through the “Abundance” agenda. We also see this “consensus” fracture whenever there’s a rare whiff of Trump making good on any of his MAGA promises.
