The delay tactic

The delay tactic
Pandemic and war could have more to do with the feared collapse of the world financial system than previously thought.


Six essays by Fabio Vighi, written between June 2020 and October 2023, document the effects of the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine on capital and the financial system. The “fight against Covid-19 and Putin” is analyzed from an extended Marxist perspective and exposed as a delaying tactic. This is intended to at least delay the capitalist system collapse, because it can no longer be stopped anyway. Fabio Vighi showed courage in doing so, because the professor, who teaches “Critical Theory” at the University of Cardiff in Great Britain, published his first writings at the beginning of the corona period. The essays compiled in the pad series show that the madness of the corona and war periods, examined with Hegelian philosophy and Marxist criticism of capitalism, makes perfect sense from the perspective of the prevailing financial system.

by Angelika Gutsche

[This article posted on 1/17/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-verzogerungstaktik.]


In the first essay, entitled “The Missing Cause: Time, Labor, and Value in the Age of the Coronavirus” (June 2020), Vighi states that the “crisis of globalized contemporary capitalism is a crisis of surplus-value production that has its origins in the ubiquitous and unprecedented automation since the 1970s.” The forced standstill due to the corona measures is a cheap attempt by the ruling politicians to pull the emergency brake so that the neoliberal train does not crash into the wall. Corona as capital's answer to the systemic profit crisis. Less and less wage labor and the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution through AI have resulted in a disproportionate expansion of the financial industry, which magically creates money through money through “tricks” and becomes capital without the detour of “labor.” Profit is generated less and less by human labor.

In the introduction to the second essay, “A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation” (August 2021), the author makes it clear: “Mankind doesn't care about the big predators of oil, weapons and vaccines,” in contrast to the financial system. To prevent the latter from collapsing, it was necessary to pump large amounts of central bank money into the system, but this had to be transferred directly into the hands of public and private sector financiers to avoid hyperinflation. Vighi lists financial engineering operations chronologically from June 2019 – from the increase in percentages for short-term secured loans (repos) to Donald Trump's executive order for the establishment of a National Influenza Vaccine Task Force for vaccine manufacturing technology – and links them to the events preceding the pandemic staging, such as Event 201 and the World Economic Forum, until the WHO declared a pandemic in March 2020.

Since the profits generated were no longer sufficient to cover debt repayment, interest rates rose sharply in September 2019, causing panic in the financial markets. To prevent their collapse, as much liquidity as possible had to be pumped into the monetary system. However, this money was not allowed to enter the real economy, as it would have caused hyperinflation there. For this reason, a pandemic was declared, lockdowns were imposed, and the engine of the economy was shut down.

A huge rescue package was launched under the guise of the virus. In the EU alone, a 1.85 trillion euro “pandemic emergency purchase program” was set up to run until March 2022.

Due to rampant automation and the associated decline in wage labor, combined with a simultaneous “utopia of consumerism,” “capitalism is increasingly dependent on national debt, low wages, centralization of wealth and power, a permanent state of emergency, and financial acrobatics.” Therefore, “the economic motive of the Covid thriller must be seen in a broader context of social change,” whereby “the pandemic can be turned on and off like a tap.” According to Vighi, the only chance of survival for “senile capitalism” is to “bring about a paradigm shift from liberalism to oligarchic authoritarianism.” However, Vighi believes that any power that seeks to achieve totalization is ultimately doomed to fail.

In the third essay, titled “The Long Covid of Central Bankers: An Incurable Condition” (October 2021), the author looks to a future in which central banks continue to inflate financial markets, “contagion narratives” still hypnotize large segments of the population, and liberal democracies are dismantled and replaced by a “metaverse of control technologies.” There is hope that significant resistance is stirring among the population, that the elites themselves do not know how to proceed, and that the recession is depriving politicians of credibility. The only viable path seems to be the controlled demolition of the economy, whereby: “No crime against humanity can be ruled out if a systemic implosion is so stubbornly denied.”

A state of emergency capitalism is maintained to manage the “human surplus”, with “virus, vaccine and Covid passport representing the Holy Trinity of social engineering”.

“Digital cash in conjunction with digital identity (...) (as) high-tech monetary serfdom.” Digital fascism would be created. The official narrative is regarded as “the sole bearer of truth”, “conspiracy theorists” are ridiculed, and science is installed as the new religion.

Despite all this, Vighi manages to draw optimism from hoping that the current crackdown on humanity will be “the best chance for radical resistance against the coming regime of capitalist accumulation and its relentless extortion.”

The fourth essay asks, “Red or Blue Pill? Variants, Inflation or the Controlled Demolition of Society” (December 2022). Vighi observes how the “pandemic” is still raging and how “entire segments of the population are often subjected to extreme forms of legalized discrimination.” We are supposed to get used to submission in the face of alleged force majeure and be distracted from “what is happening in the financial Olympus, where the real game is taking place that decides our fate.” There “must be no discussion of economic causes.” The author expects a probable “financial collapse (...) in the form of a debt market meltdown (...), which would result in an uncontrollable rise in interest rates and the evaporation of the dollar and other fiat currencies around the world”.

Vighi advises us to prepare for the crash, “which will probably hit us as a controlled accident,” by freeing ourselves mentally from submission to the pseudopandemic, practicing criticism of capitalism, and building networks. Work, community, and social wealth would have to be redefined. The treachery of the left can be relied upon.

In his fifth essay, “Pause for Thought: Money Without Value in a Rapidly Disintegrating World” (May 2022), the author draws a line to the war in Ukraine. He emphasizes that it is not Corona that is the cause of the economic problems, but the declining economy, whose bankruptcy is to be obscured. The closer the collapse, the more exogenous crises, from the global war on terror to the trade war with China to Covid-19, “while the West's brand new infection is called Russia.” Now “the war in Ukraine shields us from the real horror of total social collapse caused by a debt and stock market crash.” This is also necessary because “in the last 50 years, the US federal debt has increased 75-fold”.

With “grotesque overvaluation of all risk assets (stocks, bonds and real estate)”, the elites are trying to buy time. The currency devaluation shock, which “would bring the world system to its knees”, is to be delayed. After that, a new monetary system could emerge in which the old power structures and their elites would be preserved or even strengthened.

The war in Ukraine is deliberately being expanded to the point of threatening a nuclear war with the aim of “keeping the money printers on the job (...) to defuse the catastrophic risk in the debt market”. Ukraine as “collateral damage”.

Vighi concludes: “If the central banks' cash injections were to end, a rapid rise in key interest rates would lead to a market crash with defaults around the world. Either everyone plays by the script, or the whole show is canceled and with it the system.” There are two options: either we “emancipate ourselves from the form of capital as such or we will be drawn into a new dark age of violence and regression”.

The title of Vighis' sixth essay is: “Welcome to low-energy capitalism or: Proletarians of the world, wear face masks!” (October 2023). The author fears that a fear campaign will be launched every two months “to cool the surplus of production and consumer demand” and thus prevent a surge in inflation. A financial crash would lead to worldwide unrest, “regardless of political borders (...) or economic differences”.

In the longer term, the “pathetic attempt to save a debt-ridden system by burdening it with even more debt can only exacerbate the problem,” since revenues are chronically insufficient.

Vighi dismantles the green concept, which means more poverty and less freedom for everyone, because “poverty is the new green”. He considers the “fight against climate change” to be a “pseudo-humanitarian facade”, because fossil fuels continue to flourish. A centralized ecosystem is being promoted, including by large oil companies, “regulated by avatars, digital tokenized assets, blockchain infrastructure, bio-nanotechnologies, the internet of bodies, etc.” “Ecology as the new opium of the masses”, while attention is diverted from the core problem, the destructive compulsion for economic growth.

The author traces the path from “peak oil” to “peak work-power”. The capitalist creation of value depends on the combustion of human energy, that is, on the work of brains, muscles and nerves. This has now reached its peak, as automation is creating more and more “useless eaters” in the world, for whom a kind of “totalitarian humanism” is planned. “Capital's appropriation of technology for its own inhumane purposes turns a potential blessing into a disaster.”

Fabio Vighis's essays, which are well worth reading, are enlightening eye-openers for the interrelationships between capitalism, fiscal policy, corona measures and wars. Under these premises, the latest demand of our still-minister of economics, Robert Habeck, to increase the defense budget to 3.5 percent of our economic output, also makes sense. That would be around 160 billion euros per year – more than double what the federal government spends on education, health, families and internal security combined, as Sahra Wagenknecht calculates. Pumping money into the financial system to delay its collapse.

The underlying motive for the corona measures and the lust for war has been recognized. Now the question is: Can we stop the rapid descent into a new totalitarianism?

You can order the book here: “Covid-19 and the pandemic as a rampage of financial capital”

Angelika Gutsche, born in 1955, is a certified psychologist. After many years working in the film department at the Goethe-Institut, she now works as a freelancer. In addition to writing travel reports, she focuses on developments in Libya on her blog, but also covers other current political and literary topics. For more information, visit gela-news.de and angelika-gutsche.de.