I just had this realization one of the big things that determines how shitty a country's COVID response is going to be is how powerful and radicalized their petite bourgeoisie is. The US, Brazil, and the UK have very strong right wing parties

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based on the petite bourgeoisie. Shutting down the economy essentially liquidates the petite bourgeoisie as a class, their businesses fail en mass and are absorbed by the real bourgeoisie. This is what happened in China, a country where the

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ruling party is completely dominated by the real bourgeoisie and thus carried out massive lockdowns both to keep their working class alive and to restore profitability by sinking unprofitable small and medium size businesses and stripping their

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assets. But in the US, where petite bourgeoisie are powerful and politically organized, the class clung to life by keeping the economy open and massacuring the working class. There's a few other things related to class composition here that I

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should mention, the petite bourgeoisie is one of the major classes that spreads Evangelicalism, which serves as a perfect vector for conspiracy theories and thus undermines societal response by essentially corroding civil society. Without a

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functioning civil society it's impossible to have an actual pandemic response, hence the chaos in the US and very good responses in systems as different as Mongolia, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

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It's also important to understand that the power of the petite bourgeoisie dictates whether state capacity is used, not the state's capacity itself, which is a different question entirely. The combination of limited state capacity and non-usage

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of what capacity exists is the worst case scenario and is what's driving the pandemic "response" in the US.

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The power differential between the real and petite bourgeoisie is also really evident here, the real bourgioesie was able to get the government to just print enough money to keep them afloat and hand it to them (see the airline bailout for example

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or the money dumped into the banking system) whereas the petite bourgeoisie were only able to get small loans and thus were forced to fight for reopening on a state and local level, which fucked the working class completely.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed