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Lockdowns represent a massive primitive accumulation, asserting capitals further control over people's home and social lives in the name of public health
This isn't an argument to say that you shouldn't wear a mask where appropriate, social distance, ventilate any rooms you're in etc, but we have to understand that lockdown as currently formed, and as it can only be formed in bourgeois society, is about social control first
We can see this-economic activity, especially that favouring monopoly capital, has been allowed to continue with little barriers, while social activity, education etc, has been forced online onto privately owned platforms
Millions of people have also experienced the extension of the workplace into their own home, along with a proliferation of spy software that records their actions, paying for many of the commodities (rent, electricity etc) needed for the exploitation of their labour
This is all built on an intense fetishism that ignores the roles of all the people who still have to go to work to keep society running, often with poor pay and conditions (don't go to a restaurant, get a takeaway it's safer comes to mind)
Instead of a participatory model of public health that encourages and empowers people to take responsibility for their own and their communities health, we have seen a massive extension of state power, with a criminalisation of massive aspects of normal life
Protest has been largely criminalised with very little push back from many so called left parties, and every regulation is backed with the threat of fines or jail time.
This environment has created intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, and the response of the state has not been to create opportunities for people to socialise safely, it has instead reached for further extensions of power
While lockdowns have served some public health function, responses to the pandemic that prioritise capital accumulation and state power has always taken priority over those that serve the interests of working people-eg see the widespread reports of corporate furlough fraud
While many on the left point to successful lockdowns in eg Vietnam and Cuba as proof that lockdowns aren't about corporate and state power, it's important to note here that the nature of the state is different to that of bourgeois states like the UK
Also another point I want to bring up, I'm not necessarily saying that this is a calculated, deliberate choice, but rather that this approach to public health is the one that best maintains capital accumulation
There are capitalist States that haven't resorted to this model, South Korea for example, but what most of these had in common was actual genuine pandemic planning that prevented widespread community transmission
