BIOPOWER: a new era of social-political authority

‘There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible

Apr 29, 2021

‘There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible

- the new normal.’

Michel Foucault

What people fear most is death and dying. It has been humanity’s curse since birth. The modern world, with its increased efficiency and science, debates death more than life. The awareness of suffering and the desire to overcome it are predominant in the modern age. The ‘healthy body’ and healthy self is about the avoidance of suffering and the overcoming of illness, at almost any cost. And, as I remarked at the end of the previous chapter, it is also a target of power. In terms of well-being, it is not just bodies that are exposed, but also the psyche. The distinction between the private and the public body (including the psyche) is specifically a human social-political construct. And what was needed was an ‘event’ in order to breach that private-public distinction.

The authors of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Great Reset have stated that these ‘Covid times’ are ‘our defining moment’ and that ‘we will be dealing with its fallout for years, and many things will change forever.’[1] In the pages of their publication The Great Reset the authors brazenly declare of the coming ‘economic disruption of monumental proportions, creating a dangerous and volatile period on multiple fronts — politically, socially, geopolitically — raising deep concerns about the environment and also extending the reach of technology into our lives.’ We are told that life for many of us is ‘unravelling at alarming speed.’ Yet what, we may wonder, will be constructed to ‘re-frame’ where this unravelling has taken hold? As the ‘new norms’ are being unveiled in many societies across the world we are witnessing an attempt to reconstruct and modify a ‘new consensus’ around everyday reality. Yet this is not all — I suggest that we shall see newly defined, and pervasively employed, forms of biopower in the age of this ‘Great Reset.’

A reconfiguration of social-political power has been in process for some time and is now rapidly emerging as part of a medical-political-economic institutional complex that I refer to as the new reign of biopower. What was required for this redefinition in the monopoly of power was a ‘trigger’ that would allow a radical alteration in the legal narratives of claiming control over the categorizations of life and death. With the post-2020 pandemic landscape across the globe now being formed, a post-sovereign world is emerging where biopolitics is giving legitimacy to a network of socializing regimes from biocapitalism to biosecurity. The 2020 lockdowns and quarantine travel measures were only a foretaste of what is to come once the new regimes of biopower become fully institutionalized. Biopower is the new reign attempting to gain dominion over a whole new domain of personal sovereignty.

The French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault is well-known for bringing forth the debate on biopower and biopolitics in his work in the mid-to-late 1970s. Initially, Foucault framed his argument in the form of ‘disciplinary societies’ which he defined as an array of ‘corrective institutions’ spread across the social field — asylums, factories, schools, hospitals, universities, etc — with each serving to inculcate and condition a mode of conduct and consciousness.[2] These institutions he placed within the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Above these socializing institutions traditionally stood the sovereign, which later became the State that exercised sovereign power. One of the ‘privileges’ of early sovereign power was the right to decide life and death — the right of a ruler to seize things, bodies, and ultimately the life of subjects. It was the model of power that was codified in classical politics, and one that has remained essentially unaltered during the transition from sovereign to State. The early birth of biopower in modernity marked the point when the biological life of individuals became the ‘political subject’ that belonged to State rule. Foucault’s description of disciplinary societies was based around power exercised within institutions; in terms of early biopower this was seen as shaping disciplinary health measures as pertaining to the hospital and the asylum particularly. More recently, institutional power has seeped out from the spaces of enclosure into what is now a pervasive, fluid, almost free-floating, administration of power that represents the control societies of the post-sovereign era. We are entering into a world where continuous control will reshape the new era of biopower.

A Post-Sovereign Era: Biopower & Biopolitics

Once biological life is recognized within the framework of the modern state, then it can be included within its governance of power, which then gets interpreted as biopower. And to declare biopower as a form of governance, the State must seek to transform its citizens into docile bodies (the ‘masses’). Many globalist-influenced forms of State governance are directing their newfound biopower against both the individual body and the ‘mass body’ as a biopolitical target. The modern human condition is such that the individual is not the object but rather the subject of biopower. In many territories, but not all, the State is representing itself as a new style of biopower-driven authority.

i) Biopower

Within the context of a biological threat, the subsequent ‘pandemic’ was utilized as a social-political construct to re-constitute the ‘normalizing’ of human society. This so-called, and overly hyped, ‘normalizing’ of society is enacted by a series of ‘power seizures’ which has given authority to a newly conceived biopower that claims jurisdiction over the individual and the collective body. This biopower has given itself the ‘right’ to decide over how to administer life or even death. In short, biopower is concerned with exercising control over the administration of complete life.

In terms of the individual, this enactment of biopower over the human body gives the State the legality to put individual bodies under surveillance and, if need be, punished by incarceration, using biosecurity jurisdiction. This has been exercised in numerous cases recently, as in the 28-year-old Perth woman who broke the Western Australian quarantine rules and was handed a 6-month prison sentence.[3] The form of biopower that is being exercised under the pandemic ‘state of emergency’ is concerned with a new mapping of life — social, political, and economic. The management of human existence is undergoing profound redefinition and transition.

Part of this redefinition designates a new narrative that is currently being used to underpin State responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is utilizing a language of ‘health risks’ for intervention and intrusion into our private lives. This includes the jurisdiction to enter into a person’s house without permission to forcibly remove people either considered a health risk or insufficiently ‘obeying’ quarantine measures. The former was stated by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 30th 2020 when Dr Michael Ryan (Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program) gave a statement saying that authorities may have to enter people’s homes to remove suspected family members to an ‘isolated designated facility.’ These measures have now been enacted into law. For example, under the New Zealand state of emergency, police officers now have the power to enter homes to enforce self-isolation rules.[4] In an ironic twist, those citizens opposing such draconian measures are being negatively labelled as ‘sovereign citizens’ where originally the term sovereign individual meant the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of their own body and life. Here we see a deliberate twisting of language to now support and enforce the regimes of biopower and the new biopower laws being put into effect across the world. Legality is not the first cause required to create new laws — the power to create laws is the first cause.

The new reign of biopower refers to a range of strategies backed by ‘specialized medical knowledge’ and adopted by the State along with a supporting network of institutions, agencies, and non-state actors. The disturbing trend here is that the State is empowering private military actors as well as ‘service officers’ and giving them power as authorized officers to enforce the new public health directions.[5] All such ‘authorized officers’ are given comparative police state powers to enforce State directives — such as searching homes and cars without a warrant — although there is no guarantee that they will be held fully accountable. This has already led to many reports of overreach and overzealous policing. Continuous localized lockdowns, track-and-trace surveillance methods, drone surveillance, the loss of right to protest, and other such measures, are now becoming established as the ‘new normal’ regimes of biopower as exercised within individual States and nation territories. These forms of control and regulation are without precedent and serve to increasingly affect the psychological well-being of sovereign citizens.

Biopower is now arising as an insidious and dangerous form of global power-relations. It is a form of control that seeks to regulate social life not only from without, such as in mask-wearing and social distancing, but also from within — that is, the collective mass psyche of the population. The concept of biopower seeks to gain dominion over the vital aspects of human existence. Within the field of biopower, the term ‘biopolitics’ refers to the specific sector that is responsible for creating the strategic policies and practices of intervention into individual, public, and collective life.

ii) Biopolitics

Earlier biopolitical strategies concerned the administration and management of illness and health. Now a newly reconfigured field for biopolitics has been created that binds the individual and the collective into a strengthening mix of the technological, the political, the legal, and the financial. Current biopolitics is clearly tied into the global ‘Great Reset’ of the restructuring of power and the new regimes that have been rendered into existence by the recent states of pandemic emergency.

Biological life is now at the center of state power — and this will dictate all future agendas. All forms of biopolitical authority are now acting as agents of the State, whether they are governmental or non-governmental bodies, which aligns with a twenty-first century medical totalitarianism. Biopower and biopolitics, along with biocapitalism and biosecurity, are combining to create a totalized and singular form of power. In terms of collective humanity, this involves the biopoliticizing of the human race in order to develop new forms of social management which have as their goal making populations live in ‘productive ways’ as well as insuring against random and/or planned revolt. In other words, the globalist biopolitical agenda is the formation of control societies and the rendering of human life as ‘docile bodies’ that have no resistance against State intervention.

The biopolitical agenda also incorporates non-state bodies to enact their strategies — most notably philanthropic organizations, social pressure groups, NGOs, and assorted globalist organizations. The biopolitical field has been extended from annual health check-ups, health insurance, and preventive medicine to now incorporate the Covid-19 pandemic measures of random testing, forced isolation, and updated vaccinations. All human life has now been ‘biopoliticized’ in the attempt to eradicate not our health risks but all the neutral zones of life. There is almost no refuge from the reach of biopolitics when both the exterior and interior life fall under the jurisdiction of total State control. A person’s body, health, and happiness — even a person’s right to their ‘individual sovereign self’ — is now regarded as within the realm of authoritarian biopower. Biopower and biopolitics is a dangerous mix of narratives based upon a monopoly of so-called ‘scientific knowledge.’

Furthermore, biopolitics cannot be dissociated from the distasteful subject of eugenics. Eugenics has been shown to have links to groups/institutions, as well as the state, in using medical intervention for the subterfuge of curtailing life. In these current times, biopolitical strategies are clearly linked to a new form of high-tech biocapitalism.

The New Biocapitalism

Non-state bodies have played a key role in the biopolitical agenda, especially since the rise of the private pharmaceutical industry, global healthcare strategies, and tech giants. The emergence of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in the 1990s also contributed to state and non-state intervention into the knowledge-based management of biological life. The new genetic technologies that have come out of the HGP have the potential to add to the arsenal of biopower to create, impose, and induce particular behaviours onto individual and collective bodies through surveillance regimes of genetic screening, testing, and research. These new avenues of bioscience have developed into ever increasing industries to the point where we can now frame the large-scale capitalization of bioscience as the revenue of biocapitalism.

The field of biocapitalism aims to develop and maximize targets for pharmaceutical markets and other healthcare interventions. The administration of biocapital policies upon a great number of the world’s population is now technologically possible in a way that was not available before. Not only is it technologically feasible, with the Covid-19 pandemic there is now also a reason for its implementation. There is now credible concern in terms of the crossover where biopolitics plays out in relation to biocapitalism. This is the merger where health (and health economics) combines with the data of surveillance capitalism.

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has said that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff says that: ‘The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.’[6] People are reduced to being less than products because they are rendered into being a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. Predictions about peoples’ futures are sold to the highest bidder so that these futures can be profited from or altered to favour better commercial gains. Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential — a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.

Human experience is considered free to be taken as raw material and it is this that becomes the product of value. From this material, organizations decide to intervene in our lives to shape and modify human behaviour in order to favour the outcomes that are most desirable for commercial gains. Behavioural modification is now in the hands of private capital — and undertaken with the minimal amount of external oversight. At its most basic, humans have been reduced to ‘batteries’ that produce datasets for algorithms and machine learning to process. What is most worrying is that, by and large, the general populations are uneducated into how their data — especially health data — is being utilized by large corporations to fund their continued dominance over the market. Biocapitalism has been quick to align itself with this accelerating expansion of datasets, data tracing and tracking.

The contact-tracing applications developed by the likes of Google and Apple are likely to gather a huge amount of new data that will only add to their escalating data supply chains. Healthcare and biomedical data collection is doubling every 12–14 months; back in 2012 a Ponemon Institute study found that 30% of all the digital data storage in the world was occupied by the healthcare industry.[7] It can only be imagined how much that figure has increased in the intervening years. The move to digital has been rapid over the past decade — for example, Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) adoption rates for U.S. hospitals have gone from 10 to 90 % in that time.[8] The range of medical wearables on the market are now extensive — and growing. It is no accident that Google set its sights on acquiring Fitbit, the company that creates wearable health devices for tracking peoples’ activity, exercise, food, weight, and sleep patterns.

It is now possible to monitor most aspects of an individual’s health. It is estimated that remote patient monitoring and health trackers will generate $20 billion annually by 2023.[9] Analysis of digital healthcare data and its use for predictive analytics is profoundly changing the way patients are managed as health wearables becomes part of patients’ treatment plans. Patient health data will, without doubt, influence the business models of the biocapital market. And this data will only increase from the ‘track & trace’ apps most governments are desperately pushing upon their populations. Biocapitalism is firmly embedded within the portfolio expansion of the tech giants. Even a cursory glance at the list of projects owned or invested in by the FAMGA (Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple) tech giants will show an unsettling array of healthcare projects. Such projects involve medical patient databases, hospital research data, pharmacy retail collaborations, AI research facilities, and insurance. In the autumn of 2018, Google’s parent company Alphabet invested $375 million in Oscar Health, a ‘next-generation’ health insurance company.[10] According to their CEO, Oscar Health aims to manage people’s health care from a reinvented and rebuilt technological perspective.[11]

To say that biocapitalism is divorced from biopolitics would be greatly naïve. In the UK, the government’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, signed an agreement in March 2020 that provides legal backing for the National Health Service (NHS) to set aside its duty of confidentiality in data-sharing arrangements. Named as the ‘Covid-19 Purpose,’ the new data-sharing agreement means NHS organizations and general medical practitioners (GPs) can share all patient data with any organization they choose, as long as it’s for the purpose of ‘fighting the coronavirus outbreak.’[12]

Alongside the tech giants, the pharmaceutical industry is clearly at the forefront of biocapitalism. Big Pharma is going to make huge profits from the current pandemic situation. And the topic that is currently highest on their agenda is that of vaccinations. The response from many Big Pharma CEOs is that they are calling on society to help finance their research investments. Pharma chief executives have warned governments that they will need to provide substantial upfront funding if vaccines and testing are to be rolled out faster.[13] Most Big Pharma Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing costs are expected to be offset by government funding. And the potential outreach is staggering. In a recent report (published August 2020)[14], public ‘health expert’ Tony Fauci and epidemiologist David Morens stated that humanity has ‘entered a pandemic era.’ Their report states that the current pandemic is only the first of many more to come and that we are likely to see an accelerating rate of future outbreaks in the years ahead.[15] What this means is that the future of vaccine rollouts is secured, alongside a continuation of emergency powers. A further consequence of the continuation of emergency powers is the huge economic bombshell for struggling companies. The majority of companies, especially middle-to-small scale, are already on the cusp of collapse, or have already folded. Some of the larger players are likely to seek State financial intervention. What this means is that an increasing array of major corporate enterprises will come under the jurisdiction of State control, almost as if through the backdoor. This less visible form of biocapitalism forces a shift toward a strengthened State/Governmental control of the social-cultural sphere through such instruments of commercial influence. The private sector once again comes under the umbrella of a globalist agenda through the intermediary of the nation State. This is a trajectory that comes closer to the Chinese model of State intervention into the commercial sector.

Biocapitalism is clearly a force of reckoning that is deeply tied to biopolitics and the new reign of biopower. A global regime is emerging that is constructed from an assemblage of institutions, procedures, orthodox ‘knowledge narratives’ and enforced by authoritarian measures that are instigated through the police/military complex. The changing biopolitical arena of the 21st century, with its economic biocapitalist agenda, simultaneously implies a rising state of biosecurity, as I discuss in the next essay in this series.

See my video on Biopower: https://odysee.com/@kingsleydennis:a/biopower:a

See my video on Biopolitics: https://odysee.com/@kingsleydennis:a/biopolitics-2.1:3

[1] Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry — COVID-19: The Great Reset

[2] See Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault

[3] See — https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-25/woman-who-snuck-into-wa-on-truck-handed-six-month-jail-sentence/12592832

[4] See — https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120577868/coronavirus-police-can-now-enter-homes-to-look-for-people-gathering

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/21/overreach-and-overzealous-concerns-over-victorias-proposed-new-police-powers

[6] See — https://theintercept.com/2019/03/01/surveillance-capitalism-book-shoshana-zuboff-naomi-klein/

[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stewartsouthey/2019/06/30/medical-wearables-surveillance-capitalism-and-global-health/

[8] ibid

[9] ibid

[10] Oscar Health was founded in 2012 by Joshua Kushner, who happens to be the brother of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.