Tuesday 7 April 2020

How An Old Passage Suddenly Has Relevance

Yesterday, I was watching various politicians and commentators in TV talking about the COVID19 moral panic, and many of them were saying that after its all over, things cannot be the same again.  I seem to remember the same was said after the 2008 Financial Meltdown, and as soon as the Keynesian fiscal stimulus had stabilised the system, it was replaced with austerity, the central banks went back to massively inflating the asset price bubbles that had caused the problem in the first place, the bankers went back to getting their huge bonuses, and even the regulation that had been imposed, began to be removed, so that here we are again with an even bigger set of asset price bubbles and teetering global financial system than existed in 2008.  And for ten years, workers again paid for it in austerity, precarity, and stagnant wages.  But, if you keep voting for these people, what do you expect?

So, yesterday I was listening to all of the self-righteous preaching of the same kinds of people, who told us everything would have to change after 2008, and they were at it again.  Won't we have to recognise that we should pay bin men more money, nurses more money, and so on they said.  Won't we have to ensure that our hospitals have all of the equipment required to deal with such emergencies and crises?  But, of course, the answer to all these questions is no, they will not have to do all those things, because, as with 2008, as soon as all of the panic is over, they will go on to the next news story, and all of these questions will be forgotten about.

Its no accident that bin men, nurses and so on are very badly paid compared to bankers, let alone compared to the huge revenues that the top 0.01% get in dividends and other interest from the ownership of shares and bonds.  All of that arises directly from the capitalist system itself, and the ownership of capital in its different forms, and for workers, their non-ownership of that capital, or more precisely their lack of control over the actual capital they do own collectively, such as the socialised capital of large companies, the fictitious capital in their pension funds and so on.  Unless and until capitalism itself is replaced by socialism, unless and until workers at least obtain democratic control over the collective capital they do own, the socialised capital of the large companies, and their pension funds, then these statements about things not being the same amount to nothing more than platitudes and pious wishes.

And, its no surprise that these same kinds of pious wishes come from the mouths of Labour politicians - of both Right and Left - who look to cooperate with the government under the current trying conditions, in the plaintiff hope that after hey might have some Damascene  conversion, and begin to distribute wealth and power equitably across society.  They look to the workers main, and most powerful enemy, the capitalist state itself, to be a means of effecting this role as Good Samaritan.  But, it is all hogwash.  The capitalist state exists to protect and extend the interests of the ruling class.  It is not going to act against those interests and in the interests of workers!  The current panic is not a panic actually arising from COVID19, but from the fact that the NHS, which was never fit for purpose to begin with, as a means of catering for the health needs of workers, has been even more undermined as a result of ten years of austerity.

The data out from the ONS today illustrates the point.  It shows that of all the deaths in the UK in Week13, only 4.5% were linked in some way to COVID19.  So, why should this tiny proportion of total deaths be causing such a breakdown of the NHS?  The point is it isn't.  As anyone who has had to try to get a GP appointment in the last year or so knows, or who, as I recounted last year, from my own experience, has had to spend hours, and even days in A&E, watching people die around you, knows, the NHS was already in a state of collapse.  COVID19 has simply been the straw that exposed that the camel's back was already broken.

So, as I was watching all of this liberal pious claptrap from Labour politicians, and seeing that Starmer is getting drawn ever closer to the flame of involvement in a National Government, a passage I had read recently, had specific relevance.  In it, Lenin is dealing with a criticism by Russian Narodniks of a work by Peter Struve, who had criticised the Narodniks, and N.F. Danielson, for precisely this kind of Utopianism, in appeals to the Russian state to put Russia on a different path, rather than the path it was on of capitalist development.

"And Mr. Struve quite rightly concluded that failure to understand the class struggle makes Mr. Nik. —on a utopian, for anybody who ignores the class struggle in capitalist society eo ipso ignores all the real content of the social and political life of this society and, in seeking to fulfil his desideratum, is inevitably doomed to hover in the sphere of pious wishes. This failure to understand the class struggle makes him a reactionary, for appeals to “society” and to the “state,” that is, to bourgeois ideologists and politicians, can only confuse the socialists, and cause them to accept the worst enemies of the proletariat as their allies, can only hamper the workers’ struggle for emancipation instead of helping to strengthen, clarify and improve the organisation of that struggle."

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