A Reply To Fredtorssander

This is the last of the replies to comments on Michael Roberts' Blog that I promised to provide last week. It covers a number of issues. 

The discussion begins with my comment that many of those that have been most vociferous in arguing for economies to be closed down, in response to COVID19, are those that have also been arguing, prior to the outbreak, for borders to be closed, for globalisation to be ended, for free movement to stop, and so on. Fred says, quite rightly, that it is not many of these individuals and groups that have closed down the world economy, but global capitalism. Quite right, but I have never said anything different to that. My personal belief, expressed from the start, is that global capitalism has made a huge mistake in doing so. Its actions are not the result of some global conspiracy of uncertain purpose, but come down, instead, to global cock-up, of the power of group think, in causing irrational behaviour, of moral panic. As the well respected professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University, John Ioannidis, wrote in the middle of March that it was shaping up to be “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”

My point, however, was that, as global capitalism, and individual national capitals all fell into line – apart from some notable exceptions such as Sweden – in admiring The Emperor's New Clothes, the opportunity was taken by reactionary elements to press their own case for economic nationalism, for the closing of borders, and so on. It was used by other right-wing elements to pursue their own xenophobic agendas, blaming China or Asian people for the virus. It allowed all the associated crazies to come out with their own conspiracy theories about the virus having been created in the lab by their own particular villain of the piece, be it the CIA for some, China for others, Iran for others, and I'm sure in there will be claims that Israel was behind it all. The whole moral panic constructed around what is, in actual fact, simply a virus that has killed only about the same number of people that flu would kill, on average, were we not to have vaccines against it, that has killed only a fraction of the people who die every year from other diseases, such as smoking related illness, that has affected almost exclusively a small, and identifiable cohort of the population, who could and should have been protected against it, has enabled a whole gamut of reactionaries to pursue their agendas on the back of it. 

The truth is that the number of deaths could have been kept to a tiny fraction of what they have been if governments had followed the advice I gave at the start. A look at the data showed from the beginning that it was only around 20% of the population that was at serious risk from the virus. That 20% comprised people who were elderly, or else who had other illnesses that compromised their immune system. The data is clear. The average age of people dying from COVID19 is 81. 53% of those dying are aged over 80, with a further 39% being over 60. So, 92% of all deaths are people over 60. Of the remaining 8%, 7% had known underlying health issues, meaning only 1% of deaths are people not in these categories, and if we examine that 1% in more detail, it will almost certainly be found that they too had some other contributing factor. 

To have slashed the number of deaths from COVID19, one simple measure was required. It was to isolate those in this 20% category from any potential contact with the virus. In fact, early on, I gave an analogy of people who suffer with serious nut allergies. If you have a serious nut allergy, then you might die from contact with nuts. The number of people with such allergies are a minority. We don't ban nuts, instead we enable people with such an allergy to be isolated from them.

What was also known, from what happened in Italy, was that the greatest threat to life came from the virus having become ingrained in its health and social care system. Not surprising, because, by definition, those in these establishments are a concentration of that 20%. Yet, for example, the British government said early on that people in Care Homes should be safe from the virus, precisely because they were already “locked down”, isolated from the general public, in these institutions. It reflected the fact that their whole emphasis had been on a misguided concern to prevent the spread of a generally innocuous virus amongst the general public, rather than trying to prevent those actually at serious risk from it being in contact with it. It was like a government spending all its time shutting down production of nuts and nut products, and telling people to avoid them in case they had a reaction to them, whilst failing to actually identify people with such an allergy, and keep them away from the nuts in their cupboards! 

What was worse, is that there was no immediate prospect of being able to protect those actually at risk from the virus, in the same way we protect people in those groups from the flu. Every year, anyone in an at risk group can get a free flu jab. Indeed, anyone can get a flu jab at little cost. But, there was no prospect of a COVID19 vaccine being available for around 18 months. That meant that everyone in the at risk group would be susceptible so long as the virus was at large. Being able to isolate 20% of the population, which in Britain amounts to around 13 million, becomes progressively more difficult the longer such isolation has to be maintained. But, this is where the misguided focus on trying to prevent the spread of the virus amongst the 80% of the population not at serious risk from it, was doubly damaging. 

Coronavirus is one of the viruses responsible for the common cold, which is just a generic term for the symptoms caused by these viruses. As with the common cold, the vast majority of people infected do not suffer any serious consequences. Around 80% of people infected with COVID19 – which is just one strain of coronavirus – either do not know they have it (they are asymptomatic) or else have only very mild symptoms. However, just as with the common cold, some people can be badly affected by it. As a child, I suffered badly with bronchial asthma. When I was 13, I contracted a cold, and it affected my chest, a prolonged bout of asthma causing all of my bronchi to become inflamed. Eventually, that resulted in me contracting pneumonia from which I almost died. 

Vaccination works by deliberately infecting people with a weakened dose of a particular virus, so that the body's own immune system produces antibodies that are able to kill the virus. Once these antibodies exist, if you come into contact with the virus again, the body produces sufficient antibodies to kill the virus, before it can make you ill. That means that, for any particular type of virus, it can never infect a sufficient number of hosts so as to be able to spread. It then dies out. That is exactly what was required in relation to COVID19, so that the period of time that the people in the at risk 20% needed to be kept in isolation so as not to be at risk from it, was minimised. However, in order to achieve that, given that no vaccine was likely for 18 months, it was necessary to create a process of natural vaccination, or what scientists call “herd immunity”. That is that the healthy members of the population, the people who comprise the 80% of the population not at risk from it, needed to become infected, so that their bodies would produce the antibodies required to kill the virus, and prevent it from spreading. 

In fact, this is how the idea of vaccination was developed by Jenner in the first place. Jenner noted that milk maids rarely suffered from smallpox, which was devastating populations. He discovered that the reason was that milk maids usually caught cow-pox as a result of milking cows. Cow-pox was a less deadly relative of smallpox, and so, having contracted cow pox, the milkmaids produced antibodies, which then gave them protection against smallpox. Having identified this Jenner was able to then deliberately infect people with cow-pox, which meant that they then developed immunity against smallpox. The more who obtained this herd immunity against smallpox, the harder it was for it to spread. In fact, even when I was a kid, it was common for parents to send their kids around to visit other kids that had mumps or chicken-pox, so they would also contract it, and gain immunity. These diseases were not serious for kids, but represented a much greater threat for people as adults, so it was better to have them when you were a kid. 

But, governments in the middle of a media generated moral panic over COVID19, were under pressure to be seen to be doing everything in their power to prevent the spread of the virus. A media more concerned with its own headlines and ratings than with public health knew bad optics when it saw it, and seized on the term “herd immunity” to create a further sense of moral outrage around it, and various political forces keen to seize political advantage also seized upon it as a means of attacking governments that had quite reasonably set out to pursue such a policy, which had been outlined to them by their scientific advisors. But, as soon as the politicians buckled under the pressure of the media's outrage over the strategy of developing “herd immunity”, it was clear that the scientists themselves, having been hung out to dry by those spineless politicians, were also not going to make themselves the sole target of public vilification. Only a few honourable exceptions have had the backbone to do that, and have continued to point out that the Emperor has no clothes on. 

So, when Fred says, 

“But no matter who or what is responsible for the choice of method or if the method is a result of the pauperisation of the medical infrastructure there is no reason to let COVID19 spread?” 

And, in a further comment, 

“This is no reason though to accept that capitalism and imperialism kill more people right now by letting the coronavirus have its way?” 

I disagree. Or at least, the statement needs to be amended. It should read, “there is no reason to let COVID19 spread to the 20% of the population for whom it could pose a serious risk”. There has never been any question of simply “letting the coronavirus have its way”, but the question is how to intelligently deal with it as a threat, and thereby remove that threat. The truth is that absent a vaccine, there is no way of protecting 100% of the population from COVID19, any more than its possible to protect 100% of the population from catching a cold. Instead, we rely on the fact that the vast majority of the population who catch a cold will have only minor symptoms from it, and will develop antibodies against it, causing “herd immunity” to develop, and the outbreak to subside. In fact, one reason we have never had a vaccine against the common cold is that because a number of different viruses are responsible for it, and because these viruses mutate, its not possible to cover all possible eventualities. Not even the flu vaccine is infallible in that regard. So, even if a COVID19 vaccine is developed, it doesn't mean that next year, the same problem will not exist with COVID20, or the following year with COVID21, and so on. So, what, are we going to keep the global economy closed down for the indefinite future? 

There are essentially three models of how to deal with COVID19, and its possible future variants. The first is that adopted by South Korea, Germany and others. That relied on widespread testing from the start, which identified the small number of infected people, isolated them, tracked those they had been in contact with, tested them, and isolated them if they too were infected. It also involves borders being closed, and anyone crossing the borders having to be tested before being granted entry. The second is the strategy that has been adopted by Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere of locking down the country, closing borders, preventing movement of people inside the country, and so on. The third is the option adopted by Sweden which has been to allow continued free movement and social interaction, allowing citizens to act on information to isolate themselves appropriately where they felt they were at potential risk. 

The problem with the first two approaches is that, absent a vaccine, they provide no immunity for the population. They rely on essentially the number of infected people falling to such a low level that the virus cannot spread rapidly. But, this virus is at large in the world, and is not going away. Absent a vaccine, these solutions cannot work, and, even with a vaccine, they may not work if the virus simply mutates so that the vaccine is inoperative against it. Both rely on a shutting down of economic activity that is not sustainable in the long run.

That is most clear in the second approach where large areas of social interaction are shut down. But, the farce of this approach is shown in Britain, where people are told that they can't go to the pub or the gym, and so on, but they are expected to continue to go to work, and to get to work they have to go on the bus, tube or train! Now recognising at least the farce of this latter element, the government is instead proposing the ridiculous idea that people should instead walk or cycle several miles to work and back, thereby risking their lives in other ways. A largely unfit population is not going to do that, and many of them would have heart attacks if they tried it, and workplaces are not geared up to dozens of their employees coming in to work covered in sweat, and requiring showers and changing rooms. Nor do those workplaces allow their employees to use bikes where they need to use transport for work, because the companies insurance companies will not insure them, considering the use of bikes as to risky, which anyone who has actually ridden a bike on Britain's roads knows to be only too true. 

In an economy based upon extensive social division of labour it was clear that its impossible to actually shut down production. If the government had been serious about everyone staying home, then within hours the electricity supply would have shut down, water supplies would stop without the electricity to power the pumps, and everyone would have seen immediately that such a condition could not be allowed. But, the power stations, the water companies and so on, require supplies, which means their suppliers also have to continue working, and the engineering companies that supply those companies have to continue working, and so on. All of the workers need food and other supplies, and because supermarkets only keep around 2-3 days of supplies, that means that the companies providing the food and other goods sold by the supermarkets have to keep working. And, because all these workers need to get to work then public transport has to keep working, and to fuel the public transport, or the cars that workers use individually, the petrol stations, and the oil refineries that supply the petrol stations have to keep working. That means that the suppliers of those companies, and the suppliers of those companies also have to keep working. And, if you have a health emergency then you can't exacerbate it by not having refuse collected, which means the bin men have to work, and if the bin men are working, the council staff in the offices that deal with the timesheets, buy in the materials, process the payroll, pay the accounts, and run the computer department and so on, also have to be at work. 

The idea that Britain has been in lock down as far as work is concerned is baloney. That is why GDP – the amount of labour being performed – has fallen by only around 30%. That 30% is the labour of those people in those businesses that have had to close down, such as the small shops, hairdressers, pubs, clubs, gyms and so on. The good thing about this is that, because the vast majority of workers have continued to work, and so to come in contact with each other, a large number of them will already have long since contracted the virus without ill effects and have obtained immunity against it. The bad news is that, because it has been done in this way, some of the workers actually pressured into working will have been themselves part of the at risk 20%, and because it has been done in this way, there has been no proper protocols to ensure adequate PPE, or physical distancing.  The most obvious examples of that has been in the hospitals and care homes, which have also become killing fields for their inhabitants.  Had Britain actually imposed a lockdown of its economy, then it would possibly have limited the proportion of its population that now has such immunity, but the economy would have been destroyed, and as soon as it lifted the lockdown, any remaining cases of the virus would have a huge field of potential unprotected people to infect. 

The first approach avoids this problem of a more widespread lockdown, but it requires that the number of infections be relatively small. It also requires that borders be at least partially closed so that no one entering the country can bring the virus into it. It again implies a prolonged restriction on the functioning of the economy that is not sustainable. Moreover, because it means that no natural immunity is established, it also means that these constraints can't be lifted, because, as soon as they are, the potential for an entirely unprotected population to be infected remains. 

The only sensible approach is that taken by Sweden. But, Sweden too made mistakes. It should from the start have recognised the danger to the at risk 20% of the population, and particularly to those people contained within its old folks homes. It didn't do that, and so, as everywhere, it has suffered from large numbers of old people in those institutions succumbing to the virus. Because it has larger more concentrated old folks homes and a larger population concentrated in Stockholm than its Nordic neighbours, that explains why it has had a higher per capita mortality rate, other than early on. But, because Sweden did not impose a lockdown, it has avoided some of the damage to its economy, though not entirely, because it is impacted by the damage done to its neighbours and the global economy in general. What is more, Sweden has now achieved herd immunity for its population in Stockholm with a consequent sharp drop in the number of deaths it is now experiencing. By contrast, all the countries that tried to prevent the spread of the virus will see it continue to exact a toll for many months to come. 

Finally, let me turn to Fred's comments about “the very few remaining proletarian socialist nations”. I already dealt with this, yesterday, in my response to Jlowrie, but let me deal with it more, in direct response to Fred. One very short comment I had posted to Michael Roberts' Blog that was blocked, asked him also, given his Trotskyist lineage, as a former senior member of the Revolutionary Socialist League on his opinion of these “socialist nations”. We will never know his answer. Of course, it would have been useful if Fred himself had listed exactly which nations he was including in this category, does it include North Korea, as well as China and Cuba, for example, and does it include Venezuela or perhaps even Iran? 

Fred says that my refusal to recognise any of these nations as “socialist” is ultra-left, but for a Marxist the term socialist has a specific meaning, and its hard to justify that description to any of these unspecified nations that Fred is referring to. The only one he mentions is Cuba, so I will confine myself to that example, before making more general comments. I continue to define Cuba as a deformed workers state. It is a workers' state by virtue of the fact that the other classes in Cuba were destroyed as a consequence of its revolution, and the ripping up of the social roots upon which those classes rested. It is deformed, because from the beginning the working-class itself has never held or exercised power, or control over the political regime in its own name. The revolution itself was originally a peasant war, not a proletarian revolution, and was led by a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement, not a revolutionary communist party. On this last point, I would refer Fred to the “ultra-Left” Lenin, and his Theses on the National an Colonial Questions, where he wrote of, 

“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form;” 

Castro's movement was such a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement that operated on purely bourgeois liberal politics. The reason that Lenin and the Comintern argued that we give no left cover for such organisations is precisely because they are our class enemies, we make short-term tactical alliances with them, but certainly do not merge with them, as the Stalinists proposed, or implemented, in practice, via the Popular Front, only in order to obtain the immediate task of national liberation, but only in the context of permanent revolution, recognising that not only after any such liberation will such forces be our class enemy, but that even before such liberation, if truly revolutionary forces are likely to seize power, these petty-bourgeois forces will stab the workers in the back, just as they had done in 1848, as the Kuomintang did in 1927, an so on. 

The Cuban working-class has never held state power or control over the political regime, directly in Cuba. From the beginning political power has been in the hands of Castro's regime. It fell in with the USSR, only as protection from the US, which rather stupidly drove it in that direction. As with many other Third Worldist regimes Cuba modelled itself not on a healthy workers state, but on the deformed, bureaucratised Stalinist state in the USSR, whose client it became, and on which it depended. But, even if Cuba were a healthy workers' state, it would not at all mean that Cuba itself was socialist. As Stalin himself admitted before he developed the Theory of Socialism In One Country, and expunged his earlier writings, 

“For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are enough – to this the history of our own revolution testifies. For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like ours, are not enough – for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.” 

(The Foundations of Leninism) 

Socialism in one country, particularly a small, essentially peasant country, as Cuba was, is a reactionary delusion. Cuba never has been socialist. But, even if Cuba had developed beyond being an essentially peasant economy, even if it could be said to have had the support of other industrialised countries, what exists in Cuba could not be called Socialism, precisely because, Socialism depends upon the means of production being under the direct democratic control of the working-class, and also the state itself must be under the democratic control of the working-class, whilst no such condition exists in Cuba in either context. 

In fact, if we examine what Lenin says in Left-wing childishness, he notes the nature of the productive forces in Russia, and says that given their overall undeveloped nature, even state capitalism would represent a step forward. A Workers' state, almost by definition, inherits forms of property that are in transition, which means that they are not yet socialist forms of property. As transitional forms of property, there is always the danger that they may move backwards away from socialism towards capitalism, and that is precisely why Socialism In One Country is not possible. A Workers' State must also continue to operate in a global economy dominated by capital, and just as Lenin describes the way generalised commodity production and exchange leads inexorably towards competition, and thereby to the development of capital, capitalists and capitalism, so the continued operation of transitional forms of property, in a global capitalist economy, dominated by capital and commodity exchange, means that the transitional property is always being pulled in the direction of capitalism and away from socialism. The USSR, under Lenin, had to adopt the NEP; he tried to get multinational capital to invest in Russia, and ultimately the USSR collapsed. China has gone in the same direction. I don't know if Fred has been to Cuba, but I have, and he would see that it too, has lots of foreign investment, particularly in its hotels and tourist industry. I am not saying there is anything wrong with such investment, on the contrary, as Trotsky said, in relation to Mexico, even to build state capitalism, first capital is required. But, then, be clear that what exists is not socialism. 

Now, as I said, Fred doesn't actually tell us which countries he is referring to, when he talks about proletarian socialism, so its hard to respond. But, if we take another he might be referring to, such as Venezuela its again hard to in any way justify calling it socialist. Chavez himself was simply a petty-bourgeois nationalist, and his programme was that of petty-bourgeois nationalism, not Socialism. The creation of the PSUV as a mass workers party meant, as I said at the time, that Marxists had to relate to it, and enter it, in the same way we do with other mass workers parties, but without in any way giving it credibility as being a “Socialist” let alone “Communist” party. In the absence of any actual mass revolutionary party in Venezuela, it was necessary to work within it, precisely in order to stick with the Venezuelan workers, and to demonstrate in practice to them the true class nature of Chavez' regime as a petty-bourgeois nationalist regime, against which they would have to fight. 

The subsequent events in Venezuela, the almost inevitable destruction of the economy, despite the huge advantages the country had due to its huge oil industry, have again illustrated the reactionary nature of such regimes, and that has been compounded by the again inevitable turn of the regime to increasing levels of oppression against the Venezuelan masses, as it seeks to cling to power for its own interests. As I said, there is nothing socialist about these reactionary regimes.