How The Left Should Have Responded To Covid19 - Part 1 of 3

The response of the Left to the Covid19 pandemic has been abysmal. It has been a mixture of opportunism, Malthusian catastrophism, dogmatism and group think. The most level headed response I have seen has been that of socialists in New Zealand, and I say that not because of any general agreement with them. On the contrary, in relation to probably most things, and particularly imperialism, I would be in disagreement with them. I would describe them as being amongst that class of petty-bourgeois moral socialists/Sismondists criticised by Lenin, in the series on Economic Romanticism that I have been running recently. 

If the Labour Party, and its foreign equivalents, are considered, their response was necessarily bad. These are bourgeois parties that are never going to adopt a serious, independent, proletarian internationalist position. As parliamentarist parties, their position is always going to be opportunist, based on seeking short-term parliamentary political advantage. But, the response of the Left, outside these bourgeois parties has also been atrocious. 

The problem with the organised Left is that it is contained within ossified micro sects. Each micro sect exists on the basis of promoting its own particular dogma. They portray themselves as different, as they each seek to cultivate their own niche in the market, and to justify their separate existence, but, from a distance, they appear all to be the same heap of decalcifying bones from the same skeleton. It mitigates against any kind of critical thinking. The leadership of these micro sects have been in place for 40-50 years, longer than for most Stalinist rulers. These leaders hand down the party line, which the members are then expected to defend in tribal loyalty. Given that most of these members have then lost the capacity for critical thinking, as they simply parrot the appropriate meme, its no wonder that, as soon as they are confronted by an alternative position, which they are unable to dismiss, the discussion, particularly over the Internet, quickly descends into a barrage of abuse and expletives. Indeed, its often difficult to differentiate between the outright trolls, who have no beliefs, but simply engage in flame wars for entertainment, and the more brain dead members of the micro sects. 

In large part, the position of most of the Left, over Covid19, was just as opportunist as that of the LP. It amounted to putting a plus sign wherever your opponent puts a minus sign. Trump, Bolsanaro, Johnson/Cummings were pandemic deniers, and opposed imposing lockdowns, so the Left automatically put a plus sign where these right-wing populists put a minus sign. The first thing the Left should have done, therefore, in Trotsky's words, was to “Learn To Think”. 

“In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat... 

Those ultra-leftists who do not want to think as Marxists, that is, concretely, will be caught unawares by war. Their policy in time of war will be a fatal crowning of their policy in peace-time. The first artillery shots will either blow the ultra-leftists into political non-existence, or else drive them into the camp of social-patriotism, exactly like the Spanish anarchists, who, absolute “deniers” of the state, found themselves from the same causes bourgeois ministers when war came.” 

And, indeed, so the same comparison can be made with the outbreak of the Covid19 moral panic, which has itself been couched in wartime phraseology. It has been those that profess themselves to be supporters of workers' liberty, and in general opponents of Bonapartism, of authoritarianism, and so on that have been the greatest cheerleaders of such authoritarian and draconian measures by the state, and Bonapartist regimes, criticising them not for their authoritarianism, but for not being authoritarian enough! This is also a consequence of such micro sects having abandoned any concept of independent, working-class action and self government, and a collapse into craven reliance on the bourgeois state to provide answers to workers problems, of a pathetic collapse into Lassallean/Fabian statism, into petty-bourgeois social democracy.

So, for example, not only do we see calls for the capitalist state to enact these draconian measures to take away the right of free movement, and to withdraw the basic rights and freedoms of workers, taking them back to the conditions of serfdom, but we see ridiculous demands for care homes to be nationalised by the capitalist state, as a solution! This is the same capitalist state that already controls the NHS, which has proved itself totally unfit for purpose in protecting workers lives and health, including its own workers that were deprived basic PPE, and which has been systematically undermined by ten years of austerity. We are told that such state capitalism is “public ownership”, reinforcing the nonsense spouted by the Tories as well as social democrats, about it being “our” NHS, when it is no such thing. They seem to have forgotten the basic tenets of Marxism that there is no such thing as “the public” or “the people”, because society is comprised of classes, and those classes stand in antagonistic contradiction to each other. How can any of these things be under “public ownership”, when they are controlled by the capitalist state, a state there to protect the interests of the capitalist class, not the working class? 

Trump and the populist Right denied the existence of the pandemic, and so the Left not only had to assert its existence – which is undeniable – but to characterise it in apocalyptic terms, which it most certainly does not justify. A pandemic certainly exists, i.e. a virus that is highly infectious, and has spread across most countries of the world, but all of the claims about it causing 45 million deaths, globally, up to 500,000 deaths in the UK, and corresponding numbers in the US etc., clearly are not justified, and some analysis of this, and of the science and the facts would have shown, from the start, that it was not justified. But, the Left launched headlong into putting plus signs where the populists placed minus signs, and so, when the populists did impose lockdowns, the left could only respond by positioning themselves as even more authoritarian, even more illiberal. 

The AWL, even has it as part of its name, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, but, in the name of counterposing itself to Trump, Johnson et al, it quickly abandoned all demands for such liberty, including the right to free movement it had called for in response to Brexit. But, it was not alone. Most of the Left demanded that workers right to work, right to assemble and so on be scrapped, and that workers be confined to their quarters, required only to come out as drones to work in “essential” jobs, which really meant nearly all jobs, but that they should keep quiet about it. Even the right to free speech was challenged, as anyone challenging the received wisdom was branded a “Pandemic Denier”, an enemy of the state, or non-person, as were those who did not abide by the state and its media's requirement that everyone, each week, come out to clap the nation's health and care workers, even as the government itself denied them PPE! A more glaring example of 1984 style brain-washing and social conditioning, to see how far conformity could be induced, its hard to imagine, and was reminiscent of the kind of programming discussed by Milgram. 

The weekly clap was part of a propaganda campaign to convince us that we were “all in it together”, just as in wartime, and that the war was being waged by “our NHS” just as in wartime it is being fought by “our armies”. But, of course, they are not “our armies”, and nor is it “our NHS”, because both these things are merely aspects of the capitalist state, which itself is most certainly not ours, but is the state of the ruling capitalist class. The task of Marxists, as Trotsky sets out above is to be enemies of that state in peace and in war.  In fact, that NHS has treated its own workers appallingly, and failed not only to provide them with PPE, to provide adequate contact and isolation protocols, but even called back retired health workers, i.e. those amongst the 20% of the population actually at risk from infection by the virus! In addition it has failed to protect its patients, it has been in the confined, locked down spaces of hospitals and care homes that the greatest concentration of deaths from Covid19 came. They have been like killing fields for the virus, and yet all the attention has been on closing down wider society, where relatively very few deaths have occurred. It has engaged in large scale stunts like the creation of Nightingale Hospitals that remained effectively empty, and were then closed down, having diverted money, staff and resources from where they were actually needed. In fact, that kind of behaviour is typical of the top heavy, bureaucratic nature of the NHS as a whole. 

Its not the job of Marxists to advise the capitalist state on how it should arrange its affairs. We are not in a position to make such decisions or to make such demands upon it, and that state is not going to ask our advice in doing so. That was precisely Lenin's criticism of the Narodniks in their attempts to draw up such schemas. We can, however, examine what that state has done, why it did it, and to say, how instead a rational socialist state would have acted, and we can set out how, in the constraints of the existing state, workers can organise to defend their own interests. The Left, in fact, failed to do any of that, instead focusing on demanding that the state be even more authoritarian, even more illiberal, and destroy the economy and the basis of workers' livelihoods even more drastically. It is a measure of just how petty-bourgeois, both in composition and in outlook, that Left has become. 

Adopting a rational approach to Covid 19 was not difficult. Its true that its a new virus, but that is only true in the sense that its a new strain of an existing type of virus. Covid19 is simply a strain of coronavirus, and the coronavirus has been around for a long time. They were first discovered in animals in the 1930's, and in humans in the 1960's. It is coronavirus, along with rhinovirus and others, that is responsible for the common cold. We know that these viruses are very contagious, every year, millions of people across the globe catch colds; there is a pandemic every year in that respect. But, the vast majority of people who catch a cold, i.e. contract coronavirus, or rhinovirus, are not seriously ill as a result. Even fewer die from it. That is just a simple fact. But some people are seriously ill, and some do die from catching a cold. If you are old, or your immune system is compromised, even a cold can make you seriously ill, and, frequently, it is the fact that this prolonged illness, and your bodies response to it, that actually kills you, as you get pneumonia, or other complications.  The main means of dealing with the common cold is via the development of herd immunity, because the rapid mutation of the viruses that cause it makes developing appropriate vaccines difficult.

So, too with Covid19 as a coronavirus. For 80% of people, as with the common cold, it causes no symptoms or only mild cold like symptoms. The WHO now even says that people amongst this 80% who have the coronavirus, but who are asymptomatic, are also very unlikely to be contagious. That appears to be the case with children, which throws into question the whole farce of having closed down schools. Unlike the flu virus, which makes pretty much everyone ill it infects, including children, Covid 19 does not affect children, and has virtually no effect on 80% of the population. Even amongst the remaining 20%, it only severely affects a minority, and kills an even smaller number than that. If we take the 20%, in Britain, that is around 13 million people. The total number of deaths so far, which have been concentrated amongst the elderly in hospitals and care homes, and appears now to have reached a peak, having ravaged those confined populations, is just over 40,000. That only constitutes just 0.3% even of that 20%. It represents a tiny 0.07% of the total population. As a comparison, flu, for which we have vaccines, kills, in a bad year, in Britain, around 17,000 people, and has a mortality rate of 0.1%. So, we have a pandemic, yes, but the nature of that pandemic is by no means as apocalyptic as the media have portrayed it as being, and which the Left have themselves been complicit in suggesting. 

On average, 8,000 people die from flu each year, in Britain, despite having vaccines to provide herd immunity against it, and particularly to protect those most at risk from it. In 2018, 17,000 died, in Britain from flu, which is half the number that have died from Covid 19. But, even this is not a valid comparison. Flu affects everyone, whilst Covid 19 particularly affects the elderly. More than half those that have died are people over 80, and most of them are over 85. In terms of excess deaths its hard to say how many of the 40,000 can be absolutely attributed to Covid19, because many of those people, especially those suffering with other conditions would have died anyway. In other years, such deaths are often attributed to these other causes, or to flu, because, in previous years, no one has tested for Covid19. But, despite those 17,000 flu deaths in 2018, no one demanded that the economy be closed down, to prevent its spread. That is despite the fact that there have been warnings, for years, that a flu pandemic was likely. Each year, around 80,000 people die from smoking related illnesses, and a further 320,000 contract serious smoking related diseases. Yet, despite twice as many people dying from these smoking related diseases as from Covid19, we don't even get a ban on smoking or close down cigarette manufacturing, and so on. 

So, if we can have 17,000 people die from flu, if we can have 80,000 people die every year from smoking, without closing down the economy, what justifies closing down the economy in response to Covid19? The answer is that there is no justification.

Forward To Part 2