How The Left Should Have Responded To Covid19 - Part 2 of 3

So, we then have to ask the question why governments did initiate that course of action. The fact is, of course, that not all did. South Korea and Germany, for example, did not close down their economies. But, both of those economies, from the start, introduced large-scale testing and tracking. Before the virus could spread extensively, within their borders, they tested people coming in, or who showed symptoms, and, where they had the virus, they were isolated, and those they had come in contact with were traced, and similarly tested. By isolating those with the virus, who were a small minority, they prevented its spread, and, thereby, removed the need to close down their economies. But, as I've set out elsewhere, if you have allowed the virus to become widespread, this strategy cannot work, because it spreads faster than your ability to track it. Its why the introduction of track and trace in Britain is unlikely to work, now, because even with the higher levels of testing its not likely to keep pace with new infections, until a condition of herd immunity is achieved either naturally or by vaccination, so that the virus starts to die out anyway. 

The reason that the US and Britain did not introduce such a system, back in February or March, is not down to Trump or Johnson's Covid19 denial, but down to the inability to actually undertake such an operation. In the US its near impossible, given the length of its borders, and amount of traffic into and out of the country, but also because of its lack of socialised healthcare, meaning millions of people who are sick would not seek medical treatment until it was too late. The UK also lives by trade, and a constant flow of people across its borders, a fact that will become apparent were anyone stupid enough to attempt a hard Brexit. But, ten years of austerity means that Britain's NHS is also even less fit for purpose than it was anyway, and the introduction of charges for non-UK patients again means that many would not seek treatment when they are ill. More immediately, neither the US nor UK had the basic requirements of testing kits, facilities, staff or testing laboratories to have been able to carry out such large-scale testing in the way that Germany and South Korea had done. It requires that you had prepared for such an eventuality in advance. 

The NHS has suffered ten years of austerity, but, as a state capitalist health service, its purpose has never been to cater for the interests of workers rather than capital. The imposition of austerity has simply made that condition worse. Anyone who has waited for 24 hours in A&E, or waited weeks just to get a GP appointment knows that it was on the point of collapse anyway. Brexit will make that much worse, as all of the staff that the NHS, and social care, depends upon return to the EU. If no one had heard of COVID19, and all of the deaths were put down to “flu-like symptoms”, as they are in other years, then this would all have been put down to being the flu pandemic that has been warned about for years, and we would simply have been complaining that the government had failed to heed those warnings by providing the NHS with the resources to deal with it. In fact, in any year the number of people coming down with “flu-like symptoms” includes around 14% of people who are actually suffering with coronavirus. Had this just all been put down to the expected flu pandemic, its unlikely that there would have been such a moral panic, and demands that things be made even worse by adding a close down of the economy, creating the worst economic slowdown in 300 years, to everyone's problems. In fact, making the coronavirus outbreak into some kind of apocalyptic event that it isn't has helped Johnson get off the hook of not having properly resourced the NHS for the expected flu pandemic. It enables him to present it as something way out of the normal that could not have been anticipated, as an unexpected external enemy. Trump, of course, has milked that particular cow dry, claiming that Covid19, is the “Chinese Virus”, leaving it up to others to create conspiracy theories about it being unleashed from Chinese laboratories and so on. In short, all of the usual components of a moral panic. 

The NHS simply did not have the capacity to undertake the testing required, particularly alongside he Winter Flu Season. The US was in a worse position still in trying to achieve that. Trump and Johnson are only individuals, and if the US and UK could have done the testing and tracing then the pressure would have come from within the ruling class, and its representatives in the state, to have done so, but they couldn't. 

If an extensive programme of test and trace was not possible, as in Germany and South Korea, countries like Britain and the US were dependent on other measures to try to prevent the spread of the virus, by calling on people to engage in physical distancing. It still seems that the best way of killing the virus, apart from the development of herd immunity, is by simply soap and water, and regular hand washing. In fact, it appears that another means of slowing the spread of the virus would have been to advise the wearing of face masks, because although they are useless in preventing you contracting the virus, they are effective in preventing you spreading the virus to others. But, there was a lack of such masks, there was concern that people snapping them up would deprive health and social care workers even more of such protection, and the WHO was advising against them. The US and UK might have hoped to escape any serious consequences, because coronaviruses spread throughout the population every year. They account for between 8-14% of all “flu-like” illnesses. In addition, Sweden imposed no lockdown, and saw, and has seen, no large excess number of deaths from COVID19. On the contrary, its per capita mortality rate is lower than the UK, and the gap is widening. Over the last week, in Sweden, new COVID19 deaths have been down to single digits, or low teens, whereas, in Britain, new deaths continue to run into hundreds. 

But, the US and UK are not Sweden. Sweden did see a spike in COVID19 deaths, but it was due to the same reason that deaths rose sharply in Italy. In Italy, the virus got into its health and social care system, and so ran rampant amongst confined vulnerable populations. It should have been an obvious lesson for the governments elsewhere, because the data from Wuhan in China showed clearly that the virus posed a risk to that 20% of the population, the over 60's, and those with underlying medical conditions, i.e. those most likely to be already in hospitals and care homes! The obvious strategy, armed with that knowledge, and particularly the knowledge also out of Wuhan, that the virus posed no threat to the other 80%, was to isolate that 20% until immunity against the virus had been achieved, and it had been eradicated. 

Sweden has large care homes for the elderly, larger and more concentrated than those of its smaller Nordic neighbours, and it was in these that it saw a spike in COVID19 deaths, not amongst its general population, which continued to meet freely, and to go about its business normally, whilst simply taking sensible measures of social and physical hygiene. Contrary to all of the hysterical projections that seemed to crave a sharp rise in Swedish mortality to confirm the need for the lockdowns that were imposed elsewhere, in fact, as the data shows, its per capita mortality rates have been better than other countries that imposed lockdowns, and instead of it being only a question of timing, as some claimed, before the Swedish rates ticked up, the opposite was the case, with Sweden being one of the first to flatten its curve of new deaths, and to reduce them now close to zero. One reason for that is almost certainly that the early deaths were concentrated in the care homes, whilst its general population, dominated by the 80% not at risk, has been able to acquire a natural herd immunity to the virus without even having known it had contracted it. Only later when we get reliable antibody tests will that become apparent. 

But, London, New York and other major cities contain millions of people in close proximity. A sizeable number of those people are disadvantaged, elderly and suffer health conditions, making them vulnerable to serious consequences from infection. In fact, its not just the less dense population of Sweden and its Nordic neighbours that gives it an advantage in that respect, but also their more equitable societies, and higher levels of social provision. Both the US and UK have very large hospitals and care homes, which experience from Italy showed are the main centres around which the virus does most damage. So, absent any strategy to protect those vulnerable populations, it was inevitable that the virus would not only spread rapidly – which is not a problem in itself, as it does not affect 80% of the population – but that it would spread to these vulnerable populations and lead to a spike in deaths. 

Once that occurred, the moral panic that had been created on social media, and which had been picked up by the mass media, in search of cheap sensationalist stories, became an unstoppable force, leading populist governments to collapse into taking the most visible, the most drastic and draconian measures they could come up with. Having done so, that in itself simply fed the frenzy, because what other reason could there be for taking such measures unless, as in wartime, we all faced some real existential threat, even though, in reality, no such threat existed! 

Populist governments capitulated to popular demands, hyped up by a sensationalist mass media, and introduced lockdowns along with all the other authoritarian measures that go with it. A Left that had itself called for such action as an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction to the Populist Right's, pandemic denial, found itself wrong-footed, and driven down a dead-end in which it could now only counterpose itself to the Populist Right by itself becoming ever more authoritarian, ever more illiberal in its own demands. 

These demands for draconian measures, not even seen in wartime, and for a comparison to which its necessary to go back at least to the 18th century, and the Combination Acts, or more closely to the days of serfdom, were thoroughly reactionary, especially when they were addressed to right-wing populist regimes already travelling rapidly in the direction of Bonapartism. But, the reality was that these governments put forward the lockdown policy, largely as show. It was quite clear, and certainly should have been clear to Marxists, that the idea that you can simply close down production is a total nonsense. 

As Marx put it in his Letter to Kugelmann, 

“Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish.” 

And, with the rate of turnover of capital about thirty times faster than in Marx's time, that, today, is a matter of days, or even hours, not weeks. Large stores keep only 2-3 days of stock, and their shelves would soon empty unless their suppliers were constantly providing them with replacements. Indeed, that was the reason for shelves emptying at the start of the lockdown, rather than the “panic buying” that the media and the government were putting forward as the explanation. The capitalist economy, from its inception, has been based on a comprehensive social division of labour, with each industry being dependent on every other, and, today, that is a global social division of labour. Its why Brexit is such a reactionary and disastrous idea, and why the Theory of Socialism In One Country is a reactionary dangerous delusion. 

The lockdown message of the government to “Stay At Home”, and not go to work, was, from the beginning, therefore, a lie, and those, on the Left, promoting that message were themselves complicit in promoting this lie. Its okay if you are a teacher to think that you can stay at home for ever, so long as you don't question what effect that will have on the future of all those working-class kids deprived of their education, despite all the science showing that kids are unaffected by the virus, and so long as you don't have to think about who it is that is producing the electricity that you are using, the gas you are burning, the food you are eating. The campaign of teachers, where sections of the Left are strong, to close schools and keep them closed against everything that science tells us about the nature of the virus, seems far more about a crude, and simple minded political attack on the government than anything to do with even basic trades union health and safety, let alone socialist class politics and the overall interests of workers. Moreover, in trying to use teachers as such a battering ram, as Mike McNair has said, it is likely to lead to yet another devastating defeat for a group of workers, and for the Left that pushed them into that position. 

That Stalinist Lexiters and other such reactionary elements, and economic nationalists should promote this message is understandable, because it fits their own irrational, illiberal ideas, and opposition to free movement, but why on Earth were those on the Left that had recognised the reactionary nature of Lexit, and opposition to free movement, jumping on the same ridiculous bandwagon. It is because these tribal, boneheaded, dogmatic microsects have lost the ability to think critically. They need to learn to think! 

The government knew that the idea that everyone should “Stay Home” was nuts. For one thing, if doctors and nurses stayed home, who would treat the people in the hospitals? But, hospitals do not function just on the labour of doctors, nurses and ancillary staff; they require electricity, water, drugs, clinical supplies, bed linen, and a thousand and one other commodities that must be supplied more or less daily. If the workers producing these other commodities stayed home, where would hospitals get these supplies? And, the producers of these thousands of supplies themselves require inputs, in the form of paper, wood, cotton and other fabrics, plastic, steel, rubber, and thousands of other materials, many of which come from all over the world. So, unless the workers producing all of these primary products and manufactured materials ignored the demand to “Stay Home”, where would the producers of all these products required by the hospitals get their raw materials, so that they could produce the commodities required by the hospitals? And, of course, having produced all of these commodities, it requires that workers on ships, plains, trains and lorries continued to work, so that they could be delivered. And, in order that all these workers could get to work, it required that transport workers, on trains, the tube, buses and taxis continued to work. 

The idea that there ever could have been a lockdown, as far as work is concerned, was a non-starter. For one thing, had electricity workers stayed home, power would have been cut off within hours, bringing not just the economy, but life as we know it to a shuddering halt. Yet, the government, and the media, had to perpetuate this myth that there was a lockdown. In part, they did so, because otherwise they would have to admit that a fundamental plank of bourgeois ideology is a lie. They pretend that labour is dependent on capital. It is capital that creates wealth and employs labour, out of the goodness of its heart. Value is created in exchange not in production, and production itself is the product of capital. Had they had to face the reality that, if labour actually did stop, as workers stayed home, then the economy would collapse, it would have been a crippling blow to the lies and ideology upon which capitalism rests. 

Just using your eyes and common sense showed that talk of a lockdown was nonsense. The only workplaces that were actually closed down were those that involved people coming together as consumers. But, the data also proves it. GDP is a measure of new value created, i.e. of new labour performed. If all labour had stopped, GDP would fall to zero. It didn't. On average, GDP, at its low point, seems to have fallen by around 30%, meaning that 70% of labour has continued to be undertaken. Now, the 30% drop is undoubtedly significant, but it shows that the vast majority of labour continued to be undertaken, there was, and could be no real lockdown of production. What there was was a lockdown of social activity, which, because there was no lockdown of production was both farcical and dangerous. 

What it meant was that you could go to work, and indeed despite the lockdown lie, you were expected to go to work, and so be in contact with other workers, both at work and on public transport to work, but you could not meet those other workers outside work at say a trades union branch meeting or a LP meeting. You could be killed by a racist cop on your way to and from work, but you could not gather together with others to protest about racism, and the murder of your fellow workers! You could not even meet with your friends and fellow workers in the pub or other venue to discuss such atrocities or to organise against them. But, the Left not only went along with this lie, they acted as cheerleaders for it, only demanding that the government be even more draconian and illiberal. It inevitably found itself once again tailing the working class when it spontaneously erupted to protest the murder of George Floyd, and its manifestation of more widespread racism, in violation of all those reactionary laws designed to enforce the lockdown of social activity. 

It is this lockdown of social activity and the consumption that goes with it, that is the basis of the 30% drop in GDP. That has led to the biggest slowdown in 300 years, and those that inflicted it will pay a political price, down the road, as will those that encouraged it. Millions of workers who lost their jobs, or had their livelihoods destroyed in pursuit of a lie, will not look kindly on those who imposed such policy, especially as it will not take long for it to be seen that it was both unnecessary and ineffective. 

There is hope, however. In 1847, the UK economy suffered a 37% contraction, as a result of another artificially created economic crisis. Then, it was because a speculative bubble in railway shares burst, along with a credit crunch caused by the 1844 Bank Act. But, when the government was led to suspend the Bank Act, the economy quickly bounced back. The long wave economic boom that had started in 1843 then resumed, running through to 1865, with only the interruption of a similar financial crisis in 1857. 

There is every likelihood of the same thing happening this time. The last US jobs numbers showed 2.5 million workers quickly being reemployed, and there are signs of a wall of “revenge spending” set to be unleashed, as soon as consumers are allowed to enter the shops, pubs, restaurants and other venues they have been banned from for the last ten weeks. As I've written before, an argument could be made for governments having used the Covid19 moral panic to create an economic slowdown. In 2018, as the global economy resumed a path of higher growth, interest rates began to rise. The US financial markets crashed by 20% with corresponding drops elsewhere. By the end of 2018, Trump introduced his global trade war, which, along with Brexit, acted to slow global trade and growth. That took upward pressure off wages and interest rates, which, along with resumed money printing, reflated those crashed financial markets. But, in 2019, trade began to find new routes and channels, growth continued, and the potential for higher wages, as employment reached new heights, along with the potential for higher interest rates, again threatened to burst the massively inflated financial and property bubbles. The economic slowdown caused by the response to Covid, could be seen as a means of preventing that process unfolding and again boosting financial markets, which, though they dropped initially, are back to their astronomical highs. 

However, as I also wrote previously that is not likely the reason for governments pursuing the policies they have, which is more due to cock-up than conspiracy. For one thing, as I wrote recently, the fall in productivity and rise in costs, means that, combined with all of the injected liquidity, there is likely to be rising inflation, as soon as lockdown eases, and consumers rush back into all those places from which they have been banned. Although many displaced workers will suffer, other spheres will see rising demand and activity. Rising wages will squeeze profits, whilst the vast amount of borrowing already undertaken, plus that to come, will cause interest rates to rise, and so leading to a financial and property market crash. That is not what those governments, the state, nor the top 0.01% would want.

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