Covid & Brexit

War is breaking out inside the Tory Party, with the battle lines being drawn over the issues of COVID and Brexit. In reality, what is being fought over is the contradictory class interests, the opposing forms of property, that the Tory party seeks to represent, on the one hand the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and small capital, as against the interests of the top 0.01%, and fictitious capital. The two camps – neither of which socialists should have any truck with – are fighting it out via Whatsapp Groups, and resignation letters, as well as the normal scurrying off to the media with tittle tattle.

This weekend, has seen the unified wall of propaganda from the state, and the representatives of the top 0.01% unleashing another hysterical frenzy of Covid paranoia. The more the public begins to see through it, and to compare the stories of impending calamity with the reality they see around them, and with the simple facts about Omicron, deaths, and hospitalisations, the more hysterical that propaganda will become, and the more the Bonapartists will resort to authoritarian means to try to prevent any voices of opposition, any possibility of criticism being raised. These are the tactics always employed by creeping totalitarianism, as described by theorists of mass society, and in the writings of, for example, Arendt, and others.

At the start of the Covid paranoia, we had warnings that, in Britain, deaths could be as high as 500,000, or even 5 million! Globally, the team from Imperial College, upon whose wild predictions, most of the forecasts and measures have been based, repeated their similarly wild expectations over Swine Flu, in 2009, of 45 million deaths. In fact, in Britain, deaths even with Covid, as against due to Covid, have reached only 150,000 after two years. The deaths actually from COVID, as against with Covid, amount to only around 15,000, or about the average, over two years, for deaths from flu. Globally, the total deaths have risen, not to the predicted 45 million, but just to 5 million.

At the start of the pandemic, the media carried repeated wild stories about the need for mass burials and cremations, and again, no such thing occurred. Lurid pictures of the sites where such mass burials were to occur were shown on 24 hour TV, and we were told that undertakers were about to be overwhelmed, but again, no such thing happened, because, in fact, the total number of deaths has been well within the normal fluctuations that occur from one year to another. There was widespread media coverage of the set up of the huge barns of Nightingale Hospitals, capable of holding several thousand patients. Many of them never took in one patient, the Excel Nightingale Hospital in London, closed after having treated a total of just over 50 people, with never more than 25 gracing its beds at any one time. Hospitals were to be over-run, we were told, but in fact, the majority of hospitals throughout the country saw their bed occupancy rates fall to as low as 40%!

The country was to be in total lockdown we were told, but the claim was clearly nonsense, because, if it had been, millions would have died as power and water supplies were cut off within hours, as those workers stayed home! The reality is that only about 20% of workers stayed away from work as normal, that being reflected in the 20% drop in GDP. The large majority of workers continued to go to work, to travel on, and to drive, the public transport required to get them to work and so on. They sat with other workers on that public transport, and at their places of work in their thousands, making all of the confected opprobrium over parties held by staff in Downing Street, so much ridiculous humbug. But, this is the kind of Newspeak you get in a society that is sleepwalking towards a lack of critical thinking, and a simple acceptance of the word coming down from Big Brother.

And, now, with all that we know about these ridiculously inflated warnings over the last two years, coupled with the fact that, not only now do we have a large measure of herd immunity, with a large part of the population already having either had the virus, and developed immunity to it, or else has been multiply vaccinated against it, but the now dominant Omicron variant is, in any case, milder than its predecessors, in order to justify further restrictions, the propaganda has to be even more hysterical, and unrelated to the facts, the manipulation of reality has to be that much greater. So, we had Dominic Raab claiming that hundreds of people had been hospitalised with the Omicron variant, whereas, in fact, the number was just 9! In fact, for much of last week, there had been no such hospitalisations at all. And, from what is known about such hospitalisation, in South Africa, it is that, because of the milder nature of the variant, the patients did not even require oxygen, and stayed in hospital for much shorter times than for previous variants. Yet, according to all of the hysteria, it is as though the Apocalypse is upon us.

All of the propaganda has, of course, then, been quick to focus upon infections rather than the near zero levels of hospitalisations and deaths from Omicron. The media switches seamlessly in its presentations from talking about Omicron infections, to hospitalisations and deaths from all Covid variants, giving the impression that these are the same. And, in fact, as I have set out before, the deaths of people WITH Covid are not at all the same thing as deaths FROM COVID. The former simply means that people who have died, for whatever reason, including being hit by a bus, includes people who, in the last 28 days, also received a positive COVID test. In fact, as described above the proportion of these dying from COVID itself amounts to only about 10% of the total.

Now, as the propaganda is again ramped up, we have warnings that the NHS could be overwhelmed. But, there is no evidence of that, and no logical reason for it, other than the normal Winter increase in demand for hospital beds, as larger numbers of elderly and vulnerable people fall ill for all the usual seasonal reasons. We are now being told that 50,000 – 100,000 doctors and nurses could be away from work, but the real reason they would be is not because of being actually ill, as a result of COVID infection, but simply because of the ridiculous practice of pinging anyone who might have been in contact with the virus, and requiring them to isolate for a fortnight!

There is a confluence of different, and even antagonistic interests that contributes to the spreading of all this nonsense. On the one hand, there are elements within the Medical-Industrial Complex who will not allow any opportunity of a potential crisis to go to waste, as a means of inflating their own importance, swelling their empires, that now cross over from academia into the NHS, as well as into the giant pharmaceutical companies. The idea that any health problem can only be dealt with by the spending of vast amounts of money, as against the use of common sense, and sensible measures of primary healthcare is one that is firmly entrenched within the healthcare system, and has been for decades.

Then there are elements of the government that seek to cover the disaster that is Brexit, by hiding it under the camouflage of Covid. They are, of course, joined by the Lexiters, who have never wanted to take responsibility for the disaster they contributed to, but who also tend to be within that camp of crude, economistic Leftists, who opportunistically see any economic disaster as a basis for attacking the existing government, and who naively believe that any economic catastrophe somehow weakens capital, and strengthens labour, whereas the opposite is the case. And, then there is the outright class interest of the top 0.01%, and its representatives within the state. As I wrote the other day, they probably did not construct COVID lockdowns for that purpose, but once underway, those lockdowns fulfilled all the functions previously provided by austerity. By physically preventing economic activity, they threw workers out of their jobs, and slowed the growth of further employment; they slowed economic activity and the accumulation of real capital, thereby, limiting the demand for money-capital, and slowing the rise in interest rates, which, combined with a new round of money printing, enabled asset prices once again to soar into the stratosphere.

And, here, we have the key to the ructions now going on within the Tory Party, and the de facto Bonpartist national government, being constructed between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. The ruling class, the top 0.01% needs the prices of those assets, of fictitious-capital to be protected against rising interest rates, and a subsequent crash of those prices. But, its options are now extremely limited. The days of using COVID as justification are extremely limited, and even now, it is an option that has lost its potency, as economic activity continued to burst through despite it, and the contradictions involved in it, have sent inflation soaring out of control. Even the central banks are now having to respond by tightening liquidity and raising policy rates, the last thing they wanted to happen. Any further restrictions on the economy, attempts to hold down wages and so on, are going to require a heavy dose of Bonapartism, and that is precisely what the last two years has been preparing.

Johnson and Starmer are the representatives of the interests of the top 0.01%, the owners of fictitious capital, as manifest in the ideology of conservative social-democracy. It has to fit a square peg in a round hole, or reconcile two contradictory requirements. On the one hand, in order to protect the long-term interests of the ruling class, and the state, it must modernise British capital, and enable it to accumulate, so as to provide the basis of future profits from which dividends/interest, and rents and taxes are paid. But, it must do that without either causing the demand for labour to rise rapidly, causing wages to rise and profits to be squeezed, or causing the demand for money-capital to rise faster than its supply from realised profits, causing interest rates to rise, and asset prices to crash. It is effectively impossible to achieve that. It is certainly impossible to achieve without some kind of Bonapartist state imposing crushing limitations on the rights and freedoms of workers. To be clear, this is not a requirement for fascism, which, today, would simply strengthen the hand of the ruling class's current main class antagonists – the petty bourgeoisie.

The task has been made much harder as a result of Brexit, but also as a result of the lockouts and lockdowns introduced in response to the Covid paranoia. On the one hand, Brexit has hugely increased the costs for British capital, as well as slowing its rate of turnover, and so reduced its annual rate of profit. It has limited the free movement of labour and so cut off one potential means of fulfilling its labour requirements without causing labour shortages, higher wages, and squeezed profits. Lockouts and lockdowns, directly reduced the supply of goods and services, whilst government was forced to introduce income replacement schemes financed by huge additional borrowing, and industrial scale money printing that has devalued the currency, maintained monetary demand, and so fuelled an inflation that is running out of control. That alone means increased future borrowing, and higher interest rates.

But, that inevitably means a crash in asset prices on a scale that would make 2008 look like a minor tremor. In 2008, when the financial crash happened, the capitalists' state stepped in to bail out the owners of that fictitious capital, and the banks and finance houses that act as the centralising institutions of it. They used trillions of Dollars of taxpayers money to nationalise the banks and finance houses, so as to protect the wealth and power of the ruling class, and, once having stabilised the system, they then began to pay for it by imposing swinging fiscal austerity on to citizens and society. They held back economic growth, and they pumped even more money into the purchase of worthless paper assets, so as to restore the wealth of the owners of them.

It was termed “Socialism For the Rich”, and of itself, illustrates the fallacy of equating state ownership with Socialism. But, it does illustrate what the conservative social-democracy of Johnson and Starmer is actually currently about, because that Socialism For The Rich, can also be termed, in such conditions, National Socialism. It is “socialism” that seeks to impose state control over, and also to provide state support for, large swathes of real industrial capital, in order to boost its profitability, and to do so in the interests of the owners of the ruling class, who are now reduced to being what Marx and Engels termed “coupon clippers”, money lenders who simply draw dividends/interest/coupon from their ownership of bonds and shares.

Its true, as Lenin described in Left-wing Childishness, that this stage of capitalist evolution is the rung immediately below Socialism; it has all of the characteristics of the productive relations of Socialism itself, but has one crucial factor missing - the control of the actual capital by the workers themselves, and the organisation of the working-class, as ruling class, into a Workers State, as the means of exercising its class dictatorship. As Marx and Engels put it in Anti-Duhring,

“In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the Capitalists.

But, the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.”

(Anti-Duhring p 358)

Except, of course, for more than a century, social-democracy has conditioned the working-class to accept precisely such an arrangement, and large numbers of socialists, who even claim to be Marxists, too, have misled the working-class into confusing state capitalist ownership with Socialism, in their repeated calls for nationalisation by that capitalist state. Moreover, what Marx and Engels could not envisage was the power of the state, manifest not just in the bodies of armed men, but more potently in its ideological arms, in the mass media, the schools, and universities, all of which today are being rolled out in a massive propaganda war, 24 hours a day, in relation to COVID. They could not have envisaged the power of such state propaganda, in the context of a mass society, in which competing elites are able to speak directly to, and mobilise masses, without the intermediating functions of large mass class organisations of civil society.

And, ultimately, if those ideological arms of the state are not sufficient to ensure that society is cowed and accepts the “barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers”, there remains the bodies of armed men themselves, and all of those that have aided and abetted the development of this authoritarian Bonapartism, over the last two years, will have played their part in ensuring that it has all of the arguments ready at hand, when it comes to use them to slap down any rebellion.

And, so we come to the resignation of David Frost from the government, as a result of his disagreement with the direction of travel of Boris Johnson, and his government. What does it amount to? As I have pointed out repeatedly, Johnson does not support Brexit. He used it opportunistically to challenge Cameron and May, and to get into Downing Street. His own Brexit deal was worse than May's deal that he voted against! Johnson needed the votes of the Tory MP's that represent the petty-bourgeoisie, to win the leadership, and he needed the votes of the petty-bourgeoisie to win the General Election. But, he knows that Brexit is a dead-end, and that, in reality, Britain will have to stick close to the EU, to abide by its rules and regulations, and ultimately to re-join it. But, he is constrained by his past, and by the reality of the balance of forces within the Tory Party. However, at every stage, he has capitulated to the EU, and now, as a crunch approaches over the Northern Ireland Protocol, he knows he will have to do so again, though the representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie in his party, demand that he do the opposite, and invoke Article 15, and break with the EU. Frost is a figurehead for this faction, and hence his resignation.

But, that faction, who also comprise all of those within the party hostile to the further imposition of COVID restrictions, are impotent given that Johnson has been in an undeclared National Government with Starmer for the last two years. Starmer doesn't believe in Brexit either, but, like Johnson, he is led to champion it, because, he has to rely on the forces of the reactionaries of Blue Labour as a counter to the forces of the Left. He is led to make the hopeless argument about needing to appeal to “workers” in the former red wall seats, whereas, in fact, what the appeal amounts to is an appeal to the same petty-bourgeoisie, the ranks of “white van man” that the Tories have already sewn up tight. The loss of millions of progressive Labour votes in 2019, as Labour swung away from its anti-Brexit stance, and the even further collapse in Labour support under Starmer, shows the total idiocy of the course being charted.