The Illiberal Left, Covid and China

Across China, millions of workers, particularly more radical, young workers, are rising up in rebellion against the repressive zero-Covid lockdowns being implemented by the Chinese Stalinists. Western media, which is the propaganda arm of US/NATO imperialism, has, of course, been covering these rebellions with glee, as the global economic war of NATO imperialism against China has been ramping up over recent months. In doing so, they have noted the idiocy and impossibility of the policy of zero-Covid, introduced by the Chinese state. That, of course, simply illustrates, again, their hypocrisy, because they, along with sections of the illiberal Left, in the West, were at the forefront of demanding, for two years, and with echoes of it still, that governments imposed strict lockdowns on populations, the supposed argument for which was/is to prevent the spread of infection, i.e. to achieve zero-Covid infection!

The way that any virus or other pathogen is defeated is always via the establishment of herd immunity. That herd immunity might arise as a result of natural infection, or by vaccination. In the absence of vaccines, only natural infection is a means of producing herd immunity. Whether such a strategy is adopted or not, depends upon the virulence of the pathogen, and how contagious it is, though, fortunately, these two things tend to be inversely correlated. It would be stupid to try to eradicate a virus like Ebola by allowing natural infection to let rip, because, it is extremely virulent, leading to a mortality rate of around 50% of those infected.

The development of natural herd immunity relies upon those infected living, having developed a natural resistance to the disease. One reason that the contagiousness of pathogens is inversely related to their virulence is that very virulent pathogens quickly kill their hosts, who then do not act as transmission mechanisms to other hosts, so pathogens evolve by natural selection, into those that do not kill their hosts, enabling the pathogen to survive and be passed on to other hosts.

Pathogens that are not so virulent, but which are more contagious have a natural evolutionary advantage. Hosts that, then, develop an immune resistance to these less virulent strains, also gain an immune response to more virulent strains. Ebola is not highly contagious, so the requirement to defeat the virus via herd immunity does not exist, though that means that the virus continues to exist, unlike other viruses such as smallpox that have been eradicated, by widespread herd immunity from vaccination. Illustrating the above point, the smallpox vaccine developed by Jenner, was first produced by using the less virulent, but related, cow-pox virus, after he noticed that those infected with the latter had resistance to the former.

But, Covid never was anything like Ebola, despite all of the hype produced by the media that spread panic across the globe, and fuelled the idiotic demands for the global economy to be locked down. From the start, looking at the data coming out of China, where the first cases had been discovered, it was obvious that, not only was this a highly selective virus, only seriously affecting the elderly or those with other forms of compromised immune systems, but, also, it had a mortality rate only like that of flu, not like that of Ebola.

Yet, the data was being presented as though a mortality rate of more like 10% was possible, with forecasts that anything between half a million and five million would die in Britain, and Imperial College again forecasting – as it had years earlier with Swine Flu – that 45 million would die globally. In fact, even now, the total global deaths of people with, rather than from Covid only amount to 6 million, meaning that the number dying actually from COVID is just a fraction of that. One reason was that the Chinese authorities, themselves, from the beginning, doctored the data, for example, by removing from the number of people infected and tested, those that had already recovered. Add in the fact that huge numbers of people were already infected, but not tested, and the mortality rate was bound to have been massively inflated from the real figure.

Moreover, unlike flu, which is less selective, and, in fact, tends to be more virulent for younger rather than older people, Covid was asymptomatic for around 80% of the population, in these younger age groups, who, of course, form the bulk of the active population both in terms of employment and other social interaction. If ever there was a virus ideally suited for the development of herd immunity by means of natural infection, Covid was it. It meant that 80% of the population could go about their business as normal, knowing that, yes, they would be likely to contract the virus, but they would probably never know it. Indeed, the only reason that millions of people in Britain ever got to know they had ever had Covid is because, as now in China, they were encouraged, and even required, to undergo frequent testing whether they felt ill or not.

As I wrote at the time, prior to the development of vaccines, a rapid spread of the virus amongst the 80% of the population not at risk from it, would have been advantageous. That was also the view initially of government scientific advisors, before the moral panic whipped up in the media made anyone arguing such a rational position into a pariah. It was the rational solution, because, whilst nearly all of those infected would not even know they had had it, they would develop natural immunity against it, and that immunity itself would have quickly killed off the spread of the virus.

Moreover, in doing so, it would have restricted the mutation of the virus into ever more contagious strains. It is the fact that the virus was allowed to remain in circulation for so long, having not been killed off by herd immunity that gave it time to mutate. Moreover, the measures introduced to try to prevent its spread – lockdowns, use of masks and so on – gave an evolutionary advantage to those strains of the virus best suited to those conditions. Strains that were longer lived, and more easily transmitted, and so could overcome the restrictions of lockdowns, masks, hygiene measures, and so on, were given an evolutionary boost, and, of course, it is those strains that have flourished in the subsequent period, as with Omicron.

As Professor Woolhouse has stated, it was an example of collective madness. The Guardian in its review of his book “The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir” says,

"There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.

And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15....

“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt. All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.”

“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”

Yet, large sections of the illiberal Left, always tinged with statism, and increasingly keen to have the capitalist state impose solutions, rather than have workers develop their own independent activity and self-government, were at the forefront of goading on that madness, and demanding the state impose harsher lockdowns, and clampdown on any dissent from them. They encouraged the development of authoritarianism as an inevitable consequence of their statism, which was also coupled with their crippling catastrophism, which requires them to see disaster affecting capitalist society at every turn, and to encourage it as a means of seeking its collapse.

Such collapse, itself, would, of course, be disastrous for workers, just as the consequence of the effects of lockdowns on the economy is already proving, with rampant inflation, and astronomical debt, being the legacy of all of those lockdowns that the illiberal Left insisted on having. And, of course, for sections of that Left, it was also accompanied by a large dose of opportunism, as they saw it as a short-term means of attacking incumbent, right-wing governments, even though they had no real alternative to put in place of them.

Yet, it was obvious, even from the data that initially came out of China, from Wuhan, and was the basis of the claims by Imperial College, that what was being said about Covid was a lie. It was clear, as Woolhouse says, that it is highly selective, and, also, taking into consideration that selectivity, its virulence, in other sections of the population, was being grossly exaggerated. Indeed, even amongst those at risk from it, the virulence was overstated, as the ONS data I have referenced previously shows that only about 10% of those dying with COVID, actually died from it, the other 90% dying from other primary causes such as Alzheimer's, dementia, heart failure, stroke, pneumonia and so on. The rational response, as Woolhouse says, was not blanket lockdowns, but targeted protection of those actually at risk, i.e. the elderly and immune compromised.

The Guardian review goes on,

“Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. “Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,” says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.

The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of “shielders”, such as care home workers and informal carers. “These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.”

Britain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. “By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community. We should and could have invested in both suppression and protection. We effectively chose just one.”

This was precisely the strategy that I had set out at the start of the pandemic. Moreover, as against the statist solution that the illiberal Left supported of blanket lockdowns, it was a solution that the labour movement could have mobilised behind to implement and control. And, so, devoid of any independent working-class solutions to put forward, and left merely as cheerleaders of the capitalist state – just as many of them, now, are cheerleaders for NATO imperialism and the corrupt capitalist state of Zelensky in Ukraine – the illiberal and statist Left, were also put in the position of opposing any actual opposition to those lockdowns and other restrictions of workers' liberty.

That left the field wide open to other reactionary forces to seize that ground, such as the anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists, as well as the assorted fascists. Having cleared the ground for such forces to occupy, the illiberal Left then used the fact that it was such forces involved in those protests to deny their legitimacy, just as, today, they do the same with opposition across Europe to the effects of NATO/EU sanctions on Russian energy supplies, which has caused energy prices to soar, and threatens recession across the EU. Such a position, by which the so called Left finds itself as nothing more than the apologist of imperialism and the capitalist state, inevitably forces workers into the camp of those reactionary forces, as they seek to oppose the effects of these policies on their lives and living standards.

And, just as they have to perform acrobatics to justify their position of supporting NATO imperialism, and the reactionary and corrupt capitalist state in Ukraine, so they have to do the same thing, now, as they seek to support the opposition to lockdowns in China, having supported them in the West! The Chinese Stalinists claim that zero-Covid is necessary to prevent the spread of the virus and the deaths of large numbers, which, of course, was the argument for blanket lockdowns in the West too. Its nonsense, but because the illiberal Left supported that argument in the West, they find it hard to deny it in relation to China, and so are left as apologists for the line of the same Chinese Stalinists that Chinese workers are opposing, and whose actions they now seek to support!

So, for example, Andrew Coates, whilst writing a post entitled “Solidarity With The China Protests. Down With The Campists” (itself odd given the outright campist position he has adopted in support of the camp of NATO imperialism and the capitalist state in Ukraine), is also led to write the following bit of nonsense that simply parrots the propaganda of the Chinese Stalinists.

“Through its zero-Covid policy, China has a managed to keep the death toll from the virus down to 5,233 in total – four per million of the population compared with the British total of 2,873 deaths per million.”

The claim is ridiculous. Its true that if you look on some of the sites that provide official data on COVID deaths and infections that is what it says about China, but that is because these sites only report the official statistics. In China those statistics are unbelievable. As a number of journals have described, China is massively under-reporting the actual number of deaths from COVID. According to The Economist, the real figure, even back in January, was more than 1.7 million. If the claim were true, of course, then, logically it would mean that those protesting against what would have been a most effective means of preventing large-scale deaths were being irrational and could not be supported, though that would not mean, then, supporting the violent suppression of their protests either.

But, its clear that blanket lockdowns have not been successful in saving lives in China, any more than they were in the West. In both cases, it is the elderly, i.e. those actually at risk from the virus, that have died in large numbers, not only despite the lockdowns, but, in many ways, because of them. Blanket lockdowns distracted from the actual requirement to protect the elderly. In both cases that comes down to a failure to have adequately isolated them from potential infection, and, in China, it is compounded by a failure to vaccinate them, when vaccines became available. Western propaganda claims that the Chinese vaccine is not as effective as those produced in the West, but the real issue is that, only around 70% of the elderly population has been vaccinated, which raises further questions, in such a regimented society as to why that is.

The truth is that a continuation of blanket lockdowns, under cover of the zero-Covid policy, rather than extensive and effective vaccination, has suited the Chinese authorities, and for similar reasons as to why governments in the West also sought to impose lockdowns, and to focus on infections rather than serious illness and death as their metric of choice. When lockdowns, in China, were relaxed, its GDP rose by more than 18%, in the first quarter of 2021. Such a surge, strengthened the position of Chinese workers, but it also led to sharply rising inflation, as the massive amount of liquidity pumped into its economy flooded into the real economy, whereas, in the previous periods, it had been flowing into the same kind of asset price inflation seen in the West. That asset price inflation was already set to wreck the Chinese economy, most visible in relation to its property market, where the massive Evergrande empire was already collapsing.

China faces the same problem that western economies face. As the economy expands rapidly, the demand for capital rises, pushing interest rates higher, causing asset prices to crash, asset prices that are at even more astronomical levels than they were at the time just before the 2008 global financial meltdown (in 2008, the Dow stood at 14,000, and is now at 34,000; S & P 500 was 1500, and is now at 4000), and which have been pushed to those levels on nothing more than an ocean of central bank provision of liquidity. In China, even more liquidity has been pumped into the system to try to keep those bubbles from bursting, so that, any sharp rise in economic activity threatens to overwhelm it, bringing a combination of a huge financial crisis with also a hyperinflation of commodity prices as all that liquidity flows into the real economy.

In the West, lockdowns provided the same function of holding back economic growth, and so preventing interest rates rising and asset prices crashing. The logic of lockdowns was never supportable, and still less was it supportable once vaccines became available. Yet, states were able to keep them in place for two years, and still the media carries stories about rising infections, the effects of so called “long Covid”, as potential bases for the reintroduction of some measures, just as it has tried to hype up Monkey Pox and other possible alternative panics after COVID lost its appeal in that regard.

The illiberal Left that supported the idiotic blanket lockdowns in the West is, thereby, left in a quandary. It seeks to cover its arse for having backed such an authoritarian and irrational measure in the West, and so, like Andrew Coates, is left parroting the Chinese Stalinist propaganda that its lockdowns reduced deaths to only 5,000, and, yet, seeing massive protests in China against those lockdowns, it also wants to support those protests too, even though it opposed protests against the same policy in the West!

How does it seek to square that circle? It is doing so by not dealing with the issue of the protests against the lockdowns itself, but instead of focusing on the repression of the protests. For example, in the same thread referred to above, Jim Denham of the pro-imperialist AWL, writes, that I,

“just don’t seem to understand the fundamental political difference between covid-deniars (sic) and the pathetic anti-mask brigarde (sic) in the West and the heroic dissidents risking their lives and liberty in China, who are linking opposition to the extended and unnecessary lockdowns with a broader campaign for political freedom. There is simply no comparison to be made!”

And, this is the way this section of the Left frequently tries to argue on the basis of the old Stalinist amalgam, whereby, instead of dealing with the actual issue and argument, they try to muddy the water by associating you with some bogey, here the COVID-deniers, anti-mask brigade and so on. In fact, as I'd set out, no attempt at such a comparison was made, on my part. The issue is not whether there is a comparison between the protests of various reactionary elements in the West – who were allowed to occupy that space because of the dereliction of duty by the Left itself to oppose lockdowns – and the protests of Chinese workers currently, but the hypocrisy of sections of the Left in having advocated and supported “ extended and unnecessary lockdowns” in the West, and their opposition to them in China.

Once again, it is a reflection of the opportunist nature of large sections of the Left, and its campist approach of determining its position not on he basis of the independent interest of the working-class, but of "my enemy's enemy is my friend".