The plague of SARS-Covid-19 that has spread everywhere in 2020 brings into stark relief the natural behaviour of the bourgeoisie which defends only its own class interests and has no inclination to defend the interests of humanity; indeed, its very participation in dealing with the virus heightens the problems we all confront. The scrabbling for profits or political benefits, the bureaucratic infighting, the competition, the corruption, the drive for centralisation and the maintenance of power structures, the indifference to the needs of populations: all these facets of bourgeois rule are alive and active in their response to the pandemic. It could not be otherwise.
Behind the many faces the bourgeoisie presents to its national populations – democratic or authoritarian in varying degrees – is the historic enemy of humanity: the capitalist socio-economic system which dominates all aspects of human life. And this system, which has everyone in its grip, gives its ruling class the power to determine how the current pandemic is dealt with. The nature of the bourgeoisie is shown in its actions and is clearly revealed in its handling of the various chapters of the pandemic story to date. Indeed, the behaviour of the bourgeoisie in this pandemic highlights why the working class must rid the world of this parasitic system of exploitation which poses an existential threat to humanity.
(The following is mainly centred on the evolution of events in the UK.)
Whose Pandemic is It Anyway?
Plagues are part of human history; they weren’t invented by capitalism but capitalism has favoured their creation and accelerated their rate of spread over, say, those experienced in mediaeval Europe. The 1918 influenza pandemic originated on a Kansas farm, following a species jump from fowl (probably ducks) to humans. Patient zero had enlisted in the army, went to a mobilisation camp and spread the virus among other troops. Sick soldiers then boarded troopships bound for Europe and continued to spread it, infecting civilians as well as the front-line armies. The military hierarchy kept the sickness secret for as long as they could but it nonetheless became public – how could it not? The movement of troops across Europe and then across the world ensured the epidemic turned into a pandemic leading to perhaps as many as 70 million deaths. A hundred years later, modern capitalism’s fast and global transportation for millions has accelerated the spread still more. What took years in ancient times, months during the First World War, now can be spread even more widely in days.
For many decades, public health organisations have been concerned about the next pandemic – always considered to be inevitable; not if but when. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has kept a watch on possible candidates. In recent years, several diseases heightened this concern – HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS among them – all deriving from species jumps facilitated as a result of ways in which humans and animals interact today. These changed interactions result from, among other things, the wanton destruction of wildlife habitat and the squeezing of the remaining animals into smaller and smaller habitats, wild animal butchery markets right in the middle of Asian cities, bushmarkets in Africa and factory farming in the US. It is not yet known what and where the animal reservoir of the current coronavirus resides but the behaviour of capitalism round the world increases the likelihood of more to follow. The current pandemic has been long-expected by public health professionals, if not its specificity.
Preparations for the next pandemic
In many countries, public health authorities have made preparations for the next pandemic. Probably best prepared were those who had been through the worst of the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic, especially Vietnam and Taiwan. Among the worst prepared were the UK and the US and this despite planning exercises carried out in 2016 (UK) and 2019 (US) both of which highlighted the deficiencies in their health systems. Little surprise, perhaps, since health provision in the US is notoriously dysfunctional, especially under the Trump administration which has tried to destroy the Affordable Care Act. In the UK – despite politicians lauding the NHS which is free at the point of use – health provision has been under severe attack for years, including a stealth privatisation and the imposition of internal market structures. Health expenditure has been an important component of the social wage which the bourgeoisie has a clear interest in minimising. No wonder, then, that successive governments were unwilling to invest in measures to deal with a problem they hoped wouldn’t happen on their watch. This wasn’t a failure to act, it was policy: they didn’t want to prepare because of the cost.
Had the government wanted to draw up effective measures it could have done worse than go back to Quinto Tiberio Angelerio of Sardinia who set out preventive measures to minimise the spread of the plague in the late 16th Century. His work was heeded in his community during repeat epidemics, and this centuries before there was a germ theory of disease. Or, closer to home, they could have considered the value of the self-quarantining of the village of Eyam in the mid-17th Century to prevent the bubonic plague spreading outside. No, this is the 21st Century and governments respond only to what’s in front of them.
Lysenko rides again?
In Wuhan, in December 2019, based on his experience of the SARS epidemic, Dr Li Wenliang spotted the presence of a new coronavirus outbreak and warned his fellow doctors of his findings. Within days the police told him to stop; soon after the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter in which he was accused of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order”. He later caught the coronavirus and died of Covid-19. In late 2020, the Chinese citizen journalist reporting from Wuhan, Zhang Zhan, was jailed for four years for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Both cases underline the government’s concern to keep the flow of information under its control.
The WHO first picked up a media statement on the Wuhan Health Commission’s website on 31 December 2019 reporting a cluster of cases of “viral pneumonia of unknown cause” Over the next few days WHO and the Chinese authorities communicated and the novel coronavirus was named. However, it is generally thought that the virus had been observed/detected in November but was not reported. There is speculation on the cause of the delay. It could be that the central government wanted the outbreak kept quiet but it could also be that the local bureaucrats were afraid to tell the central government what was going on. It could be some mixture of both. But whatever the actual reason – and we may find out in time – the fact is that fear of candour is rife in all capitalist hierarchies and politics, liberal and authoritarian, and it invariably works against the population. The Lysenko affair and its consequences illustrated how deadly this phenomenon can be.
Rejecting Mendel’s theories as reactionary and idealist, Lysenko developed his own ideas of all-year agricultural work and his success in encouraging Russian peasants to return to work in the 1920s and 1930s were approved by Stalin. Lysenko’s claims to major productivity advances were eagerly expected by the Soviet leadership, and the farm managers and fearful agricultural bureaucrats gave them the news they wanted to hear. The result was the collapse of harvests and resulting famines killing millions. (Showing an unwillingness to learn, Mao adopted Lysenko’s methods; the Great Famine in China of 1959-62 brought around 30 million deaths.)
Our recent experience of the bourgeoisie’s Covid-response political manoeuvres underlines the murderous consequences of their information management. Trump has explicitly stated that he knew right from the start the menace that the virus posed and deliberately downplayed it; his politicisation of Covid as a Democratic hoax was to have a deadly effect on the American population. In the UK, the Johnson government used the mantra that it was “following the science” as advised by SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies); this was a lie. Repeatedly, through 2020 the government did not give the pandemic due attention as it was distracted by the looming end of the Brexit transition period, and by the need to placate the ‘libertarian’ wing of the Conservative Party.
Foreknowledge is …. Lucrative
With the onset of a crisis there is always a faction that looks to profit from it. They did not have to know of Machiavelli’s exhortation to “never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis“ to leap at opportunities to make a buck or two.
The Leader of the House of Commons in the UK Parliament, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is also a co-founder of a hedge fund management company, Somerset Capital Management, which notified its investors that “Market dislocations of this magnitude happen rarely, perhaps once or twice in a generation, and have historically provided excellent entry points for investors,” and that “[h]istory has shown us that super normal returns can be made during this type of environment.” They put it well. On the other side of the Atlantic, Richard Burr, the Chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, acted on the information given in his regular intelligence briefings about the Coronavirus threat by unloading about $1million of stock; he has form on this – in 2018 he unloaded his shares in a Dutch company just before a US change in sanctions regulations. Effectively this is a kind of political insider trading.
But it’s the big boys that make the big money. Jeff Bezos sold $3.4 billion’s worth of Amazon shares in the first week of February, just before the stock price peaked. The Guardian reported that: “In total US executives sold about $9.2 billion in shares of the companies they run in the five weeks before the start of the stock market rout. Selling before the 30% collapse in the market saved them from paper losses of $1.9 billion.”
So is Screwing Workers
While many sectors of the economy have suffered hugely from the shutdowns and curtailments, others have thrived, and so have their owners’ wealth. Bezos’s personal wealth increased by $70 billion in nine months, $10 billion in one week alone – the greatest growth in personal wealth in human history. The Walton family (owners of Walmart) wealth increased by almost $50 billion, . This profit has been made from low-paid workers for whom there have been countless cases where protective equipment or danger money was denied and where whistle-blowers were hounded. This obscene profiteering didn’t come out of nowhere: America’s wealthiest 50 people had a total net worth of nearly $1.6 trillion in mid-2020 and the country’s 650 billionaires had a wealth increase of around $1 trillion in nine months.
These profits did not materialise simply from increases in production, some of it came from changes in the financial and stock markets. But almost all of it is funnelled through tax avoidance schemes, creating financial holes in economies which are then filled by governments’ tax-gouging from the working class: a sleight of hand to hide who’s really paying.
‘Policies’
As the impact of the pandemic grew, governments adopted different strategies to deal with it. Those who had been through the last SARS epidemic went for combinations of suppression and containment – exemplified by China, Taiwan and South Korea who have authoritarian regimes that use tighter and more disciplined population control than in the so-called democracies. In countries that portray themselves as liberal we were inflicted with more variety. One tack was to go for so-called herd immunity. To reach this threshold in the population for this virus, a vaccine would be needed – unless letting it rip was acceptable, and in some regimes it was. Sweden took the lead on this policy, turning it into an official national programme – and so killed more than adjacent countries which went for policies to increase social distancing and mask-wearing. Johnson’s government in the UK ignored warnings about the risks of super-spreading events (such as the Cheltenham Festival) and indeed his senior advisor, Dominic Cummings, was quoted as saying that they should go for herd immunity, protect the economy and that “…if a few pensioners die, too bad.”
The most egregious were the authoritarian presidents, with Trump leading the field. Trump has admitted that he had been warned of the dangers posed by this virus; his intended self-serving decision was to downplay it – remember, it was just going to disappear – and, worse still, to politicise it as a “Democratic hoax” and scorn the wearing of masks. This profoundly undermined the efforts of national and state public health agencies to deal with the pandemic. The whys of this illustrate more dimensions of the antisocial policies of the ruling class.
One of the earliest problems in dealing with this pandemic was the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) as demand spiked globally, leading to a purchasing frenzy accompanied by a price hike. Government vied with government in bidding, and competition for supplies reached extraordinary levels: aircraft on runways readying for take-off were changing destinations and refiling flight plans as governments continued to compete for the PPE cargos. This became even more ludicrous in the US where individual states were bidding against each other. The UK declined to participate in the larger EU bids as a means to reduce costs as the government considered it to be inconsistent with its Brexit philosophy. Without shame, the same government awarded a £250 million contract for PPE to a Florida jeweller who had no industry experience; the PPE was not delivered. All this on top of stockpiled PPE having deteriorated to the point of being unusable. Furthermore, recent investigations have been met with governmental refusal to affirm that £1.1billion of PPE bought has ever been delivered.
Testing offered huge opportunities for big companies – pharmaceuticals, consultancies and logistics. Through its Operation Moonshot, the UK government was aiming to spend £100 billion on creating a mass testing regime able to perform 10 million Covid tests a day. However, relevant experts – scientists, statisticians, clinicians – were not consulted and the scheme was initiated amid warnings of the likely consequences of generating thousands of false positives being generated every day, and overall cost. By October, it was reported that the project was dumped, to be subsumed into the track and trace project.
The UK has a developed set of public health system which includes effective local track and trace organisations. These are activated for events such as outbreaks of food poisoning. There are similar veterinarian structures to deal with disease outbreaks among farm animals. These decentralised systems were ignored in the interests of handing out large central contracts to IT and consulting companies. The money involved was considerable. For example, the government let a contact tracing contract for £208 million for 12 weeks; 27,000 call handlers were hired at the rate of £20,000 a year – approximately £4,600 each for the 12 weeks during which time fewer than 56,000 contacts were reached so achieving under two contacts per call handler. This kind of ridiculous contracting has been replicated in almost every area relevant to the pandemic. By the end of July the government had spent £10.5 billion on thousands of contracts without competitive tender, generating a huge gravy train for participants; and it just so happens that many of the beneficiaries are supporters of the Conservative Party. Whether or not this is legal it is utterly corrupt.
The objectives of testing and of tracking and tracing should dovetail into the isolation policies. They didn’t. Why not? Well, one reason was the need to parcel up the overall objectives into smaller ones that would enable contracts to be let. However, the various sub-projects then have to be integrated – and this generates more interfaces that have also to be contracted out. The end result has been an expensive clusterfuck. Entirely predictable. But there are many happy companies, managements and shareholders.
The mantra of the UK political classes has been to “Save the NHS”. But for the most part this is an appeal not to swamp the hospital systems; on the other hand, the staff of the NHS are expendable – evidenced by the lack of PPE, general unpreparedness, appalling protocols (such as releasing Covid-infected patients back into care homes). In fact, care home staff throughout the country are among the lowest paid workers: many are on zero-hours contracts and have to work in several homes in back-to-back shifts. They became one of the infection vectors (as well as Care Quality Commission inspectors) in spreading infection from one home to another. How did the government deal with this? The Health Secretary declared that “right from the start we’ve tried to throw a protective ring round our care homes” and that all the PPE they needed was available. This was another barefaced lie; but telling lies costs nothing – especially with the poorest workers – and lies are traditionally the cheapest tools that politicians have. At least, they have zero cost until the day of reckoning.
The sheer incompetence of the ruling class has been staggering. This is not because, as a class, it is composed of idiots, though many certainly are. In the UK government, the entire cabinet – as was required for the whole Conservative Parliamentary Party in the 2019 general election – had to support Johnson and Brexit. The electoral crushing of the Labour Party has allowed Johnson to populate his government with some of the worst, vindictive and cruel specimens to be found. Competence – at anything except sycophancy – is not a requirement. And it doesn’t stop there; cronies are appointed to highly-paid positions of responsibility. An example is Dido Harding, the head of the discredited NHS Test and Trace programme: not only is she on the board of the Jockey Club which went ahead with the Cheltenham Festival (the major 2020 superspreader event in the UK) but without any past experience of health matters, she was made chairwoman of NHS Improvement in 2017; she is married to a Tory MP who wants to scrap the NHS. The incompetence has political roots.
A further politicisation of the pandemic takes place through the arguments between the ‘authoritarian’ and the ‘libertarian’ wings in the ruling class. The pivot is: should health or the economy be the policy driver. The libertarian wing of the Conservative Party is against the lockdowns and the constraints on retail and hospitality; the Coronavirus will be handled by the vaccine and until then casualties are acceptable. It is no surprise that the opponents of lockdowns and other Covid restrictions are the same hard right wing that drove the Brexit agenda; the old European Research Group has now morphed into factions inside the Party – the Covid Recovery Group and the Common Sense Group (sic). On the other hand, the authoritarians argue that the restrictive measures are essential to bring the virus ‘under control’. Structurally, they are so conflicted: under the gaze of the whole society, they have to pretend to square circles. Their objectives are incompatible and they profess reconciliation of the irreconcilable.
‘Implausible Deniability’
It is not only Trump who has peddled lies about the existence of Covid, and although he changed his propaganda, his original denial is still current. Even dying Covid patients in American hospitals have argued for doctors to tell them what they were ‘really’ suffering from. This denial has spread and in the UK it is growing where deniers photograph empty hospital corridors and post them on social media claiming that the deaths are not happening. As in the US, but a long way behind, this denial is becoming linked with conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxers’ propaganda.
Hammering the Population
Right from the start, the health of the UK population has been sacrificed for the needs of the economy. However, since the economy depends on the participation of workers – no surprise there – the government and the bosses have put many workers between a rock and a hard place. And they are hammering away from many angles. We can point to a few here.
Early in the pandemic, the population was told that – counter-intuitively – wearing facemasks outside a clinical environment was ineffective. When this government view was changed it transpired that it had been a propaganda effort to reduce the public demand for facemasks which would otherwise compromise the resulting availability for the NHS. (There are areas where ‘fake news’ is an appropriate term.) The effect was to make the subsequent call for the general use of facemasks more difficult to implement – with a consequent increase in the transmissibility of the virus.
In almost every Western country where lockdowns have taken place, governments have justified them in terms of the need for social isolation. But it only the relatively wealthy in the right jobs that could comply with the exhortations to ‘stay at home’. For many, there is a stark choice between the danger of infection at work or no earnings. In the first instance, workers were told to stay at home, not to travel to work if they could avoid it. While some governments prepared furlough packages for some workers, others didn’t. And many were told they had to turn up for work or forfeit their pay; these were usually the lowest paid, those on zero-hours contracts and in the poorest accommodation. Most of the workers in care homes fell into these categories and went to work, inadvertently spreading the virus and contributing to the very high death rates in those care homes for the elderly.
Outside the care homes, the government – as an employer – provided one of the worst cases. The UK vehicle and driver licensing agency (DVLA) in Swansea has had over 500 Covid cases since September, yet 1800 staff – including those with symptoms – are required to turn up to work; they are to turn off their track and trace apps on their mobile phones. As an employer, the government knows exactly what it is doing.
To stimulate demand in several sectors the government said that people should go to work as the transportation systems were under-utilised and the support enterprises near workplaces (cafes, shops, etc) were suffering from lack of business. The government then started a campaign to ‘eat out to help out’, encouraging dining in restaurants with a subsidy for every customer; social distancing was weakened. Contradiction has been the hallmark of government advice and instruction, and has been dispiriting as well as harmful; in this, Johnson has taken a few lessons from Trump. Contradictory messaging is always to the advantage of the rulers who take advantage of the resulting confusion.
The support given by the government to the most severely affected, unsurprisingly, was highly selective. Two decisions stand out. Those who are declared not covered by other programmes are told to use the Universal Credit system. This is a system designed – it was claimed – to simplify the complex benefits arrangements. To adhere to the government’s aim to make work financially preferable, the benefits were lowered, procedures stricter and payments had delays programmed in. This system has only benefitted credit companies and loan sharks. The second decision was to withhold free school meals from poor children; uproar led by a well-known footballer got the decision rescinded. This was followed by a further scandal where the catering companies were increasing their profits by giving the children substandard food boxes. And, again, the bosses of the companies involved (such as Compass Group) were Conservative Party donors.
Many of the government’s decisions over the past year show ineptitude or corrupt behaviour. But these are not the only factors. Johnson can also be seen as a piece of flotsam pushed around pulverised by the opposing political currents inside his party (the libertarian and authoritarian wings, as mentioned earlier) as well as by mayors elsewhere in the country, and by his own scientific and medical advisors. It is not always easy to discern which factors predominate in one of Johnson’s notorious U-turns. Just when the WHO was saying that mass testing was essential, and when NHS England had just announced a significant expansion of testing, Johnson ended it. The development of the mobile app by the NHS independently of the tech companies had to be abandoned as a complete failure – and given to the tech companies to develop. Face masks in shops were declared unnecessary in June, and made mandatory in July. Adamantly, no free school meals for poor children; then, after a national campaign, they were provided. Twice. Councils who tried to shut schools because of infection levels were threatened with legal action by the government – which shut the schools anyway a couple of days later. There’s no end to it. And are other governments any different?
State surveillance and control
The pandemic has provided a perfect justification for enhanced state surveillance and control measures. China in particular has devoted considerable effort to develop and use the surveillance technologies coupled with rigorous social disciplines. The eagerness of many tech companies to develop apps for contact tracing reflects the financial rewards and while they can contribute to dealing with the current pandemic, their technologies will have a ready market in state surveillance everywhere.
But in many countries the ruling class does without advanced technologies. Television news show only too graphically where police forces are given free rein to indulge in orgies of beatings to get people to go home, even when they are just trying to find food: Kenya, Iran, India, Philippines, Russia, Cambodia …. Of course, Duterte always goes the extra mile and instructs his forces to deal with people violating curfews: “shoot them dead.” Maduro in Venezuela has used the pandemic as a cover for heightened repression and censorship – victimising medical staff and journalists who complain about the state of the hospitals; now, returning migrants are being criminalised as “biological weapons” sent by Colombia.
Vaccines Meet Nationalism
The fast development, testing and regulatory approval of several vaccines in months rather than years shows how powerful the development of the productive forces has become. The mobilisation of novel science and technology, and the organisation of production and distribution has been impressive and shows the immensity of human potential for dealing with challenges such as Covid. At the same time, the pandemic has also shown how capitalism is a brake on this potential as the population is held hostage to capitalism’s profit and political objectives.
Big Pharma has proven itself over many years to be a particularly rapacious industry. It focusses on where the profits are richer with little regard to human need, apart from its role in market creation. That’s why there has been little effort put into replacing the armoury of those antibiotics undermined by pathogen resistance much of which has been caused by over- or mis-use. Far greater profits have been gained through creating dependency on opioids and other products. The fact that some companies have said that they will supply vaccines to some poor countries at cost scarcely hides the global profits to be gained through this pandemic and future use of the technologies developed, often with national subsidies.
No sooner has the vaccine rollout begun than governments are already playing games. Although the vaccines available to date rely on two doses three weeks apart, in the UK the government has now proposed to delay the second dose to 12 weeks so as to vaccinate more people in a given time. As many scientists have pointed out, there is nothing in the trials to date that supports this gamble on efficacy. Yet again, the bourgeoisie is taking a punt on health policy; in this case the gamble might pay off but this kind of gambling with people’s lives is typical.
Just as with the competition to get PPE supplies, there is developing a ‘vaccine nationalism’ which is so apparent in Europe where countries are competing against each other to get supplies, a competition that the EU is trying to get under control. And again, we see the creation of a zero-sum game being created between the wealthiest and the poorest countries where, because of production limitations, every vaccine going to a wealthy country is one not available to the poor.
* * * * *
The 2020 pandemic experience clearly shows that the interests of humanity are not served under the rule of the bourgeoisie. As ever, its behaviour in this pandemic the bourgeoisie again shows that it only serves its own interests – at the expense of everyone and everything else. This article can be read as a litany of immoral or inept behaviours but the issue is greater than that. These behaviours are not accidents. All of these behaviours have their root in the various national politico-economic circumstances, in turn stemming from the condition of the global capitalist socio-economic system. So capitalism causes these pandemics, globalisation spreads them, corruption and greed exacerbates them and nationalism condemns us to the mercy of our rulers.
To the infliction of exploitation, wars, climate crisis and famine on humanity capitalism has added plague to its scourging of the planet. The scale of the bourgeoisie’s self-serving activity has become an existential threat to the working class and the rest of humanity. Fundamentally, we have the question of political power. Only the proletariat – acting as revolutionary subject – can enable us to escape capitalism’s logic. This cannot happen soon enough. Our lives depend on it.
Capitalism is Deadly and Its Bourgeoisie is Unfit to Rule
Marlowe
15 February 2021