Recognising Unionist rights?

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A Belfast bus burning on the Shankill Road

The recent riots in the North of Ireland have been described as the worst for some years.  It is not that they are particularly large or violent.  In fact, they have been localised and rather small, many rioters being not much more than children. Some have arisen from loyalist groups more involved in criminality than politics and kicking back at policing too effective for their liking.

So why the concern?  The first is that they might get out of control and gather momentum.  The summer is the traditional unionist marching season so there will be plenty of opportunities for disturbances.  This is especially the case now that the state is going to have to relax the Covid lockdown.  A second is concern that the Boris Johnson Government is not considered to have the skills to pacify the situation, or may even have reasons to keep the pot boiling.

It is his betrayal of the unionists in his ‘fantastic’ – ‘oven-ready’ – Brexit deal that has been the main reason for the eruption of unionist anger.  If the definition of stupidity is believing anything he says then the Democratic Unionist Party has shown itself to be the dumbest of the dumb.  Yet even now their leaders call on him to do the right thing and scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the European Union; something with much bigger ramifications for the British state than riots in Ireland.

The placing down the Irish Sea of the inevitable trade border arising from Northern Ireland staying in the EU Single Market is, as unionists claim, a clear separation of it from Great Britain, even if nationalists and others claim it has no constitutional significance.  Its maintenance would be a reverse for unionism and cause for demoralisation.  While the same barriers are in place between Britain and the Irish State, the effect is to encourage further North-South economic integration.  This, however, is of most significance from a longer term perspective and the Brexit deal excludes services, where it might be expected that the British and EU economies might diverge, with possible similar effects between the two states in Ireland.

The leader of the DUP Arlene Foster started off the year more or less accepting the NI Protocol and pointing out that Northern Ireland membership of both the UK and EU markets gave it certain advantages in terms of trade and foreign investment.  The more bitter DUP MPs, such as Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley, nevertheless continued to denounce the betrayal, perhaps all the more so because they had been personally associated with being taken for fools.  Leaked minutes of a DUP meeting appeared to indicate that at least some DUP members had about as much respect for these figures as many of us outside.

Which brings us to one of the more immediate causes of unionist agitation.  As pointed out in a previous post the main cause for the swift change of direction by the whole DUP and its titular leader was an opinion poll showing significant loss of support to the even more rabidly militant Traditional Unionist Voice.  When the NI Director of Prosecutions recommended no prosecution of Sinn Fein members following their attendance en masse at an IRA leader’s funeral, and their apparent breach of Covid-19 restrictions, it proved to be the spark that lit the fire.

But this too, while causing understandable unionist anger, is largely a confection.  Unionists condemned the DPP decision but blamed the police when it was the police who had recommended prosecution.  Unionists have lighted upon liaison between the police and Sinn Fein before the funeral as a reason given by the DPP for likely inability to prosecute, but such liaison is not unusual.

The other reason given by the DPP was the Covid regulations themselves and their unfitness for the purpose of successful prosecution.  But it was the DUP (and Sinn Fein) who were responsible for drafting these regulations and if they could not be prosecuted it is yet another example of their incompetence.  Much of the consequences of Brexit and of the fall-out from the Bobby Storey funeral can therefore be laid at the door of the DUP. Far better for someone else to be the target of loyalist anger than themselves.

Arlene Foster called for the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to resign and refused to meet him, although then did so since she had previously met the loyalist paramilitaries; while the leader of the rival Ulster Unionist Party joined in calling for his resignation but could not explain in a radio interview what he had done wrong.  Meanwhile, the first loyalist riot in Belfast against this failure to prosecute lack of social distancing at the republican funeral took place in the same area in which a loyalist funeral in September had failed to do exactly the same thing.

In a sense none of this incoherence matters, reactionary causes don’t have to be coherent, they just have to be reactionary. The charge levied by unionism is that everyone else doesn’t understand them, doesn’t appreciate their anger, and doesn’t acknowledge that their ‘British identity’ is being undermined.  Since this amorphous charge is without any clear definition it becomes whatever unionism says it is. What is being claimed is that anything unionism doesn’t like is undemocratic, and the more it is upset the more undemocratic it is, and the less everyone else understands.

So what unionism wants is what it wants and deserves to get.  The Northern State was set up for them and it should fulfil its role of satisfying the majority whose existence it is for.  Since its position has historically been one of sectarian privilege and supremacy this should continue to be bolstered, and any attempt to undermine it is undemocratic and sectarian itself.  The nationalist demands for respect, tolerance and equality apply to unionism in equal measure, which means respect for its reactionary culture, tolerance of its sectarian practices and obeisance to its supremacist demands.  The current political arrangements in the North of Ireland are supposedly based on these values, to be shared by nationalists and unionists alike, making it obvious why they aren’t working.

We who live here however are expected to bow down before unionist demands and recognise the failure to offer unionism what is its due, so that we must sympathise with its turmoil and incoherence.  We are supposed to accept the democratic rights of bigots on the basis that there are a lot of them.  Fortunately, the world is a much bigger place and it is possible to imagine that the limits of political change are not defined by sectarian reactionaries, no matter how locally numerous they may be.

While forecasts of an imminent border poll and of a potential united Ireland are premature, the already existing growth of the non-unionist defining section of the population no longer allows unionism to constrain all political development and change.  Even the attempt to share out resources, privileges and rights along sectarian lines has proven unstable, although without yet the maturation of forces to make it fall over.

Socialists should acknowledge that the death of sectarianism, and the forces that defend it and promote it, will not be painless and will not be entirely peaceful.  In the next post I will look at renewed proposals to conciliate this sectarianism.  In the meantime we should not support compromise with sectarian reaction, if only on the grounds that it does not work.  What progress there has been even within Northern Ireland, has come from denying unionist demands and opposing its demonstrations and threats.  Socialism or any sort of democratic settlement will not come without the defeat of unionism, the more demoralised it is the easier and less violent its demise will be.

The basis of socialist internationalism

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Karl Marx’s Alternative to Capitalism – part 34

The previous post argued that capitalism continues to develop the forces of production while at the same time, in a contradictory process, continuing to fetter their development. This process opens the road to a new society of completely socialised productive forces, or socialism.  In order to reach it a certain level of development of the productive forces is necessary, which requires that this transformation take place internationally.

This is so because capitalism has long ago developed not only a world market but also, through the continuing socialisation of production, developed an international division of labour.  It therefore follows that the development of socialism in any single country cannot be achieved from an inferior level of development and cannot do so on its own.  While the overthrow of capitalism may first occur in a single country, the creation of socialism will face insuperable barriers and without further international development will fail.

Many analyses treat the development of the forces of production as a technological question or from a purely economic perspective, separate from consideration of class struggle or politics, divorced from the latter to the extent that they form a purely background enabling condition long since achieved.  This arises partly from the influence of Stalinism, for which purely national roads to socialism are already part of the ‘theory’, and partly from those Trotskyists for whom this constraint is no longer strictly binding because of a one-sided application of the theory of permanent revolution, positing that the tasks of capitalist development may and can, rather unproblematically, be taken forward by a working class regime due to the weakness of native capitalism.

The theory of permanent revolution is taken to have relaxed somewhat the constraint on possible socialist progress at a purely national level, while the decades of capitalist development since its first elaboration have actually tightened the constraint on the potential evolution of a country separated from the capitalist international division of labour.

In this theory the development of productive forces must be considered as a whole, at the level of the world, and at this level capitalism is ripe for socialism.  It is correctly recognised that for any revolution in a single country to survive it must spread.  However, because this revolution is considered mainly in political terms the grounds for socialist revolution as a social transformation engendered by the social power of the international working class is not fully appreciated.  The social power of the working class includes its role in the international division of labour, which provides the grounds for its political as well as economic unity, and is the basis for overcoming the much more uneven and volatile development of political struggles across the world that might otherwise leave working class political revolution isolated in a single country.

For many, socialist revolution is wrongly considered as implying that the task is simply one of destroying a system that is already historically decaying without consideration of the implications of its continuing development for a working class that is far from being able to impose its own solution.  This approach believes that capitalism is declining in a historic sense, evidenced by economic crises and general stagnation, along with other pathological conditions that are all held to be derived from decline.

Such conceptions become a dogma that is a given, and within which every malignant social and political phenomenon is interpreted and becomes an example thereof and not as more or less endemic expressions of the system.  While the laws of motion of the capitalist system discovered by Marx have produced results, ironically they are treated as if they no longer operate, which means his analysis in effect no longer applies.  So capitalism is no longer considered to revolutionise society by developing the forces of production and, despite all evidence to the contrary, is conceived as being in stagnation or perpetual crisis.  What we are left with is a dogmatic Marxism that ironically facilitates a political practice seemingly at odds with such an approach.

The effect is to reduce analysis to the level of immediate political struggle with an empirical approach to events.  As all the fundamental factors for socialism are considered to already be in place it encourages short-termism and an opportunist approach.  This does not necessarily mean that the wrong position is taken on any immediate political question but it does mean that even when the right one is taken it is not securely grounded.

If we consider the reality of the continued development of the international forces of production, we are forced to reject the nationalist perspectives of earlier left conceptions and their more recent expressions and inspirations.

For example, in this corner of the world there is no ‘British road to socialism’ and no way forward through attempts to constrain the dynamic of class struggle within national limits through a ‘left’ Brexit.  There is nothing progressive about some sort of Scotland of a ‘common weal’ that is common only to a select nationality and which believes social equality can be created within the boundaries of this small European country.  There can be no emancipation and liberation of the Irish working class – through pursuit of some mythical ‘real’ independence of the Irish nation in a Workers’ Republic – that is not part of a successful international revolution.

What all these have in common is that the international development of the forces of production makes all their struggles for national separation on supposedly progressive grounds utopian, and if they are utopian they will fail.  Whether they apparently achieve short term political success or not doesn’t matter in the end, fundamental economic and social forces will crush their promises, although these promises will long be abandoned by its sponsors before this happens.  The apparent victory of nationalism in the twentieth century and its defeat of its great ideological rival socialism hasn’t prevented the continuing International development of capitalism against which nationalist measures are impotent.  Only an international political arrangement can adequately address the governance of an international economy as capitalism already acknowledges (through the IMF, WTO, UN, NAFTA, G10, EU, ASEAN, BIS, OECD etc.)  and the only consistent International ideology and political programme is socialism.

If the Soviet Union could not develop a superior society to capitalism despite its size and resources, and if Britain cannot develop a superior capitalism to the EU, today bleeding from a thousand cuts that are barely reported, then the idea, for example, of Ireland or Scotland creating oases of social equality are fanciful.

The conditions for social equality cannot exist because the forces of production necessary for them, for socialism, must exceed the development of these forces under capitalism.  The productivity of labour and the most advanced techniques of production must go beyond that currently achieved by capitalism through its particular socialisation of production at the international level.  It is not a question of resisting and turning back what is now called globalisation but transforming the relations of production and the political determinations of these globalised productive forces.

The productiveness of any single country can no longer encompass all the goods and services considered as necessary consumption in the most advanced capitalist countries, in fact in all countries.  Inferior productivity than the most developed capitalism will see workers in any isolated regime buy goods and services from capitalist countries, so undermining their own economy and empowering capitalist industry to out-compete it.  It will see workers seek higher levels of living standards in capitalist countries, which their higher productivity delivers, by moving to these countries.

Only increased productivity can undermine the requirement for differential reward as an incentive to work, while this incentive will meanwhile exacerbate inequality.  Whatever the intentions, or the more democratic relations of production in any progressive departure from capitalism, superior capitalist forces of production will destroy such a departure if based on a narrow nationalist basis.  This is but a negative formulation of the earlier posts in this series emphasising the role of the forces of production determining – by bringing about, or in this case preventing – the development of new relations of production.

Of course, attempts at preventing all this can be made by administrative measures.  By curbing the entry into the country of cheaper goods produced by the more advanced capitalist countries and by reducing the supply of their new products and services.  By preventing investment in the country by capitalist firms and by restricting freedom to move to these countries of workers seeking a better life.  But how would this be possible if this society is ruled by the workers themselves?  How could they restrict their own freedoms if they are in charge?

These administrative measures would have to be imposed from without, and the mechanism for doing so is the state.  Since some workers would already have partially bought into this – if the project they supported was to create a new and separate ‘progressive’ state – they might at least initially support sacrifices and restrictions on freedoms, while others would not.  Those who would support them would seek reward for supporting the new state. Either by compulsion or reward the new ‘progressive state’ would generate its own inequality and its own restrictions of freedoms required to support this inequality – all in the name of progress and equality!  We have seen this film before and we know how it ends.

It is more than unfortunate that this understanding of the grounds for socialism elaborated by Marx and Engels have to be argued for again today, rather than having been forgotten, ignored of wilfully distorted or rejected by many of their so-called adherents.  The importance of internationalism and of embracing the interests of the working class as a whole was set out over 170 years ago:

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”  (The Communist Manifesto)

Covid, Brexit, Protest, and the Left too

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A couple of months ago in a Facebook discussion with a supporter of Zero Covid I argued that if he really did believe that Covid-19 represented the threat to humanity that he appeared to claim he should demand (albeit critically) more coercive restrictions on democratic rights from the State.  Nothing, after all, is more important than life.

He disagreed, insisting that socialists can never support restrictions on democratic rights by the capitalist state.

Unfortunately the proponents of Zero-Covid supported all the previous restrictions and if they are to be consistent then these new restrictions must also be an unfortunate necessity.  All the rest of the Zero-Covid demands have been made to the state and who else is going to implement them?  Again, it was they who have been hysterical in their claims that capitalism was engaged in what amounts to mass murder.

Of course, Covid-19 did not and does not represent the existential threat claimed and much of the left is wrong about this.  Their position becomes more and more untenable as people appreciate the personal threat to themselves, they tire of lockdown restrictions and more people, especially the vulnerable, get vaccinated.  Were it to become clear that Covid-19 is endemic and therefore requires regular vaccination, as with the flu, their policy would become obviously stupid.

So it should only be embarrassing that they now condemn the rough tactics adopted by the Metropolitan police when it broke up the protest of the murder of Sarah Everard.  To be consistent they should have defended the policy of the police while salving their conscience by condemning the roughness of its implementation.

Of course, the Tories have taken advantage of the widespread acceptance of restrictions of social interaction by proposing to introduce new laws that go a long way to criminalising protest altogether, as should have been feared from the start.  I recently posted another comment on Facebook pointing this out and suggesting that those who didn’t see this coming should avoid politics and find something else to do.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party is to engage in ‘parliamentary warfare’ over NHS pay while forgetting that austerity would be worse had the Tories implemented the greater lockdown restrictions demanded by Labour.  The cost would have been even greater had the Zero-Covid policy of some on the left been adopted; a policy that is the product of an opportunist attempt to attack the Tories but like all opportunism is incapable of taking a longer-term view.

It is no defence of this policy to declare that you also have a policy against austerity; one which makes heroic assumptions about the capacity of the working class to resist it.  Opportunism here is accompanied by ultra-left perspectives that envisages the capitalist class paying hundreds of millions of pounds for furlough payments, loans and grants to business and the shortage of tax receipts from workers etc.

Again, the Tories will claim the legitimacy of the bill to be paid and the left will again be exposed as it argued a policy that would have needlessly cost more. The policy of Zero-Covid simultaneously relies on the repressive apparatus of the state to work, while positing that this state can be defeated in the implementation of austerity that the policy requires.

We will leave aside any stupid notion that the combination of pandemic and austerity will somehow galvanise the working class to revolution; although these conceptions are precisely how much of the left envisages socialist revolution coming about – capitalist crisis producing a mass political consciousness that their political conceptions and interventions are incapable of envisaging coming about in any other way.

Despite their serial corruption and incompetence in most of their response to the pandemic the Tories are ahead in the polls.  Their bedrock support has relied, and continues to rely, upon their support for Brexit.  The pandemic has been used to hide the damage done by it and the Labour Party has been too afraid and too stupid to lead a political attack on it.

The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee can write that “Labour will plug away, exposing myriad flaws in the dreadful trade deal” but this is meaningless if you don’t oppose it.  It looks hypocritical, since Labour supported the deal, and it looks like the dishonesty typical of politicians given Starmer’s avoidance of even mentioning the word, refusal to seek renegotiation of the deal, and previous policy of pushing the Tories to ‘get Brexit done‘.

But once again, while Labour fails, much of the left is actually worse, having supported Brexit from the start and campaigned for it in the referendum.  The damage to working class living standards and the austerity it will entail is on them.  They too, just like the Tories, are relying on Covid and the Tory press to hide Brexit’s damaging effects and just like Boris Johnson they will – child-like – deny any responsibility.

Two alternative narratives have developed – the fault is with Brexit or the fault is with the big bad EU.  The left that thought it could move on will be cut in two by these scissors but there is little chance that it will fess up and admit a mistake.  As a rule the left does not admit mistakes and certainly not ones as big as this, especially as they cannot consign it to history.

A few years ago a comrade on the left from the Official Republican tradition said to me, while we were watching the May Day parade in Belfast, that so much of the left was rotten that it basically had to die away before a new generation of socialists could make progress. He may even have included his own tradition in that, and in my view this should certainly be the case, but it isn’t as simple as that.  The corruption of Marxism perpetrated by the nationalist and statist left both in Ireland and Britain will not be easily cleansed.

In the meantime, you can hardly blame the British working class if it ignores much of the left, it is quite right to do so.

Brexit isn’t working

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Brexit isn’t working, and isn’t going to work.  Sooner or later its false promises were going to be exposed and it didn’t take long.  The recession caused by the Government’s Covid-19 lockdown policy has only partially hidden its effects but sector specific issues and complaints from trade associations plus the emergence of official statistics are revealing the damage.

French customs recorded that exports and imports to the UK in January fell by 13 and 20 per cent compared to the average of the previous six months, while the volume of French trade to other countries increased.  German exports to the UK were down 30 per cent year on year, continuing the decline since the Brexit referendum, while Italy reported a 38 per cent drop in exports and 70 per cent drop in exports.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the pandemic and its effect on the reduction of consumer demand, and some due to the build-up of inventory in anticipation of Brexit, but these are dramatic reductions.  Although not dramatic enough it seems.

It is now reported that the British Government is so Brexit unprepared that the introduction of checks required by it, postponed until April and July, would so damage trade that they could lead to shortages in supermarkets.  They will therefore be deferred further, with a “lighter touch” in controls on imports while work on border inspection posts continues, or in some cases only starts.

British exports to the EU however will continue to have the full suite of border checks applied, while the EU will be alert to the components imported into the UK that are incorporated into these exports but have been subject to rudimentary checks, if any.  Other countries might also wonder at British discrimination in favour of EU exports to the UK while theirs suffers the full panoply of inspections.  This temporary solution cannot therefore be a permanent one but has the potential to create more problems – the “fantastic” Brexit deal all over it might be said.

On this score, while unable to implement controls on its own borders, the ‘Minister for the Benefits of Brexit’ still celebrates the achievement of “a sovereign country in full control of our own destiny while keeping open and free trade between us”; claiming that while many said it could not be done, David Frost can declare “but we did it”. Except that what “we did” – what he was personally responsible for negotiating – he has now torn up three times in one week in respect of the Northern Ireland Protocol (in relation to supermarkets, parcels and plants/machinery).

The greater integration of the Northern Ireland economy into the British, and the political divisions within it, have brought to the fore the irreducible problems of Brexit that in Britain have been addressed by reduction in trade, lorry parks, restriction of entry into Kent and postponement of the application of import controls.

These controls are undoubtedly onerous, with potentially separate approval documentation for hundreds of individual items in containers and lorries.  Many seem petty and pointless, at least to those doing the trading.  Before the controls were even implemented the leaders of the DUP and Sinn Fein had written to the EU Commission expressing concerns about the effects of these controls and asking for “flexibility”.

At the time I thought that Sinn Fein was complaining about something it had supported: the Brexit border had to go somewhere and it went down the Irish sea as it wanted.  For the DUP the complaint was consistent with their opposition to any separation from Britain, even if it wasn’t consistent with their support for Brexit.  But both were guilty of not accepting the seemingly empty statement of Theresa May that Brexit meant Brexit.

The difficulty of full implementation of the Brexit deal in relation to the North of Ireland was appreciated by the EU, which is why it was prepared to come to some agreement with the British Government if this could be separated from wider application.  This is what the EU side thought it was doing when perfidious Albion did what it does.

Both the EU and the British sought to leverage the situation in Ireland to their advantage and the latest spat is a continuation of that.  The breach of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is a provocation that obviously plays well for the Tories politically but it has no future and can only fool the gullible Brexit supporters so often – yes even some of them will eventually twig.

The EU will not be deterred from pursuing its existing course and if it does not hold all the cards, the ones held by the British entail paying a price for their being played.  The range of actions it can take will always involve a higher price being incurred by them than the EU.  The possible benefit to the British is that any eventual fudge needed to get the Irish Sea border arrangements to work can be claimed as a victory even if the EU is content to accept it.

For the EU, the difficulty is, as they say, one of trust.  How can it be confident that any attempt to adjust the working of the NI Protocol does not entail more than a fudge that it can live with?  It is even now pointing out that the British are not implementing the deal already agreed, including providing EU officials with the information they require to validate checks.

Given the nature of the existing TCA there is no great need for the EU to seek to ‘punish’ the British, it has enough mechanisms to address non-compliance.  Were the British Government to still seek to essentially violate and contravene the Protocol it would compel the EU and Irish Government to choose between a Brexit border at the Irish land border or make the entry and exit points in the Irish State that border.  The latter has been described by unionism as a win-win-win situation (for GB, NI and the Irish State) but it would entail all goods leaving the Irish State being subject to checks whether made in that EU member state or not, and it would mean acceptance into that state of any British product whether single market compliant or not; hardly a win for Dublin.

The Brexit border at the Irish border would be widely condemned as a breach of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and although it isn’t we have reached a stage where political reaction will very much go along the same lines as if it did.  Practically it would be difficult to enforce and politically it would be very damaging.  Were the GFA working smoothly it might be remotely possible to conceive that this just about might be accepted (at a stretch) but not under current and any conceivable future circumstances given the instability of the Stormont Assembly and Executive.

Sinn Fein would find it impossible to stay in a political arrangement which produced an obviously strengthened border.  The DUP and other unionists are now faced with the same choice, as ex-DUP leader Peter Robinson has explained – basically suck it up or bring down the Executive and Assembly, which is not even guaranteed to get rid of the Protocol anyway.  Comparisons have been made with unionist opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s, but this opposition failed.

The DUP engineered the temporary suspension of Brexit checks at the ports through claiming that there were threats to staff that were not confirmed by the police.  Council staff from a DUP dominated council and from the DUP controlled Agriculture Department were briefly withdrawn prompting EU staff to follow suit.  The DUP has been unable to back up its claims of intimidation and the trade unions involved have denied claims that they had raised serious concerns.  The DUP Minister has also stopped work on building permanent border inspection posts (upon which work hasn’t started) but this too will not be a permanent obstacle to operation of the Protocol.

Loyalist politicians have engaged in their usual sabre-rattling, threatening to fight and engage in “guerrilla warfare” although this is always to be engaged in by someone else, in the first place by the loyalist paramilitaries.  They in turn have reminded everyone that they and the wider ‘unionist community’ are “angry” and are withdrawing support from the Good Friday Agreement.  Since this Agreement envisaged loyalist paramilitaries disappearing through bribery, and they have no intention of disappearing and see no need to do so when the bribes keep coming, what this ‘support’ amounts to rarely gets asked, just as it’s to lots of people’s advantage for it not to get answered.

The DUP came under criticism for meeting the paramilitaries’ umbrella group but the British Government, through the Northern Ireland Office, had already done so.  Normally when the British do something unionists don’t like these paramilitaries eventually get around to killing Catholics.  This time the immediate targets are as likely to be Protestant employees carrying out border checks as Catholics, and the British Government can be portrayed as at least partially on their side in seeking modification of the Protocol, if not yet its removal.  Their problem is the EU and the Agreement made with it.

DUP opposition has been motivated as much by falling polling numbers as the embarrassing results of its Brexit policy.  Its support was reported in February to have dropped to a 20-year low of 19 per cent, more than nine percentage points down on its vote share at the last Stormont election, which could see it being eclipsed as the biggest party by Sinn Fein.  The First Minister of Northern Ireland would then be a supporter of a United Ireland.  Most of the lost DUP voters have gravitated to the even more rabidly reactionary Traditional Unionist Voice, which according to the survey has increased its support by 10 per cent.

DUP leader Arlene Foster began the year by declaring the Protocol “the gateway of opportunity for the whole of the UK and for Northern Ireland” while now calling it “absolutely devastating.”  The DUP privately lobbied the British Government for a “Swiss-style” deal before their Economy Minister condemned it for requiring the UK to “slavishly” follow the EU.  The same Minister also complained about a £70m hole in her budget created by the loss of EU funding.

Unionist opposition is therefore incoherent and is partially muffled by the duplicitous policy of the British Government, which is attempting to delay the worst impacts of Brexit and probably harbours some vain hope it can modify the workings of the TCA permanently.  The EU will continue to implement the deal and to grind down non-compliance with the tools included in the Agreement.

In all this rolling calamity, that once again has exposed the disaster that is Brexit, we should finally not forget the role of the leader of the British Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, who voted for the TCA and now also owns its results.  However, rather than begin to separate himself from it and expose the disastrous effects of the Tories’ Brexit, he thinks he can ignore it and say nothing, even as it impacts the people for whom his three wise monkey policy is supposed to be for.  This, along with everything associated with Brexit, will not work.

Is socialism only possible when the forces of production stop growing? – KMAC part 33*

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The growth of the capitalist system involves the development of new needs – we did not need the mobile phone until it was invented and many didn’t consider getting one until it got small enough in size and price.  This will be true of the new needs we are currently unaware of, that will also arise from the capitalist development of the forces of production.

The productive forces that create these new needs are primarily “the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves . . . and infinitely more important than the accumulation – which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it – of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity.  These objective conditions [machinery, equipment, infrastructure etc.] are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol 3)

This process is a fundamental feature of capitalism and thus to the development within it of the conditions for its supersession. It evolves through antagonisms, and in the 1859 Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ Marx states that ‘at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.’ At this point there ‘begins an era of social revolution.’

For Marx the creation of these conditions, the promise of a new non-exploitative and non-oppressive society, can no more avoid the antagonisms of capitalism, and all its ills, than humanity could avoid belief that the world it inhabits is the creation of a divine being.

“An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.”  (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847)

This was written early in Marx’s career and, if the last sentence is to be understood strictly, implies that the organisation of the working class supposes that the productive forces have grown to such extent that they cannot grow further within capitalism.  While some Marxists believe this stagnation or absolute retardation of capitalist development is the case, or rather repeatedly declare that this must be the case, or is impending, this is very hard, in fact impossible, to defend.  The working class continues to grow massively across the world and could not do so, by definition, if the productive forces of the capitalist system were not also growing.

Marx may be thought to repeat this understanding twelve years later in the 1859 Preface to ‘The Critique of Political Economy’ quoted above, and which we looked at over a number of posts in this series as a succinct published summary of his views on these decisive questions.

Here he says that:

“No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

G A Cohen in his celebrated book ‘Karl Marx’s Theory of History, A Defence’, rewords the first part of the sentence to read “No economic structure (set of production relations) ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed. . .”

We will leave aside his replacement of ‘social order’ by the narrower ‘economic structure (set of production relations)’ and we will come back to his translation of ‘sufficient’ as ‘for which there is room’.

Cohen is right to note that this does not say that once all the productive resources have been developed an economic structure (or social order) perishes; it may ‘fossilise’, or decline or end in ‘ruination’ as Marx once alluded to in ‘The Communist Manifesto’.  The second part also does not mean that if the material conditions sufficient for a new society have developed within the old one this new society will emerge.  It may not, and this will depend on concrete historical circumstances.  Marxists have good grounds for believing that the material conditions for a new socialist society that develop within capitalism will engender its emergence.

These grounds include the earlier statement, noted above, that

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”

These grounds are verified not only by an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, which have been verified empirically (repeated economic and political crises caused by the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production within it) but also by the history of class struggle, confirmed by the continued existence of that struggle.

What is ‘up for grabs’ is that these changes “lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”  Given the perennial optimism of many Marxists, which unfortunately (?) I don’t share, I consider this might now better be rephrased by taking out the words ‘sooner or’; although given the relative brevity of mature capitalism’s existence this might only be a reflection of a perspective from a human lifespan that is nearer departures than arrivals.

For Marxists, as opposed to analytical philosophers like Cohen, the real issue here is that the productive forces continue to be developed by capitalism and that this might imply two things.  First, that the idea that previous attempts at socialist revolution could have been successful is mistaken, and second, that current ideas that socialist revolution is on the agenda (in some historical as opposed to immediate sense) are mistaken for the same reason.

As we have seen, it will not do to avoid this potential difficulty by claiming that capitalism is not developing the productive forces.  There are political organisations which have repeated the idea that capitalism has been in crisis more or less the whole period of their own existence but, as I have already noted, the working class has grown enormously in the last period, which means the growth of wage labour, exploitation and the creation of masses of new surplus value upon which capitalist accumulation takes place.

I said I would return to Cohen’s translation of “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed” into “No economic structure (set of production relations) ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed. . .”

This passage has been translated in a number of ways but it is undoubtedly better that it be understood to mean that the social order of capitalism is insufficient for the development of the productive forces rather than the stage must be reached where there is simply lack of room for these forces to develop.

That latter suggests an absolute barrier which, when reached, will mean that the productive forces will cease to develop.  Since we have not, and do not, appear to be approaching such a stage, this would seem to argue that the destruction of capitalism is not on the historical agenda and certainly has not been in the century in which Marx lived or in the twentieth century either.  The idea that capitalism could have been overthrown at any point during this time would have been illusory – capitalism had the potential to develop the forces of production massively.  It certainly ‘had room’ for them.

The possibility of the overthrow of capitalism rests not on the existence of some absolute obstacle which ceases to provide room for its development but from the contradictions it contains that make capitalism insufficient for the development of the forces of production within it.  This is expressed in crises of overproduction, in which the relations of production impose on these forces the necessity for an expansion based on the realisation of massively increased amounts of surplus value.  In other words, the expansion of these forces is continually thrown into crisis because the need for this to involve a suitable expansion of profit.

When this doesn’t happen crises of overproduction lead to interruptions in the development of these forces through the typical symptoms of crisis – unemployed labour and instruments of production, and unsold commodities that cannot satisfy the consumption needs of workers or of capitalists for continued and expanded production.  The development of capitalism means that this contradiction increases and the capitalist mode of production becomes more and more insufficient for this development.

Each crisis trends towards a greater mass of capital unable to contribute to its own expansion, whether it is expressed in larger and larger numbers of workers unemployed, greater means of production unused or devalued through bankruptcies and reduced capacity utilisation, and a greater number of commodities unsold or sold at reduced prices.

It is not that each crisis must register a successively greater percentage of unemployment or fall in levels of production.  We should not seek confirmation of Marx’s analysis through expecting every crisis of overproduction to be worse in these relative respects, as if industrial production must fall more, and unemployment must always be higher, than the Great Depression of the 1930s etc.

It is that capitalism means the accumulation of greater and greater amounts of capital, and the crises that its contradictions create thus tend to throw back, and tend to the destruction of, absolutely greater amounts of capital.  The grounds for socialism do not arise from only one pole of this contradiction but also from the development of the forces of production that precede crises and subsequently follow them.

This is what demonstrates the fettering of the forces of production by the relations of production.  These relations imply unceasing competition between different capitals and the states they both support and rely upon.  This means economic crises become political conflicts, not just involving suppression of subordinate classes but also war between rival capitals and states.

The bloody history of capitalism, especially in the first half of the twentieth century shows the absolute devastation that the contradictions of capitalism can inflict, as the international development of the forces of production runs up against capitalist relations of production centred on national states and Empires.  Rival capitalists stand behind these states as they seek through alliances and opposition to advance at the expense of others.

*KMAC: Karl Marx’s Alternative to Capitalism

Back to part 32

People before Profit’s ‘Zero Covid-19’ Strategy

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This week the Dáil debated a motion tabled by opposition parties calling for a ‘zero-covid’ strategy.  It was supported by People before Profit and repeated a number of measures published in their strategy document.  Their approach has been supported by much of the Left in Ireland and in Britain. What can we make of it?

A number of questions are immediately raised that the strategy would have to answer. How long would lockdown have to last to achieve its objective; how much would this cost not only financially but also in the well-known drastic effects of lockdown, and what lives and health would be preserved by the strategy compared to the costs?  Is it demonstrated that the costs will not exceed the benefits?

You will search in vain for answers to any of these questions in the PbP document.

Government strategy is based on a balance of restrictive measures and permission to do certain things that have previously been taken for granted. It is accepted that this involves costs but also benefits that justify the costs, while some costs it refuses to accept.  The financial cost to the state in 2020 is estimated to have been €20 billion and Leo Varadkar has speculated that the final cost may be €50 billion.

The ‘zero-covid’ strategy means the balance is wrong but doesn’t say what the financial cost is of drastically shifting it (or the other non-financial costs e.g. deterioration in mental health, rise in domestic abuse and restriction of basic civil rights etc.).  The People before Profit (PbP) document calls for the ‘closure of all non-essential workplaces’ but doesn’t say what they are: how many more would be closed compared to the current lockdown?  Would the difference be significant?  What work is currently not essential and what would be the impact on the economy and the workers in the closed sectors?

PbP say that profits are being put before health but since we live in a capitalist society production is both for profit and to meet needs.  Socialists object that the former is an obstacle to satisfaction of the latter but they don’t claim that under capitalism needs can be met by closing down production for profit.  Even their organisation’s name seems an unconscious acceptance of this (and you could write a whole post on how incoherent that name is).

PbP says that Governments only care about people working and spending, but working class people care about these things as well, for quite obvious reasons, although this seems to escape those seeking to drastically reduce both.  Socialists of the Marxist variety also don’t believe that pieces of paper, or electronic data in bank computers, are a substitute for the actual production of the goods and services people use and consume.  The pieces of paper that capitalism presents as the universal equivalent of real wealth is useless without the production of that which really embodies the potential satisfaction of needs.

Their demand for economic security as a fundamental requirement of public health is equated with state welfare that has always been a permanent source of insecurity, as well as a more or less inadequate safety net.  Welfare systems are not meant to provide economic security for working class people and it fundamentally miseducates them to say they can.

So, the ‘zero-covid’ strategy doesn’t answer basic problems or objections.  To make big claims requires big arguments and big evidence but even obvious questions are ignored.

A second problem concerns the idea of the strategy itself.  It is called ‘zero-covid’ but appears to accept that you can’t get to a situation of absolutely zero.  Having reduced the number of cases to a low level it still envisages periodic eruptions of cases.  It does not mean ‘eradication’ but repeats that it does mean ‘elimination’, which means that control measures will still be required.  The problem is that for a zero-covid strategy these measures mean punishing lockdowns.

So, the ‘zero-covid’ strategy actually involves severe lockdown of indeterminate duration to reduce cases to very low numbers whereupon lockdown is relaxed, cases will again increase, which will require further lockdowns.  Its advocates think these lockdowns can be achieved by testing, tracking and isolation but widespread asymptomatic infection, incentives not to report, ineradicable errors in testing, more transmissible viral mutations, and drastic quarantine measures to impose isolation all point to something much more sweeping.

It should not be forgotten that cases reduced dramatically during the summer to something close to what I assume ‘zero-covid’ supporters would aim at, but was then replaced by an increasing number of cases giving rise to new lockdowns that the same supporters called to be more drastic.  Rather than the strategy looking like an alternative to repeated lockdowns it looks like a mutant variant of it, following what currently appears to be seasonal eruptions of infection.

The analogy used to describe the strategy provides something of an understanding of what is intended but analogies have a habit of leading to misunderstanding.  The example is put forward of a forest fire that requires maximum effort to put out, while recognising that embers may still remain that require to be put out when they again spark new localised fires.

The analogy fails because while forest fires destroy everything in their path the Covid-19 pandemic does not, and while new local fires can be quickly identified and ring-fenced new outbreaks of covid-19 are often without symptoms and can quickly become far from localised.

This brings us to a third failure of the strategy, which is really incredible but says a lot for its affinity to the current approach and its even worse failure to identify what the danger of the pandemic is.  While noting the importance of targeting Covid hotspots and ensuring the safety of vulnerable groups, it mentions in this category workers in meat plants, those in direct provision and migrant detention centres, and travellers and homeless people.  It fails to say anything at all about the vulnerable most at risk of dying.  Neither does the Dáil motion, which mentions that women are disproportionately bearing the burden of the pandemic.

Nothing is said about the median age of those dying being in their eighties or about over 90 per cent of fatalities having an underlying condition. Nothing is said about the scandalous multiple deaths in residential care homes, where older people should have been made safe.  Nothing about the failure of the state to secure them in its dedicated facilities or of the general failure of health services to protect them.  Nothing about the infection of older people by the heath service either in hospital or through then discharging them into homes.  Instead, infection rates in healthcare staff are put down to lack of money, as if infection control should not be a standing requirement.  The actions of the Health Service Executive has on the contrary demonstrated that this has not been seen as an absolute priority.

To say any of this would undermine the zero-covid approach advocated by PbP, including its reliance on the state and its determined refusal to accept the very limited risks posed to all but the identified vulnerable groups.  To do so might be seen to rob the situation of the sense of extreme crisis so necessary to its attempt to talk up the murderous policy of putting profit before people, and the hope that workers will wake up and smell the coffee.

What we therefore have is a strategy, not unlike the current one, that has ignored the real pandemic that has taken place, and has bought into the idea that it is a threat to everyone equally when patently it is not.  The priority given by the virus in killing people is ignored by a strategy that wants zero cases for everyone, and in doing so has ignored the priority of those whose lives are threatened by it.

The health bureaucracy has moulded its response in its own image to put itself in charge.  The left has moulded its response in the image of its own misguided political conceptions, including the potential benevolence of the capitalist state, despite that state’s obvious failure.  Which brings us to a last major failing of the strategy.

Again and again the state, especially in the form of a national health service, is held up as the answer when a quick look across the border will show that the NHS in the North has failed, has ceased to become a health service and become instead a covid-19 service.  The cost of this in future illness and death has not been a first concern.  Long waiting lists have become even longer while the latter is blamed on the former and previous failure becomes the excuse for its extension.

The PbP strategy is replete with references to the recruitment of new healthcare staff ‘to dramatically increase capacity’.  It wants ‘more public health specialists’ and to ‘recruit extra nurses and doctors’ but there are definite limits to how much can be done quickly.  Really significant increases cannot be created in months but only over years.  As an answer to the pandemic today it is a wish list that can only promise salvation sometime in the future.

It says the problem with the health services is ‘structural’ but then contradicts itself by saying it arises from lack of funding and ‘neoliberal’ management, and further contradicts itself by calling for the ‘nationalisation of private hospitals’, imposing the same structural model that has failed.

Because PbP believes that state ownership is socialist, and they think they’re socialists, then the solution is state ownership when the ‘structural’ problem is precisely this form of ownership and control.  An ownership and control beset by bureaucracy and bedevilled by narrow professional hierarchies and egos.

The problem is not a style of management but that health services are bureaucracies that privilege themselves, with the most powerful within them being best able to do so, including medical consultants who prioritise private work, although this is only one feature of the state capitalist service.  The policy of Governments to portray health service workers as heroes beyond all reproach is resisted by some staff but is pursued in order, not to protect the interests of these staff, but to protect the bureaucrats and politicians who govern the system.  The blinkered approach to the health system leads to mistakes such as the widespread responsibility for infection by hospitals and care homes being either ignored, downplayed or excused.

The absence of answers to key questions posed by the strategy; the inadequate understanding of what it would actually mean in Ireland; the failure to even identify the main threat from the pandemic, and the call for measures that cannot be implemented quickly enough to make the difference its authors say is needed; all this points to an underlying impotent political programme summed up at the end of the strategy document:

“. . . most of all, we will need to clearly articulate a vision for an alternative to the destructive instability of capitalism – in Ireland we can play our part by popularising the call for a Transformative Left Government that would reorganise the economy under democratic control, as part of an ambitious Just Transition. .  .  . A left government supported by people power and workers organised in fighting trade unions can deliver real change . . .”

Capitalism will not be changed by a ‘Left Government’, by a group of politicians seeking to transform society through wielding the power of a state that exists to defend it.  Neither can the economy be ‘reorganised’ top-down by such a Government that will in some way, somehow, then be subject to democratic control.  If anyone in PbP still subscribes to any of the fundamental ideas of Marxism they will know all this is false, and being false it is dishonest to sell such a strategy, which is why it is so threadbare.

It is not in any sense a socialist strategy either at the level of transforming society or in dealing with Covid-19, as ritual references to emulating New Zealand, Australia and Asian countries demonstrates. In what way are any of these socialist?  In what way are they safe from future infection, if it at any point they cease to separate themselves from the rest of the world in a way simply impossible for Ireland?  Australia itself provides evidence that there is no such thing as one big final lockdown that breaks the back of infection.  Numerous mutations in many countries belie the idea that these are necessarily foreign and can be avoided by border controls over any extended period.

The great advantage of the zero-covid strategy is that it presents an ideal outcome that compares brilliantly with any other potential approach; the more so since no cost is admitted and no account taken of any problems arising from, or consequences of, its practical implementation, even were such implementation possible in any relevant timescale.

That is why it is also ideal, unreal and hollow.  Not so much transformative as transcendental.

A year of Covid-19 (4) – a tragedy to be forgiven?

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It’s almost as if someone has been reading these posts on the course of Covid-19 in Ireland.  Fintan O’Toole’s latest column (paywall) in ‘The Irish Times’ also notes some of the mistakes made in its early management and, while he treats the Irish approach as one of ad-libbing and improvisation, he lends a sympathetic ear to the early performance.  To what extent is this justified?

Well, let’s start with the scope afforded by this forgiveness: “when it’s all trial and error, no one should be tried for making an error – even when, as in the case of nursing homes and residential institutions – the flaws were fatal.”  But consider if we change the tense of the sentence – ‘even when . . . the flaws are fatal’.

‘Error’ he goes on to say ‘is moreover built into the structure of science . . . but science isn’t a set of certainties . . . to follow science is to follow evidence and with a new disease the evidence has been constantly evolving.’

Well, yes and no.  The important link between the worst effects of the virus and a person’s underlying conditions has been more and more understood.  On the other hand, as I noted at the end of the previous post – ‘one aspect . . . has appeared stubbornly consistent, the median age of those dying was reported in mid-January to be 82.’  Most recently, of over 1,500 deaths in care homes 369 were in January alone, a five-fold increase from December to January.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) noted on 21 January that the 27th of the month would be the anniversary of the first meeting of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), the crisis management team for the pandemic.  It was noted in April that no mention of nursing homes had been made in its first 11 meetings, with the HSE claiming that the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) that attended the meetings were supposed to represent the interests of older people.

While boasting of the support given to care homes the HSE officials were at this time unable to provide up-to-date figures of deaths within them or a breakdown between state and private providers.  Neither did they answer as to whether any of the deaths could have been avoided.

Around the same time that NPHET was being set up a number of important academic papers were just being published on the effects of the new disease (here and here), including evidence of the effect of the pandemic in China.  The notable paper from Imperial College in London included further disclosure of the much greater threat to older people posed by the virus.  While the infection fatality rate was 0.002% for children aged 0 – 9, the rate for those 80+ was 9.3%, 4,650 times higher.  While these absolute figures were too high the relative differences remained.

Clearly avoiding infection was many multiples more important for older people than for the very young. Even between the age groups 40 – 49 and 60 – 69 the relative fatality rate was nearly 15 times higher for the latter group.  So protecting the older age groups was vital, which involved isolating them from potential infection.  How could these most vulnerable people be effectively separated?

Fortunately, many of these people were already relatively isolated in social care facilities, while identification of those in the community would be relatively straightforward.  Unfortunately, this relative isolation was not a protection.

While the health regulator was supposed to represent the interests of older people the HSE was there to protect the health of the whole population.  It became apparent however that the facilities they managed, controlled and regulated had become prime sites of infection, all while the NPHET engaged in interminable debate about opening or closing shops, hospitality, schools and workplaces etc.

When it wasn’t about the various levels of lockdown that were never applied at the levels specified, it was about testing and tracing, which didn’t identify where the virus was coming from and was later no longer advised for close contacts of confirmed cases.  So, what had been the point of it?

At the beginning of this year ‘senior sources’ were reporting the exhaustion of their approach, admitting that there was “not much else that can be done”, which didn’t stop the debate of vanishing returns continuing.  Today it revolves around rules for entry from outside the state, which is almost a moot point given the levels of domestic infection.  More honestly, it is being reported that ‘Ministers and senior officials’ view it as ‘more about politics than public health.’

Yet the places where around half of the deaths have occurred – residential homes and hospitals – are spared the outrage they properly deserve.  On 26 January it was reported that the level of infections among staff and patients in health care settings had never been higher.  And three days later the Chief Medical Officer was explaining that there was an “exceptionally elevated” infection rate among those aged over 85; that 55 recent deaths were associated with hospitals and 140 with nursing homes; and that we could “expect a large number of additional deaths in the coming weeks.”  Not much had changed over the year despite the ‘trial and error’ of ‘following the science.’

The state has incurred increased debt of around €20 billion in 2020 through various lockdowns but it is still unable to target resources effectively at the greatest problem: the daily death toll for Tuesday was the highest of the pandemic and the median age is still 80+.

It cannot be that a targeted prevention strategy would cost too much or that resources could not be prioritised – €2 billion would go a long way towards protecting older people never mind €20bn.  If even half the current death toll had been avoided and it was now around 1,750 who had died, would this justify the lockdown of society along with its enormous cost?  Would it not have been possible to identify those with the underlying conditions that make them vulnerable apart from advanced years, accounting for well over 90% of deaths? And would it then not have been possible to recognise the difference between those dying with Covid-19 and those from Covid-19?

But why would new problems be adequately addressed by the Irish health system when forever problems have not? When it turns out that the new problems are really the old ones?  As was pointed out by one TD early on, the Health Regulator – supposed to represent the interests of older people – had already reported that in care homes the compliance rates for risk assessment and infection control had fallen from 27 per cent to 23 per cent between 2017 and 2018.

Repeated problems identified have never been adequately addressed, with the HIQA complaining in November that nursing home residents were picking up the infection in hospitals and then being returned to their homes, while care home staff were being lost to contact tracing teams and agency staff were not being included in testing.

As Prof Sam McConkey, an infectious disease specialist with the Royal College of Surgeons, put it “nursing homes have been chronically under-staffed for several years.  They are going to have to start cherishing their staff as the most important thing they have.”  If staff were paid adequately they wouldn’t have to take second jobs, which might for example go some way to addressing the problem that staff weren’t turning up for testing and some were showing up for work while showing symptoms.

Some care homes were simply too small with too few resources. In some residential facilities for people with disabilities derogations were given to staff to continue working though they were identified as having possible close contact with infection.  They had not been tested and it was not clear when they would.

Yet, repeatedly bizarre statements have been issued by those in charge, including that NPHET was proposing setting up an infection-control team – in mid-December!  As if infection control was not a standard and routine hospital requirement. Or that there were difficulties in approving employment of nurses for care homes from India, Philippines and other countries outside Europe, reported in January, when many problems were the result of shortages of staff.

All this was occurring at the same time as repeated statements were made by the NPHET, which we noted in the previous post, that “there was simply no way of protecting nursing homes or any other institutional setting if we don’t control the spread of this infection in the community.” Then saying that vulnerable groups in care settings were a priority although also saying that it was “not realistic to think we could keep it out of homes.”

Unfortunately, seeking to prevent community infection through a generalised lockdown makes all talk of prioritisation a nonsense.  A general lockdown is precisely not to prioritise, and the actions and non-actions of the state are convincing evidence of this lack of ordering of risk.  To talk then, as O’Toole does, of inevitable mistakes is itself to fall into the error of identifying policy as simply mistakes.   Even in the case of vaccination, the representative body of private nursing homes has complained that just 10 per cent of the initial 77,000 vaccinations administered by mid-January were within nursing homes.

The identification, right from the start, that Covid-19 represented a specific threat should have been met with targeted and focused measures to protect those most vulnerable.  The ramshackle and incoherent attempt to lock everybody up, that cannot be sustained, has diverted attention away from this task.

That diversion continues with a false debate over a ‘Zero-Covid’ strategy, which is simply a variant of the current approach.  Like the existing approach, it targets what measures are required to support closing society instead of what measures are needed to keep it open.  It again ignores experience of just who is threatened and how specific measures might be implemented to protect them.

Both the current approach and its extension into a ‘Zero-Covid’ one can’t tell us how long we would have to be locked up for and how we could be sure that whatever metric of success is decided upon could be achieved on a sustainable basis.  What ‘Zero-Covid’ would gain in reducing deaths associated with Covid-19 would be more than offset by the costs of an intensified and indefinite lockdown, which if the advocates of it had been followed, would have been in place since March. Both ultimately can only be sold to an increasingly weary population by promising something that they can’t deliver: the development of the pandemic has had more to do with the weather than lockdown measures, and the end-point of immunity through vaccination may be illusory if new variants are impervious to the vaccines just developed.

In this case, and it may be the situation anyway, living with Covid-19 will be required and immunity through infection become the outcome, if not the objective.  In any case and in the meantime, the policy should be directed to protection of the most vulnerable.  In relation to the assessment of O’Toole, the prerequisites for forgiveness do not exist.

Back to part 3

A year of Covid-19 (3) – the Irish experience of following ‘the science’

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Following ‘the science’ and its scientists that we looked at in the two previous posts does not look well in hindsight, as a short review of the course of the pandemic in the Irish State demonstrates.  In the early days these were forecasting 20,000 deaths, six times the current figure which is just over 3,300, and an even greater over-estimate than the influential Imperial College paper that forecast a possible 500,000 deaths in the UK.

At the start, what characterised the response, just like Britain, was complacency.  On 4 March the Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan of the HSE stated that “as things stand” there was no reason why the St Patricks day festival could not go ahead, and he did not believe that it was proportionate to prevent Italian rugby fans from visiting Dublin for a cancelled match.  The attendance of thousands of Irish racegoers at the Cheltenham festival also went ahead.  From the point of view of the generalised lockdown that was later to be implemented this was a catalogue of mistakes.

The State supposedly had a policy of test and trace, in which all cases could be identified and followed up to ensure isolation.  The system and its resources were quickly shown to be inadequate, with it only subsequently being admitted that test and trace did not identify where infections came from.  Prof. Philip Nolan from the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) stated that “we would like to go back and find out where people are getting the virus, but we don’t have the time or resources to pursue this academic exercise”.  In any case, in October researchers from Beaumont reported that up to two out of every three infections could be missed through poor technique when people are being swabbed.

At this early stage the policy on testing was confused: so to be tested before March 12 a person had to be symptomatic or either in close contact with a confirmed case or have travelled from an affected area. Then having one symptom was required, then the list of symptoms changed, and if this threshold was passed the person needed to be in a priority category.

These early mis-steps have led many to see the issue as being one of weak or incomplete implementation of policy rather than the policy being misconceived in the first place.  The record suggests the latter.

The island of Ireland could not isolate itself from the rest of the world so could not avoid importing the infection.  Having imported it, it was always going to be impossible to identify all cases since most were asymptomatic.  Social distancing and isolation of suspected cases was considered to be the equivalent of the mass quarantine implemented elsewhere but was not.  The measures adopted simply slowed the spread of the infection, justified to protect the health service, but with the by-product that doing so gave it time to mutate, as it did.

Much bigger ‘mis-steps’ were made at this time, again flowing not from failure to adequately implement policy but as a result of its conception. On March 6 the representative organisation of private nursing homes, Nursing Homes Ireland, (NHI) banned all visitors to its homes.  Four days later Tony Holohan of the NPHET questioned the closures “before they are really necessary” while the Department of Health only eventually gave approval to the action ten days after NHI had introduced the restrictions.

In early March Holohan was claiming that ‘we had reacted very early and with significant action compared to other countries’, although the performance of these other countries seemed to be held up as some sort of exculpation rather than a pointer to a failing common approach. For the Chief Medical Officer their response “in the first instance had to focus on dealing with community transmission of this virus.  There was simply no way of protecting nursing homes or any other institutional setting if we don’t control the spread of this infection in the community.”

NPHET later claimed that it was not until late March that research pointed to the threat of asymptomatic transmission in care homes although by the end of May Paul Reid, chief executive of the Health Service Executive (HSE), was acknowledging that “there are obvious gaps in clarity and responsibility in the overall governance and oversight of private nursing homes.”

By mid-April Holohan was stating that vulnerable groups in care settings were a priority, but by that time there were 330 outbreaks in residential cares facilities, with concern expressed about under-reporting.  While boasting of the “unprecedented level of support” given to homes the HSE was unable to provide up-to-date figures for deaths.

Not much later Holohan was stating that it was “not realistic to think we could keep it out of homes”, while by the end of April it was reported that 735 people had died in residential community settings.  By early May the mortality rate in nursing homes was three times that among the rest of population, accounting for 61 per cent of deaths (including those in other residential facilities).

By the end of May the Department of Health had been warned by the health regulator of more than 200 “high risk” nursing homes, while receiving “just an acknowledgement” and “no response”.  NHI had quickly raised concerns around PPE and hospital discharges, but by late March 88 per cent of homes had bought either their own PPE or used home-made. Almost half of nursing homes said that they had to wait 10 days for test results to come back, and publication of cases in particular homes was not provided (unlike for hospitals).

By June it was apparent that nursing and other residential facilities were not the only health and social care facilities where infections were occurring.  At the start of the month, it was reported that more than 200 people had contracted coronavirus while in hospital in 102 outbreaks. By the end of August, it was also reported that about 90 per cent of all cases among over-65s were of nursing home residents (between March and end of June), amounting to almost 6,000 cases resulting in 968 deaths (56% of the total at that point).

By the beginning of the following month concern was again being expressed at the rise in cases among older people.  In early October a NPHET letter noted a ‘sustained increase’ in cases, with home residents accounting for more than half of the 1,810 virus-related deaths, but with Holohan again asserting that it was not possible to document all patterns of infection and that measures directed to the whole population were needed.

The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) expressed concern that there was no “consistency of approach” on whether nursing home residents should be tested where staff had tested positive. The HSE chief clinical advisor claimed that older people could not be “siphoned off safely” but the chief inspector of HIQA stated later that “not all centres where staff have tested positive have undertaken a programme of resident testing.”

In November, NPHET priorities, according to Holohan, were protection of the most vulnerable, continued resumption of non-Covid health and social care services and education of children; but by mid-November it was reported that in the week up to Oct 31 there were 56 outbreaks of infection in nursing homes and 33 associated with hospitals.

Lockdown however appeared to be getting some results, even if this was little more than postponement rather than eradication. This was now success, as was the perceived protection of a health system unable to adequately do its own job of protection.

By the beginning of December the Irish state was hailed, especially by itself, as the best performing in Europe measured by the average number of new cases.  Unfortunately, even in success the most significant threat remained, with Holohan expressing concern at the level of infections in nursing homes despite the highest Level 5 lockdown.  Hospitals also remained a problem, and on 13 November it was reported that pre-admission tests for Covid that had been recommended for hospitals were not being practised by all.  Anne O’Connor, the chief operations officer of HSE, stated that guidance had been changed in the previous two weeks.

By December the problem with hospital acquired infection was continuing, with over 200 confirmed cases in the four weeks up to 13 December and more than 400 picking it up in hospital in two weeks in January.  By the new year the Irish State had gone from the being the best in Europe to being the worst in the world in terms of growth in cases.  The State went from 80,000 cases in nine months to doubling this total in three weeks.

Since there had been a partial opening before Christmas this was held up for blame but there remained no evidence that cafes, hairdressers or clothes’ shops were a problem; it was a question of a seasonal infection flourishing in its best environment with any human interaction facilitating spread.

Doing away with the latter altogether was the only logical extension of the existing policy and all the variations on the different social distancing rules were the proverbial number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.  Very few wanted to go there, and those who might would face the difficulty that closing down sites of infection might have to start with hospitals and nursing homes, with 100 outbreaks in the former from July to mid-December and 93 in the latter.  A study in mid-January reported that the rate of infection among hospital staff in Galway and Dublin was six times that of the local community.

Despite the months of restrictions and despite the worst-in-the-world figures there did not appear to be excess deaths.  The prevailing narrative appeared to tell a story that did not add up.  One aspect however appeared stubbornly consistent, the median age of those dying was reported in mid-January to be 82.  This outcome was consistent with the North despite its apparent different path, with people aged 75 and over accounted for 77.7 per cent of ‘coronavirus-related’ deaths and with 91.5 per cent having some pre-existing condition, Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease being the most common.

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Vaccine nationalism

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The decision to attempt to prevent vaccines made in the EU getting to the UK via Northern Ireland led to a flurry of arguments that almost all mirrored the same nationalist impulse of the EU that was being criticised.  This was true of some on the left as much as any other.

Production of vaccines is an international effort and equitable access could only be carried out by agreed international Governmental and regulatory action.  If it is true, as has been claimed, that AstraZeneca had claimed that it would provide vaccines to the EU from its UK operation and promised the UK it would not, then its failure to deliver the number promised to the EU is a neat example of international production suffering from the imperatives of capitalist ownership.

On top of this, it is obvious that the conflict between the EU and UK would not have arisen without Brexit, even if its supporters are trumpeting the cack-handed approach of the European Commission and celebrating the faster advance in vaccination of the UK compared to the EU.  This opportunity for Brexiteers arises because it involves one of the few industries in which Britain is a leading participant.

Prize for top hypocrite in the affair must go to the DUP leader Arlene Foster who expressed outrage at the EU’s decision to invoke Article 16 of the Irish Protocol. This allows either the EU or the UK – in the event that the application of the instrument leads to “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade” – unilaterally to take “appropriate safeguard measures”.

This, she condemned as an “incredible act of hostility” that places a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.  “By triggering Article 16 in this manner the European Union has once again shown it is prepared to use Northern Ireland when it suits their interests but in the most despicable manner – over the provision of a vaccine which is designed to save lives”.

The impulsive triggering of Article 16, before hastily being withdrawn, shows that the EU is indeed motivated by self-interest, something that no one with even a modicum of sense would entertain the least doubt about for a second.  Socialist opponents of Brexit didn’t oppose the project because there was any illusion in the purity of the motivations of the EU.

However, a unionist complaining about the hardening of the Irish border, that they spend every minute of existence fretting over the permanence of, is too absurd for words. Since a number of leading figures in her party have already been calling for Article 16 to be invoked by the British, the charge of an “incredible act of hostility” is more than a bit rich.

In the North of Ireland, to point such things out is called ‘whataboutery’, and is frowned upon, which means circumlocution is constantly required to call someone a hypocrite and allows those who exercise it most to get away with it most often.  The North of Ireland is getting its vaccine from Britain so no one would be missing out if they weren’t allowed to get it through a supply across the Irish border.

What it shows is that disputes between Britain and the EU have the potential to reverberate inside the North and act as a catalyst for political instability, exactly what the Protocol was to supposed to avoid but reflecting the fact that the political agreement it was to support is unstable. Unionists are reminded, and demoralised by the fact, that for some essential purposes the EU determines economic and social policy and the sovereignty of the British has been diminished; while nationalists have been reminded that the EU is not a cuddly benefactor but has its own interests and that the idea of upending the Protocol they support has just become more conceivable. The latter will at least have been assuaged by the quick change of approach by the EU, promptly enacted following representations by the Irish member state, which will have had some effect.

Some on the left saw the episode as displaying the necessity for big pharma to be nationalised, or put under public ownership, as the misleading euphemism puts it.  In fact, state ownership would have exacerbated rivalry between producers of the vaccine.  Brexit is itself testament to the destructive rivalry that can be introduced to economic and social relationships by state competition.  The pharmaceutical industry is characterised by international research, development and production and it would not help if state ownership overlaid company competition.

The answer to the equitable distribution of vaccines is international cooperation that cannot be assumed to be achieved by capitalist states that might (and just has) rather hindered the international cooperation that is needed.  The socialist answer is to recognise that the separate interest of different companies and states stands in stark contrast to the common interest of workers in the pharma companies and those outside, in every country, most vulnerable to the virus and the catastrophic effects of lockdown.

It is in their joint interest that they, their families, friends and communities are protected, recognising that no single country will have immunity unless they all have it.  This points not to state ownership but the ownership of the workers, in workers’ cooperatives, working together across borders in taking over the current development of vaccines in their own interests.

If socialism is the answer, the answer is the action of workers not capitalist states, although again and again so many parts of the left forget this, if they were ever aware of it in the first place.

 

A year of Covid-19 (2) – following doctor’s orders

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The view that there is a single scientific approach to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a number of consequences.

Firstly, it became simply a scientific question; at most politicians had some discretion to accept or reject the extent of the measures proposed by the scientists and doctors, but no wider political questions were involved despite the dramatic effect on people’s everyday lives, their employment and their freedoms.  Any regard to these was argued to be putting ‘the economy’ before lives and particularly denounced by some on the Left.  The Government could pay for any of the economic consequences and let the science-led effort to control the virus take effect.  Anything else was letting politics interfere and was by definition unjustified.

Secondly, because there was a single science, whatever scientific approach was adopted was the right one, again with only a difference of degree acceptable, so that whoever was appointed the scientific leadership was by definition the single scientific authority.  Others could comment, but as we saw in the links in the last post, the scientists themselves were under pressure to accept that there was a single scientific approach, resulting in censorship and self-censorship of critical views.

One example of this was the criticism of the voluntary approach adopted by Sweden, pointing at certain times to its relatively high death toll, while failing to highlight that this had resulted from the failure to protect the elderly in care homes.  Yet exactly this same failure was held up to excuse the record of the Irish state, which pointed to the failure of other countries to protect its elderly population as some sort of exoneration.  In April the Health Service Executive national clinical advisor was pointing to the failure in Ireland not being unique and that many countries were struggling with outbreaks of infection in homes.

At this stage between 45 and 60 per cent of all Covid-related deaths in the UK, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy had been of residents of nursing homes.  Yet rather than this being a series of warnings, of wake-up calls that something was wrong with the prevailing approach, it was accepted.  The chief medical officer Tony Holohan later stating that it was “not realistic to think we could keep it out of homes”.

In 2017 the Irish State had adopted a management plan to deal with emergencies, which it then ignored when the pandemic threatened.  Instead, it made the top leadership of the Health Service Executive the scientific leadership, which almost immediately appeared to have so much authority devolved to it that it also appeared to have almost total control.

This in itself was pretty extraordinary since the HSE (and the Health Service in the North) was widely regarded as being something of a disaster, while the bureaucrats with medical qualifications that had presided over the failing health systems, along with the various governments, were for that reason considered responsible.

In the North, the extent of the failure was brought home when it was reported that Poles living there travelled home for treatment rather than wait years on a waiting list; and that one GP had disclosed that some of his patients who had fled the war in Syria were in ‘disbelief’ at the state of the North’s health system.  The same one sometimes held up as a model for the two-tier service in the South.

Such was the moral panic induced, the responsibility for the ability of the health services to do its job, to protect the health of the population, instead became the responsibility of the population to ‘protect the health service’.  In this, the situation in Ireland North and South was the same as in Britain, the architects and executive of the failing system made their failure the responsibility of the people they had failed.

Since the health services could not protect the people and had already failed, it was clear from the start that the people would fail to protect the health service. Simple and routine daily activity became the occasion for berating the public that they were letting the health service down, or as the Health Minister in the North put it, was equivalent of going into a hospital and ‘slapping a nurse.’

The blinkered approach that considered there was a single scientific approach, and the domination of this approach by a medical bureaucracy, meant that wider considerations were ignored.  It became a situation I have described before as one in which those with only a hammer perceive every problem as a nail. This was obvious when the strategy adopted became subject to the inadequate resources of the acute health systems North and South.

It is important to recognise the domination of health services by the acute sector, the hospitals, which always downgraded social and community services and public health; the price of which in the pandemic has been paid in lost lives.  It is not as if the problems with this have never been acknowledged.  In the North the necessity of greater emphasis on community services has been repeated in reports as often as it has been disregarded following their publication.  Public Health has always been the Cinderella service, although at least she got to go to the ball; in the health service she would have got to go to the laundry in the outhouse.

The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) married the erroneous view that there was a single scientific approach with the acute services bias common to many health systems.  This common bias helps explain the similar failed approach adopted by so many countries that ironically justified each other’s failure by their own.  Yet the nature of the threat has been obvious from the start.

In the last week of December, it was reported that a majority of the 2,150 deaths in the Irish State were accounted for in nursing homes and that in this, and in infections among hospital staff, it was among the worst in the world.  In the North it was reported that 39.2 per cent of all Covid-19 related deaths in 2020 were of care home residents in hospital.  In effect, the gathering of the vulnerable in enclosed locations became not protection but helpless confinement, and the mechanism to provide treatment the instrument of infection.

The common approach of generalised lockdown was justified by the need to protect an inadequately resourced health service that precluded targeted protection of the vulnerable in homes and outside.  Yet it is admitted in NPHET minutes reported over a week ago that “the majority of the excess hospitalisations, intensive care admissions and deaths would be amongst those aged 60 – 79 Years”.  The policy of precisely targeted measures and resources to protect these people was rejected on the grounds that this would lead to unsupportable demands on the heath service.  Was it not taken into consideration that targeted protection would act to reduce potential demands on the health service?

Despite all this, the authority of the medical leadership has withstood the outcome of the failed approach adopted, in Ireland and in other countries.  Instead, the measure of success is not avoiding failure, but failing better.  That is, not being so bad that the country comes out looking worse than others.  The performance of the Boris Johnson government has therefore been a bit of a get out of jail free card, and the Irish is not the only political leadership on these islands that has relied on nationalism for political protection, not excepting the Johnson government itself.

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