The fuel protests and the best of the left’s politics? (2 of 2)

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Almost as important as a correct political programme in approaching the fuel protests is an accurate analysis of them – what sort of movement was it?

People before profit were clear that it ‘supports these protests’ but wanted ‘to go further’ and to ‘deepen the movement.’  Moreover, the politics of it were basically sound – ‘The basic demand is right!’

The protests themselves and the movement that created them were to be supported, and although PbP criticised the role of the far right, it asserted ‘let’s keep coming back to the real issue of unbearable price increases and where they come from.’  The point of this article is that the question that we started with is not one that can be skirted by ‘coming back’ to what provoked it; it is the correct response to the protests which is the question posed.

People before Profit were impressed by the fact that ‘for several days Ireland has seen some of the most militant protests in years: roads blocked, fuel depots and the Whitegate refinery targeted, fuel supplies thrown into chaos.’  It justified them by saying that ‘protest to be effective must be disruptive and polarising.’

In fact, the purpose of protesting is not to polarise – that may be a consequence – the intention is to win support, not to polarise it. And the same is true of being disruptive.  Blockading Whitegate oil refinery helped create shortages of fuel supplies but it was unlikely the ultimate purpose of bringing the state to a standstill would have been widely supported. Its immediate purpose was to gain control and the question then becomes who is gaining it?  What is the character of the protest movement achieving it?  The same question arises in supporting ‘militancy’.  The north of Ireland has undergone a huge number of very militant protests over many years and quite a few of them were entirely reactionary.

People before Profit say enough about this movement to point to a problem with simply wishing for it ‘to go further’ or to ‘deepen’ it.  ‘We also have to be honest about the class character of these protests. This movement is led by people who own companies, employ workers and have access to expensive machinery.’

It was not therefore a movement led by the working class. ‘Some of the most visible leaders have made racist, misogynistic and homophobic statements publicly’ and ‘some of the loudest figures attaching themselves to these protests are cheerleaders for Trump, for racism, and in some cases for Israel.’  That is, they were supporters of those that caused the war that caused the fuel price increases.

PbP goes on to say that ‘Though workers and farmers are present in numbers, they are not dictating the pace or demands at this stage . . . many working class people [are] looking on sympathetically, in some cases inspired by the militancy of the protests. This has happened because the movement of organised workers, the trade union movement, has completely failed to give any lead on the cost-of-living crisis. In that vacuum, people will turn to whoever appears willing to fight.’

So, what we have is a movement of the petty bourgeoisie whose ‘most visible leaders’ are reactionaries but which has the working class ‘looking on sympathetically.’  This is not therefore a movement to be supported, to be deepened, or taken further.  It is one to be exposed and challenged so that workers stop being onlookers and take matters into their own hands.

PbP itself puts one thing correctly: ‘a movement dominated by small business owners and owner-drivers, with far-right figures hovering at its edges, cannot win the demands that working people actually need’ – but this conflicts with its perspective of  ‘supporting these protests’, wanting ‘to go further’, and to ‘deepen the movement.’  What was needed was an entirely different movement.

It attempted to defend its approach by stating that ‘The answer is not to sneer at that militancy. It is to deepen it, broaden it, root it in working class demands, defend it from repression, and stop reactionaries from hijacking it. We should take inspiration from the fact that the current disruption is forcing the government to act.’

The problems with this defence were that it was not working class militancy that was in evidence and what militancy there was, including in the movement that actually existed, should not have been deepened and broadened.  Its class character had to be changed, which could not be done simply by attaching oneself to it, but only by creating an entirely separate one to it.

The article we quoted in the first part of this post that approved of People before Profit’s approach points to the experience of some socialists in the protests in France by the gilets jaunes and their engagement with it in order to ‘address the proletarian elements of the movement specifically.’  Unfortunately, its author has to recognise that when PbP TD Paul Murphy visited a protest in Dublin to offer support he was harangued and sent on his way by protesters that were described as ‘political grifters trying to drag this movement in a poisonous direction.’

This article criticises Sinn Féin for one of its members being photographed with a far-right figure supporting the protests, but seeking to deepen and broaden the movement would have seen People before Profit do the same.  They would be standing beside the ‘political grifters.’  What would have prevented Paul Murphy being sent away, and framed any photograph as a right wing figure getting photographed with Paul Murphy, would have been him turning up at the protest with a couple of hundred workers with their own demands challenging the ‘poisonous direction’ being taken.  But this begs the question.

People before Profit arrived at the wrong perspective because it sought to hitch a ride on the ‘sympathy’ that many workers had for the protests.  It saw an opportunity and sought to harness it. In other words, it was an example of its opportunist politics: seeking a quick short-term gain at the expense of an immediately more difficult defence of principle that its correct characterisation of the reactionary leadership of the protests should have led it to.

It did state that ‘We must demand that our unions enter the fight. . . . . The unions have the membership, the resources and the leverage to force real change on the cost of living. It is time to use them.’  Unfortunately, the unions were too busy getting ready for a new pay agreement with the government.  PbP called on ‘every trade union branch, every shop steward, every community organisation should be discussing what action can be taken and building for it now’, but this is precisely one role that PbP itself should play, not simply demand it of others.

The electoralism of PbP and its orientation to an NGO form of campaigning meant it had helped set up an ‘Affordable Ireland Campaign’, except it proved irrelevant. Even the British socialist who hailed its intervention acknowledged that this ‘was not given serious thought before the rush to support the blockades.’

He also acknowledges the leading role of reactionaries in the protests, ‘far-right figures were providing digital signal boosting, rhetorical defiance, and organisational presence that kept the blockades in place after the initial wave of genuine industrial grievance had done its work.’  ‘This movement is led by people who own companies, employ workers and have access to expensive machinery.’  Like PbP he does not examine the importance of the movement having no coherent and democratic character while saying that workers ‘are not dictating the pace or demands at this stage.’ 

Yet, while he praises People before Profit’s political demands; notes the reactionary leadership of the protests so that workers did not ‘dictate the demands’, and that ‘the political character of the movement’s organisational core was not incidental to its demands’, he leaves aside that PbP supported them.  Even if he were right – and he’s not – about a ‘movement whose base was genuinely working-class’, it would only signal that the far-right had taken leadership of a working class struggle, a position which he appears to reject despite, and not because, of his analysis. This would have been a bigger problem than the working class simply being onlookers.

Back to part 1

The fuel protests and the best of the left’s politics? (1 of 2)

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Political commentators are claiming that the much-publicised role of figurers from the far right in the recent fuel protests herald a significant development in its power and reach.  The potential for this development also resides in the continuing war and blockade against Iran.  It is forecast that if this does not stop before the end of June the run-down of existing stocks will see the price of Brent, a global oil benchmark, climbing to $150-$200 a barrel.  In any case, a more general increase in prices is in the pipeline with an even greater hit on working class living standards.

This is not a question of ‘energy poverty’ – poverty is poverty and covers multiple items of consumption, which will become increasingly apparent as a result not just of rising prices but also of the failure of incomes to keep pace.  Poverty demoralises those affected and those who might be vulnerable to falling into it, as well as the whole class that witnesses the deprivation that the state will permit.  It will not just be a crisis of poverty but of expectations of the many who won’t go into poverty but will wonder what sort of life they’re going to have if this is what they get out of a period of a much-trumpeted economic success.

The ingredients that led to the protests are not going away; hence the importance of what the socialist movement can learn from them. A review of the experience by a British socialist here is therefore a useful point to continue to do this, following up on our initial assessment.  The article reviewed compares the intervention of People before Profit with that of Sinn Fein and ends by saying that ‘the fuel protests showed PBP’s politics at their best.’  Even an initial thought can’t help but including how this could be true given its peripheral involvement and profile.

Perhaps this is justified by an examination of what the PbP political programme says, so let’s look at this.  If we do, we can’t help wondering what the condemnation of the role of Sinn Fein does for People before Profit’s strategy of a left government, which has Sinn Fein as part of it.  If SF has just failed in opposition, in what sense could it be a partner in anything pretending to be a meaningfully left alternative government?  And if it is as bad as it is claimed, the likelihood of a left government in the near term is zero; in which case it’s not the alternative that People before Profit claim it is. In programmatic and strategic terms, it is a black hole into which everything else is sucked into and out of which there is nothing to see.

The author of the article himself demolishes this perspective in his response to the following comment by one of his readers: ‘In real terms PBP are the smallest part of a rickety anti-FFG coalition, within which SF is absolutely hegemonic. PBP are dependent on their transfers, work with them on a local level and have committed to going into government with them on some sort of a united front basis. I don’t say this to be annoying but just that it’s a bigger predicament than supposedly class independent programmes can solve.’ 

The author says that ‘The commenter is right that PBP’s class independence is real at the level of programme but constrained at the level of electoral arithmetic’ and that ‘the question of whether “external support contingent on a minimum programme” in practice becomes unconditional support for an SF government that delivers none of it is not answered by the programme document alone. It is answered by what PBP does when Sinn Féin fails to implement the programme . . .’  That Sinn Fein will not join in implementing a left programme that should be supported is presented here as a given.  ‘PBP’s position is to offer external support to a Sinn Féin government that implements a minimum programme of reforms — which Sinn Féin will almost certainly not implement.’

So, the project of a Left Government as the alternative to 100 years of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael rule is not real; it’s a fraud that cannot work. So how is it an alternative?  Is PbP going to spend the next number of years pushing an expected failure?  Is it going to going to take responsibility for this failure, through its calling for transfers to Sinn Fein, or votes for it where it does not stand?  Is it going to admit that it never expected it to work?  And what does it think those persuaded to vote for it will think of this, or any further ideas it puts forward?  Why would such an experience of failure not lead to demoralisation?

If this overall issue is not satisfactorily addressed or the questions that follow from it, what are we to make of the policies put forward by People before Profit that the article praises?

The comparison with Sinn Fein is put like this: ‘People Before Profit showed up with a programme. Sinn Féin showed up with a tax cut. The difference between those two responses is not tactical. It is the difference between a politics that names the system and a politics that names the government.’  This is a strange assertion since People before Profit’s proposals consistently condemn the government and don’t mention capitalism, i.e. ‘the system’.

What it condemns instead is ‘profiteering’, which is not at all the same thing.  Reflecting its own name, profit is not to be replaced but rather something – ‘the people’ – prioritised before it.  What level of profit is ‘profiteering’ is a matter of judgment, or rather a question of ownership and control.  The main suggestion is for price caps, but it is acknowledged that previous government action to compensate for price increases was ‘wiped out almost immediately by the scale of the global commodity crisis.’

PbP wants ‘to set the maximum price for petrol, diesel, natural gas, electricity and heating oil in order to provide price stability and safeguard the people from huge price increases’ while acknowledging that ‘Ireland imports all of its oil requirements at prices determined by global markets.’  This is also almost true of gas, while around 80% of total energy is imported.  In 2025 the average Brent price was $69.14 but could hit $150-$200 according to some forecasts.

The Irish government cannot control these prices and cannot promise price stability.  In other words, it cannot control the capitalist world market.  The proposed mechanism for doing so by PbP is explained in relation to home heating oil – that PbP would ‘establish a rebate scheme to compensate retailers for price differentials with wholesale costs.’  Since it can’t control these costs, it can’t know how much tax receipts are going to be handed over to retailers.  The article by the British socialist states that PbP has a programme ‘and it was costed’, but unless it knows what the price of oil is going to be then this is complete nonsense.

PbP states that ‘Our demand is that companies are forced to open their books and fully justify any and all price increases.’  But who is going to look at the books and ensure that there are not ‘other’ books that reveal a truer position? And who is to decide what constitutes ‘justification’?  Far from naming the system, and not the government, the entirety of the measures demanded by PbP is to be carried out by the government, which raises two problems.  First the actual government that is in office that won’t do it and secondly the flaws in the idea of a ‘left’ government that we noted above.

People before Profit proposals entail taxing data centres but also want a ban on the construction of new data centres, a not entirely consistent position.  Like limits to prices, there are definite constraints to what this sort of action can achieve, which is why socialists do not believe simply reforming the current system can meet the needs of the vast majority. Nationalisation of the energy industry, as it proposes, is not socialism and is not – in the words of the British socialist – ‘democratic ownership’, which can only arise from workers’ ownership.  Large sectors of the energy industry are already owned by the state, including the largest electricity generator; the owner and operator of the transmission and distribution system, and the largest supplier of electricity to customers.

From the Marxist political point of view the most mistaken and false claim about the programme of People before Profit is that its ‘architecture deserves to be named specifically, because it is the clearest illustration of what distinguishes a transitional programme from a fiscal one.’  In fact, it is nothing of the sort: a socialist transitional programme is about what the working class must do to defend its interests and in doing so establish its own society.  The People before Profit proposals are essentially about what the government should do, knowing that it won’t, and knowing that its own alternative proposals for government won’t either.

Forward to part 2

In Covid’s Wake (6 of 6): Censorship and truth

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Perhaps the most shocking but not really surprising aspect of the Covid lockdown was the ‘scientific’ justification of it and its associated measures that upended previous accepted views.  It was also generally successful in imposing a silence on dissenting views, treating them as dangerous blasphemy.

For example: ‘most pre-Covid plans for addressing a respiratory pandemic were skeptical of masking . . . the U.S. surgeon general tweeted “STOP BUYING MASKS!” because they gave no protection to healthy individuals. (In Covid’s Wake p234). Yet those least at risk – those at preschool – were one of the last to require universal masking up to September 2022. (p236).  The scientific uncertainty around masking was considered an obstacle to getting the population to do as it was told.

This was just one aspect of what the authors of the book consider ‘groupthink; and ‘a sense of moral and intellectual superiority’, justified by those making the decisions because of who they were. (p254) Just as many on the left justify their demands as left wing because they are the ones making them.

This included ‘the long suppression of reasonable suspicions about a possible lab leak origin of the virus.’  This involved calling the idea a “conspiracy theory” or “racist conspiracy theory”, and smearing dissenters as “fringe epidemiologists”, indulging a form of “decidedly unscientific discourse”.  All, the authors say, ‘moralistic performances aimed at marginalising dissenters and closing down discussion.’ And all redolent of arguments employed on the left for a very long time. (p297 & 294).

This moralistic view, with its attendant features, meant that ‘Covid policies were generally unresponsive to actual pandemic conditions’, which ‘tended to a wholesale abandonment of rationality.’  ‘Even as late as summer 2021, after more than thirty million Americans had tested positive for Covid and vaccines had been made widely available, the director-general of the World Health Organization was still demanding that governments attempt to track and trace every case . . . The zero-Covid frame locked policymakers into costly, futile policies with no exit strategy.’ (p291 & 293)

However, behind every moralistic policy lies material interest.  In the case of denying the lab leak from gain-of-function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology was the funding of the research by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied to a Senate committee hearing by the top administration health official Dr Anthony Fauci.

A number of scientists wanted an open discussion on the origin of the virus but the book records that a WHO investigation into it in 2021 was ‘compromised’ because it included someone whose organisation funded the research in the Wuhan Institute.  Top public health officials engaged in ‘oversimplifications, half-truths, and noble lies’ in order to get the population to follow its diktats. (p 263)

This was the case with the policy of lockdown itself, as we have already seen. It involved ‘White House officials and public health experts to work in secret with social media companies to amplify messages favouring government policy while censoring or muting dissenting voices and points of view.’  When it came to the weakness of the evidence for Covid boosters one paediatrician and professor of vaccinology was told that although ideally it was only high-risk groups who should be encouraged to receive them, ‘nuance garbles the message’ (p271 & 272).

‘Following the science’ became following the government and what was true was what the Government decided it was.  In the UK current and former BBC journalists stated that there was a “climate of fear” with experienced reporters “openly mocked” if they questioned the wisdom of lockdowns.  The threat posed to everyone had to be driven home even while ‘the actual risk to more than half the population was extremely low.’  In the UK ‘the BBC News backed up this misperception by regularly reporting rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm.’ (p112 -113)

The authors note a paper, published after the pandemic was effectively over in August 2023, by a number of scholars associated with the US Department of Health Promotion and Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  It was published in the prestigious journal of the American Medical Association JAMA Network Open, which targeted misinformation on Covid by medical professionals on their social media platforms with a view to the government agencies and professional associations taking “actions to regulate and discipline” them. (p 276)

Among the “misinformation” was the allegation of a cover up of the possibility of a laboratory leak; the claim that the government withheld key information regarding Covid-19; that the effectiveness of masks was doubtful; that natural infection and recovery contribute effectively to herd immunity, and that “Government actors” were in contact with Twitter and other social media companies telling them what to censor. The censored included two authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which emphasised the range of harms caused by lockdowns and proposed an alternative.

The authors of the book note that these ‘may actually be correct, or, at a minimum, within the scope of reasonable disagreement.’  They also note various sources that acknowledge the truth of this ‘misinformation.’  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these scholars case is the lack of awareness that it was actually many of the claims made by the government and public health officials that were untrue. (p 277 & 282)

The book’s authors also say that ‘some evidence suggests that today’s scientists are more inclined than those of the past to censor research they perceive as socially harmful.’  Editors of academic journals ‘are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities.’ (p 283).  As one senior US academic put it – there is “a real peril in a public health approach steeped in moralism”. (p 122). This is, for example, a strong feature of the approach to research by those promoting ‘gender affirming’ medical and surgical intervention.

A recent article in the Financial Times reports a professor of epidemiology at Colombia University stating that the most important legacy of Covid was “a lack of trust in public health and the implications for people refusing vaccines.” 

Unless the left that demanded zero-Covid accounts for its error it must be assumed it has learned nothing. This includes regard for the truth. Once more a quote from a dead Russian is apposite – ‘We must speak the truth’.

Back to part 5

In Covid’s Wake (5 of 6): China’s zero-Covid

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The book we have been reviewing has noteworthy things to say about the origins of Covid19 in China, including the speculation that it originated in a laboratory.  It also has interesting things to say about the interest of certain US officials in closing down any debate about it.  It states that ‘we now have more evidence of Covid transmission months before the first cases associated with the Wuhan wet market’. (p230-1) For our current purposes, the most relevant Chinese experience is the example it set for the policy of zero-covid.

It would be naïve to believe that the outcome of any review of this approach now would force reconsideration by its supporters; the general experience of much of the left is that it quickly moves on, muttering about the revolutionary party being the memory of the working class while forgetting what it did the year before, especially when experience calls into question their previous approach.

The slow car-crash that is Brexit does not seem to have affected British and Irish left support for it, except for parroting the same excuses that the right wing supporters of it have – ‘it wasn’t properly tried’.  In both cases the world in which they claim it could have been a success does not, and did not, exist.

The recent book ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’ has a chapter setting out the authors experience of living in China during the pandemic.  He explains that at first the zero-Covid policy seemed to work, so that by spring 2020 the ‘strategy had broadly halted the transmission of the virus. (p133)  If the app on your mobile showed green you were free to enter most public spaces but if it was yellow it indicated that you ‘had had some degree of proximity to a positive case’, while if it was red, you were probably already ‘hauled off to quarantine.’  Unfortunately, simply walking past a restaurant with a previously known case could turn it yellow even if you didn’t go in.

Later, in 2021, the strict policy caused more significant issues.  A story went viral of an eight-month pregnant woman refused entry to a hospital until she had negative test who bled heavily and miscarried outside.  In 2022 a few cleaning staff were infected in Shanghai, and following mass testing and tracing, lockdown meant that everyone in the apartment buildings, no matter how high-rise, were not allowed to leave, while those testing positive were quarantined in a centralised facility.

The authorities in Shanghai claimed on the 24 March 2022 that there were no plans for a lockdown, except two days later they said that Shanghai was too important for the global economy and announced a lockdown would start the next day.  Drones flew over the city with megaphones attached barking orders to those on the street without a mask or involved in an illegal gathering. “Repress your soul’s yearning for freedom” began blasting on loop from the drones with their lights blinking, with an additional message “do not open your windows to sing, which can spread the virus.”

‘Over April 2022, stress in Shanghai spiked to unimaginable levels’ (p139). Failure to warn about the lockdown meant the failure of people to stockpile food, which became ‘the primary worry for most people . . . when they could not leave their homes.’ (p139). The authorities promised food deliveries (of random items) but these ‘ran out of steam,’ while ‘much of the food that made it into the cities rotted before it could be delivered to residents.’ (p139 & 140).

One reason the policy failed was that each person had to report for a test, sometimes twice a day. Everyone in a compound had therefore to report to the medical team, and either caught it from a neighbour while waiting for the test or caught it from the person doing the testing.

On top of the government doing ‘everything it could to frighten people’ for two years, those found positive, including their whole household, were taken from their home and moved to huge quarantine facilities to be disinfected.  In Shanghai the largest such facility contained 50,000 beds, with one CNN producer placed there describing lights that never turned off, loudspeakers demanding residents attend tests at 6am the next day, and ‘everywhere the stench of toilets or unwashed laundry.’ (p144)

Children and babies were separated from their parents and, just like other countries, prioritisation of Covid meant cases of more serious disease were downgraded or ignored.  This involved making the provision of fever medication difficult, including ibuprofen, that might have allowed people to disguise their Covid infection: it ‘denied its people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic.’ (p165)

The author of the book notes that people had a variety of experiences, ‘from the nightmarish to the merely difficult’, leading to protests –‘banging pots and pans during the night became a much-shared form of protest, with a few videos portraying whole buildings of people engaged in cathartic screaming . . .’  (p 145 & 146). Protest videos posted online were deleted quickly by state censors, while the author recounts the original censorship by the state at the beginning of the pandemic to ensure that no negative news emerged while an important political meeting was taking place.

The focus on zero-Covid was bound to lead to excesses, leading to bizarre episodes of fresh-caught fish and pandas being tested, and workers streaming out of their office when a rumour would circulate that everyone in it might be put into lockdown.  The author judges that, in comparison to the US, ‘in retrospect, China’s response to Covid looks shambolic as well.’ (p158). The problem was zero-Covid meant excesses that were not bizarre or amusing. In Sichuan, people fleeing buildings during an earthquake were prevented from leaving their trembling structures, and ten people died in a fire in Urumqi when pandemic-control barricades prevented the fire service from putting water directly onto the fire.  

Despite the fear of the pandemic generated by the state, protests against the controls introduced by lockdown began to develop as anger against them grew.  These included workers at Foxconn factories facing off against riot police, and a late night protest by young people chanting ‘Down with the Communist Party! Xi Jingping step down!’ While ‘the number of protesters was never very large . . .  they were special because they involved upper-class Chinese families: wealthy people who didn’t want to suffer lockdown and well-off youths who attended good schools.  The Communist Party had always counted on these people for their support.  The denouement of China’s Covid experience features broad exhaustion’ By December 2022 many controls were no longer enforced while ‘the government’s response grew erratic.  Nearly three years after it began, zero-Covid was over’ but ‘unfortunately, the state has suppressed any official memory of Shanghai’s lockdown . . .’ (p163-165 & 168)

A bit like the Western left supporters of the same policy.

Back to part 4

Forward to part 6

In Covid’s Wake (4 of 6): The Cost

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Lockdown came with a cost, an enormous cost.  In the United States, Congress approved $5 trillion of new spending – more than was spent in the responses to the economic crash in 2009 and the New Deal in the 1930s.  Only 10 per cent was spent on direct health costs while a similar amount went on fraud.  In the UK, friends of the Tory government were given fast-track contracts worth billions of pounds with many also involving fraud.  All this expenditure increased state debt and fed into the subsequent demand for austerity.

Unemployment grew, especially among low wage workers, and particularly among women, with the increases higher in Democrat-run states than Republican ones due to their more stringent lockdowns.  Economic and social inequality grew with the authors noting that the effect in poorer countries was greater when, with younger populations, lower welfare services and a bigger informal economy, the effects of lockdown would be more severe.

The authors quote that “more than 40 million additional people in Africa [were] in extreme poverty by late 2021 when compared with 2019.  Some 4.5 million children [were] removed permanently from education in Uganda alone . . . [with] huge increases in child marriage.”  Another author is quoted stating that double the number of people suffered from severe hunger in 2023 than in 2019, the primary cause being the response to the Covid pandemic. (In Covid’s Wake, p185-6)

That all this would have made even less sense, and caused greater suffering, had a ‘zero-covid’ policy been adopted will not faze its proponents.  At the time I noted that it was nonsense to demand greater welfare payments to people while preventing them from working, and therefore not producing the goods and services that the extra welfare payments were supposed to buy.  Not surprisingly inflation increased.  The different politics of reformism and Marxism could not be clearer. Reformists habitually think that the capitalist state can and should provide subsistence to the working class in a crisis, while Marxists seek always to advance the self-organisation of the working class and the objective of seizing control and operating the productive forces of society.

Other effects are still with us.  ‘The response to the Covid pandemic entailed the most extensive and lengthy disruption to education in history.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p187). In the US, and elsewhere, school closures continued long after it was clear, if it was not already clear from the start, that schools did not drive transmission.  It has led to a continuing significant increase in absenteeism from school with long lasting damage to the children involved and to wider society.

Also, like everywhere else, health service provision was reduced while populations faced repeated demands by governments to protect them. I can’t have been alone in wondering at the time – is it not supposed to be the other way round?  Populations also responded as desired by delaying treatment out of fear.  Lockdown was to apply to everyone, not just those at higher risk, so the virus was presented as a threat to everyone.  In the US the effects of mandated and ‘voluntary’ avoidance from using health systems meant that ‘both overall health care spending and health sector employment in the United States actually fell during the pandemic, despite the pressures on the system caused by Covid.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p191)

A lot of the effects on health caused by the pandemic and lockdown have yet to be analysed, and reports on its effects are still being produced.  This one is on excess cancer deaths in the US: ‘between March 2020 and the end of 2022, the United States is estimated to have experienced nearly 1.7 million excess deaths.  It is not fully clear how much of these increases in mortality have their roots in reduced health care provision and use, economic dislocation, and other harms associated with pandemic policy.’  The book records one Canadian study attributing 17 percent of the increase in excess deaths in the US to non-Covid causes.

‘Increases in excess mortality during the pandemic were due primarily to rises in deaths from heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, overdose, and homicide.  Minority populations were especially adversely affected.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p192). Not only physical health but also mental health suffered from lockdown. Karl Marx noted of human nature in the 19th century that the ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’   Lockdown drastically broke many of these relations – what else was social distancing, stay-at-home orders and working from home – if you otherwise didn’t lose your job?  How could it be a surprise that this also damaged and broke millions of individuals?

‘After years of recommending social distancing, who can fail to appreciate the painful irony of the 2023 surgeon general declaring a “public health crisis of loneliness and isolation”?’  The authors note that ‘public officials were simply never very clear about precisely what restrictions were supposed to achieve.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p198 & 200)

So not only did they not factor into account the costs of their policies, they were never quite clear about what the mechanisms employed were supposed to achieve.  The rhetoric of flattening the curve, protecting the health system, reducing the R number, testing and tracing targets, reducing, suppressing or eliminating Covid, were all quoted as if they all formed a coherent approach.

‘Zero-Covid’ made for a simple objective but the mechanisms to achieve it were never clear. A disease that had spread round the world before its potential was even determined, and which developed quickly to infect hundreds of millions, many without realising that they had it, was not going to be eliminated even by the most drastic of lockdowns.  Its proponents, like those in authority who they criticised, had no intention of ascertaining what the cost would be and whether it would be worth it.

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In Covid’s Wake (3 of 6) The US as a laboratory

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The authors of In Covid’s Wake note that the United States formed a laboratory in which an experiment on the different approached to the Covid-19 pandemic was played out.  In Democrat controlled states the speed at which restrictions were imposed, the length of stay-at-home orders, length of school closures, and the stringency of Covid restrictions were all faster or greater.  The willingness of residents to be vaccinated was also greater.

The resulting pattern was noticed in late 2023:

  • Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states.
  • After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates.

The book therefore states that ‘variation in vaccination rates can account for fully 47 percent of state-by-state mortality.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p 140, 142) It also records that the lack of difference evident by the summer of 2020 ‘went broadly unreported, despite its inconsistency with the epidemiological models that had seen so much media coverage earlier in the year.’ One of these models reported “substantial reductions in peak attack rates “due to school closures”. (In Covid’s Wake, p 146, 148)

In the UK, a review of the literature to March 2023 reported that ‘there are still many uncertainties and unknowns’ while the Scottish official inquiry concluded that “there was insufficient evidence in 2020 –or alternatively no evidence.”  So even after the pandemic the authorities were claiming not to have learned much, if anything, about their basic approach. (In Covid’s Wake, p 154)

Some countries with light restrictions fared well while others didn’t; ‘Japan fared better than Australia and only slightly worse than New Zealand in terms of Covid mortality, despite never imposing a lockdown or widespread business closures nor making much use of Covid testing and contact tracing . . .  The underlying determinants of population health–poverty, education, comorbidity profile–shaped Covid pandemic outcomes far more reliably than non-pharmaceutical interventions.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 157)

 In the US the two Democrat-leaning authors lament that ‘rather than learning from the policy experimentation that was taking place, decision-making about pandemic policy was rigidly ideological and moralized’.  Democrats didn’t learn about the absence of support for lockdowns and Republicans, or at least some of them, didn’t learn about the efficacy of vaccination.  For the two authors this failure of ‘partisan politics is the main lesson of the pandemic.

As for the left that advocated even more severe restrictions, there is no evidence that they ever, at any point, looked in the rear view mirror; Covid may as well never have happened.  The morally right are right–by definition.  The idea of having any sort of cost-benefit analysis was dismissed as involving a straight comparison between saving lives and saving money; ‘health versus wealth’ as the book puts it.  The world’s capitalist governments were charged with being more interested in the economy than public health and people’s lives.  Further shutting down the economy was being opposed, it was claimed, in order to protect capitalist profits, in the process risking workers’ lives. 

At the time this blog noted that capitalist economies produce commodities with a use value as well as an exchange value, without which they cannot assure their sale and realisation of profit. It was never clear just exactly what production was not ‘essential’ and could be shut down, and how massive reductions in production could be accomplished in order to achieve ‘zero-Covid’ while also creating correspondingly massive income flows for those now unproductively unemployed.

Even the view that the governments’ response was focused on maintain capitalist profits hardly squares with the single focus on public health by those state officials tasked with leading the response who consciously excluded economic and social experts. The mathematical models that were so influential only looked at the effects of policy on Covid transmission, hospitalisation and deaths.  None looked at the health, social and economic consequences of lockdown to see were its costs exceeding its benefits. A point not strongly made in the book is that with models predicting catastrophe this might seem understandable, but as we have noted, when the models failed to correspond with reality the experts doubled down on lockdown.

The media played its role by stating that the pandemic closed schools and travel etc., not that it was the lockdown, and that this was a choice.  Rather like wages causing unemployment or inflation, or the war in Ukraine causing high energy prices, the conditions and interventions that actually caused them were rendered invisible.

What also became invisible was that it was overwhelmingly white collar workers who were working from home.  Blue collar workers kept working and were a stranding rebuke to those who claimed that lockdown was needed to prevent ‘mass death.’  A left more in touch with this section of the working class might have appreciated this.  The authors of the book note that, while stoking fear of the pandemic, the lowest paid and vulnerable workers were expected to show up.  So did all those calling for ‘zero-covid’, unless they didn’t actually mean zero.

The policy of lockdown was popular among trade unions and among the majority of their members.  The book records the Chicago Teachers’ Union tweeting that ‘the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny’, while the head of United Teachers of Los Angeles described school reopening as a recipe for propagating structural racism.’  (In Covid’s Wake, p132)

In fact, schools were not a vector for transmission while those workers tasked with continuing to work as normal probably included a large proportion of women and black workers.  Not for the first time politics based on identity got it wrong, ironically weakening the cause of women and black workers in the process.

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Forward to part 4

Should we be inspired by the fuel protests?

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The fuel protests in Ireland have involved the blocking of main roads, including O’Connell street in Dublin city centre, the M50 motorway around the city, sea ports and an oil refinery, leading to disruption of supplies and closure of hundreds of petrol stations.  Originally taken by surprise, and then taking a softly-softly approach, the state has moved the Garda to clear some protests away while negotiating concessions with representative bodies of some of the protestors, including seeking permission from the EU for cuts to excise duties.

The protests are mainly formed by hauliers, agricultural suppliers and farmers; in general, small businessmen and the self-employed.  In class terms, the petty bourgeoisie.  The mass of the population, including workers, are also badly hit by the rise in prices and there is general sympathy with the demand for measures by the government to reduce the impact of rising prices; especially given the large budget surpluses the state has garnered in the last number of years through the Irish state being a tax haven for a small number of US multinationals.

A number of far right figures have attached themselves to the protests and the People before Profit TD Paul Murphy was more or less chased away when he went to meet one protest in Dublin. A flavour of some of the self-appointed protest spokesmen who have attempted to sideline the trade associations is James Geoghegan who has revenue judgements of more than €500k against him, plus animal cruelty convictions.  Another prominent figure has previously stated he couldn’t care less if Greta Thunberg got raped or beaten, while claiming that instead of ‘free Palestine’ flags, some people will be waving ‘free Dublin’ ones.

The ignorant and abusive taunts by some protesters received by Paul Murphy has not stopped him stating that the protests should be supported.  He has called on ‘ordinary people’ to take mass action in effective protests; yet the existing protests are by ‘ordinary people’ in so far as this means anything at all, and they have had some effect.  He states that the working class should take inspiration from them and calls on it to take mass action while trade unions should take the lead.   

While there is evidence of limited prior organisation, the protests are essentially spontaneous.  The principal participation is by forces that the two main bourgeois parties rely on as a base, and they are not forces that the working class should take inspiration from.  The prominence of reactionary and far right figures is not accidental while there is no form of democratic control of any sort of progressive movement or organisation.

The social base of the protest is not therefore working class and claims to be representing the ordinary people of Ireland simply exposes the vacuous nature of basing politics on ‘the people’ that we have criticised before, and which Murphy’s party has been guilty of.  He is right that the working class should have a mass campaign and the trade unions should take the lead, but they haven’t and they won’t.  The left has not built a larger movement or an opposition inside the trade union movement and cannot rely on a working class spontaneous movement to rival that which has just erupted.

This weakness of the left has been reviewed before and the current situation is illustrative of the results.  The perspective of a left government championed by People before Profit has now obviously nothing to do with a left movement that would act in situations like this. The putative components of it, such as the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens have all opposed the protests while People before Profit supports them.  Sinn Fein, as usual, triangulates. Any such future government would therefore simply be an administration put together by horse-trading jobs and policies and would have no social movement that could conceivably drive it forward and represent it, which is presumably what PbP envisages?

The weakness of this perspective, demonstrated by the protests, is shown in two other ways, one significant and one symbolic.

Murphy says the protests should be supported because they have the same aims as People before Profit, which had previously sought to introduce price caps through legislation in the Dáil.  First, it’s not clear that the protests do have the same objective and are not directed at caps on the fuels used by the protesters.  Secondly, the idea of price caps is a utopian one in any case.

They cannot provide the ‘security’ claimed for them because they can’t promise to cover massive price increases such as have been incurred, which is precisely their purpose; and claims to stop ‘profiteering’ don’t work in a system in which profiteering is its whole purpose.  This is, after all, why socialists think an alternative socialist society is required.  If profiteering could be eradicated, we wouldn’t need socialism.

The second, symbolic reason, were the reactions of the protesters to Paul Murphy’s presence at the protest.  They portrayed him as simply another politician, which in so far as he thinks legislating in the Dáil will do away with profiteering, is actually close to the truth!  The far right get away with this because of the grain of truth involved–that the left has built only an electoralist base in a few working class areas based on their own variety of clientelist practices.  The jibes about Murphy’s identification with gender identity simply illustrate how easily the right can paint the left as divorced from working class concerns, aside even from the stupidity of the view itself that we have repeatedly demolished.

There is nothing wrong in seeking measures to get amelioration of sudden price increases but that is all they can be and it is misleading to pretend otherwise.  Oil and gas prices are set on the capitalist world market and cannot be avoided by any country and certainly not by one like Ireland.  It’s why socialists are internationalists, because socialism can only be international for it to make sense and to work.  Within capitalism, the working class can defend itself by actually doing it themselves; by fighting for higher wages and by building a movement that seeks to go beyond these struggles towards the only definitive solution.

It is also true that socialists should seek to win over middle layers of the population to the cause of the working class, but this is only possible if the working class itself has been won and has built a movement that can convince others.  Before this, it simply means surrendering to all sorts of misleading and reactionary petty bourgeois ideas.

Numerous people have commented that because the crisis has been caused by Trump and the US imperialist attack on Iran, it would have made more sense to protest and blockade the US embassy.  Far from the existing protests inspiring such an action, much of the social base of the protests is as likely to support an Irish O’Trump as protest against US imperialism.  Once again, we have a lesson that not all those who oppose our enemies, in this case the Irish government, are our friends.

In Covid’s Wake (2 of 6): ‘mass death . . . is a benefit to be sought’

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The imposition of lockdown that was justified as ‘following the science’ did not quite achieve the consensus that the claim implied and there were a number of voices challenging it at an early stage.

One epidemiologist in the Washington Post stated that ‘of the first 1,023 people to die in Wuhan, China . . .  only one was younger than twenty.’  He wrote that “The high death rate from the coronavirus is driven almost exclusively by the oldest cases . . . the virus causes severe disease almost exclusively in older adults.”  In March 2020 an op-ed in the New York Times was entitled ‘Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse than the Disease?’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 72). This blog also had enough information to point this out in March 2020. 

Unfortunately, ‘war’ had been declared on Covid-19 and the cliché that the first casualty of war is the truth proved only too true.  The consensus in the US was supported by Harvard’s Safra Center on Ethics, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and the ‘progressive’ Center for American Progress and focused on testing, tracing and quarantining the infected.  The policy that had previously been predicted to be unsuccessful was now the establishment view that brooked no dissent.  Yet it made little sense when the virus was already widespread, was asymptomatic while infectious and completely asymptomatic in many who had contracted it.

Sweden presented an alternative in which large gatherings were banned; people over seventy were advised to limit contacts with others; it was advised not visit to nursing homes, and recommended but not mandated that those who could work from home should do so.   Society-wide lockdown was not advised: “The storm was already here,” judged Sweden’s health authorities and what remained to be done “was to protect the most vulnerable.” No large-scale test-and-trace regimes were attempted.  Masks were never mandated. No stay-at-home orders or restrictions on movement were imposed’ and restaurants, gyms and schools for younger children and adolescents remained open. (In Covid’s Wake, p 85).

The head of Sweden’s Public Health Agency, Anders Tegnell, thought that “the world has gone mad” while ‘many thought Sweden had gone mad’ or ‘insane’.  The New York Times described Sweden as a “pariah” and some European media described it as like “a banana republic” (In Covid’s Wake, p 86-7).

The Great Barrington Declaration published online in October 2020 was another alternative view to Lockdown that pointed out the costs and proposed a policy of ‘Focused Protection’: “Our goal should therefore be to minimise mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”  Those who had such immunity ‘could play an especially important role in helping the sick and frail.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 96 & 97)

Herd immunity, however, became a term of abuse, as “simply unethical” and a call to “let it rip”.   It was ‘dangerous’ and came from ‘fringe’ and ‘maverick scientists.’ (p 74, 97 &106). One doctor, who had earlier in March gathered 800 signatures warning of the costs of lockdown had seemingly changed his mind; “I have no more fucks left to give.  Except those peddling pseudoscience, bankrolled by right-wing, libertarian assholes can kiss my queer ass …. This fucking Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that just won’t go away.” (In Covid’s Wake, p 100)

The vitriol involved in such denunciations reflected not so much a long established scientific consensus as a moral consensus that had especially gripped the ‘left’, becoming the left position because the left had adopted it, assisted by most of the support for the Great Barrington Declaration coming from the right, confirming that this was indeed the right-wing position.  The effect was to close debate and remove critical thinking–in moralistic arguments there is simply no arguments in favour of the ‘bad’.

Who made the arguments defined what was right and not the arguments themselves so that ad hominem became de rigeur.  From liberal Democrats to the ultra-left, moral condemnation could not be strident enough: The Great Barrington Declaration became ‘A manifesto of death’; ‘mass death, is a benefit to be sought’; ‘the White House’s embrace of the document is a statement of intent for mass homicide’; ‘the ruling class’s drive to allow the mass infection of the population can be imposed only by violence’.  Those who defended it on the left were from ‘the pseudo-left’ while ‘the herd immunity policy has found support not only within the capitalist oligarchy, but among sections of the upper-middle class.’

The pandemic was an unprecedented suppression of the most basic civil rights employing the weapons of fear and state surveillance, yet the largest part of the left not only endorsed it, its policy was to intensify it.  This was the policy of ‘zero-covid’ that could only ‘be imposed by violence’ as lockdowns began to be relaxed in 2020, only to then be reimposed.

The left website above stated that ‘Workers around the world must welcome the categorical and courageous stand taken by public health experts in opposition to the ruling class’s policy of herd immunity’, except the experts were divided and previous advice stood squarely against lockdowns.  Not unsurprisingly, the moralistic and catastrophist argument proved more attractive to a left for whom socialism will only come through capitalist crisis and repression, through force of circumstances, and not through the building of a class conscious movement committed to socialism that is the result of years of political education, clarification and struggle.

The authors of the book note that ‘if recovery from infection would not afford immunity, it is not clear by what mechanism vaccines would confer immunity either.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 102).  In June 2020 the World Health Organisation website defined herd immunity as “indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 104).  In November the reference to acquired immunity was removed.  The voice of ‘science’ was to be put in the service of government policy.

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Forward to part 3

In Covid’s Wake (1 of 6): the past is another country

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The Irish government report on how the state handled the Covid-19 pandemic is due to report at the end of the year, seven years after it reportedly arrived in Ireland.  The delay says a lot, as was the original announcement of the review by the government – that the review was to have a “no-blame” approach and would “not be a UK-style” inquiry.  It would not have statutory powers and would be an “evaluation” on the grounds that anything greater would drag on for years.  This was not an empty threat given the many previous tribunals of inquiry held by the state, but it rather loses conviction when it took so long to establish in the first place.

Scepticism over its role was heightened by it rejecting the stronger powers of the UK inquiry, but since this failed to question the basic approach to the pandemic adopted by the British government these in themselves would not have promised a full reckoning.   A spokesperson for a patient advocate group stated that ‘the Evaluation model protects policies and decision makers from any scrutiny at all’.  We shall see.

Two liberal (Democratic Party-type) US academics have published a new book that has much wider relevance than the US, including why it is important that we do not just forget about the whole thing. The book, not surprisingly, is controversial as the consensus it critiques has, also not surprisingly, not gone away.  The authors have responded to some criticism here.

It is said that the past is another country but since almost all other countries had the same experience this doesn’t displace it safely to the past, not least because its impact is still with us, never mind the possibility of any repetition.  

From the point of view of this blog the focus is on what the book implies for an evaluation of the approach taken by much of the left.  Those who have read the coverage during the pandemic will know that it was severely critical of the groupthink that overtook the left and was very much a minority, but not idiosyncratic, view.  The Left’s groupthink showed it incapable of challenging the politics of the state and mainstream bourgeois opinion across the world, putting forward a policy–‘Zero Covid’–that was actually much worse.

The suddenness and severity of actions taken by states meant that ‘just a few weeks after the lockdowns spread from China to Italy and elsewhere, 3.9 billion people–half the world’s population–were living under some form of quarantine.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 3) What was also sudden was the adoption of the policy of lockdown that justified this approach.  Called “following the science”, it was adopted by overturning the science as it had previously been accepted and became the club to silence and stigmatise those who challenged or even questioned it.  The Left consensus simply adopted a more extreme version of this predominant approach.

Several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including “contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, [and] border closure” were “not recommended in any circumstances” in a World Health Organisation’s (WHO) assessment in November 2019 of NPI use in a respiratory pandemic.  Quarantine of individuals–never mind whole populations–was “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure in most Member States.” Contact tracing was considered some help in “isolated communities” in the “very early stages of a pandemic.” (In Covid’s Wake, p 29) Other assessments also questioned the use of NPIs, including after reviewing the experience of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

This meant that when China introduced lockdown “public health experts in the United States and elsewhere responded with shock and disbelief”. (In Covid’s Wake, p 50). Dire predictions from Imperial College in London and China’s draconian embrace of lockdown were the occasion for a complete change of approach by the WHO so that now there was no alternative to unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement backed by massive social surveillance.

Previously inconceivable restrictions became moral imperatives supported by governments, health bureaucracies, health academics and the mainstream media; plus the majority of the left for whom the unprecedented was not unprecedented enough and the draconian not sufficiently draconian.  That China’s apparent success kept on being implemented until its population started revolting was all in the future.  The WHO’s mission to China found that it provided “vital lessons for the global response” and its measures were the only “proven to interrupt or minimize transmission”, while early predictions were made that it would succeed within three months. (In Covid’s Wake, p 56 &58)

The book records how dubious this claim must have been, including the knowledge that pandemics proceed in waves; millions of people had escaped lockdown in Wuhan, and there could be no confidence in the effect lockdown would have against the progress of a novel virus. The WHO made matters worse by stating that “globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases have died”, although it could not know how many people had been infected so could not say what percentage of them had died.  Without acting to implement stringent NPIs the modellers of Imperial College predicted “approximately 500,000 deaths” in the UK “and 2.2M million in the US”, along with the collapse of heath systems. “Suppression” of the virus was the only “viable strategy”, with China again held up as the exemplar. (In Covid’s Wake, p 63 &64)

If this didn’t scare you, or rather ‘convince’ you, this might be because you might have known of Imperial College modellers’ previous poor record.  In 2006 it had predicted “catastrophe”, ‘forecasting 150 million deaths around the world’ as a result of the outbreak of avian flu.  Nevertheless, the book’s authors note that Imperial College Covid projections ‘captured the headlines and grabbed the attention of Covid policymakers, including President Donald Trump.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 51)

Given the forces ranged against any possible dissent it is not surprising that the ‘global suspension of basic liberties was undertaken with widespread public support.’   This was despite the book stating that ‘it is important not to ascribe to policymakers’ views more coherence than they possessed with respect to the goals of the policies they pursued.  To some extent, policymakers failed to reckon with the choices between flattening the curve, attempting to contain the disease and eliminate it entirely, or suppressing the total number of infections over the whole course pf the pandemic.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 67)

In my own city of Belfast, the local hospital was converted into a ‘Nightingale Hospital’ for Covid-19 patients and apparently more or less closed for most of everything else. While claiming that Covid-19 would close it if it was not protected, it partially closed itself.   Cancer patients could die but no Covid-19 patient could be refused.  Yet even this stupidity did not give pause for thought that this whole policy was the latest example of the ‘madness of crowds.’  Moral panics demand that doubters are immoral and with so much mainstream opinion on-side it is easy to excuse the left who supported it, except it was a failure; they demanded even more of the same, and they ignored, when they weren’t denouncing, alternative voices.

Forward to part 2

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 79 – Universality (1)

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In one of Marx’s earliest writings, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1843-4, he asks the question: ‘Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?’

‘Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

The idea of universality and how it may be constituted is a central feature of Marx’s views, one that is acclaimed, as in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also implicitly or explicitly rejected by supporters of identity politics, multiculturalism, postmodernism, religious fundamentalism, and nationalism etc.

The defenders of the rights of particular groups by virtue of their identity as being a member of the of that group are often in turn supported by those who would also proclaim support for human rights that are not based on these grounds.  No doubt many would argue their compatibility, but if the particular rights claimed by the former were such as to be merely expressions of human rights, then no particular rights would need to be demanded.

This is not primarily a problem of these particular rights not being wholly consistent with that of more general human rights, but of the reality of humanity being fractured and divided in reality.  The generality of human rights cannot recognise this so become an abstract moral claim that is continually eulogised and venerated but cannot be effected without particular claims being executed.

For Marx, it is the interests of the working class–the proletariat–that are compatible with and can bring about general human emancipation.  It is for this reason that Marxists do not cloak their politics in the language of human rights, because their enactment requires recognition of the grounds that would permit them and the struggle required to realise them.  Marxists are often dismissive of claims made on the grounds of human rights because they are made hypocritically by those who defend the grounds that necessarily impose oppression in the first place.  For Marx, the particular claims of the proletariat are universal ones because these include the abolition of itself, of the grounds of its particular oppression through the abolition of all classes.

The grounds for its particular claims must thus form the basis for the emancipation of all of society, and we have written about these extensively already.  In The German Ideology Marx writes:

‘This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless”, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.’

‘And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.’

‘Without this, (i) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.’

Marx argues that these are the grounds for a real universality of freedom that previous ruling classes have proclaimed but could never represent:

‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.’

The character of the universality of the working class as the new ruling class lies in it being the working majority of society and the nature of the appropriation of society’s powers that it will accomplish, based on the universal development of these powers, including the power of the working class itself:

‘Thus, things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.’

We should not pass without noting that when Marx speaks of the working class making a revolution, and of the universal character of this revolution, his interest is not in a uniform collective, one alien to the individual and her or his freedom.  For Marx, the abolition of classes is necessary to permit the freedom of the individual that capitalism and its liberal philosophy claims but destroys in reality.  After the previous passage he therefore goes on to say:

‘The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.’

How this is achieved is what constitutes working class politics that is the realm of Marxism:

‘Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.  This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.’

The concept of universality therefore has profound ramifications:

‘The individuals who rule in these conditions — leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state — have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does not depend on their idealistic will or on their arbitrary decision, so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time to make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on their idealistic will.’

The state is today held up as the organ of the universal interest, as representing the interest of society as a whole.  There can be no more dreadful mistake, as not only does the state and the bureaucracy that it entails have its own interests, but these are bound tightly to those of the ruling class.  It is a mistake as common as it is egregious, proclaimed repeatedly even by those who claim to be followers of Marx.

As Marx notes: ‘actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have to consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society.’ (All quotations from The German Ideology, Marx and Engels)

The one hundred and seventy-five years since Marx penned these words has witnessed hundreds of millions of deaths under the banner of universal interests in the guise of nationalism, the ‘national interest’ and wars for ‘human rights’.  At the same time the ideologues of capitalism have damned the explicit call for real universality as idealistic and totalitarian, if not actually impossible. Recovering the idea of universality as argued by Marx is therefore necessary but can only succeed if the politics of its creation through the working class is defended and advanced practically.

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