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

Posted on May 4, 2026 by irishmarxism

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

Posted on April 29, 2026 by irishmarxism

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

Posted on April 25, 2026 by irishmarxism

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.

Back to part 3

Forward to part 5

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

Posted on April 22, 2026 by irishmarxism

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.

Back to part 2

Forward to part 4

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

Posted on April 4, 2026 by irishmarxism

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.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

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

Posted on March 28, 2026 by irishmarxism

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

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (6 of 6)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by irishmarxism

The most damning judgements in Fragments are that the movements since 2008 ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed’; ‘it is unlikely the Trotskyist People before Profit will manage to articulate a viable alternative . . . and the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before. The radical left ‘were engaged in a form of politics incapable of realising its own aims.’ (p183, 191, 192 & 181)

The left made gains during the years covered by the book, expressed in some relatively modest electoral successes, but this was achieved though pursuit of a strategy and practice that might be considered as one of least resistance, which had inevitable shortcomings and meant these ‘steps’ were not an ‘avenue through which society might be changed’; entailed a lack of articulation of ‘a viable alternative’; lacked clarity over how to achieve ‘the long-term goal of socialism’ and gave rise to the perception that its politics was ‘incapable of realising its own aims.’

This is not only a question of an absence of a revolutionary socialist programme, which we have already noted in previous posts. The left has worked under the assumption that achievement of its objectives requires a revolutionary party, which alone would understand the necessity for revolution and how it may be achieved, and that in its various forms it is the nucleus of this party, which is considered to be revolutionary because its leaders truly believe in revolution (regardless of how it looks from outside). This obviously means that its own activity and building its own organisations are the absolute priority.

I am reminded of the slogan that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution, except socialist revolutions are not primarily made by revolutionaries but by the working class in its great majority. The emancipation of the working class can be the work only of the working class itself, as someone famous once said. This is one of many principles widely acknowledged but without understanding what it entails. Revolutionaries are ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class . . . which pushes forward all others [with] the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’ (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).

The working class party is built not solely or even mainly by the activists of the left but mainly by the working class itself, with the socialist movement playing the role just mentioned. Instead, the mantra of building the party is reduced to building the existing left organisations not as a consequence of the development of mass working class movements but separate from them. Revolutionary organisations can only develop if they find within the working class this growth of socialist consciousness, which is itself partly a result of their own activity but only as an integral part of the struggles of the working class itself.

We have noted the need to challenge the existing leadership of the trade union movement as an example of what is needed to begin addressing these tasks. We have noted that the limits of single issue campaigns means that they were not a substitute, however useful they may be otherwise, and that the political education that was given was the failed statist politics that subordinates the class’s own activity to that of the capitalist state. This view has come to dominate understanding of what ‘socialism’ is and reflects the historical domination of social-democracy and Stalinism.

This was rudely demonstrated by the left’s customary call for nationalisation being appropriated by the state in relation to the banking system when it faced collapse; which was carried out to protect both capitalist ownership and itself, while dumping the cost on the working class. I have seen it defended on the grounds that this was not ‘socialist’ nationalisation, but this complaint just admits its unavoidably capitalist character. Could capitalist state ownership be anything other than capitalist? How could the capitalist state introduce working class control and ownership when it was its own ownership that was asserted?

Progress through the lines of least resistance does not necessarily involve conscious opportunism, precisely because it does involve progress, but like all opportunism it sacrifices long term principle for short term gains. Gains which can more readily dissolve as circumstances change and change they always do. The approach of appearing more ‘practical’ and attuned to workers’ existing consciousness by declaring that one can leverage the state to do what the workers movement itself must do, through a ‘left government’ for example, does not educate, in fact miseducates, the working class.

This does not invalidate the struggle for reforms that of necessity are under the purview of the state, but these are of benefit not only, or so much, for their direct effects but for their arising from the agency of the working class through the struggle to impose its will on the state and capitalist class. Reforms are ultimately required to create the best conditions for a strong workers’ movement, and not as solutions to their problems that act to co-opt workers to dependence on the state. Handed down from above they can primarily be seen as performing the latter role.

The alternative of seeking to mobilise workers when their organisations are bureaucratised and the majority are either apathetic or antipathetic, is often seen as less practical, less advised, and ‘ultra-left’. However, the point of socialist argument and agitation is often not with the expectation of eliciting immediate action but to advance political consciousness, which sometimes might be seen as widening what is called the ‘Overton window’.

This approach addresses the argument that only in revolutionary times or circumstances can one advance revolutionary demands. All independent action by the working class is a step towards its own emancipation, no matter how small, just as reliance on the state is not. Reforms won from the state are significant such steps if they involve independent organisation of the workers’ movement to achieve them. As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto in relation to workers’ struggles: ‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.’

Something similar was pointed out by James Connolly, who knew that temporary victories would not yield permanent peace until permanent victory was achieved, and that for such victories ‘the spirit, the character, the militant spirit, the fighting character of the organisation, was of the first importance.’ Fragments’ statements that the left ‘failed to lay deep social roots’ and ‘failed to develop a mass political consciousness’ is the authors judgement that this didn’t happen.

It is banal and trite to acknowledge that demands need to be appropriate to their circumstances, but this must also encompass two considerations. First, that even in situations in which it is almost impossible to achieve the working class mobilisation that is required, it may still also be necessary to say what must be done in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Second, only by always putting forward an independent working class position, which most often does not involve any call to more or less immediate revolutionary overthrow, is it possible for workers to begin to realise that an independent working class politics exists that has something to say about all the immediate and fundamental issues of the day. As I have previously noted, this begins by instilling in workers the conception of their own position and power as a class, not that of an amorphous ‘people’. What this involves in any particular circumstance is a political question and the subject of polemical differences that are unfortunately unavoidable.

The fall of the Celtic Tiger demonstrated that such crises on their own will not bring about the development of socialist consciousness – that capitalism is crisis-ridden and must be replaced by a society ruled by the working class. One of the earliest posts on this blog noted evidence that these crises most often do not. In order that they deliver such object lessons it is necessary for a critical mass of the working class to already be convinced that their power is the alternative to capitalism and its crises. This requires a prior significant socialist movement integral to working class life and its organisations.

We are a long way away from this, with one reviewer of the book in The Irish Times noting that its editors had excessive optimism about the experience of the Irish Left over the period. The reviewer makes other comments that are apposite. The argument of this review is that the book records enough experience to show that optimism is unjustified, at least on the basis of continuation of the political approach recorded by it.

The project of a left government that would be dominated by Sinn Fein, with secondary roles for the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens is not the road to address the failures noted at the top of the post. The project is a chimera that is incoherent and cannot work. In (un)certain circumstances it might spur a further development of consciousness and independent working class organisation and activity, but this is by far the less likely outcome and is not, in any case, what is being argued by the projects’ left supporters.

The left is always in a hurry, partly because of the preponderance of young people involved but more decisively because of the project itself, which is not based on building the strength and consciousness of the class as a whole but of building the left organisations themselves, particularly through elections. The next one is always the most vital. The former is the work of years and decades to which the project of ‘party building’ and ‘the immediacy of revolution’, understood as insurrection, does not lend itself. These are outcomes that cannot be willed by socialists but determined ultimately by the wider class struggle and the decisions of countless workers as well as by their enemies.

Elections allow socialists ‘a gauge for proportioning our action such as cannot be duplicated, restraining us from untimely hesitation as well as from untimely daring’, and ‘a means, such as there is no other, of getting in touch with the masses of the people that are still far removed from us, of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions.’ It is not a means to arrive at a government that is ‘left’ of the current bourgeois duopoly but right of socialism, and that peddles illusions that the current capitalist form of democracy can deliver fundamental change.

Back to part 5

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (5 of 6)

Posted on November 25, 2025 by irishmarxism

Fragments makes a series of observations about the political consciousness of the Irish working class, some of which we have already noted, such as the view of many on the Labour Party entering office that ‘the crisis was clearly not their fault and . . . the harsh austerity measures they took were seen as both forced by the Troika and, while painful, necessary.

It records the view of another author that the first year of crisis saw a large number of demonstrations but these ‘dried up once the public realised the magnitude of the banking crisis, and they were replaced by years of “muted protest”. Certainly, there was a sense of powerlessness at the scale and suddenness of the economic crash, a degree of acceptance of the official narrative . . .’ (p31)

It notes that the muting of protest was partially the result of emigration, particularly of the young with 106,000 leaving from 2009 to 2013. ‘However, the muting of opposition was also due to the influence of the Labour Party and trade unions, which contained protest and channelled anti-government anger down institutional routes from 2009 to 2011.’ (p30). These organisations did indeed push anger down the road of inevitable failure, and yes, they were betrayed, but how was this possible?

One contributor notes that by late 2013 ‘it is difficult to overstate the feeling of exhaustion and disillusionment’, with the radical left ‘comprehensively defeated on the one anti-austerity struggle they’d seriously fought – household taxes.’ The ‘public mood was judged sullen but compliant’ and was successfully ‘blackmailed’ into voting yes to the EU’s fiscal Treaty in 2012 ‘even though this treaty restricted the possibility of future government spending” (p 40-41)

I wrote about this result at the time, noting that: ‘At 60 per cent Yes against 40 per cent No there is no room for doubt. It is a decisive endorsement of government policy and a mandate for further cuts and tax increases. The result should not have been unexpected given the political forces ranged in support of the Treaty, the support of big and small business, the failure of the trade union movement to oppose it and the inevitable support of the mass media. In the general election last year the Irish people voted by a large majority for a new government in no important way different from the previous one and with no claim to pursue significantly different policies.’

I also noted that ‘Austerity isn’t popular despite the vote and never will be. Even the Yes campaign was under instructions not to celebrate its victory . . . In October last year when the Austerity Treaty was originally being negotiated an opinion poll recorded 63 per cent opposed to it with only 37 per cent supporting.’ I noted that some people had changed their minds or perhaps did not have the confidence to follow through on their opposition. This might have united around the demand to repudiate the debt taken on by the state on behalf of the banks and their bondholders, but this also meant opposition to the Troika upon whom the state had become reliant. It also meant opposition to the administration in the US, even though its Secretary to the Treasury Timothy Geithner thought it was ‘stupid’ to guarantee the banks liabilities.

I wrote a number of blogs on the issue of repudiating the debt here, here and here, and the disastrous and ‘stupid’ decision to bail out the bondholders in the first place. Doing so was a real political challenge and required an alternative that didn’t exist. Without this the failure of the opposition to austerity was inevitable, even if the question of the debt was only one element of the necessary political alternative.

Where the book completely fails is the neglect of what the political content of the alternative might have been, although this is revealing. In recording the activity of the left its non-appearance reflects the absence of this in the anti-austerity movement as a whole and the failure to win any significant section of it to a socialist perspective.

The same contributor noted above goes on to say that at a later time ‘A proper balance sheet would recognise how the Labour Party and the aligned section of the union movement were rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement.’ (p 42). He points to the drop on the Labour vote from 19 per cent in the 2011 general election to 7 per cent in the 2014 local elections and the ‘victory for left-wing independents and Trotskyist parties alike.’ (p 43)

He argues this was possible because in 2014 100,000 marched against water charges in October followed by 150,000–200,000 in November and 80,000 (in Dublin alone) in December in what was ultimately a winning struggle. We have already noted the limp role that was expected of the trade unions and political parties in the campaign in the previous posts but the argument that the Labour Party and trade union leaders could not divert the campaign is correct.

It won because it was a community campaign based on mass protests, blocking the installation of water meters and non-payment of bills. Independents and left wing candidates benefited from their role in the campaign which also distinguished itself by exposing the equivocating role of Sinn Fein. Despite the political weaknesses of the campaign that we noted previously its tactics were able to beat the counter-measures of the government where the previous campaign against household charges could not.

The campaign proved that individual campaigns, given the right circumstances, could defeat particular austerity measures even where the wider offensive was continued successfully. It should be recalled that the water charges campaign took off almost a year after the state exited the Troika bailout programme. It is also worth recording again the failure to draw the right political lessons as the trade union official who contributed the chapter on the campaign finishes his story by endorsing the statement by ‘one of the world’s greatest authorities on water’ that:

‘The Irish system of paying for water and sanitation services through progressive taxation and non-domestic user fees, is an exemplary model of fair equitable and sustainable service delivery for the entire world.’ (p 61)

In fact, the Irish water industry was wasteful and inefficient and state ownership is neither democratic nor socialist. For this, workers’ cooperative ownership or the demand for workers’ control would have been necessary but the Irish left, like so much in the rest of the world, have become habituated to statist views of socialism that Marx repudiated but that have become entrenched through the domination of social democracy and Stalinism over the last one hundred years.

With such a political platform the problem of the state being the solution, when the solvency and policy of the state was the problem, was once again avoided because doing otherwise would raise the question of ownership and control that would show the platform’s inadequacy.

The main victory in Fragments of Victory was thus necessarily limited and could not be a springboard to address the many deficiencies of the resistance identified in the book. These included the failure ‘to build lasting political and social institutions’ and ‘no lasting form of working-class self-organisation.’ Reliance on capitalist state ownership as ‘an exemplary model’ illustrates why a problem could not be addressed: that ‘the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before.’ (p192)

The view that the trade union bureaucracy was ‘rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement’ is therefore only partially true. The politics of the bureaucracy, and of the Labour Party, were not challenged by a wider political alternative and the much-trumpeted militant tactics of the campaign were no substitute for it.

back to part 4

Forward to part 6

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (4 of 6)

Posted on November 17, 2025 by irishmarxism

In the previous post I argued that the leadership of the trade unions were unable and unwilling to challenge austerity because it would involve a political challenge to the state it had decades of ingratiating itself with it as its ‘social partner’. However, I also noted that ‘the undeveloped and inadequate political consciousness of the working class itself [was] also a major factor’ in the union movement being unable to successfully resist austerity.

The socialist critique of the bureaucratic leadership of the trade unions is not that its passivity never reflects the views of its members but that the occasions in which members are prepared to take action are often betrayed and their passivity reinforced through ensuing demoralisation.

Protests and demonstrations (called by trade unions early in the economic crisis and also later) are only useful in so far as they are necessary steps to more effective action: by rallying the troops and persuading others that there are alternative courses of action and the means to achieve them. Otherwise, they are what they are defined as, simply public expressions of objection, disapproval, or dissent, and public exhibitions of the attitude of a group toward an issue.

There is currently no other rival union leadership that believes in independent working class politics that is separate from and opposed to the state and seeks to increase the class’s political consciousness. Bureaucratic organisation stifles any democratic control that might permit episodic bouts of struggle to advance and accumulate an understanding of class politics. Lack of democracy and low participation are both causes and effects of political weakness.

Both the leadership and membership are wedded to the view that fundamental change can come only through the state as the only (legitimate) agent capable of achieving it. All sections of ‘the left’, from Sinn Fein to supposed ‘Trotskyists’, have a political programme that hold that achievement of governmental office will enact this social transformation, and campaign on this basis. How a capitalist state will permit this is never explained.

Of course, People before Profit and Socialist Party pay obeisance to the view that the capitalist state will have to be overthrown but this plays a role analogous to republicans’ view that the legitimate government of Ireland resides within the IRA.

During the crisis there was little to no awareness of the possibility of an independent working class political force as more than perhaps a vehicle to pressurise the state, or with a view to having its representatives occupy positions in its parliament so that they could legislate sought after policies and adopt necessary measures.

This reflects the widespread support for the democratic credentials of the state and its political system, further legitimised by the country’s colonial history and the struggle against it. This gives the nationalism that is the express ideology of almost all political parties a progressive veneer and a reactionary essence.

Accompanying this is an acute awareness of the weakness of the small Irish state and its dependence on US investment and EU membership, where most power resides in the much larger European states. There are some illusions in the independent sovereignty of the state but also awareness of its constraints. When the Irish state became bankrupt the view that it could not resist the demands of the EU and US that it bailout the banks was reluctantly accepted because there appeared no alternative.

When your politics is based on winning concessions from the state, and/or the perspective of being the official government of the state, it is difficult to present these as possible when that state is bankrupt and your proposed actions are opposed by much more powerful states. Not only does it look unconvincing, it actually is. Hence the comment in the book, in relation to the Dáil, of the ‘futility of marching to an institution that was taking its own marching orders from elsewhere.’

One contributor to Fragments, writing about the trade union input into the one anti-austerity campaign that was successful – against water charges – reports that ‘political economy training . . . was the most impactful part of the campaign’. (p57) Except this training appears to have been peddling the same mistaken conception that state ownership is the answer that the whole crisis, and the response to it from the Irish state, should have utterly dispelled.

This campaign morphed into the Rights2Change movement that on paper united much of the left and some trade unions. Its programme of rights, which went beyond the question of water, made sense only if the state had an obligation to satisfy them, and it didn’t begin to address the claims by the government about the lack of state resources to do so. A programme based on the supposed moral obligations of the state was as weak as the commitment of the various organisations to the project. It demonstrated only that this spectrum of organisations was united in illusions in, and subservience to, the capitalist state.

Two aspects mentioned in the book illustrate these weaknesses: ‘throughout the period of Right2Water’s existence, nobody was working on the campaign full time. The bulk of the work on the union side was done by two or three trade union officials who also had their day jobs.’ (p61)

As to the unions role as a ‘pillar’ of the campaign, it was to ‘bring organisational skills . . . politically neutral; provide economic and political research; have activists in workplaces all over the country and bring financial assistance.’ (p 55) Nothing about workers action in the workplace and what sort of action its ‘activists’ should fight for.

The role of political parties was equally somnolent – to ‘bring political knowledge; an ability to raise issues in the Dail and have activists in communities all over Ireland.’ (p55) Again, without an acceptance that political debate over aims and strategy was absolutely required, as opposed to already accepted, there was no specifically political input sanctioned for political parties.

Like so many left campaigns, broadness was confused for depth, and political shallowness for agreement and unity. One ridiculous outcome was that at one demonstration ‘we ended up with 36 speakers or acts.’ (p53) One unambiguously positive legacy of the campaign claimed by the writer is that the ‘unions and progressive political forces were in place to prevent the movement from being co-opted by the far right.’ (p60). Not a high bar.

If the original platform for the campaign was weak (that water was a human right), there remained differences on appropriate tactics, so it could be no surprise that this attempt at turning a ‘mass movements’ into a’ story of mass organisation’ rather than simply mass mobilisation’ was a failure (p180-1 &182). This meant that it was ‘large but ephemeral’, ‘failed to lay deep social roots’, ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed, and given this, . . . failed to develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society or around what needs to be done to change it.’ (p183)

Sowing illusions in the state and failing to educate those mobilised on its unreformable class nature is guaranteed not to ‘develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society.’ The major success of resistance to austerity set out in the book came nowhere near this because it didn’t try, and it didn’t try because the left didn’t know what this would have to involve.

Back to part 3

‘Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (3 of 6)

Posted on October 20, 2025 by irishmarxism

The summary conclusions in the previous post raise a host of questions about the struggle against austerity following the crash of the Celtic Tiger: the lack of permanent organisation; the lack of working class consciousness and awareness of its specific political interests; lack of credible political programme and the inability to ‘articulate a viable alternative’; reliance on electoralism and thus on Sinn Fein, and lack of clarity on ‘the long-term goal of socialism’.

This is quite a list, and it is to the book’s credit that they are recognised. What is also recognised, more by implication than by explicit critique, is that this is the result of the conscious approach taken by ‘the left’, which the book sees as one of failure qualified by some success. It also implies that the answer to overall failure is not simply more and better activity. For the left however, it is the roller-coaster of activity that is consciously seen as necessary to keep the show on the road.

If we briefly look at these issues, the first question is why ‘mass movements were less a story of mass organisation than mass mobilisation’ and were ‘large but ephemeral’. These mobilisations were campaigns so were inevitably time limited and impermanent. The issue is why they were temporary when their object of attack – austerity – had not been defeated and why the permanent organisations that did exist failed to keep the campaign going?

The second question is posed mainly to the trade unions and particularly ICTU, which called initial demonstrations and then left the stage. Two further questions then arise – why did they do so and why were they able to get away with it?

The first answer is that since 1987 the trade unions have seen the state as a ‘social partner’ and very definitely not an antagonist – never mind enemy, and conducted themselves as partners in not opposing austerity itself but only seeking to modify its implementation. This to be done in the normal way of partners, through lobbying and negotiation.

The decline in strike activity and union density during the period of partnership was therefore not simply a result of economic conditions because they improved dramatically in the 1990s, at first rather slowly in terms of employment and then rapidly. In 1986, just before the first deal, there were 309,198 days ‘lost’ in strikes and in 2007, just before the crash, a total of 6,038 days. By 2022 this had fallen even further to 5,256 while union density declined from 46 per cent in 1994 to 30 per cent in 2007.

Economic power and state revenue shifted to foreign multinationals that unions largely failed to organize, resulting in many skilled, educated, and younger workers being excluded. One of the early results of partnership was the 1990 Industrial Relations Act that made illegal a strike unconnected to a ‘legitimate’ trade dispute, which successfully thwarted solidarity action – one of the very purposes of a trade union movement. ‘Partnership’ also did not prevent the bosses refusing to recognise or negotiate with trade unions

Since the crisis was one of solvency of the state, arising from it guaranteeing the deposits and liabilities of the banks that it could not itself finance, the response was cuts in state services and the pay of public sector staff. The initial ICTU response was therefore a public sector strike that recognised its weakness in the private sector. Bourgeois politicians and its media made hay with accusations about the privileges of these workers that sought to divide private sector workers from those working for the state, which the unions had themselves done little to prevent through their failure to organise across the whole working class.

Private sector workers were met by a withdrawal of their bosses from the social partnership arrangements, one result of which was their repudiation of sectoral pay arrangements. This demonstration of the hollowness of partnership with the state and bosses, both of whom had withdrawn, did not prevent the unions going into another deal in 2010, the Croke Park Agreement, which gave way to Croke Park 2 as more cuts were sought. When the proposals for it were initially rejected by a large majority of members the union leaders were able to manoeuvre ultimate acceptance by warning of the consequences of rejection while providing no strategy for fighting for its members decision.

‘Mass mobilisation’ was not therefore meant to involve ‘mass organisation’ but dependence on the trade union’s own bureaucratic organisation. Its purpose was to assist union leaders’ lobbying with some pressure from below that was to be applied to the government while releasing it from the working class, amounting to simply blowing off steam. By February 2013 ICTU speakers at one of their demonstrations gave over the stage to musicians before many marchers had arrived at the finish in order to avoid being heckled. They avoided it afterwards by not having any demonstrations at all.

Mobilisation wasn’t mean to be permanent, and it wasn’t meant to be an alternative to social partnership and the union bureaucrcay. Although it was formally dissolved by the state it never ended given the objectives and strategy of the trade union leaders who simply pursued it unofficially, originally pushing the idea that the Labour Party in government might mitigate the worst effects of austerity.

The trade union movement, through its bureaucracy, is wedded to the state. Most of its members are in state employment and the state facilitates its organisation through facilitating membership subscriptions, while the share of members in the private sector has declined. The alternative offered by the trade union leaders was therefore the Labour party in government; rises in taxation instead of expenditure cuts, and ‘sharing the burden’ rather than its repudiation. While the unions’ organisational weakness was material, they were partly responsible for this themselves, and while this weakness was also the basis of political passivity and failure, this too was partly their leaders’ own responsibility.

If we look to answer the questions about the lack of permanent working class self-organisation and failure to maintain mobilisation against austerity, we need to look at the prior commitment to social partnership and dependence on the state, which itself had become dependent on the Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The unions were, and are, not the expression of the self-organisation of the working class and for this their leadership is partly responsible, with the undeveloped and inadequate political consciousness of the working class itself also a major factor. While in times of social peace the union leaders can represent the passivity of the membership, in times of heightened political awareness and activity they consciously act to limit this independent action and the possibility and potential for advancing political consciousness.

Had there been any permanent opposition to social partnership within the trade union movement prior to the crisis it might have presented a starting point to build an alternative to the union bureaucrats. Any opposition however was generally of a temporary campaigning character while the bona fides of the bureaucrats became generally accepted. No independent political alternative was built within the trade unions, reflecting the political weakness of the left outside it.

In these circumstance the bureaucracy was able to mobilise spontaneous anger, demoralise it and then dump it, getting away with it primarily because the politics of the union movement went unchallenged. This in turn partly reflected the political weakness of the left.