In our first editorial on the coronavirus pandemic on March 3, we made the point that “its effects are only just beginning”. Since then, the scale of the emergency has grown day by day. So we should be under no illusions now about the scale of this crisis and its effects on political life; in fact it would be difficult to overstate it. It will have long-lasting and profound political implications.
It will be profound in the sense that there will almost certainly be a deep economic recession, with some economists even saying that it will be more severe the Great Depression of the 1930s. The economic fall-out from the 1929 crash took years to unfold, but the Covid-19 pandemic has battered the world economy to its knees in a matter of weeks.
System rigged against workers
It will also be profound in the sense that the political earthquake that will affect every corner of the world will have revolutionary implications. Even before the coronavirus, many millions of workers were drawing the conclusion that the entire system is rigged against them and for the benefit of a tiny handful of the rich and powerful. In all parts of the world, established politics and politicians were under suspicion and in many cases were being kicked out. This process will accelerate.
The coronavirus will have profound implications for the political consciousness and the struggles of the mass of ordinary workers. Not least, for us here in Britain, it has implications for the struggle for socialist ideas inside the Labour Party. Even if the right win the Labour leadership battle, what they would want to do in ‘normal’ times – like pour cold water on the radicalism of the party and evict the left – will not necessarily be what they will be able to do.
Finally, the implications of the epidemic will be long-lasting in the sense of five, ten, fifteen or more years, with political ebbs and flows, and movements to the right and the left. This moment represents a political earthquake of historic proportions and when it has passed nothing will remain as it was before. There will be reverberations, like after-shocks, that go on for many years.
Grudging support to the government
But we should not necessarily expect that there will be enormous repercussions immediately. We cannot make judgements about political events as if we were in a relatively small social media bubble. The overwhelming majority of workers will not necessarily think like us; they will support, albeit grudgingly, the best efforts of the government to fight the epidemic and they will reluctantly cooperate.
Few would have predicted, when the call for volunteers went out, that as many as 800,000 would come forward – four times the original target – in what will be seen as part of a great “national” effort. The calls for political cooperation between the main parties – even from Tory MPs – will find an echo, although the real purpose of a cross-party effort (or even a coalition) is not so much to share the burden as to share the blame when the going gets tough.
In the Second World War, the promotion of Labour MPs into the wartime cabinet had no other purpose than to persuade workers to cooperate with anti-strike legislation, wartime austerity and sacrifice.
We should not be surprised if opinion polls show that Trump and Johnson increase their support in the short term. Johnson’s own much-publicised infection will do his support no harm and he has the advantage of being at the helm and able to communicate without rivalry on the TV and in the press – witness the 35 million letters going out to every household.
Prevailing mood will be to knuckle down
We are not minimising the opposition and criticism that is already circulating now, especially from leading health scientists and epidemiologists, most recently in the pages of the Lancet, the doctors’ magazine. We ourselves, in the pages of Left Horizons and on Facebook, have highlighted some of these scandals and we will continue to do so.
Probably the most significant is the scandal of the ten-year cuts to the NHS, reducing it to a skeleton service while there has been a huge increase in profiteering from private contracts, private supply and PFIs. Nor would we suggest that these criticisms will be forgotten. When it comes to the inquest, we will be among those blaming the government, not shoppers or reluctant self-isolators. But for the moment, the prevailing mood among the mass of the population and the working class will be simply knuckling down, doing what has to be done and getting the epidemic beaten.
No-one expected a Labour win in 1945
But will only be true for the duration, as it was in wartime. Opinion polls were a relatively new feature of politics in the 1940s, but Gallup did hold polls even during the war. It is interesting that despite his initial unpopularity, Churchill’s poll rating during the war never fell below 70% and it was often above 80%. He was thought to be so popular that no-one expected him to lose the election in 1945, including the Labour leaders. Even on the day of the election, newspapers thought he would win, yet, as we know, he lost heavily.
So too for the coronavirus ‘war effort’. There may be relatively short-term issues that by themselves shake the government or the labour movement. But it will be particularly in the medium and longer term that there will be serious political implications and when that happens there will be a reckoning: a titanic clash of class interests not seen in this country since 1926.
The capitalist class will be calling for renewed austerity to pay for the unprecedented splashing of cash to fight the pandemic. They will want to claw back everything they have lost in rent, interest and profit and that can only be at the expense of the working class. Every propaganda trick in the book will be used to achieve this end, including attempts to embroil Labour and trade union leaders in what will be described as a “national” effort of re-building.
Anti-democratic powers
Besides looking at ‘democratic’ means of regaining their all their lost power, privileges and wealth, sections of the capitalist class will be also looking longer-term at other methods, including, if necessary, the destruction of the labour movement. Emergency laws put in place for the pandemic will be a useful template and many states will not want to roll back these powers, for fear of losing control over the workers’ movement. But at that time most workers, having grudgingly supported the efforts of the government to fight the epidemic, will be demanding that there will be no going back to the status quo ante.
Gig workers will demand proper sick-pay and benefits; there will be demands for wage rises and better conditions for all those low-paid workers deemed to be “key” for the smooth running of society; company bosses who tried to gain a fast buck and industrial-scale tax-dodgers will be pilloried; the idea of a Universal Basic Income will become popular to the same extent as Universal Credit is so unpopular. Above all, there will be demands for a fully-funded and fully-staffed NHS, without the profiteering and PFIs acting as a dead weight on the finances of the service.
The labour movement leaders will probably be taken completely by surprise by this, as they were in 1945. It was the Labour Party NEC and conference in May of 1945 that reflected the pressure of the working class at that time, not the leadership. The Labour leaders, in fact, had already agreed to prolong the coalition, in private discussions with Churchill, until the rank and file of the party stopped them in their tracks and an election became inevitable.
Different class interests have not disappeared
What will be the tasks of socialists now and in the near future? We need to explain clearly and coherently that during the coronavirus crisis, the different interests of the classes have not disappeared. There is no ‘truce’ in the class struggle. NHS workers are heroically risking their own health and their lives while working on without proper equipment, while the rich are closeted away. Even while workers are making sacrifices and putting up with inconveniences, not to mention the unnecessary loss of life of those closest to them, profiteering is still going on. Manufacturers will not produce ventilators “at cost” and private hospitals will not hand over resources to the NHS “at cost” whatever, they try to tell us. There will be lucrative contracts to be paid later.
Socialist policies the only guarantee
During the emergency, therefore, we will continue to raise class issues, taking as our starting point the desire of working people to ‘see this through’ and to defeat the epidemic, but explaining also that it is the class nature of society that holds back the fight against coronavirus. We call for socialist measures now, as the best possible means of facilitating and speeding up the struggle for the nation’s health. In terms of the production of machinery and equipment like PPE and testing kits, in the deployment and training of new NHS staff, in the protection of the living standards of all workers, the best possible means of doing that is a planned, nationalised economy, democratically run and managed for the benefit of all.
That is not only the best, it is the only guarantee that society can move forward in the interests of the big majority of population. Given the looming catastrophe of global warming, now added to by the possibility of frequent health emergencies, the future of humankind more than ever before is resolving itself into a choice between socialism or and extinction.
March 30, 2020
