The Necessity of Revolutionary Socialism and Militant Working-Class Unity in the COVID-19 Crisis
Red Fightback
As the virus has moved through the whole social organism, it has revealed beyond any doubt the intensity of the crisis of capitalism, in all its interconnected facets. The COVID-19 pandemic is starkly exposing the way that capitalist greed puts profit over lives; the utter anarchy of the rule of the market over the economy; the lethality of a social security system that links benefits to economic productivity; the intensifying violence of the racist hostile environment; the moral depravity of the Tory government that openly states its willingness to let the poor and marginalised die, and the complicity of the neo-Blairite Labour Party in this dire state of affairs.
Capitalism operates like a voracious cross-cut shredder, making its deadliest incisions against the most marginalised sections of society, but ultimately all members of the working class are under attack. The working-class movement needs to recognise the specificity of struggles against different oppressions and take up the fight against capitalism on every front, while simultaneously unifying against the fundamental system of wage-labour exploitation and the repressive capitalist state.
Above all the pandemic has shown that this rotten system is beyond reform, as the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries like Britain and the US have been thrown into complete disarray. Though emergency government measures such as the rail nationalisation and temporary accommodation for the homeless are inadequate, they also show how quickly things we’ve long been told were not possible can be realised. Instead of wasting more energies on a revival of the reformist Labour left that never represented workers’ interests, there’s a pressing need to raise the level of struggle into a fight for revolutionary socialism and full working-class control and ownership of the state and economy.
The working class is being made to pay for another crisis they didn’t cause
The global coronavirus pandemic has compounded an existing system-wide crisis of capitalism. Since the 2008 financial crash, global trade growth has slowed massively from the average of 10% a year in 1949-2008 to under 2.5% by 2019. The global collapse in commodity prices has been exacerbated in Britain by the economic shock of Brexit, with the pound reaching historic lows; and a year before the COVID outbreak the Resolution Foundation thinktank forecast that a third of children in Britain would be living in relative poverty by 2023. Decaying capitalism continues in its rapacious impulse to exhaust the earth’s natural wealth, a death-drive that is inseparable from the present epidemic: the impact of capitalist agriculture and extractivism on ecosystems (e.g. deforestation and human-caused droughts) enables diseases to move rapidly into new territories, and has already been linked with the spread of malaria, Ebola and Zika. With the COVID pandemic, the International Monetary Fund is predicting the worst recession since the Great Depression, as oil prices plummet and the International Labour Organization predicts the loss of the equivalent of 195 million jobs (the 2008 crisis, by point of comparison, wiped out 22 million jobs). As always, it is the working class (the proletariat) that is being made to pay for the crisis. Households in Britain are set to lose on average £515 in disposable income per month due to job losses and reduced pay.
Greedy bosses, globally and in Britain, are scrambling to rescue profits at the expense of their workers. Wetherspoon owner Tim Martin told his 40,000 laid-off staff to consider ‘applying for a job at Tesco rather than “wait around for us to reopen”’, and said there might be ‘delays’ to wage payments until the end of April. Jeff Bezos, who’s expected to become the world’s first trillionaire, is sacking workers while having the gall to demand working-class people donate to a ‘relief fund’ for Amazon staff. The British GMB union describes Amazon warehouse workers as ‘petrified’, as the company has failed to provide basic protection like hand sanitiser or reusable gloves. Richard Branson has requested ‘emergency credit’ of £5-£7.5 billion, and £500 million of public funds for Virgin, while sending thousands of workers home without pay and cutting sick pay in half. Multi-billionaire Branson is also one of the biggest National Health Service profiteers – his Virgin Care business has won over £2 billion from the vicious privatisation of healthcare, and he pocketed an additional £2 million of public money in 2017 after suing the NHS. Prominent Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who’s worth a reported £100 million, has major shares in a ‘capital management’ firm which says the pandemic offers a ‘once or twice in a generation’ opportunity to make ‘super normal returns’ from investments in private medical supplies.
Instead of combatting lay-offs and rank profiteering, the Tory government has prioritised measures to safeguard the parasite capitalist class (the bourgeoisie), conjuring up £330 billion for emergency business bailouts (there’s always a magic money tree when it’s the rich who need ‘rescuing’). European governments, as well as the European Union, have also concentrated their resources on protecting the financial and business sectors. The emergency bailout came a week after the Tories attempted to prevent the total collapse of key services through what Chancellor Rishi Sunak absurdly called ‘a people’s budget from a people’s government[!]’. Under normal conditions, the March budget’s extra £175 billion investment over the next five years would only have reversed some of the ruthless cuts that previous Conservative governments had enacted, and compensated for the existing reduction in growth forecasts the UK Office for Budget Responsibility had made for the next few years (the economic disruption of Brexit has already cost the economy £130 billion since 2016). But that’s without accounting for the additional impact of the pandemic on production and investment. The so-called spending ‘splurge’ is far too little, far too late. In fact to deal with the post-quarantine recession the Tories are planning another round of brutal austerity. A leaked Treasury document dated 5 May predicts a budget deficit of £337 billion (more than double the annual deficit after the 2008 crash) and possibly £516 billion in a worst-case scenario, compared to the £55 billion forecast in the March budget. The document also outlines a plan to impose £30 billion worth of tax increases for ordinary people, and cuts to pensions, as well as a two-year public sector pay freeze to ‘boost investor confidence’ – this means cutting the income and pensions of the frontline workers the Tory leaders line up to clap for every Thursday.
The Tory response to the pandemic has been a combination of vicious cynicism – prioritising the health of the capitalist economy over the health of the population – and callous blunder. Richard Horton, medical doctor and editor of The Lancet, has testified to parliament about the Tories’ decision to ignore ‘the urgent warning that was coming from the frontline in China’, and concluded that ‘the government is playing roulette with the public’. On 13 March, the government’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance, claimed that ‘herd immunity’ would be achieved through letting the virus spread to ‘about 60 percent’ of people; the previous day, Boris Johnson had told the public that ‘many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time’. The catalyst for a policy reversal, with the belated closure of schools and implementation of a lockdown, came on 16 March, with the publication of a report at Imperial College predicting that, unconstrained, the virus could kill half a million people, and that even the middle-of-the-road ‘mitigation’ strategy would’ve resulted in some 250,000 deaths. This was no different from the report by the government’s own pandemic modelling committee, but it was more publicised, causing the government to backtrack and sweep its obvious willingness to let literally hundreds of thousands of people die under the rug. As early as the end of January scientific advisers concluded that the virus could be devastating, and from 13 February to 30 March the government avoided no less than eight conferences about the coronavirus between European heads of state or health ministers. Even the right-wing Sunday Times has admitted the Tories’ utter complacency. The government issued no requests to labs for assistance with staff or testing equipment until the middle of March, and Johnson was accused of putting Brexit over breathing when the government said it ‘missed’ the deadline for an EU scheme sourcing life-saving critical care ventilators. Johnson was also in the Tory cabinet that buried the alarming findings from Exercise Cygnus in 2016 which simulated an influenza epidemic.
Yet politicians and the billionaire-owned media have focused on blaming ordinary people for disobeying social distancing, despite the flagrant mixed messaging from the government, and the fact that bosses have continually demanded people come into work. And now the government is sacrificing more lives to boost the economy by prematurely lifting the lockdown in England, forcing millions back into work and onto crammed public transport. Those in underpaid, insecure and manual roles who typically can’t work from home will be most affected: workers in these jobs are already up to four times more likely to die of the virus.
Support for workers has been pitiful. The ‘wage-support scheme’ up to 80% of salaries is not enough when the minimum wage is already well short of a living wage: before the pandemic, 1/5 of people in working households were already living below the poverty line. While the scheme has been extended for several months, the government has said that from August companies will have to contribute to the furloughed salary and consequently some bosses have already started giving furloughed workers notice. Many laid off workers have to starve on the meagre £94 a week sickness benefit, which in any case exempts some two million employees. Others will not be able to meet the exceedingly-bureaucratic means-tested Universal Credit criteria (even if they’re among those lucky enough to get through to the system in the first place), which also has a five-week payment wait. Even better-off workers will be discovering the cruelty of Britain’s benefits system. There is no longer a social safety net: ‘People who have paid tax and national insurance for years and never been near the social security system will be turning to it in their hour of need; yet far too late, like trapeze artists falling through the air, they will find that the net beneath them has been lowered dangerously close to the ground and is badly torn.’ The pandemic came at a time when the class war had already been burning at a high intensity for years – in late 2018 the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that the average worker has lost £11,800 in real earnings since 2008. The rich are getting richer while everyone else is getting poorer; this system has no future for the working class.
Nor does the government’s wage support scheme cover the five million self-employed people in Britain. The Coronavirus Job Retention scheme has been accurately described by the United Voices of the World (UVW) union as ‘having more holes in it than Swiss cheese’. Most of the self-employed are extremely low paid, with a median income of just £10,000. Some won’t qualify for sick pay if they have earning partners, are newly self-employed, or make a substantial part but not the majority of their income from self-employment – and none will see a penny for weeks, until sometime in June! Those who can’t work will face starvation, while those who can will be forced to work, and therefore risk contracting or spreading the virus.
The Tories have allowed the brunt of the crisis to fall on ‘frontline workers’: delivery drivers, cleaners, carers, supermarket workers, refuse workers, postal workers, health workers. These are people who were previously denigrated as ‘unskilled’ and who have seen their pay and conditions attacked in the last decade and are likely to be on zero-hours or casual contracts. Under this rotten capitalist regime, it’s a hard rule that the more your work actually benefits other people, the less you’re likely to be paid. As a group of UVW security guard workers of colour at St. George’s, University of London, fighting for occupational sick pay and to be brought in-house recognise: ‘The government and the bosses who do so much to ignore us, are now finally having to admit—albeit rather reluctantly—to something they’ve long tried to convince us isn’t true: that they need us. That we, the “unskilled” workers, the security guards, the delivery drivers, the supermarket cashiers and the cleaners, are the ones who keep the wheels of the UK’s economy turning.’ We must not forget even after the quarantine has been lifted that things like cleaning, caring, transport and food production are always the essential services of society and that workers in these sectors deserve respect and a living wage – whereas the world wouldn’t be worse off if parasitic CEOs, stockbrokers and investment bankers disappeared! Despite temporarily acknowledging that the once-designated ‘unskilled’ are in fact ‘essential’, the government has failed to ensure provision of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), or protection from ruthless bosses. 36-year old London bus driver and father Emeka Nyack died from coronavirus after being ‘told his pay would be cut if he missed work’. Dozens of bus drivers in London, Birmingham, Bristol and elsewhere have died due to lack of safety measures like full-cover perspex screens. Immediate measures are needed to safeguard workers including providing PPE for all those in frontline roles, a ban on punitive sickness absence policies, full pay for all workers irrespective of employment status, and provision of childcare to assist parents working in essential jobs.
We must also recognise the particular burden that is falling on women workers. As has been highlighted by the Fawcett Society, women are more likely to be in low paid and insecure work, and existing inequalities (considerably exacerbated for women of colour) mean that they are disproportionately impacted by the pandemic in specific ways. A report by the Women’s Budget Group shows that 77% of health workers and 85% of care workers are women; that women comprise nearly 4/5 of the 3,200,000 workers in ‘high risk’ roles, and further that 98% of at-high-risk workers paid below 60% of median British wages are women. As schools and nurseries have closed it will also be women who take on most of the unpaid care work, and many women will also be trapped at home with abusive partners. LGBT+ people, who already experience high rates of homelessness, domestic abuse and impediments to accessing healthcare, will also be disproportionately impacted by the virus. All this demonstrates the sustained relevance of socialist-feminist politics and the need to challenge workplace discrimination and the current gender and sexual orientation imbalance in trade union leadership positions, as well as recognise the under-acknowledged burden of social reproductive labour (caring, cleaning, providing food etc.) that is purposefully devalued under capitalism, while being simultaneously essential to the running of the productive economy.
Politicising the housing crisis
COVID has put a further spotlight on the housing crisis. In England, the average private renter now pays some 27% of income on housing costs, but some in London boroughs like Hackney pay as much as 83% of their normal income on rent – i.e., more than the government’s 80% wage allowance. The meagre statutory sick pay will also not cover most people’s monthly rent. But the government’s supposed rent amnesty just extends notice for renters from two months to three! As Labour’s shadow housing secretary has put it, this ‘just gives them some extra time to pack their bags’, while offering no help to an estimated 20,000 renters who were already in the process of being evicted. The community union ACORN has justly called for a ‘rent holiday’ for all those impacted by the pandemic. Rent controls have been implemented by British governments in the past, including after WWII. But there is an immediate need to go beyond demands for the mere temporary suspension of rent, as in the London Renters’ Union’s petition to the government (and even Labour’s new right-wing neo-Blairite leader Keir Starmer has backed calls for rent controls) – we need a serious political challenge to the parasitic landlord class. In 2016 100 families in England and Wales were evicted every day due to extortionate rents, while nearly 1/3 private rental properties fall below the government’s own Decent Homes minimum standard: overcrowding, vermin, damp and cold are rife. This is the result of a profit-driven system that allows social housing stock to decay while the rich buy up land and second homes. It is instructive to recall the 1915 Glasgow rent strike (led by working-class women) against rent hikes and evictions, in which over 25,000 working-class families refused to pay rent, and organised on the streets to prevent court officials, police and landlords from enforcing evictions; eventually forcing the British government to implement the first ever statutory rent controls. Rent strikes in our immediate context will certainly not be easy – the risk of evictions is exacerbated in the COVID context (and further intensified for vulnerable groups like migrants), and organising on the streets is less viable during the lockdown. Targeted coordination at the local level against landlords is also essential.
The estimated 320,000 homeless people in Britain (the highest number since records began due to ever-increasing rents, frozen housing benefits and lack of social housing) are among the most vulnerable to the virus, not least because many have underlying health issues. The government asked councils to house rough sleepers in temporary accommodation such as hotels but there are serious issues of understaffing and short supplies of food and medicine. Due to inadequate funding an estimated 35,000 people are still being held in overcrowded homeless hostels, at great risk of infection – the COVID death rate of homeless people in London’s hostels is up to 25 times higher than the general adult population. Given the extent of the existing homelessness crisis, and the stripping back of shelters, the government’s initial injection of funds to local authorities quickly ran out, and a leaked report suggests the government has now stopped funding the scheme. While principally a result of ten years of Tory austerity policies, the collapse of local services partially reflects the lack of serious resistance to council cuts over the last several years, as many activists were swept up in the illusions of a ‘democratic socialist’ Labour leadership and failed to challenge the realities of local Labour councils which Corbyn and John McDonnell instructed to stick to pro-cuts budgets: last year The Guardian reported how ‘Councils in Ealing, in west London, Bristol, Brighton and Cardiff – all of them Labour – have washed their hands of their statutory duty to homeless families by rehousing them in repurposed shipping containers that are like saunas in the summer and freezers in the winter.’ There was already a strain on food banks before the pandemic, and homeless charity Crisis says there are now people who’ve not eaten for days. Crisis also reports that there are still a thousand rough sleepers on the streets, and there are cases of homeless people being arrested under coronavirus legislation. And then there are the ‘hidden’ homeless, including women fleeing domestic violence and those who sleep on buses, who are still not being accommodated. There are reports of migrants being excluded from accommodation under the ‘no recourse to public funds’ conditionality, introduced by New Labour to prevent migrants accessing a range of welfare services.
There needs to be an instant suspension of rent to stop debt building up, and a ban on cutting off utilities. The accommodation granted to rough sleepers is only temporary, but the fact they are being housed shows there’s no reason this shouldn’t always have been the case. Homelessness could swiftly be all but solved in its entirety by taking the huge stock of empty homes into working-class ownership.
Rent strikes must be politicised to foreground the fundamental issue that under capitalism the iron law of private property makes homes a commodity and investment, rather than a human right. Even Corbyn’s plans for a million new homes over a decade were inadequate given a million new homes are needed immediately; and several million needed over the next 20 years. Ultimately the current housing crisis can only be alleviated by dismantling capitalism and putting people above profit with a vast new people’s programme of building decent council housing. Blocks of flats and housing estates should be run democratically by tenants themselves, in cooperation with trade unions and local authorities.
The lethality of austerity and revival of eugenics
The government’s utter disdain for the poor and marginalised has immediate catastrophic consequences in the context of the viral pandemic, but this should be viewed as an acceleration of an existing process. A decade of cuts to council services, the punitive bedroom tax, and cruel benefit sanctions have all amounted to calculated social murder: in June 2019 the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank found that cuts to public health and social care spending since 2012 had caused over 130,000 preventable deaths. The brunt of this has fallen on Britain’s 13 million disabled people: 1/5 of disabled people before the pandemic were in food poverty, routinely skipping meals or missing essential nutrients.
For years there has been an ideological assault on the disabled and working-class poor. Under New Labour, cuts to child benefit and new work capability assessments were accompanied with the demonisation of benefit-seekers as ‘cheats and skivers’. The culmination of this scapegoating is a present situation in which thousands die shortly after being declared ‘fit for work’ by the notorious Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and cases like Errol Graham, a severely ill Black man who the DWP killed by starvation, cutting off his benefits after he was incapable of attending a meeting with welfare officials. Politicians openly advocate an ‘ability’-segregated wage system: in 2017 chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, Labour MP Frank Field, recommended the disabled be paid less than minimum wage, and in 2018 welfare chief Iain Duncan Smith suggested bosses should hire disabled people as ‘they often work longer hours’ and forgo holiday ‘because they love the whole idea of being in work’. This is an expression of the oppressive, dehumanising capitalist logic that links worth to productivity. There has also been a surge in hate crimes against disabled people in Britain in recent years, while one in two disabled people have experienced ableist bullying or harassment at work.
The ‘skiver vs striver’ rhetoric – a revival of the old ‘deserving vs undeserving poor’ ideology – is also weaponised by the ruling class against working-class communities, who are blamed for their own impoverishment. David Cameron’s response to the 2011 urban insurrections – cathartic outbursts against years of austerity and racist police harassment – stressed ‘children without fathers’ and ‘communities without control’; Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy likewise blamed working-class parents. Tony Blair described the long-term unemployed as suffering from a ‘culture of poverty’: ‘drug abuse, low aspirations and family instability’. ‘They breed too much’ has now become an implicit Tory mantra with the two-child-limit on tax credits that is making life unbearable for many working-class mothers. The utter disdain the rich have for the poor was recently shown with Rees-Mogg’s comment that the 72 people killed in Grenfell Tower died because they lacked ‘common sense’. The ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ distinction creates a hierarchy that harms all workers by justifying the erosion of the social safety net. Now millions are discovering DWP brutality first-hand, and should abandon the neoliberal narrative that those who need benefits are ‘frauds’ and people ‘not like us’. Just three weeks into the COVID lockdown, the Food Foundation charity said that 1.5 million Britons reported not eating for a whole day because they had no money or access to food, and three million people were in households where someone had been forced to skip meals.
In addition to the generalised neoliberal assault on the poor and those deemed less ‘able’ (of making profits for the capitalists) there has also been a dangerous revival of eugenicist thinking (ideas of genetic inferiority and superiority), including among the sinister figures running the country. In 2013, as Mayor of London, Johnson said to a room of bankers: ‘it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 percent of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2 percent have an IQ above 130 … the harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.’ Johnson’s chief political advisor, Dominic Cummings, has argued that in education ‘a child’s performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her education’ and reportedly said of the government’s approach to the virus that ‘if that means some pensioners die, too bad’. It’s extremely concerning that Cummings has been involved in the meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the proceedings of which one attendee said Cummings had ‘inappropriately influenced’. Cummings appointed a Downing Street aide (Andrew Sabisky) who supports eugenics, has called for contraception programmes to stop the creation of a ‘permanent underclass’, and claimed Black people are intellectually inferior. Johnson refused to condemn this, which is unsurprising given this is a man who makes little attempt to mask his own racist views.
While all working-class people are suffering, we must emphasise that right now there is being carried out a willful culling of the elderly, impoverished, refugees and the disabled. Daily Telegraph journalist Jeremy Warner captured the raw logic of capitalism when he wrote that ‘from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the Covid-19 might even prove beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents’. Again, this is an intensification of existing trends: according to a 2018 study by the charity National Energy Action, some 36,000 deaths over the last five years, mostly of older people, can be attributed to conditions related to living in a cold home, and a further 17,000 people are estimated to have died as a direct result of fuel poverty. Thanks to all the cuts, councils were already prevented from meeting the social care needs of thousands of sick and disabled people, and thus the Coronavirus Bill suspends the Care Act 2014, that put a legal duty on local authorities to meet the needs of the disabled and carers. Those living independently on direct payments haven’t been allocated any PPE or the funding to purchase it. ‘Do-not-resuscitate’ orders (DNRs), in normal conditions intended to alleviate suffering, are now being blanketly applied to the elderly. The BBC News has reported that one Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) in Brighton and Hove told care homes that ‘hospital admission is undesirable’ and instructed them to check they have DNR orders ‘on every patient’, and there have been similar reports in Leeds, East Sussex and Wales. The Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS trust told people with muscular dystrophy ‘we’re keeping your ventilator filters for patients with coronavirus.’ Initial government advice was to send recovering coronavirus patients, infectious or not, back to care homes to clear space in hospitals. A devastating emotional toll has befallen many carers; as the GMB National Officer reports, ‘They’re terrified – not just for themselves, but for the people they look after and their families at home.’ On 22 April the Financial Times reported its analysis based on excess deaths suggesting the true COVID death toll in Britain accounting for deaths outside of hospitals was over double the official figure, including over 10,000 in care homes; the true excess death figure is now likely to be over 50,000. As of 12 May Britain’s official death toll is the worst in Europe at over 40,000, and there’s not much optimism about the epidemic subsiding anytime soon.
The government’s absolute deprioritising of the vulnerable amounts to a social cleansing of the economically unproductive. Under decaying capitalism, the first on the chopping block are those from whom little or no profit can be extracted – the disabled and the elderly – and those who are kept in as degraded conditions as possible to maximise exploitation – prisoners and migrants. The complacent denialism about the scale of the crisis among the privileged, including among a subset of the conspiracist fringe ‘left’, obscures this. We should all care first and foremost because countless thousands of people are dying, but also we all have disabled and elderly relatives and loved ones, and indeed the non-disabled are more accurately described as the not-yet-disabled – 3/4 older renters have a disability or chronic illness. There should already be mass outrage at the government’s approach. As economic depression and mass unemployment sets in, vast swathes of the working class will be next in the firing line.
It is not only the elderly and physically ill who are being imperiled, but also those with neurological and learning disabilities. In Wales a GP surgery sent out a request for ‘high-risk’ people to sign a DNR, including those with non-life threatening ‘neurological conditions’, to save ‘scarce ambulance resources’. The lack of clear government guidelines on the use of DNRs has long been an issue, and last year the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review revealed that 19 hospital patients who later died had ‘learning disabilities’ or ‘Down’s syndrome’ given as the reason not to resuscitate them between July 2016 and December 2018. In the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (‘NICE’)’s COVID-19 guideline for clinical care, published in March with the stated purpose to ‘make the best use of NHS resources’, healthy adults with autism and learning difficulties were encompassed in the ‘frailty’ category subject to DNRs, and this was only amended after a judicial review challenge. But the callousness towards those with neurological conditions continues. A GP surgery in Somerset sent a letter to an autism support group saying autistic adults should have plans to prevent them being resuscitated if they become critically ill. On 24 April, learning disability care provider Turning Point raised concerns that it had received an ‘unprecedented’ number of unlawful DNR orders for its patients. This is especially worrying as DNRs can be issued without a patient’s consent when the patient is deemed unable to make a decision themselves under the Mental Capacity Act. An open letter signed by over 400 disability charities and campaigners has insisted that treatment ‘should not be influenced by how our lives are valued by society’.
For too long the left has side-lined the struggles of the disabled. Red Fightback calls upon care workers to protect those they can to the best of their ability and to expose the realities of what is happening, and for mutual aid groups to mobilise to provide these care staff and patients with the protective equipment and essential supplies they need. But this alone is not enough: progressive forces must mount an AGAINST EUGENICS campaign, that must be led by disabled people, and which demands an end to the indiscriminate DNRs; demands the abolition of Universal Credit and its replacement with full benefits to all as a right not a privilege, and an end to the privatisation of health and social care; that does not ignore the complicity of the Labour Party in ruthless cuts to essential services; and that makes strategic linkages to the brutal methods being deployed against migrants, refugees and prisoners by the capitalist state.
Cuts to social security and welfare are also justified via rhetoric about immigrants ‘exploiting’ the ‘bloated’ system – and now the ‘bloated welfare state’ is threadbare. David Cameron himself admitted in 2011, ‘Immigration and welfare reform are two sides of the same coin’. It is in all workers’ interests to take up the fight against ableism and racism.
COVID exposes the hypocrisy of the racist hostile environment
Millions of those now designated as ‘key workers’ in Britain are migrants – including nearly a quarter of all hospital staff; a fifth of care workers, and 40% of food production workers. These are the very people who politicians and the press have for years attacked for ‘depressing wages’ and ‘overburdening’ public services.
At the very moment that the government is encouraging us to routinely clap for the workers risking their lives on the frontline, it has intensified its commitment to the racist hostile environment that oppresses many of those same workers – even saying that some won’t be allowed in the country by January 2021. Priti Patel’s Home Department decided now was the time to reiterate that as part of its new immigration rules, ‘low-skilled’ people, EU and non-EU, will be unable to apply for a UK work visa. The government is perfectly happy to use migrants as a hyper-exploited, precarious workforce when convenient (e.g. chartering a flight to bring in ‘low skilled’ Romanian workers to pick fruit), to be cast aside at whim.
As is often the case with the demonisation of oppressed groups, anti-immigrant rhetoric is wholly contradictory: migrants are apparently coming to Britain to simultaneously ‘steal jobs’ and ‘scrounge off the state’. Immigrants of course in reality prop up the NHS; but also, migrants are subjected to a punitive healthcare levy on top of other taxes (under sustained pressure, the government exempted NHS workers from the surcharge on 21 May, but there’s been no talk of reimbursing their previous payments). Immigrants are also overrepresented among the underpaid outsourced NHS staff who are especially lacking adequate protective equipment. Doctors and nurses are however also highly at risk and shockingly, the first 10 doctors in Britain who died from the virus were all racialised minorities, and many were Muslim. This belies the facile talking point invoked by privileged celebrities and cabinet office minister Michael Gove that ‘the virus doesn’t discriminate’ – its impact does discriminate in a society that is structurally racist. Recent analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics found that people of colour are over-represented among the coronavirus deaths by as much as 27% and there are disturbing reports that 70% of front-line workers who have died are ethnic minorities; while research in early April suggested over a third of intensive-care patients are non-white (i.e. three times their proportion in the British population). This is directly related to disproportionate rates of poverty, precarious work, and poor/overcrowded housing conditions as well as overt discrimination in healthcare provision, though NHS leaders have attempted to obscure all this with unsubstantiated claims about genetic factors that amount to scientific racism; and racially oppressed communities understandably have no faith in the official government inquiry headed by Trevor Phillips. The Tories have not seen fit to comment on any of this, which is not surprising given they’ve spent the last decade demonising overseas NHS workers and fuelling racist sentiments. ITV News finds that the number of recorded racist attacks against NHS staff nearly tripled from 589 in 2013 to 1448 last year. This racism is also often compounded by sexism, particularly in nursing and care work which are traditionally ‘feminised’ roles.
All this also demonstrates the need for socialists to abandon the nationalist mythos surrounding the NHS, which is now being weaponised with the invocation of the ‘Blitz spirit’ through calls of ‘Your NHS needs you’, flag-waving, and talk of medals and memorials (never mind vital PPE) for the ‘troops’ to legitimise their use as cannon fodder. Labour’s post-WWII construction of the welfare state, while partly a ruling-class concession after decades of working-class militancy (it was never ‘gifted’ to us), was also in part a racialised nationalist project, as the NHS was serviced by superexploited healthcare workers (especially women) from Britain’s former colonies e.g. in the Caribbean and South-East Asia, who were directed into the lowest pay, least secure auxiliary roles and often placed at permanent risk of deportation. Indeed as the Windrush scandal exposed, that risk never went away, with victims such as Gretel Gocan, an 81-year-old Windrush-generation nurse kept out of Britain and separated from her children for nine years after taking a holiday to Jamaica (and deportations to Jamaica also continued in the weeks leading to the COVID lockdown). This history (and present) gets whitewashed in notions of ‘progressive patriotism’ advanced by Corbynite shadow education secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey, some trade unionists, and the national-chauvinist Communist Party of Britain. British patriotism is not a ‘less sinister sibling’ of British nationalism, both invoke fealty to an imperialist nation-state that is inherently exclusionary. The new (New) Labour leader Starmer is perfectly content to (quite literally) let the Tories get away with murder, saying, ‘In the national interest, the Labour Party will play its full part. Under my leadership, we will engage constructively with the government.’ Appeals to nationalism are a ploy to plaster over class antagonisms. Nationalism is a paternalist ideology that draws on Britain’s colonial legacy, and the ability of the bourgeoisie to use the superprofits of imperialism to bribe privileged sections of the working class through improved living standards. Historic anti-colonial struggles, and resistance by racially-oppressed workers domestically, have posed great threats to British capitalism. To survive this, the ruling class has successfully convinced some white workers to short-sightedly respond to their own hardships by seeking to narrowly defend their relative, insecure privileges vis-à-vis racially oppressed workers – in employment, housing allocation, social security provision etc. – when they should be instead joining with workers of colour in combatting the overarching conditions of capitalist exploitation! We shouldn’t buy into the idea of ‘national interest’ in a nation divided into classes. We should take pride in our class history, as when Black nurses and porters demonstrated en masse alongside white NHS workers against vicious healthcare cuts in the 1970s-80s. We must fight for the defence of the welfare state – but on truly socialist terms, recognising the underacknowledged role of workers of colour, and supporting their struggles for equal pay and conditions and against racist discrimination and abuse.
Our support for migrants is unconditional. Imperialist exploitation built the ruling class we confront today, and it would be a grave and chauvinistic error to believe our struggle can be carried out separately from the struggles of racially oppressed workers exploited in Britain. At the same time, it’s very easy to demonstrate how nonsensical anti-migrant arguments are. While serving as home secretary, Theresa May suppressed up to nine studies that found immigration doesn’t negatively impact British wages! The real issue isn’t ‘undercutting’ or ‘stealing’ jobs; rather it’s how labour market segmentation harms the bargaining power of workers. Creating new legal restrictions on migrant labour simply increases its precarity and vulnerability to hyper-exploitation; this is part of a broad political strategy on the part of the bourgeoisie to pauperise the entire working class through intensifying flexibility and deregulation. The ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ distinctions are likewise based on arbitrary standards and thresholds created by employers to oppress workers, and the way to combat this is to fight for the rights and pay of all workers including migrants. Migrants are in fact often at the forefront of the very struggle against low wages and hyper-exploitation they are falsely accused of causing. For example, when migrant workers at the University of London organised in the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and won the London Living Wage. The UVW workers of colour mentioned above are spot on in emphasising that:
To keep us in our ‘place’—to keep all workers in their ‘place’—bosses try to make us docile and grateful for the crumbs they throw our way; and when we resist, they adopt the most punitive measures possible to discourage us and other workers from ever demanding more. The COVID-19 crisis has laid all this bare by brutally bringing to light how successive governments have, over a period of decades, used the law as a weapon to drive our rights as workers to the barest of minimums. … while this systematic driving-down of rights, pay and conditions affects us most of all, it also affects all other workers, in varying degrees.
Racism causes harmful divisions within the working class, as seen recently with the overt scapegoating of Roma and Travellers (as in the sensationalist Channel 4 Dispatches episode reinforcing anti-Traveller prejudices) – an easier target now that many Black and Asian workers are temporarily visible as ‘essential’ workers – as well as of Britain’s Chinese and South-East Asian communities, whose harassment (reported incidents include abuse in supermarkets, racist graffiti on shop windows and physical violence) is being driven by the ‘blame China’ narrative fuelled by prominent politicians including Gove. The latter narrative draws on the racist ‘yellow perilism’ that associates Chinese people with depravity and disease and which fuelled the murderous riots against Britain’s Chinese communities in 1919; there were also racist incidents against the Chinese community during the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis. But racism is not just an ideological ‘trick’ to divide workers. Racism also deprives, murders and terrorises. Workers of colour are seen as expendable, as when the SOAS University of London told a middle-aged cleaner of colour to ‘lock the door behind them’ and disinfect a room, without being informed that a student suspected of having COVID had just been in there. The intensifying hostile environment of arbitrary deportations, inhumane asylum detentions and racist labour hierarchies is deadly: the discovery of 39 dead Vietnamese migrants in a refrigerated truck in Essex was only one particularly harrowing expression of this systemic racist violence.
There are no shortcuts to anti-racism, and the only way to achieve working-class unity is through socialists and white workers recognising the specificity of racist oppression, while at the same time unifying against the total system of wage-labour exploitation and the repressive capitalist state. Trade unions in particular need to seriously step up to combat racism within their ranks – a recent TUC report found racism in the trade union movement is being fuelled by Brexit-related xenophobia as well as a divisive narrative peddled by politicians and the media about the ‘white working class’ being ‘left behind’.
The pandemic is further exposing the inhumanity of Britain’s carceral regime. Among the most at risk to the virus are those kept locked up in prisons and asylum detention camps like Yarl’s Wood. The charity Detention Action has found that not only are people still being put in immigration detention, some are being detained when presenting with coronavirus symptoms. Despite the lack of testing and overcrowded, unhygienic conditions, only around 700 detainees have been released, and the high court has ruled against the release of the 368 still being detained, against the recommendations of the British Medical Journal and key health professionals. The government has so far accepted a pitiful 16 of the 5,000 unaccompanied children living in the crammed and unsanitary refugee camps on the Greek islands, who are stranded by a hostile EU that views Greece as a ‘shield’ to prevent the movement of refugees – many of whom are fleeing conflicts fuelled by Western imperialist destabilisation campaigns in the Middle East and Africa, in which Britain is complicit. Outrageously, deportation flights from Britain have taken place during the lockdown. Outside of detention though the situation for migrants is not much better: standard financial assistance for asylum seekers in Britain remains under £40 a week, less than half of the statutory sick pay that politicians admit is impossible to live on, and many migrants are prevented from seeking medical help because under the hostile environment medical officers are made to function as border guards.
We join dozens of pro-refugee groups and the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) in demanding the government grant ‘leave to remain’ for all undocumented migrants to ensure access to healthcare and other essential services. But we must go beyond this and demand an end to the structural violence of the hostile environment and the racist immigration regime with its spurious ‘skill’ categorisations, as well as the permanent closure of all immigration detention camps, and the granting of full rights to all migrants.
Prisoners are another extremely at-risk category, with COVID outbreaks confirmed in a majority of prisons in Britain and over a dozen prisoners reported to have died from the virus so far. At the beginning of April the British Ministry of Justice announced plans for the early release of at maximum only 4,000 prisoners in England and Wales, under 5% of Britain’s bloated prison population, to reduce overcrowding and risk of contamination, but as of 12 May only 55 have been released. Cells are still being shared, and prisons have become a COVID incubator as inmates exposed to the virus or displaying possible symptoms are grouped together under the ‘cohorting’ system. To add insult to injury, some prisoners are to be put to work on £2.50 a day to make PPE after the government mismanaged the stockpile. Red Fightback support Community Action on Prison Expansion’s campaign to #FreeThemAll4PublicHealth. As socialists, we recognise that the capitalist prison system in Britain is both institutionally classist and racist (Britain imprisons more Black people proportionally than the ultra-racist USA), that it perpetuates abuse, and that it does not solve the root cause of crime which is overwhelmingly related to economic insecurity. A number of countries including Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey have already released tens of thousands of prisoners. There must be immediate universal release in Britain, and longer-term we must raise the fight for a humane carceral approach that emphasises education not punishment, with rehabilitation centres under workers’ supervision; and for prisoners to be given the right to vote.
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