by Brian Bamford
CHARLES CHARALAMBOUS, Editor of Labour Internationalist, questions my treatment of the argument set out in his editorial: '“Thinning out the herd”: austerity kills'. He is responding to my posted critique 'ON CERTAINTY' IN THE Coronavirus'.
He asks: 'what do you (Northern Voices) think of the basic argument set out in the statement?'
He says: 'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions, which Labour Internationalist endorses.'
He confirms: 'We cannot (nor would we want to) predict the medical impact of Covid-19, but what we can say is that the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.'
He further asks: 'Do you disagree with the argument that the deliberate underfunding of the NHS over many years, designed to encourage the creeping privatisation of various components of the NHS and the promotion of a healthcare "market" that involves profits and shareholder dividends, is a major reason for the NHS's lack of resources and capacity to respond to the virus's impact in a timely and appropriate way?'
What is wrong with this form of reasoning?
We have got to distinguish between the effects caused by government policies from other effects outside their control. The political scientists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, have demonstrated 'Democracy for Realists (2016)' that often shows voters punish politicians for outcomes that are clearly not under their control, including natural events such as shark attacks, droughts and floods. To these we might, I suppose, add pandemics such as the current Coronavirus.
Mr. Chahalambous wisely qualifies his position by saying he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19' none-the-less he says the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.
The Origins of the virus
What we do know is one doctor in China tried to warn the world in December, and he, too, is now a statistic after dying from the virus in January.
A sad and disturbing part of this epidemic is the story of Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, which is the epicenter of COVID-19.
Dr. Li found seven confirmed cases of respiratory disease and coronavirus infection in his hospital in late December 2019.
He messaged his medical school classmates in WeChat, the Chinese social network, on Dec. 30, 2019. His WeChat post was shared in multiple internet platforms and gained wide attention.
We also know that the local authorities in Wuhan reprimanded Dr. Li for making false comments on the internet. He was then forced to sign a letter of admonition and promised not to repeat the transgression.
After the admonition, Dr. Li went back to work in Wuhan Central Hospital where he examined a patient, who was a storekeeper at Huanan Seafood Market with glaucoma and fever. Sadly, he became infected with coronavirus, which eventually took his life.
That was the initial sequence of events that led to the medical development of the virus throughout the world. The virus is presumed to have an animal origin with animal-to-human transfer at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. The infection became human-to-human and is now a global pandemic.
It suggests that in a strict hierarchical system such as in China that the local authorities in Wuhan sought to do what they thought would please their bosses in Beijing, and thus their first reaction was to clamp down on the whistle-blower Dr. Li. Consequently the underlings misread the situation.
Cookbook Explanations & Remedies
Whenever I engage with a tract based on a Marxist perspective such as Mr. CHARALAMBOUS offers here from the Fourth International, I feel as if I'm reading a book on French Provincial Cookery. I feel that something's being cooked-up for me that comes from some rigid recipe from a tired cook, who can't be bothered to think outside the ideological box.
I'm not saying Mr. CHARALAMBOUS hasn't thought through his analysis. Indeed not, as he has a closely considered position, and he is modest enough to admit that he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19', but he insists the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'. Nor would I say that our government was well prepared for a pandemic such as Covid-19. Clearly it wasn't. Especially when compared with Germany that was so much better prepared to tackle the virus and has checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report. Germany also benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.
Germany has a powerful weapon in the battle to contain Covid-19: a wealth of private laboratories that are helping it test more than 50,000 people a day.
The country had already tested about 920,000 people through late March and checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report. That may still understate the country’s total effort, since not all the laboratories that have done assays have yet submitted numbers for last week.
Germany’s widespread testing -- still not as comprehensive as many there would like -- has enabled better tracking of the coronavirus’s spread than in many other European nations. The country benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.
The fact is as Wittgenstein wrote: 'It is hard to tell someone who is shortsighted how to get to a place. Because you can't say “Look at that church tower ten miles away over there and go in that direction".'
We should all by now be coming to realise that in the current crisis we are all shortsighted!
Claims & Predictions
What we at Northern Voices hold to, as I tried to explain when I wrote my post 'ON CERTAINTY' in the Cronavirus', is that maybe 'Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs..'
Yet, Mr. CHARALAMBOUS writes:
'what we can say is that the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided. So, the alternative to capitalist barbarism is socialism, which starts with defending the interests of the working class against the interests of the capitalists.'
He insists: 'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions'
But which version of the Marxist perspective is he and his followers employing here? Most thinkers these days realise that the social sciences can't prophesy future historical developments with any degree of accuracy because of the many variables involved in human affairs and the unintended consequences of human actions. A pandemic had been predicted; five years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates gave a TED Talk had been warning that the world was not ready to take one on - but no one could prophesy that it would come from a wet market in Wuhan and how it would then develop.
Karl Popper* has written: 'It should be mentioned.... that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences of these unintended consequences.' And he writes that '[i]n his more mature utterances, he [Marx] says that we are all caught in the net of the social system. Popper adds: 'The capitalist is not as not the demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than the proletarian.'
This sociological view of Marx has been disregarded by Marxists and Popper claims it has been replaced by a 'perhaps for propaganda reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it - and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy Theory has replaced it.'
Conspiracy Theories
Charles Charalambous in his editorial “Thinning out the herd” writes: The UK government 'chose a strategy based on the theory of “herd immunity”, which means survival of the fittest: let the virus work its way through the population, who will gradually build up immunity, and if hundreds of thousands of older and weaker citizens die, well tough luck.'
He said: '[the] initial response to the crisis (for at least one month) was to ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists around the world who were calling for urgent practical measures to limitand confront Covid-19.'
This is not true because on March 27th, Tim Harford wrote in his column in the FT:
'When I read about a
new disease-modelling study from the University of Oxford, I
desperately wanted to believe. It is the most prominent exploration
of the “tip-of-the-iceberg hypothesis”, which suggests that the
majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed
unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even unnoticed by the
people infected. If true, many of us — perhaps most of us in Europe
— have already had the virus and probably developed some degree of
immunity.'
Clearly Charles Charalambous had seemingly overlooked the Oxford University model when he wrote that the Johnson government chose to 'ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists'. Clearly initially the government chose to follow the 'tip-of-the-iceberg' Oxford study rather than the grimmer Imperial College study which has now been adopted of a current 'lock down'.
This then leads to a kind of conspiracy theory based on a kind of catastrophic gradualism that allows in a form euthanasia in which is an attitude of "let it thin out the herd" and so, for him, it ultimately proves 'the bankruptcy of the capitalist system: let the older and weaker citizens die, which ultimately will lighten the burden on the NHS and the pensions system.'
Karl Popper does not assert that conspiracies never happen, but he does say 'they are not very frequent, and they do not change the character of social life.' If Charles Charalambousis is asserting that people with a taste for eating pangolins or bats in a wet market in Wuhan, China is evidence of a capitalist conspiracy, then I think the Labour Internationalist are scrapping the bottom of the barrel.
* Conjecture and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) by Karl Popper
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