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Title: The Plague Author: Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group Date: 10th April 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19 Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-11 from https://melbacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/anvil-2020.04-v-web-final.pdf
The coronavirus pandemic started in a market in Wuhan late last year. It
grew into a crisis through bureaucratic suppression of bad news by local
“Communist” Party authorities. It has now become a global catastrophe
because of haphazard and often complacent reactions by capitalist
governments. So far, there is no vaccine to prevent it and no treatment
that can cure it. The best that doctors can do is treat the symptoms and
hope the body of the patient fights it off.
This would be bad enough even in a libertarian communist society, but
capitalism makes it so much worse. What needs to happen? As any
epidemiologist could tell you, in the absence of a vaccine, you test as
many people as possible, isolate the people infected and trace their
contacts. At the same time you cut off the path of infection by
practising good hygiene and reducing the number of people that each
person contacts.
Here in Australia, the Federal Government is trying hard (thus
distinguishing itself from the United States, where Donald Trump has
blown hot and cold on the issue), but won’t go all out because of the
consequences for business. So we get very strict rules about movement of
individual people and physical distancing, but they go out of the window
when they interfere with the operations of employers.
As this article is being written, new Australian cases of COVID-19 are
decreasing and it looks as if the spread of the disease is slowing in
the most heavily hit countries of Europe. It is rampaging through the
United States and is just getting started in most Third World countries
– where it threatens to kill a hundred times more people than it has so
far.
In Australia, you can’t have more than a hundred people in the same
indoor space – unless it’s a worksite. Pubs, clubs and restaurants are
closed down, even small ones – but building sites go full steam ahead.
You mustn’t sit in a park with a friend or two – but any retail shop can
stay open serving up to a hundred customers at a time, provided there’s
4 square metres a person.
The glaring contradiction became obvious when six Qantas baggage
handlers tested positive to COVID-19 on 31 March. People don’t become
immune to the virus just because they’re at work, so any work people do
away from home brings a risk of infection. This can only be justified if
the work is essential to the functioning of society. Instead, Scott
Morrison says “every job is an essential job”. Many people who should be
paid to stay home and prevent the spread of the virus are instead going
to work to keep the capitalists in business.
People with little or no knowledge of Anarchism might think the
coronavirus pandemic provides a refutation of our philosophy. After all,
having people just decide individually what to do would lead both to
hoarding and to no effective action against transmission of the virus.
This, however, would not be Anarchism but capitalist individualism.
An Anarchist society could fight the pandemic more effectively than
capitalist ones. We wouldn’t have to worry about the viability of
business, so we could close down all non-essential activities.
Construction, for example, could be put on care and maintenance.
Production of luxuries or other low priority goods could be ceased,
letting workers go home, turn their plant to medical equipment and
supplies as required, or reinforce the supply chain of necessities. And
a panel of medical experts, elected in each region and given parameters
by the affected communities, would hold the necessary authority to set
health guidelines.
How would these guidelines be enforced? How would we achieve the
physical distancing so important to preventing transmission? We’d do it
the same way we would handle enforcement of any of our laws, whether
that be concerning serious crime, anti-social activity or anything in
between.
While this is not the place for a detailed discussion of an Anarchist
criminal justice system, we can say a few things. In the first place,
we’d have community discussion and persuasion, acting through reason and
social solidarity. When it comes to recalcitrants (we’re not so naive as
to think they won’t exist), communities will defend themselves. Rather
than having a standing police force though, we could roster volunteers
from the widest sections of the community (noting a pandemic might
necessitate a considerably larger roster for the duration of the
emergency). Importantly, the volunteers would not have powers above and
beyond those of citizens generally. And, since there will be no prisons
because we will refuse to be gaolers, in the last resort recalcitrants
could be exiled to a comfortable island.
By contrast, governments in Australia have become increasingly
authoritarian. The New South Wales and Victorian Governments have laid
down the toughest restrictions, banning many activities that couldn’t
possibly spread the virus. Instead, they draw the line where cops can
easily enforce it. Armed with arbitrary powers and a wide area of
discretion, they are spreading fear and enforcing social conformity.
Indigenous and immigrant youth are only too familiar with “discretion”
in the hands of racist cops. They are highly likely to undermine the
social solidarity needed to keep up the regime of physical distancing
for the period of at least six months which will be necessary.
There is another dimension to the actions of the capitalist State,
though. Under the hammer blows of necessity, the Coalition has abandoned
the dictates of neo-liberalism and introduced policies it scoffed at
only three months ago. They doubled the unemployment benefit. They
introduced free child care. They banned evictions. They introduced a
flat rate wage subsidy (the Jobkeeper Payment) at about the minimum full
time wage. And there’s more to come. Of course, Scott Morrison is boldly
saying everything will “snap back” to pre-pandemic levels when the
crisis is over, but that’s a lot easier said than done. Class struggle
will determine the results.
In a telling development, the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission has spent the last month handing out waivers to competition
rules, so that companies can co-operate to improve the supply chain for
necessities and increase production of medical equipment. Think about
it.
None of this makes for a workers’ paradise, however. The measures taken
are full of gaps and injustices because they are aimed firstly at
keeping capitalism functioning under emergency conditions and secondly
at preventing widespread industrial action by the working class. So free
child care excludes centres run by local councils. The Jobseeker Payment
excludes people on disability pensions. There’s no rent relief yet for
residential tenants. And neither workers on temporary visas nor casuals
with under twelve months seniority get the Jobkeeper Payment. Government
reforms are about capitalist stability first and daylight second.
Justice doesn’t get a look-in.
Three areas of struggle are necessary immediately. Firstly, industries
not essential during the pandemic need to be closed – for the good of
the workers involved and the population generally. Importantly, the
entire construction industry should be put on care and maintenance.
Building workers need to be paid to stay home and not spread the virus.
Secondly, workers in essential industries need to take action to defend
their health and safety and to institute fair rationing systems where
hoarding has distorted supply chains. And thirdly, the whole working
class needs to support those locked out of the Jobkeeper Payment. This
is especially crucial for workers on visas, who are being left
destitute. They will be under pressure to accept cash jobs that ignore
physical distancing, thus spreading the virus to the detriment of all.
The union bureaucracy is in the road. The ACTU, having asked the
Government to extend the Jobkeeper Payment to the whole workforce, has
received a slap in the face for its troubles. But it’s not proposing to
fight back. The CFMMEU officials, disgracefully, aren’t calling for
building workers to be paid to stay home. And officials of the SDA,
which covers supermarket workers, are so committed to class treason that
their organisation doesn’t deserve to be called a union.
The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group calls on Anarchists to start
rank and file groups in the unions to fight for a workers’ response to
the coronavirus pandemic. Workers need to use workplace power to force
the closure of non-essential industries, adequate protection of health
and safety and the provision of a living income for all. If a
groundswell for these demands gains strength, the officials will have
either to give in to the rank and file, or be swept aside.
In the course of this struggle over immediate issues, workers will raise
broader demands, both about the management of the pandemic (e.g. civil
liberties) and the sort of society we want afterwards. And it is in the
context of this struggle that we can begin to win the argument for
Anarchist Communism and to build the movement for a workers’ revolution
that can create it.
FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITY
TO EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR NEED