Critiquing the Anti-Lockdown Left

We've dealt with the grifters. The Tory-friends-of-Covid were looked at. But there's another group that have set their face against pandemic precautions, particularly social distancing, restrictions on movement, closures of services and amenities - particularly hospitality - and quarantine measures. People who, politically speaking, are otherwise sound. For ease of short hand, I'm referring to the anti-lockdown left. This group of comrades, which tend to be London-based, very online, but, politically speaking, otherwise heterodox are critical of Covid precautions that require more than mask wearing. That vaccines are rolling out and large numbers are triple jabbed renders curbs on social mixing obsolete. Not ones to cheer on Boris Johnson, undoubtedly his decision to avoid reimposing new requirements ahead of New Year's Eve was welcome to them.

Different comrades emphasise different points. For some, young people welcoming in 2022 are probably going to be taking greater risks than contracting Covid. Others suggest calling for more precautions is indicative of middle class privilege, as the expectation is still on working class people to bring them their supermarket deliveries and Amazon orders. Meanwhile, independent SAGE - who've done a pretty good job of pushing the science around Covid and the measures required to curb it - is elided with an ideological state apparatus suggesting its "function" is social control. Others criticised the Tories bringing in travel bans and red listing. We've seen comrades claiming that high transmission rates don't matter. Others have bristled at Covid-inspired inroads into civil liberties, while praising successful containment strategies in "socialist" countries like China, Vietnam, and Cuba - policies much more restrictive than anything seen in the UK. And the comrades over at The Popular Pod have just released a series looking specifically at the harms of lockdowns.

What follows is not about point scoring or narcissistic posturing, but trying to come to grips with a trend on the left, its roots, trajectory, and political fall out. As such, it's neither total nor complete nor comprehensive. It sets out not to denounce and attack but persuade.

Let there not be any doubt, after almost two years the use of lockdowns and travel restrictions are a policy failure. The Tories have had ample opportunity to enforce mask mandates to stymie the spread of infection. They could have installed air purifiers in schools and clinical settings, made grants (or, knowing Sunak, loans) for businesses and public sector agencies to install filtration systems in their buildings. Manufacturing capacity could have been expanded to make FFP2 and FFP3 masks and distributed for free. The Tories could have introduced better sick pay, so workers didn't have to choose between their incomes and their health. Instead, their class politics were (and still are) in the driving seat. Johnson's might be an authoritarian project, but his Covid management has been a stop-start cycle of freedoms and restrictions, making future reasonable precautions against surging infections politically and socially difficult to implement. Unfortunately, what has been largely absent is a class analysis on the part of the left, despite providing many of the key policies the Tories co-opted into their pandemic governance. Keir Starmer has proven dreadful and failed to rise to the occasion, whereas other MPs have made the right calls on sick pay, furlough, and Universal Credit this was not incorporated into a joined up analysis that makes sense of where the Tories have crashed and burned, but have also, almost surreptitiously, succeeded.

The beginning of the Coronavirus crisis in March 2020 threatened to open politics up. Under Johnson and before him, Theresa May, the Tories were moving away from the austerity economics the government had pushed the previous half-decade. The massive stimulus such as the job retention scheme, the grants and the loans, and the uprating of social security reminded us that British capitalism is underwritten by the state. For a brief period Sunak superficially had more in common with Gosplan bureaucrats than his pantheon of free market saints. What was particularly worrisome from the standpoint of Tory economics was the challenge Covid posed governance. To put it plainly, the project of different governments has been the naturalisation of the entrepreneurial outlook so it is spontaneous and unquestioning. This cultivation was and is conscious and fully intended by policy makers, even if it was badged as "consumer choice" or "driving up standards". It's now the case practically all public institutions relate to us as bearers of this neoliberal subjectivity, and are in turn governed by metrics that more or less stand in for customer satisfaction. The advantage of promoting these modes of governance in the state's institutions, according to John Major who enthusiastically restructured the civil service along these lines, was that employees, service users, and the agencies themselves would autonomously and more efficiently deliver their "products" than administrative instruction. For all the trumpeting of levelling up and the tacit acknowledgement of market failure, Johnson's "modernisation" is premised upon leaving these strategies of governance intact. And why not? It individuates and atomises, encourages people to look to their own economic, cultural, and social capital, and failure, however that is defined, is a matter of bad luck or insufficient effort or ability. It inculcates an outlook that treats capitalism as the inescapable and normative horizon of social life.

Public health strategies for mitigating Covid cut against these neoliberal logics. The move to homeworking on the part of millions of workers, and the abeyance of work for the furloughed caused sleepless nights on the Tory benches. Management surveillance of performance was always the reality of the self-activating, entrepreneurial worker - hence the government's oft-noted keenness to get workers back at work. But on the more subtle level, Covid mitigation reorients the axis of responsibility. Early in the pandemic, it became common knowledge that masking up wasn't fantastic for preventing one from contracting the virus, but what it did do was prevent the spread of infected droplets. In other words, instead of the onus being on protecting oneself from infection we had a duty to protect others, especially given the prevalence of asymptomatic spread. All of a sudden, the responsible citizen in the age of Covid went from the self-interested and self-regarding individual to being a potential vector in a web of contagion. Our actions were not about risks to ourselves, but risk to others. I was responsible for the health of acquaintances, colleagues, friends, family, etc. and they were responsible for my continued good health too. Covid communitarianism meant those who were clinically vulnerable and/or could not have the vaccine for whatever reason were acknowledged, and that the public health of the group was the guarantee for the public health of the individual.

It's not difficult to see how a solidaristic Covid citizenship poses neoliberal governance and with it the class relations they support a danger. You can have a serious pandemic strategy that puts saving lives first, or a haphazard approach that buttresses the wage relation, rentier and debt relationships, and social security conditionality. Far from being the dictatorial overlords of a NHS-state with Tory characteristics, Johnson's government have gone out of their way to undermine lockdowns and any other mitigation measures. The Autumn and Winter 2020-21 lockdowns were nowhere near as stringent as the first, and the progressive relaxing of precautions, culminating in July's absurd "Freedom Day" and the end of furlough and the UC uplift, progressively shifted the pendulum away from communitarianism. Covid was now a matter of individual self-responsibility, and contracting it was a case of rotten luck or risky behaviour. Why else resist even the most elementary of precautions, namely masking up on public transport, shops, and indoor communal areas? It had nothing to do with loving freedom and liberty, and everything to do with resetting the governance underpinning class relations after the pandemic's initial shock.

The problem with the anti-lockdown left's "critique" of Covid precautions is its fidelity to the state's effort at returning things back to normal. Recommending comrades look to their own individual risk profiles is the advice Johnson, Javid, and the grim coterie of Tory backbenchers are proffering. They make exactly the same arguments about young people having their youth robbed from them, their new-found concern for mental health if people can't socialise, and the tough time businesses and workers in hospitality are facing. Albeit with an anti-authoritarian sheen.

This is not working class politics. Building anti-capitalist capacities is a collective enterprise. It requires the construction of new institutions, new political collectives, rebuilding and strengthening workplace organisation, popular cultures of resistance, and encouraging newly emergent movements. These overlapping efforts and projects can only head in the same direction if there is not just a theoretical appreciation of the solidarity necessary to hold them together, but a substantive politics that encourages it. It's perhaps unsurprising those bits of the left closest to and embedded in the labour movement have had the best approach to Coronavirus. They have put the safety and wellbeing of our class first and raised the necessary demands.

Yet this left libertarian response is not simply a matter of comrades having the "wrong ideas". It has material roots more serious than wanting to go to the pub. Firstly, there is the universal experience of restrictions themselves. These range from inconvenience to the hellish and the tragic. People not seeing loved ones for up to two years, the corrosion of social isolation, not being there when family members and friends needed them. Saying final farewells over Zoom, and unnecessary bereavements because Covid put people off attending medical appointments. A great well of sadness, regret, and bitterness has filled to overflowing for the duration of this crisis, which helps explain why the anger over the Tory Christmas parties is so volcanic. Who cannot empathise with the desire to be free of Covid restrictions, particularly when some of the comrades making the libertarian argument have badly suffered? The second is thanks to the class location of most young people. Disproportionately working in hospitality and retail, and with Sunak's studied refusal to directly support workers in these depressed sectors, restriction-scepticism is straightforwardly the spontaneous reaction to livelihoods under threat from a virus that isn't terribly likely to do them serious harm. It has internalised and fatally resigned itself to no government help, which merely reinforces the scepticism. Surely it's no accident a number of comrades who have made this case now find themselves left media entrepreneurs of some description, and so are subject to similar levels of precarity. The left libertarian critique articulates these sentiments, even if it's not making the relationship between the political position and their class basis explicit.

Covid is going to be with us for a long time and we have to learn about how to cope with it. The question is how we live these lives. Do we tail the government and, despite ourselves, assist them in bedding down their post-pandemic settlement - which looks a hell of a lot like the pre-pandemic settlement? Or do we try something different and proceed from our class analysis of the situation?

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