39. ANARCHISM AND COVID-19 - Does the need for government intervention undermine the anarchist argument?
As an anarchist, Monday March 23rd here in the UK left me confused. I found myself endorsing a government-enforced nationwide lockdown, radically curbing our freedom of movement and limiting our social interactions with each other. A legal clampdown which at any other time would have horrified me was something I had been practically hoping for as the day began with news reports that the country’s citizens were treating the previous Friday’s edict to “stay in your homes” and closure of all schools, pubs, cafes, bars, theatres, cinemas, gyms and leisure centres as an early start to the Easter Holidays. Far from “socially distancing”, people were crowding at the beach, at the supermarket, at the park. Those of us even vaguely literate to the science of epidemiology were bewildered by such gross disregard for the vulnerable in our society and lack of understanding at how infection could spread. It seemed that those flocking to teeming public venues didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation: a potentially lethal virus, which you can be infected with without showing any symptoms, racing across the globe and infecting populations at a rate too fast for their healthcare systems to cope with. By keeping apart, we can slow the spread of the disease and hopefully make it more manageable, ensuring our hospitals and emergency services are not overwhelmed and resources not stretched at the cost of our fellow citizens’ lives. All we had to do to keep each other safe was stay in our homes and do nothing. Read a book or three. Watch some TV. Interact with the family we are usually too busy to see. The holidays had come early, but we had to enjoy them fairly solitarily. And we were limited to only the food already in our cupboards. So it was like a disappointing holiday at an ill-equipped self catered place without much of a view, but with the added bonus of saving lives.
But the British public couldn’t cope, and so the government stepped in. Mere suggestion and encouragement became law, backed by threat of police enforcement. No gatherings of more than two. Only allowed out of the house once a day for exercise. The whole country became a prison - and I was glad.
Which, of course, led to those friends and family members who know my anarchist leanings but are not sympathetic to them to feel sorry for me. “Surely you can see now,” they would say, “that anarchism doesn’t work? Left to their own devices, people are selfish and make dangerous decisions. Sometimes you need a government to step in and do by force what autonomous people won’t do without being made to, for the common good.”
As an argument it goes something like this:
1) An anarchist claims that governments are unnecessary because people can govern themselves.
2) The people were left to govern themselves on the matter of stopping the spread of coronavirus, and they failed to do so.
3) Therefore government has proven itself necessary.
But I reject the claim wholeheartedly because the argument is far too simplistic and doesn’t fully understand the anarchist critique, which is not that government is merely unnecessary, but that government is actively damaging to its citizens and state-structures - not merely governments but the entire state system, including its economies - undermine the potential for cooperation and mutual aid humanity possesses.
Assuming that people genuinely were choosing to act irresponsibly (for it still remains possible the government’s negligence in remembering that many people don’t actually watch 5pm press briefings, live in a Twitter bubble, or subscribe to daily newspapers and simply did not hear the message) an anarchist response to the above argument - and my response to those doubting friends and family - would go something like this:
1) While it is true that citizens failed to autonomously choose to follow the suggested government advice to self-isolate and socially distance, there are reasons why people did not and many of these reasons stem from the corruption of the state rather than any natural or intractable human selfishness.
2) People largely failed to freely follow the advice because…
a) They could not afford to follow the advice. Although the government, lately, the Friday before, announced a significant expansion of social welfare in order to ease the financial burden of those missing out on income by staying home, the expansion was not enough, not immediate, and not guaranteed. Nor did it cover everyone, most notably the self-employed. And even when it did finally cover the self-employed the following week, many were left unable to claim any money until at least June, and even then there was no guarantee what income they received would cover all their costs Lest we forget that renters are beholden to landlords who may kick them out if the rent is not met, and that the majority of homeowners in this country do not own their homes at all, but rather have them on loan from banks hungry for the next mortgage payment. Food, water, gas, electricity - these utilities all come at a price. The capitalist economic system maintained and reenforced by the state has made the life of many economically precarious. People without economic security under such a system have no guarantee that they will keep a roof over the heads or food in their bellies if they stay at home, and so they don’t.
b) Because of the economic fragility and struggle of most people’s lives under the current system, many don’t have the luxury of having a home fit to spend locked inside. Lack of space, lack of gardens or local green areas, make it difficult for health and wellbeing to stay inside, especially with young children used to being active and unable to comprehend the rationale behind suddenly being locked inside, especially those who are not neurotypical and have extra needs. If we all lived in nice houses, with space to run about in, it would be easy to stay home and save lives, but too many of us don’t. So they didn’t.
c) I mentioned earlier the idea of people acting as if the Easter holidays had come early. Well because of the capitalist economic system over which our government presides most of us are overworked and overstressed and do not get enough time to rest and relax. many have no holidays at all, or extended time away from work, and those of us who do are seeing the closure of our places of employment at this time coming with the tacit agreement that we all know afterwards the usual holiday guarantees will be over. As a teacher, I have already been told we will be working over Easter. So knowing that they will not be able to request time off later in the year after an enforced absence because of COVID-19, but also knowing that this time off will not be a holiday as such, because they will trapped for most of it inside their homes, many took advantage of the loopholes and lack of clarity in the government advice and went to the beach. It may be their last opportunity for the foreseeable future, or their first opportunity to do so in years. Not a wise choice. Not justifiable. But understandable. And the fault of our economic system, propped up by our political system, rather than our intrinsic human nature. I’d also add that the way capitalism works turns everything into a commodity, and much of our economy - as we are finding out - is run by monetising our free time. Companies want us to spend our money with them. They use clever advertising campaigns and marketing strategies to make us part with our money, so much so that for many the prospect of weeks, if not months, of free time without being able to go out and spend, spend, spend, is free time they simply do not know what to do with. Again, not because people are naturally unable to entertain themselves and be creative, but because they have been trained their entire lives to be passive and buy-in their entertainment. Children especially, once left alone with their imaginations, have had their childhood monetised considerably, preying on the consciences of parents worried about doing anything wrong in the raising of their children that might lead to them missing out on the limited opportunities offered by our economic system. The nightmare scenario of their children locked indoors for months with nothing to do, was an incentive to make a break for freedom while freedom was still available and get in one last trip to the park, to the beach, to the National Trust property which explicitly advertised that they were open during this time. And why would the National Trust do something so irresponsible? Because they too need money to maintain the properties in their trust. Because the government had no money in their bailouts for charities, which have all suffered as a result of the economic shock of Covid-19. And why do we need charities in the first place? Because we have a political and economic system which leaves so many without that which they need.
d) History has shown us that government cannot be trusted. We have been lied to in order to fight unjustified wars, we have been lied to about the need for certain policies, such as austerity, and we were lied to by our current government repeatedly and unashamedly throughout their electoral campaign. We have been lied to by governments and we have been let down. See the Windrush scandal, or the treatment of many European residents in the aftermath of Brexit. See the miners’ strikes, the poll tax riots, the MP expenses scandal. This has had a twofold effect on government announcements about Covid-19. Firstly, scepticism about the truth of any of the statements being made. You can never fully trust again someone who has lied to you before, so it ought not be surprising that many Brits have heard Boris Johnson speak to them in his daily coronavirus press briefings and not believed a word of it. Nor do they believe the experts speaking in support of government policy because, frankly, they’ve heard experts lie in the service of government before. But the second way in which distrust in the government has led to the recent behaviour of some UK citizens is that they do not trust they will be looked after by government. They have witnessed, in many cases firsthand, the cruel indifference of welfare policies which have left people to die in poverty, oversights which have deported the desperate and the vulnerable, and corruption which have protected certain interests at the expense of others. Knowing government’s history of letting people down, and letting people die, is it any wonder they second-guess government advice and take their chances on a quick panic-buy at the local Tesco? Better to have some food in the house when the shortages come and we’re left to fend once again for ourselves than be one of the statistics in the inevitable hollow inquiry that follows yet another government failure. There wasn’t £350 million a week after Brexit with which to fund the NHS, and there may not be 80% of our income in the latest government promises either.
e) A concerted government dismantling of our National Health Service over decades has made us deaf to claims about its failings. We are told every winter that there aren’t enough hospital beds, that there is an impending crisis in the sector, and many of these stories are amplified despite their not actually being true, because they serve an ideological purpose - creating the case for privatisation. Keeping us convinced that the NHS is on the verge of collapse is a good way of getting us ready for private capital to bail it out, as has been done in various ways to get support for privatisation through the backdoor on a number of former NHS services. Yet survey after survey shows that the British public love the NHS and are happy with what it offers. It is therefore entirely possible that years of media fear-mongering about the NHS being on life-support while the day-to-day experience of citizens using it is largely positive has made us take stories about an overwhelmed NHS in our stride? Not because we’re selfish monsters who don’t care about putting pressure on an already stretched NHS, but because we have been battered with anti-NHS propaganda for so long we’ve developed a deep sense of distrust for such stories. Like the boy who cried wolf, tell us the NHS will collapse too many times without it actually collapsing and we won’t believe you when you tell us that this time it is for real.
3) Therefore, a government-enforced lockdown being needed in this case to force people to make the right decision to stay home which they failed to autonomously make themselves is merely a further symptom of the state failing us rather than evidence of its necessity.
4) As an anarchist, therefore, while I may personally welcome the government acting to ensure the health and safety of the people, finally, by enforcing a lockdown - because I don’t want people to unnecessarily die - I can simultaneously acknowledge that such enforcement would not be needed were we living lives untouched by the corruptions of government in the first place.
5) Supporting the lockdown does not, therefore, undermine the anarchist argument, but, to the contrary, makes it even clearer how dangerous, infantilising, and corrupting such state-systems can be.
AUTHOR: D.McKee