49. AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY & COVID 19: a Postscript on a Pandemic

We were about to send my book, Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism, to the printers in early March when my publisher asked me, amidst the unfolding crisis, whether it might be worth doing a short appendix on Covid-19. I thought about it briefly but replied, confident: ‘I like the idea but worry a rushed Covid response might date the work’. 

The book, released in May, is a piece of political philosophy which makes the case for anarchism as the only political framework that can fulfil the underlying social contract upon which, I argue, any legitimate politics is necessarily based: the promise of making life ‘better’ for ‘people’ than it would be without it. At the book’s heart is an argument – meant to be as timeless as possible – that the only intelligible way of defining ‘people’ within such a contract is as all people, and that therefore the only reasonable way of judging what might be ‘better’ for a society is to unpack those interests universal to all people as a means of identifying the bare minimum requirement of any legitimate political arrangement. The rest of the book shows the multiple ways in which our current representative democratic arrangements, situated within capitalist economic systems, have historically failed, and continue to fail, at meeting this minimum requirement to fulfil their citizens’ ‘species-interests’, concluding that the only authentic political model which can fulfil this legitimating contract is a form of small-scale, federated democratic anarchism.

But the world I critiqued in the book seems a very different one from the world into which it has been published. It would therefore be an easy objection to make now, given the enormity of both the global challenge caused by Covid-19, and the unprecedented response to it by those same governments I lambasted in the book, that arguments made about political arrangements before Covid-19 are the ones we must now consider dated.

Unfortunately for the world, though helpful to my book, far from illustrating the necessity of government, Covid-19 has served only to support the thesis defended within the pages of Authentic Democracy, proving even further how our current, flawed, political arrangements continue to fail us. We don’t even have to look too far down the list of ‘species-interests’ identified in the book to see this, with number one being the fairly self-evident interest in ‘avoiding unnecessary death and preventable suffering’. In the UK, at the time of my writing this article, there have been nearly 42,000 deaths caused by the coronavirus. While some of the deceased may well have died anyway during this period from underlying medical conditions, it is well-documented by now that numerous failings by the UK government since it first became clear there was a potentially fatal virus spreading around the globe led to a crisis in this country on a far larger scale than was necessary, and one which was entirely preventable. Delays in locking down the country and quarantining those coming into the UK; failure to stockpile vital PPE, invest in ventilators or properly fund the NHS; messing up and misusing testing, tracking and tracing of the virus; introducing a furlough scheme which did not cover everyone who needed it quickly enough or, for some workers, cover them at all; maintaining a punitive benefit system and the catastrophic ramifications of ten years of unnecessary austerity policies which left many of the most vulnerable in the country unable to safely self-isolate or socially distance when needed, along with an ever-expanding record of confused or contradictory messaging from the Prime Minister and his team which left even people who could stay home unclear about what was, and wasn’t, safe in this strange new world all contributed to the glut of unnecessary death and preventable suffering. Far from keeping the British public safe during the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK government made decision after decision, month after month, which puts responsibility for the country’s shameful death-toll – the highest in Europe – squarely at their feet.

In each case, the reason for these governmental failings was subservience to an economy instead of acting in the interests of the people they are supposed to represent. Whether it was attempts to keep businesses open as long as possible, the consequences of years of privatisation, or simply, as in the complicated and inadequate furlough scheme, commitment to maintaining the myths of the economy even if it cost people their lives, each decision seems made not to make life better for people, but to ensure ‘business as usual’ can continue when and if the virus is defeated. A brazen devotion to economic interests over the interests of citizens exposed further by the way in which, when lockdown restrictions were finally eased, it was not to reconnect us as a society after months of isolation – allowing reunions with family members and friends; safe and socially distanced visits to see loved ones in hospital; expanding the numbers who can attend funerals, or care homes; re-allowing small weddings and modest social gatherings, etc. – but merely to rush us back to work. Nothing has changed in terms of our likelihood of catching and potentially dying from Covid-19 since the lockdown was introduced. There is no vaccine, no hidden stashes of PPE or ventilators that have been discovered, not even an agreed pharmaceutical treatment for those who get sick. Yet, as soon as the numbers started to fall, government, counting the cost to the economy rather than the cost to our humanity, pushed us back out into harm’s way, allowing us to be reacquainted with our bosses and colleagues before we were even allowed to reunite with our families and friends. 

While some might say that protecting the economy is protecting citizens, such claims only hold credence in a world where we forget the contingent and synthetic nature of such economies. Although currently it is true that without our jobs most of us will have no money for food, for shelter, for the basic necessities of life, and that employers not generating an income cannot conceivably afford to pay their employees to stay at home, this is true only because we have chosen to set up economic arrangements in this way. The notion behind the furlough scheme, or far more humane calls for a universal basic income, is a reminder that economies can, and have been, arranged in radically different ways, putting people before profit. The number of citizens dead or seriously ill with Covid-19 because they were faced with the stark choice of putting themselves at risk or losing their livelihood demonstrates that our current capitalist system, like the governments who prop it up, continues to fail in making life better for people than they might be without it. Likewise, those who became known as ‘key workers’ during the crisis showed us that the essential work which needs to be done to keep us safe and healthy – cleaners, food producers, healthcare workers, etc. – is not the work our economic system has hitherto valued.

Of course, some might point at sensationalist pictures shared on social media of citizens behaving poorly, flooding to beaches on sunny bank holidays when they were meant to be self-isolating, as evidence populations still need governments to coerce them into acting appropriately when they fail to do so autonomously. However, it is worth noting that the vast majority of citizens – most of whom, if they caught Covid-19, would suffer only a mild illness – did not flock to the beaches and, by choice, sacrificed months of their lives to stay home and keep the most vulnerable in the population safe. The government decree of a formal ‘lockdown’ and shuttering of businesses was essential only to counteract the negative pull of an economy with no such concern for our safety. A lockdown which would have been impossible to enforce coercively (by cramming offenders together into impossible to social-distance prisons?) and was successful only because of the collective, freely chosen, will of millions of individual citizens to agree to keep each other safe, even at great personal cost. Meanwhile, as government repeatedly failed to act in the best interests of its citizens and the economic structure disincentivised people from acting responsibly, it has been the actions of ordinary, everyday people which have been there to genuinely make life better for us during this crisis. Whether it be individuals or groups simply choosing to stay at home or close their businesses long before any official edict came from Westminster; the million volunteers who offered to help the NHS as hospitals became overwhelmed; the countless formal and informal mutual aid groups popping up across the country to bring essential supplies to the self-isolating, vulnerable or shielding unable to leave their homes or arrange deliveries; or the diverse ways in which communities both local and international have come together online to provide innovative ways of offering financial, psychological or moral support to those who need it – from free educational resources, arts events, communal quizzes and ways of keeping fit; to charitable giving to fund those who may have lost their income and foodbanks that continued feeding the hungry; to strategies to keep safe victims of violence or those vulnerable to grooming whilst stuck inside dangerous domestic situations; to simply checking in with those known to be alone during this difficult time and reminding them that others are still there for them. As our government, and our economy, continued to fail us throughout this pandemic,society continued to flourish without it. 

Far from coming to our rescue at this time of crisis, our political and economic system remain unfit for the purpose on which their very legitimacy rests: that of making life better for people. That these systems are found so wanting, even during this most life and death test of their competency while we, the people, continue to make life better for ourselves in spite of their multiple failings only confirms the argument I make in Authentic Democracy. If we truly want to emerge from Covid-19 into a better world than the one from which we quarantined we can’t succumb to the tempting calls that we ‘get back to normal’ as soon as possible. It remains all too clear that ‘normal’ is not good enough. We urgently need something better.

Author: D. McKee

Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is out now on Tippermuir Books or available from Amazon in print or as an eBook. Also available as an eBook on kobo. For more information follow the author page on Facebook.

Authentic Democracy Reviews:

“Standing in the analytic political philosophical tradition of Paul McLaughlin, Magda Egoumenides and Robert P. Wolff, Dan McKee’s accessible, thoughtful and expansive text carefully undermines liberal justifications for state power and defends an anarchistic egalitarian ethic. This book makes a valuable contribution to this discipline, summarising and critiquing traditional arguments and providing provocative arguments for anti-capitalism and anti-statism.”

- Benjamin Franks, Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy, University of Glasgow, author of Anarchisms, Postanarchisms and Ethics

“This is a highly readable and provocative book.  Its author works within the best traditions of normative political theory, posing questions about what political structures and institutions are for and whether our current systems are the best we can come up with.  The discussion combines an insightful survey of the familiar versions of contract theory that have been used to justify the state, with an account of the material conditions necessary to ensure a liveable human life, and a trenchant critique of the reality of life in contemporary capitalist societies. The conclusion, that only anarchism  - as a federated, fully active and participatory democratic system -  can meet the minimal ethical obligation of preventing unnecessary human suffering, will perhaps be an uncomfortable one for readers whose response to contemporary concerns about “the crisis of democracy” has been to argue for more, not less, state power.   It deserves to be read, both for its challenges to conventional narratives about the normative desirability and practical inevitability of representative democratic states, and for its contribution to the project of dispelling some common misunderstandings about what anarchism means and what it can offer.”

-       Professor Judith Suissa, Professor of Philosophy of Education, UCL Institute of Education, author of Anarchy and Education

 “Dan McKee offers an engaging and accessible case for anarchism, deeply rooted in ethics and powerfully responding to conventional defences of authority. This book is an original and valuable contribution which deserves a wide audience”.

-       Uri Gordon, Teaching Fellow, Durham University, author of Anarchy Alive! and joint editor Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics.