If there is any consistency on the activist revolutionary left in the UK about coronavirus it is in their massive overestimation of the risk posed by it, in tandem with a universal acceptance that the Tories were initially hell bent on a ‘herd immunity’ strategy.
“Whilst superficially based on an honorable tradition of advocating necessary health and safety measures for working people, the reality is that ‘don’t do anything until everything is a hundred percent risk free’ is not only an irrational, cynical, opportunistic, and unsustainable position, but a politically dangerous one in that has provided cover for an even more outrageous concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few that even existed before.”
The data is in: lockdowns serve no useful purpose and cause catastrophic societal and economic harms. They must never be repeated in this country
Left Lockdown Sceptics interviews Andy Libson, an American anti-lockdown high school teacher and revolutionary socialist
It was early on a sunny morning in April 2020 when I entered the store at the entrance of the compound where I used to live, located in a working-class neighbourhood in Bogota, to buy arepas (maize preparations) for my breakfast. As soon as I entered the old man who runs the store, certainly a migrant from a rural area judging by his accent, asked me behind his mask, ‘so, Paolita, how do you see the situation?’ To which I replied, ‘well Abelardo, we humans created this disaster, we now need to face it’.
Although it his now rumoured that nurses will get 2%, the pay offer proves once and for all that the government isn’t locking us down to protect the NHS – it is using support for the NHS to justify an assault on workers’ rights. In reply, NHS workers should join the public in mass civil disobedience.
When he was reflecting on the seemingly interminable periods of political stasis when nothing much changes, interrupted by concentrated outbreaks of dynamic political developments, Lenin astutely observed that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.
