The Lockdown Left Is Waging a Class War…on the Working Class

"The left" now agitating for economic ruination, unemployment, house arrest, and the decommissioning of working people

If you want to know how messed-up politics has become in the Covid era, consider this: a Tory government is agitating for working people to have the right to return to work, while the TUC and the rest of the left are howling for working people to be kept at home. Evil Tories want to get the working classes working, while hip Corbynistas cry: ‘No! It’s too dangerous. Leave them in their flats.’

It’s an about-face of epic proportions. How far we’ve come since the Battle of Orgreave. It is now the left that wants working people to be decommissioned, put out to pasture, languishing on state-paid wages or Universal Credit and uncertain of whether their job will even exist once the lockdown is finally lifted. And it’s the Tories saying: ‘Erm, don’t you think it would be better if working people worked?’

Of course, the left’s justification for its new policy of preventing the working classes from working is that they might catch Covid-19 and die. They’re ramping up the culture of fear in a desperate effort to present their bizarre, historically unprecedented anti-work outlook as a good, noble thing. Actual facts – like the fact that under-40s have made up just 0.75 per cent of deaths from Covid – don’t get so much as a look-in. No, keep all workers at home, even the fit, healthy young ones.

Part of the problem here is the colonisation of the left by the middle classes, which means the left has less and less understanding of the importance of work as a means of earning, and feeling autonomous, and having a sense of dignity. This is why someone like Owen Jones, still working from his comfortable apartment, can describe the government’s desire to get people back to work as ‘the working classes [being] ordered to return to their function as generators of revenue’. Only someone completely removed from the reality and aspirations of working-class communities could describe work in such dehumanising terms. Jones thinks he is caricaturing the Evil Tory view of working people, but in truth he is letting slip his own middle-class pity for the poor, exploited souls of the capitalist machine.

This is also why the pseudo-Marxists at Novara Media can do a pisstake of the government’s new Covid slogan that says: ‘Back To Work, Catch The Virus, Save The Billionaires.’ Because for these vulgar leftists, capitalism is little more than a conspiracy in which the filthy rich steer the dim workers into harm’s way in a desperate bid to make loadsamoney. No wonder the Corbynista movement was so easily overrun by the Socialism of Fools.

And of course there’s a huge element of hypocrisy in the middle-class left’s insistence that workers be kept at home until their workplaces have been made 100 per cent Covid-proof (as if such a thing were even possible). These people are still shopping for food, getting Dirty Burgers delivered by Deliveroo guys, giving lectures via internet systems maintained by electricians. If they really thought work was unsafe right now, they’d be agitating for a complete shutdown. They aren’t, of course, because the ‘work as death’ line they are currently pushing is entirely cynical. It is not based on reasoned reflection of the threat posed by Covid-19, far less on the needs and interests of working people, but rather on the question of how best to score political points against the Tory government.

The anti-work left presents its opposition to the lifting of the lockdown as a pro-working-class stance. ‘We want to save the working classes from death’, they say, blissfully unaware of how much they sound like Victorian moralists seeking to lift The Poor out of darkness (or in this case to keep them in darkness, under house arrest, for as long as possible). But there is nothing remotely pro-working-class about keeping working people locked down with no regard whatsoever for the devastation that will result from this unprecedented shutdown of economic life and from the manmade recession we are creating.

Britain is heading for the largest economic contraction on record. It is predicted that millions will lose their jobs. The global lockdown contagion has had even more terrible consequences elsewhere. More than 100 million Indians are at risk of losing their livelihoods. The International Labour Organisation believes that 1.6 billion people could lose work as a result of the pandemic and the lockdowns. And that’s not to mention the poverty and hunger that will take hold in various parts of the world as a result of the halting of production and trade.

The naivety of believing that halting economic life is in any way good for working people is staggering. The lockdown most severely affects working-class people who need to leave their homes to earn a living, and its global consequences will be most severely felt by the world’s lowest-paid workers.

Using fact-lite fear and panic to sustain the lockdown – by arguing that working people risk death from Covid-19 if they go back to work now – is a transparent effort by the left to escape moral responsibility for what it is really agitating for: economic contraction, unemployment, and the decommissioning of working people.

Pro-working-class? Do me a favour. To the modern left, working people are just weapons to be wielded against the Evil Tories, not individuals for whom work is a source of money and independence and pride. There is far more humanity in Boris Johnson’s invitation of people to return to work than there is in the left’s deranged insistence that working people will die if they leave their houses.

Source: Spiked

30 Comments
  1. sabelmouse says

    i can understand the common left, but the real left?!

  2. Padre says

    Why do you keep calling it “The left”?There’s nothing left left in them!

  3. Julio Cesar Perez says

    For a long time our economic bubble would burst and that we would plunge into a nightmarish economic collapse. Now it has happened, and it turns out that fear of COVID-19 was the “black swan event” that triggered the collapse. The ironic thing is that COVID-19 is not even close to the worst thing that is going to happen to us. But it was more than enough to topple our incredibly fragile economic system, and now tens of millions are deeply suffering. During the last recession, the unemployment rate peaked at about 10 percent, and we have already left that number in the dust. The figures that we are seeing now are truly, truly horrifying, and what is even more frightening is that they aren’t even that accurate. The Central Bank seemingly is an ongoing mission to destroy the bottom 90%.
    The one lesson that we have clearly learned since the 2008 “Great Financial Crisis,” is that monetary and fiscal policy interventions do not lead to increased levels of economic wealth or prosperity. What these programs have done, is act as a wealth transfer system from the bottom 90% to the top 10%.

    1. Cherry Pie says

      Fear of the virus not the virus itself is the problem?

  4. dreamjoehill says

    And this site is called “anti-empire?”

    I don’t think there’s an anti-empire article on this entire site.

    It’s all COVID-19 denial all the time.

    I wonder who’s paying them to pump out this crap.

    1. RagingAfrikan says

      Troll, go away!

    2. Cherry Pie says

      And crap it is. Bigtime crapola.

  5. ke4ram says

    This is really something! In the US State of Washington the governor is threatening folks that disobey with ACTUAL house arrest. They will not be allowed to go out of their house/apartment even for food. It will be brought to them by a State geek.

    I had no idea that people were so gullible, so pathetically timid, so absolutely stupid. In the USA these are not even laws,,, just dictates of the oligarch government class. Yet people OBEY just as if they were in fact law. Worse,,, arrogant law enforcement act as if they were laws.

    I am surprised that there hasn’t been serious blowback toward the governments. Wow! They close you down, eliminate your job, eliminate your livelihood, put you in house arrest, force you to wear masks that are bad for your health, tell you how close you can get to another human, eventually force you to take vaccines that will likely kill you or make you sterile, and you obey! What the hell does it take for people to simply say no? For thousands to surround the tyrants to emphasize their point!. What else have they got to do now that they are unemployed? It’s absolutely incredible!

    1. Cherry Pie says

      You have a rich full fantasy life.

  6. Mensch59 says

    But there is nothing remotely pro-working-class about keeping working people locked down with no regard whatsoever for the devastation that will result from this unprecedented shutdown of economic life and from the manmade recession we are creating.

    Too true. @disqus_D0gqaX8WRE:disqus, would you like to weigh in? Maybe you can bring into the discussion how “the devastation that will result from this unprecedented shutdown of economic life and from the manmade recession we are creating” is racist.

  7. Saint Jimmy (Russian American) says

    There is no left in the US. Big Money killed the American left during the 1990s. There is no democracy in the US – only empty rituals. The US is a financial fascist state that now resembles Brazil. It is becoming a hell for those of us who remember when it was worth living in.

    1. Steve Kaczynski says

      There has not been a significant US left since the 1950s – it never recovered from the postwar Red Scare. The New Left in the US did not exist outside colleges.
      European countries were a different matter.

      1. Sharon Marlowe says

        I thought the left died in the 1930s when the U.S. and Britain were in favour of Germany and opened businesses there, like Ford automobiles?

      2. Saint Jimmy (Russian American) says

        Maybe so. We could argue about it but it doesn’t matter. We have a conformist, dumbed down corporate dictatorship.

    2. Sharon Marlowe says

      When was that time, Saint Jimmy? Wasn’t the left killed in the 1930s?

      1. Saint Jimmy (Russian American) says

        When the Clintons sold their fat asses to wall street, along with any decency left in the democrat party, and proceeded to completely bow down to wall street and multinationals for 8 years. That’s when. The coup was completed under bush the younger moron.

        1. Sharon Marlowe says

          Agreed that that was a notable moment leading to today, but before that, from 1980 to 1992, it was three consecutive terms of CIA Bush in power, and prior to that, Carter introduced Brzezinski to the White House. I can’t seem to find a left-leaning White House in the 20th century.

          1. Mensch59 says

            I can’t seem to find a left-leaning White House in the 20th century.

            Me neither. Perhaps the closest the US got was Eugene Debs running for president.

            1. Sharon Marlowe says

              Thank you for that name to look up today, because I don’t know anything about him:)

            2. Cherry Pie says

              I am a fan of Eugene Victor Debs. He was a candidate for POTUS from American Socialist Party 1916. I got interested in him because I read this quote when I was 15:
              While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. The most heroic word in all languages is revolution. I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.

          2. Saint Jimmy (Russian American) says

            That’s a matter of opinion. FDR. His administration’s response to this depression would have been completely different and FOCUSED ON JOBS.

            1. Sharon Marlowe says

              Just based on the power that, for example, Ford had– if Ford is pro-Germany in the 1930s, then that’s a powerful influence against communism in the U.S. Germany was probably against communism moreso than against jews (though there’s probably some argument to be made that Germany looked at communism as a jewish thing).
              But yes, it’s only my speculation:)

            2. Saint Jimmy (Russian American) says

              I’m simply now focused on a few facts that Americans no longer even consider. The unemployment rate will not get much better – ever – and will remain around 20 percent, even after these shit holes trumpet victory and a big economic recovery – BOTH PARTIES WILL DO THIS INCLUDING FAKE AMERICAN “SOCIALISTS”. There will be no repair or undergirding of our economy, such as national health care, permanent, long-term job creation across the country with guaranteed lifetime employment and retirement. There will be no separation of the banking and gambling sectors of the economy. There will be no slow, steady re-creation of industry in America.

              America is dead. This was just the second big robbery of the corpse and it isn’t over. Bigger job losses are coming this year, combined with billions in free money for the corporate Lords who cut the jobs with no promises to create jobs or any security.

              Fuck that environmental shit. Fuck racial issues. It is only us and the billionaires. That’s all that matters any more.

            3. dreamjoehill says

              You’re political observations are pretty accurate. Too bad you’re an arrogant jerk.

  8. Charles Homer says

    Here is an article that looks at the high cost of unemployment on both health and mortality:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-high-ultimate-cost-of-covid-19.html

    The masses of the working class are paying an extremely high cost for the actions taken by a few elites.

    1. Mensch59 says

      Good link. Thanks.

    2. sabelmouse says

      they usually do 🙁

  9. Cherry Pie says

    Nature has given us the General Strike we have been needing so badly. And anusholes like the author, instead of utilizing the situation, are further fueling the real abuse of workers with whackadoo bullcaca.

    1. Mike the human says

      But what about the laaand lords?

      1. Cherry Pie says

        Hang them. It’s traditional.

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