Originally published October 2015

Little noticed amongst all the Syria coverage, peace has been breaking out across Ukraine. After a faltering start, the so-called ‘Minsk II’ agreement – signed in February by the so-called ‘Normandy Four’ – now seems to be making serious headway.

A new ceasefire, which began on September 1, has been largely adhered to by all sides, paving the way for the withdrawal of weaponry from the frontline which was a key demand of the Minsk agreements.

On the political front, there have also been breakthroughs. One of the key sticking points was resolved two weeks ago when representatives of the self-declared People’s Republics in Lugansk and Donbass agreed to postpone elections to ensure they are held in line with Ukrainian law and international electoral standards. Meanwhile, in August the Ukrainian parliament – after a heated and tumultuous session – approved a law on decentralization that grants significant autonomy to the Eastern regions; another key demand of the Minsk agreements.

That the so-called ‘Normandy Four’ (Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine) are keen for the peace to hold no surprises. For, ultimately, the US-UK destabilization strategy in Ukraine aims at weakening all of them.

It is worth recalling the key US and UK role in fomenting the war in the East of Ukraine. Whilst both powers openly supported the fascist-led coup in February 2014 – British EU commissioner Catherine Ashton, for example, giving immediate recognition and finance to the new coup government – they have also been instrumental in stoking the war in the East of the country. When resistance to the coup began in the Donbass region in April, CIA Director John Brennan was immediately flown to Kiev. By the time he left, the Ukrainian coup government’s bloody crackdown on the Eastern regions was well under way; it was pretty obvious he had been sent to push for precisely this response.

However, the crackdown did not go as hoped. Ukrainian tanks were met by angry crowds demanding the soldiers refuse to fire on their compatriots and give up their weapons. Many did precisely this, expressing sympathy for the resistance and fraternizing with the crowds; within days, a full scale mutiny appeared to be underway, with 21 armored vehicles turned over to the resistance. The futility of a military solution became increasingly clear, and even the coup-installed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk began making noises about federalism and the need to respect the rights of ethnic Russians for the first time since coming to power. The door appeared to be opening for negotiations and some kind of peaceful compromise.

It was at this point that no less a figure than US Vice President Joe Biden was sent over – and, once again, the offensive was renewed the day he left. But this time the reliance was less on the regular army, and more on the ‘National Guard’, a new paramilitary formation created the month before by Andriy Parubiy. Parubiy, from the extreme Russophobic ‘Fatherland’ party, had been the ‘head of security’ of the Maidan protests (and therefore directly implicated in the sniper shootings of February 20) before being made National Security Chief of the new government following the coup. The National Guard was a crude means of putting ultra-nationalist militias on the government payroll – and following visits by Biden and Brennan these militias became the spearhead of the US policy of war on Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population.

Within weeks, new militia such as the Azov, Donbas and Dnipro battalions were created, incorporated into the National Guard and thrown into battle. Azov’s founder, Biletsky, explained that: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival: a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” The US has subsequently poured hundreds of millions into the training and equipping of such militias.

The result of this fascistic war has been to weaken Russia, Europe and Ukraine itself. On the one hand, it has been a willful provocation of Russia, whose very modest attempts to defend the eastern regions (allowing Russian volunteers to join the resistance, for example) have been characterized as aggression and used by the US as means of maneuvering Europe into supporting self-destructive sanctions against Russia. At the same time, Ukraine – which had higher per-capita industrial output than Germany during Soviet times – has become an economic basket case, facing massive inflation and economic contraction. Just last week, Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko requested a doubling of the $40 billion IMF rescue package just to stay afloat.

All of this suits the US very well. On the one hand, it is fully in line with veteran cold warrior (and Obama advisor) Zbigniew Brzezinski’s strategy to maintain US supremacy by keeping Europe and Russia divided. On the other, the sinking of the Ukrainian economy leaves the country utterly dependent on foreign loans and at the mercy of its Western creditors in the IMF, making the return of a genuinely non-aligned foreign policy along the lines of those followed by Yanukovich ever more unlikely. That is why the US has been at the forefront of pushing for this war.

It is also why not only Putin, but Hollande, Merkel and even Poroshenko are so keen for the war to end. So long as the ceasefire holds, European sanctions on Russia are due to expire at the end of the year. And as EU President Jean-Claude Juncker – well aware of the damage sanctions are doing to the European economy – said last week, “We must make efforts towards a practical relationship with Russia … we can’t go on like this… We can’t let our relationship with Russia be dictated by Washington.” Likewise, even Poroshenko – despite all his tub-thumping at the UN – knows that simple geographical reality dictates he needs to have a constructive relationship with Russia, and that continuation of the war will make economic recovery impossible.

For the US, however, the surest route to maintaining economic war against Russia, keeping Europe and Russia divided, and keeping Ukraine dependent, is for the war in the Ukraine to continue. This is why the US policy of directly supplying and training the fascist militias is so worrying. For these militias will be the wild card in the months to come. They have already shown their willingness to violently challenge Ukrainian government authority, and have made no bones about their willingness to subvert any peace agreement that is not to their liking.

Three people were killed, for example, during ultra-nationalist demonstrations against the decentralization law, and in July Right Sector militias were involved in a firefight with Ukrainian police, leaving four dead. Following that incident, the Right Sector’s press spokesman commented that: “In the event of a new revolution, Ukrainian president Poroshenko and his associates will not be able to flee the country as the former president did. They can expect nothing but execution in some dark cellar, conducted by young Ukrainian military men or members of the National Guard.” A fascinating article by Nicolai Petro argued that, in the event of a full scale showdown between the paramilitaries and the official government forces, it is far from clear that the government would win.

The fascist militias, then, are the wild card who may threaten the peace that Russia, Europe and even the Ukrainian government are seemingly so committed. Could it be that the US has been developing its relationship with these forces for this very reason? The fact that the immediate US response to the success of the recent ceasefire has been to promise an additional $300 million worth of training and equipment to military “and other security forces” in Ukraine is a worrying step indeed.

Part one: counter-revolutionary backstop

Originally published in Counterpunch magazine, 2021

The death of Elizabeth Windsor’s husband Philip Mountbatten earlier this year prompted an establishment-led frenzy of monarchism across Britain, with wall-to-wall sycophantic TV and radio coverage and Covid public information boards replaced with Philip’s portrait. The standard view of the British monarchy is that they are no more than symbolic figureheads lacking any real power; mere ornaments adorning the British political system. But the truth is that Philip and his family were and are crucial pillars in the maintenance of the class power of the British imperialist bourgeoisie, both domestically and globally. 

To begin with, the Sovereign still has a significant place in the British political system. The government is still known as ‘her majesty’s government,’ there to govern on her behalf. It is she who appoints the prime minister, not just in the UK, but in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and twelve other countries. And it is only by convention that she appoints the leader of the winning party following an election – as Gough Whitlam discovered in 1975 when the monarch’s representative in Australia dismissed him from office, despite his party having won the previous year’s elections, and appointed in his place the leader of the losing party, deeming the winners too radical. In the UK, she has weekly meetings with the prime minister to discuss government business, and her approval is required before any legislation passed by parliament can become law. Whilst it is true that this approval – known as Royal Assent – has been granted to all Acts of Parliament since 1707, what is more commonly withheld is the lesser known ‘Queen’s Consent.’ For bills affecting the Queen’s private interests, as well as those impinging on the royal prerogative powers (executive powers which can be used without consulting parliament), the Queen’s permission must be granted before it can be put to parliament. Such ‘Queen’s Consent’ (or ‘Prince’s Consent’ in the case of bills affecting the Prince of Wales’ private interests) was sought 146 times between 1970 and 2013 according to former government minister Norman Baker. Any bill that might affect the income from the monarch and her son’s private estates, for example (the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster, comprising some of the most lucrative real estate in the London, the Strand, as well as Balmoral and Sandringham) is subject to veto by the Crown. And here, unlike for Royal Assent, the Queen is neither obliged by convention to give her consent, nor to act in accordance with advice from her ministers – she is free to use her discretion. All laws affecting income or land tax, for example, or employment rights, require Queen’s Consent, as did the 2006 Animal Welfare Act, because it granted inspectors the right to go onto private estates to investigate claims of animal abuse. To prevent the bill being vetoed by the Crown, the Labour government agreed that the Windsors’ private estates would be exempt from the legislation – literally putting them above the law. Queen’s Consent even had to be sought for the 2008 Child Maintenance Act as it affected payments to the Queen’s private staff. And the Queen is uniquely exempt from a 1973 Act of Parliament requiring shareholders to identify themselves, allowing her to anonymously hold shares in companies of dubious repute. This exemption may well have been a condition for giving consent to the bill in the first place – we cannot know for sure, because no record is kept of when and how Queen’s Consent is used, and the negotiations go on behind closed doors before the first draft of the bill is ever published.    

    ‘Queen’s Consent’ is not only a tool for the personal enrichment of the Windsors, however. Bills which affect the Royal Prerogative powers (powers exercised on behalf of the monarch by government ministers) also require Queen’s Consent, and in this case, unlike in the case of bills where her personal interests are involved, the Queen will simply give or withhold consent according to advice from her ministers. This allows the government to use the Queen to prevent certain private members’ bills, for example, from even being discussed in parliament. Norman Baker’s excellent book on royal powers, “And What Do You Do?”, from which much of the material for this article was garnered, notes that the Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill in 1999 was blocked after the Queen withheld her consent, as was the 1964 Titles (Abolition) Bill and the 1969 Rhodesia Independence Bill, amongst others. 

But this use of Queen’s Consent is just one way in which the residual powers of the monarch are used by the government to avoid public or parliamentary debate and scrutiny. The Royal Prerogative powers, exercised by government ministers on behalf of the monarch, mainly pertain to foreign relations, and can be exercised without the consultation of parliament. This allows the prime minister to deploy troops and agree treaties without even informing, let alone consulting, parliament. The use of the Royal Prerogative occurs through the Privy Council, a group of current and former members of the government, senior members of the opposition, and senior members of the royal family, including the Queen. Members are sworn to secrecy, and the body has the power to secretly create legislation, known as ‘Orders of Council’. In the first half of 2000, over 250 such Orders were issued, around ten per week – including, says Baker (who was made a Privy Councillor by virtue of his position a junior minister in the Conservative-Liberal Coalition government) “an Order relating to the Saint Helena Act 1833, an amendment to a naval pension scheme, an Order relating to sanctions on Yemen – the sort of thing thing that the Commons ought to have had the chance to debate – and an amendment to the misuse of drugs act 1971, which I knew nothing about despite having been the drugs minister for a year until shortly before.” And these were just those passed in one meeting. Baker broke his oath to reveal this information, but such revelations are highly unusual, and the passage of such laws willo rarely reach the public domain. 

Yet the most important aspect of monarchical power in British politics is not the Windsors’ role in day-to-day government so much as their function as a kind of ‘counter-revolutionary backstop’. Globally, this is an ongoing and active role, as will be explored in part two of this series. In the domestic arena, however, it is more as a potential, a ‘force of last resort,’ should popular unrest ever get seriously out of hand.

Of fundamental importance here is the oath of loyalty sworn by members of the armed forces. This oath commits them to the defence, not of the constitution or the elected parliament, but of the monarch and her successors, and to do so “against all enemies,” including, therefore, domestic enemies – such as, for example, any future parliament that attempted to abolish them. It also commits them to “obey all orders of her majesty, her heirs and successors.” Were, for example, a genuinely radical parliament to be elected in Britain, the armed forces would be a priori committed to support an armed overthrow of such a parliament should the monarch command them to do so. Baker suggests that we “suppose Hitler had invaded England, and suppose Edward the Eighth, with his Nazi sympathies, were restored to the throne as a sort of puppet, a scenario that certainly existed in Hitler’s mind. If the restored Edward the Eighth had called on the armed forces to lay down their weapons and accept a sort of Vichy Britain with him at the head, they may well have done so, whatever the elected government may have thought. I know members of the armed forces who take their oath to the Queen very seriously, and for them this allegiance trumps any democratic considerations. The fact that members of the royal family occupy senior positions right across the military only reinforces this.”

Nor is it only the armed forces who are made to swear such an oath – it is also a condition of entry into the British police force, judiciary, and parliament, as well as (since 2003) British citizenship itself, for those applying for it.  This means that when (and it is indeed a matter of when, not if) the proverbial shit hits the fan in the UK, should the ruling class feel the need to impose military rule and rule by diktat, this oath ensures the army, the police and the entire criminal justice system, will be committed in advance to support such a measure, so long as the Windsors are on board. As Baker has noted, “the Queen herself on her accession took an oath to govern the country and uphold the rights of bishops. Parliamentarians take an oath to the Queen. Nobody takes an oath to uphold democracy.”

The key to understanding the role of the monarchy in a bourgeois society like Britain is to go back to its origins, which lie, not deep in antiquity, but in the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. There has not been seamless continuity or evolution when it comes to royal power, but rather three distinct major monarchical epochs, separated by violent upheavals. First was the feudal monarchy that existed prior to 1485, in which the monarchy was the head of an aristocratic-ruled state. Second was the monarchy that was established under Henry the Seventh in 1485, at the head of an alliance between the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, an era that was decisively ended with the execution of Charles I and the creation of the English republic in 1649. Our current monarchy, under bourgeois domination, took shape between 1660 and 1689, and though it was ushered in with the so-called ‘Restoration’ of Stuart power, when the deposed Charles’ son, Charles II, was invited to take the throne, it was in reality an entirely new institution (as Charles’ brother James II learnt to his cost when he attempted to challenge the new dispensation and was swiftly replaced). The question is – why did this third epoch of monarchism even come about? When the bourgeoisie had so decisively defeated the aristocratic power that the monarchy represents, why did they then re-create the institution? And the answer is – the fear of popular revolution. 

Cromwell had mobilised the masses in his war against Charles I, but their demands – as exploited, land hungry, peasants, and even as small traders and artisans – went far beyond his as a merchant landowner. What Cromwell sought was not the abolition of exploitation, but the extension of the absolute right to exploit, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, via an end to the aristocratic monopolies on foreign trade and land ownership. Radical trends within the republican movement, however – including, crucially, within Cromwell’s army itself, such as the Levellers – sought genuine social equality – equal access to land, political participation, and a toppling of the very hierarchical pyramid that Cromwell had been fighting for the right to ascend. Cromwell had their leaders executed but the fear of a resurgence remained – and in the late 1650s, when rising prices were leading to growing unrest and agitation, the bourgeoisie reasoned that, though their power seemed secure for now, the time may yet come when they would need to call on the defeated aristocracy to help suppress a renewed popular uprising. And this is what the current British monarchy is: the artificial keeping alive of feudal remnants (along with their symbolic counterpart in the human psyche) as a potential counter-revolutionary ally of an insecure bourgeoisie. 

That this is so can be seen clearly in the waxing and waning of royal privilege over the years. Here, a clear pattern emerges whereby, in periods where the bourgeoisie feel more secure, and less in need of their feudal allies, royal privileges are limited or revoked; whilst in periods of real or potential unrest, they are extended. If the army are loyal to the monarch, the ruling class need to be sure that the monarch is willing to do its bidding. And that costs money. 

In the years following the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution,’ however – when, in 1688, Parliament called on the Dutch King William of Orange to depose King James II and take the crown for himself, on the strict understanding that his position would be subordinate to Parliament – bourgeois rule seemed impregnable. The 1690s saw the formation of the Bank of England, the tearing up of the Royal trading monopolies – heralding a commercial frenzy, especially in the trafficking of kidnapped Africans – and the dispossession of Ireland. With the English merchant class triumphant, they had little need to make concessions to a monarchy that, after all, they themselves had placed into position, and was effectively their mouthpiece. Thus, in 1697, did the Crown agree to surrender even the income it gained from the Duchy of Cornwall. 

This era of untrammelled security did not last long, however. The failure of William and Mary, as well as her sister Anne, to produce any surviving offspring, had led Parliament to pass the Act of Settlement in 1701, decreeing that the Crown would pass to the (Protestant) Hanoverians. Their claim to the throne by virtue of royal bloodline was shaky to say the least – but the newly empowered merchant class were determined to prevent a Catholic restoration, with all the resultant continental political realignments and reversals that would entail. This seemingly arbitrary passing around of the Crown for political convenience was a step too far for many, however, and the Jacobite movement – which called for the continuation of the Stuart monarchy, in line with established hereditary principles – was born. Thus it was in 1721, two years after the third major Jacobite rising, at a time when the schemes of the government were under serious threat from inter-ruling class rivalry, that the mechanism of ‘King’s Consent’ – whereby the monarch gets veto power on any bill affecting his private interests – was introduced. 

Once the threat dissipated, however, the monarch’s fortunes were reversed. In 1745, the Jacobite movement was decisively defeated, and the bourgeois ascendancy seemed, once again, triumphant – and in no need of feudal backup.  Thus, in 1760, did the entirety of the Crown estates (with the supposed exception of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster) pass into the hands of the state, finally stripping the king of his position as ‘landowner-in-chief,’ the basic tenet of monarchical power since 1066. It was not without some benefit for the monarch, as, along with the estates, he also gave up responsibility for funding the growing costs of the state, which would now be taken on by the government directly. The king also negotiated a hefty annual subsidy from the state coffers, set initially at £800,000 per year and still in operation today, known as the ‘civil list.’ Yet the ban on the monarch’s ownership of private property that accompanied the deal was, by any standards, a reduction in power. It was not to last. 

The earth shattering events of the 1790s – in France and Haiti primarily, but with planet-wide reverberations that continue to this day – struck terror once again into the hearts of the English ruling class, and over the decades that followed, various forms of emergency rule and suspension of liberties became the norm. Lacking the legitimising cloak of liberal niceties, the legitimising cloak of regal bullshit took on a new importance for government. The monarch’s value to the imperilled bureaucracy grew, and the ban on his ownership of private property was lifted. And not only that – an argument was made that the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall were already private estates of the monarch, exempt from the 1760 agreement that surrendered the rest of the Crown estates. The reasoning? They had not been explicitly mentioned in that agreement, and were therefore not covered by them. The compelling legal argument that this was so precisely because, since 1697, the Duchies were already understood to be public assets (their income streams having been handed over at that date) was trampled underfoot by the cavalry charge of the counter-revolutionary war and its need for maximum unity against the Jacobins. Two hundred years later, the income streams from this desperate act of political expediency remain exceptionally lucrative: the holdings of the Duchy of Lancaster alone amount to over half a billion pounds, with annual profits reaching £20 million in 2018, and the Duchy of Cornwall not far behind, including a particular bonanza in 2012 from the auctioning of tungsten and iridium mining rights on Duchy land.  

The pattern continued throughout the nineteenth century. As tumult grew in Ireland, Jamaica and both rural and urban Britain between 1829 and 1831 – resulting in major concessions on all three islands – the Duchy of Lancaster was, in 1830, again exempted from a bill formalising the government takeover of royal income streams. As Baker noted, “with the great reform bill on the stocks, the government did not want to alienate the king unnecessarily.” The same year, the two Duchies also secured an exemption – alone in the country – from the abolition of the feudal practice of landowners taking over the estates of anyone who dies on their land without relatives. This would prove particularly lucrative for George VI, who got a bonanza from all those killed on Duchy land during World War Two, and continues to bring in additional income for the Windsors to this day. 

The Great Reform Act was eventually passed in 1832, successfully breaking the middle class-working class alliance that had shaken the country in previous years. The wealthier middle classes had been enfranchised by the Act, and now happily supported the repression of their erstwhile proletarian comrades. Bourgeois rule was secure, and again the need to buy royal favour declined. In 1842, income tax was introduced for the first time, and the monarch was not exempt. From now on, taxes would be paid not only on royal income – including on the civil list subsidy, and on Duchy profits – but on royal land and property also. This was confirmed in the Crown Private Estates Act of 1862 (during another period when the British ruling class were feeling secure, when the country’s industrial monopoly had birthed a labour aristocracy following the defeat of the Chartists).  The Act was unambiguous: “The private estates of her majesty,her heirs or successors, shall be subject to all such rates, duties, assessments, and other impositions, parliamentary and parochial, as the same would have been subject to if the same had been the property of any subject of the realm.” 

Yet even during this period, royal privileges ebbed and flowed in line with the degree of feared unrest. In 1848, proletarian revolution broke out across the continent, and the Chartists planned a march on London. Although the demonstration was ultimately outnumbered by pro-government volunteers, the state took no chances, and shored up its favour with the King through the establishment of ‘Prince’s consent’, extending the existing veto rights over legislation affecting the King’s private interests to his eldest son. No legal justification for this anti-democratic provision was even attempted; threat of revolt demanded royal concessions, the practice was established, and that was that. Again, it is a practice that continues until today. 

In the period 1865-7, near-simultaneous risings again broke out again across Jamaica, England and Ireland. Then, In 1873, the great economic boom which had begun in the 1850s ground decisively to a halt, just when Britain had lost its industrial monopoly to Germany and the USA. The depression lasted until 1896, and a new wave of militant trade unionism amongst the lowest paid broke out. Foreseeing a time when the monarch’s collaboration in the suspension of civil government might be required, the government during this period ramped up the civil list payments, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Writes Baker, “As a result of Albert’s pleadings of poverty they [Victoria and Albert] were given more than they needed to enable Victoria to carry our her constitutional duties, but then hung onto the cash which had been obtained under false pretences and invested it in property.” In 1889, a parliamentary select committee noted that Victoria had siphoned off almost £1 million from her civil list ‘expenses,’ which had been used to purchase the private estates of Balmoral, Sandringham and Osborne (in the Isle of Wight). Philip Hall, in his book Royal Fortune, estimates that a total of £67million has been saved by the monarch from civil list payments over the last five reigns, making the MPs’ expenses scandal look like a parking violation. But the point is, this subsidy has been willingly granted by an insecure ruling class as an insurance policy against (so-called) democracy.  

In the years before the First World War, this insecurity went into overdrive – and so too did the ‘insurance payments’ to the royals. Revolutionary trade unionism was spreading like wildfire across Britain, with major strikes taking place in key industries such as minings, docking, building and transport, many of them successful. The ruling class were terrified: Conservative cabinet minister Leo Amery recorded in his diary at the time that he went to purchase a revolver to arm himself against the revolutionary threat, but found they had all sold out. The value – and so the price – of royal backup thus increased again; already by 1903, Edward VII had wrangled his way out of paying income tax on his civil list payments (despite the existence of very clear laws on the matter), and in 1910 prime minister Lloyd George agreed to exempt the monarch from paying income tax at all. In 1913, this tax exemption was extended to the Duchy of Cornwall. Says Baker, “Despite the fact that the inland revenue had gone into the matter of the Duchy’s status quite exhaustively and concluded there was no case for its exemption from taxes, the government’s law officers, in a very short ruling, and one without any explanatory arguments, disagreed, and that was that.” In 1911, another unprecedented – and legally indefensible – ruling exempted royal wills from public scrutiny. To this day, royal wills are the only wills that can be kept private, enabling the extent of royal wealth to remain forever secret. This means that the amount of wealth stolen from civil list payments can be kept hidden, as can the extent of ‘gifts’ – which must, by law, be turned over to the state when given in connection with public duties – amassed by the monarch and her family. Says Baker, “if it became publicly known how much had been bequeathed, the public might begin to question afresh the level of taxpayers’ support the royal family benefits from, or indeed begin asking how it was possible to accumulate such wealth in their lifetimes without seemingly having any external means to do so.”  The 1911 ruling thus effectively sanctioned the siphoning off of civil list payments for private gain, giving legal cover to what had already become standard practice. Thus, by the time of Elizabeth Windsor’s sister Margaret’s death in 2002, she was believed to have amassed a fortune of £20 million. “Where did Princess Margaret get £20 million from?,” asks Norman Baker, “Even the generous largesses provided by taxpayers through the civil list cannot explain that.” Elizabeth’s mother, meanwhile, is believed to have left a fortune of £70 million, well beyond what she is believed to have inherited herself. And yet her spending far exceeded the £634,000 per year she received from the civil list, her private staff wage bill alone coming to £1.5 million per year. Comments Baker, “What is certain is that the sealing of royal wills does not allow the proper checks to be made to ensure that what properly belongs to the state has not slipped across into private property [of the Windsors].”  

Popular unrest did not cease in the years after the war, and there was genuine fear of Bolshevism spreading throughout Europe following the epic events in Russia. 1919 saw a police strike in Liverpool, the growth of the militant ‘tripartite’ alliance between the dockers, railwaymen and miners’ unions, and the establishment of a workers’ Soviet in Glasgow, prompting Lloyd George to send in the tanks. The price of royal backup appreciated further. In 1921, just as the ‘Geddes Axe’ fell, decimating public services, the Prince of Wales was granted further tax concessions, enabling him to stash away £1million by the time he became King Edward VIII in 1936. In the 1930s, too, as the Great Depression took hold, King George V stopped paying tax on Duchy of Lancaster profits, with his entire tax levy dropped in 1937. Writes Baker, “Overall in the interwar period, royal taxes dropped while those for everyone else rose. This dichotomy became even more pronounced during World War Two.”

The end of the Second World War saw Soviet prestige at an all time high, a powerful workers’ movement (with military experience) across Europe, and anti-colonial insurgencies across the globe, a situation that largely pertained until well into the 1960s. In 1952, when Elizabeth Windsor took the throne, the civil list payments were extended from the monarch and her spouse to their entire extended family, today covering over 40 people. At the same time, the monarch was no longer required to pay tax on her investments. Up until George VI, monarchs had always paid such taxes, although George began the dubious practice of reclaiming it. In 2001, it was calculated that the Treasury had lost out an estimated £1 billion revenue in lost payments on the £200million stock market investment made by the Queen in 1952 alone. Also in 1952, it was agreed that the wages of workers employed on the upkeep of the palaces should be transferred from the monarch to the Ministry of Works, as well as further tax exemptions such as taxes on agricultural profits, a major windfall for the Duchies. 

The era of neoliberalism, however, saw a reversal of workers’ power, and, especially after the defeat of the miners in 1985 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, bourgeois supremacy once again seemed guaranteed. The need for a royal coup seemed far off, and the period saw a corresponding limitation of handouts to the monarchy. In 1992, following a major fire at Windsor castle, the royals were left to fork out their own cash for the repairs, and a year later, Charles and Elizabeth actually started to pay income tax, including on their investment income. The Memorandum of Understanding that initiated this spelt out that this was a purely voluntary arrangement that the could rescind whenever they chose, but nevertheless, the fact it was agreed at all suggested that the royals had become aware that their financial privileges were now at risk. In 2000, the civil list payments were frozen for a period of ten years, with some expenditure previously paid for by government departments now to come out of those payments. This amounted to a real-terms cut, the closest the list had ever come to an actual cut. 

The ‘neoliberal (domestic) peace’ did not last. The buildup to the war on Iraq would ultimately lead to the biggest ever demonstrations in British history, and the biggest backbench rebellion for 150 years. Luckily for the Blair government, the colonial left leadership of the Stop the War movement prevented this anger from being channelled into effective resistance, but such resistance had been a real possibility. Had even a fraction of the crowds that amassed in 2003 stayed for ongoing protest outside parliament, or heeded the anarchists’ calls for direct action at airbases, the situation could have quickly got out of hand. Thus in 2002, the era of containment of royal finances came to an end, and the convention banning the public from viewing royal wills was secretly – and without legal precedent or justification – made into law. Also during this period, some very dubious accounting practices – such as including the wages of 28 members of Charles’ personal staff, along with the jewellery, clothes, horses and bodyguards of his mistress Camilla, as tax deductible – were discretely ‘overlooked’ by the inland revenue. The result was that, by 2012, Charles was paying less than half a million pounds tax on £18 million of Duchy profits; the 1993 Memorandum of Understanding had now been virtually revoked in all but name. 

The 2007-8 financial crisis was the biggest financial crash since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and triggered a global slump from which the world has still not recovered. The danger of mass unrest suddenly became very real. To add to the fears, the election of 2010 was indecisive, threatening political stability just as economic and social stability was already on a knife-edge. The coalition government that emerged took the opportunity to restore owning-class fortunes through a massive attack on public spending through their flagship policy of ‘austerity.’ Cuts led to riots in 2010 and in 2011 following the police execution of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, at the same time as uprisings across the Gulf threatened the ruling families placed in power by the British. The threat to bourgeois order was as high as it had been at any time since the miners’ strike. Emergency powers suddenly did not seem so unthinkable. 

Thus in 2011 was royal collaboration with such a path ensured by the biggest hike in royal finances since at least 1952. The Sovereign Grant Act finally overturned the 1760 deal with George III entirely, ushering in a massive and ongoing hike in taxpayer payments to the royals. For the first time since that deal, the link between royal fortunes and the Crown Estates was reestablished, with the civil list payments no longer based on an estimate (however fraudulent) of the legitimate expenses of the royals, but instead calculated as a proportion (15%, later increased to 25%) of the income from the (former) ‘Crown Estates’ that had been in effective public ownership since 1760, a massively retrograde step at a time of deepening mass poverty. In the first year – a time of severe wage cuts for the population at large – the civil list payments rose by well over 50% from just under £8million to almost £14 million. Similar rises followed year on year, taking the payment to a staggering £82.8 million by 2019, a more than tenfold increase from the pre-austerity amount. Furthermore, it was written into the Act that these payments could never be reduced, making permanent any temporary good fortune in the value of their estates, and immunising the royals against any collapse in the value of British real estate. The forthcoming auction of windfarm sites on Crown Estate land (which covers hundreds of miles of coastline) alone is likely to produce a windfall of hundreds of millions for the royals. 

    Since the bourgeois monarchy was first established in 1660, then, the pattern has been clear: when the capitalist order is under threat, the stock of the royals – as the ultimate counter-revolutionary backstop and ‘legitimising’ force for the imposition of rule by decree – increases. When the order is secure, it declines. The fact that royal handouts have increased tenfold in recent years, then, should be seen as a sign not so much of a ruling class so powerful it can plunder public funds with impunity, but of one with a desperate fear of the future, and of the masses, and with a total lack of faith in its own ability to rule by consent. Either way, the case for republicanism has never been clearer. 

Originally published in Counterpunch magazine, May 2020

Amongst all its glistening commodities, one product has defined capitalism above all else: human waste. Superfluous people, not necessary for production, not able to participate in the market, and an ever-present threat to the stability of the system, are – and have always been – the main output of the bourgeois epoch; managing, containing, expelling and eliminating this waste has always been its prime, if hidden, concern. In the nineteenth century, surplus Europeans were exiled, in their millions, to the colonies – to Australia, Canada, the US, Algeria etc – to continue the process of exterminating surplus non-Europeans. In the twentieth century, two world wars functioned not only to destroy surplus capital, but surplus humanity too, in unprecedented numbers. 

But today, for the first time in history, it is a majority of humanity who face redundancy. In 2004, Zygmunt Bauman published Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. In this short book, he argues that “the production of ‘human waste’, or more correctly wasted humans… is an inevitable outcome of modernisation, an inseparable accompaniment of modernity.” Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he wrote, “the disposal of human waste produced in the ‘modernised’ and still ‘modernising’ parts of the globe was the deepest meaning of colonisation and imperialist conquests,” as these conquests produced outlets for the export of surplus human beings. As Europe ‘modernised’ itself, throwing people off the land and replacing them with, first, sheep, and then threshing machines, these ‘surplus’ humans were shipped off to the colonies. Thus did the modern European states “seek, and find, global solutions to locally produced ‘overpopulation’ problems.” But this situation, he noted, could only last “as long as modernity (that is, a perpetual, compulsive, obsessive and addictive modernisation) remained a privilege. Once modernity turned, as it was intended and bound to, into the universal condition of humankind, the effects of its planetary domination have come home to roost. As the triumphant progress of modernisation has reached the furthest lands of the planet and practically the totality of human production and consumption has become money and market mediated, and the processes of the commodification, commercialisation and monetarisation of human livelihoods have penetrated every nook and cranny of the globe, global solutions to locally produced problems, or global outlets for local excesses, are no longer available…the volume of human waste [is] outgrowing the extant managerial capacity.” As a result, the world now faces “an acute crisis of the human waste disposal industry”. This issue – what to do with those growing number of souls superfluous to the requirements of modern capitalist production – is “simultaneously a most harrowing problem and a most closely guarded secret of our times.”

The year before Bauman’s book was published, in 2003, the UN published a report entitled “The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements.” This paper noted that almost a billion people – one third of all city dwellers globally – now lived in slums, with this number projected to double by 2020. The causes were straightforward: “The collapse of formal urban employment in the developing world and the rise of the informal sector is seen as a direct function of liberalization. . . . Urban poverty has been increasing in most countries subject to structural adjustment programs,” imposed on the global South throughout the 1980s and 90s by Western-controlled financial institutions. Fragile national economies were forced to open up to heavily-subsidised, high-tech imports against which they had no chance of competing, with entire industries and farming communities devastated as a result. Life in the slums produced by these policies consisted of “the most intolerable of urban housing conditions” whose residents “suffer inordinately from water-borne diseases such as typhoid and cholera, as well as more opportunistic ones that accompany HIV/AIDS.” By the year 2030, the report’s authors predicted, the world’s city dwelling population will consist of three sections, summarised by Mike Davis as follows: “1: .1 billion urbanites—owners, managers, technicians, and skilled information-sector workers—will provide the principal demand for branded international production.2: . 1.5 to 2 billion workers—ranging from Mexican American nurses’ aides in Los Angeles to Chinese teenagers in Guangdong sweatshops—will provide the metropolitan labor-power for the global economy.3: 2 to 3 billion informal workers—at least 2 billion of whom live in classic slums or peripheral shantytowns—will exist outside the formal relations of production, in Dickensian conditions or worse, ravaged by emergent diseases and subject to a menu of megadisasters following in the wake of global warming and the exhaustion of urban water supplies.”In other words – consumers; producers; and those superfluous to the reproduction of capital; the latter by far the biggest group. Of them, Davis wrote that “this outcast proletariat… is the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet. By and large, the urban informal working class is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers during booms; to be expelled during busts; then reabsorbed again in the next expansion. On the contrary, this is a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.” Superfluous to the needs of capitalism, and with “little vested interest in the reproduction of private property,” this class does nevertheless possess “yet unmeasured powers of subverting urban order… the contemporary megaslum poses unique problems of imperial order and social control that conventional geopolitics has barely begun to register.” Fast forward sixteen years to today and it has certainly registered. Frase warns us that “A world where the ruling class no longer depends on the exploitation of working class labor is a world where the poor are merely a danger and an inconvenience. Policing and repressing them ultimately seem more trouble than can be justified. This is where the thrust toward “the extermination of multitudes” originates. Its ultimate endpoint is literally the extermination of the poor, so that the rabble can finally be brushed aside once and for all, leaving the rich to live in peace and quiet in their Elysium.” In the “dystopic robo-feudalism” that is our near future, Ian Shaw writes, “a policy of ‘neo-exterminism’ might be enacted.” 
***
On December 31st 2019, China alerted the World Health Organisation to the existence of several cases of an unusual pneumonia in the town of Wuhan. Eleven days later, Chinese scientists published the genetic sequence of the virus causing it, identifying it as a new strain of coronavirus. That it was deadly was confirmed by Wuhan’s first death from the virus, reported the same day. On 24th January, a study published in the UK’s leading medical journal, the Lancet showed that a third of China’s Covid-19 patients required admission to intensive care, with 29% worsening to the point where they needed ventilation. The authors made clear the lethal potential of the virus, making comparisons to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic which killed up to 50 million people, and recommended measures be taken to suppress the virus.

Understanding the seriousness of the coming pandemic, the British government convened its first COBRA emergency planning meeting on the outbreak. But underscoring their determination not to fight it, the prime minister refused to attend, as he would fail to attend the next four COBRA meetings that followed; as one senior government advisor told the Sunday Times, “There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there.” A week later, on January 31st, the Lancet published another study on the new virus, concluding that  “On the present trajectory, 2019-nCoV could be about to become a global epidemic…for health protection within China and internationally…preparedness plans should be readied for deployment at short notice, including securing supply chains of pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, hospital supplies, and the necessary human resources to deal with the consequences of a global outbreak of this magnitude.” The same day, the Covid-19 outbreak was declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organisation.  Since long before humanity even knew about viruses, the time-honoured method of dealing with them has been to identify those with symptoms, isolate them, and follow up everyone they have been in contact with, today known as “test, track and trace”. These were the measures public health experts had been advocating since the new coronavirus was first identified, and have been used by all countries (such as South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam) that have managed to keep a lid on the spread of the virus and death rates low. As Mike Buckley has pointed out, “WHO advice is abundantly clear, based on existing guidelines and the experience of countries which have successfully contained and turned back COVID-19 and previous pandemics. The essential elements for success are mass testing, the isolation of the sick and those carrying the virus, contacting and testing people who may have been exposed to it, and social isolation to prevent its spreading by people yet to show symptoms. This is not theory, it is fact.”  Yet, in the UK, noted the Lancet in a scathing editorial in March, “they didn’t isolate and quarantine. They didn’t contact trace. These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque… February should have been used to expand coronavirus testing capacity, ensure the distribution of WHO-approved PPE, and establish training programmes and guidelines to protect NHS staff. They didn’t take any of those actions.” Indeed, when the government’s SAGE committee – an ad-hoc subgroup of COBRA tasked with providing scientific advice during an emergency – first commissioned a study on the impact of possible Covid-19 interventions in January, it specifically requested that test, track and trace was not included in the modelling. It was later claimed that this decision was taken because “not enough tests were available”. Yet they had eight weeks to prepare; Vietnam had been able to produce its entire supply of Covid tests domestically in far less time. As Anthony Costello noted in the Guardian, “The UK had been among the first countries to develop a Covid-19 test in mid-January, approved by the WHO, and has an exceptional national research infrastructure,” including a sophisticated pharmaceutical industry, and 130 NHS labs which were never utilised. The idea that it was beyond Britain’s physical capacity to produce the tests it required is utter nonsense; what was lacking was the political will.

Clearly, a decision had been taken very early on that the only tried-and-tested measures of disease control were not to be implemented in the UK. Instead, the UK government seemed determined to follow a policy of what could only be termed ‘let it rip’. As the government’s chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance explained, the aim was “to reduce the peak [of infection], not suppress it completely”. Graham Medley, the government’s chief modeller, elaborated: “We’re going to have to generate what we call herd immunity … and the only way of developing that in the absence of a vaccine, is for the majority of people to get infected”. Robert Peston summarised it as follows: “The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact of Covid-19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity”. This strategy went into overdrive on March 12th, when the limited testing that had been occurring was stopped, and the advice to travellers coming into Britain from hotspots such as Wuhan and Northern Italy to self-isolate for fourteen days was withdrawn. At this point, noted the Financial Times, “there were fewer than 1,500 confirmed cases in the UK, while in contrast infection rates were soaring in Italy and Spain.” The result, said the government’s Chief Scientific advisor Patrick Vallance, was that a wave of infections were “seeded right across the country.” 

Advocates of the so-called ‘herd immunity’ (aka Let It Rip) strategy proposed that the most vulnerable should be shielded whilst the virus was allowed to flow through the population. Yet in practice, far from being shielded, those most susceptible to the disease appear to have been deliberately targeted. The particular vulnerability of the elderly to Covid-19 had been understood since the study of its first victims was published on January 23rd. Yet the government ordered that elderly patients be removed from hospitals, where they may well have contracted the virus, and sent back to their care homes, where they would inevitably spread it. As one NHS cardiologist told the Telegraph newspaper, “Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did. We discharged known, suspected, and unknown cases into care homes which were unprepared, with no formal warning that the patients were infected, no testing available, and no PPE to prevent transmission. We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable.” When discussing the policy of wilfully spreading the virus, Boris Johnson’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings was reported to have said that “if a few pensioners die, so be it.” The cardiologist continued, “We let these people die without palliation. The official policy was not to visit care homes – and they didn’t (and still don’t). So, after infecting them with a disease that causes an unpleasant ending, we denied our elders access to a doctor – denied GP visits – and denied admission to hospital. Simple things like fluids, withheld. Effective palliation like syringe drivers, withheld.” By the start of May, 12,500 care home residents were recorded to have died from Covid-19. Meanwhile, no effort was made to increase the population’s ability to survive the disease by boosting their immune systems. In the 1940s and 50s, cod liver oil was provided free to children, pregnant mums and nurses due to its immunity-enhancing properties; yet in 2020, government ministers made no effort even to promote immune-boosting vitamins or foods, let alone provide them. On the contrary, the government’s lockdown guidelines actively prevented people receiving their daily dose of vitamin D by barring those without gardens from the sun, despite growing evidence of the vitamin’s importance in fighting the disease. 

That people would die, in their tens of thousands, from the government’s policy of ‘wilful neglect’ was painfully obvious, and indeed, was admitted at the time. As countries across Europe were announcing bans on mass gatherings and school closures, Johnson resisted such measures, and instead told the nation to brace themselves for mass death. On March 12th, the day the government formally announced its intention to roll the virus out across the population, Boris Johnson told a press conference that “It is going to spread further and I must level with you, I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” This was at a time when Vietnam – which shares a border with China – had suffered zero Covid deaths, due to their timely implementation of WHO advice.  At the time of writing (17th May) they have still not suffered a single fatality.  Yet, far from being a cause for concern, the coming cull was positively welcomed in some quarters. Toby Young, old friend and fellow Etonian of Boris Johnson, and an advocate of what he calls ‘progressive eugenics’, said in his column on 31st March that “prolong[ing] the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money.” Earlier that month, financial writer Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph had written that “from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long-term by disproportionately culling elderly dependants.” BBC radio broadcast ‘moral philosophy’ programmes debating which patients were more deserving of access to ventilators, the young or the old; the fit and healthy or those with obesity or diabetes. The idea that the sick and elderly should be denied medical care was being pushed further than ever before. 

As the ‘herd immunity’ strategy was greeted with universal horror by public health experts, the government performed an apparent (but only apparent) volte face and pretended it had never existed. Eventually, with infections doubling every three days, and a steadily mounting death toll, calls for action became irresistible. Yet the nationwide ‘lockdown’ imposed on March 24th – with all but ‘essential’ businesses ordered closed and the rights to assembly and association suspended – has been widely misinterpreted. Far from being a belated recognition and reversal of the reckless negligence that had characterised their initial response, it served as a cover for continuing that response but in a way that preserved the integrity of British state institutions such as the NHS.  Once the virus had spun out of control, a lockdown could have served the useful purpose of buying time to establish the basic disease control procedures that should have been implemented from the outset – mass testing, contact tracing and quarantining. But, even during lockdown, the government’s stubborn refusal to take these measures continued. Travellers remained free to enter the country from known hotspots, without testing or quarantining, and no test-and-trace system was put in place. Whilst a symbolic target of 100,000 tests per day by the end of April was announced to placate the media, testing remained at a far lower level until right up to the 31 April, when the target was magically reached by testing tens of thousands of people twice on the same day, a horrific waste of resources when care homes were crying out to be allowed access to testing. The following day, the numbers slumped back down again. Meanwhile the British company delivering test kits for use in Germany told the Telegraph, on April 16th, that it was ready to provide one million tests per week to the British government, but their calls had been unanswered. Those tests that were carried out were not done as part of an integrated programme of virus suppression; they were simply a standalone distraction for the media. To the extent they had any purpose beyond pure symbolism, it was to maximise staff turnout at hospitals (by preventing suspected cases from needing to self isolate) and nothing more. Care homes, who needed these tests the most, remained barred from them right up until the end of April. No system of contact tracing was established. And test results – carried out not by the 130 world-class NHS labs ideal for the purpose, but by the accountancy firm Deloittes – were not shared with local Directors of Public Health or GPs; the entire infrastructure of public health was still being barred from the information which would have enabled them to identify and tackle local outbreaks. A successful contact tracing apparatus could have been set up in three days using the existing infrastructure based around Environmental Health Officers alongside retraining those furloughed in other lines of work, explained public health expert Allyson Pollock, if the political will was there. But it wasn’t. The government only started advertising for contact tracers – via outsourcing giant Serco, to whom it awarded the contract – on May 10th, six weeks into the lockdown. Even now, it remains far from clear whether this is part of a genuine attempt to keep track of the virus or simply an excuse to award a lucrative monopoly to a major government-backed private company in order to help build up its global brand; once again, the existing public health infrastructure necessary for a holistic, integrated response has been cut out of the process. 

Meanwhile the government hammered out a message of “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. Yet this was more than simply a benign injunction to ensure people avoided picking up or transmitting the disease; it also carried the more subtle message that you should not bother the NHS at this crucial time. People were being made to feel guilty for seeking treatment, especially if they were old. How dare they distract the NHS from its essential Covid work? Old people were told they would almost certainly not get emergency treatment and were pressured to sign ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders en masse, whilst the NHS was effectively shut down for all but Covid patients (and, in the case of elderly care home residents, even them). Hospitals were cleared, ‘elective operations’ cancelled and treatments stopped. The emptying of sick elderly patients led to an increase in care home deaths from an April average of 8000 to a staggering 26,000, only 8000 of which were attributed to Covid; the rest very likely a result of the abrupt termination of their treatment. Oncologist Dr Karel Sikora noted that cancer diagnoses were around 5000 in April, down from what would normally be around 30,000. All these missed diagnoses, along with the cancelled treatment for known cases, could, he estimates, lead to an additional 60,000 cancer deaths this year. Thus, both the ‘let it rip’ strategy and the measures supposedly taken in response to it, such as the clearing out of hospitals, have had unnecessary mass death as their result rather, it seems, than their target. That same day the government finally started recruiting contact tracers – four months and 30,000 deaths after it had been recommended by the Lancet – Boris Johnson ordered low-paid manual workers back to work, to be followed by the reopening of primary schools three weeks later. This was in breach of WHO advice, and public health experts were united in their view that this easing of the lockdown without having put in place any system to trace and isolate the virus in was reckless and threatened a second wave of infection and death. As Oxford University professor of epidemiology David Hunter wrote in the Guardian, “the countries that have succeeded in taming their coronavirus epidemics – such as South Korea, Taiwan, China, Australia and New Zealand – … all have in common “test, trace, isolate” as the centrepiece of their strategy.” In Johnson’s speech, however, “what we did not get was any list of the actions in place to pursue and contain the virus….If we take the prime minister’s advice and return to work in large numbers now – and without the ability to test, trace and isolate – then virus spread will increase.” Yet this seems to be precisely the point; as Hunter notes, “emerging antibody data from hard-hit cities such as New York show that, with less than a quarter of the population affected, it would take at least another wave of devastation to get close to the herd immunity threshold.” Far from using the lockdown to buy time to establish disease-control structures, the government appears to be using it as a ‘tap’, not to reduce infections, but to ensure their flow across the population in a timely manner. It is a tap they are now slowly turning back on, and will have predictable, and fatal, results.  

Covid’s results in the Southern hemisphere, however, are likely to be catastrophic. Here, noted World Food Programme’s chief economist Arif Husain recently, “is where the winter is coming, where the flu season is coming. I’m really, really concerned about Southern Africa. Why? Because there’s extreme poverty, extreme malnourishment, to begin with, and poor, poor, poor health infrastructure. There’s already a history of H.I.V., aids, and TB, and they’ve gone through multiple climate disasters. Now you get covid-19 on top of that —what do you think is going to happen?” The WFP’s executive director David Beasley, in a disturbing address to the UN Security Council in April, noted that the Covid crisis had already sparked “the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two”.

Yet Covid itself is only half the story; the lockdown imposed by Western societies is also ravaging the global South. Siegfried Kracauer has written that “the measures provoked by existential fear are themselves a threat to existence,” and this is certainly true of the ‘lockdown’ prompted by the fear of the government’s refusal to tackle Covid. Remittances, which last year overtook foreign investment as the largest source of capital inflows to low and middle income countries,  are expected to drop by $100billion this year, as migrant workers find themselves unable to earn money to send home, money on which millions of families depend to meet their nutritional needs. And the wiping out of demand consequent to the lockdowns is likely to prove equally devastating. As Beasley noted, there is “a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of Covid-19 than from the virus itself,” warning that famines could break out in 55 countries in the worst case scenario, with 300,000 starving to death every day and 260 million ultimately at risk of starvation. “If we don’t prepare and act now,” he concluded, “we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months.” “In all,” the Guardian concluded, “shortages are likely to affect a fifth of the world’s population,” some 1.6 billion people.  

And yet there is no shortage. “The world is not running out of food,” one humanitarian worker told the Telegraph. “Global food prices have been coming down for several years and we’ve had good harvests over the last few years. The main problem is access.” This is capitalism being pushed to its depraved logical conclusions. People will be wiped out by a lack of food not because there is a lack of food, but simply because their labour is not needed to meet the demands of wealthy countries. 

***

We are  living through the early stages of a massive extermination event. To deliberately and wilfully allow a deadly virus to rip through the population, fully aware of the consequences for the elderly and vulnerable is beyond negligent; it is the rebirth of colonial eugenics in the heartlands of empire, unprecedented since the foundation of the welfare state. As Bauman noted, with the universalisation of modernity, and the consequent drying up of ‘non-modern’ areas for the export of surplus population, “societies increasingly turn the sharp edge of exclusionary practices against themselves”. The demonisation of the elderly and sick, the ideological war against their right to life, tentatively floated with Cameron’s proposition that obese people should be denied access to the NHS, appears now to have passed a major milestone. Our reactions are being tested; Covid is being utilised as a canary in the mine for our willingness to be abandoned by any pretence of state protection in the face of the coming economic chaos and climate misery. The 1% and their state planners must be very pleased with the results.  Meanwhile, famines “of biblical proportions” threaten the global South, provoked by the gratuitous – because, had public health advice been followed, unnecessary – lockdowns which have strangled global supply chains. Saskia Sassen, in her 2014 book “Expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy”, notes that “the move from Keynesianism to the global era of privatisations, deregulation, and open borders for some, entailed a switch from dynamics that brought people in [to global capitalism] to dynamics that push people out”. We appear now to have reached such an extremity of that process, however, that there is a new switch under way – from the containment of those pushed out, to their outright elimination. Already the humanitarian agencies, tasked with keeping a lid on surplus humanity, are warning that their calls for an emergency $4.7 billion to feed those “pushed out” by the Covid response are nowhere near being met. With nativists like Trump in charge of the richest economies already terminating contributions to the World Health Organisation, what are the chances of a newfound love for the World Food Programme emerging anytime soon?

Order, Bauman reminds us, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the condition in which everything is in its proper place and performs its proper function.“ Yet in the capitalist order of the near future, there is no proper place or proper function for the majority of humanity, neither as producers nor as consumers. Asked how he obtained the beautiful harmony of his sculptures, Michaelangelo reputedly answered: ‘Simple. You just take a slab of marble and cut out all the superfluous bits’. Comments Bauman, “In the heyday of the Renaissance, Michaelangelo proclaimed the precept that was to guide modern creation… through cutting out and throwing away the superfluous, the needless and the useless, the beautiful, the harmonious, the pleasing and the gratifying was to be divined.” Today, the ‘harmony’ of the capitalist order can be preserved only by a massive intensification of this “cutting out and throwing away” of the superfluous who, quite apart from being a threat to stability, are an abhorrent reminder of the defects of the system. “As modern times went by,” says Bauman, “an ever larger part of the designing zeal and design-drawing efforts was prompted by the urge to detoxicate, neutralise or remove from sight the ‘collateral damage’ done by past designing.”

And yet, we must always remember, none of this is inevitable. The technical capability to provide the housing and nutritional needs of everyone on the planet has never been greater. Charity has never been more than a sticking plaster, nor intended to be more; what is needed is the realisation of article 25 of the universal declaration of human rights – the right to subsistence. All are capable of making a dignified contribution to the global provision of subsistence, regardless of their economic circumstances, and none should be denied food or shelter simply because their labour is superfluous to the requirements of capital accumulation. A new global movement with this principle at its heart is needed – and needed urgently.