Features by Conor Kostick Independent Left

A comparison of Tony Cliff’s Lenin: Building the Party with Paul Le Blanc’s Lenin and the Revolutionary Party

In 2013, not long after the British SWP went into dramatic convulsions over the way their party failed to support a young member in her allegation that a very much older and more senior member had raped her, I had reason to be in Chicago. While there I met up with the International Socialist Organisation (at the time a relatively successful example of a revolutionary party), gave a talk on Ireland’s revolutionary years and attended a dayschool of theirs on Lenin and the revolutionary party. The bookstall had copies of studies of Lenin by Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc and Tony Cliff.

Anyone wanting to encourage the development of a revolutionary party has, of course, to form an opinion of Lenin. Before the ISO fell out with their British equivalents (i.e. the SWP), their approach to Lenin would have been profoundly if not exclusively shaped by the British SWP and in particular by the leading figure in that party, Tony Cliff. It interested me that the ISO had a wider outlook on the subject than was usual in the SWP and the enthusiasm of the bookstall organiser meant that I came away with a copy of Paul Le Blanc’s Lenin and the Revolutionary Party.

This book was first published in 1990 and I had never read it because having inhabited a rather closed-minded organization, I felt there was little that someone closely aligned to the politics of Ernest Mandel would have to say on the subject that would be useful. After all, as I was told and believed at the time, I had been guided in my understanding of Lenin by someone with vastly superior politics to those of Mandel: Tony Cliff. More than this, as an SWP organiser in the UK and then in Ireland I had always used Cliff’s Lenin: Building the Party as the essential text for explaining the theory behind SWP party-building methods to those members who I anticipated would go on to play leading roles in their branches and nationally.

The ISO – in the words of one of their organisers – said at the time that they drew on a canon of the best of other traditions and individuals to inform their attitude to Lenin and the lessons for today in regard to the revolutionary party. This sounded admirably open-minded. But I couldn’t help wondering if this willingness to promote other studies of Lenin than that of Cliff was, in fact, a watering down of the revolutionary Lenin in favour of a more Occupy-friendly version.

Given the 2019 collapse of the ISO, it is also reasonable to ask whether a move away from their traditional, if one-sided, reading of Lenin contributed to the crisis?

Then too, there was the 2018 submergence of the Irish SWP (I was a member at the time they voted to become a network within People Before Profit, yet I had no opportunity to vote on the decision; no documents were sent to me for consideration; no invitation was made for me to offer my views. I accidentally discovered from an online post that the party I thought I was a member of had gone). When you combine this with the self-destruction of the ISO and the rape-apologist behaviour of the UK SWP, the word ‘crisis’ is barely strong enough to encapsulate what has happened to parties of this type, who were once all thriving and united in a common organisation: the International Socialist Tendency.

It seemed evident to me that the failure of these parties meant that every aspect of SWP theory had to be looked at again with new eyes. Moreover – somewhat reluctantly, since it was time consuming – I felt that I had to make more of an effort to re-examine my attitude to Lenin. Without doing so, I was missing out in regard to developing my own understanding of the issues of party of class in an age when new means of communication mean some of the the old certainties, such as the essential role of the physical newspaper (a major topic in Cliff’s book), were fast becoming obsolete. So I reread Cliff and studied Le Blanc.

Side by side: Tony Cliff vs Paul Le Blanc on Lenin

The first thing to say about these books is that the story they tell is an inspiring one. Lenin became a Social Democrat (i.e. Marxist) in 1893, at the age of 23. Twenty-four years later, at 47, he led the successful Russian Revolution. Trotsky met revolutionaries in 1896 at the age of 17; he was 38 when he oversaw the October insurrection. Reading again the story of Lenin reminded me that when I became a revolutionary, during the great miner’s strike of 1984-5 in the UK, I thought that by now I would be living in a post-revolutionary era. After all, it took only twenty-four years for Lenin to go from next-to-nothing to the 1917 revolution.

It is worth noting that the experience of Western revolutionaries 1985 – 2020 has been a low-key one in comparison to the storms experienced by Lenin and Trotsky’s generation or that of the next. This, of course, is about to change and one reason why I’m delighted to have come through the experience of having COVID19 is because socialist politics are clearly going to be relevant in the 2020s.

At the deepest level, the crisis of the International Socialist Tendency is explained by this relative historical quiescence. Although the specific problems that arose in the UK and the USA deserve close analysis (with particular attention being paid to the question of who controlled their assets, worth a great deal), there’s a reasonable chance that the flaws in these parties and especially the emergence of a predatory male elite would not have become fatal had their members been engaged with the ebbs and flows of profound social upheavals such as those dealt with by Lenin. They would have been more deeply rooted in working class communities who would not tolerate the kinds of behaviour that ultimately brought them down.

Lenin’s efforts to build a revolutionary party from 1893 onwards are fascinating and deserving of scrutiny because they culminate in his having decisive influence over the October revolution of 1917. The twists and turns and dialectical inversions and leaps of the development of the Bolshevik party, even in the quiet years, are compelling to read about, because each argument at every stage really mattered. Each conference, debate, new pamphlet, new recruit, split, had consequences that rippled out over time to affect millions. Both books grasp this process well and while Le Blanc’s is the more scholarly in an academic sense, Cliff’s holds up surprisingly well in terms of the effort he made to contextualise each moment of the drama.

Neither author was able to access untranslated Russian source material directly. Cliff was perhaps the more eager to seize upon a tiny detail in a memoir to illuminate a particular moment. Le Blanc prefers to sum up contextual situations by reference to a secondary source, usually a work, to be fair, that is based on a detailed study of the Russian sources. Opening Lenin and the Revolutionary Party at random and finding an example, this type of statement is typical (p. 234): ‘As Hasegawa writes, “by the fall of 1916 the [Menshevik] workers’ group was obviously losing ground to the Bolsheviks and to regain its lost influence among the workers, the workers’ group turned leftward in December 1916.”’ This methodology is often unsatisfactory, as often the point being made by the secondary work comes across as an assertion without foundation. I wanted to see the primary evidence for the point being made.

Another difference between the books is that Le Blanc makes more of an effort to contrast his reading of Lenin with those of right wing or social democratic authors. This works to a certain extent, in ‘rescuing’ Lenin from the stereotype of the ruthless Machiavelli, but it surrounds the story with a commentary that is much less interesting than Cliff’s if your focus is the question: what does this all mean for revolutionaries today? In other words, there is no question but that Le Blanc’s is a much more helpful book for a student battling against ideologically driven attacks on Lenin. But for building the party, Cliff’s approach, potentially, has the advantage. At various points, Cliff puts the breaks on the narrative to digress with generalisations about party building and it is these generalisations that served for years to inform the practice of those on the SWP branch, district and national committees both in the UK and Ireland.

I say ‘potentially’ because of course, the conclusions about the revolutionary party that Cliff drew do not, in fact, have the emancipatory power I once thought they did. Here, I think the best critique of Building the Party comes from Ian Land in 1994.

Lars Lih does an impressive job of overthrowing various paradigms concerning misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Lenin (not only those of Cliff), using 600 pages of densely sourced argument in his book Lenin Rediscovered. And that is very valuable. But to understand what particular lens was distorting Cliff’s view of Lenin you only need a few lines. In Cliff’s experience of leading the SWP, you had to battle hard for a new orientation for the party and the people you were battling against were those who had most immersed themselves in the old orientation. Your weapons? Exaggeration and youth. Cliff was expert in galvanising the openness of new members to new tactics to turn them against older members who might resist the new course.

So we learn this about the young Lenin from Cliff:

This readiness to bend the stick too far in one direction and then to go into reverse and bend it too far in the opposite direction was a characteristic that he retained throughout his life. It was already clearly apparent at this early stage of his development as a revolutionary leader.

Later, in discussing the rules of the party, Cliff wrote:

An overformal party structure inevitably clashes with two basic features of the revolutionary movement: (1) the unevenness in consciousness, militancy, and dedication of different parts of the revolutionary organisation; and (2) the fact that members who play a positive, vanguard role at a certain stage of the struggle fall behind at another.

If you are trying to explain to a party member why, having campaigned on a certain issue in a particular fashion, the party is now doing something radically different, these formulations are a great help. They address an important truth, which is that the currents of revolutionary politics are fast changing and the party has to be able to make swift turns and not be trapped, for example, by the moralism of a declining campaign, into substituting for a real movement. Nor must a revolutionary party be afraid of pouring every resource behind a critical strike, say. But Cliff’s formulations address this truth in a one-sided fashion.

Is it accurate to characterise Lenin as believing he was being excessive but that the outcome would justify his exaggerations? In other words, was Lenin willing to deliberately present a distorted picture of the world to win his perspective? In short, the answer is ‘no’. Le Blanc and Lars Lih and my own reading of Lenin’s works convince me that fundamentally at every stage Lenin believed that the truth was on his side, at least until events proved otherwise. Holding doggedly to a particular focus and task for the party is not the same as telling the party something which deep down, you do not actually believe, but which you consider expedient.

Here’s how one staunch defender of Cliff puts it in more recent times:

Cliff had learned from experience that shifting an organization of several thousand members (as oppose winning an academic or historical debate) from one strategic orientation and one way of working to another to meet the challenge of changed circumstances, required an almighty great tug on the relevant levers and, sometimes, a certain exaggeration. For Cliff achieving the desired end was more important than terminological exactitude or consistency and he rather thought, as do I, that Lenin felt the same way. http://johnmolyneux.blogspot.ie/2006/11/lihs-lenin-review-of-lars-t-lih-lenin.html

There is an evasion here. The argument is not whether Lenin was fussy about terminology but whether Lenin ever felt it necessary to deliberately exaggerate ‘to achieve the desired end.’ John Molyneux believes so. I do not. Lenin was fully aware the dialectics of revolutionary socialism do not allow for the separation of means and ends. The means you adopt will shape the end you arrive at. The moment you cease to tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable or how it works against the point you want to make, is the moment you abandon the prospect of realising a socialist society. I say this for entirely practical as well as moral reasons.

Secondly, look again at the question of party structure. It is an observable fact that all revolutionary parties are uneven, Cliff’s (1), but (2) is not as clear cut as it seems because it contains a value judgement. Who decides whether a member is falling behind? While another member is being ‘positive’? The true test has to be in regard to how effective the respective members are in changing the world. And judging that effectiveness is a complicated matter, where collective decision-making, honest accounting and democratic forms are essential. But in Cliff’s hands, this piece about rules can be read as follows: rules are all very well, but when some idiot is dragging the party down, it is necessary to find those who are getting results and use them to smash the conservatives, even if that means violating formalities.

Anyone expelled – or rapidly thrust from leading bodies within the SWP – by Cliff in the UK or Kieran Allen in Ireland will be familiar with what this depiction of Lenin meant in practice. But I think this depiction of Lenin also helps explain something of the attitude of those who have been in these parties for a long time and unfailingly endorse the initiatives of the leadership. Such long-term members have internalised the same ideas as profound revolutionary truths, which leads them to reason along the following lines: ‘I don’t want to be like the committee-men of 1905 who resisted the party’s turn to the class, therefore I will overcome my reservations and embrace the latest line. After all, this is the best way to test a perspective.’

Over time, the membership of the party learn to accept (and justify to themselves and others) that they have no meaningful input into the creation of new initiatives or the party’s position on crucial issues. This is in marked contrast to the vigorous and lively internal life of the pre-1917 Bolshevik party.

As a guide to the nature of a successful revolutionary party, Cliff’s interpretation of Lenin’s approach to rules only works if the party leader is always right. But who judges the judge? Who corrects the leadership when they are wrong? History? History has made its judgement upon Cliff’s party and its associates.

If Cliff’s Building the Party is flawed in this way, i.e. flawed at the points where it addresses the methodology of ‘stick bending’, is Le Blanc’s Lenin and the Revolutionary Party the better tool for guiding revolutionaries in the theory and practice of building the revolutionary party? I don’t believe so. In fact, despite the criticism I’ve just made, I’d rather give someone Cliff’s book, mainly because of its activist focus. Le Blanc’s is a very good history written by someone with a clear understanding of the political stakes in the various debates but it has half an eye on academia. This means the standard of scholarship is high, but at the cost of the book being less of a manual for revolutionaries. It also has some political weaknesses, perhaps the most important being the failure to articulate the full scope of Lenin’s anti-imperialism. The author has a soft spot for the Sandinistas, bringing them up to the level of the Bolsheviks, and also for Cuba. This means Lenin’s emphasis on not giving anti-imperialist movements ‘communist colouring’ is entirely lost.

Where does this leave me in regard to reading Lenin? I’m faced with a situation where an uncritical approach to Cliff’s works no longer serves, but where there is no obvious single alternative. Best, then, to read a variety of books from different perspectives and, of course, the works of Lenin himself.

There are two worlds.

In one, people try to occupy themselves at home, maybe spend time in the garden where the birds are so lively just now, or watch TV or – although I found my concentration levels weren’t up to it – do something creative.

The other is darker and consists of those with COVID19.

Having crossed the invisible barrier into the latter, I had an intense realisation of these two worlds as I walked my partner to the emergency tent at the Mater hospital. It was sunny, probably, and there were so many normal people around: a group of builders, smoking and chatting, united by their day-glo jackets; two hospital staff, ID badges swaying, smiling; a large man just standing there on the corner of the road and – evidently unconcerned by our masks and her being in a dressing gown – not inclined to move. We skirted him.

I squeezed her hand one last time and watched from the entrance as the two staff members took her details then brought her further in. It occurred to me that this might be my last ever sight of her, but I told myself not to be alarmed, that she was much safer in their ‘yellow’ ward than at home. That she was lucky, in fact, because perhaps soon they would be turning away people who need monitoring for lack of staff.

And then I went back to the car and the waiting kids, along a street with the other world all around me.

One in which the sun was probably shining.

Dawn, Easter Saturday and she’s home. I’m lying on a mattress outside her door, like Cú Chulainn at the threshold of his king, my namesake. Outside, a pigeon is asking over and over, ‘look, can we, tee de?’ When it stops, the far sweeter chirp of a robin takes its place, but so rapid is the robin’s voice that even Democritus would have struggled to understand him.

Ever since we hung out a bird feeder, we have had a pair of robins in our back yard. I’m sure they are nesting in the thick, thorny bush that I was supposed to trim. I’m glad I never got around to that task, because our neighbour has a very attentive cat, who likes to walk on the top of the wall. He cannot get past the overgrown bush, no matter how carefully he tries to place his paw.

Heart irregularity, high blood pressure. In need of several days of bed rest. But her lungs are fine. Well, pneumonia to be sure, but mild. So long as she can rest in quiet solitude, she should get through this. Quiet solitude. That’s why I sleep at the door, for while the elven-year-old and the eight-year-old understand and respect the rules, we have a three-year-old who does not understand boundaries.

She’s awake already and after considering my unexpected presence says, ‘I don’t want you there.’ When I fail to disappear, she begins crying. Like the dawn birds, there is a cycle to the cry. ‘I want my mummy’, over and over. Not too much of a shriek, more an unhappy insistence. Every five chants I offer an explanation that I know won’t be accepted, but perhaps my gentle tone of voice does some good because she settles.

It helps that the eight-year-old, having woken, announces that there are eighteen hours and seventeen minutes until Easter. He started that timer three days ago.

Delighted with the prospect of chocolate and understanding that it is imminent my three-year-old is immediately cheerful. And it makes me realise there is a power in her refusal to see boundaries. I just have to follow her and I will find the way back.

The spread of a new coronavirus – 2019-nCoV – has to be of concern to everyone. Efforts to keep the virus out of Ireland have failed and any attempt to shrug off the dangers posed by the situation by saying, for example, that many more people will die of the flu this year, are seriously misplaced. Unlike the flu, as of March 2020 there is no vaccine for the coronavirus. Nor is there a method for ensuring the survival of those who contract it.

True, some four out of five people who become sick from the coronavirus will not suffer greatly but about 3.4% of those who contract the virus will die. Those who are old, those with underlying conditions, and those who smoke or who previously smoked are most at risk of death, which typically comes from respiratory failure.

The virus enters the lungs and penetrates deep into the tissue there, creating pneumonia and becoming life threatening for older people, particularly if the person already has hypertension or diabetes. Men (5%) are more likely to be killed by the virus than women (3%).

At the time of writing (1 March 2020), there are 88,382 officially confirmed cases; there have been 2,996 deaths; and – more positively – 42,769 people who have recovered. You can see the latest, up-to-date, live data for the spread of COVID-19 here.

Ireland’s first confirmed case was announced on 1 March 2020 and within hours, Scoil Chaitríona, Mobhi Road, was closed for two weeks. Shockingly, and this is something I’ll return to below, only for the fact that the information was shared by parents on social media were the public informed of this important news.

The official HSE website failed to explain that the case was that of a student who had returned from Italy or give a timeline or location for the report that someone had tested positive for the virus.

What are the causes of the coronavirus COVID-19?

Flu-like viruses have intermittently troubled humanity throughout our existence. Recent outbreaks include the SARS virus of 2002 – 4 and the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. The latest, 2019-nCoV, is said to have started at the massive Wuhan market in China; Wuhan, capital of the Hubei province, has over 11 million people. There is some evidence for transference of the virus from livestock in the Wuhan market, with early clusters of cases associated with activity there.

At the same time, a certain amount of what is frankly, racism, has obscured the origins of the virus. Some accounts of the appearance of coronavirus have expressed in mocking and hostile terms the belief that it has arisen from the wide variety of animals eaten in China, including those that do not feature in the Western diet.

Yet only a minority of the infections arose in people who had been in the Wuhan market streets near wildlife. A quarter of those originally infected had never been to the market and the earliest case of the coronavirus had arisen before anyone from Wuhan market was infected. One research team has speculated that the local hog population was the source of the new virus, based on the fact that this livestock species has similar physiology to humans in critical respects.

The increase in factory farming in China is likely to have been a contributor to the appearance of the coronavirus. In the past, new viruses often failed to spread beyond a small, local area because their means of transmission to large human populations was disrupted. In the twenty-first century, the speed of transmission is completely different to even the twentieth. A Chinese farmer can bring poultry, say, to the urban market very quickly with modern industrial methods and an infection can be shipped to a major city very quickly.

And as the environmental scientist and socialist, Rob Wallace, has written, the connectedness of the entire planet means the unprecedentedly swift spread of new viruses.

H1N1 (2009) crossed the Pacific Ocean in nine days, superseding predictions by the most sophisticated models of the global travel network by months. Airline data show a tenfold increase in travel in China just since the SARS epidemic.

Why is there so much misinformation about the coronavirus?

Unfortunately, in 2020 there exist vested interests that mean instead of a unified, planetary response to the coronavirus, one where everyone is accurately informed about the necessary steps to halt the increase in cases and deaths, there exist people who have a reason to put out misinformation.

For a start, there are those who have the incentive of making money to drive them to create confusion around the virus. There are websites selling cures and medical equipment that professes to be the answer to the virus, but isn’t. Iran, in particular, has had some wild nonsense passed around via websites and social media, suggesting mint, vinegar, saffron, rosewater and turmeric, among other substances, can act to prevent the virus. More criminally, worldwide but with a focus on Japan, there are email scams which seem official and to be containing important information about coronavirus, but when you open them, they install trojans into your computer and search for valuable personal information.

Politicians have misinformed their constituents about the coronavirus

From the very beginning of this outbreak, politicians in authority have had a dangerous, irresponsible approach to dealing with the virus. A tragic example is that provided by Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan. At the end of 2019, he posted on a chat group for doctors that there might be a new SARs-type virus as there were seven patients showing symptoms at his hospital. He advised medics to wear protective clothing. For this, he was visited by the police, brought to the Public Security Bureau and made to sign a document acknowledging that he would be brought to justice if he persisted in stubborn, impertinent and illegal activity. On 10 January 2020, Dr Li started coughing, he had caught coronavirus from one of his patients. On 30 January the diagnosis was confirmed and he died at the start of February.

Long after the evidence was overwhelming for the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese officials were still underreporting it and discouraging an effective response. Yet the West is little better.

Donald Trump, for example, has twice explained to the world that the threat of coronavirus will ‘go away’ in April with warmer weather. He’s said that life will return to normal after the spike and that the media have been exaggerating how dangerous the virus is.

And in their own way, the caretaker Irish government have been failing us. Their theme is ‘don’t panic’. Well, yes, panic wouldn’t help the situation. But is it panicking to want to know where the virus has been present and what measures are being taken to prevent it spreading? As the case of the student from Scoil Chaitríona shows, Fine Gael have a strategy of keeping detailed information out of the public domain as much as possible and assuring us that no special measures are needed.

This approach is creating panic rather than ending it. The less we know, the more we speculate and rumours (not without foundation in respect to the Mater hospital, but made up in other instances) of other possible cases fly around social media. Crucially, too, lives will be lost if the message goes out – as it did this morning on RTÉ’s panel discussion – that public concern about the coronavirus was massively exaggerated and we should carry on as normal. We shouldn’t even cancel travel plans to centres of infection like northern Italy.

By repeating the idea that more people will die of ordinary flu and failing to have someone on the panel with genuine expertise in pandemics, RTÉ ensured a complacent message came across, one that was exactly in tune with the ‘don’t panic’ theme of government communication. Yet the comparison with annual flu is utterly misleading. Not only is coronavirus far more likely to kill someone, we are still at the very early stages of its spread. If coronavirus is anything like H1N1 from 2009, which it seems to be, the final figures will be grim. According to the Lancet, probably some 284,000 people were killed in one year as a result of that last virus.

Business interests are preventing the necessary measures to stop the coronavirus

What unites the Chinese authorities, Donald Trump and Fine Gael is the terrifying prospect of massive losses to business if they take strong measures to stop coronavirus: measures such as closing airports, schools and factories. In the last week, even at the thought that such measures might prove necessary, stock markets lost nearly six trillion dollars in value.

The world economy had been picking up slightly in the wake of the resolution of the US-Chinese trade war but now it will plunge downwards. Already, indicators are showing we are heading for a dip comparable to 2008 and this is likely to worsen.

There is a clash of interest between many businesses and the needs of public health. In insurance, for example, companies only have to pay out to passengers who cancel their trips, if the government has placed official advice not to travel to the region of the planned trip. There is pressure, therefore, on the government from this industry not to introduce notices advising against travel or to limit the regions covered by the notices.

Or, to take the example of large sporting events such as the 2020 Olympics. So much vested interest and wealth is tied up in the Olympics that authorities have been extremely reluctant to announce its cancellation, when it is an obvious precautionary step to take to do so. On a much smaller scale, despite the advice of Ireland’s chief medical officer, there was considerable delay before Ireland’s rugby international with Italy was postponed.

Yes, people will lose fortunes over this outbreak. But lives lost can never be regained and nor will they be compensated for, in the way that some businesses will escape the full hit of the impact of the cancellation of events and the temporary closure of factories.

Ireland is not ready for the impact of coronavirus COVID-19

We have a particular problem in Ireland when it comes to coping with an outbreak of the coronavirus: we are already starting from a situation where there is a huge shortage of hospital beds. Years of neglect of the public health system, both in terms of staff and facilities, means there is already a crisis, even before the spread of the coronavirus. Every major hospital, the HSE tells us, has identified an isolation room to which a COVID-19 patient will be taken. In other words, with the exception of the Mater hospital, which does have an isolation unit already functioning, these are hypothetical spaces.

And of course, as soon as the outbreak hits hard, the theoretical preparations are going to prove pathetic, inadequate and dangerous to hospital patients and staff. Coronavirus patients are going to need intensive care to survive, particularly in regard to equipment to assist their breathing. Yet, as Dr Michael O’Dwyer of St Vincent’s Hospital told the press the use of intensive care beds was at ‘a hundred and ten percent capacity’. There has not been a free intensive care bed at St Vincent’s since Christmas.

It would only take around a hundred coronavirus cases and the consequent five or so patients who need life-saving interventions would strain the system, with knock-on effects in other areas. Instead of identifying rooms, ‘in case’, the government should prepare for a worst-case scenario and immediately recruit the extra staff and actually set up the extra intensive care rooms that have been identified. To do this, however, would be a complete reversal of Fine Gael’s approach to health, where there has been an unofficial embargo on recruitment for months.

Another failure of the government in Ireland with regard to the coronavirus is that they have not insisted that all large workplaces and public transport hubs provide facilities for the hygiene measures needed to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Where are the hand sanitizers at all the LUAS, Dart and railway stations? At the major colleges? At the libraries? Theatres? Big workplaces? Some have them, most don’t.

I gave a lecture at Trinity College Dublin two days ago on another threat to humanity, that posed by geo-engineering. The hand sanitizers I passed were empty. Whether that was a failure by the college or government or both, it was symbolic of a deep complacency and resistance to spending money to avert a crisis.

Will workers in Ireland be paid if the coronavirus means that their workplace closes?

If the virus spreads through Ireland, there will be more closures like that of Scoil Chaitríona. The situation for entire workplace closures seems to be that while the employer might request workers do what they can from home, failure to pay staff who are available for work would probably be a breach of contract. For individual workers, however, there is likely to be something of a battle between unions and management.

In theory, if you are advised by the HSE to self-isolate, your employer is not obliged to pay for your absence. Or if you have to leave work to care for a child sent home from a school closed because of coronavirus, you might be told this has to be paid leave, that the situation is not one of force majure. In the examples above, which were issued by TCD HR on 5 March, pressure is put on staff to take annual leave, parental leave or unpaid leave. Obviously, in the interests of public health, the government should insist that all workers who are being responsible and self-isolating must be paid. Ditto the parent who cares for a child in isolation. But again, this is not Fine Gael’s approach. They are, along with Fianna Fail, the friends of the employers and have issued no such guideline. It will be up to the unions to establish this policy or workers themselves, taking industrial action in support of their member who has protected everyone by not coming in to work.

From the UK comes a warning on this issue, where Wetherspoons, who also have businesses in Ireland, have refused to pay workers for their absence, other than the statutory payments under the sick pay regulations and that means nothing for the first four days then only £94.25 a week. Not only is this a moral disgrace, financial hardship might well will lead to people with the virus coming to work instead of self-isolating. In other words, a tough line by the employers is a disastrous one for the public.

There is a petition in support of workers rights in Ireland here, demanding that the government insist that workers who are self-isolating should be paid.

The free market is not the way to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus

Another way in which competition between businesses is making the the coronavirus far more dangerous than it should be is in regard to developing anti-viral solutions. Those pharmaceutical companies involved in the development of vaccines are doing so for the potential to profit from the crisis. Shares in Moderna for example, rose by eleven percent in one day in January when the company said it had US health funding for research on a vaccine. Clearly, investors calculated there was money to be made for the company, after fulfilling its obligations to the US state.

This private company solution to the development of a vaccine means we must be concerned about its cost and that inability to pay might lead to a divide between the rich and poor, in terms of who is protected from the virus. This is happening all the time in medicine and the Irish government should have no hesitation in breaking a private monopoly over a vaccine should one arise. Again, this is not a step that the Fine Gael caretakers would endorse.

The market has already failed us in regard to a vaccine for the coronavirus: as Professor Peter Hoetz explained to the Guardian, the tragedy is that after SARs a vaccine could have been stockpiled and made ready to go. But ‘the investor enthusiasm for a Sars vaccine was zero.’ No global health organisation or government stepped in and we are now racing against time to develop a vaccine. The issue is not so much the creation of a vaccine, there are several promising approaches, but the necessary delays in testing, to make sure there are no unforeseen and dangerous consequences.

The US provides a clear case what happens when the right to make a profit and the free-market are seen as essential to health care.

The Miami Herald reported how it works there. Osmel Martinez Azcue, acting responsibly, reported to hospital for a check after returning from China. The subsequent bill to his insurance company was $3,270. In a country with 27.5 million people without health insurance and more than a third of the workforce are not entitled to sick leave, the private system of medicine clearly doesn’t make sense in the face of a public health care challenge like an epidemic.

A socialist society would be a lot less vulnerable to coronavirus-type outbreaks. Agriculture would be less likely to create the conditions in which viruses develop among animals and cross over to humans; our representatives would not be under pressure from businesses to delay the necessary measures to halt the spread of the epidemic; we’d have much more investment in hospitals and staff to treat patients, and we’d share knowledge about the epidemic and possible vaccines and cures globally, for free.

FAQs about the coronavirus based on information provided by the World Health Organisation.

What are the symptoms of the new coronavirus, COVID-19?

Like a bad flu, the symptoms of COVID-19 are fever and tiredness. Also a dry cough. Some people report aches and pains, nasal congestion, a runny nose or diarrhoea. The symptoms usually begin gradually. If you have a temperature, cough and difficulty breathing, look for medical help.

What should I do if I think I have coronavirus?

Isolate yourself, including from your family e.g. occupy a room for yourself only. Seek medical advice promptly from your GP or the HSE helpline (below). Call before leaving for care to help prevent the spread of the virus and also to be directed to the appropriate place.

What should I do to limit my exposure to the coronavirus?

Firstly, everyone in Ireland now needs to take the risk of infection seriously. The virus can spread when an infected person sneezes or coughs. Try to maintain at least 1 metre distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing. As it can probably survive on a surface for days, regularly and thoroughly wash your hands after being in public places.

How can I minimize the risk of becoming infected?

Regularly and thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand rub (at least 60% alcohol and let the santizer dry on the hand). Don’t bring your fingers to your eyes, nose and mouth (entry points to your body for the virus).

Is there a vaccine for COVID-19?

Not at present.

Who should I call in Ireland for more information about the coronavirus?

The HSELive helpline on 1850 24 1850.