Chasing Unicorns? Orwell, socialism and patriotism

“England has got to be true to herself”, a famous English socialist once wrote. “She is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax”.

George Orwell typed these words in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz as German bombs were raining down. His short book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, has subsequently become the ur-text of a patriotic vision of socialism. Corbynism, it is claimed, fatally lacked this essential ingredient of popularity – indeed stamping on any tendencies in this direction. This was a major reason why it crashed and burnt in the 2019 election. Socialism still – in Orwell’s phrase – has not “really touched the heart of the English people”.

Keir Starmer, on the other hand, is determined to avoid such a fate, wrapping the Labour party (literally) in the Union Jack and signalling a deep emotional attachment to the monarchy. He even ordered in his MPs to abstain on a bill authorising the security services to commit murder and torture without legal repercussion – for fear of appearing ‘patriotically’ suspect.

Don’t sing ‘Rule Britannia’

But the interesting thing about The Lion and the Unicorn is that the patriotism it pays homage to is not the same patriotism that the Labour party in 2020 is seeking to identify with. Starmer’s conference speech was trailed to the media as rebranding Labour as the party of “flag, forces and family”. Blue Labour, the Labour faction which heralds ‘conservative socialism’, is committed to the triad of “family, faith and flag”. There is a subtle difference if you look carefully.

However, Orwell explicitly rejects the idea that the patriotism of the English working class revolves around these cornerstones. Its patriotism is “profound” but “the working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack”. Rather, there is an ingrained hatred of war, militarism and uniforms, and – outside of war – a widespread refusal to join the army even in times of mass unemployment. “So deep does this feeling go” writes Orwell, “that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.”

In Orwell’s view, “all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff is done by small minorities”.

Of course, The Lion and the Unicorn was written nearly 80 years ago. Attitudes may have changed – witness the ubiquitous uniformed soldiers before kick-off at football matches and the pressure of conformity about poppy wearing. But Orwell made a crucial distinction between nationalism or jingoism and patriotism.

It is a similar story when it comes to religion or ‘faith’ as modern-day adherents like to call it. “The common people” says Orwell, are not puritanical and “without definite religious belief”. Though there is a “deep tinge” of Christian belief, in terms of organised religion, the Anglican Church is mainly the preserve of the landed gentry and the Nonconformist sects only appeal to minorities.

Defining patriotism

So what then is patriotism? According to Orwell, it is a purely defensive attitude and protective of a particular way of life. “It is bound up,” Orwell writes, “with solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.”

Mercifully he soon becomes less misty-eyed and then makes an astute point about English culture which, I believe, is still true decades later. The English – despite the contentedly defeatist attitude of much of the liberal-left which sought salvation, oddly, in the neoliberal European Union – are not irredeemably conservative, capitalist or right-wing. This fatalistic stance should have been exploded by the 2017 election in which a left-wing Labour party gained nearly 42% of the vote in England. But there is, Orwell says, a definitive privateness about English life:

The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you.

Undeniably, this feeling can be used to fuel a seemingly endless housing boom – rooted in the comfort induced by seeing the value of the house you own continually rising and in viewing your home as a haven against the world. But it can also be – and would be by a serious Left – utilized in the opposite cause. In a country where millions have scant security as private tenants, and are being evicted as we speak, and where wealthy individuals and businesses buy up hundreds of flats and houses for no other purpose than renting them or selling them on, “the liberty to have a home of your own”, but not necessarily one you are free to sell, is the kind of aspiration the Left should champion. In Marxist terms, we live in a world where ‘use value’ (the function of a house or flat to provide security, stability and shelter) has become the slave of ‘exchange value’ (seeing them as simply ‘units’ to make money from). That is why Orwell could proclaim a fervent belief in the ‘liberty of the individual’ but also advocate (in the political programme that accompanies The Lion and the Unicorn) the abolition of private land ownership in urban areas – and see no contradiction between the two.

Orwell the Red

Indeed, what is striking about Orwell ‘patriotic socialism’ is that the socialism involved is of the deepest red. The second half of The Lion and the Unicorn is devoted to espousing an “English Revolution” that would set free “the native genius of the English people”. Railways, banks, major industries and land would all be nationalised (Orwell recommends allowing private ownership of land of up to 15 acres in rural areas, but as seen above, would completely abolish private land ownership – and thus landlordism – in town areas), incomes would be restricted to a ten to one variation, the House of Lords abolished and private schools flooded with state-aided pupils or simply closed. Orwell even envisages the stock market being torn down!

However, it is interesting that despite Orwell’s intense anti-Communism, his economic beliefs do not seem vastly different in their fundamentals. Orwell defined himself explicitly as a “democratic socialist”, not a Communist, and clearly saw great danger in vesting political power in an all-seeing political party, but in economic terms, did not see any alternative to state socialism.  “From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State,” he writes, “the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State, is themselves.” Despite fighting in an anarchist/syndicalist revolution in Spain, and with a Trotskyist battalion, just four years previously Orwell seems to have imbibed none of their critique of state socialism, nor their advocacy – indeed living example of – workers’ control.

Nonetheless, by comparison with Orwellian socialism, Corbyn’s mellow social democracy appears – notwithstanding the hysteria it generated – quite tame. And Blue Labour, which might claim to be the inheritor in the Labour party of the Orwellian vision, seems oblivious to his decrying of the party’s “timid reformism”. In aligning with – at best tolerating – insipid centrist leaders like Starmer and Miliband there is an all too common wilful blindness to Orwell’s radical side.

Ashamed of their own country

But the incongruous thing – and probably a large reason Orwell is claimed by divergent political philosophies – is that he combines a frankly revolutionary socialism with unvarnished contempt for left-wing intellectuals. Orwell berates the “shallow leftism” of intellectuals and the “mechanically anti-British attitude” which was de rigueur on the radical left of the time. Much of the contempt stemmed from widespread left-wing support for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Orwell, by contrast, had seen Stalin’s inherent brutality – and well as his anti-revolutionary stance – at first hand during the Spanish Civil War. However, some of the critique transcends the circumstances of the time. In The Lion and the Unicorn and elsewhere (for example the essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’), Orwell develops the idea of “transferred nationalism” – taking all the emotions, affection and loyalty that might have been attached to your own country and simply directing them somewhere else – the Soviet Union, primarily, in his era. Despite its pretentions, this mental transference gets the protagonist no closer to “genuinely internationalist outlook”.

The same transference was in evidence during the EU referendum campaign and the endless negotiations that followed. Implicit in much of the liberal-left embrace of the Remain cause was the idea that virtually everything that made life bearable in England came from ‘civilised’ European influence, without which the country would descend into a corporate free-loading, racist hell-hole (ironically, in devoting most of their energies to taking down Jeremy Corbyn – and thus helping Boris Johnson – liberal Remainers ensured this vision would come to pass). The idea that a home-grown socialism was even possible was dismissively rejected as a contradiction in terms.

Thus, Europe (the institutions of the EU) became a purely benign endeavour, without conflict or desire, pitted against a country whose temporary, austerity-wreaking rulers (a trait they shared with the EU) were seen as representative of its eternal character. But genuine internationalism involves the recognition that all countries (including pan-governmental entities and repressed or colonised nations), have their own elites and plebeians, their own fractures between capital and labour, their own bigots and mobs, and their own interests which leaders will attempt to pursue.

Orwell, notwithstanding his unabashed patriotism, is aware of this. Thus, in his treatment of India (at the time part of the British Empire) he can recognise both that Britain, out of fear of trade competition and a desire to make rule easier, has artificially held back Indian development and that, partly as a consequence of British domination, the average Indian suffers most keenly at the hands of his fellow-countrymen. “The petty Indian capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness,” notes Orwell, “the peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender”. That kind of analysis seems strangely sophisticated today.

Return of the ‘drowsy years’

However, in one important way, Orwell’s essay is rooted in its own time; a time when Britain (and its Empire) seemed the only obstacle to the total domination of Nazi Germany. He likens Britain to a family with the wrong members in control – the dividend drawers, the landed class, the “functionless” owners of industry – who are holding back the intelligent and capable. The ruling class, in Orwell’s view, are not corrupt so much as “unteachable” and mired in self-deception. While Nazi Germany has the SS man, we have the rent collector.

War, said Orwell, was the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up long-term processes and brings previously unacknowledged realities to the surface. In the midst of the Blitz, the “drowsy years”, as Orwell encapsulated the 1930s, were well and truly over and it was possible, necessary actually, to become both revolutionary and realistic.

But now the dividend drawers, the owners of industry, the tax evaders are back, if they ever really went away. Rent is the (anti)-lifeblood of the economy. Students are cajoled into returning to halls of residence so that they can pay rent to the owners. The spectre of city centres devoid of commuters petrifies the owners of commercial and residential properties who see their rental streams drying up before their eyes. Hedge fund managers and bankers are exempted from quarantine regulations because of their alleged contribution to the economy. The company directors of Orwell’s time who try and dodge “Excess Profits Tax” have been superseded by a multi-trillion dollar tax avoidance industry orchestrated by banks and green-lighted by governments.

The outright treachery that frightened Orwell has been replaced by ordinary corruption. The reverence for the impartiality of the law even if it is unjust, which Orwell believed characterised England, now pales before the staging of show trials of those who embarrass the rulers of the world. The “right to exploit others for profit” is deemed sacrosanct while a bill allowing MI5 agents to murder British citizens with impunity is waived through the House of Commons with the connivance of the Labour party. The drowsy years are back with a vengeance and nothing seems likely to jolt us back into attentiveness.

The Long March of State Neoliberalism

Whenever neoliberalism is defined it is invariably equated with the osmosis of the ‘untrammelled free market’ into ever more areas of life.

One of neoliberalism’s intellectual originators – Friedrich Hayek – made the hugely influential claim that people (and by extension their political representatives) could never know enough to plan or intervene in the economy. A person’s knowledge was limited to “their own small circle” and the things which were important to them, which only they knew. Because knowledge was never available to people “in its totality”, attempting to direct the economy in certain ways or favour some economic entities over others was dangerous and inimical to the limited sphere of freedom people truly possessed.

The consequence of these assumptions was that only the free market could guarantee liberty. The only genuine choices people could make were to do with buying and selling because they concerned matters and desires that only they knew about. If markets were left alone and the price mechanism remained unregulated, the economy would achieve ‘equilibrium’ and people would receive what they wanted and were due.

These ideas have played a massive role in constructing the world in which we now live, in areas as diverse as electricity provision, financial services, corporate mergers and takeovers and the housing rental market (to name a few). The job of government was restricted to setting markets up and getting them running. Beyond that the state should get out of the way. It cannot, according to Hayek, know more than markets do. And while individuals within markets can make mistakes, markets as a whole – because they are an agglomeration of individually optimal choices – cannot be wrong.

Thus democracy – which is, in essence, about the ability of people to understand the world and act on their desires – should be heavily constricted. Indeed, we can be sure that had representative government and a universal franchise not already existed, neoliberals would not have invented them and would have opposed any attempts to create them – as their 19^th century forebears in fact did.

This ‘market fundamentalism, as many have noticed, requires a stronger state than the ‘night-watchman’ state of neoliberal yore. The state must not only enforce private property rights but also banish outside interference with markets. In practice, in the US, Britain and elsewhere, this meant destroying the power of the trade unions. Although voluntary, not statutory, organisations, trade unions distorted markets by intruding on their natural operations – by, for instance, insisting people were paid more than they were worth in ‘market terms’. The Conservative party in Britain, which under Thatcher became a truly Hayekian organisation, dutifully destroyed the power of trade unions.

However, the state as an entity never went away, and as the Covid-19 crisis has shown it has proved more important to neoliberalism than few can have imagined.

How low can you go?

The 2008 financial crisis was a major turning point. Not only did governments use their power to bail out banks and corporations – which under the law of the free market should have vanished – they instituted a regime of ultra-low interest rates. At these historically unprecedented levels – never going above 1% – they have two important effects. Firstly, they preserve insolvent, hugely indebted companies by reducing the amount of interest they have to pay on their debts. This is the polar opposite of the approach of the Hayekian Thatcher to manufacturing industry in the Britain in the early 1980s. She hiked interest rates – up to 15-17% – as a way of driving trade union-heavy manufacturing industry to the wall.

Secondly, they make any recovery of the private sector extremely difficult. Just as they make debts more affordable, ultra-low interest rates discourage investment by ensuring the financial return on advanced money is negligible (the tiny official bank rate was reflected in nominal interest rates in the economy as a whole and Quantitative Easing programmes made sure they stayed low). But in these circumstances, private companies naturally eager to make profits had somewhere to turn – the government.

The two phases of privatisation

In this they took advantage of the historic process of privatisation, which aside from the onslaught on trade unions and deregulating the economy, was the main way neoliberalism was implemented. In Britain, the “great divestiture” of privatisation had two distinct phases. In its early years privatisation was about simply transferring ownership of industries from the state to the private sector. In this way, companies like Jaguar, BP, Cable & Wireless, Rolls Royce, British Steel and even Thomas Cook were denationalised and had to sink or swim in the private sector. While some survived, others were taken over, heavily denuded (British Steel) or went bust – as was the fate of Thomas Cook last year.

But privatisation soon became much more ambitious. From the mid-1980s until now, it has been primarily about contracting out monopoly services from the state to the private sector. The (very long) list includes utilities (water, electricity etc.), railways, academy schools, NHS contracts, air traffic control, the Royal Mail, local authority outsourcing and care homes. Very often these services were funded – and continued to be funded – by the government and, most importantly, could not be allowed to cease to exist.

This very conditional privatisation was actually very welcome to the large companies that won the contracts to provide these services. They were anything but free markets zealots and were very glad for a guaranteed profit stream in the context of private sector torpor. As noted by health campaigner Allyson Pollock some years ago in terms of NHS privatisation, “the private health care industry is not interested in a purely private market. Its interests lie in becoming for-profit providers in a basic health system funded out of taxation.” An insight that could be applied across the board of modern privatisation.

Hence, Britain has seen the grown of private companies – such as Serco or Capita – that specialise in delivering public services. Potentially everything in the public sector – GP services, benefit assessments, prisons, school inspections, speed cameras, nuclear laboratories, early warning systems and even the operation of spy planes – was open to being run by the private sector on a contract basis.

The hollowing out of the state in the name of putative private sector efficiency and ‘sound management’ (ho, ho) has occurred across the world. A 2004 profile of Lockheed Martin in the New York Times noted:

Lockheed Martin doesn’t run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic.

In one sense, this was – from the point of view of neoliberals – a welcome development that flowed naturally from the thinking of pioneers like Hayek: the state was creating and protecting markets. But in other ways, it had unforeseen consequences. Large oligopolies hoovered up contracts – far from competition letting a thousand flowers bloom, three or four companies – at most – reigned supreme. Competition, in the idealised vision of Hayek, meant “decentralised planning by separate persons”, but in no sense can the actually existing privatised state be described as decentralised or involving people, as opposed to large corporate entities. Only big companies had the resources to bid for government contracts and public sector monopolies – the object of neoliberals’ enduring enmity – became private sector oligopolies.

Secondly, democracy or government – the very thing neoliberals wanted to restrict and limit in its ambitions – was essential to the whole process of privatisation. Closeness to government was essential to winning contracts and a revolving door between the private sector and elected institutions and the civil service span permanently. This was an open door for corruption and a distortion of democracy but it was of no interest to neoliberals who were unconcerned about the distortion of something they didn’t like in the first place.

They were however concerned about the private sector and this became, thanks for the ultra-low interest rate regime, equally distorted. It is not a widely known fact the Austrian school of free market economics (of which Hayek and fellow neoliberal, Ludwig Mises, were the most prestigious members) was intensely distrustful of low interests rates because it holds them responsible for causing economic slumps (see the musings of former Tory and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell for a 21^st century version).

But although low interest rates potentially increase the amount of money circulating in the economy and make life easier for insolvent companies by reducing the interest of their debt, they make it difficult to make a profit on investments because the returns on offer are so low. The alternative is either to go for riskier private sector investments or to seek the security of government contracts which often offer double digit returns.

Since the financial crisis interest rates in Britain have never gone above a half of one per cent and, since the coronavirus lockdown, have been cut further – to 0.1%. This situation – in conjunction with the Hayekian ideology of successive Conservative governments – goes a long way to explaining the incompetence of the public response to the virus.

Useless and lethal

What was demanded was a smooth and joined up public health response, involving local councils, that prioritised above all else the needs of health workers and patients. What actually happened was a labyrinthine mess of competitive tendering and outsourcing which awarded contracts to large companies, like Deloitte and Serco that had no expertise in what they were supposed to do. The result, apart from “cementing the position of the private sector in the NHS supply chain”, has been a test and trace system that won’t be “fully operational” until September and a “useless” system of delivering PPE to NHS staff. The deaths of hundreds of NHS and care workers from the virus, many of them avoidable with proper PPE, as well as the highest excess death rate in Europe – in part the consequence of inadequate or non-existent PPE allowing the virus to spread in hospitals – cannot be divorced from this farrago.

But this is likely to merely be a trial run for what is in store. Against the backdrop of a huge fall in GDP of over 20%, the worst projected economic downturn of all major economies and mounting unemployment, the government will almost certainly proclaim a jettisoning of ‘ideological presumptions’ and commit to an interventionist, state-driven economic policy. A ‘green industrial revolution’ will be announced, aiming to create jobs and reskill millions of people.

Such a policy might even appear ‘socialist’ – a green industrial revolution was obviously the centrepiece of Labour’s offer at the last election – but the Conservative version will be careful to offer private companies profit-making opportunities at every stage of the process. It will be a like a souped-up version of the Work Programme. This can already be seen in the free school meal voucher scheme – the one extended over the summer holidays after the campaign by Marcus Rashford. A corporation – Edenred – is in charge of the scheme, not local councils. Astonishingly, the same company has been accused of “woeful” preparation and failing to send out vouchers to hundreds of thousands of parents who need them.

Facile comparison

This is why equating the current actions of the Conservatives in Britain with the policies of Corbyn’s Labour at the 2019 election is facile. The superficial resemblances – increased public spending, train nationalisation, a green industrial revolution – betray fundamentally antagonistic philosophies.

This is not a question of one being enthusiastically statist and other reluctantly so. It is matter of the Conservatives being committed to constructing a statist shell underneath which a privatised bevy of oligopolistic corporations running contracted out services are permitted to make a level of profits which the fêted free market can no longer provide. Some ‘Corbynite’ policies, such as a ‘national care service’ and ensuring 100% high speed broadband, would, it is true, have supplied a statist stimulus to the private sector. But others such as renationalising the NHS and utilities like water and electricity would have repealed the decades-long neoliberal hollowing out of the state.

But this, as we know, will not happen. Instead state neoliberalism, its intellectual roots now long forgotten, will continue its long march.

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Cui bono? State capitalism comes to town

According to the investment bankers Macquarie, the “beating heart of Australian capitalism”, the reactions of world governments to coronavirus are a sure sign that “conventional capitalism” is being discarded in favour of a “version of communism”.

The view of the bank, which is famous for leaving Thames Water £2 billion in debt, seems to chime with the idea that the British government, following its promises to pay ‘furloughed’ workers 80% of their wages and support the incomes of the self-employed (in about 3 months), has undergone an overnight conversion to ‘socialism’.

In fact, if any conversion has taken place it is to state capitalism, not socialism, and it represents an intensification of previous trends, rather than their negation.

State capitalism, as a theory, is associated with Trotskyism and some anarchists and the idea that the Soviet Union, far from being socialist in any way, was actually a continuation of capitalism in which the nomenklatura extracted the wealth made by the rest of the population. Early on Trotsky predicted that, in a wave of privatisation, state capitalism would become conventional capitalism again. This is indeed what happened, though many decades later.

But I propose a simpler definition: State capitalism is using the power of the state to control, sustain, and, in some cases, own, private resources whilst leaving power and wealth in the hands of private corporations and high net worth individuals.

This can be seen in the ‘effective nationalisation’ that has occurred in the British railway system. 

While rail franchising has been ended, private train operators are being paid a management fee to continue to run services. The government is guaranteeing their income as long as the coronavirus crisis lasts.

The same is true of the unconditional bail out for bus companies.

In the health service, NHS England has temporarily assumed powers from the clinical commissioning groups set up by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act to buy services from the private sector but there is no indication that the government has changed its mind on outsourcing to the private sector or competition in the internal market. Trade negotiations with the US, in which medicine prices and the NHS are thought to be up for grabs, will still commence as soon as possible.

QE 2

However, the major way in which state capitalism is asserting its dominance in our allegedly ‘free market’ system is through quantitative easing. QE, which works by central banks buying government bonds and other debt from banks, is a form of massive state intervention which nonetheless leaves the most powerful private actors in the economy untouched – in fact it enormously bolsters their position.

Not only does QE hugely increase inequality as a direct result of government action, as economist Grace Blakeley observes, it inverts the way a free market economy is supposed to work. Theoretically a company’s share price should increase only if other people think it is a good bet to make profits in the future. QE, however, by reducing the yield on government bonds, ‘incentivises’ investors to switch their funds into other assets – primarily the stock market – regardless of whether such a switch is justified by underlying economic conditions. In other words, QE creates stock market booms – the appearance of economic health – where none should exist.

The world’s governments resorted to QE in the aftermath of the financial crisis with the desperation of an alcoholic grasping for another drink – the four largest central banks have created around $10 trillion in new money since 2010. This was an era presciently described by geographer David Harvey as defined by the “dictatorship of the world’s central bankers”. This was state control – central banks are an intimate part of national states and pan-national state organisations – but a type of state intervention insulated from democratic interference: since the 1990s central banks have invariably been made ‘independent’ of any meddling by elected governments.

However, the era we are now entering – I think it’s unarguable that March 2020 marks the beginning of new historical era – has and will see levels of quantitative easing that make the previous decade seem like the height of sobriety. And, moreover, QE that will take its inherent logic of expanding state ownership of the corporate economy to new peaks.

In Britain, £200 billion QE has been announced. The European Central Bank, which already was dabbling in QE to the tune of €20 billion a month has expanded the programme so that it will create €750 billion by the end of 2020. And the Federal Reserve in the US has unveiled “QE infinity” – unlimited quantitative easing – in addition to, for the first time, the purchase of corporate, as well as government, bonds.

In the last case, certainly, what this portends is not only the state massively intervening in the economy – in the interests of the rich and powerful – but also taking ownership of its commanding heights.

The new nationalisation

Because this is what has been happening in the birthplace of quantitative easing, Japan. Confronted since the 1990s with a stubbornly stagnant economy, the Bank of Japan has resorted to ever greater doses of QE. In 2013, it inaugurated Quantitative and Qualitative Easing (QQE), buying government bond and “other market assets” worth £1.8 trillion. In an article from last summer, entitled ‘Capitalism’s Silent Surrender”, economist Harry Shutt noted the “creeping nationalisation” occurring all over the world. The Bank of Japan, he wrote “is now estimated to own at least half both of all outstanding government bonds (JGBs) and of equities quoted on the Nikkei 225 Index of the Tokyo stock exchange”.

On the surface, Japan still appears to be a classic capitalist economy. The world-famous names of its economy – Toyota, Hitachi, Sony, Mitsubishi and so on – are all still alive and kicking and internally organised no differently to before. The country is as hierarchical as it ever was, as well as steadily becoming more unequal. But behind the scenes it is transforming, in terms of ownership, into something different. “If this trend continues,” Shutt concludes, “it is evident that the Japanese state will become the de facto owner of the bulk of what has been the hitherto privately owned enterprise sector.”

And, as current events show, this trend is continuing, in fact rapidly accelerating. If lockdown persists for 18 months, albeit with brief relaxations, it seems almost certain that the main capitalist countries of the world will follow Japan and become the effective owners of large swathes of the private sector.

State control is not socialism

But it won’t be anything resembling socialism, unless the suffix “for the rich” is added afterwards. This isn’t merely because, in the UK, Sunak’s massive package to pay 80% of employee wages will go to the companies that employ them not to the workers themselves. Or that support for businesses eclipses that for ordinary people (estimated in the US to be set at 2/3rds for business, in terms of cash and loans and 1/3rd to unemployed workers and the self-employed). Or indeed that the rescue package is conspicuously partial, passing over private renters – who can still be evicted – and benefit claimants for whom existing sanctions have not been rescinded.

It is mainly because the expansion of state control and ownership will be used to reinforce the power and control of the small minority at the top of the corporate economy. While small businesses will suffer, large corporate entities with enormous cash reserves, will survive and likely prosper, aided by state bail-outs and de facto state ownership.

As Blakeley wisely notes, the Left should not react to the massive rises in public spending in evidence across advanced economies as if its programme is being reluctantly enacted by those ideologically opposed to it. “The legacy of this crisis will be the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a tiny oligarchy, composed of senior politicians, central bankers, financiers and corporate executives,” she says.

The question to ask is cui bono.

What Shutt said last summer in relation to another financial crisis may, in fact, be the end result of the coronavirus crisis: “… it may suddenly dawn on the public that it has already, by default, assumed ownership of most or all of what was once believed to be the private enterprise sector – without ever having taken control of it.”