Just as I am
getting used to the idea of not having to go to work, having been made
redundant after 33 years of local government service on 31 December,
suddenly everyone
else is doing the same thing!
All our
thoughts must of course be with those
workers who need to keep working (including particularly those who need to
keep working outside their own home) – and that isn’t just the obvious
categories, such as the health workers who will save thousands of lives, or the
care workers in my father’s nursing home – today trading standards and
environmental health officers (who comprised the first Lambeth Directorate I
worked in all those years ago) have the job of enforcing
business closures.
Faced with this
pandemic the old slogan “think globally, act locally” has never seemed more
apposite. The pandemic clearly expresses a warning from Mother Earth to her
human children that we are testing the limits of our only planet (not so much
by our numbers as by the misallocation of resources caused by the capitalist
mode of production). This is a global crisis like no other.
The appropriate
response to the sheer enormity of this global crisis is exemplified by the
proliferation of mutual aid groups growing from the grassroots up. All credit
to the anarchists whose practice is informed by Kropotkin’s
concept of mutual aid, and who inspired this widespread and admirable response.
Whilst Governments flounder in the face of a challenge which requires them radically
to depart from the received wisdoms of orthodox economics, ordinary working-class
people organise spontaneously to support each other.
It is now for
the official organisations of our movement, our Labour Party and trade unions,
to catch up with the rank and file.
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