A short essay
Spanish polling, heating up for the winter 2015 General Elections, show Podemos ('We Can') with 12% support, now third behind the Social Democrats (PSOE) and Spain's main right wing party, the Peoples Party (PP), both of which have around 20%. As late as May, Podemos, the PSOE and the PP were even in the polls - with Podemos rising. Most commentators (but not the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias) put the Podemos slump in the opinion polls down to the defeat of Syriza's anti austerity policy in Greece. Pablo Iglesias's response to Syriza's defeat is, however, clearly not convincing a large slice of the Spanish electorate. He supports Alexis Tsipras and, most particularly Tsipras's call for a new mandate from the Greek people, while simultaneously claiming that Spain's 13% of the Eurozone economy makes its possible leverage with the EU leadership to win the battle for an end to austerity much more likely to succeed than Greece's 3.5%.
The core of the Podemos dilemma remains. How to build a popular majority for an anti-austerity left in Southern Europe - while remaining part of a united, commercial and financial continental unity, expressed most directly through a shared currency.
This is a look at Podemos's main economic and social policy, rooted in a definite view of the overall historical balance of social forces in Europe - following the struggles of the 20th century.
'Clearly in the present conditions this (the Podemos policy) has nothing to do with revolution, or transition to socialism in the historic sense of those terms. But it does become feasible to aim at sovereign processes that would limit the power of finance, spur the transformation of production, ensure a wider redistribution of wealth and push for more democratic configuration of European institutions.' (PI, NLR, May/June 2015)
It is necessary to return later to the new concept of 'sovereignty' as used by the left in Spain and Greece. But first Pablo Igelsias's use of 'sovereignty' (see above) would be termed by him as a typical and valuable 'transversal' initiative. The word 'transversal' is borrowed from the Argentinian philosopher Laclau (another self described 'post marxist' personality who also received his post graduate degree from Essex University!) Transversal is an extension of Gramsci's thoughts (who never went anywhere near Essex) on 'hegemony'. Gramsci argued that especially in the conditions of the developed West after WW1, it was a crucial goal for socialists to 'make the political weather', to establish, through thought and action, the prevailing 'common sense' in society in order to win the nation culturally and institutionally, as the key to the eventual conquering of state power. But Laclau and Pablo Iglesias go much further. By transversal they imply the requirement to base public politics on the ambiguities and 'openings' offered by mainstream parties of the status quo, the elites, the general public as expressed through popular media etc. It is not effective to fight on questions that simply isolate the would be radicals.
So, for example, Pablo Iglesias promotes his own personal leadership role in the media as a way of inserting himself and Podemos into the current fetish for the study and acclamation of public personalities - while using Latin American analogies on the role of popular power and individual leaders to give the process a left flavour. In fact the Podemos leadership has made a major effort not to be identified as a radical left party. It deliberately avoids taking issue on questions like the monarchy. This is transversal politics.
Pablo Iglesias's analysis of the origins of Podemos, as it captured the 'Indignatos' from their mass occupations of the Spanish public squares, is that the movement was, essentially, a middle class and lower middle class phenomena. He argues that not only was this rising separate from the traditional left actions and the remains of the Spanish working class trade union movement, but the marginalisation of these 'traditional' forces was a precondition for the space that opened up for the new rebellion. As might be expected in some respects Pablo Iglesias's analysis of the sources of Podemos's rapid growth is shared by most Spanish political commentators.
There are many arguments that might be had with the Podemos leaders' political theories - so long as it is recognised that such a discussion takes place in the context of the Podemos initiative which has become one of the most successful and creative political organisations in the history of post WW2 progressive organisations in Europe. Of course it will be tested to the limit, given the fear it has provoked in the Spanish establishment and among the EU princes. Every ounce of Podemos's flexibility and political intelligence will be required if it is to move to its stated aim of surpassing the PSOE and then to its next 'moment' in dealing with power across Spain.
Comments on aspects of the 'transversal.'
There is a serious gap in Pablo Iglesias's understanding of the relationship between the people of the squares, the Indignatos', and the experience, practise and campaigns of the more traditional centres of the Spanish working class. The issue is not to decide between them. Transversal thinking is not just a possible tool to deal with Spain's establishment. Rather, a transcendent analysis recognises the potential of a politics of recomposition and of a new centre emerging in that recomposition of Spain's subordinate classes, which overcomes division between the parts of the majority. A new 'common sense' a new hegemony is to be won first there - in order then to win the whole of society. It could be argued that Podemos's first tasks are not so much to 'overcome' the PSOE, but rather to consolidate the rebellion among all those who struggle and who have struggled, in order to overcome PSOE.
Similarly Pablo Iglesias's theory of leadership is contradictory. (Of course, he would insist.) Except the contradiction has moved to create friction and fissures in the camp of the rebellion! The very open base of Podemos, with its supporters' primaries for the selection of candidates etc., was designed to show the informal and open nature of Podemos. But Podemos has begun to develop a casual, informal leadership who lead because they know each other from the beginning. As Podemos grows, embracing more than the Indignatos their decision making legitimacy is now coming under pressure among the ranks. Podemos is already no longer the newest kid on the bloc. That, and a reduced media presence, as the right have now set up its own 'new' anti-corruption party, means that Podemos have lost some of their media sparkle.
And Europe?
The absolutely central question for Spain's anti-austerity movements' success, is and will increasingly be, its relationship with the Eurozone, a subject, it appears, that cannot be fully transversalised! Podemos (and Syriza) start well in their complex and significant use of the political concept of sovereignty, playing on a deep popular consciousness (and an even deeper history) to great strength. Pablo Iglesias initially borrowed the term from left-populist movements in Latin America. The anti-colonial aspect of the social struggle in LA is a direct consequence of the unfinished revolutions for independence in the 19th and early 20th century; unfinished because the new world super power, the USA, after supporting the removal of the Spanish, dominated and still largely dominates, its own 'backyard. Syriza in Greece found this a fertile analogy in respect to their ruling class, acting just as an LA oligarchy, through tight family control of the economy and politics and social life. The weight of land ownership in the economy added to the parallels. There were also some similarities in the establishment set up in traditional Spain.
But in Spain and in Greece the struggle against US was and is submerged in favour of two new meanings ascribed to sovereignty. The first is the drawing out of the analogy between the LA and the Spanish, Greek and some of the Italian dominant classes in the fact of their networking and corruption, particularly in politics. The self-seeking, nepotistic Spanish political class are particularly despised across Spain. They have become the ultimate dysfunctional family, although both Italy's Mafia and Greece's Shipowners would give them a run for their money! Second is the widespread feeling of the unaccountable, remote and unalterable, neo-liberal character of EU institutions; which feels similar to the occupation of a foreign power. This is not at all the same as a desire to remove the nation from a European economic and political entity. It has some parallels in the feelings of underdeveloped parts of developed and thriving nations. And the response to this experience is the call for more sovereignty.
This is, however, a special type of sovereignty. The call for sovereignty in Spain, in Greece and now in parts of Italy, is not used to call for national separation from other European nations (although in Spain and Italy it does raise some historically regionalised battles) rather it is used to underline the general powerlessness of the ordinary people. They are protesting their lack of access to the potential of the union in Europe, in terms of their rights, of their political representation and of their economic security. It is more an argument that in the EU arrangement, the European people should have sovereignty over the caste of bureaucrats and politicians and bankers that now run the show. Although there is much ambiguity in this melange of thoughts and beliefs among the population as whole, much exploited no doubt by transversal leftists, the call for sovereignty is not yet at all a return to the defense of national interests above all others. (Something of this process might also be seen in the campaign around Scottish independence in the UK.) Of course nothing is permanent. Already some European far right parties are pushing successfully in a chauvinist direction - most alarmingly in France.
Last June, in a dramatic moment in European history, Alexis Tsipras was speared by the horns of what seemed an irresolvable dilemma; the Greek people had just voted overwhelmingly 'no' to the demands of the Troika. At that exact moment he decided to accept the Troika's demands. He knew that 'no' meant leaving the Euro. Unfortunately he calculated that the fight to leave the Euro would be worse than capitulation.
Podemos argues like Syriza used to, that they too can build a popular anti-austerity movement across the EU, composed of nations and movements and experts, which will defeat the current EU leadership of Germany and the Troika. That seems much less possible now that Syriza has failed and a new economic crisis threatens. In any case the Podemos policy, a bigger version of the Syriza policy, seems to many of its previous supporters in Spain to have already failed. Podemos will need to rethink how to present its policy on Europe.
What is certain is it is utterly useless to simply denounce the Syriza retreat as 'a betrayal' (while no doubt claiming that some other group, party, leader would never have done such a thing.) And a similar barb aimed at Podemos's policy would be equally useless. This blog has argued from the beginning of the Syriza government that they would not be able to implement their anti-austerity platform and stay in the Euro. And that means that Alexis Tsipras did make the wrong choice. But the point is 'why?' What are the fundamentals here? And what would be a feasible, potentially popular policy on Europe?
The big majority of Greeks and of Spanish people support 'an Ever Closer Union' in Europe - to use the phrase that British Prime Minister Cameron wants to ditch. In principle that view is right. Just to take the current catastrophe in Syria and North Africa and the exodus of refugees fleeing war and want, how could this even begin to be managed in a humanitarian way without some sort of European unity? It is politically perverse to oppose a powerful and systematic, institutional-based co-operation across the continent for the purpose of dealing with the current humanitarian crisis, the wreckage of 2008, climate change, or for getting a grip on big capital. None of these necessities can be achieved solely at the level of the European nation state anymore - if they ever could. In 1921 Trotsky supported a European Union, a federation to deal with the results of WW1 in Europe and to prevent domination by the US. He argued only revolutionaries would be able to build the impetus for such a change, but thirty years on, after the devastation of WW2, it was big capital that initiated their own type of European unity. And it is capital that has now not only outgrown the nation state but even genuine continental wide cooperation; and from their global vantage point, big capital has inevitably negated its own pro Europe policy to turn into the 'enemy within'. Indeed, the modern European cooperation that it has created is overwhelmingly in defence of its own global interests! That is exactly what it means when politicians like Blair and Cameron insist that Europe and the EU 'embrace' globalisation. Big capital want the EU to be another India, Africa or China, particularly when it comes to the 'flexibility' of labour and the the freedom of capital. An ever closer union of the people of Europe would be an anathema to the global corporations, and to their European instrument, the Troika, and to the leadership of every European state and every European mainstream party, with the partial exception of Greece.
What is the essence of the matter?
So we start from the indispensable need for (at least) a European level of multinational cooperation to deal with major problems facing European societies and their people. And that fact is already part of a deep understanding among the majority of the people in most European countries. They are not deluded in their belief. They do not have a false understanding of the world they live in. The problem is the type of European collaboration that they are saddled with.
It is inevitable that the dominant social, political and economic force in the world will be driving the European institutions do exist. Unremarkably therefore those institutions overwhelmingly consist of economic and (subordinate) political mechanisms which have been created ultimately to defend big capital. Therefore the call for sovereignty of the people in Europe can be a thoroughly progressive call and should be promoted by those interested in challenging the domination of Europe's current rulers. Further, decisions about whether to restore aspects of national sovereignty, for example whether to join or to leave the Euro, are defensible or not depending on whether they promote or not the advance of a European sovereignty of the people of Europe as a whole over Europe's current leadership. (In that context Greece's withdrawal from the Euro would have opened the door to wider and deeper challenges in the whole of Europe to Europe's current crop of imperial princelings.) That approach in turn widens out to a policy, which at either national or international, level promotes movements that already fight for the peoples' sovereignty in Europe - by organising in favour of key international actions (like opening borders to refugees, or supporting free health care against US 'free' trade deals.)
All this is obvious and clear. And it can include the fact that sometimes the route to furthering the sovereignty of the people of Europe is by breaking up, or at least away, from the current EU institutions that act as a barrier to such a sovereignty, at least as a short term perspective. But this is not a set of rigid rules. Each specific social and political context has to be examined to work out what route progressive thought and action should take. A strategic frame supports the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. Such a frame cannot be used as a set of stop/go traffic lights.
A very popular initiative in Spain is the call that Podemos has made for a public audit of the debt - where it is from - who borrowed it - and who is repaying it. This could be widened into an examination of the role of the IMF, the ECB and the Council of Ministers, the EU's current leadership, in promoting loans, then distributing wealth and then forcing the repayment of the debt in the EU. Let the Spanish people see if a new leadership of Europe is required.
Postscript:
In the UK, Cameron's 'in/out' referendum on the EU, to be held by 2017, is designed to recompose the Tory party, the main party reflecting ruling class interest in the UK, against the impact of the internal 'eurosceptics and of UKIP, with its one MP and 4 million rightward leaning votes. This is a critical requirement as the traditional British party system is currently suffering a major crisis, which up to now has included the Tories.
A major component of the UK party crisis involves sections of the voter's attitudes towards immigration. (Cameron has just announced the laughable but so called 'generous' total of 4000 Syrian refugees a year who are now allowed to come into Britain up to the next election.) The referendum looks likely to centre on the question of attitudes to the European 'free movement' of labour. In the British context this is an absolute diversion. The two immediately critical issues for the future of Britain and its nations are to roll back austerity, which means a toe to toe fight with the City of London (not Brussels in the first instance) and to reform Britain's dying political system, with its completely unrepresentative House of Commons and its bloated, parasitic, 800 plus 'Lords' - a 'second chamber' of pure, political putrefaction and an insult to the modern world.
Tuesday, 8 September 2015
Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Where are we now?
Where (from the point of view of engaged and radical leftists) are we now? Many other commentators also ask this question but are careful to avoid mention of their own starting point - which does not mean that their subsequent answers contain a god like neutrality. For they surely have a starting point, and a consequent purpose, but they assume they have universal credentials that are not necessary to identify to the rest of us. They are starting from the defence of the status quo which translates as far as the commentators are concerned into 'basic common sense.'
In fact the period we are now in was opened by three historic shifts. First was the imperialist disaster of the Iraq war and the recognition of the failure of the Afghan war, finally symbolised by the 2010 withdrawal of US forces from combat in Iraq. Second was the international finance crisis of 2008/9 that now deepens into a classic crisis of production, of over-production, and the hyper inflation of stock market values. Third was the so called Arab Spring, which hit the world's headlines first in December 2010, with the revolt in Tunisia, and which has now turned into a new proxy world war. The main aspects of the political and economic world, particularly in the West, are still turning around these events and their aftermath.
In Europe whole populations were polarised by the US led adventure in the Middle East. But unlike the European reaction to the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s, the political leadership of Europe and all of the major European parties, most significantly including most of Europe's Social Democrat remnants, supported the US 'War on Terror'. This was most destructive, from a social democratic point of view, for the Labour Party under Blair in the UK. A similar position was also taken by the political leadership and all the mainstream European parties in the case of the responses to the world's financial crisis in 2008 - to this day. And the social bases of the Arab Spring (albeit a different mixture of lower middle class youth and the urban unemployed) coalesced with the middle class and utterly politically-alienated youth in the West that first rose against austerity (alongside the remaining organised bastions of the traditional working class in the case of western Europe.)
The Arab Spring has become its opposite, transformed into the worst of the barbaric wars since 1939/48. The Arab Spring was not able to get to the foundations of inequality, of corruption of military rule, of the state of Israel, of a united, future Arab nation, nor create the social alliances needed to address these issues. Despite the young people's heroism and hope (and the decisive turning point in Middle East history that their brave actions have opened up) their place has now been taken by mainly reactionary forces, who are now in fierce battle. The Arab East in 2000 was an arrangement made by a century of western imperialism, in the first instance by the UK, then the US. The first phase of the Arab rebellion has been defeated - but the system has been cracked and cannot be put together in the old way (as the recent US treaty with Iran, and the increase in Turkish intervention both demonstrate.) The destabilisation of Pax Americana in the Middle East is permanent. And at least some new and progressive forces, with powerful social and historical roots and a pan Arab perspective, have emerged from the Kurdish diaspora as the direct imperialist grip of the region convulsively and violently unwinds.
The contest in Europe over austerity and now over some of the effects of the West's domination over the Middle east - including the floods of refugees westward, is full on. At the moment, despite the setback in Greece, the main political feature is the continued weakening of the traditional mainstream political and economic institutions in the face of these conflicts and problems. And while the independent working class organisations of Europe continue, after decades of defeat and erosion, to remain structurally weakened, new initiatives and leaderships have brought their remaining nuclei into the battle, to varying degrees and in unique ways in different countries. But the overall qualitative judgement is that a new political trend has emerged across Europe that is at odds with its traditional political institutions, including the party establishment and which is a potentially decisive new turn across the political complexion of the continent; a radicalisation of a new sector of society not seen since the 1960s and 70s.
Are there new strategic implications in the new period?
Yes. It was the great mass of the working class in industrial production seen as the majority of any potentially revolutionary class that was deemed to be the keystone to the success or otherwise of the new revolutions of the 20th century - at least for many socialists across Western Europe and the US. (In Latin America no such shibboleths applied or apply today.) But it is true that in Western Europe over the last thirty years the liquidation of much large scale industrial production had certainly helped to shift qualitatively the balance of power between the main classes.
What is often forgotten is that the greatest and most successful revolutions of the 20th century took place in countries where the industrial working class was in a tiny minority. And that industrial production did not just fade away in western Europe. Strategic sectors were often attacked in an act of class struggle which was then lost by the working class and their unions. Historically speaking, the Chartists came from a hundred different occupations in villages and cities. The Communards that fought for the 1870 Paris Commune were leather workers and bakers and servants and clerks.
Now the 1980s and 90s and the 2000s are shaken off. The working class in Western Europe is reassembling. It takes on different faces in the different nations - partly dependent on the direction taken by the remaining centres of trade union organisation and their leading role - or lack of it. It is coming blinking, uncertain, trying everything, accepting nothing, even playful, into the light. Where the old rubrics of shared housing, workplaces, communities marked your working class status; where the day to day shared 'social and economic' experience rooted every identity, the new working class, coming from a thousand different occupations and from none, from different communities and ethnic histories, assembles itself primarily politically. It is appalled by its enemy, a political class, which has some power to change things and steadfastly, corruptly, refuses to do anything for the people. This latest incarnation of the working class sees its day to day life not so much blighted by the factory or the mill (although often by its housing or lack of it) but rather by the grotesque and growing inequality in an (un)shared society, which progressively blights its health, welfare, security and independence.
But the new political current that has emerged from the new working class is not born with all of its required accouterments. While not entirely starting from year zero, and having built significant movements in a series of countries, it has to start again. It has no national political platform of its own. Union organisation (however essential) is a minority condition. It requires new alliances and new ways to present itself to win the leadership first of all the most oppressed and then of the whole of society. The social democratic perspective has collapsed across Europe (and while its divisions and break up can offer some building blocks, trying to reorganise the whole show back into existence would be fruitless.) A radical green perspective and the need for root and branch political and institutional reform are already part of the DNA of this new left. As are new types of activism and communication. But these, by themselves, do not constitute a broad and overarching enough appeal to conquer the mainstream.
The first new strategic idea is the recognition of the emerging working class, with a radical political current, seeking novel ways to present itself in society.
The second is the understanding that over the last 30 years, and excepting the collapse of the USSR, it is only partly European Russia and some of its ex satellites where the rulers have succeeded to establish a 'strong state' in the West's orbit of influence. And the absence of stronger states in key European countries is becoming a difficult matter and creating new and dangerous vulnerabilities for them.
The US based magazine 'Foriegn Policy' has carried a debate for nearly a decade which argues back and forth about the the relative of strength of Western versus Chinese capitalism. Many Western thinkers believe that China's strong state (and not Bush's milksop 'democracy') was the natural co-determinant of a vibrant capitalist economy. In the 1970s and 1980s many (including on the left) in Europe believed that the French, Spanish and Portuguese political revolutions, and the partial political revolution in Italy, proved that the remnants of democratic freedoms would have to be curtailed in modern European countries, in order to marginalise the frightening role of the powerful labour movements, and to reduce the price of labour in face of growing, mainly US, international corporate competition. But the drive towards strong states in the West did not happen.
Instead Europe, with the partial exception of Thatcherism and the UK, decided to create a new multi-state apparatus, thereby bringing the political protection of the planned, competitive, European international corporations outside of the interference of particular nation states, progressively preventing these 'local' states, with their awkward electorates, from influencing the key economic objective of the then European rulers. In practise the distinct European nations including the UK (in Britain's case more because of the role of the City of London) became less and less able to influence the economic trends that their people had to live with. Today, big capital has certainly outlived the nation state, even in the largest countries. But the nation state remains the first manager of the overwhelming majority of peoples' lives. The contradiction between multi-national capital and national governance is now a critical crisis. Where it has always been at breaking point, in the colonial countries, local strong states have always been essential, buttressed if necessary by international war machines. Today in European nations, the economic / political contradiction has reached a crisis but the local states are both unable to interfere with economics (except where it ransacks the nations' people to pay for its mistakes) but nor are they equipped to be able to crush the potential opposition.
The opposition in the West and especially in Europe has emerged. The experience of the nation state on its knees to pay for international Capital's 2008 indigestion created a howl of protest. Already facing large scale alienation from populations that had seen the collapse of any radical choice between the main parties, the realisation emerged among the majority that the national political systems were bankrupt and false and packed with self-seekers. Now the humanitarian crisis at the gates of Europe implies the necessity of national governments driving an international solution - having to start with a complete break from the US's war machine.
Strategically new definitions of political institutions are required that are simultaneously credible as representative of and accountable to the majority of people and which have the power to radically intervene and alter the direction and organisation of big, multi-national capital. On the one hand the relatively weak European states remain vulnerable to big changes in the peoples' political mood being reflected in their elected governments. On the other, these governments have no independent power over economic life. This is the contradiction that has paid such havoc with the initially anti-austerity Syriza government in Greece. Believing that the Greek example is unique, or is not relevant to the larger countries in Europe, is to miss the fundamental point. Relatively weak states in Europe, with open government make formal 'democratic' advances credible and likely. On the other hand such governments will immediately be confronted with their lack of decisive power. And it will be for the new radical movement, in its battles and in its discoveries, to grapple with and to solve that dilemma, both on the national and the international level if it is to win the leadership of society and make its mark on the world.
Next: European federation and the political dichotomies of Pablo Iglesias
In fact the period we are now in was opened by three historic shifts. First was the imperialist disaster of the Iraq war and the recognition of the failure of the Afghan war, finally symbolised by the 2010 withdrawal of US forces from combat in Iraq. Second was the international finance crisis of 2008/9 that now deepens into a classic crisis of production, of over-production, and the hyper inflation of stock market values. Third was the so called Arab Spring, which hit the world's headlines first in December 2010, with the revolt in Tunisia, and which has now turned into a new proxy world war. The main aspects of the political and economic world, particularly in the West, are still turning around these events and their aftermath.
In Europe whole populations were polarised by the US led adventure in the Middle East. But unlike the European reaction to the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s, the political leadership of Europe and all of the major European parties, most significantly including most of Europe's Social Democrat remnants, supported the US 'War on Terror'. This was most destructive, from a social democratic point of view, for the Labour Party under Blair in the UK. A similar position was also taken by the political leadership and all the mainstream European parties in the case of the responses to the world's financial crisis in 2008 - to this day. And the social bases of the Arab Spring (albeit a different mixture of lower middle class youth and the urban unemployed) coalesced with the middle class and utterly politically-alienated youth in the West that first rose against austerity (alongside the remaining organised bastions of the traditional working class in the case of western Europe.)
The Arab Spring has become its opposite, transformed into the worst of the barbaric wars since 1939/48. The Arab Spring was not able to get to the foundations of inequality, of corruption of military rule, of the state of Israel, of a united, future Arab nation, nor create the social alliances needed to address these issues. Despite the young people's heroism and hope (and the decisive turning point in Middle East history that their brave actions have opened up) their place has now been taken by mainly reactionary forces, who are now in fierce battle. The Arab East in 2000 was an arrangement made by a century of western imperialism, in the first instance by the UK, then the US. The first phase of the Arab rebellion has been defeated - but the system has been cracked and cannot be put together in the old way (as the recent US treaty with Iran, and the increase in Turkish intervention both demonstrate.) The destabilisation of Pax Americana in the Middle East is permanent. And at least some new and progressive forces, with powerful social and historical roots and a pan Arab perspective, have emerged from the Kurdish diaspora as the direct imperialist grip of the region convulsively and violently unwinds.
The contest in Europe over austerity and now over some of the effects of the West's domination over the Middle east - including the floods of refugees westward, is full on. At the moment, despite the setback in Greece, the main political feature is the continued weakening of the traditional mainstream political and economic institutions in the face of these conflicts and problems. And while the independent working class organisations of Europe continue, after decades of defeat and erosion, to remain structurally weakened, new initiatives and leaderships have brought their remaining nuclei into the battle, to varying degrees and in unique ways in different countries. But the overall qualitative judgement is that a new political trend has emerged across Europe that is at odds with its traditional political institutions, including the party establishment and which is a potentially decisive new turn across the political complexion of the continent; a radicalisation of a new sector of society not seen since the 1960s and 70s.
Are there new strategic implications in the new period?
Yes. It was the great mass of the working class in industrial production seen as the majority of any potentially revolutionary class that was deemed to be the keystone to the success or otherwise of the new revolutions of the 20th century - at least for many socialists across Western Europe and the US. (In Latin America no such shibboleths applied or apply today.) But it is true that in Western Europe over the last thirty years the liquidation of much large scale industrial production had certainly helped to shift qualitatively the balance of power between the main classes.
What is often forgotten is that the greatest and most successful revolutions of the 20th century took place in countries where the industrial working class was in a tiny minority. And that industrial production did not just fade away in western Europe. Strategic sectors were often attacked in an act of class struggle which was then lost by the working class and their unions. Historically speaking, the Chartists came from a hundred different occupations in villages and cities. The Communards that fought for the 1870 Paris Commune were leather workers and bakers and servants and clerks.
Now the 1980s and 90s and the 2000s are shaken off. The working class in Western Europe is reassembling. It takes on different faces in the different nations - partly dependent on the direction taken by the remaining centres of trade union organisation and their leading role - or lack of it. It is coming blinking, uncertain, trying everything, accepting nothing, even playful, into the light. Where the old rubrics of shared housing, workplaces, communities marked your working class status; where the day to day shared 'social and economic' experience rooted every identity, the new working class, coming from a thousand different occupations and from none, from different communities and ethnic histories, assembles itself primarily politically. It is appalled by its enemy, a political class, which has some power to change things and steadfastly, corruptly, refuses to do anything for the people. This latest incarnation of the working class sees its day to day life not so much blighted by the factory or the mill (although often by its housing or lack of it) but rather by the grotesque and growing inequality in an (un)shared society, which progressively blights its health, welfare, security and independence.
But the new political current that has emerged from the new working class is not born with all of its required accouterments. While not entirely starting from year zero, and having built significant movements in a series of countries, it has to start again. It has no national political platform of its own. Union organisation (however essential) is a minority condition. It requires new alliances and new ways to present itself to win the leadership first of all the most oppressed and then of the whole of society. The social democratic perspective has collapsed across Europe (and while its divisions and break up can offer some building blocks, trying to reorganise the whole show back into existence would be fruitless.) A radical green perspective and the need for root and branch political and institutional reform are already part of the DNA of this new left. As are new types of activism and communication. But these, by themselves, do not constitute a broad and overarching enough appeal to conquer the mainstream.
The first new strategic idea is the recognition of the emerging working class, with a radical political current, seeking novel ways to present itself in society.
The second is the understanding that over the last 30 years, and excepting the collapse of the USSR, it is only partly European Russia and some of its ex satellites where the rulers have succeeded to establish a 'strong state' in the West's orbit of influence. And the absence of stronger states in key European countries is becoming a difficult matter and creating new and dangerous vulnerabilities for them.
The US based magazine 'Foriegn Policy' has carried a debate for nearly a decade which argues back and forth about the the relative of strength of Western versus Chinese capitalism. Many Western thinkers believe that China's strong state (and not Bush's milksop 'democracy') was the natural co-determinant of a vibrant capitalist economy. In the 1970s and 1980s many (including on the left) in Europe believed that the French, Spanish and Portuguese political revolutions, and the partial political revolution in Italy, proved that the remnants of democratic freedoms would have to be curtailed in modern European countries, in order to marginalise the frightening role of the powerful labour movements, and to reduce the price of labour in face of growing, mainly US, international corporate competition. But the drive towards strong states in the West did not happen.
Instead Europe, with the partial exception of Thatcherism and the UK, decided to create a new multi-state apparatus, thereby bringing the political protection of the planned, competitive, European international corporations outside of the interference of particular nation states, progressively preventing these 'local' states, with their awkward electorates, from influencing the key economic objective of the then European rulers. In practise the distinct European nations including the UK (in Britain's case more because of the role of the City of London) became less and less able to influence the economic trends that their people had to live with. Today, big capital has certainly outlived the nation state, even in the largest countries. But the nation state remains the first manager of the overwhelming majority of peoples' lives. The contradiction between multi-national capital and national governance is now a critical crisis. Where it has always been at breaking point, in the colonial countries, local strong states have always been essential, buttressed if necessary by international war machines. Today in European nations, the economic / political contradiction has reached a crisis but the local states are both unable to interfere with economics (except where it ransacks the nations' people to pay for its mistakes) but nor are they equipped to be able to crush the potential opposition.
The opposition in the West and especially in Europe has emerged. The experience of the nation state on its knees to pay for international Capital's 2008 indigestion created a howl of protest. Already facing large scale alienation from populations that had seen the collapse of any radical choice between the main parties, the realisation emerged among the majority that the national political systems were bankrupt and false and packed with self-seekers. Now the humanitarian crisis at the gates of Europe implies the necessity of national governments driving an international solution - having to start with a complete break from the US's war machine.
Strategically new definitions of political institutions are required that are simultaneously credible as representative of and accountable to the majority of people and which have the power to radically intervene and alter the direction and organisation of big, multi-national capital. On the one hand the relatively weak European states remain vulnerable to big changes in the peoples' political mood being reflected in their elected governments. On the other, these governments have no independent power over economic life. This is the contradiction that has paid such havoc with the initially anti-austerity Syriza government in Greece. Believing that the Greek example is unique, or is not relevant to the larger countries in Europe, is to miss the fundamental point. Relatively weak states in Europe, with open government make formal 'democratic' advances credible and likely. On the other hand such governments will immediately be confronted with their lack of decisive power. And it will be for the new radical movement, in its battles and in its discoveries, to grapple with and to solve that dilemma, both on the national and the international level if it is to win the leadership of society and make its mark on the world.
Next: European federation and the political dichotomies of Pablo Iglesias
Saturday, 29 August 2015
Chinese whispers - of a future collapse
The decline of the Chinese stock exchange by 20% over the last weeks, and its general convulsive behaviour since early April this year, has many echoes of the Great Depression (1929 - 39.) Although the apocryphal story of that time was the account of stock brokers jumping out of Wall Street windows when the final crash occurred, inevitably it was the workers and small farmers who suffered the most. This was obvious later in the 1930s but one less known aspect of the time was the fact that in 1929 millions of US workers and their families, sold, borrowed and pawned to raise the cash to 'get into the market.' By the first half of 1929, as the market started playing 'loop de loop', small investors had been loaned over $8.5 billion by stock sellers. This was more than the total value of all the currency then circulating in the US. The final and definitive crash of 1929 destroyed any future financial stability for millions of ordinary people in the US - at a stroke. Since then, and despite the wave of Thatcherite selling of utilities etc, picked up across the western hemisphere through the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of shares sold on the stock exchanges of the west were, and are, held by big corporations and financial institutions. Conversely, for two years the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has been encouraging ordinary Chinese people to 'invest' as much of their savings as they can in the market.
Naturally the leadership of the CCP understands it is in a pickle via a vis its relations with the generally politically cautious Chinese population. In April this year alone, the Peoples Bank of China bought $256 billion in stocks to prop up the market. It has become difficult to accurately report further spending in the market by the PBC since then. But the current overall debts of China, combining personal, corporation, local and national government debts, are $28 trillion. This debt amounts to 282% of China's Gross Domestic Product. In fact current estimates show the total value of China's economy as $10.4 billion. Looked at objectively there is the real prospect of an irrecoverable market collapse in China.
There has been considerable speculation in the western media about the impact of a serious economic collapse in China on the rest of the world. As China's voracious appetite for both commodities, and for luxury western goods diminishes, there are already serious problems emerging in the BRIC countries and the the EU. But a debt laden crash in the world's second largest economy is something else. Its fundamental character is of a classic crisis of overproduction - as with 1929 / 31. And this at least requires a root and branch reorganisation of global capitalism - with all its attendant political and social crises. When the preemptive, sui-generis Keynesianism that has already been used by Western governments and by Japan, to 'ease' the banking crisis of 2008 is added to the picture, the potential global prospects of a Chinese collapse are nothing less than calamitous.
In the US in the 1930s the Roosevelt administration used government spending to build infrastructure, advance new technology and to increase the wealth of subordinate classes, in effect the overwhelming majority of the US population, in order to promote spending. These are the classic Keynesian solutions to capitalist crises of over-production and debt. In a perverse, not to say lick spittle version of the same project, the US, UK, Japanese and now the EU have introduced 'quantatative easing' as a rich person's version of Keynesian model, to stem the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. This has meant the UK 'Bank of England' has spent $577 billion via banks on stocks and shares in the last 5 years. The US 'Fed' spent $3.8 trillion up to October 2014 in the same way. In Japan the national bank has already spent $923 billion; Japan originated QA as a result of its decade of stagnation. It is now spending $447 billion on QA every year, an open decision taken in October 2014. The European Central Bank's first serious act since its hurried, crisis ridden birth, has been to announce a $1.23 trillion QA programme. (January 22, 2015.) Amounting to a current global total of $4.51 trillion QA 's main impact has been to massively increase wealth (and the wealth of the wealthy) through the creation of a constantly inflating stock exchange. Leaving the busted finance industry, the global market became the next golden goose, the next security, indeed the next golden egg, for the world's rich.
This $4.51 trillion was not used to develop infrastructure and investment, not used to conquer disease, ease homelessness, was unavailable as a source of spending for the majority whose living standards lurched downwards. It secured and then increased the wealth of the rich. Accordingly, the national debt mountains and the personal debt mountains have increased in the west since 2008 as debt is the only means to secure peoples' spending - in reality, partly as a result of the remedy of QA. (For instance by June 2015 in the UK, people owed £1.441 trillion in personal debt - including their mortgages. The average debt per adult was £28 532 - 111% of average earnings. And UK people paid £53.497 billion in interest. This is all miles higher than it was in 2007/8. The national debt has also increased to over a £1 trillion.) And it is precisely this still expanding debt bubble, masking the chaos of capitalist overproduction, that renders western economies and ultimately their societies so vulnerable to the current Chinese disequilibrium.
Note: The data for this piece was drawn from many sources but three are worth particular mention.
Guardian 'QE Around the World' Katie Allen, 22 January 2015; Bloomburg April 2015 report on the Chinese market and indebtedness; The Money Charity, June 2015.
Naturally the leadership of the CCP understands it is in a pickle via a vis its relations with the generally politically cautious Chinese population. In April this year alone, the Peoples Bank of China bought $256 billion in stocks to prop up the market. It has become difficult to accurately report further spending in the market by the PBC since then. But the current overall debts of China, combining personal, corporation, local and national government debts, are $28 trillion. This debt amounts to 282% of China's Gross Domestic Product. In fact current estimates show the total value of China's economy as $10.4 billion. Looked at objectively there is the real prospect of an irrecoverable market collapse in China.
There has been considerable speculation in the western media about the impact of a serious economic collapse in China on the rest of the world. As China's voracious appetite for both commodities, and for luxury western goods diminishes, there are already serious problems emerging in the BRIC countries and the the EU. But a debt laden crash in the world's second largest economy is something else. Its fundamental character is of a classic crisis of overproduction - as with 1929 / 31. And this at least requires a root and branch reorganisation of global capitalism - with all its attendant political and social crises. When the preemptive, sui-generis Keynesianism that has already been used by Western governments and by Japan, to 'ease' the banking crisis of 2008 is added to the picture, the potential global prospects of a Chinese collapse are nothing less than calamitous.
In the US in the 1930s the Roosevelt administration used government spending to build infrastructure, advance new technology and to increase the wealth of subordinate classes, in effect the overwhelming majority of the US population, in order to promote spending. These are the classic Keynesian solutions to capitalist crises of over-production and debt. In a perverse, not to say lick spittle version of the same project, the US, UK, Japanese and now the EU have introduced 'quantatative easing' as a rich person's version of Keynesian model, to stem the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. This has meant the UK 'Bank of England' has spent $577 billion via banks on stocks and shares in the last 5 years. The US 'Fed' spent $3.8 trillion up to October 2014 in the same way. In Japan the national bank has already spent $923 billion; Japan originated QA as a result of its decade of stagnation. It is now spending $447 billion on QA every year, an open decision taken in October 2014. The European Central Bank's first serious act since its hurried, crisis ridden birth, has been to announce a $1.23 trillion QA programme. (January 22, 2015.) Amounting to a current global total of $4.51 trillion QA 's main impact has been to massively increase wealth (and the wealth of the wealthy) through the creation of a constantly inflating stock exchange. Leaving the busted finance industry, the global market became the next golden goose, the next security, indeed the next golden egg, for the world's rich.
This $4.51 trillion was not used to develop infrastructure and investment, not used to conquer disease, ease homelessness, was unavailable as a source of spending for the majority whose living standards lurched downwards. It secured and then increased the wealth of the rich. Accordingly, the national debt mountains and the personal debt mountains have increased in the west since 2008 as debt is the only means to secure peoples' spending - in reality, partly as a result of the remedy of QA. (For instance by June 2015 in the UK, people owed £1.441 trillion in personal debt - including their mortgages. The average debt per adult was £28 532 - 111% of average earnings. And UK people paid £53.497 billion in interest. This is all miles higher than it was in 2007/8. The national debt has also increased to over a £1 trillion.) And it is precisely this still expanding debt bubble, masking the chaos of capitalist overproduction, that renders western economies and ultimately their societies so vulnerable to the current Chinese disequilibrium.
Note: The data for this piece was drawn from many sources but three are worth particular mention.
Guardian 'QE Around the World' Katie Allen, 22 January 2015; Bloomburg April 2015 report on the Chinese market and indebtedness; The Money Charity, June 2015.
Thursday, 27 August 2015
Political regroupment in Greece
There has been a bitter battle in Europe since January 25 this year between, on the one side, the second most powerful political and financial elite in the world and, on the other, the Greek people and their allies and leaders. It was nothing less than the choice of the direction of the future economic policy of Europe. This battle, which continues, has already produced several convulsions, including the U turn on the need for Greek debt relief by the Washington based International Monetary Fund, the opening of wide divisions between the French and German political class and the current necessity for the German political establishment to take up the cause of the current wave of refugees as a result of the negative international impact of the tarnished and authoritarian reputation that the German leaders have attracted as a result of their treatment of the Greeks.
On the other side, the battle has confronted and shaken Europe's anti-austerity movements. This is most obvious in Greece itself with the split in Syriza after Tsipras's agreement to a new Troika package of deeper austerity and deflation, tied to a permanent debt economy. On August 21, 23 Syriza MPs voted against the new proposals and Tsipras resigned as Prime Minister provoking a September General Election. On August 27, 53 members of Syriza's Central Committee announced their support for a new Popular Unity Party (Laiki Enotita), based on opposition to the new EU agreement and exit from the Euro, if that is required to sustain Greek opposition to the EU's previous and to their current austerity and debt repayment programmes.
But there are further shifts. Pablo Iglesias, leader of Spanish Podemos, may be giving his support to Jeremy Corbyn,
'In Podemos we share Jeremy Corbyn’s view that another Europe is not just possible but necessary. Against the irresponsibility of the troika and the Eurogroup, against the Europe of financial lobbies and puppet representatives, a new democratic and social Europe is emerging, and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory would be great step in that direction.'
But his reaction to Tsipras and the Greek crisis was more worrying; calling Tsipras a 'lion', Iglesias said he was confident Greek citizens would again show their support for him.
'He (Tsipras) recognised that he wouldn’t be able to complete some of the elements of his program, so Tsipras did what any democrat would do – he asked the citizens of his country if they want him to remain prime minister, if they want him to continue negotiating, if they in some way support the manner in which he is negotiating,' Iglasias has not yet seen fit to mention 'what any democrat would do' about the July Greek referendum, which gave the Greek citizen's emphatic negative opinion on the Troika's proposals - now adopted by Tsipras.
And now the new context in Europe will create a new and more deadly battlefield for its contending forces. The largest wave of refugees since WW2 is gathering its personal, social and collective calamities in a movement away from western originated poverty and wars towards life, for safety and for humanity, all of which it demands from the west, from Europe. The social and political institutions of Europe and its major countries were not built to favour such a gigantic and insistent cause. They are built to preserve and increase the wealth and power of Europes' corporations, banks and rulers. This utter failure of Europe's institutions and its current political classes will magnify despair and fear among its populations. Golden Dawn will reemerge with new force in Greece's next election. And the economic and its associated social crisis are equally unrestrained indeed fomented by those same European institutions - as the thunder and dust of debt collapse begins to shake the planet from the East.
A renovation of Europe's current direction in its politics and economics is certainly needed. How absurd it would be not to include a thorough going inspection of the movements, policies and proposals presented by the 'alternative' Europe? Surely, as the evolution of the Greek battle against austerity demonstrates, the counter to Europe's current direction requires the utmost critical examination and debate. Such argument and discussion is best achieved in the actual struggle for humanity, another lesson for those who stood aside from Syriza's contest with the Troika between January and July this year. As the various crises of Europe come to their peak, so will the ferocity of the contest between the future and the past and so must the intensity of the debate and discussion. It is one of our movement's greatest strengths.
On the other side, the battle has confronted and shaken Europe's anti-austerity movements. This is most obvious in Greece itself with the split in Syriza after Tsipras's agreement to a new Troika package of deeper austerity and deflation, tied to a permanent debt economy. On August 21, 23 Syriza MPs voted against the new proposals and Tsipras resigned as Prime Minister provoking a September General Election. On August 27, 53 members of Syriza's Central Committee announced their support for a new Popular Unity Party (Laiki Enotita), based on opposition to the new EU agreement and exit from the Euro, if that is required to sustain Greek opposition to the EU's previous and to their current austerity and debt repayment programmes.
But there are further shifts. Pablo Iglesias, leader of Spanish Podemos, may be giving his support to Jeremy Corbyn,
'In Podemos we share Jeremy Corbyn’s view that another Europe is not just possible but necessary. Against the irresponsibility of the troika and the Eurogroup, against the Europe of financial lobbies and puppet representatives, a new democratic and social Europe is emerging, and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory would be great step in that direction.'
But his reaction to Tsipras and the Greek crisis was more worrying; calling Tsipras a 'lion', Iglesias said he was confident Greek citizens would again show their support for him.
'He (Tsipras) recognised that he wouldn’t be able to complete some of the elements of his program, so Tsipras did what any democrat would do – he asked the citizens of his country if they want him to remain prime minister, if they want him to continue negotiating, if they in some way support the manner in which he is negotiating,' Iglasias has not yet seen fit to mention 'what any democrat would do' about the July Greek referendum, which gave the Greek citizen's emphatic negative opinion on the Troika's proposals - now adopted by Tsipras.
And now the new context in Europe will create a new and more deadly battlefield for its contending forces. The largest wave of refugees since WW2 is gathering its personal, social and collective calamities in a movement away from western originated poverty and wars towards life, for safety and for humanity, all of which it demands from the west, from Europe. The social and political institutions of Europe and its major countries were not built to favour such a gigantic and insistent cause. They are built to preserve and increase the wealth and power of Europes' corporations, banks and rulers. This utter failure of Europe's institutions and its current political classes will magnify despair and fear among its populations. Golden Dawn will reemerge with new force in Greece's next election. And the economic and its associated social crisis are equally unrestrained indeed fomented by those same European institutions - as the thunder and dust of debt collapse begins to shake the planet from the East.
A renovation of Europe's current direction in its politics and economics is certainly needed. How absurd it would be not to include a thorough going inspection of the movements, policies and proposals presented by the 'alternative' Europe? Surely, as the evolution of the Greek battle against austerity demonstrates, the counter to Europe's current direction requires the utmost critical examination and debate. Such argument and discussion is best achieved in the actual struggle for humanity, another lesson for those who stood aside from Syriza's contest with the Troika between January and July this year. As the various crises of Europe come to their peak, so will the ferocity of the contest between the future and the past and so must the intensity of the debate and discussion. It is one of our movement's greatest strengths.
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
It's my party - and I'll cry if I want to.
Caroline Lucas, Britain's single Green MP, has written an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn (see The Independent, 25 August.) She calls for a
'Progressive alliance', for the next election. This alliance is to be based on Corbyn's programme, then what she describes as the unique Green contribution and, most importantly for the future, the fact that,
'The beauty of this moment, and what scares the political establishment most, is that the power of your campaign (Corbyn's campaign) is coming from thousands of grassroot voices - not a diktat from above'.
Lucas argues that
'The old politics is crumbling, not just in Britain but across our continent.' But she expresses her disappointment that Corbyn's campaign has
'Not focused more on reforming our ailing democracy. A truly progressive politics fit for the 21st century requires a voting system which trusts people to cast a ballot for the party they believe in.' And Lucas goes on to suggest that if Corbyn were to win his Labour Party leadership bid, the momentum would open the opportunity for him to spearhead the call for a Constitutional Convention
'To allow people across the country to have a say in remodelling Britain for the future.'
Exciting stuff.
The gathering of popular support for Corbyn is certainly a remarkable political fact - first brought into life by the mass demonstration called after the General Election in June - by the Peoples' Assembly. Hundreds of thousands marched in London (with a large Green contingent) showing the awakening of a new, youthful based political current, that regarded the election result, and the traditional parties and choices that it expressed, as not representing them or their hopes. Corbyn's candidacy, and Labour's new internal election rules (that Miliband thought he was borrowing from the US Democratic party) have provided another focus for this new political trend. So much is obvious, and while the concrete details of history are always unique, the new potential radicalisation was generally predicted, well before the election, by the leadership of the Peoples' Assembly - among others.
So far the new British radical movement has not been disrupted by events in Greece. But in its most political centres there is increasing interest in the progress of the left organisations across Europe that challenge austerity and a growing recognition that the great questions of the future are inextricably linked to European, not to say global solutions. But although this active layer constitutes hundreds of thousands, if not a million or two, it has yet to 'win' a leadership role in the wider British society. This fact may yet be reflected in a much closer call in Labour leadership elections than expected, if not the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy. Should Corbyn win then the Britain's radical left has created a much greater platform to address the whole of society and to begin the task of winning the leadership of Britain's nations to a new direction.
Corbyn's 'grass roots' campaign is the opposite to Foot's campaign and his victory as Labour leader in the 1980s, where the left trade union ranks and the mass Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were used solely as adjuncts to the decision making power of the immensely powerful trade union bureaucracy of the day. But while the political space for a new version of the Social Democrat party, presumably under the Blairites, does not exist (witness what happened to Clegg et al) a Corbyn victory would certainly herald a further disintegration of the parliamentary Labour Party. Already the negative impact of the Scottish National Party's victory in Scotland for the future governmental prospects in Westminster of the traditional Labour Party is causing serious self-searching among Labour's right wing. A Corbyn leadership would bring Labour's crisis to the fore. Quite soon new quasi-party formations would emerge inside Labour and rightist coalitions sought, to prepare against future electoral 'ruination'
The weakness of British mainstream political thought (as reflected in the media debate about Corbyn's campaign) is that it does not understand that Labour's crisis is also a feature of the crisis of the British capitalist political system as a whole. The Empire and the City of London no longer buttress Britain's political stability; they no longer allow the wholesale export of its domestic social violence and economic misery to other, poorer parts of the world. As we approach 2016 a new global economic collapse looms and the EU is in its greatest turmoil since its inception. Mass movements by the near-world's poor and war-torn are on the march towards Europe while the EU itself is in a battle royal over austerity. All of which underlines the global and European dimension of everyday political lives in the UK. And, against that background, the Tories are about to start a excoriating 'debate' in society about EU membership. It is this combination that will frame the next stage of political radicalisation, both to the left and to the right, inside British politics. It will not be a discussion about whether or not to accept Cameron's treaty compromises. It will be a social, political, economic and moral battle about what sort of society is acceptable in an advanced country, what is feasible, what would be based on human need as opposed to the defence of the wealthy; how far is this a European, even a global cause? This debate has the potential to crack wide open all three of the main traditional parties of Britain, as well as challenging the basis of our current, decrepit political system itself.
And the key for the British left in this tussle? Whether or not to join the Labour Party? Whether to set up a left inside the SNP? Build new left parties? Perhaps to federate with the Greens? All, no doubt, important tactical questions to be determined in the concrete conditions of the new reality. What is strategic here (and across Europe) is something that Britain's new left might well learn from Greece as its European interest grows; it is that the various political developments now in creation, including the possibility of a Corbyn victory, will undoubtedly require the utmost political intelligence and imagination to succeed, but most of all, the priority of continuing to build up a fighting mass movement, against austerity, for human dignity and welfare, will, in the end, be the critical precondition for any secure progress.
'Progressive alliance', for the next election. This alliance is to be based on Corbyn's programme, then what she describes as the unique Green contribution and, most importantly for the future, the fact that,
'The beauty of this moment, and what scares the political establishment most, is that the power of your campaign (Corbyn's campaign) is coming from thousands of grassroot voices - not a diktat from above'.
Lucas argues that
'The old politics is crumbling, not just in Britain but across our continent.' But she expresses her disappointment that Corbyn's campaign has
'Not focused more on reforming our ailing democracy. A truly progressive politics fit for the 21st century requires a voting system which trusts people to cast a ballot for the party they believe in.' And Lucas goes on to suggest that if Corbyn were to win his Labour Party leadership bid, the momentum would open the opportunity for him to spearhead the call for a Constitutional Convention
'To allow people across the country to have a say in remodelling Britain for the future.'
Exciting stuff.
The gathering of popular support for Corbyn is certainly a remarkable political fact - first brought into life by the mass demonstration called after the General Election in June - by the Peoples' Assembly. Hundreds of thousands marched in London (with a large Green contingent) showing the awakening of a new, youthful based political current, that regarded the election result, and the traditional parties and choices that it expressed, as not representing them or their hopes. Corbyn's candidacy, and Labour's new internal election rules (that Miliband thought he was borrowing from the US Democratic party) have provided another focus for this new political trend. So much is obvious, and while the concrete details of history are always unique, the new potential radicalisation was generally predicted, well before the election, by the leadership of the Peoples' Assembly - among others.
So far the new British radical movement has not been disrupted by events in Greece. But in its most political centres there is increasing interest in the progress of the left organisations across Europe that challenge austerity and a growing recognition that the great questions of the future are inextricably linked to European, not to say global solutions. But although this active layer constitutes hundreds of thousands, if not a million or two, it has yet to 'win' a leadership role in the wider British society. This fact may yet be reflected in a much closer call in Labour leadership elections than expected, if not the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy. Should Corbyn win then the Britain's radical left has created a much greater platform to address the whole of society and to begin the task of winning the leadership of Britain's nations to a new direction.
Corbyn's 'grass roots' campaign is the opposite to Foot's campaign and his victory as Labour leader in the 1980s, where the left trade union ranks and the mass Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were used solely as adjuncts to the decision making power of the immensely powerful trade union bureaucracy of the day. But while the political space for a new version of the Social Democrat party, presumably under the Blairites, does not exist (witness what happened to Clegg et al) a Corbyn victory would certainly herald a further disintegration of the parliamentary Labour Party. Already the negative impact of the Scottish National Party's victory in Scotland for the future governmental prospects in Westminster of the traditional Labour Party is causing serious self-searching among Labour's right wing. A Corbyn leadership would bring Labour's crisis to the fore. Quite soon new quasi-party formations would emerge inside Labour and rightist coalitions sought, to prepare against future electoral 'ruination'
The weakness of British mainstream political thought (as reflected in the media debate about Corbyn's campaign) is that it does not understand that Labour's crisis is also a feature of the crisis of the British capitalist political system as a whole. The Empire and the City of London no longer buttress Britain's political stability; they no longer allow the wholesale export of its domestic social violence and economic misery to other, poorer parts of the world. As we approach 2016 a new global economic collapse looms and the EU is in its greatest turmoil since its inception. Mass movements by the near-world's poor and war-torn are on the march towards Europe while the EU itself is in a battle royal over austerity. All of which underlines the global and European dimension of everyday political lives in the UK. And, against that background, the Tories are about to start a excoriating 'debate' in society about EU membership. It is this combination that will frame the next stage of political radicalisation, both to the left and to the right, inside British politics. It will not be a discussion about whether or not to accept Cameron's treaty compromises. It will be a social, political, economic and moral battle about what sort of society is acceptable in an advanced country, what is feasible, what would be based on human need as opposed to the defence of the wealthy; how far is this a European, even a global cause? This debate has the potential to crack wide open all three of the main traditional parties of Britain, as well as challenging the basis of our current, decrepit political system itself.
And the key for the British left in this tussle? Whether or not to join the Labour Party? Whether to set up a left inside the SNP? Build new left parties? Perhaps to federate with the Greens? All, no doubt, important tactical questions to be determined in the concrete conditions of the new reality. What is strategic here (and across Europe) is something that Britain's new left might well learn from Greece as its European interest grows; it is that the various political developments now in creation, including the possibility of a Corbyn victory, will undoubtedly require the utmost political intelligence and imagination to succeed, but most of all, the priority of continuing to build up a fighting mass movement, against austerity, for human dignity and welfare, will, in the end, be the critical precondition for any secure progress.
Monday, 13 July 2015
The EU destroys Syriza. Will austerity win?
The drastic terms of the EU/Syriza deal (July 13) have destroyed any remains of the Syriza leadership's project; to overturn the 'neo-con' austerity policy in Europe and the Eurozone, currently led by Germany, in favour of a policy for growth and for the protection of the living standards of the working and middle classes.
The deal has all the hallmarks of a deliberate and pitiless revenge on the Greek nation. Greece is to have no authority over its fiscal policy, an indefinite status, which is to be swallowed by the Greek parliament and then conducted day by day, by the Troika, in Athens. The Greek government is to sell off all of the nation's assets but keep the proceeds in a separate account - to pay debts. And although every economist in the world knows it will have to happen eventually, Greece is to remain encumbered by all of its debts - apparently a specific requirement of Mrs Merkel - with no guarantee of their reduction.
Syriza is breaking up under the weight of this defeat. Those, like the Syriza Minister for Administration, who honestly admits that Syriza was not able to overturn the 'balance of forces' in the EU and that the Greek 'deal' is a defeat and a blackmail of Greece, also claim that the war is not over. They point to coming elections in Spain, in Ireland and in Portugal. They believe that accepting the EU's demands is not the end for Greece and that Syriza's leadership at least has survived and will carry on fighting in the right direction.
But this estimate is false. The 'deal' will crack Syrtiza wide open, produce a new defacto National Government and drive the Greek population lower and lower. The 'deal' carries with it its own story; that the election of Syriza was obviously foolish; that supporting Syriza has just made things even worse than they were; that there was no alternative but to accept Satrap status under German capital. And the effect of the Greek 'deal' on Spain and Ireland and Portugal will be to strengthen the idea that there is no alternative and to weaken consistently anti-austerity forces both within their own movements and parties and in their larger societies.
However Greek's new 'deal' is so shaming; so burdensome, so endless that it reveals a serious error in the thinking and in the demands on Greece made by the now re-empowered princelings of the EU. The mistake thay have made is to conflate Syriza with the Greek mass movement against austerity. Syriza did emerge as a product of the Greek anti-austerity movement but not out of it. In the movement of the squares in 2010-2012, a broad leadership emerged that certainly encouraged the then nascent leaders of Syriza to take a role, but there was no sense that Syriza blossomed out of, still less directed, the mass movement itself. On the contrary, there was more than a little resistence from some parts of Syriza in the face of the occupations and demonstrations. Today, the Solidarity (not charity) organisations across Greece that run the voluntary markets and clinics and schools and pharmacies, and which are used by 3 million Greeks, are not initiated or run by Syriza. They were and are led by the vast layer of people that arose from Greece's protest movement. Syriza was never the parliamentary wing of the Greek peoples' anti-austerity movement.
But the EU leaders do not know that. They would not understand it anyway, given their own entitlement based notions of leadership and the lack of connection with the ordinary people who pass by in the bus. They have struck at Syriza to warn the rest of Europe of the folly of electing anti-austerity representatives. And they will likely break Syriza, whose main leaders will now need to rely on the votes of the old memorandum parties to carry the new austerity laws in the Greek parliament. Thus a new National Coalition will be born - in defence of the Euro. The mass movement however is unlikely to face the same fate. So long as there is some, credible representation at the level of the national political institutions in general and in the Greek parliament in particular, the anti austerity movement of the Greek people, the sea in which the old Syriza could swim, will move again in defence of the whole nation.
Syriza has, up to the referendum, led the fight against austerity in Europe and against the EU leadership, since its election on January 25 this year. It would have been absurd and sectarian to stand outside or on the margins of that fight. A subordinate argument inside Syriza's leadership (and outside) meanwhile strongly argued that Greece should be prepared to repudiate all debt and to leave the eurozone. Those who argued the case for this plan B denied that the fight within the eurozone was likely to remain the main, indeed only theatre of struggle for the continuing battle with austerity, and that preparations should be made for the shift in the location of the struggle. They have lost their argument in the leadership of Syriza at the moment where the battleground has definitively shifted. It is vital that they are now a leading part in the new formation and campaign - as a leading part of the Greek mass movement against its new austerity government.
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