A response to 'Homage to Catalonia'

From Patrick Sikorski

Back to Catalonia, the Basque Country, Greece, Scotland and Ireland!

Clearly a trend. Clearly also areas wrested to one degree or another from the old imperialisms. Clearly on the periphery of the Old Continent - even though they might not be the so-called, "classic" colonial freedom struggles envisaged in the consciousness of the average Brit and given expression by Uncle Mac and his Winds of Change blowing through Africa speech!

From the point of view of working class Barcelona, West Belfast, the Bogside/Creggan, the central belt of Scotland (and Motherwell), Athens/Pireus, ...well, the national, political and economic struggle continues but not exactly in the same way or in the same conditions as a century ago.

However, as Tariq correctly identifies in the closing remarks of his Talk, none of the mainstream (centre) parties emanating from the Socialist Parties (2nd International) or the Communist Parties (Stalinised 3rd International) have anything to say on this! Well, they do but it's completely reactionary. That is they collapse completely into the Euro right position that the EU and it's institutions (especially now including its currency) is the last hope in face of the threat from the East - be it from Russia, the Middle East or China! (I personally heard this from a Refundazione MP in Florence around the time of the Social Forums). It, this collapse, is clear in the capitulation of the Syriza leadership (despite their peaceful referendum), the "timorous wee beastie" that is today's SNP leadership and the fatal gradualism which is now the watchword of the leaderships of Podemos, the Catalan Assembly, Sinn Fein and the Corbyn wing of the LP.

I'd say that not only has capitalism been a happy bedfellow of the late feudal/early modern period, the European  Rennaisance, the Ancien Regime, the Enlightenment and Imperialism it is now impossible for any "progressive" political party to at one and the same time co-exist with it and at the same time defend any of the gains of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution even in it's heartland of Europe.

This has been a trend for over a hundred years but perhaps it has reached it's very own April thesis moment as the liberal, social democratic middle ground is annihilated between the anvil of the multinational corporations and the hammer blows of combined and uneven development outside of, but penetrating deeper and deeper into, the post industrialised first world.

How else can one explain why a mild form of civil disobedience such as we have just seen in Catalonia which was aimed at pushing forward to independence, be met by rubber bullets, 900 injuries, the stealing of millions of pre printed ballot papers and then the stealing of ballot boxes by Guardia Civil (new hats same old fascists); how else can it all be explained other than to recall Burntollet and the B Specials - and then bring us back to a May government of ghouls reliant on power courtesy of 10 members of the no surrender DUP party?

In such a world every one of those 2.7 million pro Catalonian independence votes - "legal" or not, registered directly in struggle are worth their weight in gold. Of course there was a reactionary counter demonstration - mobilised throughout Spain! There would be such a demo in this country - led by Princes William and Harry - in full uniform - if Corbyn and McDonnell ever got serious.

I think that we should be in solidarity with the independence movement in Catalonia in its current struggle against the Spanish state - unless we think that the Catalonian independence movement is just a livelier, more excitable version of Brexit? If we think this then we should say so and then work through the consequences of not supporting partial breaks such this and the earlier Greek episode, and say until we're all ready at the starting line and have had successful socialist revolutions there is no chance of breaking with the EU institutions or Troika. But would not such stageism have placed us with Martov and not with Lenin a hundred years ago this month?

Patrick Sikorski

Homage to Catalonia

Britain's second best known radical-socialist and successful writer, Tariq Ali, states that today's upsurge in Catalonia has deep, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist roots. (See Tariq's talk.)

Tariq's comments were made before the enormous pro-Spanish unity demonstrations across Spain and in Barcelona on 8 October. The police counted 350,000 'at least' in Barcelona. The organisers claimed 950,000.  Barcelona is of course the capital of Catalonia.

Catalonia is home to 16% of the Spanish population. But it accounts for nearly 27% of Spain's exports, 19% of its GDP and nearly 21% of Spain's foreign investment. The Madrid government claims that Catalonia owes it 52 billion Euros. And it is money that makes the national political life of Spain go round. Spain has the dubious reputation as having the most corrupt political class in a very corrupt EU and Spain's PM, Mariano Rajoy Brey has the 'honour' of leading Spain's most corrupt party. (Only Spain's royalty has a larger proportion of corrupt members than are to be found in the leadership of the Peoples Party.) These are the people who sent the national police to injure 900 would-be voters in Catalonia's informal referendum on independence (October 1) and the people that used their influence (and considerable constitutional power) to sternly warn their subjects to mind their ways!

2.3 million Catalans voted on 1 October; 37% of the Catalan population. Tariq does not discuss in his talk the political implications of the limited numbers voting for Catalan's endorsement of independence from Spain. Instead he focuses on the consequences of independence. He rightly says that the EU will not support an independent Catalan. He adds that a separate Catalan could only stay in the EU if it supported the EU's economic policy (which nearly destroyed Spain and still means 25% youth unemployment) and NATO. But perhaps the Catalan political question starts at an earlier point in the argument than a discussion of the possible consequences of Catalan winning independence vis a vis its relations with the EU.  

As with the Scottish example, Tariq agrees with many left commentators that the national upsurges in Europe are, in large part, a response to decades of misery as a result of Europe's own versions of globalisation. The fault lines in the body-politic are apparent in and across many European nations. The all derive from particular histories. In the Scottish case the democratic deficit causing decades of political oppression of the country and society by an 'unelected' Westminster government sparked the most recent rise of the SNP. The fault lines are cracking open to various degrees, almost all (exception made of Flanders in Belgium) as a means of resisting modern capitalism's impact by trying to create new and accessible states that will defend themselves.

The main parties in Spain, the Peoples Party and the Socialists, promote Spanish 'unity' and state violence if that unity is threatened. The biggest left party in Spain, Podemos, supports the right of the Catalans to have a referendum on independence but the Podemos leadership prefers a 'no' vote in that circumstance.

What are the fundamentals here?

We are not looking at the vast efforts of colonial nations to overthrow their metropolitan rulers and the lines that they drew to demarcate their different empires. The national upheavals in modern Europe are not aimed at the overthrow of an occupying empire; they are drawn from historical struggles but are aimed as an effort to break-away from political systems that are remote, corrupt and that do not protect them. As a result there is intense interest in these national campaigns about the alternative ways in which democracy might work. Part of the often positive attitude shown towards the EU is a reflection of the desire, particularly of the youth, to be less national, more global in outlook and more local in the distribution of power.

These upsurges have nowhere yet confronted capitalism's formidable architecture in the European, let alone the global arena. Part of Tariq's talk includes a clip showing a Spanish economist explaining his utopian vision of the economic strength of an independent Catalonia. Again, the assumption is that the EU would accept such a set up.

The result of a radical momentum, to by-pass, to go around, to jump over, to turn your back on a appalling centre of corrupt wealth and dogmatic power that is the Spanish state's politics, but without a realistic and radical sense of the future, is a split. On October 8, it was not middle class people banging their pots and pans who turned out for Spanish unity. Many of the speakers used all the old slogans about the need for unity to fight 'the enemy'. (Their version of unity is down among the old socialist party bureaucracies, the self-serving party mayors, the central offices; down among the lowest of common denominators.) But hundreds of thousands of Catalans were not serving the status quo in their actions.

Starting from political basics, Catalans; workers, professionals, youth and unemployed are not united over Catalan's independence as a sufficient answer to the woes that they share. They doubt the current Catalan leadership. They doubt that even if they were once removed from the Spanish political stink they would have found something new. The Catalan cause needs to look, not so much at the 37% of the voting population who voted for independence but how to unite, with answers, the 37% with the remaining 63%. Part of that is surely the defence of the right of Catalan people to do whatever they see as fit against their current system to change their lives. And that includes the creation of a second referendum for all. In that second debate comes the versions of the future which the people want to see - with a frank account of the real difficulties to be faced and the real allies that are needed to overcome those difficulties.

To lose the energy of October 1 by confronting it with October 8 will be to break the momentum in Catalan - mobilised up to now against a rotten state that lives off its wealth and power. October 1 and 8 have got to be merged and build a new energy from a new political perspective.

British PM defends capitalism.

The British Prime Minister was forced to defend capitalism in a speech she gave on the 28 September and then throughout her Tory party conference at the beginning of October; why? And was she right in her claims about capitalism's achievements?

Teresa May probably thought that she would never have to stand up for capitalism again after her jolly student days. Yet here she is, in office, as one of Britain's shakiest PMs, giving a major speech on the benefits of one system of society as against another social system. Thatcher's sole entry into that particular argument was 'There is no alternative.' In other words, it has been decades since British political leaders, from both right and left, have, in any sense, felt the need to talk about, or to defend, the capitalist system of society.

The reason May made her speech is because the Corbyn led Labour Party has shifted the centre of political gravity in Britain. On the 29 September, the day after May's first speech, the press were full of stories that Tory MPs were supporting a letter to the PM on the need to cap domestic energy prices, and another group of Tories were demanding a halt to their own 'Universal Credit' policy roll-out, on the grounds of its grievous social-welfare reductions. On the day before the Tory Conference Boris Johnston (again) broke Cabinet rules with his press comments on Brexit in a shot aimed directly at the Tory leadership crisis. And now her closing conference speech, 4 October, was deemed a disaster by the mainstream media. The Tories desperately seek a new leader but with that comes the undeniable pressure from the British public for a new election.

In the meantime a YouGov poll found that 58 % of Britons support re-nationalising the railways, water companies and other utilities (with 17 % opposed). 61 % support increasing the minimum wage to £10 (with 19 % opposed) and 52 % support increasing the top rate of tax to 60 % (with 23 % opposed). There is also majority support for policies such as rent controls (59 %), abolishing zero-hour contracts (64 %) and introducing universal free school meals (53 %). And a 2016 YouGov poll found that the public see socialism as more favourable than capitalism. (Data from New Statesman 28 September.)

May made her pro-capitalist speeches because she was, and remains, frightened that Corbyn's Labour Party has now given a shape to how austerity might be reversed. At the same time Corbyn proposes (modest) inroads into the ever-expanding wealth of the rich. (Labour's new manifesto is an essentially Keynesian document but nevertheless it is more than enough to panic the neoliberal horses!)

This shift of mainstream political thinking, if consolidated by Labour through another election, will in turn provoke the next episode of Britain's political crisis. The paradox is that as Labour gets closer to implementing any serious reform in society so will a majority of its parliamentary party and some of its affiliated union leaderships revolt - in the defence of a Blairite agenda. That therefore means the survival of the Labour Party in its current form is fragile - at the very point where it is most close to becoming the government in a new General Election.

The main characteristic of Britain's on-going political crisis is therefore not the apparent decomposition of the Tory Party. It is in bad shape but its old age, its war over Brexit and its own leadership problems do not come from the class based schisms that score Corbyn's Labour Party. The Tories will always consolidate when ruling class interests are challenged. That is its historical role.

Labour on the other hand has 'a river running through it.' Most of the European social democratic parties have already destroyed themselves as they have consistently levered the working class interest out of their organisations. Uniquely, the British Labour Party, despite or more accurately because of Blair's failures, has been able to provide a home for a new, deep anti-austerity, anti-racist and anti-war radicalisation. This directly clashes with Labour's bureaucracy, with many Trade Union bureaucracies and with most Labour MPs. And the divisions inside the Labour Party are a class-based.

The next stage of Britain's political crisis, now the Tory government is under the gun, will concentrate around the future of the Labour Party. The outcome for Labour members and supporters and the Corbyn leadership will be determined ultimately by the success (or not) of the build up of a mass social and political movement both inside and outside the Labour Party. Such a movement has to be joined together by a shared, active and courageous challenge to a society and a signal campaign aimed at root and branch change in the Party itself.

This new political pole in society is yet to fully emerge. But the elements for its birth are surely evident in the waves of industrial action, the strength of young people's voices, the new anti-racist movement, and the demands from the ranks for a bottom to top reorganisation of Labour. To make radical change in society it is required to make radical change in the organisations and movements that already exist. To that end the Labour Party Momentum current, the trade union contingents, sharing the anti-Tory demonstration and other radical events in Manchester, during the Tory Party conference, is a model of the alliance to be built.

But that is for the (perhaps) imminent future. A solid and coherent socialist perspective has not by any means yet won over society as a whole and May's speeches still need to be answered and challenged.

The points that May has raised needs to be examined honestly. She said that capitalism, despite its faults had, throughout its existence, changed the world and the lives of most of the world's population immensely for the better.  Her followers added that 'real socialism' had never been successful at any time in history. (They give the example of the China's Communist Party needing capitalism to improve the country's growth and increase its living standards.)

Leaving aside May's extreme exaggeration of the radicalism of Corbyn's programme as 'Marxist', her point about 'the regulated market' sounds like it might work. After all that is what Roosevelt did in the US, Attlee did in the UK etc. Social democracy was able, in the US in the 1930s and in the UK in the 1940s to regulate capitalism with positive results. (In reality May and her coterie demand a bonfire of all regulations 'hampering' capital.) But surely there has been tremendous human progress in periods of 'regulated' capitalism - as May pretends now to support?

History certainly proves the staggering, and up to now, unique energy and technical progress spawned by the capitalism system as it spread across the globe, transforming, as Marx remarked, every aspect of life. But despite the utopian visions of thinkers like Adam Smith, a fundamental characteristic of this new, live-wire system of society quickly emerged which also 'changed the whole world.' The capitalist machine, it turned out, depended entirely on exploitation. And its first act was to create a whole new social class, pulled gradually and then savagely away from a thousand different ways of life, as the bedrock of this exploitation, by turning work, like everything else, into a commodity to be bought and sold.

But capitalism is just another social system. No more, no less. It has been more dynamic in its technique than previous systems. Its purpose (despite all the magic processes that its academic supporters claim it produces for the benefit of all) is to create wealth for a tiny elite who own the means of production and therefore the exploitation of the bulk of the human race. Full stop. So exactly from where comes the undoubted and unique social and political advances that have taken place (and that are still taking place in some countries) under this social system of capitalism?

Besides its drama and speed and technical development it is also certainly possible also to describe the capitalist system as the most deadly and and traumatic social system since the initial civilisation of the human race. In turn it has framed Slavery, World Wars, the Holocaust etc. But it is also the first social system in the history of humanity to face its own creation. The exploited mass of the population subject the system to a virtually relentless pounding as a vast, relatively homogeneous, social class that, in its collectivity and its indispensability to the system, shock and even, from time to time, break-open the conditions of their own exploitation. All, every single example, of any substantial social and political progress that has been achieved under the capitalist system, including 1930s US and 40s UK, has been the result of this struggle of the exploited. Capitalism has created the greatest counter-force in the whole history of all previous class societies. Capitalism gave birth to a new vast majority with the opposite interests to those of its selfish, frightened parent.

The capitalist system is not benevolent. It is true that some people with vast riches can and do worry about the world - or their personal future status in heaven. They give charity. It is true that children's history books and films present the heroic roles of (mainly) white, leading men in the reforms that have been forced through. But schools and the vote and hospitals and welfare and leisure and an end to slavery and women's equal rights and housing and, and, and, were all fought for, sometimes with immense sacrifices, and won by millions of working class people and their organisations.

Yet every single inch of progress that the vast majority of working people have travelled across the centuries of capitalism remains insecure - for the simple reason that the exploited are not the ruling class. They are never allowed to control economics which is dominated by ownership. And even their hard won potential political 'control' (through fighting for and achieving the franchise in many countries) deserves to be in inverted commas for 99% of the time, as political life is dominated by those who rule economics!

The great successes of capitalism in the reform and improvement of society turn out to be the great successes of its opposite, against the grain, against the tide, against the basic mechanism of the social system that people live under. The exploited contradict the very society that created them.

If capitalism as a system therefore provides no substantial advantages to society, except those ripped from its rulers, what of the failure of socialism as a new system in the world; and what then of socialists requiring capitalism to improve their societies?  What should be made of the modern developments of capitalism in China?

First it is worth noting that the UN figures on the rise of living standards across the globe since the 1980s - always quoted by academics that cherish capitalism - is almost entirely caused by the dramatic movement of a half to two thirds of a billion Chinese people moving from the land to work in cities. That huge movement, on its own, substantially changes the whole world's picture of humanity's, of working class's material progress. In Europe and the US living standards are on average falling and have been since the 1980s in the case of the US. The West, from the point of view of the average living standards of the bulk of its population, is in decline. It is most dramatically obvious in the almost universal view across Europe (and the US) that the next generation will have a substantially lower standard of living than the current one.

Nevertheless, was it not the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party themselves that used capitalism, the capitalist system, to make a breakthrough in the living standards of millions? After all, millions of Chinese peasants were not battling to create cities or factories.

Does this vast shift in China, the single greatest forward shift in the standards of living in human history, prove the merits of the capitalist system? Such a tremendous event deserves at least some study.

The paradox is that China's huge 'advance' comes from out of the weakness of global capitalism. In another one of those spectacular contradictions of a system in turmoil, the decline of the world's greatest single capitalist power over the last 25 years created the very conditions for an underdeveloped, agriculturally based, minor economic power, hostile to the US, to develop the space for a state controlled, capitalist, expansion. US led imperialism began its global decay in Vietnam. By the 21st century the US's overblown military and its declining share of world trade crossed lines that were brutally exposed in Afghanistan and Iraq (and today in Syria and in its dealings with N. Korea.)

It is the continuing and expanding weakness of the world's main capitalist leadership the opened the door to the Chinese CP. The control of global finance, a key feature of successful Western imperialism for 100 years, has been partly redistributed in a complex and uncertain network. And it was the great international corporations in the West that forced down the West's own barriers to trade with China in their desperate greed for cheaper labour. China's second great leap forward, strictly under the control of a Chinese leadership, is a result of the decay of Western hegemony and perhaps of the capitalist global system as a whole.

The fundamental nature of Chinese society is also controversial. The successful grasp of capitalist development promoted by the Chinese CP has expanded and fertilised the association of China's regime with institutional corruption. But prior to the 1980's and 90's 'reforms' to develop a capitalist market, the Chinese CP had already long adopted the 'Stalinist' road. Many socialists outside China (and inside) already regarded the Chinese socialism as a failure. Therefore it was not at all the 'capitalist experiment' as such that defined China's government and state. It is clear even now that the capitalist market in China is wholly subordinate to the state and the Communist Party. The total absence of the representation of China's working classes in the centres of power - since the 1948 revolution - and the social turmoil that is today associated with the critical political and economic disasters in China often effecting the majority - all serve to demonstrate the consolidation of a state capitalist regime in China. (China has remained the country with the most social upheaval in the world, according to UN figures. It is followed by South Africa.)

Does the Chinese example therefore show that even a would-be 'communist' country needs capitalism? What is the relationship between socialism and capitalism - if there is any at all? And why has the resistance to - and the inroads driven into - world capitalism never actually resulted in the victory of a fully developed socialist system of society in any major developed country?

These three questions all depend in practise on the truth of the assertion that all countries that have tried socialism up to now have failed. The truth is that historical reality is only been able to give a partial answer to that allegation. (Some left organisations have claimed that all the conditions have been there for success - at least since 1917 - but a succession of wrong leaderships failed, betrayed and ultimately destroyed the socialist projects in their grasp. This explanation for the retreats and defeats that the socialist cause has faced across the world and across a century and a half seem at best partial and limited. Did the Paris Commune die through weak leadership? Were the Vietnamese leadership doomed to failure despite their world breaking success?)

Any objective study of the last 200 years however would need to start from the recognition of the immense triumphs of the exploited classes on a world scale that are visible, tangible and produced virtual miracles in their time. Since the days of the French revolution humanity has tried to find rational ways to order society in the interests of all - and that still remains the great unresolved issue of our time. But a virtually constant contest between the majority social classes and capitalist rule has made astonishing advances. (Amongst other things forcing the progress of technical advances made through capitalist enterprise.)

On the narrower plain of the supposed vulnerability of socialist societies to capitalism, it is valuable to note Lenin's practical approach in 1917. This was the early days of the Russian revolution and six years before the Soviet regime was forced to open up a capitalist market on the land.  Lenin tackled enthusiastic workers committees representatives that wanted to both manage and control their enterprises. He argued with them. Who knew how to operate the connections with the banks, organise transport requirements, how to draw in raw materials and how to make the accounts? He proposed a new type of apprenticeship where the workers' committees had overall control but would simultaneously take up an exercise in practical learning from those who knew and used the companies' systems. This was the dialectic of apprenticeship and control. In the event, War Communism shattered any medium or long term learning - as the White Russians and 17 imperial armies launched their counter-revolutionary blood-fest.

In Tsarist Russia Lenin could see two decisive new moments in the battle to win a new society based on working class leadership and majority rule; first from the way capitalism won economic dominance under the noses of a ruling feudalist, aristocracy with a God given monarch. In fact capitalist economic success inside non-capitalist regimes started in Italian banks during the Renaissance. Later it turned into the common route across the West and latterly Asia ultimately aiming towards the revolutions and wars that capitalism finally led to overthrow the old monarchical and feudal regimes. Lenin noted that this was the opposite to the means of establishing any socialist system. Socialism cannot spread its economic hegemony under a capitalist system. The socialist project depended first on the conquest of political power.

Second Lenin understood that in underdeveloped countries like Russia, progress in society would not pass through any long term 'capitalist stage' as the imperialist centres had done. The capitalist system, under imperialist control in these underdeveloped countries, was entirely happy to work alongside feudal power. Indeed they defended it against their own workers. Capitalism could happily live with, indeed promote, the 'ancien regime' while its economic system, dominated by the great empires in the West, would spread. Progress of any sort would not therefore come at all within capitalism. Lenin saw that only political and state power organised by the exploited, by workers supported by the peasant insurrection, could open the door to any chance of progress, and that would need to be in a socialist direction in Russia. Which, as demonstrated earlier, did not mean that capitalism could not be used if properly controlled in building a fresh economy in an underdeveloped nation.

It is speculation to imagine what would have become of Lenin's suggestions to the Worker's Committee representatives from Petrograd and Moscow's great factories. The working class, allied with a revolutionary peasantry, in control of a state power that's built democratically, learning the capitalist mechanisms for production, distribution and exchange; capitalism as a subordinate economic system, inside a would-be socialist society. Full of danger no doubt as Russia's later experiment opening up a market on the land (NEP) quickly exposed - as a new class of 'entrepreneurs' emerged with resources and their own self-seeking political objectives. But NEP was essential for survival; and in the end successfully controlled even by the battered early Soviet state.

How do these complex experiences reflect on the British Prime Minister's views of the merits of the capitalist system?

In the first place there is no evidence from history that the capitalist system, the free market, provided the slightest instance of social progress for capitalism's exploited classes. Every advance made by capitalism's exploited classes was wrung out of indirect or direct confrontation, industrial and political struggles, revolts, wars and revolutions, sometimes in desperate wars of survival; sometimes 'delivered' by political instruments that rested on the working class's support (for example the social democratic parties and trade unions.) The capitalist system in not neutral. It serves owners of Capital. Left to itself it serves no-one else.

Second, capitalism did not 'free' the world from feudal misery and slavery. On the contrary slavery was a 100 year economic platform for the British Empire's capital accumulation. It finally broke with slavery to defeat its competition. Slaves then had worse lives as labourers. In many underdeveloped countries with feudal type political and social rule, capitalism deliberately refreshed and promoted their savagery and backwardness (e.g. 'British' India.)

Third, every major effort to establish a socialist society, a society that can ensure the basic requirements of all within it, where economics is subordinate to the whole of societies' interests, has never come close to victory in any developed capitalist country. The desperate lives and misery created by the imperialist stage of the capitalist system in underdeveloped countries led and still leads to waves of revolutionary efforts to transform conditions. Lenin once commented that the revolution would succeed in such countries but socialism, which depends on a certain level of economic and social development, would be mastered there only with the greatest difficulty. Meanwhile, while a majority-led social revolution in developed countries would be immensely difficult, the road to building socialism would be easier.

What May does not understand is that the world and its people are only at the beginning of successfully challenging the capitalist system. This change in society will be the first in human history where the conscious efforts of millions of the exploited will be its engine - rather than the attractions of personal wealth or God's will, or any of the other ridiculous banners that litter history. May does not see that daily life is a struggle between the classes and that great gains have already been forced from a system that, left to its own devices, denies human security, is uninterested in a positive life for all and rejects the precedence of people over commodities. It is absurd to say that socialism does not work. Its preparatory work is all around us, every day. The final fruition of a socialist system overthrowing global capitalism, will take more time and be a continuous and enormous effort. But because of the immense technical advances of modern capitalism starting from its battles with feudalism and fermented by irrational competition (how many washing powders do you need?) it will be much faster than capitalism's centuries of preparation.

A response to 'The Force of Labour's Manifesto' (16 September).

I have a different perspective to your comments regarding the Labour Party ( “Labour’s Next Step? – The force of Labour’s Manifesto”)
           
             I have to say that I don’t share the effusive claims for the Labour Party’s 2017 GE Manifesto. Perhaps, as a result of a considerable number of years witnessing Labour’s disappointments and betrayals I have developed a jaundiced view of Labour’s ability to act in any meaningful way on behalf of working people. Having said that however I recognise that some progressive noises of intent have encouraged support for a change of political direction at this time. I don’t regard the Labour Manifesto as being a great radical prospectus as has been proclaimed by some. I suppose that considering where we have been with Labour over the years it will be seen in that overblown context. A further concern I have is the seriously flawed strain of what is described as “Corbynism”. Corbyn appears to be sincere and I welcome the fact that he has prevailed against the “right” in the Party albeit without seeing them off completely; but surely we have learnt the futility of personality politics. So he may be sincere but he can also be sincerely wrong. I give as an example his attitude towards Scotland and the right of self-determination.  The Labour Party is opposed to Independence for Scotland (Labour’s GE Manifesto) but not only are they opposed to Independence they are also opposed to the Scots having a referendum on the issue. They have acted in concert with the Unionist Tories and Lib-Dems in attempting to deny Scots the opportunity of another referendum. Whenever I hear Corbyn speak on the matter it is the same language as the reactionary Better Together allies (Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour).  I would have thought that there is a basic democratic principle at stake, no good saying – they had a vote, it’s over – as Corbyn has been saying recently. I wonder what he has to say about developments in Catalonia where the Spanish Government is using repressive force to deny Catalans a democratic vote on the same issue as Scotland.
          I am writing this as the Labour Party Conference begins,  realising that experience tells me that  moments of positivity can quickly dissipate after it is over. At the same time there is a Labour Leadership contest in Scotland that in itself says a lot more about the Labour Party. One of the candidates (there are two) is a millionaire whose children are privately educated, he is a shareholder in his family business that does not pay the Living Wage to its employees and does not have Trade Union recognition. He stated in a radio interview that he did not receive any remuneration from the company including dividends. It transpires that he had been receiving 20,000 pounds pa in dividends. The reason I mention all of this is because this individual publicly states that he is a socialist. He also says that he is a Corbyn supporter when he was in fact a signatory to a letter in opposition to Corbyn’s leadership.  He has secured a number of Labour MSPs as supporters. He was favourite to win but since the revelations his opponent is now regarded as favourite.
I note that in a desperate act he has stated that he is to relinquish his shareholding and put it in trust for his children !!  That’s another endearing quality he has – arrogance. His opponent is a former GMB Political Officer and current MSP and while he claims an agenda synonymous with that of Corbyn he is fiercely anti Scottish Independence and a Referendum and firmly opposed to any progressive alliance against the Tories if it includes the SNP – how is that working in the interests of working people?
I find his message less than inspiring.  Labour are currently the third party in Scotland, is it their intention to pledge continued resistance to a democratic ballot on Scotland’s future?
The reason I mention all of this is because there needs to be some serious changes. Hercules and the Augean Stables crossed my mind as I write this.

You describe support for Labour’s Manifesto as being a “great breakthrough”, you contend that Britain’s traditional political caste has never been weaker and pointing to different groups and elements in the class struggle you argue that if all this coalesces around the Labour Manifesto (that will itself need revision as the movement and its debates move on) you conclude that in due course “it will need to help create the first British Constitution.”

There are a number of improbables there that would need further examination but let me try to explain why I am not a supporter not just of  Unionist Labour but am opposed to a British Constitution which for me is not a solution.  I contend that our problem is the Westminster System of Government, it has failed all of us in creating a more fair and equitable society, the evidence is all around us.
From Britain’s imperialist past to the present it is designed to and has acted to prop up a system of power and privilege that is resistant to change. You yourself argue that “state-wide political institutions have to be reformed, rebuilt or built anew” and I accept that there has to be a renewal. I believe that can only come about with radical change; that change for me is Independence for the Nations of what is risibly called the United Kingdom. I support the case for Scottish Independence because when it happens it will not only liberate us from the pretence that we are a Union of Equals, it will cause the network and institutions of power and privilege to fall and by so doing provide an opportunity for all working people in these isles (in the nations of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland) to be, as you say, “enabled, through the political institutions that they support, build and have confidence in, to lead the whole of society in the direction that has been chosen.”
The Labour Party wedded to the Westminster system is on the wrong side of history ( in fact it seems to forget its own history and raison d’etre) and as such will therefore be unable to effect the changes needed.

   John Milligan

“Instead of seeking to reform the individual the wisdom of a Nation should apply itself to reform the system”
Thomas Paine  -  The Rights of Man

No middle-way for the UK!

In the UK a body called the Electoral Commission monitors Party Political Broadcasts which appear on the traditional media (mainly TV and Radio). On September 20th the Liberal Democrat Party -  12 MPs now led by Vince Cable - were allowed one of the seasonal offerings available to all parties with representatives in Parliament. It was a dreadful piece in that it tried give viewers a comedic vision of the Party' strengths and appeal particularly to the now very active youth vote. It was neither funny - nor appealing. (Lib Dems trying to be funny with the Metro youth!)

The broadcast failed on 2 fronts. First it patronised and mocked the very youth that it was designed to win over. It implied they were stupid. In the June 2017 General Election the radical youth vote was a dramatic new feature in Britain's political life. The vote for Corbyn's Labour Party was not, as the Lib Dem broadcast suggested, a half-baked search for 'real' personalities. The youth vote stood against a tidal wave of mainstream attacks from all sides on Labour in general and Corbyn in particular. Labour's Manifesto featured as a major deciding point for many younger voters as indicated in several surveys. It has been half a century since any British Political Party's election manifesto has been studied with such attention. Against the tide, and with an unprecedented participation in the arguments and debate, the British youth vote, 3 months ago, was a tremendous breakthrough against the grim prospect of a mountain of Tory MPs, topped by a humourless and insecure Tory martinet.  

Second, the broadcast tried once again to open up the 'middle way.'

Labour peer Lord Adonis, ex Labour PM Tony Blair and various leading commentators like Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian newspaper have set up the symbol of a second referendum on 'the Brexit deal' as the means to avoid Corbyn's radical Manifesto on the one hand and the impact of the Tory's ever more fractious Brexit on the other. The Lib Dems want to be its Party and Vince Cable has said he will be its Prime Minister. Whatever else is missing in the increasingly shaky and malodorous British Parliament, there is no lack of ambition! (With all proportions guarded, a dire political psychology we have seen before in the Wiemar Republic, the end of the Soviet Union, in John Major's Cabinet and in the current scramble for influence among President Trump's coterie.)

Brexit is undoubtedly accelerating Britain's political and economic fragility. But is Brexit causing this lurch? And would the restoration of Britain's status inside the EU reverse these trends? Is there an EU based middle-way out of Britain's crisis?

The key weaknesses of the British economy have been evolving through decades. Nearly a century ago (as Will Hutton quoted in an Observer article, 10 September '17) Churchill and Keynes said that in Britain 'finance is too proud and industry too humble'. France's new President Macron may be buffing up Paris's financial centre but the American banks, the Hedge Funds, the Wealth Investors, the Insurance Companies and all the rest of the gang that make up the City of London are slavering at the prospect of being at the centre of the world's largest tax haven. Indeed it one of their conditions to remain in London and to resist Mssr. Macron's blandishments. The City of London is not interested in a middle-way. Another opportunity has opened up. But the fundamental point remains. The City continues to be the enormous parasitic growth in the belly of the British economy and it is now, as it has always been, squeezing the life out of its host. The biggest bank in the world, with its glittering name projecting solidity and 'gentlemanly' behaviour, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Britain's biggest international investment in 2008, turned out, like all the rest, to be a den of liars, spivs and thieves. These people still dominate Britain's economic life.

The pitiful and declining productivity of British labour is another, critical long term, feature of Britain's economy. Why? Britain lacks serious long term investment. Finance Capital dominates. PM Harold Wilson in the 1960s was one of a long list of post WW2 PMs that tried to take on the task - and failed like all the others. His 'white hot heat of the technological age' fizzed out, along with all the other efforts to win over an insatiable ruling elite away from their sumptuous, instant, share dividends and huge managerial pay, and instead use resources for future investment.

Today's version of this most regular feature of the British economic helter-skelter is illustrated by the recent fate of one of Britain's most successful tech companies, ARM Holdings. As Private Eye (No 1452) pointed out, PM Teresa May's joy as she applauded Japan's foreign investment in the UK on her recent visit, included plaudits for 'SoftBank.' Their 'investment' amounted to buying up ARM Holdings - helped by a 10% fall in Sterling. This discount on the £24bn price was expanded when 'SoftBank' sold on 25% of ARM Holdings to a Saudi Government company. So, a large British company provided an enormous payoff to its British shareholders, and world standard British Tech is now divided up between Japan and Saudi. From the fantasy that 'my word is my bond' to the generations of rapacious greed, Britain's ruling class, fostered by the golden days of Empire, is the least functional element in modern, Western capitalism. That is to say, it plays little or no productive role within its own system. It has an almost entirely parasitic relationship to its own means of production. Brexit's role in this malaise is marginal. Brexit speeds up Britain's economic realities. But neither would continued membership of the EU stop it, let alone reverse it.

On the political level the latest revelation that over a year 115 Lords claimed £1.2 million of expenses without saying a word and £4 million was handed to the 277 who spoke five times or less in Parliament, shows where Britain's mainstream politics finds itself. MP's expenses; constant movement between Ministers, big corporations, banks and lobbyists; illegal arms trade; choice international trips and post Parliament jobs have created a nouveau riche political class, but this too is over decades. Brexit will not stop it. But the EU certainly nurtured corruption within in its nation states and between them.

The conclusion from these facts of life is that it is not true that Brexit, at the level of British capitalist economics or British political rule will make things worse. Here and there it will speed things up. At a social level, there is no doubt that Brexit continues to stimulate (already existing) racism into new activity. At the political level of international corruption and lack of accounting it may slow things down. Equally, a return to a Blairite age through reapplying for membership of the EU is neither feasible nor available. And the EU does not challenge racism. On the contrary Shengen is great crime against large parts of humanity. Individual nations that are responding positively to refugees are not doing that through any agreed EU framework.

The trends that are changing Britain's capitalist economics and politics are fertilised from domestic roots and do not stem, fundamentally, from the EU and nor from Brexit. Those two particular choices simply make change more stark. Britain's domestic roots are undoubtedly entangled internationally in a globalist jungle - but even that aspect is neither 'solved' positively by Brexit nor by its reverse. Britain has been building great change in itself for half a century and more.

In that context there is no (longer) a middle way for Britain. Radical change is coming in all major departments of economic and political life. The choice here is straightforward. Who will plan for the radical change that the people of Britain already want, and who among their political leaders will be able to act on that and win?

The force of Labour's Manifesto

There are manifestos that have led to constitutions, dramatically changing politics in many countries, but never, since Magna Carta (June 1215), in the UK. Roger Scruton, the well-known, right wing philosopher in Britain, imagines this is a result of UK common law. In other words, practical, detailed, day to day judgements are made by judges, 'on the strength of the case', and they become precedents for future decisions. Scruton also imagines that this process has 'protected' British law from ideological schemes that are fomented often in extreme circumstances and which are driven by dogmas. Hurrah!

Scruton naturally loathes European Human Rights legislation. Indeed he rejects the necessity for any conscious, strictly political decision making of state-wide laws that are designed to roll back the oppression of groups, including majority groups across the world - as in the cases of working class people, of people of colour and of women. He is also blind to the historical political and economic interests of the judiciary itself and to the social class, gender and ethnic group from which judges almost inevitably come. He has therefore no answer to oppression because, in his own circle of life, he does not see it. This point of view ends up with the ruthless defence of the status quo and even his risible notion that the 3 or 4% of people who live in the British countryside constitute the real definition of 'Englishness.'(sic)

The tragedy in Britain is that Scruton's self-serving dogma has been the prevailing view for Britain's ruling elites for centuries. And most British institutions, including the Judiciary, reflect that. There are some notable exceptions like the NHS. But such exceptions have been under the hammer almost permanently - in the front line of 'reforms' designed to extinguish their principles and their functions. The Labour Party has experienced a century-long, class-based, civil war - where union bureaucracies and state managers have held fast their pro-system domination - up to now. Parliament itself has long been squeezed into the margins of any real decision making about who should hold wealth and power.

Corbyn's Labour Manifesto is a modest document, in relation to the structure of Britain's modern capitalist society, which it nevertheless challenges. But in June 2017 millions of people, especially younger voters, engaged with Labour's latest General Election Manifesto. This novelty was partly a product of Tory leader, Teresa May's Manifesto disaster. But most mainstream commentators now seem to agree that the main reason that Labour's Manifesto attracted wide-scale support (despite the howling ridicule of 99% of the traditional media at the time of publication) was that it offered a fresh approach to Britain's seemingly endless political and economic failures that were experienced by the overwhelming majority and especially by younger people.

The heart of the Manifesto is a positive end to austerity (i.e. precise additional funding plans for ransacked public services rather than the Scottish Nationalist Party's 'end to austerity' meaning no more cuts.) The Manifesto demands a redistribution of wealth to pay for the new spending, including taxing the top 5% incomes. The economic centre of the Manifesto is a new £250 billion state investment bank, with regional offshoots, to renovate investment in infrastructure. A list of reforms include a limit of 20 to 1 in relation to salaries and wages; the socialisation and nationalisation of Energy, Water, Rail and Royal Mail, 100,000 social homes a year, rent controls, Health and Care to receive an additional £39 billion, etc. Brexit should be friendly and defend workers' rights. The weakest parts of the document (beside inadequate housing targets and vagaries about immigration) are the vague, solely symbolic warnings to private finance and the City of London, the support for Trident, the maintenance of UK support for NATO's dangerous antics and the shadowy shape of Britain's future Constitution.

The latter weakness is, in the end, most telling. Lots of Labour's new Manifesto's implementation will be bitterly resisted by private finance and the City, as well as the major corporations, the EU, the US, and the mainstream political organisations in the UK including the majority of Labour MPs.  Each of these opponents, and others not mentioned, will have their own parts to play in the upheaval. There is only one way to manage this deluge. State-wide political institutions have to be reformed, rebuilt or built anew that are democratically constructed to carry out the program that British people, in their large majority, want to see carried out. In other words, a big majority needs first to be built for the Manifesto and then that majority must be enabled, through the political institutions that they support, build and have confidence in, to lead the whole of society in the direction that has been chosen. Nothing less will be enough to breakthrough even to the partial reforms laid out by Labour. Albeit in a different context, Greece's Syriza's collapse demonstrates the weakness of reliance on simply traditional political institutions in the campaigning for substantial reform.

At the moment, Labour's Manifesto suggests that the House of Lords could become democratic in 5 years; that voting should be available to 16+ year olds; that Britain should become 'more federal' and that there should be a Constitutional Convention. In the first place the organisations of workers and youth that are fighting austerity must have representation in its dismantling and its replacement with something better. (Just as the Grenfell inhabitants need to lead the Public Enquiry on the safety of the Grenfell Tower.) Where is their place in the new Constitution? The Labour Party itself needs to prepare its democracy for its Manifesto. The half million members are its sovereign body. It needs to be a model for all those who want and need to be heard in a society where they are currently silenced. How do NHS workers at all levels want their service to work? Where do experienced track maintenance workers get to explain their experience of a proper Railway safety scheme? Where is it, and how do all Briton's decide whether they want Trident?

The interest in and support for Labour's Manifesto is a great breakthrough for the big majority in their experience of Britain's insecure, grim and declining society. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the the MP most supported by members of the Tory Party for leadership. This Victorian buffoon reeks of the stale, shambolic, self-parodies that most of the current Tory leadership reveal. Britain's traditional political caste has never been weaker. The potential political strength in the country lies elsewhere. It will be seen in the Peoples Assembly-led protest at the coming Tory Conference in Manchester; in the strikes of the fast food workers; in the coalition of unions preparing to blow away the cap on pay; when the tenants speak in the Grenfell Enquiry and all of this and all the rest can be brought together by Labour's Manifesto. And the Manifesto itself? It will need to be revised, rewritten, argued over, revised again as the movement and its debates move on. And in due course it will need to help create the first British Constitution.