The State and things to come

The last section of this blog attempted to address the continued survival of capitalism in the world into the 21st century and its further capacity to produce progress for humanity as a whole? Is its destruction inevitable as a result of its internal contradictions? It was a part of a discussion of four distinct issues facing modern Marxism. The second is the modern state – especially the 21st Century western states.

What is the question here? Has the modern state outgrown the traditional Marxist revolutionary shibboleths – dictatorship of the proletariat, soviet power etc.? How do Marxists now analyse the state?

Lenin is not everybody’s cup of tea. But he has the merit of elaborating a theory of the state and then implementing it, which makes his writing a good place to start. Lenin outlined the Marxist view of the state most comprehensively in State and Revolution. This is what he thought about parliamentary democracy in Germany.

‘This, in turn, is connected with the fact that at a certain stage in the development of (capitalist ed.) democracy, it first rallies the proletariat as a revolutionary class against capitalism, and gives it an opportunity to crush, to smash to bits, to wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois state machinery - even its republican variety: the standing army, the police, and bureaucracy; then it substitutes for all this by more democratic, but still a state machinery in the shape of armed masses of workers, which becomes transformed into universal participation of the people in the militia.’

He was arguing against the German Social Democratic leaders who were the first socialists to believe that the working class would find victory via the extension of the democratic portion of the existing German state. He went on:

‘What, then, is this largest proportion of politically conscious and active wage slaves that has so far been observed in capitalist society? One million members of the Social Democratic party-out of fifteen million wage­workers. Three million organised in trade unions-out of fifteen million.
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich- that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the mechanism of capitalist democracy, everywhere, both in the "petty" - so called petty - details of the suffrage (residential qualification, exclusion of women, etc.), and in the technique of the representative institution, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "beggars"!), in the purely capitalist organisation of the daily press, etc., etc.-on all sides we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions obstacles for the poor, seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has himself never known want and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine tenths, if not ninety-nine hundredths, of the bourgeois publicists and politicians are of this class), but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics and from an active share in democracy.’

All quite clear then. But wait a moment. He writes, again in State and Revolution, something quite curious about the German post office:

‘A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true. At the present the postal service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type, in which, standing over the "common" people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, ... we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the "parasite", a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all "state" officials in general, workmen's wages ....To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service ... all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat - that is our immediate aim. This is what will bring about the abolition of parliamentarianism and the preservation of representative institutions. This is what will rid the laboring classes of the bourgeoisie's prostitution of these (representative ed.) institutions.’

Earlier in State and Revolution Lenin also noted Marx’s silence on the necessity for armed revolution to smash the state in Britain when Marx advises on such a course for France in 1871. Lenin suggests that the absence at that historical point of the domination of a bureaucratic/military apparatus in Britain might have been the cause of Marx’s reserve. But in 1917 Lenin adds Britain and the US to the list where the policy of armed revolution is necessary to overthrow the state because since Imperialism has produced the highest stage of capitalism, both the UK and the US have proved, by their reorganisation of their states in the interests of winning WW1, that their states are truly dominated after all by a bureaucratic/military machine.

So, some interesting assertions emerge about the state from the point of view of the modern discussion. It is, for Lenin and Marx at least, the military/bureaucratic (appointed ministries etc) core that identifies the fundamental character of the capitalist state. According to Marx it seems some advanced capitalist states, prior to the new Imperialist stage of the capitalist system and which were on the way to granting universal franchise, might not have required their violent overthrow, depending on the weight and power of their military / bureaucratic machines – although those conditions and that time has now gone. And finally a new accretion to capitalist state power in the form of trusts, like the German PO, might be reformed rather than dissolved and replaced, so long as overall state power lay with the working class.

These and other considerations make mincemeat of any claim that Marxists have a set formula for the state and for revolution – a set of caste iron principles that are eternal in their composition. Instead we see decisive considerations, derived from an analysis of the totality of class relations.

Gramsci’s contribution, particularly on the state in Western Europe in the 1920s and 30s is worth, and has produced, volumes. The centre of his concern was how to tackle these post WW1 phenomena from a revolutionary point of view. No real justice can be done to his thinking here and readers interested should get hold of Perry Anderson’s brilliant essay, the Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci, published in New Left Review which opened up the heart of Gramsci’s argument, which was a struggle for the state conceived as a prolonged war of position. Anderson pointed out the crucial ambiguity in his approach on the key question of the passing of power from one social class to another. Today we are in an altogether different world than Gramsci – writing in code from Mussolini’s prison. We have had decades of new experience of the state in the context of new, world changing, wars and revolutions.  

And what has happened to the state since Lenin and Gramsci?

Two things. First in most developed and semi-developed countries it has grown massively. Some examples, with more easily accessible information are typical of the whole. In the UK prior to World War I, public spending sat at about 15 percent of GDP. Then, after the war it emerged at about 25 percent of GDP and remained at about that level, except for a surge at the start of the depression in the 1930s. After World War II, public spending amounted to about 35 percent of GDP, and this level continued through the 1950s. At about 1960, state expenditures began a steady rise that peaked in the early 1980s at 45 percent of GDP. During the 1980s public spending was cut as a percent of GDP from about 45 percent down to 35 percent in 1989. But then, with the ERM sterling crisis and associated recession, it rose back to 40 percent of GDP before declining to 36 percent in 2000. After 2000 public spending increased rapidly, with a peak of 45.5 percent of GDP in 2010 in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 (followed by a minor decrease up to the present day.)
The UK is not a special case.
As a share of national income, German government expenditure was about 15 percent before World War I, 25 percent during the interwar period, 35 percent around 1960, 48 percent in 1975, and about 50 percent by 1980-81. The German share has risen well over 50 percent again during the early 1990s where it remains. The government's share of spending in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium showed the same gradual increase but in modern times reached higher levels than that of the UK. In the most recent period, the United States government expenditure averages about 37 percent, and Japan, (before last year’s Trillion dollar QE) about 33 percent. Both countries show a marked increase in state expenditure in the last century.

Second, the character of the states’ physiognomy has changed drastically in the advanced capitalist and post capitalist societies since 1917.

To take two distinct, even surprisingly contrary, examples;
The US government spends the equivalent of 4.5% of GDP on military expenditure. But if you dig down into what this means for the bureaucratic/military axis or ‘industrial military complex’ that rules the US according to the late President Eisenhower – 37% of US taxes in 2012, double the amount of the next biggest spend (which is on health) goes into war and the results of war. The US state remains today the most similar Western state to the, albeit much smaller, state machines that went into action in 1914 / 18.

By way of a much more typical contrast; to take the example of the UK government; its type and proportion of expenditure has much more common with modern Europe and some of the newer developing countries. In 2013 the British state spent £720 billion. It has the fifth highest military expenditure in the world but it spent 71% of its budget on health, education and welfare. It spent less than 10% on ‘defense’ and ‘protection’ (police etc) together. No wonder Merkel spoke up about the European state expenditure at the end of 2012:

‘If Europe today accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world’s population, produces around 25 per cent of global GDP and has to finance 50 per cent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.’ We know what that means. Our rulers are testing those means today in Greece.

So the modern state has engorged itself and, in significant parts of the globe, protected private capital by collectivising the necessary concessions to the working class coming out of a century of war and revolution (see last blog, second part on ‘the highest stage of capitalism’.)

The evolution of this type of modern state has, in turn changed the nature of class configuration in those countries where it is most developed. There are some hints of this idea even in Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution.’ He points to layers among the more ‘comfortable’ workers and peasants who have been incorporated as minor office holders into the secure and burgeoning state machine in both Russia and Germany. This process has steamrollered into modern times where millions of workers now work for the ‘the state’ in some capacity. And this process has in turn created a class recomposition from the very top to the bottom of politics and society.

For example Blair’s New Labour did not so much represent the disaggregating remnants of the once powerful trade union bureaucracy (the traditional roots of the Labour Party) as basing itself on the vast layer of highly paid and secure managers and middle managers working in the state. And this material and social layer in society was the also the root and economic and social basis of the Labour section of the political class that sought its tenure in office from the state employees’ more active voting record and interest in the future of employment in the institutions where they worked. Indeed this process (the increasing job security and incomes of the public sector workforce over decades, vis a vis its private sector comparators) performed a major role in data underpinning Picketty’s analysis of the decline in wealth differentials between the richest section of society and the rest of us in the 20th century.

And, of course we now learn what actually happens to the modern equivalents of Lenin’s post office as they mature inside capitalist societies. They become themselves a set of new engines for class differentiation – of political and social compromise with the capitalist system and, latterly, the source of gross profit for new parasitic private capitalist formations. We also see a parallel process in the great new state bureaucracies that were established in the major post capitalist states like China. The emergence of massive state organisation, even if under revolutionary conditions in the first instance, still apparently leads to bunkers of secure privilege for those who successfully maneuvered themselves into the inheritance of the political mantle of the revolution itself, mostly via ‘the leading party.’ So, ‘laying hands’ on the trusts like the ‘socialist’ post office, is not so simple. Not only must there be an unequivocal answer to the question ‘who rules?’ But also there needs to be a most thorough going reform of ‘social trusts’ to turn them into working class organisations.

But it is still the case that a large number of modern, west European and wider states cannot simply be reduced to their ‘armed bodies of men’. (Even the 1974 Portuguese revolution had to fight the police – with the help of the army!) And although we must beware any blindness towards the major hidden armies and police – of NATO, of the security services, of the military bases, of the World Bank, the IMF, the City of London and the EU – that bestride the modern world, many national states are not equipped to suppress a majoritarian upsurge by force alone. It is a structural consequence of the retreat of world Imperialism and the concessions made to the western working class, especially in Europe, over the last century. It is likely therefore that while a core of state machinery that is expected to use force in defense of the state, the military, police, state security services etc, would still need to be broken up and dismantled and completely evacuated from society, large parts of the modern state could be adopted under the new dispensation, reorganised in the majority’s interest and opened out to the needs of all the people.

And the dictatorship of the working class? And soviet power?

The call for the dictatorship of the working class is associated in modern history more with dictatorship by the party that with anything else. As the discussion about ‘agency’ (see below) is opened then who struggles against capitalism, who goes ‘all the way’ and who rules after, inevitably emerges.

Turning to the soviet question, most directly linked, as a socialist ‘solution’ to the issue of the state and state power, it is so far an historical fact that while prominent, and in the Russian case, even determinant, under extreme revolutionary conditions, the great achievements of soviets have never yet extended into a post revolutionary society. Some, like Trotsky argued that they were first stifled by material conditions and that their proposed renovation later crushed by the political decision of the party clique around Stalin. The great Chinese revolution started with the Shanghai commune but was won twenty years later, by prolonged war. Cuba and Viet Nam never developed the form. For many years, great Marxists in the west (for example Ernest Mandel) argued that the working class would create superior agencies of democracy, which would express the political will of the working class much more directly than any parliament. They pointed to the workers’ commissions established by the mass struggles and political revolutions across Southern Europe from 1968 – 74. Today new formations like ‘Occupy’ are experimenting with the idea that the democracy of the 99% is universal, consensual and does not accept a distinction between decision and implementation. This proposition is expressed in Lenin’s State and Revolution as a future goal of socialism /communism. It has proved to be too fragile for history so far.

So, looking at the history of revolution it is surely difficult to maintain that the soviet is an indispensable ideal against which we measure our progress against the capitalist state. Trotsky, writing on Britain in the 1930s, underlined the importance of the multitude of working class organisations, for education, for health, for insurance, for leisure and for defense at work, as a school of workers democracy. Although the Councils of Action sprang up in the 1926 general strike, they restrained themselves to unifying support for the action.

In reality soviets up to now have proved themselves to be one type, a very significant type, of means to provide unity across layers in society to carry through revolutionary change. It would seem that even in Russia; where the capitalist state was extremely primitive, the soviets could not carry out the revolution and then also go on to provide anything like the adequate administration and organization of the new state. A traditional army and the old administrators were required. Trotsky and the other oppositionists to the direction of the party from 1924 onward called for the renewal of the soviets as a political instrument to involve the working class in and challenge the major party political decisions of the day. There was no proposal that they ran society.

The new conditions of the capitalist state in parts of the west and the value of already existing social institutions are a tremendous plus in that regard. The struggle can start from their defense and open out into the potential provision of a tried and tested backbone to the organisation and administration of major parts of society. The multinationals are a deadly model for society. The principles of the NHS are the opposite. The necessary novel and revolutionary experiments in political representation can maintain their inspection of the social ‘trusts’ for bureaucratism and worse while gradually maturing to a later point where they can consider taking over the day to day administration of social life.  

Next we turn to ‘agency’, the question of who will carry through revolutionary change.

More on modern marxism

Marxists redux II

All aspects of politics, not to say social theory, need to be revamped in light of the changes wrought by the extraordinary 20th century; the first century in which the battle for the conscious management and control of the world by the majority of the world’s population began: the real beginning of un-alienated human history.

In popular culture, understood in its broadest sense, the emphasis presented for us today prioritises both the continuity of the human experience as a consistent background chorus bridging the old century with the new, coupled with a mosaic of individual and personal acts of brilliance, mainly technological invention, – picked for us by the cultural establishment - and which in turn appear to alter nothing in the historical flow of the ‘common sense’ of daily life. A TV series on the Romans tells us that people have not changed in their characters and personalities at all, only really in what they wear and possibly the speed by which they ‘communicate’. Everything is changing and yet, apparently, nothing has changed. It has all just got faster and faster.

This specious absurdity is another attempt to commodify the human imagination by alienating it from its own conquests. In fact humanity has changed utterly in the last 2000 years. Mainly through its struggles (and not mainly through its science and technology) human beings have defeated the aristocracy, state slavery, political weightlessness, ignorance, want, and waves of reaction in vast wars and revolutions. They have opened the door to the vacuum cleaner, Health Services, penicillin and television.  All of this has been achieved (albeit temporarily) in large parts of the world. And that has changed us all. It has changed how we see ourselves and how we see others. The great sparks of human thought were the fission generated out of all these great battles for a meaningful life.

The key characteristic of human existence is change and change in the context of a totality of change. What is change? Change, which can be better captured in the term motion, is the result of the contradiction that presses everything that is not us against everything that is (ourselves, our class, our gender, our ethnic background, our desire for a different society etc). And that process simultaneously alters us, and everything that is not us, because the friction, that struggle, to overcome the contradiction increases our adaptation to everything else, and also increases its adaptation to us. This is as obvious in our mental world and our social world as it is in our physical existence. The point about the Romans is that their social and economic organization, and therefore their mental landscape, were devastatingly different to us. Their clothes (because the human form alters at a snail’s pace) are what remain most similar.

When we examine the thoughts of a genius from 150 years ago, particularly in the sphere of social and political theory, it is simply inconceivable that social and political life has not given rise to the need for new insights and considerations. Some will argue that Darwin established a benchmark that stands firm after a similar period. But while Marx did the same – at a basic level of the comprehension of the great forces of change in human history – his policy for going forward in a completely new stage would inevitably be more fragile.  Millions have gone into battle demonstrating the evidence of the accuracy of his vision but that in turn has changed things, both itself and everything in its world. Marx’s initial theses on capitalism and its overthrow, even as adapted and modernised by Lenin and many others, needs to be reconsidered in light of those great battles and their results.

Looking at four original Marxist concepts, a critique of them enables us pose important new questions and see the cause of liberation in a new light – even to begin, at the highest level of abstract thought, to make new concrete analyses of the concrete situation.

The four (linked) ideas are: The problem of Imperialism and the ‘progress’ of capitalism; the problem of agency and the character of the working class; the problem of the state; and the problem of the ‘scientific’ character of socialism.

Some initial thoughts follow on each of these points.

Capitalism and its premature death agony

‘The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
Communist Manifesto.

These words of Marx and Engels are the only definite prediction of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system; the creation of social production contradicting private accumulation. Their prediction rests on the emergence of the proletariat who will become the nemesis of capitalism and its ruling class. At other points in their writings they point to the inevitability of ongoing capitalist crises – essentially produced by ‘over production’ but not that these crises are defined as mortal as such. Lenin writes of imperialism as the highest (and last) stage of capitalism. Again, it is the revolutionary character of the working class and not the internal contradictions of the capitalist system itself that will bring it to its end in his view, although World War One and its results seemed enough like Armageddon to give merit to the idea of inevitable capitalist collapse. The vivid slogan of ‘socialism or barbarism’ was born, although this was not a prediction as such, but more a moral claim on oppressed classes to prevent the collapse of all civilization. In this version capitalism could end up as the gravedigger of us all if we did not, if we do not act.

Another element enters into the argument in later parts of ‘Capital’ and in later references by Marxists in the first years of the 20th century. The imperialist stage means that capitalism has begun to form itself into an economic and social system that can no longer produce the expansion of the productive forces of the planet. The capitalist system, by locking up its productive capacities in the west, by its growing dependence on monopoly and finance capital and among dominated countries, by super-exploitation and the political castration of local capitalist classes, can no longer expand and create (albeit in a deformed, indeed a nightmare, fashion) technological and social progress for the planet as a whole. Its race, as a social system, has run.

And what has happened? Capitalism is still with us. Indeed it has overthrown the revolution against it in a significant part of the globe. The factories in China (and the huge social unrest in China as UN figures show year after year) look exactly like the workplace hell described as the fate of proletarians in the Communist Manifesto. Yet in 2005, for the first time in human history, a majority of the planet’s population had moved to cities. Imperialist dominated countries like Brazil, India, China and South Africa had broken some of the west’s traditional imperialist chains and have begun enormous industrial development. Indeed the huge progress in China has single handedly reduced the most extreme world poverty in the world by half. These and many other aspects of the modern capitalist development are hugely contended. Development that occurs in 2014 is often temporary, lopsided, completely unequal, at the cost of the environment and brutal – even counter productive - in its impact. But development happens. And the health and welfare services of a large part of Western Europe are real enough – and although constantly eroded, suborned by private capital and under attack, they still exist, after 60 years, as the largest single item of Western Europe’s states’ expenditure. Facts like these need a new explanation.

In Picketty’s magnificent book on the formation of capital over centuries he demonstrates that the 20th century showed a narrowing of the gap in the west between the wealthiest and the rest compared with the 19th century and the 21st century. As Picketty leans towards social democratic politics, he associates that position with the value of the social democratic cause in those years. Picketty misses the great facts of the 20th century, and the totality of the world which forged direct links between developments in economics and politics in the west with the condition of the rest of the world. The two overriding determinants of the 20th century turn out to be imperialism – the main project of capitalism on the one hand, and on the other - revolution.

The great revolutions and imperialist wars (often co-mingled) of the 20th Century have created a new landscape in which, despite appearances, immense gains have been won by the world’s working class – most especially in the anti-imperialist struggle. Western Imperialism is weaker than it has ever been, without which the development (albeit industrial capitalism) that has taken place in countries like China, affecting billions, would never have happened. If you like, the huge efforts and sacrifices of the working class and its all allies, across the globe, have broken through the social and economic contradictions of the system to restart some productive capacities of capitalism in some parts of the world, originally destined only to be basket cases, and wrenched vast structural reforms from it in the west after revolution and two world wars.

Is this a social democratic vision? Does this herald a new reformism? Far from it. It is ‘reform’ but as a bi-product of a century of revolution and war. Social democratic parties may have done some bargaining with their ruling classes in the west on behalf of their working class vote – but blocked with their various imperialisms when it came to sorting out where the resources came from.

Capitalism as a system of society today is rotten ripe. Imperialism in its traditional sense is failing. The mechanisms sustaining it (which are enormously fragile as we saw in 2008) are more and more bizarre. Essentially the US, the world’s leading power today, relies on Chinese ‘investment’ read profits, to sustain a country that has no economic engine of its own. Its society is rapidly falling into decay and its politics are in deep crisis – with a haunting suspicion among its leading class that even their own billionaires’ democracy must give way to a more authoritarian (and successful) system. It is sustained in its leading position only by the manipulation of international capital flows and a vast war machine, which itself has just suffered two major defeats. Capitalism today seems to have reached its apogee. Its reach is over-extended. The imperialist chickens are coming home to roost from all over the globe.

The legacy of the defeat of the Soviet Union remains today a huge material and ideological stumbling block for the development of the next wave of humanity’s endeavor to found societies representing the majority. One sign that capitalism is tipping, even in some parts of the globe already producing the conditions of barbarism, is the reactionary banners under which opposition often emerges. Seeing the world rolling backwards the object of the revolutionaries becomes to create their own version of a fantastical past. And this is a major problem

A summary at the end of the discussion about modern revolutionary Marxism will examine (in practice) the implications of this and the other questions that have been raised.

Marxists (particularly in England) need to do two things.

First, they need to study the main strategy that some have had since the 1990s – of creating a new mass party/political front to represent the now unrepresented working class. (Other marxists never embarked on any of the various efforts made to develop this strategy preferring more eternal verities.)

Second, like the social democrats (see Pickety’s book on Capital) marxists need to discuss their marxist contribution, its roots, its failures and successes, a modern basis for its future existence and its priorities.

First things first. Of course in one, rather decisive sense, the Labour Party never politically represented the working class. It was a party formed by the labour bureaucracy (small l) based on an ‘historic compromise’ with its own ruling class, over empire, over monarchy, over war, over the survival of the capitalist system. But in another sense it did represent the working class movement. Millions of working class people voted Labour. Hundreds of thousands were rank and file leaders of the labour movement. Even a solid clutch of MPs (often the most right wing) came from the shop floor via the union bureaucracies. Working class people could recognise and identify with at least some of their Labour leaders. Drawing out the contradiction in the Labour party and the wider labour movement between its working class base and its leadership which dominated the party’s policy framework and its compromise culture, formed the main axis of marxist work over decades.

Since the 1960s, as the Empire collapsed and concessions from the ruling class table became harder to come by, Labour began to lose its monopoly hold over its traditional base. Global shifts created a radicalised generation in the west, including in the UK. Simultaneously working class organisation at the base came under enormous attack as British capital tried to compensate for loss of its imperial possessions. A huge rank and file movement grew up in the unions. 250 000 shop stewards took the lead in a battle to maintain previous conditions. An argument blew up among marxists between a reform perspective in the unions and the Labour Party on the one hand and on the other, a clean break policy with the goal of establishing an explicitly open revolutionary marxist party. Benn managed to bridge some of the gap for a few years with the mass socialist movement in the late 1980s.

By the 1990s the British working class movement had been thoroughly defeated. Indeed the wholesale reorganisation of paid work itself had begun to take place. Personal contracts (the petit-bourgeoisification of labour) had begun. (Today 4.5 million are self-employed ‘cleaners, handymen or nannies’, Telegraph 11 June - and there are many more millions on part time, short term or zero hours contracts.) The remnants of organised labour were concentrated in the diminishing public sector and were on defencive retreat. Into that world stepped Tony Blair.

Some years prior to Blair and the first steps towards Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party a new debate had started among marxists, not so much about the historic possibility of the reform of the Labour Party although some stalwarts remained (and remain) convinced of that view – but whether any part of any future wave of radicalisation both inside and outside the labour movement would consider such a perspective as realistic or worth the candle. The focus sharpened around the debate about affiliation to Labour by the trade unions. This was never an argument about the need to work with left Labour MPs etc – and even less about whether to work with their supporters. It was a debate about the way marxists should organise politically and how they should present to others who battled with the system the best way for them to organise politically.

Since then we have seen a succession of attempts to create the basis for a new working class political party – to ‘fill the vacuum’ left by the Labour Party. The latest of these are the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, TUSC, led by Dave Nellist with the official support of the RMT for some of its candidates and linked to the Socialist Party’s campaign for a new mass working class party. Then there is the newly founded Left Unity, founded by Ken Loach and primarily inspired by the emergence of leftist parties, now growing in response to the crisis in several European countries.  (Left Unity are currently having a rather acrimonious debate about the worth of joining forces with TUSC – which some see as an old fashioned front for the Socialist Party.)

But we are now in a position to take a more general stock of this nearly 20-year-old project.

Every step in the ‘replace  Labour’ strategy’ that the marxist left has been pursuing in Britain has had different characteristics and different immediate triggers. All of them had partial critiques of the previous efforts that had failed. Lots of important points were made in these criticisms that deserve further thought but the overarching question was never addressed and this was because marxist analysis was not used – to analyse the marxists' own project!

Temporary movements and campaigns emerged which objectively challenged the role of the Labour Party from 1995 until today – the greatest of which was the massive movement against the Iraq war. The mobilisations that took place in that campaign came the closest to the creation of a new political current in the new, evolving working class in the UK. And it was this new political current of hundreds of thousands, even millions that created the material basis for the emergence of Respect through its various incarnations. (Scargill’s SLP had thought to rest its existence on the old Benn/Scargill current which it transpired was finally dissolving just as the SLP lifted off.) And this is the root of the matter. The tremendous significance of the anti-war movement was not that it ‘floated’ Respect but that it brought together the leading elements of the working class, in a potentially new political and social re-composition. It began to create a new, albeit temporary, class identity. We learned that great units of industrial production did not have to be the essential component of the creation and growth of a new working class. A class ‘for itself’ could be called into history under a political banner (as indeed the original Charter had in the 1830s and 40s.)

However the anti war movement arose in a context where the West including the UK in particular, were consolidating their decades of economic and political offensive and, no longer concerned by the Soviet Union, on the biggest military roll since Viet Nam. Western political stability was unaffected (although Blair was mortally wounded.) The anti-war movement proved unable in those conditions, to lead the country. Unable to move forward, out onto the economic and political terrain, its potential to focus a new class wide identity subsided and then broke up. And Respect was beached on an ebbing tide – turning eventually into a one-person farce.

The anti war movement should have changed the debate among the marxists about the actual condition of the actual working class in Britain. Instead it argued about the sectarianism of ‘the other’. It was not in itself the continuation of the war and the weakness of attempts in the West to succeed in stopping it that began to disaggregate the great alliance built to challenge the war. It was rather the absence of impact on the politics in Britain that undermined its attraction here. The global context pressed on, and attracted, the most committed youth more than ‘local’ events. The leaderships that emerged in the anti-war movement were unable to consolidate an agreed direction. And, yes, the absence of a continuous social and economic unity, impressed by daily life among participants in the movement, enhanced its fragility.

Since then no new and significant working class movement has emerged at a national level, until that is the very earliest shoots of a possible national movement to defeat austerity that are only appearing now.

TUSC believes that it can switch the affiliations of the remains of the TU movement away from Labour and to the TUSC, but this is an organisational and administrative fantasy that takes no account of the political problem of the characteristics and political structures of the new working class. Unions need to disaffiliate from Labour. Trade unions need to be independent. But that can only make sense to those who sacrifice and risk so much to keep them going if it is part of something that is better; i.e. that it will link them to wider forces in society, not isolate them more.

Left Unity identifies a (partial) European trend in the emergence and progress of parties of the left like Syriza and Die Link. They claim to share the need to fill the same vacuum left by the rightward moving social democracy in all West European countries. They ignore the significance of the collapse of the communist tradition in the countries concerned and the great well of potential support for the left project that remains as its legacy, which is entirely unavailable in the UK. The only British roots offered for the Left Unity project is a return to 1948. Again this is a construct resting on wishful thinking.

The political vacuum left by the definitive shift of Labour to ruling class consensus has not ‘sucked up’ the left in Britain. And it is not the lack of the right policy, or particular tactic, or absence of sectarianism, or exclusivity, or idol worship that has promoted or prevented the magic Hoover from doing its progressive work. It is the painful and debilitating reorganisation of the working class following momentous defeats over a generation and echoed on a world scale. Large units of production, at least in the UK, will remain few and far between. The enormous majority of the working class has changed utterly. New principles are required to regroup a working class movement and these are as likely to emerge on the political, as on the social and economic stage. The first task of marxists is to elaborate and try to put into practise these new principles. And while we measure our advantages – for example the political system is now in a deep crisis and is thoroughly despised, we should also recognise the facts, including the fact that first political regroupment of a significant section of the working class has already happened – around the UKIP banner and saloon bar fascism. The vacuum has already done its work. The 20 year ‘new mass party’ experiment is over.

The second part of this blog will look at what marxists should discuss about marxism.

Mosul: the centre of two great crises

The most senior British officer involved in planning for post war Iraq, licensed lay reader in the Church of England, Major General Sir Tim Cross told us all on ‘Today’ (BBC Radio 4, 11 June) that he thought ‘they’ (presumably he and his pals) had underestimated the depth of the divisions between Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq, indeed, in the whole of the middle East. Referring to the break up of Iraq and the Syrian civil war, it could all go on for another ten years he sadly suggested.

This particular specimen of the British military perhaps did not realise that in large part that was how the brits and their empire set up the Middle East in the first place – by fomenting these and other useful divisions.  Like Pakistan and India, the modern map of the world owes a great deal to that particular legacy.

But perhaps not surprisingly General Tim misses the point. The move by ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is also known as ISIL, seizing Mosul and dissolving the Iraqi army, together with their previous capture of Ramadi and Falluja, is a major shift in Middle East and world politics. It is nothing less than a signal of the break up of unchallenged western over-lordship in the Middle East. It is also another, decisive door closing on the ‘Arab Spring.’

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar etc., were always nothing other than puppets of the US and remain so. Egypt’s military dictatorship is in new and positive negotiations with the Pentagon about its own status. Israel, because of its endless war with the Palestinians (the traditional, radical enemy of the west) remains the favored regional policeman. The Iranians overthrew both the British and the US empires – but the two progressive forces that might have united the Arab / Palestinian / Iranian cause, socialism and a united Arab/Middle East Federation – based on Arab nationalism - have both been seen to fail. The second Iranian revolution defeated the US but it also opened the door for the current reactionary utopianism and the fantasy unity of the Caliphate.  However, unlike the Arab Spring, many can see Muslim radicalism, at least in the sense of its success in resisting imperialism, to be a realistic template for an independent society. (Although western style capitalist ‘reality’ is already re-growing inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.)

Imperialism (the US and its assorted hangers on) feel the ground shifting from under their feet, after defeat for their new puppet regimes in Iraq and in Afghanistan, despite years of war and trillions of dollars. The tectonic plates are now shifting in the Middle East (and in India and Pakistan.) All that blood and money – for what? The US’s influence and control is weaker than it has ever been.

Here we come to the remorseless logic of the permanent revolution. This grand political insight of the early twentieth century is mostly identified with Trotsky and exemplified in Lenin’s April Theses, the strategic document that led to the successful second Russian revolution. In the case of the new brush fires of revolt, aimed against western influence, across Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Libya, they emerge from the failure of indigenous capitalism to consolidate its independence and a new life for its people. Despite the Arab Spring and its echoes in Iran, the city based classes that capitalism spawned, could not begin to consolidate the re-founding of their societies and the country as a whole in social, economic and political terms, and therefore were unable able to lead the whole nation to its real freedom. The absence of this social and political leadership did not make Imperialist efforts any more successful – given their hopeless wars - instead this lacunae created a different leadership, a different sort of popular mobilisation, inevitably carrying echoes of the old slogans (e.g. for a United Arab federation) and using a distant, reactionary (and fantastical) past as its only available route map to true and free independence.

Mosul expresses both the weakness of Imperialism in the Middle East and beyond, as well as the weakness of the working and other urban classes and socialist politics and its place in these modern struggles in the Middle East. The world’s two great social classes in the world appear empty of any perspective in the current shifts across the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan/India. The cracks in western capitalism continue and so the explosive social and political oppressions that it has contained will vent. In the west we must do what we can to keep our war mongers away from any more of the disasters they have already created. There has to be the maximum space for the people in revolt in the Middle East to find their own way to the answers of the questions they face.

Is British democracy worn out?

 To discuss democracy in light of the UK Coalition’s proposed new law on the replacement of MPs by their constituents, rather than Bashar al-Assad’s and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s ‘democratic’ victories in Syria and Egypt, seems to put a very small cart before a very large horse. Nevertheless, the immense disaffection in the west with the available politics and politicians has now apparently surfaced in Egypt, while Syrians, ‘encouraged’ by armed occupation (but without attractive alternatives) voted, in large numbers, for the devil they know. These fake elections represent a turning point in the ‘Arab Spring’ as the counter-revolution gathers force. The new leadership in Egypt has been bought and paid for by the US. Assad is not the west’s first choice by any means, but the Syrian, Iranian alliance appears strong enough to defend itself both from its own internal revolts and the machinations of the west. The ‘democracy’ of the Egyptian and Syrian elections has little to tell us about democracy as such, and much more about global realignments and the growing weakness of the west after defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2008 economic collapse.

In Britain however, according to some, democracy is making a faltering advance with the new proposal to ‘recall’ MPs. In the event we are told that a parliamentary committee will first decide which particular MPs should be available for 10% of their constituents to bring back to a new election. This safeguard is to prevent ‘populist’ and ‘special interest’ initiatives getting a grip on the process.

The Recall bill may be a non-event although at least it allows the rest of us to see that the political class feels under pressure. But there is more to unravel here. What is the meaning of our democracy implied by the new bill? And in the now decades long detachment of the oppressed and excluded layers of our society from the political system, what alternatives does it suggest?

We have a representative democracy in the west – apparently. But the content of this term had been progressively scooped out and refilled with a calculated alternative. What did representative mean and what does it mean now? When the Labour Party was set up they aimed to get working class men into Parliament – because the working class was not represented there. A representative was someone who shared the key characteristics of those who voted for them; something of their life experiences; their income and conditions; their place in society – and by that means these people would know the interests of their voters. Now a representative, according to the Encarta world English dictionary, means 1. Somebody who votes or speaks on behalf of others. 2. A member of a legislative assembly.

What has shifted? What has changed is that apparently anyone might ‘represent’ me. Indeed they may represent me by expressing their own opinions that might be quite contrary to my own. I voted for their party and my MP can apparently still represent me while in no way sharing my experience or by fighting for my views and beliefs. My representative speaks for me. The accent is normally given to the third word in that sentence but to understand what is happening it should rest on the fourth.

More acutely in the case of the Labour Party we are encouraged to vote for our ‘representatives’ because they are not like us. Candidates are selected by parties on the basis of their success in the institutions of our society. They have been to top schools, universities, are successful in their professions or in business, or, increasingly, in the political bureaucracies. They seek the vote of those who are none of those things ... in order to ‘represent’ them, to speak for them (to substitute for them.)

At the same time a vast bureaucratic state machine tied in innumerable ways to those who pull the economic levers in society manages all of our lives. This, the most powerful aspect of government, represents nobody but itself. It turns out that the civil service leaders, the tops of industry and finance that all these people, are from the same backgrounds as those who we are allowed to vote for. So, what sits at the very centre of our democracy is a corporate, collective, consensual class and its apparatus that makes everything tick. These people are not young, they are not female, not BME, not poor, not insecure, not disabled, not dependent, not wage earners, not single parents, do not live in estates, do not use public transport, are not looking for a house or a flat or a room to stay in. And a few hundred of them out of the many thousands, are elected – their particular aim is to publicly support the consensus.

A democracy gives rule to the majority over the minority. Like the word ‘representative’ that has been hollowed out and refilled with its opposite, so democracy now means the exact opposite of majority rule. It is, as far as can be managed by our movers and shakers, as close to a guarantee that they can get, that the majority will not rule. The minority will rule.

Nothing is static. Great wars and revolutions in the last century created a state in Britain immediately after WW2, which had to balance the ferocious energy and climactic achievements of the working classes here and abroad with the need to maintain capitalism.  Great inroads into capital’s power were achieved. The state did not change its ultimate class character. Its semi-permanent leaders in the great ministries and their networks in the forces and the economy assured that. But the elected component of the state was able, at least partially, to ‘represent’ the mass of the working class and express, at least partially, its interests. Industries were nationalised. The NHS was born. Colonies’ battles for independence were recognised. Full employment was guaranteed and rationing did continue. This was the first and last time the working class in the UK found any expression in the British parliament, or among British mainstream political parties – as a bi-product of its successful participation in a momentous and world changing struggle. It turns out that Parliamentary democracy – at least for the majority in Britain – has not been a success. About the best that could be said for it was that it is more susceptible to pressure than most of its alternatives. After the experience of fascism we are not neutral on that point.

What would a truly representative democracy look like? Or rather what has it looked like? The great movements for emancipation over the last 150 years have given us some basic ideas. In the first place, as the old suffragette slogan has it
‘None so fit to break the chains as those who wear them!’
The representatives of the majority should be from the majority. All parts of the majority. And because they are representing the majority they should be paid the average wage of the majority. Political representation should never be a career move. Second; the decisions of the representatives need to be carried out by the representatives. The representatives need to lead on the changes they call for. They need to set up the plan, organise the work and mobilise and consult those involved, employ the experts. And yes, third, if they cannot do it, or if they go in the wrong direction, they should be recalled, immediately, by those who voted for them.

To imagine such a state of affairs is easy. To drive towards it will quickly encounter the furious opposition of the minority who live off the status quo and that will be very difficult indeed. It would need a revolution! The sooner we get started the better.