Thursday 24 September 2015

Greek solidarity - on the ground.

The massive solidarity (not charity) structure in Greece is a great achievement. (See last blog.)

The anti-austerity Popular Unity split from Syriza polled 2.9% of the popular vote and failed to get into parliament in the September elections. But the absence of a national political lead for the Solidarity movement has already been discussed by Greek activists.

Here is the view of one Greek activist on the future for Solidarity under the new conditions. 

Wednesday 23 September 2015

Greece elections; what has changed?

Syriza's ex economics minister, Vourofakis, wrote in the British 'Guardian' (22 September) that the economic deal made by Alexis Tsipras with the Troika would fail. Indeed his argument was that it has been tried already, over 6 years, and 5 General Elections, and that it has already, definitively, failed.

Syriza gained 2.2 million votes in the elections in January 2015 and 1.9 million in September.  They therefore lost 15% of their vote between the two elections. (The overall Greek vote declined by 13% from January.) Syriza now leads the government in coalition with ANEL, a right wing party opposed to austerity, as it did after January's election, when it opposed any more deals with the Troika.

What has changed?

Back in June, when the Greek people voted on the Troika's latest proposals in a referendum, 64% of the Greek voters voted. 2.2 million voted 'yes' and 3.6 million voted 'no', despite the 'no' vote almost certainly requiring Greece to leave the Euro and repudiate their debt mountain. Alexus Tsipras then led Syriza in the opposite direction to the Greek peoples' decision and accepted the most recent Troika plan.

As Vourofakis has explained, the Greek people now face another impossible economic mountain to climb. But there have been other, political, changes that flow from the Tsipras led Syriza rejection of the referendum result.

1. 'Nothing to vote for.'
 After the results of the June referendum were dumped by the Tsipras leadership there was nothing to vote for in the September General Election. The new Syriza leadership ( a third of its 149 MPs resigned) were simply, in effect, another pro-austerity party. And some sort of EU organised austerity plan was now the only choice. The new Syriza made much in the election of their 'new politics' and there was some truth in the fact that they had made a fight with the EU and that they had been open with the Greek people about that fight. But there were many attempts made by the new Syriza in the election campaign to 'soften' and to 'spin' their latest concessions and the previous hope and enthusiasm of the anti-austerity electorate had dissipated according to all the main Greek political commentators. Popular Unity, led by the Syriza anti-austerity rebels, failed to make an electoral impact.

While 'Golden Dawn' (Greek's fascists) only slightly increased their vote, they are Greece's third party with 18 MPs despite a leadership that has just come out of prison still on bail for murder and other serious crimes. They are now the major 'anti-austerity' mainstream party, albeit that the (mainly) magnificent reaction of the Greek people to the refugee crisis so far shows that all is far from lost.

2. Erosion of the mobilisation of the Greek people.
The tremendous efforts made at the base of the movement for change in Greece, the 'Solidarity for All' structures that provided health care, teaching, shelter and food, have been hit. At its height in the summer more than 3 million Greeks were using these self organised resources and facilities. While it was never the plan of the organisers of the solidarity movement to stand in for what should be any modern state's responsibilities, nevertheless the tremendous inspiration created by the movement suggested to all that the Greek people could, and would be able to organise a new type of society.

The Solidarity for All umbrella for the movement seems to have blown out by Syriza's turn. At the most severely practical end of the spectrum the health clinics, at least in and around Athens, seem to be the least effected so far.

3. A critical social/political alliance has been pulled apart.
Greek polling (except the post election night polls) are notoriously innaccurate. Nevertheless pre election polling consistently showed that Syriza had lost its majority among the unemployed and among young people aged between 18 and 24. (Indeed the latter group showed a consistent majority for Golden Dawn. GD's previous base among young people in Greece had been largely overturned by the time of the January 2015 General Election.)  The new Syriza did not poll a majority among 18 - 44 year olds either.

Additionally, Syriza's radical wing, the 'conscience' of the party, certainly the group with the most history of involvement in the Greek squares movement and in Solidarity for All, in other words the group with the most contact with the Greek peoples' daily lives and resistence, have now been definitively cut out of the Syriza alliance.

4. A new/old leadership emerges.
Tsipras's leadership of Syriza has always been a major factor in the popularity of the party. Indeed part of the left in Europe has 'theorised' this new type of leadership phenomena (see blog re Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, 8 September). But the contact that popular leaders like Chavez had with the Venezuelan people, were premised on the enormous self activity and mobilisation of the poor and disadvantaged, who could see, in practice, how the leadership directly and concretely supported their efforts and their aims. At the same time, the oligarchs and the 'great families' were confronted and denounced.

While popular and displaying a 'common touch' (no frills and no social pretensions) Tsipras never displayed such radical charactersitics (despite being 'suspected' of them.) But since the June referendum his personal leadership style has turned into its opposite. Tsipras's eldest son enrolled into one of Greece's most prestigious, expensive, private schools in September. Tsipras and his family spent part of the summer in a villa owned by a wealthy Greek shipowner and commuting to Athens by helicopter. (See Financial Times, 19 September.)  Earlier in the same week Tsipras posted a Twitter cartoon of himself as the messiah which was captioned
'There may not be any miracles if you abstain.'
It's just a joke! Yes, but it suggests how Tsipras now sees the role and function of the Greek people in their own future.

These and other changes in Greece's political life do not (yet) amount to a definitive defeat. But they are signs of a major stepback. And we will see in the October elections in Portugal and the December elections in Spain what the Greek retreat means for other anti-austerity political forces in Europe.


Thursday 17 September 2015

Corbyn, Labour and Scotland


Jeremy Corbyn told the parliamentary Labour Party (14 September) that Tom Watson, Labour's new deputy and he would be visiting Scotland at least one day per month in order to boost Scottish Labour's vote before the May 2016 elections for the Scottish parliament (Holyrood.)

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the SNP, told the media that she hoped Jeremy Corbyn's victory in the vote for the leadership of the Labour Party would mean that Labour would collaborate with the SNP to build a common front against austerity and to oppose Trident - Britain's nuclear weapon. She also told the Scottish media that as Jeremy Corbyn was unlikely to win the 2020 British election, the only way for Scots to escape future Tory rule was to achieve full independence in Scotland.

Behind this opening salvo there is a tangled web of confusion among different parts of the anti-austerity movement in England, Wales and Scotland. There is, undoubtedly, a debate to be had. If Scotland wants an end to austerity, surely it should vote for a UK wide Labour Party, for Corbyn. Indeed, without Scotland voting Labour there is little chance that Corbyn's Labour Party could win any General Election. On the other hand surely Corbyn's leadership is fragile. It would be better to ensure the end of austerity in Scotland if it were independent. On top of that, is it not 'more progressive' for Scotland to be able to decide its own political future anyway?

The debate will rage and roar away. Without in anyway intruding on the right of the Scots to determine their own future here are some (hopefully clarifying) thoughts.

Some (influential) supporters of Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party are completely convinced that the national question in Scotland (and therefore the SNP) are now a dangerous, 'blind alley' for the real 'battle for socialism'. Scotland must get behind Corbyn's chance to become a Labour Prime Minister for the whole UK and the SNP 'diversion' should be totally defeated. Such opinions in England are found most forcefully represented among some of the leadership of the left unions. (In fact this stance is actually an extension of their previously held views about the Scottish referendum campaign.)

This blog has argued before that Scotland is not a colonial nation dominated by English imperialism. But there is no doubt that Scottish politics is dominated by Westminster. This is not the same as the political conditions in Newcastle or Liverpool. Scotland has a national, political identity which means that just as Greek and Spanish anti-austerity movements call for the establishment of the people's sovereignty over remote and wealth-serving institutions that drive the EU, so millions of Scots tie their domination by the Westminster political class to the possible freedom that might be offered by the achievement of their own national sovereignty. In Scotland, the poverty question, the question of inequality, of Trident and of welfare, in other words the class questions, are not the opposite or alternative to the national question. They are now inextricably linked.

Unfortunately for this perspective, the Scottish Labour Party (despite the removal of the hapless Jim Murphy) is now led by another ex-Blairite. In Scotland most people voted SNP in the last General Election (May 2015) because, unlike Labour, the SNP argued for an end to austerity and to Trident. Kezia Dugdale, Scottish Labour leader, attacks the SNP in Scotland over education results, over 'pushing' for a new referendum, over a long list of things — but not over the absolute need for no Trident and an anti-austerity Scotland. Scottish Labour is unlikely to be promoting Corbyn's politics anytime soon.

Just as it was the anti-austerity, anti-war movement in England that toppled the traditional leadership of Labour in favour of Jeremy Corbyn (and certainly not some long term mushrooming campaign inside the Labour Party, or even inside the unions) so the same trend in Scotland has, up to now, associated itself with support for the SNP - albeit critically (including many of the Scottish members and activists in those same left unions whose leaders are hell bent on burying the national question). This is because Labour has been more than tried, and then tested to destruction, over decades in Scotland. And what the Scots have learned is that Labour cannot defeat the Tories in England - even if they hold Scotland. Worse, that they have tried to become them. They note Corbyn's victory and are glad for it. They also note Corbyn's weak social base and the political fragility of his leadership, and they feel the absolutely decisive requirement to get away forever from Tory governments of both the Conservative and the Labour kind. And more; to get away from the distant, overbearing and corrupt Westminster political class, with its thousands of representatives in the leadership of all three traditional parties.

Can Corbyn's tremendous victory mesh with, even push forward a more radical perspective and political movement in Scotland?

Undoubtedly. But not by trying to unwish the hard political experience of the Scots. (Although some of Corbyn's English well wishers will need to learn the value of modesty.) It is perfectly reasonable, from any point of view, to promote the requirement for Scottish Labour to take its own 'independence' from Westminster. An independent Scottish Labour Party might then stand more than a fighting chance to take on the SNP's programme — from the left. If the Scottish Labour Party removed the issue of an independent Scotland from the agenda — by supporting it — then the social question, the class question would determine the direction of Scottish politics, to the benefit of the Scots - to the benefit of Scottish Labour and to the benefit of the rest of Britain.

A determining socialist presence in Holyrood would transform the political debate in all of the rest of the UK, while breaking up the power of Britain's political class and the over-mighty post imperial ambitions of its rulers. England would be a smaller country and with smaller European countries in mind, it might even begin to learn to behave itself better. The key is that the movement in England, against war and against austerity, that has already pushed over the rotten leadership of a decaying mass party, as another aspect of Westminster's political crisis erupts, would be immensely strengthened. And that is good for all our futures.

Monday 14 September 2015

John McDonnell MP


'Corbyn gives top job to IRA sympathiser: New Shadow Chancellor who wanted to kill Margaret Thatcher to push through plans for taxes on middle-class families'

This is the British Daily Mail's headlines on Jeremy Corbyn's appointment of John McDonnell as 'shadow chancellor.' The Daily Mail lives up to its reputation.

Elsewhere McDonnell has been described by commentators as 'factional' to those who he disagrees with, as 'further left than Corbyn' (see 'Today', the BBC morning news programme, 14 September.) It seems that 'General Secretary' Corbyn has lined up his new Beria to frighten the enemy and begin the internal purges.

Anyone who has ever met or worked with John McDonnell, (not to mention the 27,000 voters he won in the 2015 election, representing 60% of the vote - a rise of 4% in his constituency, Hayes and Harlington) knows him as a kind, interested, supportive person, with clear ideas and a heartfelt sense of the injustice of our society.  But we wait (with trepidation?) as this bureaucratic monster gets to work cutting his way through the Labour Party MPs who fail to fall in love with 'big brother' Jeremy.

Good grief.

Thursday 10 September 2015

What does Corbyn's campaign mean?



The British Labour Party emerged, like the German Social Democratic Party, at the turn of the 19th and the early 20th century, as a new mass workers party from the heart of one of the three most powerful capitalist countries in the world.

This fact, a fact in the British case underpinned by the enormous wealth of its Empire, gave a particular character to Britain's new party. Two key features of the Labour Party's political structure flow from the effects of Empire. The first was that a significant social layer of worker's leaders had already risen above the general conditions of the ordinary worker. This layer was concentrated in the trade union bureaucracies who had established the habit of privilege among themselves over decades. The prospect of advancing within the unions inevitably acted as a pull to the most articulate, active (and self-seeking) trade unionists from the ranks. The employers often found it helpful to use the trade union bureaucracies as a filter in their relationships with their employees and encouraged the growth of this more malleable layer.

Second, when social and economic concessions appeared to blunt rebellion, even political concessions, could be allowed to the working class and their organisations (albeit after some ferocious struggles) - based on the vast profitability of Britain's Imperial wealth.

Socialists, mainly outside the UK, described the British working class as capped by an 'aristocracy of labour', a group of workers who saw themselves as in a 'trade' or special sector, with particular skills. They acted as a material base for the expression of narrow, sectional interest, often crystallized by the trade union bureaucracy in 'special interest' arguments, and which provided a social basis for the bureaucracy to lean on both from social classes for their continued influence and survival.

Many British trade union leaders from that time publicly praised and defended Empire. They obviously understood where the butter for their bread came from. In 1921 Walter Citrine (the head of the TUC, known for his meticulous pamphlet on chairing meetings and later ennobled) accompanied the leaders of Britain's main industrial and transport unions to a meeting with Prime Minister Lloyd George after 'Black Friday', a one day General Strike. He wrote in his memoirs;
'The Prime Minster said, "Well gentlemen, the power is yours!" At that moment I knew we had lost.'

Although it was not inevitable, the trade union bureaucracy, its foundations in Britain's aristocracy of labour, proved the decisive force in the creation and control of the early mass Labour Party. Lenin, among others, saw the Labour Party as a party whose leadership, policy, structure (the dominance of the parliamentary party over the rest etc.,) was wholly, indeed irretrievably, rooted in the defense of capitalist, Imperialist Britain. The base of the Labour party, its voters, its campaigners, its participants in the clubs, coops and most of all the millions in the affiliated unions, were the real agency in the defense of the independent and potentially revolutionary interests of the working class.

Nothing remains the same. The Labour Party arrived at its zenith after WW2 with the creation of the NHS and the welfare system. It slid through the crises of the 1960s and 1970s gripped in the clutches of a cold war labour movement bureaucracy. But the post 1984/85 Miner's Strike period began to mark a change in the fundamental class character of the Party. First Thatcher smashed up the main industrial unions and their industries. Then Tony Benn led a movement for Labour reform, which peaked and was then destroyed. (Benn remarked a year or two later that if he, with a still powerful labour movement behind him, could not win the deputy leadership of the Party, he doubted that the Party would ever be winnable by the left.)  There followed a decade where Labour's leaders tried to turn to becoming Britain's Democratic Party to the Tories Republicans.

Blair's leadership and then premiership confirmed a qualitative shift in the class character of Labour. It still fostered within itself an old social democratic trend, and it still paid court to some, by now, diminished trade union leaders with lots of historically accumulated cash, but the relationship with them was much in the style of the of the US Democrats. The aim of Blair's Labour Party was not to rebuild the labour and trade union movement; it was to replace the Tories; to become a long term prospect for government, securely based on the newest sectors of capitalist development in the south of the country, combined with the support of state employees, the media and of at least part of the most globalised sector in finance, rooted in the City of London. The famous Clause 4 was dumped. The working class in Blair's society was, for the first time since the emergence of the early 19th century Chartists, to have no public, independent programme of its own.

Since Blair and now with the destruction of the Labour Party's base in Scotland, the British Labour Party has been in deep, perhaps terminal crisis. It has no identity. Its base of voting support is breaking up, both to the right and to the left. Paradoxically Jeremy Corbyn's successful campaign, while of immense value - and a real breakthrough since the demise of the Benn/Scargill left current of the 1980s - in reconstituting a left political, even activist current in Britain's mainstream politics, including in the unions, is a part of that Labour Party crisis. Whatever else it is, it is not a sign of the renewal of the British Labour Party.

The main approach adopted by British socialists towards the Labour Party in the first part of the 20th century was to try to bring its mass base into collision with its leadership, structures, parliamentary dominance and defense of the establishment. From the late 1960s onwards, socialists began to stress their independence from the Labour Party, summed up in the 1980s by Benn's thousands strong Socialist Movement, which combined the Labour Party left with the left outside the LP. From Blair and the Iraq war onwards, socialists in Britain, particularly in some key unions, believed a fight inside Labour was more likely to be a result of struggles and campaigns and even new parties built by a new left outside the Party than any internal Labour Party fight. And that appears to be what has happened.

An anti-austerity / anti-war left has emerged across Britain in the last ten years. In Scotland it has found some space in the SNP-led independence campaign. In England and Wales it has emerged from the mass movements created to oppose war and austerity, and partly found political expression in support for the Greens. It has now lit up the sky in the battered Labour Party by driving behind Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy, (backed by the remains of the anti Blair forces still inside the Party.)

It is worth repeating that Corbyn's campaign is immensely valuable in consolidation of an anti war, anti austerity current in society. But it will not 'win' the Labour Party. The Labour Party is run through Parliament. Jeremy's 20 MPs will not hold the line. The Labour Party leaders will do their best to ruin Jeremy.

But the most significant point here is not that Jeremy's campaign cannot 'win' Labour (despite all the utopian plotters now lining up 'the right' candidates for the delectation of the myriad Labour internal committees.) It is that while Jeremy's campaign is giving political expression to a new, vitally important current in society, that current is still a tiny minority. Even if Jeremy wins the leadership of Labour, even if he avoids or defeats internal attempts to remove him, it is the electorate that will in next May's elections and beyond, destroy him. Yes, Jeremy will argue that internal dissension, media bias etc is to blame and that will be partly true. But the main reason why Jeremy's possible leadership would drive Labour support in the polls to single figures is that the anti-war, anti-austerity political current in society has not yet conquered its first task - to show that today's economic, social and political crisis can be, has to be, overcome by new politics and new economics and new mass organisations.

Such a mass political current can, will and has already influenced mainstream politics, dramatically in the case of Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy. But it is only beginning to take its role in Britain's history.

Empire (but not support for Imperialist wars and takeovers) has long gone. The British 'labour aristocracy' is no longer a social base for a vast and homogeneous labour bureaucracy. The remaining labour bureaucracy is in decline and is changing as a political force. The current Labour Party, like many of the European Social Democrat Parties, is cracking and flaking as it hollows out. A new left is growing as an old society, and all its associated junk, sinks. It is emerging in action and without preconceptions, trying anything and everything. What do socialists do?

They show how a minority can become a majority. How a political current can become a mass organisation. How the paralysis of the past can be broken. How the huge new changes and their accompanying fears can be managed and dealt with. How new political and economic systems - and a new society - are entirely possible.

Wednesday 9 September 2015

We are a great grandmother!

Mrs Thatcher, British Prime Minister for ten years, first came out with the phrase
'We are a grandmother' in the 1980s.
Britain's queen has been a great grandmum for a while now. She has not made any personal announcements about it. After all, she's not the daughter of a grocer.

A range of the not very great and the far from good (Dr David Owen, John Major on the phone and a couple of history professors) were rounded up this morning by the 'Today' programme on BBC 4 - the only TV or radio station that still plays the national anthem when the queen AND her husband have official birthdays - to tell us all how simply spiffing it all was that Britain's current queen had reigned over the Brits for longer than any of their other monarchs.

But they all struggled to explain in what Elizabeth's (the second's) greatness lay. In the end they found different ways of repeating that she had gone on and on and on - and that was, well, bloody marvellous!

'She has secured', stated the sonorous Doctor, 'three generation of the royal succession.'

There you have it. The purpose of a good monarch in a nutshell.

Tuesday 8 September 2015

The EU and European unity; portents from Spain and Greece

                                                                       A short essay

Spanish polling, heating up for the winter 2015 General Elections, show Podemos ('We Can') with 12% support, now third behind the Social Democrats (PSOE) and Spain's main right wing party, the Peoples Party (PP), both of which have around 20%.  As late as May, Podemos, the PSOE and the PP were even in the polls - with Podemos rising. Most commentators (but not the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias) put the Podemos slump in the opinion polls down to the defeat of Syriza's anti austerity policy in Greece. Pablo Iglesias's response to Syriza's defeat is, however, clearly not convincing a large slice of the Spanish electorate. He supports Alexis Tsipras and, most particularly Tsipras's call for a new mandate from the Greek people, while simultaneously claiming that Spain's 13% of the Eurozone economy makes its possible leverage with the EU leadership to win the battle for an end to austerity much more likely to succeed than Greece's 3.5%.

The core of the Podemos dilemma remains.  How to build a popular majority for an anti-austerity left in Southern Europe - while remaining part of a united, commercial and financial continental unity, expressed most directly through a shared currency.

This is a look at Podemos's main economic and social policy, rooted in a definite view of the overall historical balance of social forces in Europe - following the struggles of the 20th century.

'Clearly in the present conditions this (the Podemos policy) has nothing to do with revolution, or transition to socialism in the historic sense of those terms. But it does become feasible to aim at sovereign processes that would limit the power of finance, spur the transformation of production, ensure a wider redistribution of wealth and push for more democratic configuration of European institutions.' (PI, NLR, May/June 2015)

It is necessary to return later to the new concept of 'sovereignty' as used by the left in Spain and Greece. But first Pablo Igelsias's use of 'sovereignty' (see above) would be termed by him as a typical and valuable 'transversal' initiative. The word 'transversal' is borrowed from the Argentinian philosopher Laclau (another self described 'post marxist' personality who also received his post graduate degree from Essex University!) Transversal is an extension of Gramsci's thoughts (who never went anywhere near Essex) on 'hegemony'. Gramsci argued that especially in the conditions of the developed West after WW1, it was a crucial goal for socialists to 'make the political weather', to establish, through thought and action, the prevailing 'common sense' in society in order to win the nation culturally and institutionally, as the key to the eventual conquering of state power. But Laclau and Pablo Iglesias go much further. By transversal they imply the requirement to base public politics on the ambiguities and 'openings' offered by mainstream parties of the status quo, the elites, the general public as expressed through popular media etc. It is not effective to fight on questions that simply isolate the would be radicals.

So, for example, Pablo Iglesias promotes his own personal leadership role in the media as a way of inserting himself and Podemos into the current fetish for the study and acclamation of public personalities - while using Latin American analogies on the role of popular power and individual leaders to give the process a left flavour. In fact the Podemos leadership has made a major effort not to be identified as a radical left party. It deliberately avoids taking issue on questions like the monarchy. This is transversal politics.

Pablo Iglesias's analysis of the origins of Podemos, as it captured the 'Indignatos' from their mass occupations of the Spanish public squares, is that the movement was, essentially, a middle class and lower middle class phenomena. He argues that not only was this rising separate from the traditional left actions and the remains of the Spanish working class trade union movement, but the marginalisation of these 'traditional' forces was a precondition for the space that opened up for the new rebellion. As might be expected in some respects Pablo Iglesias's analysis of the sources of Podemos's rapid growth is shared by most Spanish political commentators.

There are many arguments that might be had with the Podemos leaders' political theories - so long as it is recognised that such a discussion takes place in the context of the Podemos initiative which has become one of the most successful and creative political organisations in the history of post WW2 progressive organisations in Europe. Of course it will be tested to the limit, given the fear it has provoked in the Spanish establishment and among the EU princes. Every ounce of Podemos's flexibility and political intelligence will be required if it is to move to its stated aim of surpassing the PSOE and then to its next 'moment' in dealing with power across Spain.

Comments on aspects of the 'transversal.'

There is a serious gap in Pablo Iglesias's understanding of the relationship between the people of the squares, the Indignatos', and the experience, practise and campaigns of the more traditional centres of the Spanish working class. The issue is not to decide between them. Transversal thinking is not just a possible tool to deal with Spain's establishment. Rather, a transcendent analysis recognises the potential of a politics of recomposition and of a new centre emerging in that recomposition of Spain's subordinate classes, which overcomes division between the parts of the majority. A new 'common sense' a new hegemony is to be won first there - in order then to win the whole of society. It could be argued that Podemos's first tasks are not so much to 'overcome' the PSOE, but rather to consolidate the rebellion among all those who struggle and who have struggled, in order to overcome PSOE.

Similarly Pablo Iglesias's theory of leadership is contradictory. (Of course, he would insist.) Except the contradiction has moved to create friction and fissures in the camp of the rebellion! The very open base of Podemos, with its supporters' primaries for the selection of candidates etc., was designed to show the informal and open nature of Podemos. But Podemos has begun to develop a casual, informal leadership who lead because they know each other from the beginning. As Podemos grows, embracing more than the Indignatos their decision making legitimacy is now coming under pressure among the ranks. Podemos is already no longer the newest kid on the bloc. That, and a reduced media presence, as the right have now set up its own 'new' anti-corruption party, means that Podemos have lost some of their media sparkle.

And Europe?

The absolutely central question for Spain's anti-austerity movements' success, is and will increasingly be, its relationship with the Eurozone, a subject, it appears, that cannot be fully transversalised! Podemos (and Syriza) start well in their complex and significant use of the political concept of sovereignty, playing on a deep popular consciousness (and an even deeper history) to great strength. Pablo Iglesias initially borrowed the term from left-populist movements in Latin America. The anti-colonial aspect of the social struggle in LA is a direct consequence of the unfinished revolutions for independence in the 19th and early 20th century; unfinished because the new world super power, the USA, after supporting the removal of the Spanish, dominated and still largely dominates, its own 'backyard. Syriza in Greece found this a fertile analogy in respect to their ruling class, acting just as an LA oligarchy, through tight family control of the economy and politics and social life. The weight of land ownership in the economy added to the parallels. There were also some similarities in the establishment set up in traditional Spain.

But in Spain and in Greece the struggle against US was and is submerged in favour of two new meanings ascribed to sovereignty. The first is the drawing out of the analogy between the LA and the Spanish, Greek and some of the Italian dominant classes in the fact of their networking and corruption, particularly in politics. The self-seeking, nepotistic Spanish political class are particularly despised across Spain. They have become the ultimate dysfunctional family, although both Italy's Mafia and Greece's Shipowners would give them a run for their money! Second is the widespread feeling of the unaccountable, remote and unalterable, neo-liberal character of EU institutions; which feels similar to the occupation of a foreign power. This is not at all the same as a desire to remove the nation from a European economic and political entity. It has some parallels in the feelings of underdeveloped parts of developed and thriving nations. And the response to this experience is the call for more sovereignty.

This is, however, a special type of sovereignty. The call for sovereignty in Spain, in Greece and now in parts of Italy, is not used to call for national separation from other European nations (although in Spain and Italy it does raise some historically regionalised battles) rather it is used to underline the general powerlessness of the ordinary people. They are protesting their lack of access to the potential of the union in Europe, in terms of their rights, of their political representation and of their economic security. It is more an argument that in the EU arrangement, the European people should have sovereignty over the caste of bureaucrats and politicians and bankers that now run the show. Although there is much ambiguity in this melange of thoughts and beliefs among the population as whole, much exploited no doubt by transversal leftists, the call for sovereignty is not yet at all a return to the defense of national interests above all others. (Something of this process might also be seen in the campaign around Scottish independence in the UK.) Of course nothing is permanent. Already some European far right parties are pushing successfully in a chauvinist direction - most alarmingly in France.

Last June, in a dramatic moment in European history, Alexis Tsipras was speared by the horns of what seemed an irresolvable dilemma; the Greek people had just voted overwhelmingly 'no' to the demands of the Troika. At that exact moment he decided to accept the Troika's demands. He knew that 'no' meant leaving the Euro. Unfortunately he calculated that the fight to leave the Euro would be worse than capitulation.

Podemos argues like Syriza used to, that they too can build a popular anti-austerity movement across the EU, composed of nations and movements and experts, which will defeat the current EU leadership of Germany and the Troika. That seems much less possible now that Syriza has failed and a new economic crisis threatens. In any case the Podemos policy, a bigger version of the Syriza policy, seems to many of its previous supporters in Spain to have already failed. Podemos will need to rethink how to present its policy on Europe.

What is certain is it is utterly useless to simply denounce the Syriza retreat as 'a betrayal' (while no doubt claiming that some other group, party, leader would never have done such a thing.) And a similar barb aimed at Podemos's policy would be equally useless. This blog has argued from the beginning of the Syriza government that they would not be able to implement their anti-austerity platform and stay in the Euro. And that means that Alexis Tsipras did make the wrong choice. But the point is 'why?' What are the fundamentals here? And what would be a feasible, potentially popular policy on Europe?

The big majority of Greeks and of Spanish people support 'an Ever Closer Union' in Europe - to use the phrase that British Prime Minister Cameron wants to ditch. In principle that view is right. Just to take the current catastrophe in Syria and North Africa and the exodus of refugees fleeing war and want, how could this even begin to be managed in a humanitarian way without some sort of European unity? It is politically perverse to oppose a powerful and systematic, institutional-based co-operation across the continent for the purpose of dealing with the current humanitarian crisis, the wreckage of 2008, climate change, or for getting a grip on big capital. None of these necessities can be achieved solely at the level of the European nation state anymore - if they ever could. In 1921 Trotsky supported a European Union, a federation to deal with the results of WW1 in Europe and to prevent domination by the US. He argued only revolutionaries would be able to build the impetus for such a change, but thirty years on, after the devastation of WW2, it was big capital that initiated their own type of European unity. And it is capital that has now not only outgrown the nation state but even genuine continental wide cooperation; and from their global vantage point, big capital has inevitably negated its own pro Europe policy to turn into the 'enemy within'. Indeed, the modern European cooperation that it has created is overwhelmingly in defence of its own global interests! That is exactly what it means when politicians like Blair and Cameron insist that Europe and the EU 'embrace' globalisation. Big capital want the EU to be another India, Africa or China, particularly when it comes to the 'flexibility' of labour and the the freedom of capital. An ever closer union of the people of Europe would be an anathema to the global corporations, and to their European instrument, the Troika, and to the leadership of every European state and every European mainstream party, with the partial exception of Greece.

What is the essence of the matter?

So we start from the indispensable need for (at least) a European level of multinational cooperation to deal with major problems facing European societies and their people. And that fact is already part of a deep understanding among the majority of the people in most European countries. They are not deluded in their belief. They do not have a false understanding of the world they live in. The problem is the type of European collaboration that they are saddled with.

It is inevitable that the dominant social, political and economic force in the world will be driving the European institutions do exist. Unremarkably therefore those institutions overwhelmingly consist of economic and (subordinate) political mechanisms which have been created ultimately to defend big capital. Therefore the call for sovereignty of the people in Europe can be a thoroughly progressive call and should be promoted by those interested in challenging the domination of Europe's current rulers. Further, decisions about whether to restore aspects of national sovereignty, for example whether to join or to leave the Euro, are defensible or not depending on whether they promote or not the advance of a European sovereignty of the people of Europe as a whole over Europe's current leadership. (In that context Greece's withdrawal from the Euro would have opened the door to wider and deeper challenges in the whole of Europe to Europe's current crop of imperial princelings.) That approach in turn widens out to a policy, which at either national or international, level promotes movements that already fight for the peoples' sovereignty in Europe - by organising in favour of key international actions (like opening borders to refugees, or supporting free health care against US 'free' trade deals.)

All this is obvious and clear. And it can include the fact that sometimes the route to furthering the sovereignty of the people of Europe is by breaking up, or at least away, from the current EU institutions that act as a barrier to such a sovereignty, at least as a short term perspective. But this is not a set of rigid rules. Each specific social and political context has to be examined to work out what route progressive thought and action should take. A strategic frame supports the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. Such a frame cannot be used as a set of stop/go traffic lights.

A very popular initiative in Spain is the call that Podemos has made for a public audit of the debt - where it is from - who borrowed it  - and who is repaying it. This could be widened into an examination of the role of the IMF, the ECB and the Council of Ministers, the EU's current leadership, in promoting loans, then distributing wealth and then forcing the repayment of the debt in the EU. Let the Spanish people see if a new leadership of Europe is required.

Postscript:

In the UK, Cameron's 'in/out' referendum on the EU, to be held by 2017, is designed to recompose the Tory party, the main party reflecting ruling class interest in the UK, against the impact of the internal 'eurosceptics and of UKIP, with its one MP and 4 million rightward leaning votes. This is a critical requirement as the traditional British party system is currently suffering a major crisis, which up to now has included the Tories.

A major component of the UK party crisis involves sections of the voter's attitudes towards immigration. (Cameron has just announced the laughable but so called 'generous' total of 4000 Syrian refugees a year who are now allowed to come into Britain up to the next election.) The referendum looks likely to centre on the question of attitudes to the European 'free movement' of labour. In the British context this is an absolute diversion. The two immediately critical issues for the future of Britain and its nations are to roll back austerity, which means a toe to toe fight with the City of London (not Brussels in the first instance) and to reform Britain's dying political system, with its completely unrepresentative House of Commons and its bloated, parasitic, 800 plus 'Lords' - a 'second chamber' of pure, political putrefaction and an insult to the modern world.

Wednesday 2 September 2015

Where are we now?

Where (from the point of view of engaged and radical leftists) are we now? Many other commentators also ask this question but are careful to avoid mention of their own starting point - which does not mean that their subsequent answers contain a god like neutrality. For they surely have a starting point, and a consequent purpose, but they assume they have universal credentials that are not necessary to identify to the rest of us. They are starting from the defence of the status quo which translates as far as the commentators are concerned into 'basic common sense.'

In fact the period we are now in was opened by three historic shifts. First was the imperialist disaster of the Iraq war and the recognition of the failure of the Afghan war, finally symbolised by the 2010 withdrawal of US forces from combat in Iraq. Second was the international finance crisis of 2008/9 that now deepens into a classic crisis of production, of over-production, and the hyper inflation of stock market values. Third was the so called Arab Spring, which hit the world's headlines first in December 2010, with the revolt in Tunisia, and which has now turned into a new proxy world war. The main aspects of the political and economic world, particularly in the West, are still turning around these events and their aftermath.

In Europe whole populations were polarised by the US led adventure in the Middle East. But unlike the European reaction to the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s, the political leadership of Europe and all of the major European parties, most significantly including most of Europe's Social Democrat remnants, supported the US 'War on Terror'. This was most destructive, from a social democratic point of view, for the Labour Party under Blair in the UK. A similar position was also taken by the political leadership and all the mainstream European parties in the case of the responses to the world's financial crisis in 2008 - to this day. And the social bases of the Arab Spring (albeit a different mixture of lower middle class youth and the urban unemployed) coalesced with the middle class and utterly politically-alienated youth in the West that first rose against austerity (alongside the remaining organised bastions of the traditional working class in the case of western Europe.)

The Arab Spring has become its opposite, transformed into the worst of the barbaric wars since 1939/48. The Arab Spring was not able to get to the foundations of inequality, of corruption of military rule, of the state of Israel, of a united, future Arab nation, nor create the social alliances needed to address these issues. Despite the young people's heroism and hope (and the decisive turning point in  Middle East history that their brave actions have opened up) their place has now been taken by mainly reactionary forces, who are now in fierce battle. The Arab East in 2000 was an arrangement made by a century of western imperialism, in the first instance by the UK, then the US. The first phase of the Arab rebellion has been defeated - but the system has been cracked and cannot be put together in the old way (as the recent US treaty with Iran, and the increase in Turkish intervention both demonstrate.) The destabilisation of Pax Americana in the Middle East is permanent. And at least some new and progressive forces, with powerful social and historical roots and a pan Arab perspective, have emerged from the Kurdish diaspora as the direct imperialist grip of the region convulsively and violently unwinds.

The contest in Europe over austerity and now over some of the effects of the West's domination over the Middle east - including the floods of refugees westward, is full on. At the moment, despite the setback in Greece, the main political feature is the continued weakening of the traditional mainstream political and economic institutions in the face of these conflicts and problems. And while the independent working class organisations of Europe continue, after decades of defeat and erosion, to remain structurally weakened, new initiatives and leaderships have brought their remaining nuclei into the battle, to varying degrees and in unique ways in different countries. But the overall qualitative judgement is that a new political trend has emerged across Europe that is at odds with its traditional political institutions, including the party establishment and which is a potentially decisive new turn across the political complexion of the continent; a radicalisation of a new sector of society not seen since the 1960s and 70s.

Are there new strategic implications in the new period?

Yes. It was the great mass of the working class in industrial production seen as the majority of any potentially revolutionary class that was deemed to be the keystone to the success or otherwise of the new revolutions of the 20th century - at least for many socialists across Western Europe and the US. (In Latin America no such shibboleths applied or apply today.) But it is true that in Western Europe over the last thirty years the liquidation of much large scale industrial production had certainly helped to shift qualitatively the balance of power between the main classes.

What is often forgotten is that the greatest and most successful revolutions of the 20th century took place in countries where the industrial working class was in a tiny minority.  And that industrial production did not just fade away in western Europe. Strategic sectors were often attacked in an act of class struggle which was then lost by the working class and their unions. Historically speaking, the Chartists came from a hundred different occupations in villages and cities. The Communards that fought for the 1870 Paris Commune were leather workers and bakers and servants and clerks.

Now the 1980s and 90s and the 2000s are shaken off. The working class in Western Europe is reassembling. It takes on different faces in the different nations - partly dependent on the direction taken by the remaining centres of trade union organisation and their leading role - or lack of it. It is coming blinking, uncertain, trying everything, accepting nothing, even playful, into the light. Where the old rubrics of shared housing, workplaces, communities marked your working class status; where the day to day shared 'social and economic' experience rooted every identity, the new working class, coming from a thousand different occupations and from none, from different communities and ethnic histories, assembles itself primarily politically. It is appalled by its enemy, a political class, which has some power to change things and steadfastly, corruptly, refuses to do anything for the people.  This latest incarnation of the working class sees its day to day life not so much blighted by the factory or the mill (although often by its housing or lack of it) but rather by the grotesque and growing inequality in an (un)shared society, which progressively blights its health, welfare, security and independence.

But the new political current that has emerged from the new working class is not born with all of its required accouterments. While not entirely starting from year zero, and having built significant movements in a series of countries, it has to start again. It has no national political platform of its own. Union organisation (however essential) is a minority condition. It requires new alliances and new ways to present itself to win the leadership first of all the most oppressed and then of the whole of society. The social democratic perspective has collapsed across Europe (and while its divisions and break up can offer some building blocks, trying to reorganise the whole show back into existence would be fruitless.) A radical green perspective and the need for root and branch political and institutional reform are already part of the DNA of this new left. As are new types of activism and communication. But these, by themselves, do not constitute a broad and overarching enough appeal to conquer the mainstream.

The first new strategic idea is the recognition of the emerging working class, with a radical political current, seeking novel ways to present itself in society.

The second is the understanding that over the last 30 years, and excepting the collapse of the USSR, it is only partly European Russia and some of its ex satellites where the rulers have succeeded to establish a 'strong state' in the West's orbit of influence. And the absence of stronger states in key European countries is becoming a difficult matter and creating new and dangerous vulnerabilities for them.

The US based magazine 'Foriegn Policy' has carried a debate for nearly a decade which argues back and forth about the the relative of strength of Western versus Chinese capitalism. Many Western thinkers believe that China's strong state (and not Bush's milksop 'democracy') was the natural co-determinant of a vibrant capitalist economy. In the 1970s and 1980s many (including on the left) in Europe believed that the French, Spanish and Portuguese political revolutions, and the partial political revolution in Italy, proved that the remnants of democratic freedoms would have to be curtailed in modern European countries, in order to marginalise the frightening role of the powerful labour movements, and to reduce the price of labour in face of growing, mainly US, international corporate competition. But the drive towards strong states in the West did not happen.

Instead Europe, with the partial exception of Thatcherism and the UK, decided to create a new multi-state apparatus, thereby bringing the political protection of the planned, competitive, European international corporations outside of the interference of particular nation states, progressively preventing these 'local' states, with their awkward electorates, from influencing the key economic objective of the then European rulers. In practise the distinct European nations including the UK (in Britain's case more because of the role of the City of London) became less and less able to influence the economic trends that their people had to live with. Today, big capital has certainly outlived the nation state, even in the largest countries. But the nation state remains the first manager of the overwhelming majority of peoples' lives. The contradiction between multi-national capital and national governance is now a critical crisis. Where it has always been at breaking point, in the colonial countries, local strong states have always been essential, buttressed if necessary by international war machines. Today in European nations, the economic / political contradiction has reached a crisis but the local states are both unable to interfere with economics (except where it ransacks the nations' people to pay for its mistakes) but nor are they equipped to be able to crush the potential opposition.

The opposition in the West and especially in Europe has emerged. The experience of the nation state on its knees to pay for international Capital's 2008 indigestion created a howl of protest. Already facing large scale alienation from populations that had seen the collapse of any radical choice between the main parties, the realisation emerged among the majority that the national political systems were bankrupt and false and packed with self-seekers. Now the humanitarian crisis at the gates of Europe implies the necessity of national governments driving an international solution - having to start with a complete break from the US's war machine.

Strategically new definitions of political institutions are required that are simultaneously credible as representative of and accountable to the majority of people and which have the power to radically intervene and alter the direction and organisation of big, multi-national capital. On the one hand the relatively weak European states remain vulnerable to big changes in the peoples' political mood being reflected in their elected governments. On the other, these governments have no independent power over economic life. This is the contradiction that has paid such havoc with the initially anti-austerity Syriza government in Greece. Believing that the Greek example is unique, or is not relevant to the larger countries in Europe, is to miss the fundamental point. Relatively weak states in Europe, with open government make formal 'democratic' advances credible and likely. On the other hand such governments will immediately be confronted with their lack of decisive power. And it will be for the new radical movement, in its battles and in its discoveries, to grapple with and to solve that dilemma, both on the national and the international level if it is to win the leadership of society and make its mark on the world.

Next: European federation and the political dichotomies of Pablo Iglesias