Friday 27 May 2016
France in revolt. Some comparisons.
Two months of French protests escalated over the past week as unions targeted the sensitive oil industry, blocking fuel depots and refineries. Workers in the big majority of power stations have voted to join the action.
In squares across France students and other young people have been protesting against the Socialist Party's proposed attack on labour rights. Bypassing the French Assembly, Socialist Party President Hollande, is trying to force French workers to give up rights won over decades. Now key sectors of workers have moved to break the new Bill. In a sad reflection of the Syriza leadership in Greece, who have just taken the strongest programme of cuts through the Greek Parliament so far imposed by the Troika, another traditionally left regime is relaunching an anti-working class initiative which its traditional right wing predecessors could not win.
The banner under which Hollande has launched his battle is 'an end to France's long term unemployment of 10% and 24% for youth.' It is French worker's rights of pay and conditions which Hollande proposes to remove in order to get France back to work! And the UK (according to Chancellor Osborne and Prime Minister Cameron) could be the example to follow here. UK unemployment is 5% and youth unemployment 'only' 18% (See Statistica Feb. 2016.)
Some of the obstacles that Hollande would like to dismantle are those legal rights that apply in France to Temporary Employment. In France all temporary contracts must have a definite start and end date. Equal treatment with full time workers is obligatory, temporary contracts can only be used in a few statutory defined conditions, they can only be renewed once, they are no longer than 18 months, full pay for the contract must be paid in the event of an early termination, there is severance pay of between 6 and 10% at the end of the contract, and unemployment benefits are linked to previous earnings. Not surprisingly perhaps, temporary contracts in France lead to 8 out of 10 being recruited to full time positions. (Personnel Today, March 2015, Guardian, Oct 2014.) And in general the French still work on average five fewer hours a week than the Brits!
In France there are 500 thousand Agency workers. Nearly a million in the UK. There are 4.2 million in part time employment in France and over 8 million in the UK. Perhaps it is this sort of 'flexibility, that needs expanding in France to increase employment? And the secret weapon in the UK's arsenal when it comes to reducing unemployment, particularly youth unemployment - leave aside young peoples' benefits reductions - are the UK's Zero Hour Contracts! In France such contracts are currently illegal.
There are 800 thousand people in the UK 'on' zero hour contracts - 2.5% of all workers - up by 19% this year and climbing. Zero hour contracts are 'offered' (in an 'I'll make you an offer you can't refuse' sort of way) to a quarter of all UK unemployed. They average 26 paid hours a week. (ONS March 2016.) In fact in general in the UK there has been a 53% increase in part time and temporary work of all kinds between 1984 and 2012, with young people twice as likely as all employees to 'benefit' from this sort of work. And just in case you might think that Britain is still a nation of small shopkeepers, Public Administration, Education and Health account for two fifths of this work while Distribution, Hotels and Restaurants cover one fifth. (ONS 2012.)
So here then is the answer to Holland's woes?
Except it does not make sense - even in its own terms. Hollande wants to 'deal' with long term seemingly irreducible unemployment - a feature of capitalist societies since their dawn - by reducing the cost of labour. This is of course the main point of a 'reserve army of unemployed'. But even the most short sighted scrutineer of the UK's answer to long term unemployment in general, and youth unemployment in particular, must agree that its solution is considerably worse than the problem it seeks to fix.
There is another way to compare 'work' and 'unemployment' between the two countries. First, the string of measures put in place by Blair and the subsequent regimes in the UK, to create more and more 'flexible' labour, have created an emerging catastrophe. Today labour productivity, the amount of value produced in one hour of work, is 31% lower than in France. The UK's productivity is the lowest of the G7 countries and it has the biggest gap with its leading competitors since modern productivity measures began. (Guardian, Feb 2016.) Second, soaking up any sort of labour, without rights and at pitiful prices, by punitive measures and huge cuts in benefits, has further skewed the UK's economy away from production and further into services and finance, where profit is available without much product. Third a 'precarious' workforce cannot buy houses or pay for pensions or for places in care homes or a decent life.
Hollande has another agenda besides removing unemployment pinned to the back of his proposed labour 'reform.' He believes that he is uniquely fit to assure a more pliant labour movement in France, a movement with its claws cut and its teeth removed. This, he conjectures, would open the road to the European and international investment that he believes France requires, if France's state is to reduce its own role and its increasing need for taxation. But whatever his hackneyed, Thatcherite plan, perhaps the facts are more obvious to the young protestors in France than to Hollande (or the smug fools who lord it in the British Treasury.) And so the apparent paradox, that the young French unemployed are fighting tooth and nail against the Socialist leader's anti-labour law, becomes immediately resolved.
Tuesday 24 May 2016
Brexit debate extracts
What follows are extracts of a response to an individual argument with the direction taken by this blog on Brexit. When it is technically possible to reproduce the original piece, permission has been given for its publication. However, it was still felt useful to rehearse some of the points that were made countering the original contribution in favour of Brexit.
Fundamentally, staying in or leaving the EU is not the question of ‘our generation’ or the ‘most important decision that will be taken since WW2.’ A simple test reveals the hollowness of such claims. Whatever the decision on June 23, nothing substantial will change regarding Britain and its relations with the world (exception made of an acceleration towards the already likely future of independence in Scotland.)
The EU’s Euro core is bound together and will maintain itself as a redoubt against what will be characterised as a rightist and nationalistic dis-aggregation of Europe. There is little doubt that this understanding will predominate among all classes in the eurozone. In Britain the politics and economics of globalisation will remain dominant. As you rightly state both the ‘remainers’ and the ‘exiteers’ would continue to allow the movement of labour across UK borders, because they have to and because the deals they want will force them to.
Does that mean that nothing at all changes on June 24? Not at all. And here we come to what is really in dispute on June 23. Across the western world new social and political bases are being carved out of an essentially working class constituency by a new type of ruling class leadership. While this new leadership is levering its own domestic success on populist racism and patriotism, it too will float its boat on the sea of globalisation and link itself indelibly to the super rich. In fact the telegenic racists who govern Poland and Hungary, who nearly won the Presidency in Austria, and have a good chance of success in the US, will, in all cases further break up indigenous working class benefits and rights. And in the UK, a form of this new, ultra-globalist leadership, that will sell everything including the NHS to make its ‘hard bargains’, albeit nation by nation, is already under construction under the banner of Brexit.
Next we come to the critical question of the refugee and immigrant crisis.
I think you are right to say that immigration is essential to capitalism. It is the other blade, hinged with unemployment, which makes up Capital’s scissors cutting the cost of labour. Labour is the only commodity in the ‘system of generalised commodity production’ that can be produced infinitely through self-reproduction – but not at every place at every time (although various efforts have been made recently to apply the same nostrum to Capital, with catastrophic results.)
Here we come to three main points. The first is simply an historical fact. Since capitalism won hegemony on Earth the movement of labour has been a permanent feature of the system’s existence. The movement of millions from the land to the cities; the movement of millions from Europe to the USA; the greatest single movement of population in world history, the movement of millions from rural China to its industrial areas, are all examples of this momentous, tumultuous, seething ebb and flow of labour across the globe; from continent to continent, nation to nation and inside nations.
Is this process possible to halt in one place at one time? Yes. But can the tap be permanently turned off. No. Not at least if capitalist competition is to survive. In other words, indigenous labour has always had to deal with the constantly changing numbers and character of its own working class. It has always faced the prospect of cheaper labour, whether from the next village or from the other side of the world.
A moment’s reflection on the history of the labour movement demonstrates how well organised radical left labour dealt with this problem. There was no hint of 'liberal arguments about immigration' when the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) took on the American Knights of Labour for their ‘Boycott’ of immigrant workers. There were battles in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff when ‘heroes’ like ‘red Clydesider’ Emmanuel Shinwell called on his fellow seaman to hunt down the ‘Lascars’ who crewed the ships in WW1. These were not liberal arguments when two were shot to death a hundred yards from the famous ‘red’ George Square. Positive results for the unity of immigrant and domestic workers have come from the minimum wage movement and the universal demand of a settled ‘price for the job’. There have been direct and organised alliances between workers as in the case of the German VW plants that struck in the 1980s for their South African counterparts over wages and conditions.
In other words it is a constant requirement of any labour movement under capitalism to respond to immigrant, foreign, agricultural, previously distant workers joining indigenous ranks. Working class leaders who have fought this by trying to exclude the new workers, as with Shinwell, or the Engineers union and its fight with women workers causing 'dilution' during WW1 etc etc, do not stand for the working class interest, they fail it.
Why is this so?
An answer brings us the second point. As a class, the working class, those who have to sell their labour power in order to exist, have as many ‘interests’ (understood as requirements, or goals that they seek) as the total number of persons in that class. If we step back from the noise of millions, we may discern large sections or groups who share certain interests, which might serve their particular condition or mitigate a specific hardship. In some cases we note that such a group’s interest appears to clash with some other group’s interest. An example might be where a set of skilled workers demand certain gains, but present that as a structural arrangement in relation to other workers eg ‘we are always to be paid 10% above the paint shop, or the cleaners, or the women workers, or the black workers, or the young or the new workers.’
And this is where a labour movement comes in. An effective labour movement in economics and in politics (viz a working class party) tries to distill and generalise working class interests as they effect the whole of that class AND as that class goes on to effect the whole of society. These shared, collective and societal interests stand above and sometimes repudiate partial interests within the working class where those interests damage another part of the same class. So comes the developing understanding that the fluctuation and downward pressure on wages and the constant mixture of the movement of labour and unemployment is an essential part of an antagonistic social system, which must be replaced as a whole.
Again this is not playing with 'liberal arguments about immigration' but rather with the endless struggle to build up a class movement that represents class interests as a whole, vis a vis itself and the society it wishes to lead.
A third significant point now emerges. The question of immigration is more acute today in western societies at any time since WW2 such that ‘open door’ immigration does appear as an anachronistic fantasy. (And, as some seem to argue, the traditional radical sectarian left apparently gets tangled up with middle class metro liberals!)
The material basis for this shift of mood is normally presented as a result of the increasing volumes of migrants that are now ‘westward bound’. More realistically and much more fundamentally, such ideas are rooted in the essential contract between labour and capital, which has shifted drastically in the recent past in the West. Since the 1980s there has been an inexorable process whereby the predominant nature of work has moved towards what has traditionally been described as provision of services. Associated with that, and the terrible defeats of the trade unions, has been a contract that attaches to the individual worker, rather than a collective bargain, and which has progressively tied the worker to an expanding responsibility for increasing aspects of what had been the ‘social wage.’ Collective organisation, based on the workplace, has been seriously damaged thereby. The new contract sets worker against worker in a competition for jobs. The ‘self employed’ Essex builder is in competition with the (cheaper) Polish builder. But if there were no Poles, the relentless march of the new economic arrangements between the classes, the new contract, would mean that the Essex builder would find himself or herself in exactly the same position when faced with competition with a cut-price builder from Bolton or Cardiff.
The defeat of large parts of collective labour in the UK has also created large-scale working class dependence in new ways on forms of welfare. Tax credits were necessary to subsidise employers who pay poorer and poorer wages. In general, as permanent austerity continues and budgets are driven down, access to welfare, to housing, to care all become more ‘competitive’, more an individual or family experience. The ‘problem’ invariably becomes ‘the cheats’, the queue jumpers, the secret racial networks that promote their own.
In essence then the argument, even if it were possible under late capitalism to apply, that limitation of certain types of immigration would be in the working class interest is false to the core. Unless the working class reorganises its interests on the basis of all who have to sell their labour power to exist, it can only fail to win society at large.
The crisis of the British working class is not addressed by any sort of immigration control in the framework of the type of society in which we live. If immigrants were not there then it would be the Scots, the old, the young, the neighbours who are to blame. Immigration controls and the associated rhetoric of the foreign ‘swamps’ verses our limited resources, is just the latest Malthusian approach to human-made scarcity.
Facing these realities, but also noting a signal rise of a new and young left political current across the west, albeit still a significant minority, requires the complete renovation not to say internal revolution of the modern working class movement. Indeed in all sorts of ways the modern working class has to recompose; to become once again a class for itself; which involves the evolution of a separate yet universal interest. The working class, since it was ushered into existence by capitalism, has gone through many experiences of defeat and restoration and advance. There is nothing, for example, that pre-determines the working class movement be centred pre-eminently on the economic principle and brought together by large units of industrial production. Of course a sense of the tremendous gap in fortunes between classes underlies all. But this is often expressed by the political principle in the first instance. There are many such examples, including the tremendous and leading role taken by South African unions in the overthrow of Apartheid. The British Chartists called together hand loom weavers from their villages, miners and their families from their quarries, shoemakers from their houses in the towns to form a national working class and a movement, which gave it its first expression.
We cannot rerun history. But we can grasp, from Latin American examples, from high points and mistakes in Greece, from the explosive growth of new and radical political formations in many countries, from the occupation of the hollowed out Labour Party in the UK by the active anti-austerity movement and the election of Corbyn over the heads of his MPs; we can learn something of how to build the alliances which will re-cement the mosaic of the modern working class. And this is argument is developed across other parts of the blog.
Returning then to the issue of remaining in or coming out of the EU; this is not what is really at stake in the coming referendum. The character of Britain’s economic life will not change substantially. Instead the vote is narrowly about who will lead the Tory Party. More widely it is about whether a new, populist and fiercer right will take the leadership in society. More widely still, the vote will help decide whether the internal crisis of the Tory Party will create the British version of a new and ferocious right wing already successful and still emerging across the west. Arguments that this new right is overestimated are specious, especially as the working class movement, including in the UK, is in its birth pangs. And the 4 million UKIP voters, substantially working class in origin, threaten to break up the nascent evolution of a new working class interest, particularly around the question of immigration and refugees.
This issue is the single most significant question in modern British politics, in that it will now decide which of the two possible directions that working class politics takes in the next period. No compromises on this issue are possible. Because of all of these factors and to aid the disruption of a new right wing, we should vote on the real issues we face regardless of the false question that has been set for us to answer – and vote to remain in the utterly un-reformable EU.
Fundamentally, staying in or leaving the EU is not the question of ‘our generation’ or the ‘most important decision that will be taken since WW2.’ A simple test reveals the hollowness of such claims. Whatever the decision on June 23, nothing substantial will change regarding Britain and its relations with the world (exception made of an acceleration towards the already likely future of independence in Scotland.)
The EU’s Euro core is bound together and will maintain itself as a redoubt against what will be characterised as a rightist and nationalistic dis-aggregation of Europe. There is little doubt that this understanding will predominate among all classes in the eurozone. In Britain the politics and economics of globalisation will remain dominant. As you rightly state both the ‘remainers’ and the ‘exiteers’ would continue to allow the movement of labour across UK borders, because they have to and because the deals they want will force them to.
Does that mean that nothing at all changes on June 24? Not at all. And here we come to what is really in dispute on June 23. Across the western world new social and political bases are being carved out of an essentially working class constituency by a new type of ruling class leadership. While this new leadership is levering its own domestic success on populist racism and patriotism, it too will float its boat on the sea of globalisation and link itself indelibly to the super rich. In fact the telegenic racists who govern Poland and Hungary, who nearly won the Presidency in Austria, and have a good chance of success in the US, will, in all cases further break up indigenous working class benefits and rights. And in the UK, a form of this new, ultra-globalist leadership, that will sell everything including the NHS to make its ‘hard bargains’, albeit nation by nation, is already under construction under the banner of Brexit.
Next we come to the critical question of the refugee and immigrant crisis.
I think you are right to say that immigration is essential to capitalism. It is the other blade, hinged with unemployment, which makes up Capital’s scissors cutting the cost of labour. Labour is the only commodity in the ‘system of generalised commodity production’ that can be produced infinitely through self-reproduction – but not at every place at every time (although various efforts have been made recently to apply the same nostrum to Capital, with catastrophic results.)
Here we come to three main points. The first is simply an historical fact. Since capitalism won hegemony on Earth the movement of labour has been a permanent feature of the system’s existence. The movement of millions from the land to the cities; the movement of millions from Europe to the USA; the greatest single movement of population in world history, the movement of millions from rural China to its industrial areas, are all examples of this momentous, tumultuous, seething ebb and flow of labour across the globe; from continent to continent, nation to nation and inside nations.
Is this process possible to halt in one place at one time? Yes. But can the tap be permanently turned off. No. Not at least if capitalist competition is to survive. In other words, indigenous labour has always had to deal with the constantly changing numbers and character of its own working class. It has always faced the prospect of cheaper labour, whether from the next village or from the other side of the world.
A moment’s reflection on the history of the labour movement demonstrates how well organised radical left labour dealt with this problem. There was no hint of 'liberal arguments about immigration' when the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) took on the American Knights of Labour for their ‘Boycott’ of immigrant workers. There were battles in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff when ‘heroes’ like ‘red Clydesider’ Emmanuel Shinwell called on his fellow seaman to hunt down the ‘Lascars’ who crewed the ships in WW1. These were not liberal arguments when two were shot to death a hundred yards from the famous ‘red’ George Square. Positive results for the unity of immigrant and domestic workers have come from the minimum wage movement and the universal demand of a settled ‘price for the job’. There have been direct and organised alliances between workers as in the case of the German VW plants that struck in the 1980s for their South African counterparts over wages and conditions.
In other words it is a constant requirement of any labour movement under capitalism to respond to immigrant, foreign, agricultural, previously distant workers joining indigenous ranks. Working class leaders who have fought this by trying to exclude the new workers, as with Shinwell, or the Engineers union and its fight with women workers causing 'dilution' during WW1 etc etc, do not stand for the working class interest, they fail it.
Why is this so?
An answer brings us the second point. As a class, the working class, those who have to sell their labour power in order to exist, have as many ‘interests’ (understood as requirements, or goals that they seek) as the total number of persons in that class. If we step back from the noise of millions, we may discern large sections or groups who share certain interests, which might serve their particular condition or mitigate a specific hardship. In some cases we note that such a group’s interest appears to clash with some other group’s interest. An example might be where a set of skilled workers demand certain gains, but present that as a structural arrangement in relation to other workers eg ‘we are always to be paid 10% above the paint shop, or the cleaners, or the women workers, or the black workers, or the young or the new workers.’
And this is where a labour movement comes in. An effective labour movement in economics and in politics (viz a working class party) tries to distill and generalise working class interests as they effect the whole of that class AND as that class goes on to effect the whole of society. These shared, collective and societal interests stand above and sometimes repudiate partial interests within the working class where those interests damage another part of the same class. So comes the developing understanding that the fluctuation and downward pressure on wages and the constant mixture of the movement of labour and unemployment is an essential part of an antagonistic social system, which must be replaced as a whole.
Again this is not playing with 'liberal arguments about immigration' but rather with the endless struggle to build up a class movement that represents class interests as a whole, vis a vis itself and the society it wishes to lead.
A third significant point now emerges. The question of immigration is more acute today in western societies at any time since WW2 such that ‘open door’ immigration does appear as an anachronistic fantasy. (And, as some seem to argue, the traditional radical sectarian left apparently gets tangled up with middle class metro liberals!)
The material basis for this shift of mood is normally presented as a result of the increasing volumes of migrants that are now ‘westward bound’. More realistically and much more fundamentally, such ideas are rooted in the essential contract between labour and capital, which has shifted drastically in the recent past in the West. Since the 1980s there has been an inexorable process whereby the predominant nature of work has moved towards what has traditionally been described as provision of services. Associated with that, and the terrible defeats of the trade unions, has been a contract that attaches to the individual worker, rather than a collective bargain, and which has progressively tied the worker to an expanding responsibility for increasing aspects of what had been the ‘social wage.’ Collective organisation, based on the workplace, has been seriously damaged thereby. The new contract sets worker against worker in a competition for jobs. The ‘self employed’ Essex builder is in competition with the (cheaper) Polish builder. But if there were no Poles, the relentless march of the new economic arrangements between the classes, the new contract, would mean that the Essex builder would find himself or herself in exactly the same position when faced with competition with a cut-price builder from Bolton or Cardiff.
The defeat of large parts of collective labour in the UK has also created large-scale working class dependence in new ways on forms of welfare. Tax credits were necessary to subsidise employers who pay poorer and poorer wages. In general, as permanent austerity continues and budgets are driven down, access to welfare, to housing, to care all become more ‘competitive’, more an individual or family experience. The ‘problem’ invariably becomes ‘the cheats’, the queue jumpers, the secret racial networks that promote their own.
In essence then the argument, even if it were possible under late capitalism to apply, that limitation of certain types of immigration would be in the working class interest is false to the core. Unless the working class reorganises its interests on the basis of all who have to sell their labour power to exist, it can only fail to win society at large.
The crisis of the British working class is not addressed by any sort of immigration control in the framework of the type of society in which we live. If immigrants were not there then it would be the Scots, the old, the young, the neighbours who are to blame. Immigration controls and the associated rhetoric of the foreign ‘swamps’ verses our limited resources, is just the latest Malthusian approach to human-made scarcity.
Facing these realities, but also noting a signal rise of a new and young left political current across the west, albeit still a significant minority, requires the complete renovation not to say internal revolution of the modern working class movement. Indeed in all sorts of ways the modern working class has to recompose; to become once again a class for itself; which involves the evolution of a separate yet universal interest. The working class, since it was ushered into existence by capitalism, has gone through many experiences of defeat and restoration and advance. There is nothing, for example, that pre-determines the working class movement be centred pre-eminently on the economic principle and brought together by large units of industrial production. Of course a sense of the tremendous gap in fortunes between classes underlies all. But this is often expressed by the political principle in the first instance. There are many such examples, including the tremendous and leading role taken by South African unions in the overthrow of Apartheid. The British Chartists called together hand loom weavers from their villages, miners and their families from their quarries, shoemakers from their houses in the towns to form a national working class and a movement, which gave it its first expression.
We cannot rerun history. But we can grasp, from Latin American examples, from high points and mistakes in Greece, from the explosive growth of new and radical political formations in many countries, from the occupation of the hollowed out Labour Party in the UK by the active anti-austerity movement and the election of Corbyn over the heads of his MPs; we can learn something of how to build the alliances which will re-cement the mosaic of the modern working class. And this is argument is developed across other parts of the blog.
Returning then to the issue of remaining in or coming out of the EU; this is not what is really at stake in the coming referendum. The character of Britain’s economic life will not change substantially. Instead the vote is narrowly about who will lead the Tory Party. More widely it is about whether a new, populist and fiercer right will take the leadership in society. More widely still, the vote will help decide whether the internal crisis of the Tory Party will create the British version of a new and ferocious right wing already successful and still emerging across the west. Arguments that this new right is overestimated are specious, especially as the working class movement, including in the UK, is in its birth pangs. And the 4 million UKIP voters, substantially working class in origin, threaten to break up the nascent evolution of a new working class interest, particularly around the question of immigration and refugees.
This issue is the single most significant question in modern British politics, in that it will now decide which of the two possible directions that working class politics takes in the next period. No compromises on this issue are possible. Because of all of these factors and to aid the disruption of a new right wing, we should vote on the real issues we face regardless of the false question that has been set for us to answer – and vote to remain in the utterly un-reformable EU.
Sunday 15 May 2016
Farage, Johnson and a dead President
On May 3 this blog spelled out how Britain's right would recompose around Brexit. Courtesy of the May 15 British 'Mail on Sunday' UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage lets us all know his thoughts.
'Nigel Farage has backed Boris Johnson’s bid to succeed David Cameron if Britain votes to quit the EU – and held out the prospect of working for ‘Prime Minister’ Boris. The Ukip leader compared fellow anti-European Johnson to former US President Ronald Reagan – and said he would be a much better leader than ‘pro-Brussels fanatic’ Cameron.'
'Asked if he would like to work for Johnson if the Brexit camp wins and Johnson succeeds Cameron in No 10, Farage said: "I love Boris, respect him, admire him; I’m a Boris fan. Could I work for him? Yes. Could I see a scenario if he was PM and he asked me to do something? I wouldn’t rule it out".
The other western politician currently being compared to Reagan is of course Donald Trump.
On May 22 Austrians will elect a new president. Polls predict that Norbert Hofer will win. He is the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party. Hofer is one of a list of extreme rightist leaders that have taken root in Western societies over the last decade. Their emergence into international view started with the 2010 election victory of Viktor Orban,and his ultra nationalist party Fidesz. Last October the Law and Justice Party (PiS) swept to power in Poland under Jaroslaw Kaczynski .
'Both parties buttress their rule by subverting the independence of the judiciary, the media and other pillars of a free society'. (FT Comment, 14 May.)
The eastern part of Europe's new right is refueling itself from the refugee crisis. Slovakia seems to be the next in line. But Europe's western states, and across the Atlantic in the US, a new right wing is also gathering momentum with Trump in the US and then the French presidential election and the advances of the junior Le Pen.
Britain is shaping up for its own version of this trend through Brexit. The point about Farage is that he has built (a still fragile) social base for his politics and that will be used if possible as leverage in the current crisis of the Tory Party as it moves, after Brexit, into a leadership battle.
Powerful new radical left movements are also underway across Europe and the US but (with the tragic exception of the Syriza leadership) they have not yet engaged for the leadership of the whole of society. Those in the left who naturally see their own new strength cannot allow themselves to be reassured by either their growth or by the crisis of traditional politics, which does tell us all that the old system is cracking. There are other, deeply powerful forces that are also in movement who in some cases are able to contest for the leadership of whole nations.
Thursday 12 May 2016
Let's be clear about Brexit
By focussing on 'the thing itself', that is to say trying to answer the question 'what is the EU?', the debate in the British left about Brexit has been as leaden and as uninspiring (with one or two honourable exceptions) as the the ding/dong combat between the would be leaders of the mainstream British right. Centered in the Tory Party, these heroes cheerfuly bounce claim and counter claim against each other, reducing their discussion to a game of 'who is the real liar?' (That is an easy question to answer. Both.)
In the 'grand' (mainstream) debate over Brexit, so far only President Obama and now ex PM Gordon Brown have made some effort to scribble the odd sketch on a wider canvas than simply dwelling on the merits or otherwise of the EU. Both Obama and Brown did consider, albeit momentarily, the creation of blocs of nations and their potential in the context of globalisation.
Unfortunately the 'minor' (non-mainstream) debate among the British left has not even reached that level.
Singling out the fundamental character of the EU ; its irrevocably capitalist character; its defense of the multi-national, neo-liberal and anti-labour cause; the inherent corruption of its institutions and its utterly undemocratic and even ruthless politics, takes the British left's debate away from the essential struggle that the left should be leading; that real people in the here and now have to engage with. In the given reality it makes the left's position more and more abstract.
To understand day to day reality and how it can and must be changed, analysis has to start from a much deeper abstraction than just the role of the EU. Analysis has to start from modern politics and its response to globalisation. The EU is such a response. Following the Common Market, the EU was always set up to create and sustain a system of international and then global corporations, based in Europe, rooted in what was advanced technology, in order to resist US domination and to control the rise of post colonial Asia and Africa. The UK, with its ex colonies forming a post-imperial preference zone, was always unhappy with this Franco/German project. Latterly, Britain's 'offering' of the City and its 'welcome' to US and Asian investment, as a constituent part of the global reach and global leverage of Europe, alongside other European based multi-nationals, made an uneasy alliance more possible; (albeit with the 'necessary' protections from Germany over the City of London's autonomy and independence.)
The new EU politics is, of course, is a far cruder and more vicious thing, than the subtlety and intricacies of its economic arrangements. This is already exposed across the whole of the European population for what it is; a political system that is the unseasoned, disfigured spawn of a rapidly constructed new economic order. The feeble concession to European democracy contained within its structures, the European Parliament, is nothing more than a self-seeking and embittered, marginal fraction of the steadily festering European political class - and rightly mostly ignored by the bulk of European voters. The ongoing destruction of Greece's autonomy and standard of life is the latest example of current EU political and economic savagery - as crude and as basic as the reactions of a Victorian Mill owner to their workers.
Yet Brexit will not remove Britain or its people one centimeter from capitalism's globalisation or its accompanying new politics. That is why the debate between Britain's political leaders is so jejune. Globalisation, and European capitalism's political and economic responses to it, will not change in direction one iota should Brexit succeed, any more than it will change in the UK. Just as the arguments of Britain's new right wing are absolutely hollow as to the supposed benefits of EU exit; less EU immigration, restoration of sovereignty, greater connection to the rest of the world etc., so are the arguments of the prospects for EU reform, whether from a rightist or a left point of view. Both 'strategies' are complete fantasies.
Taking an example of the British left's case in favour of Brexit; is it really EU legislation on nationalisation and privatisation that prevents the collective ownership and control of the nation's assets by the people of Britain? And would not the price of access to the European 'Free Trade' area require nominal adhesion to these rules anyway? And are we not underestimating the reaction of an enlarged and more confident British opposition? To ask the questions is to answer them. Such a potential (Corbyn led?) programme would face the full force of global capitalism and its domestic support, as well as the leadership of the EU - with or without formal membership of its organisation. And the recent argument that now a powerful left wing has emerged in British society, such that it would shift the content of Brexit in a progressive direction, simply underestimates the political relation of forces in British and for that matter in global society. While a new left is emerging, albeit unevenly and without shared core intentions, a new right is organising too. The struggle for a new relationship of forces, since the emergence from the dark decades of the 1980s until 2008, has yet to be joined.
So what is the real 'concrete analysis' and argument, about 'the concrete situation' that the British left should have about Brexit?
Neither Brexit nor EU membership contribute to any strategy for progressive change in the UK. But the impact of the EU referendum will be mainly political in that Brexit would create an opportunity for the regroupment of a new right wing politics in UK society paradoxically much more tuned to the savage political necessities of globalisation.
By winning Brexit, British right wing politicians believe that in the name of removal of red tape and the return of sovereignty, they would be more able to move more directly against their own people, for the defense of multi-nationals, tax havens and the rich, in favour of longer working hours, reduction of pensions etc., etc., exactly as EU leaders try to do in Europe today. In the end, the Brexit manouever turns out to be another a small part of the political jigsaw being created by the latest stage of globalisation. Its place in the modern, global totality has nothing to do with holding back or deconstructing any aspect of globalisation, it is simply another rightist and pre-eminently political adjustment within it. It is undoubtedly creating a crisis for the Tory Party in the UK just as Berlesconi, Sarkozy, and Trump were and are, in their own contexts, tearing up the old ruling class political rules and intending to deal with any threat from the new left most sharply.
Accordingly the British left should advise a vote against Brexit at this time to avoid strengthening and further emboldening the new right wing emerging in its own society. The struggle against the EU, the IMF and Europe's degenerate political institutions has to have the Continental wide scale implied by that line up and the EU, as it is, remains a key obstacle to the people of Europe - and any sort of progressive future. But Brexit does not contribute to that goal at this stage, any more than the idea that the EU institutions and leadership might be reformed.
Britain cannot exclude itself, or bypass, or opt out of the conflict with globalisation. Right at the beating heart of Britain's economics and therefore its politics sits the 'global' City of London - already inextricably tied to the EU's financial engine. The defeat of the European version of global capitalism starts not from the British (non) debate about exit or not, but rather from the development of a positive, continental wide set of answers to the mayhem, misery and oppression that the EU and the City continues to recycle. All but the politically blind recognise that the plight of refugees; that the international scope and power of the banks and the corporations; the destruction of the environment and the competition to the bottom on wages and welfare all and more; all of them require international, and global solutions. It is imperative that the British left turns its face towards its natural allies across the continent and the wider world, standing together with them in their battles - as Peoples Assembly delegations to Calais witness.
Extending common cause across Europe's people involves the call and shared campaign for an international living wage; for a shared, progressive wealth and capital exchange tax; for genuine free movement for all the world's citizens tied to a new Marshall Plan to create the facilities and support needed; for an end to nuclear weapons, first on the continent; an end to all foreign wars and repudiation of the debts from the old system.
Globalisation is not going to go away European country by country; by virtue of a return to the life and dominance of the major individual nations and their elites. (It is worth noting in passing that national independence has never been enough for dominance under capitalism; that the most successful nations in the 19th century West depended on slavery and Empire.) Socialists and others need to create their own responses to late capitalism, and those responses have at least to rise to the level of the new realities.
In the 'grand' (mainstream) debate over Brexit, so far only President Obama and now ex PM Gordon Brown have made some effort to scribble the odd sketch on a wider canvas than simply dwelling on the merits or otherwise of the EU. Both Obama and Brown did consider, albeit momentarily, the creation of blocs of nations and their potential in the context of globalisation.
Unfortunately the 'minor' (non-mainstream) debate among the British left has not even reached that level.
Singling out the fundamental character of the EU ; its irrevocably capitalist character; its defense of the multi-national, neo-liberal and anti-labour cause; the inherent corruption of its institutions and its utterly undemocratic and even ruthless politics, takes the British left's debate away from the essential struggle that the left should be leading; that real people in the here and now have to engage with. In the given reality it makes the left's position more and more abstract.
To understand day to day reality and how it can and must be changed, analysis has to start from a much deeper abstraction than just the role of the EU. Analysis has to start from modern politics and its response to globalisation. The EU is such a response. Following the Common Market, the EU was always set up to create and sustain a system of international and then global corporations, based in Europe, rooted in what was advanced technology, in order to resist US domination and to control the rise of post colonial Asia and Africa. The UK, with its ex colonies forming a post-imperial preference zone, was always unhappy with this Franco/German project. Latterly, Britain's 'offering' of the City and its 'welcome' to US and Asian investment, as a constituent part of the global reach and global leverage of Europe, alongside other European based multi-nationals, made an uneasy alliance more possible; (albeit with the 'necessary' protections from Germany over the City of London's autonomy and independence.)
The new EU politics is, of course, is a far cruder and more vicious thing, than the subtlety and intricacies of its economic arrangements. This is already exposed across the whole of the European population for what it is; a political system that is the unseasoned, disfigured spawn of a rapidly constructed new economic order. The feeble concession to European democracy contained within its structures, the European Parliament, is nothing more than a self-seeking and embittered, marginal fraction of the steadily festering European political class - and rightly mostly ignored by the bulk of European voters. The ongoing destruction of Greece's autonomy and standard of life is the latest example of current EU political and economic savagery - as crude and as basic as the reactions of a Victorian Mill owner to their workers.
Yet Brexit will not remove Britain or its people one centimeter from capitalism's globalisation or its accompanying new politics. That is why the debate between Britain's political leaders is so jejune. Globalisation, and European capitalism's political and economic responses to it, will not change in direction one iota should Brexit succeed, any more than it will change in the UK. Just as the arguments of Britain's new right wing are absolutely hollow as to the supposed benefits of EU exit; less EU immigration, restoration of sovereignty, greater connection to the rest of the world etc., so are the arguments of the prospects for EU reform, whether from a rightist or a left point of view. Both 'strategies' are complete fantasies.
Taking an example of the British left's case in favour of Brexit; is it really EU legislation on nationalisation and privatisation that prevents the collective ownership and control of the nation's assets by the people of Britain? And would not the price of access to the European 'Free Trade' area require nominal adhesion to these rules anyway? And are we not underestimating the reaction of an enlarged and more confident British opposition? To ask the questions is to answer them. Such a potential (Corbyn led?) programme would face the full force of global capitalism and its domestic support, as well as the leadership of the EU - with or without formal membership of its organisation. And the recent argument that now a powerful left wing has emerged in British society, such that it would shift the content of Brexit in a progressive direction, simply underestimates the political relation of forces in British and for that matter in global society. While a new left is emerging, albeit unevenly and without shared core intentions, a new right is organising too. The struggle for a new relationship of forces, since the emergence from the dark decades of the 1980s until 2008, has yet to be joined.
So what is the real 'concrete analysis' and argument, about 'the concrete situation' that the British left should have about Brexit?
Neither Brexit nor EU membership contribute to any strategy for progressive change in the UK. But the impact of the EU referendum will be mainly political in that Brexit would create an opportunity for the regroupment of a new right wing politics in UK society paradoxically much more tuned to the savage political necessities of globalisation.
By winning Brexit, British right wing politicians believe that in the name of removal of red tape and the return of sovereignty, they would be more able to move more directly against their own people, for the defense of multi-nationals, tax havens and the rich, in favour of longer working hours, reduction of pensions etc., etc., exactly as EU leaders try to do in Europe today. In the end, the Brexit manouever turns out to be another a small part of the political jigsaw being created by the latest stage of globalisation. Its place in the modern, global totality has nothing to do with holding back or deconstructing any aspect of globalisation, it is simply another rightist and pre-eminently political adjustment within it. It is undoubtedly creating a crisis for the Tory Party in the UK just as Berlesconi, Sarkozy, and Trump were and are, in their own contexts, tearing up the old ruling class political rules and intending to deal with any threat from the new left most sharply.
Accordingly the British left should advise a vote against Brexit at this time to avoid strengthening and further emboldening the new right wing emerging in its own society. The struggle against the EU, the IMF and Europe's degenerate political institutions has to have the Continental wide scale implied by that line up and the EU, as it is, remains a key obstacle to the people of Europe - and any sort of progressive future. But Brexit does not contribute to that goal at this stage, any more than the idea that the EU institutions and leadership might be reformed.
Britain cannot exclude itself, or bypass, or opt out of the conflict with globalisation. Right at the beating heart of Britain's economics and therefore its politics sits the 'global' City of London - already inextricably tied to the EU's financial engine. The defeat of the European version of global capitalism starts not from the British (non) debate about exit or not, but rather from the development of a positive, continental wide set of answers to the mayhem, misery and oppression that the EU and the City continues to recycle. All but the politically blind recognise that the plight of refugees; that the international scope and power of the banks and the corporations; the destruction of the environment and the competition to the bottom on wages and welfare all and more; all of them require international, and global solutions. It is imperative that the British left turns its face towards its natural allies across the continent and the wider world, standing together with them in their battles - as Peoples Assembly delegations to Calais witness.
Extending common cause across Europe's people involves the call and shared campaign for an international living wage; for a shared, progressive wealth and capital exchange tax; for genuine free movement for all the world's citizens tied to a new Marshall Plan to create the facilities and support needed; for an end to nuclear weapons, first on the continent; an end to all foreign wars and repudiation of the debts from the old system.
Globalisation is not going to go away European country by country; by virtue of a return to the life and dominance of the major individual nations and their elites. (It is worth noting in passing that national independence has never been enough for dominance under capitalism; that the most successful nations in the 19th century West depended on slavery and Empire.) Socialists and others need to create their own responses to late capitalism, and those responses have at least to rise to the level of the new realities.
Wednesday 11 May 2016
Who supports Bernie Sanders?
While the attention of most of the world's media outside the US is focused on the rise and rise of Donald Trump, and while most political commentators inside and outside the US have Hilary Clinton as the Democratic Party shoe-in for the presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders' campaign is churning up the biggest political change on the ground in the US since the eruption of the Civil Rights movement.
Although he is likely to lose the Democratic nomination against Clinton in the end, Sanders has recently beaten Clinton in Indiana and now in West Virginia. His campaign will peak in the California primary in June. California is expected to be a big win for Clinton in the Democrat primaries particularly as she scores heavily among Black American and Hispanic Democratic voters. (The weakness of Sander's appeal among African-American Democrat voters is the subject of considerable controversy that will be discussed in a later blog.) But Sander's campaign has important news.
Since the beginning of 2016 nearly 1 million new voters have registered in California. Latino registration is 98% larger this year than in 2012 which is generally positive and bucks the effects of de-registration seen in some other States. Perhaps more immediately significant for the Sander's campaign there has been a 70% increase in the number of voters age 18-29 registered in 2016, as compared to 2012. Democratic Party registration in California is generally up 185% over 2012.
Why is the youth vote so significant for Sanders?
A new Harvard Poll of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 51% of respondents do not support capitalism, compared to 42% that do. The results corroborate with previous research indicating a profound shift among Millennials (people born or becoming aware of politics after 2000) towards a negative opinion of capitalist economics.
The pollsters note the results are difficult to interpret, as capitalism means different things to different people. Nevertheless 33% of respondents also indicated a preference for 'socialism'.
The same poll showed Sanders was the most popular presidential candidate among young people. Polling director John Della Volpe said Sanders’ ideas have proven highly influential to Millennials, changing the way they think about politics.
'He’s not moving a party to the left,' Della Volpe said. 'He’s moving a generation to the left. Whether or not he’s winning or losing, it’s really that he’s impacting the way in which a generation — the largest generation in the history of America — thinks about politics.'
Throughout the Sanders campaign, not only has he gathered enormous rallies, with young people at the centre; contrary to Obama's campaign, he has explicitly supported a range of candidates for Congress, including giving support from his own election funds, who have emerged from class struggle or campaigning backgrounds, in order to build a political mass movement, which he has always insisted is essential to win his Political Revolution. He is fighting for a cause that he says will go beyond November's presidential election, whether he wins or not.
Tuesday 3 May 2016
Brexit and the shape of things to come.
This blog has argued that the British EU referendum is a sham. Both sides have substantially the same economic and social programme for the future of the UK and its people. (The Brexiteers are marginally worse.) The characterisation of the referendum as being the most important decision of 'our generation', or of 'greater significance that any decision taken since WW2' is an estimate as hollow (but as noisy) as a drum. The heart of capitalist Europe, the eurozone, will remain unbreached either way. The City of London's international web will remain untouched.
This blog has also judged that, on balance, a vote to remain in the EU is the marginally better course. The rest of the left in Europe are highly unlikely to see Britain's decision, if it is to leave the EU, as in any way progressive. And that will have nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that somehow, against all the odds, the British left that supports exit have seen farther ahead and more accurately than their European mainland counterparts. It also has nothing to do with whether you think that the central institutions of the EU are or are not reformable - the second of which views this blog also believes.
Comparisons with 1975 only show the contrast between then and now. In 1975, and despite the racists, the British left led the fight against membership. The left would have been strengthened by a 'no' vote. Today Brexit is the defining political tool in the recomposition and re-consolidation of the right in British society. It is the main reason to vote to remain in the EU at this point.
And the shape of Britain's 'rennovated' right is now emerging from the fairy dust.
We have seen the emergence of Berlusconi, the cheerful right wing billionaire cutting through Italy's traditional political swamp, attaching the country to his personal power and turning corruption into an art form. In a more organised and successful political context, Sarkozy renamed and turned France's main rightwing party, the Republicans, into his own personal operation. And Social Democratic Hollande is about to give him his third chance (if Le Pen junior does not get through to the final.) In the US, Trump, a billionaire emperor, has turned the traditional Republican party inside out and now seriously threatens to defeat the Clintons' heartless, establishment machine. And in the UK a decrepit Tory party threatens its 'renewal' through Brexit, when the day after any 'no' vote is successful, the leader of UKIP, Farage, calls on his 4 million voters to do what the left did when it turned into the hollowed out Labour Party to elect Corbyn, install a new leader in the shape of the malevolent clown Boris Johnson, and to take a new direction apparently into eternal Thatcherdom with a tinge of the Tory's own ancient racism, last promoted by Enoch Powell.
This prospect, like similar, national fantasies that blossomed from the lips of Berlusconi, or Sarkozy and now from Trump's petulant mouth, amount to nothing. International capitalism's engine room will remain the key driver of politics across the West whatever the result of the British referendum (or even the US presidential contest.) But the right in the West is evolving and finding new voices.
We argue in this blog that this process should be clearly recognised and as far as possible disrupted.
This blog has also judged that, on balance, a vote to remain in the EU is the marginally better course. The rest of the left in Europe are highly unlikely to see Britain's decision, if it is to leave the EU, as in any way progressive. And that will have nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that somehow, against all the odds, the British left that supports exit have seen farther ahead and more accurately than their European mainland counterparts. It also has nothing to do with whether you think that the central institutions of the EU are or are not reformable - the second of which views this blog also believes.
Comparisons with 1975 only show the contrast between then and now. In 1975, and despite the racists, the British left led the fight against membership. The left would have been strengthened by a 'no' vote. Today Brexit is the defining political tool in the recomposition and re-consolidation of the right in British society. It is the main reason to vote to remain in the EU at this point.
And the shape of Britain's 'rennovated' right is now emerging from the fairy dust.
We have seen the emergence of Berlusconi, the cheerful right wing billionaire cutting through Italy's traditional political swamp, attaching the country to his personal power and turning corruption into an art form. In a more organised and successful political context, Sarkozy renamed and turned France's main rightwing party, the Republicans, into his own personal operation. And Social Democratic Hollande is about to give him his third chance (if Le Pen junior does not get through to the final.) In the US, Trump, a billionaire emperor, has turned the traditional Republican party inside out and now seriously threatens to defeat the Clintons' heartless, establishment machine. And in the UK a decrepit Tory party threatens its 'renewal' through Brexit, when the day after any 'no' vote is successful, the leader of UKIP, Farage, calls on his 4 million voters to do what the left did when it turned into the hollowed out Labour Party to elect Corbyn, install a new leader in the shape of the malevolent clown Boris Johnson, and to take a new direction apparently into eternal Thatcherdom with a tinge of the Tory's own ancient racism, last promoted by Enoch Powell.
This prospect, like similar, national fantasies that blossomed from the lips of Berlusconi, or Sarkozy and now from Trump's petulant mouth, amount to nothing. International capitalism's engine room will remain the key driver of politics across the West whatever the result of the British referendum (or even the US presidential contest.) But the right in the West is evolving and finding new voices.
We argue in this blog that this process should be clearly recognised and as far as possible disrupted.
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