An Essay
1. Where are we?
After decades being told by academics, by scornful right wing politicians including social democrats like Tony Blair, that the working class had disappeared in the west, the working class is back - with a vengeance!
First they have emerged as the absolute majority of the potential voting population in both the US and the UK (not ignoring the fact that working class votes split in both countries, and more profoundly over Brexit in the UK.) Second, while racist and nationalist politicians have led this renaissance, the working class has also made a central aspect of their political expression the demand to end the power of the political elite in both of their two societies. France’s elections will soon see if all, or only some, of these moods travel beyond the Anglo Saxon world.
Despite the deep class anger reflected in the voting in the US and UK, this phenomenon has been harnessed to a substantial gearshift of western society to the right. Right wing, racist, nationalism has become the initial, but for now predominant, solution to the west’s unraveling political crisis. In two cases the working class left-based challenge to neo liberal globalisation in the west, has faltered. First in Greece, the Syriza government collapsed backwards in the face of the millions of Greeks’ unexpected challenge to neo-liberal EU mandarins. Second in the US, Bernie Sanders tied his challenge, and the momentum of his popular anti-establishment movement, to Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party – and thereby shared in its catastrophic attachment to the status quo and in its collapse.
However, the political crisis in both the UK and the US (with France, Italy, Spain and even Germany next in line) is still evolving in the west in general and in Britain and the US in particular. Trump’s pre-presidential antics may be amusing, but behind them is a savage regroupment of the ‘Grand Ol’ Party’ Republicans, and epic battles still to come in the headless chicken that is now the Democratic Party. In the UK, Prime Minister May is about to enter her own sea of troubles, with unfulfilled sharks snapping at her heels and without the life belt of any sort of mandate from anyone. In other words the new stage of the west’s political crisis, a stage where the momentum at leadership level has shifted to the right, has only just begun. And behind all of that is yet another after-shock in the seemingly endless crisis of international finance capital.
Meanwhile the working class movement is aroused in many European countries and testing out radical solutions and those politicians that promote them. The fundamental contradiction for the political right in all this is that its future, a future where it leads the whole of society, depends utterly on two conditions being met. For the radical right to truly succeed the working class need to be divided. And although misogyny, racism and anti-immigration have struck a cord, even pumped up racist attacks etc., as yet the popular majority according to social attitude polling in both the US and the USA tie opposition to immigration to the loss of jobs or in Britain to the deeper and deeper rationing of social services and housing, rather than commitment to segregationist and superior ethnicity type arguments. After dividing the working class, the radical right then has to break to pieces any and all independent working class organisation - in order to rule society. In other words rightwing politicians in the west, basing their popularity on the political arousal of the working class, are in danger of producing the conditions for their own destruction. They require an all out offensive against the very forces they have partially marshaled into mainstream political life. We have seen the prolonged agony of government and state produced by this contradiction in the case of Berlusconi’s Italy. But we shall see how this plays out much more rapidly in the case of President Trump and Prime Minister May, as history speeds up, as new economic crises bite and as the population tests and rejects its political choices with greater and greater speed.
The success of the right so far in the ruling classes’ political crises, means that the next stage of the battle in society will inevitably be defensive and predominantly marked by the success, or otherwise, in building a new, coherent and united policy and program supported by the working class movement as a whole. Such a program has to be based first on the defeat of the traditional political elite and the root and branch reform of political life; second on support for refugees and immigration and fair trade not free trade; and third on a massive commitment to investment in both social and technical infrastructure including improved living standards for the majority. In many respects, as will be seen, such a program grows out of key aspects of the class insurgency and consciousness as already witnessed. But such a program has simultaneously to be accompanied by the defense of the political and social independence of the working class, from billionaires, from racists and their organisations and from any attempt to return to previous versions of the old and failing traditional working class parties. And that struggle is not based in theory or programs, but in mass action.
2. Marxism – (sort of) out of the mouth of Republicans!
In one of the ten thousand and two celebrity TV debates about the future of the US, pre Trump and post Obama, an old reptile called Ed Emmett Tyrrell Junior, Editor of the American Spectator, poked out from under his rock into the Trump sunshine, to denounce Marxism’s ‘theory of false consciousness’. This particular oddity will pop up again and again, albeit taking different shapes and forms, as the general debate in political circles focuses on the growing class conflict that is bound to arise as the post WW2 political system’s tectonic plates in the west continue to shift. Old Ed touched on a significant issue as he got his anti Clinton, anti women and anti black poison out. He implied that his fellow debater could not separate and distil the working class vote for Trump into an anti elite vote alone. Ed was right. It is unacceptable to isolate one component from the stew from all of its characteristics. And those socialists in the US (and elsewhere) who try to separate out the mucky racism, sexism and nationalism of the working class vote from its insurgent, anti-establishment, anti-elite radicalism, imagining that the former can simply be explained away as ‘bad’ media, as the result of ‘tricks and smokescreens’, will fail at the first fence. The meaning of the working class vote in the West has to be faced full on.
Some socialist commentators especially in the US still argue their own version of the false consciousness idea that working class people who voted against immigration etc are the ‘victims’ of the lack of information, of right wing media, of lies and propaganda. No. That is not it. A change of media would be delightful. Socialists swamping the Internet more so. But ‘sorting out the mistakes’ in peoples’ minds will not resolve the question of class consciousness for the majority of people who have already in any case a deep and healthy cynicism for all sorts of lecturing, media and messages. A serious argument and an argument in practice, through action and experience will be needed to test and resolve whether, objectively, billionaire and banker leaders, racism and anti-immigration, are in the working class interest or not.
Working class consciousness has little to do with daily routine displaying its contradictions. Even in the days when millions of workers from the West went into the giant factories in Detroit, Northern Italy, France and the North and Midlands of the UK, their burden was dunned into the pattern of their minds. Many on the lines were annoyed when the endless routine of their labour was halted by a technical stop. Relentless activity at least sped the working hours away. Regular union meetings were a sacrifice when they cut into your time, the time for eating, rest and family. But most accidents, which invariably went back to reckless employers, would start up class-based thinking. First there would be a ‘whip round’ if the injury was bad; the poorest supporting each other in the knowledge that the employer would not. Second there would be anger against the bosses. On the shop floor circles of workers would start arguing about what had happened and who was ultimately to blame. Collective action might start. Then the union might be called in. This is the actual process of emerging class-consciousness. This is how disgust with popular media begins. This is when you see who are your friends and who are your enemies. Class-consciousness grows from a class in the active process of becoming itself.
‘False consciousness’ on the other hand emerged from Engels’s pen in 1893 when he was dealing with the more instrumental end of what he thought Marx’s ideas meant in practice. Indeed Marx did open out and cut through the great frauds and mysteries of the capitalist system - in its world beating march across the globe. (Today apologists for capitalism still try to tie capitalism’s functioning to some twaddle about the basic nature of human beings, or try to explain its ‘inevitable’ human progress as anything other than the desperate episodes of class struggle and sacrifice that have been required to take children out of chimneys and the old and ill off the scrapheap.) But Marx, in his ruthless exposure of capitalism’s realities, did not ever use the term - false consciousness.
One good reason to be suspicious of the term is its use in the building of political parties that claim to ‘really’ represent the working class. Famously, Marx proposed that existence proceeds to consciousness; that is, it is the experience of material life that creates the conditions for its understanding. And that means ideas and attitudes are woven in the minds of people from their interactions with reality, albeit mediated in a myriad of different ways, historically, psychologically, etc, etc, and most of all through the experience of existence as part of a social being, mainly, but not exclusively, in the case of the working class through its labour. But, argue Engels’s would-be followers, when US workers vote for Trump or UKIP in Britain it is because, in some sort of way, they have been brainwashed out of their own experience. And that is where some alarming theories of ‘the working class Party’ come into their own. False consciousness means that the working class must rely on the creation of distinct political machinery to create a full picture of the ‘real’ class-consciousness that the working class should have. In this scenario the working class cannot assemble and express its own interests. It needs to donate that role to a separate entity.
Any critic of revolution by the majority can immediately see the role in this ideological construction for a self identified elite, who exist in order to spot the true interests of the working class. Perhaps this model of a working class political party could be argued as necessary in an illiterate population ruled by a Czar, or under Fascist conditions. But under universal franchise, not withstanding its limits and corruption, it appears arcane, dubious and even reactionary.
Existence does proceed to consciousness. There is no need to return to religion or some other version of ‘the spirit’ to amend the now generally accepted idea that human behaviour and thought is, ultimately, deeply and irretrievably attached to the material conditions of life. But existence does not simply proceed to consciousness. On the contrary, human experience, the human connection with the material world, including other humans, is refracted through an immense kaleidoscope of history, of personal and collective psychology, of work, of love, of media, etc, all of which mediate experience and the consciousness of that experience.
All classes’ experiences are fashioned, at the broadest level, by their ultimate relations to the means of production and reproduction; how they are able to live and recreate themselves. But this broad determination is a multifaceted experience of the most complex kind. It rarely becomes deeply collective unless the basic elements of society become revealed through crisis, and fundamental collisions across that reality have produced a telling clarification of life and times. Social conditions mostly reveal themselves through social conflict and class conflict reveals most. It is a creative paradox that social truth, including what is the working class interest, is won mainly through struggle. And it is that function, which can be ‘remembered’ by political organisations and programs, as ‘normal’ daily life returns workers to their ‘normal’ world.
With this outlook, specialized cadres do not determine working class interests. Real working class interests come to full revelation through the struggle between classes, in which parties have to sink themselves. In the context of this struggle the memory of previous battles, the study of similar conditions across the world and through time, play an indispensable role in helping to clarify and promote ‘the new’. But they cannot and do not produce it. Working class parties can play the role of a centre of class memory and international experience. But all the great social revolutions of the last 150 years have been new. All of them expressed working class interests in entirely new ways – often with working class political organisations acting as a drag – until they too managed to learn the new working class interest (or not.)
The 1st International of Marx and Engels did not invent the Paris Commune. Nor did Lenin and the Bolsheviks create the soviets, nor Mao invent the red bases and the extension of anti-colonialism only being fully resolved by social revolution.
The point of all this is to reject the idea of false consciousness in the working class votes for Trump (or that section of the British working class that voted for UKIP). The panoply of thoughts and feelings and political choices made by the working class in the face of Trump’s Presidential campaign were not shoehorned into working class heads. They were not a result of false news on Google, or an effect of the narcissistic antics of FBI chief James Comey. They were the summation of what they took to be their experience. All of it. The ex miners and their families in Arkansas took stock of their own situation, and ransacked recent history for a better time. That time was worse for others, but better for them. It was a real, lived experience. So they want that back – and the removal of anything that gets in its way. Because they know in their hearts that the political system has always been against them, and is getting worse, they have started by getting rid of that, which is what they hope voting for Trump will do. And voting for an ‘all-powerful’ outsider-President is a very big deal indeed.
What will therefore change those conclusions into a line encompassing full class unity, regardless of gender or legal status or colour, is not just another vote, but a deep and prolonged struggle for working class objectives for a better life, for well paid work, where those who share their conditions and their struggle become allies and those who do not are exposed. And from such a start that is what would-be working class parties, including Sander’s ‘revolution’, need to fully embrace, independently of a failed political system and its parties, and develop into new action and organisation.
3. But capitalism works; doesn’t it?
The vote for Trump by millions of US workers, despite their general hatred for the political system based in Washington, was not an accident. It is true that voters often said that they despised him but he was better than the Clintons. And his rallies showed that Trump did move tens of thousands into the type of ecstasy associated with potential Nuremburgers. Overall then, the Trump vote demonstrated a relatively small bloc of hysterical support, large support for the lesser of two evils but, most significantly, it showed general support for a successful businessman who was outside the ranks of the big corporations, corporations that had run American politics and had sold off the working class of the country to the world. (Equally, working class votes in the UK for a half-baked banker showed that hostility to the political system did not extend for most UKIP voters, to indigenous businesses.)
Underpinning the vote for Trump for many voters was therefore the idea that Trump had become successful outside traditional politics and outside the influence of multi-nationals, and that his success as a billionaire showed his competence and potential power ‘to get things done.’ He did not have to pollute his political decisions by the need for any payback. Trump’s local, US based, success in the market apparently inoculated him from the ‘political swamp’.
Nationally focused, and purified from politics, global corporate business and the world market, Trump’s appeal appeared to many to stand for one of the principles on which a return to a ‘great’ America could be based. (Leave aside that every politician since JFK called on voters to ‘make America great again.’) The benefit of a ‘purified’ market, the market in principle, rather than the actual market, even had echoes in Bernie Sanders’s campaign, where the villains of the piece, multi-national corporations, were on the same list that some of the Trumpites might have drawn up.
After WW2 it was the failure of ‘planning’ in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China to provide the living standards then available in the West that weighed most heavily with western workers when they compared the ‘socialist and communist’ countries to their own. Increasingly from the 1960s and the Vietnam War, the traditional politics and parties of western societies were held in growing cynicism. By the 1980s, even given expanding political disenchantment with political system and after the major assault on workers rights and conditions in the West, the western working class still did not shift in their negative view of the economic life of the USSR, Eastern Europe or China. The world’s experiment with a fully planned economy finally finished with the long car crash of the USSR and Eastern Europe and then the second ‘great leap forward’ in China, this time towards the market. Today even the ‘new’ socialists of Podemos, or Corbyn’s Labour Party have a timid reaction to any extensive plan for state control of key parts of the private economy; including some of those parts, like the power industry, which were only recently sold off.
The apparent historical failure of planning creates a vacuum where the rational choices of an economy organised for the benefit of humanity should naturally stand. Trump’s plan boils down to the use of the US’s political strength (once its political system is ‘freed’ from Clintonesque links to multi-national banks etc.,) to force unfavorable deals on the rest of the world and meanwhile to rebuild US infrastructure, reopen traditional industries etc – with private finance. Trump’s plan will fail spectacularly and quickly. The real tragedy in all this is where we have actually reached with the planning principle.
Is there something about the future of working class economics to learn from the attitudes and experiences of the Trump voters (or even those who voted UKIP in Britain) despite their support for at least their own domestic market organisation?
Trump voters join a long list of peoples and protests against globalization, which is not working for anybody except millionaires and billionaires. Social Democratic economists and political pundits like Picketty have it round the wrong way when they insist that something must be done about modern Capitalism’s monstrous distribution of wealth (or lack of it.) What must be dealt with is the new, global ruling class and the way they make their money. Globalisation does not work for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, including the western working class. Why is it not working? The Trump voters understand why. It is because ‘ordinary’ (read working class) people can have no power, no control indeed no purchase, of any sort, on it, no matter how often they vote. The conclusion that the working class voters for Trump have come to is that globalization has bought and paid for politics in the US; that they can change that through voting Trump and that they want an economy based in the US over which they can have some influence and even control; especially if the political swamp is drained.
US workers who voted Trump will not expect that the Globalistas will give up their political property without a fight. They will expect to have to fight. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions could be mobilized – should Trump do the unexpected and seriously try to ‘drain the swamp.’ At least that might ‘free up’ the American political system to be ably to act in defense of the majority of its people – if it so wishes. Global trade and finance will continue, but the economy entirely based in particular countries, especially as it can only be based in those countries, as the weight of the service sector grows, is accessible to at least partial control via political action.
Yet the nationalisation of Google or Goldman Sachs or the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund, even by a US President, would be a ridiculous proposition. But the use of economic and political planning - on an international level - is not.
Trump voters want an end to what they see as unfair trade deals between the US and other parts of the rest of the world. Given that nobody in the US (yet) believes that they should just shut up and go on their own, how can Trump’s voters’ demands be realised? Free trade deals are mainly savage instruments designed to pit lower priced labour against higher priced labour; to dig private ownership into companies and services where social ownership still exists; to prevent political action saving jobs or paying for services and to put all to the sword of the marketplace. Free trade is simply a clarion call to defend the most powerful private owners winning all.
To get where the Trump voters want to be then trade deals should at least start from the best conditions, the safest practices and the highest possible living standards for all engaged. These are Fair Trade deals; deals attached to which are minimum wages for all workers involved; where common tax bases in all participating countries are established, where types of ownership are allowed the widest possible scope; where conditions are equalised drawn from the highest pertaining levels; where free movement of labour is standard and an agreed tax regime adopted by all parties to the agreement. This might all start from a charter of principles for international Fair Trade deals. The power of the US and the depth of its market make all this entirely viable – if, first, the political swamp is genuinely drained and second, Trump sets up Fair Trade instead of Free Trade deals. And all this would be a new planning principle ‘invading’ big capital, and forcing drastic inroads into the dynamics of the current global market place – where everything and everyone is currently for sale.
The tragedy in all this is that while a desperately underdeveloped, even colonised nation, that successfully overthrew the thrall of international capitalism in the first part of the 20th century was forced to establish economic planning under the most brutal, war-like, scarcity – which eventually failed. Today economic planning is more and more essential across the globe, especially in the most developed nations, in the light of global warming, global finance, with its endless crises, and the universal, exponential growth of inequality. If international capitalism (as it has been literally forced to do in the case of modern, state capitalist China) had abandoned its policy of invasion at the beginning of the century (Russia was invaded not once but twice) and instead had been forced by the international working class movement in the early years to allow Russia to keep political and state control in the hands of the Soviets, then the use of the market to promote initial capital accumulation in Russia would have been possible. Under such conditions a fully financed, working class led, democratic and creative, planned economy could have been built. It would still have faced the enormous power of global capitalism and have been restricted in its potential. But in 1948, with the victory over Hitler and the successful Chinese revolution, the comparison between the market and that sort of planning, incorporating the market if required but subordinating it politically, might well have turned modern history inside out.
4. Ok. What now?
But the working class in the West in reality is still unconvinced by the planning principle (at least outside of social services) in light of the actual history of the 20th century. Nevertheless the connections and insights from the millions who voted for Trump are part of the logic of a class in movement. This logic will of course be tested to distraction when Trump and his Alt Right Republican allies try to deepen the political swamp and increase the wealth of the wealthy. (He already has the wealthiest Cabinet in US history.) He will move first by accelerating the divides the working class have already had brought out, between American white workers and the Mexicans and the African Americans and Latinos. And then Trump will try to bust up the momentum of the US working class - that the US election itself has started. But beginning with the need to mobilise – in action – three real and deep concerns of the US workers who voted for Trump (and, to an extent, some of those who voted for Brexit in Britain) can be still be addressed and even still be led – from the left.
First draining the swamp (ending money’s lordship over politics); second mobilising to use the vote, using politics to attempt to control and reorganise the economics of daily life, jobs, living standards and economic security; third, intervening into globalisation in the direction of the defense of working class standards and conditions; these are potential platforms for the left. First comes the demand on the new administration to deliver on these promises. Second comes the need to mobilise and organise to get what was voted for – regardless of Trump and his pals. Micah White, co-founder of Occupy Wall Street, states that street protest is broken and that now what is needed is a movement connected to new parties, aiming for political sovereignty.) And third comes international deals to guarantee the equality of workers across countries and continents, as the only way to ensure that capital does not use these deals to drive workers down to the lowest level that they can find.
Racism and misogyny have to be confronted head on, but starting from a common base that the left can share and develop with Trump (and in different ways UKIP) supporters. These key base lines would be completely unobtainable without the defeat of racism and misogyny; without overcoming working class division.
The paradox of a defensive period, now opened up by right wing political success in the West, is that defense can succeed best when it uses its bridgeheads (in Britain the NHS, welfare, the terrible record of the privatizations etc) but also to defend and provide succour to the best features of what the western working class is newly creating in its own challenge to globalisation. And although the working class movement into mass politics has been used by the right (to the working class’s detriment) - forcing the contradiction between what working class people need and the current leaders who appear to offer it, will explode today’s (fragile) political alliances. But because the working class in now moving to political solutions for its bleak future, this will work if, and only if, there is an alternative and independent political point of departure. The political focus in the West is now indispensable to the working class and to the left. And there are critical preparations that the left have yet to make in order to make their defense and then to win the ‘new.’
In the US, Micah White’s political insight and Bernie Sanders ‘revolution’ as he calls his movement, have to fuse. Sanders’s emphasis on winning Democratic Party posts, to make the revolution inside the Democratic Party, is not starting from tens of millions of ordinary people demanding from their move into political life that their leaders ‘drain the swamp.’ The Democratic Party, even given the millions of its voters who held their noses, is part of the problem. Neither of the old parties now really represents virtually anybody in the US besides millionaires and billionaires, including the millions of working class and middle class women that were offered a woman candidate in the last election. It is that fact that produced Trump’s victory. And the left in the US have to start from that fact.
In the UK, the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party is an immense victory for the left. That victory emerged from a radicalization erupting from years of mass action against austerity, led from outside Labour Party. But, again, hundreds of thousands of people realised that the key to anti-globalisation economics was political so they joined Labour and voted for a left MP as leader who had sat in the tiniest of margins of the Party since the 1970s. But, of course, this can only be the beginning. However, the pressure inside the old official labour movement, including key trade unions, is to attempt to unite the Parliamentary part of the party and that has meant that Corbyn’s politics are essentially silent to the public in order to ensure that no obvious divisions within his new ‘shadow’ cabinet emerge in the media. Why? Because the cliché that divided parties do not win elections has primacy in the conditions where the likelihood of an early General Election is quite strong.
This would be a mistake normally. In the current situation it is a serious error. In the first place the bulk of Labour MPs are hostile to Corbyn, including some inside his Cabinet, and they will howl their hostility to Corbyn from the rooftops if there is a General Election – to prevent, as they see it, the certain loss of their seats in Parliament if they are associated with him. Second it does not allow Corbyn to speak directly to the concerns of millions of working class people, including the 4 million that voted UKIP in the 2015 Election, if need be over the heads of his utterly immovable MPs. Critical in this is his complete silence on the need to ‘drain the (British) swamp.’
Britain has its own political swamp, which, in its latest iteration, looks to the rest of the interested world like a scene from the Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. Discussed in previous blogs, the absence of root and branch political reform, a part of which, after the Scottish and the Brexit Referendum must be fair votes for all, this absence from a Corbyn led Labour Party policy, cuts bridges to millions of working class voters. Included in such a policy would of course be the top to bottom reformation of the Labour Party itself, which would take account of its own six hundred thousand members, the million Green voters and the millions of Scots who want a left nationalist answer to austerity and to Britain’s war machine.
Traditional liberal politics on immigration will not do either. And racism has to be faced down. Yet, again, all is quiet on that front. If the Corbyn leadership were speaking regularly on that question then there would be no lack of public debate. A clear plan for a massive increase in health facilities, schools and housing, nailed down, area by area, year by year, would begin to reduce the impact of the racists and start to isolate them in the arguments about immigration – especially when richer areas with better facilities were opened up. And, again, this needs the political courage to step away from the large number of Labour MPs who want to get in a competition with the Tories over immigration cuts and step towards the large bulk of members at the base of the Labour Party.
In other words we are in a fast moving intensely political period. Great gains for the left in the West are still available, despite the right’s current status, if bold moves are made. Corbyn and Sanders need to turn towards a western working class that is itself moving out of apathy and quiescence and into mainstream politics, while already creating a new canvas for its new political designs.