NATO's crisis

As NATO met recently by a Welsh golf course this once mighty engine room of the cold war looked like it would fail its MOT. NATO remains the armed wing of US led imperialism and its current fragile state reflects the tentative reach of US power following the bloody shambles it has bequeathed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is western power in every sphere is on the wain. Which is not the same as saying that its current opponents are dedicated to serving the interests of humanity. It would be more accurate to say that they are part of the toxic residue deposited in the wasteland that imperialist madness has created in parts of Asia and the Middle East. The Taliban and now Islamic State put a minus wherever their previous oppressors put a plus. The result is that their creations of hybrid states appear as grotesque inversions, captured by a distorting mirror, of the societies they claim to abhor. Their factional lines simply reverse those that applied in the previous puppet regimes. Their murders are personal rather than engineered by remote control. Technology is used to defend modern caricatures of medieval social and political structures. 

Of course I.S. is also a desperate response by a section of the oppressed to fight hell-fire with hell-fire. The mass destruction of the drones and the jets, the annihilation of any sense of self-determination, the blood sucking international corporations are all still at large in Iraq, (with the hard won exception of the Kurdish enclave) and in Afghanistan, still representing the overarching presence of the most powerful forces on the planet. But fire is rarely overcome by fire. And recently, near Cardiff, the US leadership of NATO was edging towards a new regional alliance in the Middle East, making military training deals with Jordan, financing a 'non-sectarian' government in Iraq that can 'credibly' call in NATO to 'defend' the country, preparing a noose around the neck of I.S. pour encourager les autres. The US has already bought and paid for the State of Israel, the Egyptian army the Afghan government and its army and countless bases in the region. It now wants Jordan's army (a problem for the Brits), a new dictator in Syria and a (very expensive) deal with Iran. 

At the centre of all this is the complete disaster that western imperialism has meant for the peoples of the Middle East and now Afghanistan. Chopped up land spaces turned into countries based on western oil 'concessions'; deliberate fomenting of religious differences among Arab peoples to ensure western control; 'solving' the Jewish question at the expence of the Arabs following Europe's ethnic cleansing; it is difficult to see a whole people (the Africans?; Latin Americans?) who have suffered more at the hands of the great western powers. 

From an immediate and humanitarian point of view NATO and its friends in the oil business and the security business and the rest, need to be thrown out and then kept out of the area. Yet  I.S.'s provocative beheadings are precisely designed to draw in the West, to force a change in local allegiances in the region, courtesy of another western invasion. An invitation that should be firmly rejected in any form.  (It is ghoulish to note that the famous western bastion, Saudi Arabia, supports I.S. informally and itself beheaded 113 people in the last 20 months without the slightest murmur from the west.) On the other hand it is surely right that the Kurds should be able to defend themselves against factional religious armies, a struggle which could help to create nations defined by all those people who wish to be part of that nation rather than by ethnicity, or by imperialist map makers.

We should be aware that as the world and the struggle for its resources becomes a more and more acute, and the great policemen of the twentieth century world shrink in their power and pomp, so the struggle for fairer divisions will erupt more often, but mixed together in more and more wild and extreme forms. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the debasement of the world's first coherent and analytic ideas of human liberation have rendered the battle for justice all the more chaotic for now. But that stage is not eternal. Humanity only poses questions when the conditions for their solutions exist. And without the battle, without the struggle to be managers of our own fate, as a species we are finished.

UKIP - a wide political regroupment.

Most commentators have picked up that the Labour Party also has a lot to loose from UKIP's advance. They no longer believe that UKIP is mainly to be understood as the current Tories version of what was Labour's nightmare in the 1980s, the SDP. Cameron may be sick with worry that he is never going to be PM again but in the longer term Labour is more at risk, and if Scotland goes independent, both the English and the Scottish Labour will be holed below the waterline. (Which is one of the very good reasons why the anti-austerity left will need to develop some intelligent tactics regarding Labour Party MPs, towards and through the next elections.) 

We will return to the Labour Party and the general question of MPs very soon but UKIP's rise is also a critical new fact in the arguments going on about political tactics inside the British anti-austerity left, most particularly among some of its more overt political formations. Establishing a new party to the left of Labour, whether the emphasis has been placed on the new party's potential British working class organisational roots or its possible parallel success given the rise of a new left in mainland Europe, preoccupies significant parts of the far left today. In fact it is an idea that first emerged in the late 1980s and its current popularity seems to echo the British Military General Staff's inevitable enthusiastic adoption of a war plan that might have won the battle that preceded current hostilities. 

There are three components of what might be termed the British working class movement today - four if you include Scotland. This claim is made in the sense that these are groups of people defined socially and economically as working class and who are in active political movement. Key trade unions spearhead anti-austerity action. A potentially enormous group, led by south Asian heritage communities, is anti-war. In Scotland the political choices of west coast working class people will determine whether Scotland becomes an independent nation. Finally an unknown section of mainly older working class people who used to adhere to Labour are shifting to UKIP. 

In Scotland, Labour's monopoly hold of the working class has already broken - whether or not independence wins. But the anti-austerity left, initially led by Sheridan's Scottish Socialist Party, fouled its own nest and missed the chance to challenge the hegemony of the SNP's left among the shifting politics of the scottish working class. Britain's enormous anti-war sentiment in parts of its population has not yet moved party political allegiances among these groups and one, ultimately farcical attempt, Galloway's Respect, has made that less likely in the near future. The RMT remains isolated even among radical unions in its disaffiliation from Labour.  Its chosen route to a new 'mass working class party' a campaign led by the Socialist Party, that has had a minute impact, seems to underline the futility of such an approach.  And finally, the disaffected millions that fell out of Labour's grip in England, that were an initial target for Scargill's failed SLP, that have even dropped out of the franchise as Blair evolved into Brown and then into Miliband, are currently regrouping around UKIP. 

The debate about new parties in the far left in Britain has mistaken important political shifts in and between the classes in society for a one way street in the case of the labour movement. Mass action against austerity and war has yet to become the centre of gravity for all the political movements with in the working class (a possibility that would be immensely strengthened by a new country in the UK at least initially defined as anti-Tory, anti-nukes and pro welfare state.)  Yet such mass action taking a central role inside the thinking of the working class has not yet happened and yet is the single biggest condition for any successful future substantial political regroupment of the left. 

Half and half

The Tax Justice Network has recently made the calculation that the corruption industry cost us about $30 trillion over the past 15 years - about half the entire world's gross domestic product.
'So for every $1 of output, 50 cents is being siphoned off in bribes and other illicit payments.' Alexander Lebedev - ex Russian billionaire writing in 'his' Evening Standard (1 September.)

Lebedev goes on;
'Between 2000 and 2011, just from China $3.97 trillion is thought to have disappeared, much of it the profits of corruption, channelled into secretive financial offshore financial havens. From Russia the figure is close to $1 trillion. In the EU the total lost is put at $1.2 trillion ($150 billion from Italy alone.)'
'Sadly' he adds 'London is at the very epicentre of this web.'

Leaving aside the 'no editing of the owners copy' privilege that Lebedev obviously makes use of in his article, his proposal is to create a new agency; an international anti corruption force. He estimates it would need a budget of $70 million a year and 'at its head I would appoint someone of global credibility and stature.' Who might that be we all wonder?

Lebedev (of course) misses the point. The whole developed and developing capitalist world now has the stature of one of those third world kleptocrcacies that the Bullenden boys so like to denounce.

What should the British left do next?

What next?

Introduction
1.a
A significant and growing part of the European working class do not accept austerity but their rulers cannot go on in the old way. Between America and Asia, the European continent is being squeezed into new shapes. On the one hand its labour is too expensive – especially now in the in the south. On the other welfare is too expensive – especially in the north – including Britain. Between the dollar and the linked renminbi the euro still staggers after eight years of crisis. Europe has not been able to fight its own wars for decades. Now it cannot maintain its post war concessions to its own populations on welfare. And despite the loud words of Christian Democrats after the last European elections, it cannot guarantee its own political stability. Only Germany seems solid. But breaches with France have undermined even that keystone of the European Union.

Britain’s rulers have had their typical reaction. Cut a new deal or run. But this time they can’t. First they face exactly the same economic dilemmas as their European counterparts and second everybody knows that their traditional route march out of Europe is directionless. The UK cannot ‘go home to Mamma.’ The US platform of stability in the world, the policeman that defended vast international investments, many organised and centered in the City of London, is no longer as available as previously. It is making its own  ‘turn to Asia.’

In China and India and Brazil and South Africa, huge social struggles are underway. The Middle East, reacting to the weakness of the west and its client regimes, experienced a first wave of revolution aimed at social and political development that stalled, then reversed and has now started new wars. There is a deep political crisis In the US itself, underpinned by the most cavernous political polarisation since the period just before the Civil War. Revolutionary mass mobilisation in Thailand, Cambodia; political/military crisis in Ukraine, in Iraq and now Afghanistan; the disintegration of the ‘Pax Americana’ and its western hangers on is obvious.

The one consistent reaction of the European rulers, including the British, has been to ratchet up the offensive against their own working classes and further shield and safeguard the rich.

1.b
This new picture, characterised by profound economic and political crisis of capitalism – especially in Western Europe - emerges from, and reorganises all of the existing class relations that we have been familiar with. Already transformed by the 20th century, the worlds’ two leading classes are now shaping up for the next stage of their historic confrontation in new formations and in new ways. Europe will be a major battlefield as it is forced further into relative global decline.

Britain is a weak link in the western Imperialist camp. It destabilises Europe’s ‘chain of command’. It is utterly unbalanced in its domestic economy and now starting a period of its own serious political crisis; (the prospect of continued coalition governments based on a smaller and smaller vote, uncertainty over Scotland – whichever way the vote on independence turns and turmoil over the EU.)

2.a
The progress of the British working class movement
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the British working class movement had 12 million organised in unions (out of 20 to 24 million economically active in the overall population during that period.)  In launched major strikes, defeated industrial relations bills and acts, massively contributed to the raising of working class living standards and social welfare but in the end, was incapable of leading the whole nation. When an industrially defeated Heath put the question ‘who rules?’ to the country in the 1974 General Election, he nearly won it. The voters were uncertain what the industrial power of the unions represented.

At the time (and after) many radicals claimed that the weakness in the working class movement and its eventual defeat (with the isolation of the Miners in 84/5) was the result of its bureaucratic leadership. According to this view the energy of the working class was being stifled or misdirected by the labour bureaucracy both in the Labour Party and the unions. And truly, the bureaucracy was separated off from the shop floor and often concentrated the most backward and reactionary moods that did sweep through society from time to time. But it was also true that in popular consciousness, even in the most radical sectors of the unions, revolts never really breeched union walls (with a couple of honourable exceptions.) The far left often reinterpreted the trade union militancy they witnessed among the rank and file as something else. Without much experience they translated the day-to-day diet of trade union struggles into revolutionary fantasies. This weakness was of course linked to the role of the trade union and Labour Party leaders, and again some left organizations had a greater grasp on reality than others, but there was more at stake in getting to grips with what was going on in the union movement than simply the perfidious (and eternal) role of the bureaucracy.

The left unions did not join the students in the Viet Nam protests. With few exceptions they supported British state policy over Ireland. What did even the radical trade unionists sing to the crowds, the women, the immigrants; the small shopkeepers that watched their marches and demonstrations pass by?
‘You can’t get me, I’m part of the union.’
Later this bowdlerization of an old union song by a pop group (that were actually making an ironic attack on the self serving attitudes of the 1970s unions) was replaced by a chant, now normally led by the far left, that still emerges from time to time, and that puts things more defensively;
‘The workers united – will never be defeated.’
This slogan is an old anti-fascist chant used when barricades were raised against Mosley in London’s East End – where all were workers (on both sides.) It made some sense to the whole community. It is less obvious what it means today.

2.b
The whole union movement is barely half the numerical size of its 1970’s ancestor with a tenth of its political significance. In 1970 unions represented nearly half the total of those who were economically active. Today, in a population with 32.7 million economically active in Britain, they represent 12%. And the left unions are an even smaller part of this already shriveled national trades union movement.

Yet today unions like the RMT, the FBU, the NUT, CPS and even UNITE are part of a majority female trade union movement, discussing whether to move to independence from the Labour Party, acting and organising in defense of all who suffer austerity, and which have a far greater chance of offering a lead to the whole nation by unions than at anytime since WW2. They have broken in part, and unevenly, from the paralyzing spell of trade union consciousness. They have started to map out a way towards a socialist future.  But there is still a real struggle to be had.

First unions start off from a position of some isolation in society and there is a danger that they are seen as, or worse, act as, special interest groups that stand only for the relative privileges of their particular sector of the workforce. We can already see some union leaders who already describe their function as a unique and special interest. The feminisation of unions is one crucial, material block to this danger and initiatives like those of the RMT and UNITE to try to organise unemployed, semi-employed and very low wage, illegal economy workers, are crucial bridges into the much wider but unorganized working class.

Second, the widespread understanding in the left unions that they cannot win by themselves and also that their defensive actions must be linked to a wider political perspective, is not resolved by those thoughts alone. Indeed these ideas become more and more vulnerable to the extent that they are not carried out in practice. Huge efforts have been made on this score by unions like the RMT. But those efforts have so far not been met by a similar response on the political left. The grotesque implosion of the Scottish Socialist Party, despite the affiliation of the Scottish RMT, was signal in this regard.

On the other hand the emergence of the Peoples Assembly as a national anti-austerity movement is the most significant advance in the battle with austerity so far and it has huge potential in the effort to connect the left unions to a much wider working class community on that front. The coordination now happening between striking unions and a mass anti-austerity campaign brought together by the Peoples Assembly, and its effect on the TUC, and even on some in the Labour Party, is unique since the Miners strike. This is the biggest step taken so far, with left trade unionists at its core, to rebuild a general working class movement.

3.a
What can be done now?
The government and the state
1. As the General Election approaches (and May 2015 may well produce the conditions for another election relatively rapidly) the priority is to get at least one, well-known, independent socialist elected to Parliament. The left unions and left trade unionists in other unions, could select genuinely representative and well known people to be candidates, given the need to focus on breaking the monopoly consensus that the Tories, Labour and the LibDems have created; on austerity; on immigration; on union rights; on privatization; on war. Supporting far left nation wide junkets, with hundreds of unknown candidates attracting few votes, representing no one, has proved to be a costly waste of time and effort at this stage. Equally, fighting for identikit, follow my leader Labour candidates in key marginals (which will be the command issuing from what remains of the leadership of the TUC etc) is worse than futile. We will need to win Labour supporters to action against austerity but the huge majority of Labour MPs, let alone a Labour Government, will give us more. The key now is to get some real representation for anti-austerity. Carolyn Lucas and, in the past, Bernadette Mckaliskey, have made a huge difference as single MPs who stood for a cause. The anti-austerity movement has a much larger potential constituency than they had. We must start with a pole of attraction for the country, a symbol of what might be done. We need one, better a handful, of brave MPs who are not identified with the mainstream political sewer and who genuinely speak for us. They will be an extension, into Parliament, of the independent unions and the national anti-austerity movement. They will be tribunes of the people.

Looking further ahead, it is clear that the conditions at the end of the 19th century when the leaders of mass unions set up the new Labour Party are reversed. Today, although our political left unions are a crucial advance for the whole working class, they cannot organise the new working class in the mass unions of the past. Instead it will be political initiatives and not the economic and social structures of the working class that will call together the new working class in Britain, with the left unions at the core of those initiatives. This is not speculation. The first signs of the British working class gathering itself together again since the mid 1980s was the great anti-Iraq war march and campaign. Like the Charter of the 1830s, which brought millions of toilers into action, so it will be political action that initiates a new class unity under the new conditions. A great anti-austerity movement is, currently, the biggest stepping-stone available towards any future mass political organisation of the new working class.

3.b We must begin the political offensive on our rank, corrupt, unrepresentative, timeserving democracy. Britain needs a new democracy  - based on principles. All MPs on average wages. All MPs helpers (up to 2) on average wages. All candidates for election, whether put forward by parties or other community based organisations, have to be in twos (one female and one male). All costs of elections to have a low ceiling for all candidates. Once an election is called the privately owned media is barred from any comment. All MPs not allowed more than three terms. All governments and all ministers, including the Prime Minister, to be voted on by all MPs as a whole.  Proportional representation in all elections.  No non elected law makers (including the monarchy and the House of Lords.) As for the old and proposed new anti trade union laws – they have to be broken. Let’s have the fight for solidarity, for the common cause for all and show that ordinary people, if they organise, can win.

3.c We are the defenders of state education, state welfare, state pensions and state healthcare. That part of the state belongs to the people and we are its guardians. Stafford and two other Hospital Trusts are selling off their cancer services – to people who want to profit from misery, fear and pain. The NHS cancer services are the jewel in its crown. Already private contracts in health have risen to £9 billion a year. We will support all non-cooperation with the privateers. We will organise community conferences to attack the profit mongers, to defend our NHS and to discuss our local health priorities and needs. We call for an expansion of the health budget year on year for ten years, funded from reductions in defense, to bring all its parts up to the best modern standards.

3.d The economy
British Banks and companies are being fined $billions for their crimes by US authorities. We call for a National Commission to investigate tax crime by the rich and then fine them and/or seize their assets. The National Commission should then make recommendations on how to close the growing gap between rich and poor, including sweeping away rich privileges like the public school system. Banks already in part state ownership should be made the core of state banks, designed to fund development and green technology. All other banks should have their investment arms brought under state control. This would be the first step to regulation of the finance industry and the City of London.

3.e Minimum wages and benefits in Britain have become a national disgrace. (More people who work have to receive top-up benefit than those who are unemployed.) The minimum wage should become the Living Wage and tied like all benefits to the cost of living. Each workplace employing over 200, both public and private should publish top and bottom wages annually. A legal restriction for the gap in incomes should be established defining a limit of 5 times in the first instance.

3.f Public polling shows overwhelming support for the nationalisation of transport and public utilities – including the Post Office. This should be the first step in a root and branch survey of what parts of our economic life need to be owned and governed exclusively by the people as a whole. Our principle is that our economic life should serve the needs of the population and not the other way around.

3.g War
The British people are finished with foreign wars. Building western empires has damaged so much of the world. Millions have paid the price. Enough is enough. Even when we are told the war is to defend democracy it turns out to be a failure as well as a lie and the real reasons based on power and wealth that are consistently hidden from us by our leaders. First, the whole population needs to vote on any new proposal to use armed forces. Second we can get rid of Trident and much of the rest of the useless paraphernalia the admirals and generals so love. Then we can use the resources released to build up agencies of peace and development of which we might be proud. (After its astonishing revolution, Cuba subsequently gained more international credit by sending doctors round the under-developed world than virtually anything else it did.)

These and other measures (see for example the Peoples Charter, now part of the Peoples Assembly) attempt to summarise in practice, for the British situation, some of the implications of the crisis our civilisation faces, but undoubtedly the best is yet to come and will emerge from the imagination of the people released in the battles ahead.

NOTE: This blog will be resumed in August.

Is socialism scientific? What does it matter?

Scientific socialism – a message from the grave.

Engel’s speech at Marx’s funeral insisted on Marx’s place among the scientists of his day.
‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history:...
But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. ...
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries. ...
Such was the man of science. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez. ...’

Among the dozen or so mourners at Marx’s grave there were two recognised scientists, the zoologist Professor Ray Lankester and the chemist Professor Schorlemmer, both members of the London Academy of Sciences (Royal Society) and both followers of Darwin.

In ‘Socialism Utopian and Scientific’ Engels went on to insist that the scientific basis of his and Marx’s socialism first derived from their analysis of human history as the history of class struggle and, secondly, the discovery of the consequences of the contradiction between the two main classes in the modern world, workers and capitalists, that simultaneously created each other and that would, inevitably, destroy each other as the capitalist system was overthrown. Engels counterposed this systemic social, economic and historical study to any radicalism that was essentially underpinned simply by moral outrage, or the natural, eternal and inherent rights of ‘man.’

To modern eyes this can seem like a muddle. Some very old ideas are mixed with new ones and the course of history has intervened appearing to undermine any ‘scientific certainty’ about the inevitable end of capitalism.  It is worth trying to look at these problems in more detail.

It was the prevailing goal of European philosophy for more than two centuries up to the 20th century, to re unite ‘natural’ philosophy, the meaning of nature, the universe etc., with the philosophy of humanity, of history, of the mind. The ancient Greeks provided the original model. For both Marx and Engels, their study of the explicable ‘evolution’ of human history and the ‘laws’ of motion of modern society were inextricably linked to Darwin’s discoveries on the evolution of the species – except that humanity could now break from simple evolution and become the subject of the its own history – a step beyond all other living things in the rest of the natural world.

While Marx and Engel’s enthusiasm for Darwin is understandable, it is more appropriate today to first, accept the weight that both sets of analyses still continue to bear in our modern society, but second, to register now a distinction between Darwin’s thesis of the evolution of the species that inevitably continues through history, albeit effected by changes in the human world, on the one hand and, on the other, Engel’s prediction of what has, in the end to be apparently both an inevitable but also a conscious act, engendered by millions, to overthrow a prevailing system of society at a point in the future. Engels wants, it seems, to claim the inevitability of the evolution of the species as a scientific parallel to his insistence that the workers will overthrow capitalism. But the connection does not stand; for while human consciousness is not an independent state of being from the material conditions of life it is not a mirror of the material world – any more than the material world, including all of those we share it with, itself provides a static image. The permanent interaction between humans and between humans and their world means that human understanding, consciousness, is also a constant ebb and flow, in a state of becoming, albeit predominantly, over time, most influenced by the forces and means of production. Capitalism, as we know to our cost, constantly breaks down. The revolution against it however is built by experience, by knowledge, by class independence, by struggle. It too ebbs and flows, like the human mind. It too breaks down. Despite the horrors, despite the famines, slavery, generations of oppression, the concentration camps, imperialist wars, nuclear bombs, despite all this, a weaker, more desperate, more rapacious capitalism still survives, still dominates the world.  The future may look back and see the inevitability of its overthrow, but the world’s current population does not have that luxury.

The evolution of science itself means now that we need no longer scratch our heads about the level of ‘science’ to be found in Marxism. That sobriquet no longer carries the weight it once had when deciding accuracy, truth and prediction. Indeed these concerns have been superceded both theoretically and in practice. In practice Marxism remains the predominant analysis of human history up to and including now. It is still the main point of departure for all those who would want to elaborate an alternative. Class constantly reasserts itself as the prime factor in human behaviour and predictor of outcomes over generations including in social and economic status. As for science, it has marched well beyond formal logic. The foundation of quantum mechanics is the study of unpredictability. In cosmology we discover that 90% of the matter in the universe is unknown. The ‘science-ness’ of these the furthest edges of scientific enquiry are based on open-ended math, on imagination and on a profoundly dialectic view and analysis of totality and permanent change.  

Meanwhile the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism has begun. In that aspect we can accept the poignancy of Marx and Engel’s prediction. The revolution’s  ‘inevitable’ victory was based on the most solid, indeed still the most prevailing ideas about human history so far developed, but in truth, we need to look beyond predictions. They are no longer the watchword of science – let alone history. Where we need to go is to recognise that the contradiction between the social character of production and private accumulation has itself evolved since the late 19th century, through titanic struggle and huge sacrifice, through revolution and its defeats, which in turn have created vast changes in the nature of social labour, and violent evolutions, including concessions, in the character of capitalism.  We looked at some of these consequences for Imperialism, for the State, and for the working class itself, in previous blogs.

Next it is possible to look at what those consequences mean for our political tactics today.

Who can make successful revolutions?

Agency;
There has been a big argument in academia, the media and even in mainstream political parties in Western Europe about whether or not the working class still exists in the west. (Not in US mainstream politics. There everybody has been ‘middle class folks’ since Roosevelt.) But this article does not discuss whether a working class exists. Capitalism, even our current neo-liberal version, could not live without it. And a great many writers and academics – including supporters of the status quo - have studied and analysed the sociological, economic and even demographic evidence to come to the conclusion that there is still a working class – and that, from a global perspective, it is growing in numbers as well as in percentage terms. Perhaps it is therefore unsurprising that despite huge changes in western societies, even in Britain, a country without any mass Marxist tradition, the term, ‘working class’ stubbornly sticks in popular understanding. Despite Blair, Mandleson and Milliband who think (and hope) that the working class has dissolved into their mush of ‘hardworking families’, 60% of the UK population still insists on defining themselves as working class. (Jan 2013 – Independent.)

Ok. The question then becomes whether or not the actual working class, in its modern mosaic, still has the revolutionary potential to overthrow capitalism. The critical question for Marx was - who could lead and succeed in the struggle of the majority to overthrow the social and economic system of capitalism? This would be the first time in history where the majority consciously undertook the removal of a social system that served a small minority class and then, consciously, replaced it with another that served first the majority and then all. For Marx the crucial role of the working class emerged from its place in the fundamental contradiction of the new system of capitalism, the contradiction between private accumulation and social production. Nowhere was this contradiction expressed more acutely than in the vast units of production which sucked in all who had only their labour power to sell and their owners, who expanded and accumulated their wealth exclusively through their private ownership of those means of production.

And even where the working class were a tiny minority of the oppressed classes in the whole of society, for example in 1916 Russia, their social concentration, their rough equality of condition and their vast collective enterprise at the workplace would provide the material basis for their leadership of all the oppressed in the battle with the old system. Russia in 1916 had the largest factories in the world. The Russian working class was the most class conscious at that point in history. They led their cities, the countryside and the army through two revolutions and the beginnings of the creation of the new ‘socialist order.’

Today, the ‘large units of production’ are growing exponentially through countries like Brazil, South Africa India and most of all China. Tomorrow they will conquer the whole continent of Africa. Their emergence (and the independent, albeit distorted, national development that they create) is a product of the weakness of modern western imperialism and not an example of the extension of its strength. (See last blogs.) And they still produce the largest examples of social unrest apparent on the planet today. But in Western Europe today, ‘large units of production’ employ a small minority of the workers as a whole and a rash of different contracts for the sale of labour have replaced the weight of the old collective agreements and industrial bargaining. Millions are ‘self employed’. (They are ‘outsourced’ labour that is paid for by big owners or the state with the minimum overheads. Few really ‘own’ their own means of production when you include premises, energy sources, raw materials etc.) Other millions are employed temporarily, with their insecure contracts. It is the politics of the arguments about the minimum wage that appear vital to more millions, as the only apparent avenue to improvement of their lot.  And so Capital has not liquidated the working class. They have defeated its leading, best organised trade union sectors, most especially in Britain, then they have reorganised it to service its international investment in overseas production, its markets, domestic sales and finances, its services and transport, its high tech markets and rearranged all of the contracts for its labour. Simultaneously it has further demarcated the division of labour – but now on a global scale – to make use of the new infrastructures, created by state property in China and India, to access the cheapest unskilled labour on the planet.

Marx lived in England at the point of its fastest industrial development. He observed the working class as it emerged in the world’s first industrial nation (although even England did not have a majority of its population in the cities until the early 1880s.) The younger Marx, inspired by Europe’s (failed) revolutions of 1848, began to watch at first hand the emergence of this new class in a laboratory pure experiment conducted in his new country of exile. He made a natural mistake.

Both Marx and Engels commented profusely on the Chartists in Britain, supportively and with respect. They also saw the new politics required by the emergence of the working class in Europe as a whole and the weakness it displayed, as it could not wrest its independence from middle class and even bourgeois class forces across Europe in the 1848 revolutions. But, impressed with the class independence of the Chartists and its revolutionary (‘physical force’ wing) they did not see in Britain that the working class was socially recomposing from its pre-1848 character to an altogether different social existence post 1848 – and that Chartism was already dieing as a consequence. Yet Chartism and Chartism alone of all the various expressions of working class politics in Europe up to 1848 had been the most independent of other social classes and had organised millions.

Chartism was overtaken because the British working class was recomposed by Capital in the 1840s 50s and 60s. By the time that some workers in towns got the franchise in 1867 the British working class had been transformed.

Chartism was undoubtedly the first political even partly revolutionary expression of the British working class – as Marx saw clearly. But that working class was not at all the working class being assembled at an extreme rate into large units of production. On the contrary. In the premier Capitalist nation on earth, where obstacles first to the international slave trade and then to Empire had been destroyed by the revolutions of the 17th century, where the market dominated land, rent, overseas expansion and Parliament, Britain’s first self acknowledged and self conscious working class emerged from Hand Loom Weavers in cottages and shacks in villages and farms – as well as from the earliest cotton mills, from ‘self employed’ families scratching coal out of the landowners’ pits, from agricultural labourers, from spinners and weavers gathered in small workshops. They sold vegetables and meats around the streets in the new towns. They made shoes in their masters’ workshops. (Much later the majority of the members of Marx’s First International in Britain worked in shoemakers shops.) They rowed boats to collect the tobacco off the ships on the Thames, the Mersey, the Avon and the Clyde. They were domestic servants and sewed jute and hemp. They returned from the Napoleonic wars and starved. Already by 1819 and the Peterloo massacre the Manchester workers led the others. The city was where to protest. Burning the barns and the ‘Spinning Jennies’ did not work. But it was no simple utopian accident that the Chartists developed a ‘land for the workers’ policy. Most of the Charter’s support was barely one generation from that rural sense of how the poor might secure their independence.

In other words the working class in Britain went through a thorough social and economic as well as a political refoundation in front of Marx’s eyes. He could see the future in Chartism but not its past

As we know, courtesy first of Marx, all capitalism’s relations are constantly changing, shifting even at moments of crisis, turning into their opposite. The political significance of Chartism is that already the working class of the first capitalist country had created a multi-millioned revolutionary movement of working class political independence, but one hardly built on any major units of production at all! It was not defeated as part of the general failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. It was destroyed by the social transformation of the British working class.

The working class across the planet is in constant social, political and economic change. This change is contradictory and uneven. What emerges as China’s high road to national development creates a vast new layer of humanity chained to the equivalents of the Mill and the Mine is that, at the same time, and as part of the same process, a million workers in the UK’s five thousand call centres (UNISON 2014) are socially organised as the modern market – for the distribution of money and goods - while the cost of this essential labour to ensure consumption in the west of commodities and related services, is reduced to the minimum.

It remains the case, both in China and the UK, that the ‘large units of production’ that do exist can still play a disproportionate role in social upheaval and in class struggle. But working class consciousness, the sense that you are part of a separate class, that you have class interests that are separate and apart and contradictory to those of the capitalist class, that you need to express those interests distinctly from all other layers in society – although you might welcome their support; that sort of understanding does not depend on 1950s heavy industry.

It follows that the working class can achieve its identity in a number of different ways and / or combination of those ways. For example in Britain the trade unions created the Labour Party. The defense of the social and economic interests of the workers’ movement, trade unions, became the basis for its political expression. In France and other European countries the political formations of the working class, mainly the old Socialist Parties that had supported WW1 and the new Communist Parties that supported the Russian Revolution, created their own trade union federations. The workers’ movement’s political expressions in those cases created the different routes to its economic defenses. In Spain that state of affairs was further divided by the Anarchists. (And it would seem that Britain’s much vaunted ‘working class unity’ behind the TUC and the LP has not exactly proved its superiority over these examples!) The working classes in Thailand are today being called together by a political revolution launched by reformers from within the state. Their class independence has yet to be achieved, as is also the case in the various political revolutions ‘summoned up’ by different factions of the ruling class across Eastern and South Eastern Europe over the last twenty years.

In Britain the clearest, albeit fragile and uneven expression of the ‘new’ working class has come with the anti-war movement against Blair’s Iraq war. This profoundly British political action was at once global in its perspective, deeply hostile to the savage remnants of past imperial glory, horrified by the betrayal of the Labour Party leadership and committed to mass action because nothing else in politics or society represented those that were involved. What this event showed was the error of any belief that the ‘new’ working class cannot act in its interests, including directly, including politically with a capital ‘P’. But it also showed its immaturity in that it could not yet lead the whole of society – even against war. It could not yet challenge the political system with an alternative political system. It has not yet built the germs of the ‘new’ working class organisations, communities, activities and culture that express an alternative way of life, way of ‘doing things.’ It has no system, no coherence, and no combinations yet to counterpose to the rotten core of British society. But the ‘new’ working class has emerged out of the convulsions of change with some small examples of its best and most worthy parts of its history still intact – indeed more politically powerful than ever. Those tiny examples in a few unions and the campaigns of working class democracy (e.g. the defense of local hospitals, occupy, anti-fracking etc) are an immeasurable gain. They will help new working class leaders address the new working class politics and economics as well as promote the sort of society for which the new working class will stand, and it will be done in practice, in life, in argument and thought, as we fight the battles ahead.  

Note: The last of the four issues of Marxism – its claim to be scientific – will follow next. And after that some of the practical political implications of the four discussions will be elaborated.