Where is China going?

Western reporting of the recent Chinese Communist Party Congress, at least in anglophone countries, has been dismally poor with very few exceptions. The highest point reached in the limited material available in Britain have been articles (see Financial Times and the Guardian 17 October) which stressed the tremendous significance of Xi Jinping's main speech 'for us all'. There followed little in the way of serious examination of the speech, or its surrounding measures. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics', as the speech was titled, ultimately boiled down to Xi Jimping's consolidation of power and the vague threat of future Chinese 'world dominance' as far as most Western media were concerned.

But the 19th CCP Congress was a remarkable event. A great change in the Chinese leadership's future orientation was presented to the world. 

Starting from some of the measures confirmed by the Congress; there were, for example, profound changes to the Peoples Liberation Army's places in the hierarchy. China's military elite were cut away from their previously dominating position in the CCP. Only 17% of the previous military delegates to the Chinese CP Central Committee were returned to their positions. The anti-corruption campaign accounted for 38 members of the Central Committee losing their places. 53% of the standing CC 'retired.' Overall there was a 70% turn over in the membership of the Party's Central Committee. Only the Party changes in the 9th Congress in 1969, the period of Mao's Cultural Revolution, had the same spread and depth.   

The speech styled China as a 'moderately prosperous society' and outlined a 15-year plan to commence in 2020 'to see that socialist modernisation is basically realised.' Next will come a further 15-year plan to 'develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.' Some sort of democracy by 2050. It was the sole mention of the word. Meanwhile developmental gains are still being made.

In the past five years, China's GDP rose from £7 trillion to £10 trillion, contributing more than 30% of global economic growth.

Over the same period it was claimed that more than 60 million more people had been lifted out of poverty. Over 1,500 reform measures had been launched, establishing general frameworks for reform in major fields and lending greater impetus for growth.

But China, it was stated, was still facing severe challenges and would long remain in 'the primary stage of socialism.' Its international status as the world's largest developing country had not changed.

'Some acute problems caused by unbalanced and inadequate development await solutions; and the quality and effect of development are not what they should be,' Xi said.

'China's ability to innovate needs to be stronger'...  'the real economy awaits improvement, and the country has a long way to go in protecting the environment.'

The answer to China's problems was also made clear. In essence the Chinese CP, with 89.5 million members, will take a much stronger grip on Chinese society. This decision has various aspects. First is the centralisation of power around Xi and his immediate supporters - as the Western media duly noted. More profoundly however, the party's centralisation echoes the strong message from the Congress on the need for the centralisation, the homogenisation, of China itself, due, among other things, to 'unbalanced and inadequate development' mentioned in the above quote from the speech. But that in turn is only a part of an even greater mosaic. For example the current campaign against corruption is also to deepen. Already 1000s of local and regional party officials have been expelled from the party and jailed. Congress delegates were housed in basic accommodation and offered simple food. Further measures are promised and corruption is certainly under scrutiny and attack - and, at the same time, the campaign is used as a key weapon to eliminate any inner party criticism of the new direction.

Related to the impact of what Xi called 'unbalanced and inadequate development'  a major political decision has also been taken, or solidified, regarding the scope of China's 'great reform.'  When Deng Xiaoping opened the road to the market in the 1980s and 90s many debates arose inside China in general and the CCP in particular about the possibility of accompanying economic reform with political reform. This reached its terrible apogee with the counter-revolutionary events during the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. But political reform has remained a topic of debate in the margins - which has also been stimulated by the (rare) comments of Deng himself when he addressed the issue in the 1980s and 90s.

Deng argued that the Soviet example proved that economic development should be won and then consolidated (at the level of what was known then as 'First World' conditions) before a political culture could be built that would allow increasing democracy. Because Perestroika and Glasnost had been implemented before any economic effort to reach 'First World' conditions in Russia, the Soviet Union had been destroyed. Deng never defended any sort of Western model of democracy, but seemed to accept the idea that greater participation by the Chinese people in political life would ultimately be a positive aim - once economic development had reached a reasonable peak.

The 19th Congress has rejected all that. The experience of Hong Kong's mass demonstrations, the Tibet undercurrent of independence, the upsurges in Xinjiang - with its significant Uyghur Muslim population - and other regional and national strains; the emphasis that Trump gave to Taiwan's role and, the under the surface struggle over islands in the China sea, all mean that consolidation of China is now the watchword. Deng's flirtation with democracy with Chinese characteristics is dead. China needs to be concentrated and centralised in every sense and at every level in order, it seems, to deal with the 'unbalanced and inadequate development.' The CCP is the key instrument for that purpose. Its independent bureaucratic power is to be mobilised defining China's needs with its own defence.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. What is the relationship between CCP State power and the actual engine of growth and development - the 'free market'?

China's 'free market' is a matter of considerable controversy and there are no definitive measures of its weight in the overall Chinese domestic economy let alone its part in China's international trade and foreign investment. However, while industry, especially industry oriented to exports, in China is predominately private, China’s largest companies are state owned. Given China’s state monopolies in oil and electricity, it is not surprising that the country’s three largest companies are two giant oil conglomerates and the national electricity grid. The combined revenue of these three giants in 2013 was US$1.3 trillion, which is the same figure as the GDP of Mexico.

Central State companies also dominate telecommunications and transport. The government also owns China’s main banking and finance companies, the tobacco industry, major media and the post office. Altogether these central state companies, often large business conglomerates with hundreds of subsidiaries, took in half of the US$9.2 trillion in revenue earned by China’s top 500 companies in 2013. Beneath the central government, Chinese provinces own more than 100,000 state firms, many of which have joint ventures with private capital.

The Chinese state therefore appears to remain dominant in the domestic economy not least through its key role in finance and banks, and its control of infrastructure.

Two general consequences of China's progress in its relations with capitalism are worth noting before focussing on current political conditions in China. First is the success in Chinese development produced by the opening up of a significant 'free' market within a state system of control. In 1921 Lenin introduced the 'New Economic Policy' (NEP). NEP marked the end of starvation in the USSR's cities and therefore aided the final defeat of the counter revolution. Lenin described the move as state capitalism. China's experience would also seem to show that the capitalist market, albeit controlled by the state, can still function as an instrument of rapid growth in the context of under-development.

Second, there has not been the slightest inkling of any interest in 'democratising' China from the private sector. The attempt in the 1980s and 1990s to weld democratic politics to the 'free market' was always spurious. The Silicon Valley billionaire 'anarchists' were the first to drop their fancies about the new freedom of the world-wide-web in China and the whole free market = democracy show has now been unceremoniously dumped by the 'free world's' main leader.

However, economic corruption, uneven development and social upheaval (China has the largest level of social disturbance in the world according to UN statistics) are never simply causes of problems. They are symptoms. But of what?

Whatever characterisation is applied to the Chinese regime, outside any notion that they are simply capitalist, the contradictions between different types of property, of that owned by the State and that owned by private owners, invariably and increasingly opens cracks and friction in society. Such frictions opened up even in the much smaller NEP experiment in Soviet Russia. They were containable, but not in any longer term and especially not in the context of a global system of capitalism.

There are 594 billionaires in China, ahead of 535 billionaires in the US. A huge and widening gap has opened between the mass of the Chinese population, that has only recently moved from poverty and starvation, and the new rich. There has always been a layer of corrupt officials in the CCP but now corruption is a mechanism used to facilitate the development of this region, to guarantee that planning permit and allow another population movement. It is indispensable to deal with the strained relationship between state monopolies and finance and the need to find large, new chunks of local labour and fast means of exporting fashionable goods. 'Unbalanced and inadequate development' or, more historically put, uneven and combined development, is an absolute necessity of the capitalist system when it encounters under-development. Investment moves to areas with the lowest price of labour - both between countries and within them.

The centralisation of Xi's leadership, the CCP and even the whole of China will not resolve these contradictions. They are unreachable by such measures. Stalin 'resolved' NEP in Russia in 1928 with a ruthless industrialisation, a terrible famine and a mass political purge. The alternative then, outlined by Stalin's critics in the New Course, included the demand for the wholesale democratisation of Communist Party and Russian society as well as a careful and planned industrialisation. The crystallising Communist Party bureaucracy was identified as a major part of the USSR's crisis. The opposition were all murdered for their thoughts. 50 years later, after massive sacrifices and effort by millions, the so called Soviet Union died.

Today, in China, the need to open out an increasingly democratic debate is becoming indispensable in 'solving' the current (and mounting) difficulties. The enormous and genuine 'leap forward' of the mass of Chinese people is the platform for a new accountability of the CCP and the role of capitalist accumulation in Chinese society. Uneven development between the regions and nations in China can be faced and reformed best by decisions made by the very people who live with those difficulties. To open the state to the democracy of China's workers and farmers will certainly 'turn the world upside down'. But it is the real road, the only road that defends the gains that the Chinese people have made and strengthens their future in a way that the Chinese people can decide and embrace and, if necessary, defend.  

Can Corbyn change Britain?

The reason Teresa May, Britain's Prime Minister, survives in office, is nothing to do with her abilities. The Tory Party and Britain's movers and shakers are scared of a Corbyn led Labour government, or rather what a Corbyn government might unleash, so May stays on. But Britain's politics are now more fragile that at any time since the rise of a mass Labour Party at the turn of the 20th Century. Unexpected eruptions in the once impermeable Tory Party (viz an arrogant Foreign Secretary or the exposure of another Cabinet sex-pest) become more and more possible.

The class discipline of the Tory Party in government is as shaky as at any time in its modern history. And a Corbyn led Labour government is the practical alternative. But even a Corbyn led Labour Party - as it stands - cannot become the solution.

It is overwhelmingly obvious that the interest of Britain's working class, inclusive of virtually all who must work to have an income, is to get this wretched Tory government out. But then the question arises; how can the Corbyn Labour Party succeed? How can it stand against a ferocious Capital strike; alienation from all other Western leaders and most of the rest of the planet's rulers; let alone the sabotage plotted by its own bulk of MPs?

The answer, in general, is of course that the success of Corbyn's leadership will depend on the mobilisation and organisation of British people - essentially the British working class people. That is the source of any substantial change for the better in Britain. But expressed just as that, such a magnificent truth, left alone without a context, turns into an achingly empty abstraction. A mass movement for a new government is critical. No progress will be made without it. But we leave the political struggle inside the Labour Party at our peril. The movement both outside and at the base of Labour requires sharp political thinking and action to break through the barriers.

There are many hurdles ahead for a left government but there are basic steps that the Corbyn leadership must take in order to give realistic support to a movement of working class people for decisive change. A mass movement against all forms of austerity may be the key condition for initial success against the Tory government but that is only the beginning. Certain critical political steps are required from the Corbyn leadership to fuse the new government to the mass movement to nourish both and to help build the self-organisation of a new class trying to break from what they experience daily as a failing system.

On November 4 Corbyn wrote out to all Labour members and supporters. His first words were;
'When I ran to be Labour leader, I said I wanted to transform our party into a movement.' He went on to praise the sharp increases in Labour support seen at the last General election.

Momentum, Labour's pro Corbyn left wing, sent out a rejoinder.
'Today, the Labour Party launched the Democracy Review. The review represents the most significant opportunity to radically transform the structures, culture, and balance of power of the party in modern history, and we want as many of you to feed into it as possible.'

These are fine, organisational aims. But they express a political absence - even weakness that must be addressed, whether through regional conferences, open public discussions and debates or a vast, emergency gathering across Britain of any and all who want to see the Tories out and radical change as an alternative.

Examining some of the political steps urgently needed must start with Labour, Corbyn's Labour, and Scotland. Winning a Labour government majority could become difficult, depending on the Scottish vote in a snap General election. Along with the continuing disastrous Labour policy supporting Britain's nuclear weapon, Trident, the British Labour party still has the most juvenile policy on the Scot's right to independence. The current weakness of Scottish Labour is entirely caused by Labour's decades of Tory policies but also by the failure of the party to support the Scots' right to self determination. Corbyn has stated recently that he supports such a right. But that is barely at the beginning of the need for a (rapid) process to revolutionise Labour's approach to Scotland. Labour must offer a solution to this question. Currently it is dividing working class opinion in Scotland, a working class that had made a great leap forward in the Independence debate regarding the sort of country that should be built, into those who feel the issue is over, and those who distrust Corbyn as 'nothing new.'

Corbyn and Kezia Dugdale, Scotland's Labour leader up to August this year, talked about promoting a federal solution across Britain. But this was dropped as a result of the siren calls of key British union leaders, who sincerely believe that Labour, offering a more radical social and economic program than the SNP, would shake mass working class voting in Scotland back into its traditional shape thereby solving the problem by denying it exists.

This will not do. Scottish labour (small l) is, as a result of a two year national debate about their country - amongst other reasons - at the very pinnacle of popular political understanding in Britain. They have studied the direction of their country and society. They are aware of the great levers of power and influence. The British Labour Party must learn from this experience, whether or not people voted for or against independence. Historically, in its formation years, Labour supported self-determination for the Scots. That is the starting point for a renaissance for Scottish Labour today. Such a position implies that it is the Scots and the Scots alone who determine if, when and how any referenda on sovereignty are called. Tying that clear call to a genuine and radical anti-austerity program (putting the SNP leadership to shame) would regroup Scottish politics.

Second, how to raise working class benefits, wages and incomes? Here the Labour leadership have (rightly) offered a vast, new program of public investment which will stop Britain's Capital investment strike and rebuild productivity. Wage caps will be gone. Public service workers will be allowed to seek increases. The top 5% will be properly taxed. The minimum wage will rise and the removal of the most recent Tory measures taken against the unions will be annulled.

All this is a big shift. But it does not address the kernel of the problem of working class income.

Working class incomes are, fundamentally the product of a contest. Trade unions in Britain did not wither away because modern techniques changed work. They were smashed to pieces and chained up. That meant they could not contest for the collective support of the new labour and new industries - where the payment of labour was systematically reduced over decades in relation to profits, managerial incomes and shareholders.

Collective organisation, unions, are the self organised measure that working class people take to resist the tremendous and endless efforts of owners and their wealthy hangers on to extract more production, more profit, with less labour costs. There is no denying that, like the post war Labour Party itself, great unions built even greater towers of internal privilege and self-interest, where self preservation of privileges and perks often rolled over the needs of the union's ranks. But there were many dramatic exceptions, when unions like the Miners NUM took action to defend the income of nurses. And on the 'shop floor' the daily defence of union members saved millions from poverty and worse.

Today, all the anti-union legislation of the past must be rescinded. To succeed in the fight to increase working class incomes, unions must be released from tyrannical laws. A new union movement can be built, by those who fight for each others decent existence. Like a new successful, radical Labour Party, the unions need a total democratic overhaul to win the new millions who labour. But unions are in the end, in this society, the primary self-organised route to the increase of working class incomes and Corbyn's Labour must set them free. That is the real and decisive step for Labour to 'transform itself into a movement.'

Finally the vile, sexist, chauvinism of Britain's main political institutions are available for all to see on any TV at any Prime Minister's question time in Parliament, as red faced buffoons bellow and honk - particularly at women MPs. The mass media have tried to capture the battle by women against their treatment from (male) power in politics but have not succeeded. The point that is emerging from this latest wave of struggle against Britain's woefully backward institutions - is how far they are effectively obstacles to modern social progress!

Labour's creditable efforts to reform itself under Corbyn will mean relatively little if they are not a part of a program to reform Britain's political institutions, most urgently its Parliament. How can Parliament lead society against oppression when its leaders and its organisation effectively promotes sexism and institutional racism; generally blocks working class people from representation, continues to fertilise a vast swamp of Lords; all in the context of a tsunami of austerity for the rest? All this needs root and branch reconstruction.

In this field too, Corbyn's Labour Party must take the issue to the people and their movements. Every vote should count. Until the political culture changes then we need quotas to ensure that women, that people of colour, that working class people represent our society in our political life. Corbyn's Labour has to play a key role in all this. But it will be the movements underway, the defenders of the NHS, the fighters for decent wages, the voices raised against racism that will re-inspire Britain's political institutions. 'None so fit to break the chains as those who wear them.' (Connelly.)

Priti Patel, another small piece in the Alt Right's jigsaw.

The Alt Right does not have a coherent global strategy. But it does aim at power through dominance.

Trump's siren songs in China - including his insistence that it is the previous US leadership's failure that is 'to blame' for Chinese success in the balance of trade between the two countries rather than the craft of the Chinese Communist Party - is actually designed to build US dominance over China. The US already has the largest and most offensive 'cordon sanitaire' around China that the world has ever seen in any previous military disposition. At the same time Trump wants to oil his way into the Chinese market and train the Chinese CP to concern themselves with a 'deranged' North Korea. The Chinese know all this of course, but currently depend disproportionately on financing US debt in government bonds and have a significant holdings in their inflating stock exchange.  Thus the new, epic, silk road to Europe and the vast Chinese investment in Africa.

And Priti Patel in all this? Small beer, but nevertheless part of a gathering international momentum emanating from the US in its own post-glory days. Every nation that sees itself as an 'international player' has its own 'alt right' version of external dominance and the divisive domestic politics required to animate a section of the alienated population and suppress the rest.

Priti Patel's political physiognomy stems from Thatcherite parents (her father was in UKIP.) She denounced foreign aid and called in 2013 for the Department for International Development that she was eventually to lead up to November 8, to be closed. She also opposed gay marriage, wanted the death penalty brought back and even when she had to change some of her more extreme views as a rising star of the Tory Party, she campaigned as a radical right-wing supporter of Brexit.

At first glance her 'secret' meetings with Israeli leaders while on a family holiday seems a simple political disaster for Ms Patel. The decline and fall of an ambitious politician whose hubris overcame their common sense is the flavour of the British media reports. But the traditional British media, with a very few honourable exceptions, is the least analytic in the Western world these days. In reality Priti Patel has already started on a road that has opened up with Trump's victory and the continuing threat from the new right in Austria and now Germany. The fact she is a Tory politician simply reflects the anachronistic political system and the party structure in Britain. In reality, like her fellow Cabinet member Dr Fox, she is carving out a new right wing political project for Britain.

There are some obvious indications of Ms Patel's intended trajectory. Being slung out of PM Teresa May's Cabinet is a bit like being ordered to leave the Titanic. Association with a crumbling, factional, ravaged set of failed has-beens is not the most obvious platform to start your heave towards the top. On the contrary, Ms Patel's 'independence of mind' and her 'willingness' to face May's rejection will (she hopes) soon become valuable currency in the messy struggle to come when this despised  government collapses. She has decided that a General election is coming sooner rather than later and that Corbyn's Labour Party will probably win. Given her politics she expects Labour will fail under the weight of a massive Capital strike and she will be set fair for a run at the new Tory leadership, designed to 'save' the country.

It is also obvious that Ms Patel had no interest in the Department she led and saw it as a means to this particular end.

Most significant of all however is what Ms Patel actually did on her Israeli holiday.

The alt right aim to break down the remnants of the post WW2 consensus (led by the old 'Western world') on all remaining fronts. The United Nations is now (in the absence of the US government / state and the weakness of May, Macron and now Merkel) the leading institution in the world trying to uphold that fragmenting orthodoxy. One of the longest term assumptions bolstered by the UN is the (utterly failed) nominal support for both halves of the original Balfour declaration - which called for a Jewish state in Palestine but also argues that Arab political rights should be upheld. Finally interpreting this idea into the 'two state solution', for decades most Western nations have stuck to this gigantic failure of a policy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump met at the Trump Tower in New York, September 25, 2016. The PM held up Trump as a true friend of Israel. Trump wanted to move the US embassy to divided Jerusalem. The alt right were breaking away from the failed UN cliches - but to the right! They supported Israeli settlements, their control of the Golam Heights and their proposed military hostility to Iran. Even the minimal 'concessions' of the Balfour declaration in respect of Arab rights were to be blown away.

The destruction of the West's traditional political 'common sense' - on the Middle East question, the traditional alliances (including the EU), the forty year effort to get a grip on climate change, on 'global development' and soon to come, on the ban on first-use nuclear weapons - are under assault, from the new right. Ms Patel on her holidays was adding her own shoulder to the new alt right dispensation and signalling to whomever might be watching. It is a part of her new trajectory; not to join an international conspiracy of the far right, but to become a leader of a British type model of politics that lives with the multi-nationals but carves out forms of national dominance over others, both inside the peoples of the country and in relation to other nations.

A response to 'Homage to Catalonia'

From Patrick Sikorski

Back to Catalonia, the Basque Country, Greece, Scotland and Ireland!

Clearly a trend. Clearly also areas wrested to one degree or another from the old imperialisms. Clearly on the periphery of the Old Continent - even though they might not be the so-called, "classic" colonial freedom struggles envisaged in the consciousness of the average Brit and given expression by Uncle Mac and his Winds of Change blowing through Africa speech!

From the point of view of working class Barcelona, West Belfast, the Bogside/Creggan, the central belt of Scotland (and Motherwell), Athens/Pireus, ...well, the national, political and economic struggle continues but not exactly in the same way or in the same conditions as a century ago.

However, as Tariq correctly identifies in the closing remarks of his Talk, none of the mainstream (centre) parties emanating from the Socialist Parties (2nd International) or the Communist Parties (Stalinised 3rd International) have anything to say on this! Well, they do but it's completely reactionary. That is they collapse completely into the Euro right position that the EU and it's institutions (especially now including its currency) is the last hope in face of the threat from the East - be it from Russia, the Middle East or China! (I personally heard this from a Refundazione MP in Florence around the time of the Social Forums). It, this collapse, is clear in the capitulation of the Syriza leadership (despite their peaceful referendum), the "timorous wee beastie" that is today's SNP leadership and the fatal gradualism which is now the watchword of the leaderships of Podemos, the Catalan Assembly, Sinn Fein and the Corbyn wing of the LP.

I'd say that not only has capitalism been a happy bedfellow of the late feudal/early modern period, the European  Rennaisance, the Ancien Regime, the Enlightenment and Imperialism it is now impossible for any "progressive" political party to at one and the same time co-exist with it and at the same time defend any of the gains of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution even in it's heartland of Europe.

This has been a trend for over a hundred years but perhaps it has reached it's very own April thesis moment as the liberal, social democratic middle ground is annihilated between the anvil of the multinational corporations and the hammer blows of combined and uneven development outside of, but penetrating deeper and deeper into, the post industrialised first world.

How else can one explain why a mild form of civil disobedience such as we have just seen in Catalonia which was aimed at pushing forward to independence, be met by rubber bullets, 900 injuries, the stealing of millions of pre printed ballot papers and then the stealing of ballot boxes by Guardia Civil (new hats same old fascists); how else can it all be explained other than to recall Burntollet and the B Specials - and then bring us back to a May government of ghouls reliant on power courtesy of 10 members of the no surrender DUP party?

In such a world every one of those 2.7 million pro Catalonian independence votes - "legal" or not, registered directly in struggle are worth their weight in gold. Of course there was a reactionary counter demonstration - mobilised throughout Spain! There would be such a demo in this country - led by Princes William and Harry - in full uniform - if Corbyn and McDonnell ever got serious.

I think that we should be in solidarity with the independence movement in Catalonia in its current struggle against the Spanish state - unless we think that the Catalonian independence movement is just a livelier, more excitable version of Brexit? If we think this then we should say so and then work through the consequences of not supporting partial breaks such this and the earlier Greek episode, and say until we're all ready at the starting line and have had successful socialist revolutions there is no chance of breaking with the EU institutions or Troika. But would not such stageism have placed us with Martov and not with Lenin a hundred years ago this month?

Patrick Sikorski

Homage to Catalonia

Britain's second best known radical-socialist and successful writer, Tariq Ali, states that today's upsurge in Catalonia has deep, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist roots. (See Tariq's talk.)

Tariq's comments were made before the enormous pro-Spanish unity demonstrations across Spain and in Barcelona on 8 October. The police counted 350,000 'at least' in Barcelona. The organisers claimed 950,000.  Barcelona is of course the capital of Catalonia.

Catalonia is home to 16% of the Spanish population. But it accounts for nearly 27% of Spain's exports, 19% of its GDP and nearly 21% of Spain's foreign investment. The Madrid government claims that Catalonia owes it 52 billion Euros. And it is money that makes the national political life of Spain go round. Spain has the dubious reputation as having the most corrupt political class in a very corrupt EU and Spain's PM, Mariano Rajoy Brey has the 'honour' of leading Spain's most corrupt party. (Only Spain's royalty has a larger proportion of corrupt members than are to be found in the leadership of the Peoples Party.) These are the people who sent the national police to injure 900 would-be voters in Catalonia's informal referendum on independence (October 1) and the people that used their influence (and considerable constitutional power) to sternly warn their subjects to mind their ways!

2.3 million Catalans voted on 1 October; 37% of the Catalan population. Tariq does not discuss in his talk the political implications of the limited numbers voting for Catalan's endorsement of independence from Spain. Instead he focuses on the consequences of independence. He rightly says that the EU will not support an independent Catalan. He adds that a separate Catalan could only stay in the EU if it supported the EU's economic policy (which nearly destroyed Spain and still means 25% youth unemployment) and NATO. But perhaps the Catalan political question starts at an earlier point in the argument than a discussion of the possible consequences of Catalan winning independence vis a vis its relations with the EU.  

As with the Scottish example, Tariq agrees with many left commentators that the national upsurges in Europe are, in large part, a response to decades of misery as a result of Europe's own versions of globalisation. The fault lines in the body-politic are apparent in and across many European nations. The all derive from particular histories. In the Scottish case the democratic deficit causing decades of political oppression of the country and society by an 'unelected' Westminster government sparked the most recent rise of the SNP. The fault lines are cracking open to various degrees, almost all (exception made of Flanders in Belgium) as a means of resisting modern capitalism's impact by trying to create new and accessible states that will defend themselves.

The main parties in Spain, the Peoples Party and the Socialists, promote Spanish 'unity' and state violence if that unity is threatened. The biggest left party in Spain, Podemos, supports the right of the Catalans to have a referendum on independence but the Podemos leadership prefers a 'no' vote in that circumstance.

What are the fundamentals here?

We are not looking at the vast efforts of colonial nations to overthrow their metropolitan rulers and the lines that they drew to demarcate their different empires. The national upheavals in modern Europe are not aimed at the overthrow of an occupying empire; they are drawn from historical struggles but are aimed as an effort to break-away from political systems that are remote, corrupt and that do not protect them. As a result there is intense interest in these national campaigns about the alternative ways in which democracy might work. Part of the often positive attitude shown towards the EU is a reflection of the desire, particularly of the youth, to be less national, more global in outlook and more local in the distribution of power.

These upsurges have nowhere yet confronted capitalism's formidable architecture in the European, let alone the global arena. Part of Tariq's talk includes a clip showing a Spanish economist explaining his utopian vision of the economic strength of an independent Catalonia. Again, the assumption is that the EU would accept such a set up.

The result of a radical momentum, to by-pass, to go around, to jump over, to turn your back on a appalling centre of corrupt wealth and dogmatic power that is the Spanish state's politics, but without a realistic and radical sense of the future, is a split. On October 8, it was not middle class people banging their pots and pans who turned out for Spanish unity. Many of the speakers used all the old slogans about the need for unity to fight 'the enemy'. (Their version of unity is down among the old socialist party bureaucracies, the self-serving party mayors, the central offices; down among the lowest of common denominators.) But hundreds of thousands of Catalans were not serving the status quo in their actions.

Starting from political basics, Catalans; workers, professionals, youth and unemployed are not united over Catalan's independence as a sufficient answer to the woes that they share. They doubt the current Catalan leadership. They doubt that even if they were once removed from the Spanish political stink they would have found something new. The Catalan cause needs to look, not so much at the 37% of the voting population who voted for independence but how to unite, with answers, the 37% with the remaining 63%. Part of that is surely the defence of the right of Catalan people to do whatever they see as fit against their current system to change their lives. And that includes the creation of a second referendum for all. In that second debate comes the versions of the future which the people want to see - with a frank account of the real difficulties to be faced and the real allies that are needed to overcome those difficulties.

To lose the energy of October 1 by confronting it with October 8 will be to break the momentum in Catalan - mobilised up to now against a rotten state that lives off its wealth and power. October 1 and 8 have got to be merged and build a new energy from a new political perspective.

British PM defends capitalism.

The British Prime Minister was forced to defend capitalism in a speech she gave on the 28 September and then throughout her Tory party conference at the beginning of October; why? And was she right in her claims about capitalism's achievements?

Teresa May probably thought that she would never have to stand up for capitalism again after her jolly student days. Yet here she is, in office, as one of Britain's shakiest PMs, giving a major speech on the benefits of one system of society as against another social system. Thatcher's sole entry into that particular argument was 'There is no alternative.' In other words, it has been decades since British political leaders, from both right and left, have, in any sense, felt the need to talk about, or to defend, the capitalist system of society.

The reason May made her speech is because the Corbyn led Labour Party has shifted the centre of political gravity in Britain. On the 29 September, the day after May's first speech, the press were full of stories that Tory MPs were supporting a letter to the PM on the need to cap domestic energy prices, and another group of Tories were demanding a halt to their own 'Universal Credit' policy roll-out, on the grounds of its grievous social-welfare reductions. On the day before the Tory Conference Boris Johnston (again) broke Cabinet rules with his press comments on Brexit in a shot aimed directly at the Tory leadership crisis. And now her closing conference speech, 4 October, was deemed a disaster by the mainstream media. The Tories desperately seek a new leader but with that comes the undeniable pressure from the British public for a new election.

In the meantime a YouGov poll found that 58 % of Britons support re-nationalising the railways, water companies and other utilities (with 17 % opposed). 61 % support increasing the minimum wage to £10 (with 19 % opposed) and 52 % support increasing the top rate of tax to 60 % (with 23 % opposed). There is also majority support for policies such as rent controls (59 %), abolishing zero-hour contracts (64 %) and introducing universal free school meals (53 %). And a 2016 YouGov poll found that the public see socialism as more favourable than capitalism. (Data from New Statesman 28 September.)

May made her pro-capitalist speeches because she was, and remains, frightened that Corbyn's Labour Party has now given a shape to how austerity might be reversed. At the same time Corbyn proposes (modest) inroads into the ever-expanding wealth of the rich. (Labour's new manifesto is an essentially Keynesian document but nevertheless it is more than enough to panic the neoliberal horses!)

This shift of mainstream political thinking, if consolidated by Labour through another election, will in turn provoke the next episode of Britain's political crisis. The paradox is that as Labour gets closer to implementing any serious reform in society so will a majority of its parliamentary party and some of its affiliated union leaderships revolt - in the defence of a Blairite agenda. That therefore means the survival of the Labour Party in its current form is fragile - at the very point where it is most close to becoming the government in a new General Election.

The main characteristic of Britain's on-going political crisis is therefore not the apparent decomposition of the Tory Party. It is in bad shape but its old age, its war over Brexit and its own leadership problems do not come from the class based schisms that score Corbyn's Labour Party. The Tories will always consolidate when ruling class interests are challenged. That is its historical role.

Labour on the other hand has 'a river running through it.' Most of the European social democratic parties have already destroyed themselves as they have consistently levered the working class interest out of their organisations. Uniquely, the British Labour Party, despite or more accurately because of Blair's failures, has been able to provide a home for a new, deep anti-austerity, anti-racist and anti-war radicalisation. This directly clashes with Labour's bureaucracy, with many Trade Union bureaucracies and with most Labour MPs. And the divisions inside the Labour Party are a class-based.

The next stage of Britain's political crisis, now the Tory government is under the gun, will concentrate around the future of the Labour Party. The outcome for Labour members and supporters and the Corbyn leadership will be determined ultimately by the success (or not) of the build up of a mass social and political movement both inside and outside the Labour Party. Such a movement has to be joined together by a shared, active and courageous challenge to a society and a signal campaign aimed at root and branch change in the Party itself.

This new political pole in society is yet to fully emerge. But the elements for its birth are surely evident in the waves of industrial action, the strength of young people's voices, the new anti-racist movement, and the demands from the ranks for a bottom to top reorganisation of Labour. To make radical change in society it is required to make radical change in the organisations and movements that already exist. To that end the Labour Party Momentum current, the trade union contingents, sharing the anti-Tory demonstration and other radical events in Manchester, during the Tory Party conference, is a model of the alliance to be built.

But that is for the (perhaps) imminent future. A solid and coherent socialist perspective has not by any means yet won over society as a whole and May's speeches still need to be answered and challenged.

The points that May has raised needs to be examined honestly. She said that capitalism, despite its faults had, throughout its existence, changed the world and the lives of most of the world's population immensely for the better.  Her followers added that 'real socialism' had never been successful at any time in history. (They give the example of the China's Communist Party needing capitalism to improve the country's growth and increase its living standards.)

Leaving aside May's extreme exaggeration of the radicalism of Corbyn's programme as 'Marxist', her point about 'the regulated market' sounds like it might work. After all that is what Roosevelt did in the US, Attlee did in the UK etc. Social democracy was able, in the US in the 1930s and in the UK in the 1940s to regulate capitalism with positive results. (In reality May and her coterie demand a bonfire of all regulations 'hampering' capital.) But surely there has been tremendous human progress in periods of 'regulated' capitalism - as May pretends now to support?

History certainly proves the staggering, and up to now, unique energy and technical progress spawned by the capitalism system as it spread across the globe, transforming, as Marx remarked, every aspect of life. But despite the utopian visions of thinkers like Adam Smith, a fundamental characteristic of this new, live-wire system of society quickly emerged which also 'changed the whole world.' The capitalist machine, it turned out, depended entirely on exploitation. And its first act was to create a whole new social class, pulled gradually and then savagely away from a thousand different ways of life, as the bedrock of this exploitation, by turning work, like everything else, into a commodity to be bought and sold.

But capitalism is just another social system. No more, no less. It has been more dynamic in its technique than previous systems. Its purpose (despite all the magic processes that its academic supporters claim it produces for the benefit of all) is to create wealth for a tiny elite who own the means of production and therefore the exploitation of the bulk of the human race. Full stop. So exactly from where comes the undoubted and unique social and political advances that have taken place (and that are still taking place in some countries) under this social system of capitalism?

Besides its drama and speed and technical development it is also certainly possible also to describe the capitalist system as the most deadly and and traumatic social system since the initial civilisation of the human race. In turn it has framed Slavery, World Wars, the Holocaust etc. But it is also the first social system in the history of humanity to face its own creation. The exploited mass of the population subject the system to a virtually relentless pounding as a vast, relatively homogeneous, social class that, in its collectivity and its indispensability to the system, shock and even, from time to time, break-open the conditions of their own exploitation. All, every single example, of any substantial social and political progress that has been achieved under the capitalist system, including 1930s US and 40s UK, has been the result of this struggle of the exploited. Capitalism has created the greatest counter-force in the whole history of all previous class societies. Capitalism gave birth to a new vast majority with the opposite interests to those of its selfish, frightened parent.

The capitalist system is not benevolent. It is true that some people with vast riches can and do worry about the world - or their personal future status in heaven. They give charity. It is true that children's history books and films present the heroic roles of (mainly) white, leading men in the reforms that have been forced through. But schools and the vote and hospitals and welfare and leisure and an end to slavery and women's equal rights and housing and, and, and, were all fought for, sometimes with immense sacrifices, and won by millions of working class people and their organisations.

Yet every single inch of progress that the vast majority of working people have travelled across the centuries of capitalism remains insecure - for the simple reason that the exploited are not the ruling class. They are never allowed to control economics which is dominated by ownership. And even their hard won potential political 'control' (through fighting for and achieving the franchise in many countries) deserves to be in inverted commas for 99% of the time, as political life is dominated by those who rule economics!

The great successes of capitalism in the reform and improvement of society turn out to be the great successes of its opposite, against the grain, against the tide, against the basic mechanism of the social system that people live under. The exploited contradict the very society that created them.

If capitalism as a system therefore provides no substantial advantages to society, except those ripped from its rulers, what of the failure of socialism as a new system in the world; and what then of socialists requiring capitalism to improve their societies?  What should be made of the modern developments of capitalism in China?

First it is worth noting that the UN figures on the rise of living standards across the globe since the 1980s - always quoted by academics that cherish capitalism - is almost entirely caused by the dramatic movement of a half to two thirds of a billion Chinese people moving from the land to work in cities. That huge movement, on its own, substantially changes the whole world's picture of humanity's, of working class's material progress. In Europe and the US living standards are on average falling and have been since the 1980s in the case of the US. The West, from the point of view of the average living standards of the bulk of its population, is in decline. It is most dramatically obvious in the almost universal view across Europe (and the US) that the next generation will have a substantially lower standard of living than the current one.

Nevertheless, was it not the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party themselves that used capitalism, the capitalist system, to make a breakthrough in the living standards of millions? After all, millions of Chinese peasants were not battling to create cities or factories.

Does this vast shift in China, the single greatest forward shift in the standards of living in human history, prove the merits of the capitalist system? Such a tremendous event deserves at least some study.

The paradox is that China's huge 'advance' comes from out of the weakness of global capitalism. In another one of those spectacular contradictions of a system in turmoil, the decline of the world's greatest single capitalist power over the last 25 years created the very conditions for an underdeveloped, agriculturally based, minor economic power, hostile to the US, to develop the space for a state controlled, capitalist, expansion. US led imperialism began its global decay in Vietnam. By the 21st century the US's overblown military and its declining share of world trade crossed lines that were brutally exposed in Afghanistan and Iraq (and today in Syria and in its dealings with N. Korea.)

It is the continuing and expanding weakness of the world's main capitalist leadership the opened the door to the Chinese CP. The control of global finance, a key feature of successful Western imperialism for 100 years, has been partly redistributed in a complex and uncertain network. And it was the great international corporations in the West that forced down the West's own barriers to trade with China in their desperate greed for cheaper labour. China's second great leap forward, strictly under the control of a Chinese leadership, is a result of the decay of Western hegemony and perhaps of the capitalist global system as a whole.

The fundamental nature of Chinese society is also controversial. The successful grasp of capitalist development promoted by the Chinese CP has expanded and fertilised the association of China's regime with institutional corruption. But prior to the 1980's and 90's 'reforms' to develop a capitalist market, the Chinese CP had already long adopted the 'Stalinist' road. Many socialists outside China (and inside) already regarded the Chinese socialism as a failure. Therefore it was not at all the 'capitalist experiment' as such that defined China's government and state. It is clear even now that the capitalist market in China is wholly subordinate to the state and the Communist Party. The total absence of the representation of China's working classes in the centres of power - since the 1948 revolution - and the social turmoil that is today associated with the critical political and economic disasters in China often effecting the majority - all serve to demonstrate the consolidation of a state capitalist regime in China. (China has remained the country with the most social upheaval in the world, according to UN figures. It is followed by South Africa.)

Does the Chinese example therefore show that even a would-be 'communist' country needs capitalism? What is the relationship between socialism and capitalism - if there is any at all? And why has the resistance to - and the inroads driven into - world capitalism never actually resulted in the victory of a fully developed socialist system of society in any major developed country?

These three questions all depend in practise on the truth of the assertion that all countries that have tried socialism up to now have failed. The truth is that historical reality is only been able to give a partial answer to that allegation. (Some left organisations have claimed that all the conditions have been there for success - at least since 1917 - but a succession of wrong leaderships failed, betrayed and ultimately destroyed the socialist projects in their grasp. This explanation for the retreats and defeats that the socialist cause has faced across the world and across a century and a half seem at best partial and limited. Did the Paris Commune die through weak leadership? Were the Vietnamese leadership doomed to failure despite their world breaking success?)

Any objective study of the last 200 years however would need to start from the recognition of the immense triumphs of the exploited classes on a world scale that are visible, tangible and produced virtual miracles in their time. Since the days of the French revolution humanity has tried to find rational ways to order society in the interests of all - and that still remains the great unresolved issue of our time. But a virtually constant contest between the majority social classes and capitalist rule has made astonishing advances. (Amongst other things forcing the progress of technical advances made through capitalist enterprise.)

On the narrower plain of the supposed vulnerability of socialist societies to capitalism, it is valuable to note Lenin's practical approach in 1917. This was the early days of the Russian revolution and six years before the Soviet regime was forced to open up a capitalist market on the land.  Lenin tackled enthusiastic workers committees representatives that wanted to both manage and control their enterprises. He argued with them. Who knew how to operate the connections with the banks, organise transport requirements, how to draw in raw materials and how to make the accounts? He proposed a new type of apprenticeship where the workers' committees had overall control but would simultaneously take up an exercise in practical learning from those who knew and used the companies' systems. This was the dialectic of apprenticeship and control. In the event, War Communism shattered any medium or long term learning - as the White Russians and 17 imperial armies launched their counter-revolutionary blood-fest.

In Tsarist Russia Lenin could see two decisive new moments in the battle to win a new society based on working class leadership and majority rule; first from the way capitalism won economic dominance under the noses of a ruling feudalist, aristocracy with a God given monarch. In fact capitalist economic success inside non-capitalist regimes started in Italian banks during the Renaissance. Later it turned into the common route across the West and latterly Asia ultimately aiming towards the revolutions and wars that capitalism finally led to overthrow the old monarchical and feudal regimes. Lenin noted that this was the opposite to the means of establishing any socialist system. Socialism cannot spread its economic hegemony under a capitalist system. The socialist project depended first on the conquest of political power.

Second Lenin understood that in underdeveloped countries like Russia, progress in society would not pass through any long term 'capitalist stage' as the imperialist centres had done. The capitalist system, under imperialist control in these underdeveloped countries, was entirely happy to work alongside feudal power. Indeed they defended it against their own workers. Capitalism could happily live with, indeed promote, the 'ancien regime' while its economic system, dominated by the great empires in the West, would spread. Progress of any sort would not therefore come at all within capitalism. Lenin saw that only political and state power organised by the exploited, by workers supported by the peasant insurrection, could open the door to any chance of progress, and that would need to be in a socialist direction in Russia. Which, as demonstrated earlier, did not mean that capitalism could not be used if properly controlled in building a fresh economy in an underdeveloped nation.

It is speculation to imagine what would have become of Lenin's suggestions to the Worker's Committee representatives from Petrograd and Moscow's great factories. The working class, allied with a revolutionary peasantry, in control of a state power that's built democratically, learning the capitalist mechanisms for production, distribution and exchange; capitalism as a subordinate economic system, inside a would-be socialist society. Full of danger no doubt as Russia's later experiment opening up a market on the land (NEP) quickly exposed - as a new class of 'entrepreneurs' emerged with resources and their own self-seeking political objectives. But NEP was essential for survival; and in the end successfully controlled even by the battered early Soviet state.

How do these complex experiences reflect on the British Prime Minister's views of the merits of the capitalist system?

In the first place there is no evidence from history that the capitalist system, the free market, provided the slightest instance of social progress for capitalism's exploited classes. Every advance made by capitalism's exploited classes was wrung out of indirect or direct confrontation, industrial and political struggles, revolts, wars and revolutions, sometimes in desperate wars of survival; sometimes 'delivered' by political instruments that rested on the working class's support (for example the social democratic parties and trade unions.) The capitalist system in not neutral. It serves owners of Capital. Left to itself it serves no-one else.

Second, capitalism did not 'free' the world from feudal misery and slavery. On the contrary slavery was a 100 year economic platform for the British Empire's capital accumulation. It finally broke with slavery to defeat its competition. Slaves then had worse lives as labourers. In many underdeveloped countries with feudal type political and social rule, capitalism deliberately refreshed and promoted their savagery and backwardness (e.g. 'British' India.)

Third, every major effort to establish a socialist society, a society that can ensure the basic requirements of all within it, where economics is subordinate to the whole of societies' interests, has never come close to victory in any developed capitalist country. The desperate lives and misery created by the imperialist stage of the capitalist system in underdeveloped countries led and still leads to waves of revolutionary efforts to transform conditions. Lenin once commented that the revolution would succeed in such countries but socialism, which depends on a certain level of economic and social development, would be mastered there only with the greatest difficulty. Meanwhile, while a majority-led social revolution in developed countries would be immensely difficult, the road to building socialism would be easier.

What May does not understand is that the world and its people are only at the beginning of successfully challenging the capitalist system. This change in society will be the first in human history where the conscious efforts of millions of the exploited will be its engine - rather than the attractions of personal wealth or God's will, or any of the other ridiculous banners that litter history. May does not see that daily life is a struggle between the classes and that great gains have already been forced from a system that, left to its own devices, denies human security, is uninterested in a positive life for all and rejects the precedence of people over commodities. It is absurd to say that socialism does not work. Its preparatory work is all around us, every day. The final fruition of a socialist system overthrowing global capitalism, will take more time and be a continuous and enormous effort. But because of the immense technical advances of modern capitalism starting from its battles with feudalism and fermented by irrational competition (how many washing powders do you need?) it will be much faster than capitalism's centuries of preparation.