The Naive and the Cruel - The Ideological Struggle for the Heart of Europe

Part of the pro-European Union pitch relies on the promotion, mostly from Marxist intellectuals and fellow-travellers in the Academy, of a naïve anti-Atlanticist economic model which is designed to appeal to the younger generation. Needless to say, both the Atlanticist neo-liberal and this neo-socialist European model are deeply flawed but the latter is naïve where the former is cruel. Because the former is cruel, the latter becomes attractive and so it must be ripped apart by serious democratic socialists before it gets traction.

The two key issues neither side are addressing are a) the massive impending flow of refugees this year and possibly in subsequent years and b) the economic instability of the Eurozone in the context of a global slowdown not only in Europe but also in China and the US.

These people are not getting it – a perfect storm of an economic system on the edge and massive population shifts for which there has been no preparation does not lead to democratic socialism but to authoritarianism and national populism. And eventually to violence which can only be handled by the surveillance society (and not that either).

The only real solution is the restoration of flexible and responsive national democracies in a framework of internationalism (not supra-nationalism) in which democratic socialists (not neo-socialist liberals) restrain the forces of reaction and maintain ‘civilisation’ before returning to effective long term power and the rebuilding of the welfare commonwealth - and then perhaps returning to the construction of a new collaborative Europe from the ground up.

The economic projects of the European neo-socialists are doomed on massive welfare costs and the revolt of the Middle European middle classes from the taxation and inflation required. A system built on the assumption of constant high economic growth relying on cheap labour and minimal infrastructural investment has been called out by history. Eight years after the 2008 Crash, the reliance on the 'inevitable' up-turn looks more futile than ever. There will eventually be a massive structural up-turn on technological innovation (biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI/robotics) but it will be fiercesomely disruptive and our elites are simple not competent enough to handle it.

Even if they get into power, like the French Popular Front in 1936, our backwards-looking soft Left will be out of it within a year or two. The logic that destroyed Tsipras still exists within the European Project and Varoufakis can appear on TED as many times as he likes with his 'alternative strategy' but it is little more than the same old intellectual failure re-packaged for dim-witted liberals.

Worse, this is not the way to help the refugees or the working population most threatened by break down. Both deserve better - they deserve realists and not idealists, a political class prepared to get stuck in and bring peace to troubled regions, fund reconstruction for destroyed territories, turning camps into viable townships where return is not possible. We must match migration aspirations to labour shortages and not rely on spurious human rights claims and the demand for ever cheaper labour to feed the maw of late capitalism. Liberal internationalist idealism (as opposed to democratic socialist internationalism), the deontological impulse of the cultural studies departments, is at the very root of the murder and mayhem we see across the peripheries of the West.

The liberal idealists who now sit, like Cnut before the waves, at the leading edge of European 'socialism' are worse than simply naive, they are potentially destructive in that naivete, part of a failed elite instead of the vanguard of a new democratic socialist political elite (there I have said it) that will transform the condition of the people under conditions of democracy, technological innovation and socio-economic redistribution within an internationalism of free democratic welfare states.

Labour In Europe - Re-framing Internationalism as Liberal Imperialism

Much could be said about the framing of the Brexit Debate. Perhaps I will come back to this again later - especially on the deliberate confusion of being pro-European and pro-European Union - but in this posting I want to look at the reframing of internationalism by Labour In Europe.

Labour in Europe frames itself as internationalist and anti-nationalist and then associates resistance to the Project as radical nationalist and so fascist. In my earlier posting, I pointed out that this resulted in a strongly implied slur on me at one point in one of their local party presentations - only partially withdrawn, This is disgraceful but to be expected and, as I say there, not helped by some of the idiotic rhetoric of right-wing troglodytes.

In fact, democratic socialist internationalism presupposes the existence of free democratic nation states which collaborate INTER-nationally. What pseudo-democratic Leftists have done is to re-frame the debate so that supra-nationalism (that is something ABOVE nations, creating a SUPER-NATION) becomes, falsely, internationalism.

This is lie and a blatant one. A world of giant imperial SUPERSTATES (the US, the EU, Russia, China and India) is not a world of free democratic nations but is a world of competing empires in which the nations within them act within rules set by the imperial elites in their own interest. The result is the paradox that such supra-nationalism encourages nationalism as we see in the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party in the United Kingdom and of various forms of national populism within the European Union (or should we say Empire). Those elites are always trying to manage the aspirations of the population instead of understanding them and, then, through engagement and political education, sharing in their fulfilment.

In this context, much is at stake for the British people - that is, to whom we will be subject. The last vestiges of a British Empire small enough to be reformed radically by the exercise of our own democratic political will or a massive European Empire whose very complexity strengthens the hold of its imperial elite over the levers of power.

We should not be surprised that the representatives of these imperial elites at the European level would use any means to retain and expand their power through half-truths, yes, but also through threats such as those we are currently receiving from President Hollande of France. Even an old Etonian like Darius Guppy has castigated Boris Johnson in the Spectator for not seeing that this struggle is one of national self-determination in the face of international capital. If one of the old elite can get it, surely Leftists can!

I would like to think that not all British Leftists are so pusillanimous that they will not question the claims of Labour in Europe and come to their own conclusions based on a careful analysis of the actual consequences to democracy and the economy of the Stay proposal. Recent experience has made me ... pessimistic.

The Labour Party and Its Culture of Pessimism

I saw a smidgeon, but only a smidgeon, of what Iain Duncan Smith has recently been talking about (‘bullying and threats’ from the anti-Brexit campaign) at our local Labour Party this week. I do not want to get this out of proportion. Our local Party is represented by a really decent and civilised group of people who generally treat each other with respect and courtesy. The 'bullying' (such as it was) came from an outsider. It should also be said that some of the grassroots supporters of Brexit on the Right are far more vicious in their own presentation of their case than their opponents and that these Brexit Tweeters lose votes every time they lift their malign little fingers. However, I would have expected far more from the official representative of Labour's campaign to remain within Europe.

I am not interested in naming names. It may just have been an 'off night' but the pro-European Union speaker (there was no representative of the countervailing case) directed comments at the only eurosceptic in the village (me!) which overtly associated my position with that of fascists like Nick Griffin. This was unacceptable and recognised to be unacceptable (he apologised for the 'offence' but not the misrepresenting claim) but a lot of half-truths and claims remained unchallenged and on the record. That's fine up to a point - after all, the party apparat is using a conference decision to claim priority for the pro-European case. This gives it carte blanche, one supposes, to walk all over those of us with a more nuanced vision of democratic socialism and a healthy distrust of Delorsian promises that have not been delivered, are not being delivering and will not be delivered.

It was conveniently not mentioned that the speaker might as equally be associated with Goldman Sachs as I am apparently associated with extreme nationalists but let that pass. Although (to his credit) he came clean about his presumably paid position at The European Parliament, it would also have been nice to have someone represent the Stay Campaign who did not have such an obvious professional interest in the result.

Regardless of all that, my political position was redundant. Not only was there no speaker for the alternative case (which is fine), I was not given the chance to respond to the implied slurs on my character (which was not). I did not expect to be allowed to challenge the misrepresentation and half-truths of the campaign itself and indeed had made that clear but I did think it reasonable that the specific charge of association with nationalistic fascism be refuted (the Chair failed at this point). Whatever! The membership seem totally sold on the European Project regardless of anything that I might have said in any reasoned way. Further intervention on my part would have been useless. I just disliked being treated like that by a 'comrade' who had been placed in a superior position by the decision of the Executive Committee ... if I was not such a tough nut, I think I might reasonably call that 'bullying'. Nor am I alone in this from reports in other parts of the country. It may raise questions for many people whether this liberal internationalist and European Socialist Party is really their natural home but I think that assessment comes later.

I walked away that evening very much more aware of the determination and resources of the soft left machine behind Stay within the Labour Party (with its very glossy and well produced brochure), of the risks that the Party is taking in its potential alienation from its historic working class base (not only on this matter but on the refugee crisis), of the dominance of the left-liberal (rather than democratic socialist) component of the Party and of the lack of fairness and tolerance towards other voices on this issue on the grounds that it was 'party policy'. This reproduces the mentality of past Labour top-down authoritarianism if worn with a relatively velvet glove.

Further reflection has also made realise just how much the party machine is broken in terms of its responsiveness to the twin needs of mobilising and engaging new members and creating a machinery for political education that can act as a transmission belt between the wider population and the 'avant-garde' of party thinking. Again, do not get me wrong - the local Party is friendly, vigorous in its own way, and making serious attempts to professionalise its approach to the electorate. There was an excellent local election policy statement developed by a leading member, albeit one that threatened to be turned into a curate's egg by its need to satisfy the standard liberal-left posturing on some issues.

But rules (which, of course, members can do nothing about) that mean that a member only gets a CLP vote when they go through the palaver of attending a branch meeting and getting elected as a 'delegate', and the way that these delegates are forced into supporting branch resolutions created in meetings which they could not attend, means that many new members sit at the CLP as observers rather than participants, delegates lose an important degree of autonomy in discussing policy and the processes are excessively manipulable by the sort of activist who can give up time at the convenience of the party calendar.  Small branches can also be out-manouevred by the effective organisation of large branches instead of being in the position of persuading the members as a whole on the merits of a case.  Surely members themselves should feel free in their own right to bring up resolutions if they can get sufficient support from other members.

Of course, to be fair, the branch activists are also the ones who organise the machinery that gets candidates into office and so perhaps should have some additional rights but the balance strikes me as wrong. The sort of party reform that has been batted around since the mid-1990s is long over due. It is good to hear that Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, is looking into this and, indeed, according to reports, is giving special attention to the digital issue which includes the particular problem of the possible disenfranchisement of those who do not have digital access. These are complex issues with no easy answers but at least there seems to be some intent to grapple with them under the new Leadership team.

In my own case, as a result of the manner in which the meeting was held this week, I came to a decision that I could not face our local electorate (as requested) in May under conditions where I might be misrepresented as supportive of the European Project simply by virtue of being a Labour candidate and so I withdrew.  Six months of engagement in the Party has started to make me feel uncomfortable on other grounds. The bottom line was that I could see that taking on UKIP in a strongly working class area would be almost impossible under such circumstances making me, suddenly, a pessimist which is not what I want to be - and life is short!

The Party's own aggressive stance on Europe had simply made me more determined than ever to stand for non-fascist and non-racist democratic socialists' argument for Leave and to give that struggle absolute priority, to the exclusion of every other political project, over the next four months. The national pessimism about May seems to have become infectious. I have caught the disease so that saving the nation from supra-nationalism in the greater interests of its working people in the long run suddenly seems so much more important than maintaining the illusory dreams of the jobsworths in the European Parliament. This does not mean that the Labour Party and Labour Movement are not to be supported as the primary voice for progressive politics in the United Kingdom (quite the contrary - they are, sadly, the only voice left!) but it does mean that the support should not be as unconditional as it once was in the days of tribal politics.

As I see it, the Labour Party at the moment has become mired in a 'culture of pessimism' as a result of the disastrous Blair-Brown legacy, the failure in the 2015 Election and the prospect of losing millions of pounds because of some particularly self-interested and vicious Tory legislation. Spend time with any activists working at a national level and they are excessively pessimistic about the prospects for their own Party. They are excessively pessimistic about their own Leadership in many cases. They are certainly ridiculously pessimistic about the opportunities to continue the democratisation and transformation of our own nation. As a result, this culture of pessimism has grabbed hold of an utterly undemocratic belief (for it is a belief) that a Social Europe can do the job that the Party cannot do domestically. This is added to a romantic idealism in which internationalism is reframed as supranationalism, democracy as platonic bureaucratism and the genuine cultural concerns of the working class as proto-fascism.  In other words, these liberal idealists would prefer a bureaucratic Europe to impose their values on the British people rather than persuade the British people to adopt those values itself.  That is not the democratic way and yet what has distinguished the Left in Britain since the days of the Chartists has been its commitment to democracy.

Brexit, Incommensurable World Views and the Failure of the Left

The articulate cases put in our major newspapers by various Tory Ministers on both sides of the European Referendum Leave/Stay debate seem to come down to two incommensurable world views. Either one is a 'homo economicus' (a member of a nation of shopkeepers as Napoleon put it) or we are 'free born Englishmen and women' (the Celts having sold the pass a long time ago).

In the latter case, it is accepted that the defence of freedom and democracy may have 'costs' (though even this is, as yet, unproven). The first [Stay] tries to present the second [Leave] as irrational but the second could equally present the first as short term thinkers who do not understand the degree to which long term prosperity depends on freedom and democracy.

Leave tries to present Stay as deeply limited in its world view (which is not difficult to do) but perhaps has not understood that people are concerned with economic issues because they feel vulnerable. They want 'protection'. They will often prefer to be happy slaves than struggling free peoples. Cameron is playing all this up by linking the economic arguments with highly spurious national security arguments - his pitch is fear in a population who have had no political education since the days of Wilson. Fear is not second to pride as a motivation for political action.

My own instinct is that, partly because of the depressing cowardice of the new Labour Leadership in this matter (which otherwise I support) and the opportunism of Liberals and the Labour Right, the argument for freedom will be lost in a frightened and dangerous run to the new 'mummy' in Brussels.

We Leave people might despise this cowardice and ignorance but our side have to take responsibility for not offering sufficient arguments for security well in advance. In fact, nothing could be more insecure than the floundering European Empire and nothing will be more costly than the bailouts and bribes we will be finagled into once the vote is secured.

Nearly everything Cameron has negotiated is highly contingent, Almost everything could be whittled away without recourse after a Stay vote. The majority of the English working class could certainly find themselves having been sold down the river by their own middle classes and the non-English elements in society, creating the opportunity for populist enmity in the future. For, be in no doubt, the passionate concern for national sovereign identity will not go away but will turn further to the Right after a lost vote and wait until the first economic crisis that has European origins to make its move.

The Official Left's role in this is most disturbing. With sterling exceptions (CAEF, some trades unions and MPs and Labour Leave), it has placed dreamy idealistic notions of a potential Social Europe ahead of the evidenced harsh reality of a proto-super state that will always be run by middle class Germans and their allies - as the fate of Greece demonstrated. Greek Leftists were naive and so are ours. Forgetting what happened in Greece so soon is a staggering amnesia.

Worse, the Left once represented radical democracy and the freedom to struggle for radical change (as Tony Benn often adumbrated) but it is as if it has just given up completely on popular struggle and has turned to well meaning bureaucrats and activists to deliver social reforms. That is exceptionally naive about power and turns the Left into little more than courtiers at the modern Versailles. Or is it kneeling peasants calling for justice from Confucian Mandarins?
 
It is the stupidity of the Official Left combined with its utter pusillanimity in the face of capital that strikes me as the most dreadful legacy of the Blairite years. With a Stay vote, the Labour Party may soon have no other purpose than that of fiddling at the margins of politics to ensure reforms beneficial to its current rump voters and activists rather than the people of Britain as a whole. It would be the final stage of its transformation into a weak version of the American Democrat Party and all the more tragic that it should take place under the watch of the so-called Hard Left.

Text of Presentation at the TEAM EU Counter Summit London, November 7th, 2015

I am on the Advisory Board of the Democracy Movement which is a long standing critic of the anti-democratic nature of the European Union and I attended the first meeting of the Leave.EU Advisory Board last month. This was a contribution to the discussion on the coming British Referendum of whether or not to leave the European Union which was held at a useful one day Summit [1] convened by TEAM [The European Alliance of Euro-Critical Movements] on Saturday. 

First of all, I must make clear that, today, I am speaking for the Democracy Movement and not for Leave.EU. The difference is important as I shall make clear. 

I am going to try and do three things in the limited time at my disposal and I will welcome questions later.

First, I want to inform you of what the Democracy Movement is doing in the great cause and re-cap a little on its history to explain how it has got to where it is.

Second, I want to give my impressions of what Leave.EU, one of no less than two [major] euro-realist or euro-sceptic organisations that have emerged in recent weeks and months, is and why I think it is potentially very important.

Third, I want to thread the two themes together as I speak and show why the Democracy Movement is minded to support Leave.Eu while not yet having made its absolutely final decision although it is a decision expected very soon.

I cannot emphasise enough that not only DM but Leave.EU and the socialist and democratic organisations operating in this space consider themselves internationalists and true Europeans.

To be a true European is to stand for democracy and the self-determination of the European peoples collaborating as nation-states on equal terms. This is the legacy of the European Enlightenment and is also resolutely anti-imperialist.

This commitment to being European but firmly against the European Union is something that must be stated again and again in British contexts because the lie being perpetrated about the ‘leave’ camp is that it is anti-European, xenophobic or ‘little Englander’ (a very useful lie when mobilising our Celtic brothers and sisters). [2] 

Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the modern British Eurosceptic craves a deeper and firmer cultural connection with Europeans.

What he or she will not accept is being dictated to by Eurocrats when we have a perfectly good sovereign Parliament and ancient liberties at home.

I will go further and say that, while some Eurosceptics are stuck in the old Atlanticist model, the modern British Eurosceptic is very much an internationalist at a much more global level.

If he is a Eurosceptic of the Left, he wants to ensure that global trade and Western power are used to better the lives of the vast majority of humanity that still lives in dire conditions across the world.

If she is a Eurosceptic of the Right, the emphasis may be on global trade and the betterment of humanity through that means.

Both Right and Left will disagree profoundly on means and, in some respects, ends but what they have in common is that freedom can only be offered by example, by a free people freely determining its laws through sovereign institutions.

Having given that cultural background, let me move on to the Democracy Movement which has one of the longest continuous records as defender of national sovereignty from a non-partisan point of view in this country.

It was founded as all-party, as the voice of those who wanted to have the risks to democracy of technocracy brought to public notice. Over subsequent decades it came to link traditional right of centre concerns about the European Union with those of the Left.

It was central to the creation of the People’s Pledge, a non-partisan movement which included both Euro-sceptics and Euro-philes, which demanded and got a Referendum – something the elite of our country would happily have denied us.

Tony Blair himself clearly loathed the very idea of the people making a choice for themselves about the future destiny within the European Union.

He said in his Durham constituency in April: “Think of the chaos produced by the possibility, never mind the reality, of Britain quitting Europe.” 

Well, I see no chaos in the streets or the markets but I am too polite to endorse Boris Johnson’s assertion that Blair was an ‘epic, patronising tosser’ for making his remarks.

The point is that the Democracy Movement and People’s Pledge helped to make a Referendum happen against the massed ranks of the old elite. Now that the Referendum is assured, we will see the same determination to see the matter through to final victory – to leave, leave, LEAVE!

The strategy of the Democracy Movement in recent months has been to husband its resources which include its substantial mailing list and campaigning experience and ensure that those resources are used correctly and to maximum effect when the time comes.

This is an asset that must not be wasted and the activists on its lists must be treated with the utmost respect as fellow soldiers in a shared battle.

But the most important aspect of DM (to use its shortened acronym) is that it has long acted as clearing house for contacts between otherwise mutually suspicious Left and Right Euro-sceptics. This now becomes invaluable in ensuring that the two wings remain united as we get closer to the vote.

The obvious tactic of the Eurocrats is to try to set Left and Right Eurosceptics off against each other in the street.  This must not be allowed to happen. 

For the Eurocrats, given their base-line of centre-right, State and big business support for the pro-European position, the game is to silence the Left and have the old pre-Corbyn elite of the Labour Movement and the Labour Party speak as one voice for the European Union.

But it is not going to happen like that for a number of reasons.

The first is that the numbers of Euro-sceptical left-wingers are much higher than the mainstream Press would like you to believe. They have simply been overwhelmed [in the past] by the group-think of those who purport to speak for them. They simply need leadership and to know they are not alone.

Some became frustrated enough that they drifted across to so-called ‘Red UKIP’ as working class people who felt their concerns were not being addressed by New Labour.

I am reliably informed that many of these people – who are not racists or xenophobes – are now going home to Labour with the arrival of a new Leader, in Jeremy Corbyn, who is clearly more open to the concerns of working people and to open debate on difficult issues such as Europe, TRIDENT and even migration.

However, I am not here to speak of the Left since our Chairman, John Boyd, and Brian Denny of CAEF can do so with more authority than I can.

The Democracy Movement has, however, been helping to prepare the ground for a resurgence of Left Euroscepticism in very difficult times and now the Left can be assured that they are not alone and need not be embarrassed (or as little as possible) by the more rabid nationalist elements on the Right who can sometimes lose more votes than they secure in British contexts.

I am personally very much of the Left with a long track record of activist organisation in the Labour Movement. My long two decades or more association with DM has caused me no problems whatsoever.

There are issues, of course. This is politics. Many on the Left will not sit on a platform with some on the Right. Democratic socialists will not always sit with democratic nationalists but issues like TTIP, the incompetence of the European External Action Service in Ukraine (which has exposed the lie of the European Union as instrument of peace) and the appalling treatment of the Greek people are bringing activists together for this critical vote.

Without a functioning representative democracy answerable to the people, a people with a common history and struggle, there is no opportunity for Left and Right to contest a constitutional space if the only constitutional space available is one dictated by lawyers and technocrats.

Which leads to the final independent initiative of DM alongside maintaining its campaigning asset and increasing understanding between Left and Right democrats –the promotion of the ideal of democracy itself.

What happened in Greece and is now happening in Portugal is a sharp reminder that we are faced by a post-modern Imperial Power that hides its brute corporatist economic force under a velvet glove of liberal ideology.

DM is actively pulling together a second wave of British groups on the theme of national sovereign democracy. These are wholly committed to a ‘leave’ vote when it comes.

Now, at last, let me speak of Leave.EU. As you know there are two ‘leave’ organisations in Britain. I can characterise ‘Leave.EU’ as the mass-orientated one that seeks to mobilise the street to reach the people who really matter here, the voters.

The other ‘camp’, originated by Business For Britain, is a far more elite operation dominated by Members of Parliament of all parties and conservative business interests.

My own view is that there is room for both. Although they may be rivals for funding and attention, there is room for the elite and the mass to have their own organisations.  I see no virtue in public quarrels.

We are on the cusp of a major change in politics where power shifts from the old elite politics to the new politics represented by the power of social media and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

The radical new politics straddles party lines – Labour’s Tom Watson is matched by the Tory Zac Goldsmith – and both Douglas Carswell and the Bennite Left see the Levellers, the radicals of the old English Republic, as part of their inheritance.

Yet the old politics still has strong residual power. Some people will still be persuaded to their position by the leadership role of ‘big beasts’. The elite is still part of the game.

So which way will DM jump?

Leave.EU is much closer to the new politics model and DM was a pioneer of this approach. DM shares with Leave.EU a belief in the ultimate wisdom of the people and the need to communicate with them in a two-way dialogue. 

Although no final commitment has been made (since DM, perfectly reasonably, wants to know that its carefully acquired campaigning asset will be managed appropriately and effectively) DM, like so many radical democratic organisations in this country, is minded to give its wholehearted commitment to Leave.EU at the right time.

At some stage, the Eurosceptical arguments are going to have to be put to the people within the funding and other restrictions of the Electoral Commission.

We trust this body. It is not partisan. In our judgment, faced with an elite or a mass offer where the latter has a significant track record of campaigning over decades, it must, if it is to be fair, go with the people and not the big beasts. 

But what I personally like about Leave.EU is that it is not allowing itself to be the rabbit in the headlights of officialdom and not relying on that outcome.

It knows that the pro-European Union lobby has been planning its campaigning for years, has accumulated massive resources and will have the same devious forces working for it as those who stole the first Referendum vote in 1975.

There is no advantage in hanging around until everything is perfect. Battle must be joined sooner rather than later. Leave.EU has simply decided to by-pass the old system of what it calls the ‘Westminster bubble’ and go into the struggle regardless. And we think that is entirely the right strategy.

Notes

[1] Delegates included, in addition to the host nation, Danes, Germans, Greeks, Irish, Norwegians and Slovenians amongst others with a supportive statement from Austria.

[2] A question from the floor by an Irish member of the international delegations raised the point that many of our Celtic brothers and sisters would not mind so much a 'Little Englander' approach if it meant that the people of England would free themselves of an imperial mind-set and commit to their own self-determination alongside that of the peoples of Eire, Wales and Scotland. However, the point stands because, in an English context, the phrase is used by critics of the 'leave' campaign to suggest that their opponents have no understanding or empathy with European culture. Having just finished reading a short story about hope under conditions of institutionalisation by Wolfgang Borchert written in 1947 just before writing this note, I am confident that we can argue that it is our love of Europe and European culture that makes us determined to resist its bureaucratisation, corporatisation and institutionalisation.

The Failures of Liberal Internationalism - Cooper Two Decades On

One of my more curious intellectual habits is to avoid reading contemporary work by public intellectuals and prefer instead to study material written two or so decades ago. This may seem perverse but experience has taught me that anyone writing in the now is usually promoting an opinion based on limited information whereas something written in the recent past can be tested against subsequent events, giving insights that would not otherwise be available. Many of my book reviews of this type can be read on my Goodreads account.

Clearing out some old boxes, I found the files relating to my time launching Demos, the 'modernising' centre-left think tank, back in the mid-1990s. I broke with it quite quickly though amicably. It was part of the post-Soviet move of revisionist Marxists into what would soon become Blairism whereas I was a non-ideological traditional English socialist more concerned with ancient liberties than theory. It was an era of struggles over who would own the 'Moscow Gold', of desperation by the political Left in its search for power and of intellectual confusion.  Strange alliances were formed and old political relationships collapsed. Elements in the State attached themselves to new anti-conservative forces and old revolutionaries started their trajectory towards the moderated neo-liberalism that was to fail us in 2008 and is still thrashing around today, like a dinosaur whose wounds have not yet reached the brain as signals of its doom.

Demos produced a journal and a number of pamphlets, one of which, nearly two decades old now, was a short 50-page booklet by a diplomat, Robert Cooper, Head of the Policy Planning Staff at the FCO. This latter tells us a great deal about the mental map that was to influence the social democratic elite who surrounded Blair and who would be found in such places as Chatham House, in corporations like BP and in Government - a road map for what would be Blairite foreign policy, if you like. That foreign policy would be characterised in Blair's 1999 Chicago Speech as a duty of intervention in the world, one that was to unravel the Westphalian system that had been re-instituted in 1945, and which would lead ineluctably, sixteen years later, to a situation where the entire periphery of the European West would come to be in a state of financial and insurgent chaos. That chaos is being brought, through uncontrollable mass migration and organised crime, into the very heart of Europe.

Cooper's work, in retrospect, helps us to understand how things went so horribly wrong because the mental mapping in that pamphlet [1] gives us a plausible but ultimately flawed vision of international relations. We realists found it impossible to counter at the time because the almost faith-based commitment to idealism seemed so much nicer than what we had to offer. It was a shame, I suppose, that history proved us right. Thinkers like Cooper were able to add a theoretical rationale for emotional impulses about the ethical that provided what the idealists wanted to hear. It was a way of seeing that drove all before it and might equally be exemplified by the work of Michael Ignatieff who was explicit in his attack on the Westphalian presumptions of the past in his debate over intervention in Kosovo against Robert Skidelsky in 1999 [2].

The intellectual flaw in Cooper's work begins with the title - the assumption of something called post-modernity as a really existing permanent feature of the political landscape. This flaw derived from an oddity in intellectual thought at the time, a convergence of revisionist left-wing Hegelianism seeking a way out of the problem of Soviet collapse and a right-wing Hegelianism, derived perhaps from Kojeve, that was looking to the European Project as the natural means of assuring peace and security through ending both nationalism and socialism. Later, liberal internationalism would find itself in bed with a darker force in Schmittian neo-conservatism and then entangled with the radical 'detournement' of Trotskyism as a radical war on the same forces that disturbed the liberals - but that is a few years in the future. At this point, around 1996, before New Labour was in power and while the dodgy triangulation of Clintonism provided little more to inspire than a sort of well meaning realism with liberal rhetorical characteristics, the new politics, driven from London, emerged. It was a combination of liberal bureaucratism and the desperate desire of the official Left to reinvent itself for a post-Soviet and post-Thatcherite world. It would be neo-liberalism with a human face, perhaps as absurd and as kind an intention as Dubcek's illusion of communism with a happy smile.

Cooper's global model was simple but now seems simplistic. But simple models can concentrate the mind so long as they are critiqued against not only the facts but future possibilities. However, a naive political class did not take these theories as hypotheses to test but as articles of faith. They met certain political needs that could bind their alliance of unions, activists and liberals and make their idealism acceptable to the technocrats, progressives and bureaucrats of the State mechanism. Once the hypothesis had passed from theory to ideology and had proven effective in the acquisition of power, there was no turning back to criticism against the facts - an ideology then governed our relationship to the international community that was as irrational (though logical on its base assumptions) as national socialism in the 1930s or international socialism under the Comintern.

The central thesis was of an international system that was ringed like an onion - with pre-modern, modern and post-modern structures co-existing and requiring different ideologies of action in the relationships between them. The post-Marxist progressive model was implicitly Hegelian from the beginning - recall Fukuyama's now increasingly absurd notion of the 'end of history' which had appeared in 1992. There was no awareness of the future re-balancing of the world that would create new Powers even though there were many reasons to predict this on the facts to hand. Nor did anyone outside the PNAC neo-cons see the relative decline of old Powers (although, to be fair, Martin Jacques of Demos was always an advocate of the rise of China long before it was fashionable). Nor did anyone seem to see the possibility of a major economic crisis (as we have seen in 2008) despite the history of capitalism being a series of lurches involving bouts of creative destruction. Nor the effects of peripheral political collapse creating problems for the progressive heartlands. Yet all of these should have been understood as possibilities from a basic understanding of the history of capitalism and of past empires.

Instead, we were offered what amounted to a dream of never-ending economic (no awareness of massive indebtedness and criminal intergenerational transfers of wealth from the future to the present) and bureaucratic progress as well as the illusion of a secure democracy with no possible threats to it because the power of the radical centre was too firmly embedded in a network of activist representative bodies, corporate lobbyists, barely accountable state servants and self-appointing political elites. Given this failure of imagination, Cooper's world looks shaky but let us review it on its own terms.

The inner post-modern ring was represented by the progressive abandonment of national sovereignty to sets of supranational institutions (with minimal democratic accountability), based on rules and procedures, of which the European Union and NATO were the centre-pieces. The proposition was put forward that giving up sovereignty was the reasonable price to be paid for the security and prosperity of a post-modern West in which individuals had free-floating identities that were no longer localised, no longer feared such impositions as conscription and could leave governance to experts. The European Union would not, in fact, be a super-state so much as a transnational set of rules and regulations to which all civilised people would adhere, much like the ideal of the old Roman Empire perhaps. We might see TTP and TTIP as examples of this system in operation in the near future where democratic bodies no longer can make any decisions in areas of trade because the rules and regulations of a trans-national system make the rules for them. Contemporary European officials no longer even try to hide their disinterest in democracy which they associate with populism and ignorance. The road to that anti-democratic position was laid two decades ago.

The second ring of the system was the remaining Westphalian system of powers outside the post-modern world of the Atlantic system, the European Union and NATO. There is no doubt that these powers were seen as second order powers representing potential threats and that, therefore, there was no more 'Mr. Nice Guy' as soon as the borders of the imperium were reached. Liberal idealism existed within the Empire but realism was directed at the states that were not in the Empire because that is all they understood. Russia was, in 1996, effectively a defeated second rank state and China was nowhere near the economic arbiter it is today so the logic of the situation was to ensure that the centre held the biggest stick and beat any recalcitrant states into line from a position of superior power. This is the road that led from Blair's Chicago Speech to the imbroglio in Iraq within four years and has lead to a trail of destruction from North Africa through Greater Syria to Central Asia before and since. However, the weaker states of the second rank have proved not only that they can stand up to the West but that they are quite capable of creating a rival Empire in response to what has often amounted to patronising passive-aggressive bullying (the SCO) and of undertaking missions both to resist Western claims (Ukraine) and to resolve international problems (Syria) with more effectiveness than the confused post-modern bureaucrats in Brussels, London and Berlin (and Washington).

The final ring of the system was positioned as pre-modern with a somewhat patrician neo-colonialist stance that reminds one of the rhetoric about the 'heart of darkness'. This was the world of so-called failed states. Cooper was clear, to his credit (as would be Ignatieff) that intervention in this space should be limited to not only what was right but what was feasible. Unfortunately, the genie was let out of the bottle here - or would it be better to say that Pandora's Box was opened. The rational bureaucratic approach to an interventionary approach that was really liberal Imperialism by Nice People was obviated almost immediately by two factors. The first was that 'post-moderrn' democracy gave a voice to irrational and half-educated populations led by media and NGOs who demanded (or resisted) imperial actions. This instigated half-baked actions in which the spin and manipulation destroyed any trust in the good will of the people undertaking them. The second was that the interventionary approach was hijacked by some Not So Nice People in Washington with an ideological and economic motive for selective regime destruction: again, the post-modern bureaucrats lost trust because they preferred to associate with a powerful devil and compromise on their values rather than turn back from the brink. The fall of New Labour took time but it lies not only in economic failures but a failure to understand that it was no longer trusted to administer a system that had failed at this level of national security.

So, at every level, the new world order proposed in different forms by liberal internationalists and neo-conservatives alike collapsed on a poor reading of reality. It was a faith-based system that failed to ask fundamental questions about whether post-modern politics was viable and whether the Westphalian system was, in fact, over. But, if the Westphalian system was over, it meant the extension of the pre-modern (to use Cooper's mode) sphere of influence rather than the second order eventual integration into a global post-modern system led by the West. The Westphalian elements have reasserted their status as sovereign powers outside the 'post-modern world' (and we must never forget that the US never actually bought into this theoretical model which was a British and European conceit) while some of those within the post-modern system (Greeks, British, various national populists, Hungarians) are beginning to pine for the old ways already. Meanwhile, the pre-modern has not remained on the periphery but has begun to by-pass the modern Powers and affect, indeed infect, the post-modern system through mass and uncontrollable migration, economic degeneration and, above all, organised criminal networks accumulating significant capital at a phenomenal rate.

The entire Cooper system is hanging by a thread ... it is only bureaucrats with a fixed ideology and false confidence in their own control over the levers of power who persist in believing that everything will turn out for the best as crisis after crisis hits the core system. The European Union blundered in Ukraine and caused the gravest security crisis in modern times. It and indeed the US have proved themselves totally ineffective in dealing with serious security threats in Greater Syria. 'Modern' allies are beginning to make their own own arrangements and hedging their bets in dialogue with the rising rival powers. The cohesion of the European Union is threatened by an appalling anti-democratic intervention in Greece and the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants without adequate planning or a coherent policy. Above all, 'post-modernity' has meant that millions of people no longer trust their rulers, whether politician or bureaucrat. They have no intention of being guided by them into post-modern policy decisions. If anything, increasing numbers are pining openly for a return of variants of national sovereignty and of socialism in a way simply incomprehensible to the generation that came to power in the 1990s. Worse (from the perspective of career diplomats like Cooper who retained a strong sense of realism in 1996), the discussion of international relations is increasingly led by ineffectual and counter-productive liberal idealists who seem to be blind to the economic consequences of patronising non-European powers and to the domestic political consequences of migration and job losses arising from globalist idealism.

It is, in short, a mess. Mr. Cooper is certainly not to blame for that mess. He simply put forward a thesis for discussion and criticism, a model for exploration. How could he possibly have known that his ideas and those of people like him would be taken up by people of lesser intellect and more cunning whose purposes would be divided between their short term hunger for domestic office and a narcissistic desire to paint the global canvas with their mythologies. Somehow, I suggest, we are going to have to start all over again ...

[1] Robert Cooper, 'The Post-Modern State and the World Order' (Demos, 1996)

[2] The somewhat acrimonious debate between Skidelsky and Ignatieff took place as a series of letters published in Prospect, then a significant intellectual liberal-left journal, in early May 1999. It can be read in full in Ignatieff's 'Virtual War' (London 2000). In the exchange, Skidelsky (though I happen to think he was to be proved right) argues less ably than the impassioned but disciplined Ignatieff who had all the moral passion of someone who had seen the Kosovan refugee camps at first hand. All the fervour of the 'something must be done' school of liberal politics faced arguments that lacked force because they could not jump out of the box of liberal conventionalism to speak in consequentialist terms of the probable harms of action undertaken without adequate planning, preparation and commitment. Every intervention that took place after Kosovo compounded this central fault within liberal internationalism that it acted first and thought second, without being able to rely on the mobilisation of total war to ensure that every act could be followed through and history be firmly written according to the dictates of the victors.

Shifting Position - On Rejoining the Labour Party

Two weeks ago, I decided to rejoin the Labour Party, I had left the Party in 2004 in growing disgust at the 'imperial' expansion by force of allegedly liberal values and the lack of progress in building a case with the public for a moderate and sensible democratic socialism in one country able to collaborate constructively with socialists, democratic socialists and liberals elsewhere in the world.

As recently as May of this year, I produced a fairly blunt analysis of why Labour had failed to win the 2015 General Election. This turned out to be one of my most widely circulated posts. Only last month I gave a similarly pessimistic view of politics under the two 'bourgeois' factions of one centrist liberal and increasingly culturally totalitarian 'National Party'. This latter piece had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the importance (to me) of transparency - I wanted readers to know where my biases and prejudices came from so that they could winnow them out when taking what they could from my work. Unusually, I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything. All I am trying to do is to get my readers to think for themselves and challenge their own assumptions as they challenge mine.

Last month, I hinted that I could rejoin the Labour Party but I was pessimistic: " ... the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? ... The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)"  

Because of that pessimism, I declined to do what I considered to be dishonourable and send in my £3 to join a bandwagon, vote for Jezza and then claim to be one of the faithful. What I underestimated was not only the level of discontent within the Party (whose activists I had prematurely dismissed as variants of Orwell's cart horse in 1984) but the impressive personal performance of Corbyn and the radical shift of opinion within huge stretches of the trades union movement persuaded me that I was wrong to stand aside. The trades unions seemed to have finally got that being the servant of urban liberals was demeaning, that the union gift of power to the Blairites in the 1990s had achieved little and that trying to regain power through a quasi-Leftist intellectual Blairite like Miliband was not going to work.

I took time to decide whether to rejoin the Party but when the decision came, it seemed right even though much of the pessimism remains. It was helped by the estimable old Labour Right winger Tom Watson being elected as ballast (as Deputy Leader) and John Prescott's statesmanlike call for Party Members to respect the decision of the Members and rally round the new Leader. 

Meanwhile, the brutal negativity of the media, of the Blairite Right and of all but the most humanely civilised of Tories such as David Davis showed us that Corbyn would have an uphill struggle. His fundamentally decent principles may stand little chance against the crude sociopathy of the radical centre with its little trotters dug firmly in the pork barrel of late capitalism and its brute determination that its sty not be cleaned out. But I was wrong about Corbyn's victory as Leader (I thought up to the wire that Burnham would get it on second votes) and I could yet be wrong about him being Prime Minister. But perhaps it is time to drop my 'cold realism' and show a little faith in the democratic socialist dream.

I said in my August posting that Corbyn's politics were not mine - I am probably an edge more nationalist, more libertarian, more aware of market reality and more wary of some of the ideological Marxists in his advisory circle - so the question arises - why? Why rejoin now as a moderate democratic socialist when a lot of middle class intellectual non-Marxist democratic socialists are running for cover. There are five core reasons other than blind sentiment to my old tribe and a mad desire to make an absurd existentialist commitment to something decent:-

1. The man matters. I knew him as my Constituency MP in Islington North in the 1990s and I was struck then by his fundamental integrity, decency and intelligence. I saw him at close quarters act on a sensitive human rights issue and discovered how much senior Conservatives respected him as the 'go to' man in this area. Everything he did during the weeks of election campaigning confirmed that integrity and also his courage, courage in standing up to stupid and biaised journalists and for what he believed.
2. I don't like fools and bullies and much of the attack on him (not admittedly by the competing candidates who conducted themselves well throughout) was either intellectually stupid or sheer thuggery. The attacks made me look more deeply into what he was actually saying and not what he was reported as saying. I was impressed
3. The attack dog mentality on his economics was worse than overdone, it was criminally ignorant. There is, in fact, more in common between serious financial market practitioners and Shadow Chancellor McDonnell than there is between either of these and the fools who have run our country into the ground. The pragmatism of Corbyn was ignored - there was no absurd rhetoric from him in the end but only a systematic commitment to the betterment of the mass of the British people which became even more clear in the notes of Ann Black, elected NEC constituency representative of the first NEC meeting held under his auspices as Leader,
4. I persist in seeing the Party as it is currently structured as decadent. This is a direct function of the democratic centralism of Tony Blair and his refusal to have an intelligent debate about party engagement at the 1996 Party Conference. An internal revolution ensuring that a democratic socialist was in control of the democrat centralism created by Blair would show up its internal contradictions and force some form of democratic reform and mobilisation on the Party. The rival candidates to Corbyn were remarkably lack-lustre and the brutes of 1997-2010 had clearly failed to create their own succession for the sake of country and party - liberal egoism at its worst.
5. Although he had to undertake something of a u-turn because of the demands of the party elite that he had inherited and of the system of forums and fixing at the top, Corbyn was prepared to open the door to important debate on key isues where the Party had previously closed off debate - the European Union, Trident, the Monarchical Constitution and the State, and socialist economics. I would disagree with important aspects of Corbyn's position, including his u-turns on some of them, but what he was doing was opening up ground for serious discussion and political education in a way unseen in three decades. This was not an excuse for disunity and internal party warfare but an opportunity for serious debate and discussion on the facts.

So, on all these grounds - the man, the frightened negativity of the failed old guard, the pragmatism underlying the policies of the man, the opportunity to transform the Party into an agent of national debate and mobilisation and the fact that new ideas were being permitted to be heard even if they may later be rejected - the re-joining of the Labour Party became a 'no-brainer'.

What next? The first thing to recognise is that, once a field general in the struggles of the 1990s, I am now no more than a foot soldier in a back water so it behoves me to watch and wait for at least six months while I understand how this party has changed since I was last a member in 2004. I also have businesses to run and a hinterland of my own - interests that have nothing to do with politics. 

This does not mean I won't be involved in politics but my instinct is to show solidarity and support for the New Leader and for the Party while it negotiates the vicious attacks of the dim and lazy low lives in the Press and from cynical and opportunist political opponents from inside and outside. If a successful coup is mounted against him by Blairites before he has had a chance to prove that he is the wrong person for the job, then my pessimism returns - I shall just bugger off to a private life again - but the long haul is the reconstruction of a democratic socialist Party capable of reaching a mass base and winning an election in 2020 without falling into the hands of loopy ideologues, becoming authoritarian on private life under the influence of post-Marxists or showing weakness when faced by serious challenges like mass economic migration or the blow-back from the petty wars of the previous Labour administrations. Be in no doubt, the Party is never anything other than a means to an end - a better Britain - and loyalty to any other end such as office for the sake of office is sheer simple-mindedness.

My one political commitment is to a 'leave' vote in the British European Referendum that must take place before the end of 2017. My opposition to the European Union has been consistent since the first Referendum of 1975. It is based on a a rational critique of the sheer danger of its aspirations to become a liberal super-state based on bureaucratic centralism, the suppression of national self-determination and, ultimately, on the economics of the free market at the expense of welfarism in a 'competitive world'. It is German-dominated (albeit with France as junior partner) and I find this a problem. 

The appalling management of the Ukraine crisis (which might have brought us to war), incompetence in the handling of the refugee crisis and the morally repugnant treatment of Greek democracy by neo-liberal ideologues are only elements of my wider outrage at the presumption of this system which is designed to ensure that democratic socialism is impossible from the Atlantic to the Urals and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic. Take a look at the TTIP and that should be enough to know that the destiny they have chosen for us is to be happy serfs and little more except that we will get to vote for our serfdom every few years or so. I expect to say more on these issues in due course. 

Meanwhile, this blog may change tone a little. The Frontiers series will continue (and will eventually be packaged in a separate blog as we have done with the Tantra and Basic British History series) and there will be occasional essays on culture as before but you may see more politics. Let us leave it there ...

Utopianism and Anarchism

(The following paper was to be given at the London Anarchist Forum Meeting on June 12th, 2009 but, circumstances beyond the control of the organisers meant that it could not be presented. However, I was grateful to the LAF for triggering this paper which looks at anarchism from a contemporary democratic socialist point of view, with special thanks to Steve Ash now deceased who suggested it. It is really here just as a matter of record and I have added notes in italics where I have changed my mind in the intervening half decade or have something to add or something needs contextualising or explaining)

The Current Crisis - A Challenge to the Utopianism in Anarchism

I am not going to speak as an anarchist but as a mainstream democratic socialist who is sympathetic to the anarchist tradition from the libertarian Left - and who thinks that far more was lost than was gained when the Left made its successive turns towards sole concentration on Parliamentary action on the one hand and towards Marxism and vanguard parties on the other.

I do not think that the decision to organise in political parties was entirely wrong but the nature and purpose of those parties has clearly become corrupted so that what passes for the Left has become degraded into a professional political class seeking to administer the state for its own benefit - far more than for that of its own constituents.

Similarly, the impatience and a-morality of Marxism created a monstrosity in the consequent management of the 1917 Revolution, even if a lot of the terror must be put down to the determined attempt by the Western liberal powers to strangle what started as a people’s rising. In the pantheon of cowards, Kerensky must go down in history as a man who failed to seize the moment for peace and land redistribution.

In other words, the victors over the nineteenth century anarchist tradition have proved worse than flawed, they have proved themselves either self-regarding opportunists or vicious tyrants. But what do both have in common that gave them the energy to overcome the fluid leaderless resistance of early anarchism? They had a commitment to hierarchical organization.

They introduced both solidarity and a fixed ideology and this allowed some to step over others to acquire the sort of centralized power epitomized by Blair in the one tradition and Stalin in the other. The similarities between these monsters are greater than we may think – centralization led to sclerosis and ultimately to failure.

Greed for power and office and incompetence are built into institutions that set the rules for themselves. Just as the Communist Party of Russia set the rules for a whole society, so Parliament sets rules that allowed its members, in secret, to take what it wanted as if of right [1]. In both closed societies, the perpetrators had no consciousness of their having done any wrong.

They had literally become institutionalized into crime – the Vatican gives us another example. Think of the link between the Catholic Church and the Inquisition or the Ustase and then think of the ideals in the Gospels. This is the common theme of institutionalisation – the perversion of fine theory into cruel practice.

But this is precisely where anarchist utopianism gets challenged.

First, if anarchism is so good why does it rarely win a straight fight and then, if it does, not for long. The experience of the communards and of POUM in Spain suggests that others tend to win in a fight and, unless you are prepared to rely on some abstract theory of evil, there must be some reason for this in history. It may be different in the future and we will come on to that but history tends to show that anarchists don’t win for long [2].

Second, the conduct of MPs in modern Britain and of Communist Party cadres in twentieth century Russia shows very little sign of human nature being benign. Of course, the anarchist argument is that the system makes the man and that if you removed social and institutional pressures on man, the natural co-operative spirit of mankind will out. Unfortunately, this sounds rather like the essentialist fallacy of human nature that the Communists themselves held to when they stated that a New Man would arise from a change in the conditions of the working class.

This was perhaps Marx’s own transfer of the romantic imaginings of Rousseau via German Idealism - a nod to anarchist ideals - when he proposed that the state would wither away when the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established. It is not that there is no evidence for this misreading of our animal aspects but that the evidence of psychology in recent years is in precisely the opposite direction.

Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated what cruelties we will undertake if sufficient authority is applied to us. To the anarchist mind, this might merely show that we should seek a state of no authority, yet other experimentation and observation tends to tell us that differential intelligence and personality will lead to manipulative exploitation. Some will always fall into that class of sociopath that is so problematic for those who believe that humans are intrinsically good.

(I don’t want to get into the problem of evil, sin and the fall of man here because these are just attempts to create a moral explanation from outside of man for contingent facts about what it is to be human.)

Perhaps the most devastating account of human cruelty does not lie in the bare account of bureaucratic murders in the last century or the savage conduct of so-called barbaric peoples but in the most disturbing book that I have read in a long time because it is made up of the testimonies of individuals who were victims and perpetrators on all sides of what happens when the rule of law really is removed completely – the conditions of the second world war in two theatres.

This is Laurence Rees’ 2008 book, ‘Their Darkest Hour’, which demonstrates the co-existence of great altruism and exceptional sadistic cruelty but certainly gives no cause to believe that a society without law would not be anything other than a vicious jungle. Human beings are complex and only contingently ‘good’ (if good means co-operative and engaged in non-exploitative conduct, without us even getting into the possibility of altruism).

There is no reasonable condition of life, including the unlikely situation of no competition for basic resources, which would not involve some form of psychic vampirism or exploitation by some over others because our minds are structured to be limited in perception and to react to events according to past experiences – unless, that is, we are prepared to countenance some drug-induced social control such as that envisaged by Aldous Huxley in ‘Brave New World’ or see the ‘withering away’ being undertaken as a massively long evolutionary process. Unfortunately, politics is immediate and messy ....

So we have the problem that progressive anti-anarchisms have failed because the human condition expresses itself as egotism within theoretically otherwise benign systems, but that anarchism itself cannot succeed in political practice for long because of that same human nature in its competitive and reactionary mode. There are even libertarians who would claim to be brothers and sisters of anarchists but are in direct opposition to them as persons who see the good society as one of dynamic competition rather than collaboration.

Are we to be left with conservative pessimism then? Is the Left project, essentially one of liberation, equality and of fraternity, doomed on the altar of our animal nature. I think not, not because I am a utopian but because I am an anti-utopian. The findings of psychologists about the unthinking or limbic aspects of human nature and their ineluctability and their ‘unknownness’ (we cannot know other minds and we are certainly not fixed essentially in any particular moment of time) provide an argument for a politics that is much closer to anarchism than it is to organized socialism as it exists today within (say) the British Labour Party or the European Socialists [3].

It is socialism that has to adapt to anarchism more than anarchism to socialism to create a workable Left project. The introduction [4] referred to my co-ordination (over a decade now ago) of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. Its failure was instructive on two grounds.

First, it did not fail from within. Very disparate left-wing groups with a radical democratic model of party reform were able to collaborate on a very limited programme and operate against the party machine to a very high level of propaganda success (including a supportive editorial in the Guardian) through using new technologies. The campaign was an early user (1995/6) of e-mail as a consultative and decision-making tool.

It failed eventually because a deal was made in a smoke-filled room between the rising faction in the party and the political officers of the union backers of that party. The rising politicians were engineering a deal to remove themselves from membership scrutiny, indeed from all constraints. They traded a special interest agenda with executive officers who operated without reference to their own union members.

The lesson is that people can self-organise effectively BUT that they are soon faced with structures that hold power so tightly that no protest, demonstration or campaign can break the hold of those few who command it. This was brought home to people in the massive anti-war protests at the beginning of the century - the public was simply ignored by the decision-making calculation of, in fact, one man and those close to him. A traditional revolution, under these circumstances, merely replaces one set of the few with another … the control systems remain.

This coup by New Labour gave us twelve years or so of the most viciously anti-libertarian non wartime government since Castlereagh and the most war-mongering government since Salisbury or perhaps Palmerston. The harvest was reaped only in the last few weeks [5] – not only in a devastating defeat for it in the political field, the democratic equivalent of the Fall of Berlin, but a defeat that has given legitimacy not merely to the centre-right and to the propertied interest but to a vicious racist rump (the BNP)

What happened in 1996 when the CLGA failed and events today are intimately connected [as argued in Lobster 55]. Political recovery on the democratic socialist Left is going to require the spirit of the anarchic to overcome it. Let me explain. The current crisis is a crisis of big-ness and centralization. Globalisation has created a need for technocratic institutions at a global or regional level that can never be properly scrutinised by anything other than other experts of a similar degree of alleged sophistication [6].

An argument that such institutions cannot be democratic and must work against democratic and popular accountability does not need to be made to this audience. The people becomes a mob mediated by, yes, the media. This is the politics of Berlusconi yet, in a sense, it is more authentic than the cod-progressivism served up by contemporary liberals.

The strategy of post-Soviet socialism has been to try match the technocracy blow for blow, to capture its commanding heights and to turn it to ‘progressive ends’. But such a strategy means bigger and bigger trades unions, NGOs and political parties whose ruling membership is self-appointed, and often interchangeable with each other and even with the big business that it purports to contain and restrain.

For example, a typical career path today might involve a young trades union bureaucrat getting into Parliament in early middle age and then advising a corporation as a public affairs consultant to a corporation. Another might involve a young public affairs consultant entering Parliament and then running an international NGO. Under such conditions, group think and acceptance of the status quo must be the normal way of doing things. It would be like the flow of think tank professionals, military men and party officials in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

Through the Parliamentary and party process, State, progressives and institutions become one liberal totalitarian whole. Since the totalitarian process is nearly indistinguishable after a while between ‘progressives’ (whether called Democrats or PES) or ‘conservatives (whether called Republicans or the EPP) [7], it is no wonder that effective resistance to this cold machinery comes only from the Far Left and the Far Right or from the many differing types of economic, political and social libertarian.

The Ayn Rand worshipping radical free marketer, the polyamorous or transgendered sexual revolutionary and the political anarchist or dissident democratic socialist, let alone neo-pagans and thelemites, will have more in common as dissidents against liberal orthodoxy than they do with the system against which they struggle.

Excessive regulation that levels people down and assumes that no one can be trusted, a sexual culture of licentious imagery and commodity fetishism instead of natural sexuality, centralized power and bureaucracy and the presumption that unaccountable theocratic appointees can represent more than themselves … all are part of the same general culture which turns people into stereotypes, none worse than that of leftist identity politics.

The socializing tendencies of the machine means that the real resistance will now always tend to come more effectively from the Right [8]. David Cameron may be more acute than liberal commentators think in associating himself with euro-critical Polish and Czech parties than with those who take all this at face value. Berlusconi adopts yet another model of resistance – nationalist populism that operates with almost carnival flair to pinprick the po-faced political correctness of his dull opponents [9].

Since entrepreneurs, artists and dissidents are generally ineffective political organizers, the bureaucratic Left steadily cedes ground to the populist Right which offers a moderated social and economic freedom in return for authoritarian state governance.

Berlusconi may protest at pictures of his nearly erect willy in a Spanish newspaper but it does no harm to his electoral fortunes anymore than racism did to the BNP’s or Jobbik’s. When excluded from any power, the public starts to get a taste for sex and violence. As Disraeli said of old Palmerston when it was revealed that he was allegedly having an adulterous affair, “Let’s hope that it does not get out or he’ll win by a landslide”. In despair at progress or under threat, bloodlust soon becomes normal – give me an imposed Roman Peace and I shall soon give you the slaughter in the Coliseum.

Socialism has thus lost the plot for the third time in history. The first time was when it dropped its international trousers in 1914 and allowed itself to become the catamite of militarists. The second was when it adopted vanguardism and cornered itself into state terror and trying to explain complex political philosophy to peasants. The third moment is now – when it tries to enforce good on a population that is not ready to be bored in heaven by choirs of angels.

So let’s get back to anarchism. While socialism has made three attempts at changing the world – in one country, through global revolution and through progressive internationalism – anarchists have contemplated their navels or engaged in hobbyism. Read any text on anarchism and you see nothing but the small scale up to a point. This is good. This is of the essence of anarchism but it is not doing anything to drag the mass of the world’s population out of poverty or redistribute wealth and power in the first world.

What is happening is that anarchists are pauperising themselves to live a dream, abstracting themselves from a wasteful and incompetent global system and perhaps hoping it will all go away. But be warned, if the fascists, communists or even progressive liberals seize the organs of state and the monopoly of force, then the fate of anarchists is extinction - whether by aggression or stealth.

The general population will be sucked into the totalitarian mind-set and, for them, it will be just a case of waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn again and give them some new noble lie, some totalizing world view that tells them what to think and what to be.

So, if anarchists have a wrong-headed view of the essential niceness of the human condition and seem incapable of moving far beyond stunts, localised insurgencies and happenings and if socialists have proved malign, incompetent and authors of their own destruction, where do we go from here …

My proposal is that anarchism does NOT change its essential nature, which is self-organisation, nor its default position in favour of collaboration and altruism. What it should be looking at now is having the courage to return to the experience of POUM in Catalonia which was snuffed out by force and to the techniques (though not the ideology) of urban welfare systems like those of Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, you heard me right. Though common sense suggests that guns should not be part of the equation.

The BNP has overlaid its gangster class on very real distress and anxiety amongst the weakest sections of the urban working class. The Labour Movement, though not the socialists (i.e. the 3% of the vote that emerged last week), has abandoned them and no longer has the will or the manpower to organize them. If the Left does not adopt an organizing approach to these communities, they will turn to fascisms or populisms with more determination than we have seen to date.

This is a rare opportunity to apply anarchistic organizational principles, even along the original rather than the debased model of the Soviets, to real social problems and to create an organizational structure that, in non-sectarian alliance with democratic socialists, can create a non-racist and non-authoritarian model for localities under pressure – one that can put the fear of the people into the liberal establishment, the opportunists in the political class, the State and the fascists. [10]

This is true revolution from below and it has a place for direct action strategies. Indeed, direct action strategies like Raven’s Ait and the Tyting Farm Community [11] and the organization of economic and anti-war protest, will be more effective to the degree that they have a sea of support in which to swim. The alliance underpinning the campaign against the third runway at Heathrow in which middle class residents and street environmentalists is one to watch [12].

In the event, Raven’s Ait was re-occupied with impunity and its bland Liberal Democrat MP reduced to mildly sympathetic impotence because the assumption in society was that the island involved could only be administered through procedures far distant from the community in which it was situated.

But there is a price anarchism will have to pay … It will have to cease to be hobbyist. It will have to cease to be utopian. It will have to cease to be an aesthetic position. It will have to realize that the dispersal of power means the acquisition and management of power and that the control of opportunists, incompetents and exploiters from below needs to be, yes, institutionalized in a demotic form of the original liberal vision of 1688.

What we are talking about here is the next stage in the slow evolution of that long revolution from Magna Carta through 1688 and on to the welfare state that started to go into reverse under Thatcher and which reached criminal levels of reaction under Blair.

The point is that positive democratic, social, economic and legal reform was bought at the cost of the steady centralization of the State and of culture. This has proved to be a devil’s pact, the sort of devil’s pact that could order its young to die for diplomatic misjudgements, listen to only four national radio stations and take that as arbiter of culture and give, in return, decent welfare provision. Bismarck did something similar without having to piddle around worrying about democracy.

National welfare was traded, quite legitimately up to a point for many working people, for decreasing freedom. The pact was a balanced one, a social democratic one. But when the system decided to start to remove key freedoms and community institutions in order to permit market-led social and economic changes, the pact was broken. Working people have got neither welfare nor democracy and our Roman Peace is now inclining them towards a limbic rage about their condition [13].

Yet the collapse of the shared social democratic (or was it national socialist?) political structure also meant the collapse of strategies of moderate resistance. Freedom is not a matter of liberal constitutional reform, of proportional representation, republicanism and bills of rights, or the current tinkering of Gordon Brown – these merely lock in the power of the propertied. It is about the seizure of power from below in an orderly and sustained way. It is truly revolutionary, preferably bloodless.

There is a great deal at stake here. An established constitutional state, such as the US, can apparently lance the boil of mass discontent with a decisive victory for a President but the UK’s informal constitution and Europe’s half-baked constitution provide an unusual opportunity for constructively disruptive action. If the liberals get their way and impose a written constitution or the Lisbon Treaty is imposed on the constituent states of the EU through the rank treachery to the people of their political classes, the game is probably up.

If either happens, anarchism may as well abandon any pretensions in the developed world to a political life and revert to alternative lifestyles, aestheticism and community work. So the urgency is clear. Anarchists, if they have a political sense, need to work in an organized way with libertarians and socialists against both the Lisbon Treaty [14] and similar attempts to create a federal state and against the liberal elite’s attempt to give itself cover through regulation and legal structures that will enable a permanent state of manipulation of us by them.

If they succeed in these plans, political anarchists, libertarians and 'true' socialists will become neutered or forced into insurgency – or, in modern parlance, they will become ‘terrorists’. And, before you think this fanciful, consider the amount of effort going into intelligence-based policing against dissidents and protesters, often at the expense of the basic maintenance of social order in the inner cities [15].

But what I have not referred to is the ‘good society’ and what it comprises. I have taken a fairly negative view of human nature but this is not a true reflection of my views. My view is similar to that of many sensible anarchists – that we are neither good nor bad in essence, just human, and that our actions are directed, by chance and necessity (including poverty and history), down channels that may be good or bad for others or for ourselves.

We are good and bad only in contexts and in relation to others and our own true will. This is where society comes in because it is the context against which we measure our true will. It can enable and it can repress. It can be fair or it can be exploitative. The good society is one where all are equally enabled and none are exploited. And the best judge of what is good for me is me and not some cod-progressive in an office in Whitehall or Brussels.

The difference between me and many anarchists is only in emphasis and means, The libertarian in me sees the only structure for the good society as being one in which I have a voice and a stake and which minimizes its interference in my life and that of others.

However, the issues surrounding enablement and resistance to exploitation require, for me, some sort of governance, a framework with a rule of law. That is where we may agree to disagree because at the end of the day that framework has to be democratic (based on the collective will of the population at large) and socialist - or at least welfarist (representing the interests of the whole community).

The great political parties are broad churches and there is no reason why the resistance to them, to the state and to exploitation should not be a non-sectarian broad church as well. Contemporary technology – from contraception through medical intervention to internet communications – provides much greater opportunities for self-awareness, self education and self determination than at any other time in history [16].

This is the essence of the current potential for revolution. We are not now free because we are told that we are free – whether by Rousseau or Marx – but we are free because we are actually free, not potentially but actually, sexually and in our right to self-expression as much as in any other respect. We are not beyond good and evil but we are beyond convention and custom.

For some reason, the ‘authorities’, perhaps existing as no more than a neurotic authoritarian mind-set, are becoming deeply frightened by what this may mean in terms of our willingness to be taxed and told what to do [17]. Their entire machinery is designed to constrain and contain our free spirits. Our freedom is contained within a ready-made mass culture of titillation and received ideas, an overt sexual culture that is observed rather than lived [18], and a rhetoric of rights and democracy without the practice.

Now is the time to say that we will not take any more and that anything, I say again, anything, is permissible to preserve our real freedoms.

So I shall end there … if you think I have a point, then it is time for anarchists to start to consider how they will organise themselves at this critical time.

And if you do not, then I thank you for your time and advise you to abandon political dreaming and make pots or take up flower arranging.

NOTES

[1] The reference here is to the then-recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.

[2] A current case study in this is going on, while we write, in the streets of Greece where a non-anarchist neo-socialist movement is facing the might of institutional capital after serious errors of judgment by pseudo-socialists in the preceding administrations. If such an organised alternative to anarchism and to neo-liberalism fails to achieve anything at all in defending the Greek people from the past mistakes of their own ruling classes, then we are in very murky waters indeed, driving, perhaps, populations to total submission to undemocratic technocracy, to neo-communist alternatives or to social and political breakdown.

[3] Close but not identical with - Syriza seems to have some anarchistic elements within an essentially socialist structure while the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has recently offered us a Marxism that makes significant concessions to the anarchist position on social structures.

[4] This refers to an introductory political biography to the talk. 

[5] This was a reference to political conditions at the time which saw a rapid rise in the vote for the Fascist BNP and its subsequent rapid fall. In fact, I was on record in other papers as dismissing the BNP threat and condemning the liberal-left hysteria surrounding, as, more recently, I have comndemned the hysteria surrounding the Charlie Hebdo hysteria. However, June 2009 saw massive falls in electoral support for Labour in the European and local elections and, although not sustained for the 2010 Election, Labour lost power to a Conservative-Liberal coalition a year later. I probably over-egged the crisis for the Left for the audience but it was a shock that eventually resulted in a slight shift to the Left in the Party with the election as leader of Ed Miliband. 

[6] Events since 2009 appear to have confirmed that the international institutional infrastructure that was being built up in the decades before the 2008 crash was coming under severe strain half a decade later. This 'not fit for purpose' aspect of the attempt to contain and control globalisation through liberal institutional structures is self evident to anyone observing the cracks in the system appearing in every direction - political, social and economic - and yet the liberal centre ground persists in avoiding and evading analysis of the facts placed before them by history. 

[7] To some extent we are seeing changes in the cosy situation where global governance is a matter of the competition betwen two bourgeois factions of the same global centrist party. In the years since the talk was drafted, the main revolt has been on the national populist Right represented by non-fascist entities such as the Tea Party, UKIP and the National Front in France as well as national and more neo-nationalist and quasi-fascistic operations in Eastern Europe and Greece. Only recently have we seen a countervailing Left populism emerge with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Italy and perhaps signs of incipent organisation in Italy and in the US. Taken together, the liberal bourgeois centre faces a war on two fronts but one where the Right is more destabilising and driving power to the liberal-left whose instincts are to ignore reality and expand provocatively their international liberal internationalism - at obscene cost in terms of human suffering on the Western periphery. 

[8] This was definitely true in 2009, especially as Occupy and Femen represented the height of middle class liberal posturing. However, there are signs that the Left is now beginning to even up the resistance score as the centrist model continues to fail to deliver economic growth, the posturing liberals dig themselves into ever deeper holes and the centre appears to have no option left according to its own rules of engagement but to drive an austerity programme that seems to be unfairly directed at the weakest and most vulnerable. 

[9] Berlusconi, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, eventually fell victim to a centrist liberal strategy of using the law to discredit inconvenient persons and there was a natural end to his tenure because of age but the principle he represented not only persists but flourishes in the smaller European countries whether directed at neonationalism (as in the Czech Republic or Hungary) or a curious form of hyper-liberal Westernism linked to NATO (as in the Baltic Republic and Poland). 

[10] The point I would have made more strongly here (and bear in mind that the rhetoric at this point has moved into persuasive mode designed to shake up anarchists from their torpor) is that the liberal Left took a dramatic wrong-turning with the adoption of identity politics as the basis for coalition-building to the exclusion of locality, family, cultural tribe and work-place organisation. It 'went against nature' by encouraging the attribute of a person instead of the person as the core unit of society. 

[11] A matter of local concern to London Anarchists at that point in history.

[12] This, resistance to Cross Rail and the Gatwick extensions are still ones to watch. Fracking would have been added to the list except that Cameron suddenly back-tracked from the aggressive promotion of the shale gas industry in anticipation of its effect on the Southern English vote in core Tory areas. The plan was to come back to it after the election with a solid majority and damn the hides of the English middle classes. If he had not drawn back, the Greens might be more of a threat than they are and built up a 'Blue' Green support much as UKIP has defied its right wing tag and built a 'Red' element. 

[13] In fact, as the last 2015 Election TV Debate showed, the limbic rage has moved up the social scale to the articulate middle classes. 

[14] Unsurprisingly, the Lisbon Treaty came into full force at the end of that year (2009) and the post-Crash European Union has looked increasingly ramshackle ever since, hanging on to its constitutional position as substitute for any form of policy that would offer democratic solutions for problems to its population. Needless to say, it was the bankrupt centre-left (or rather 'radical centre') that engineered this farce and so the resistance to its failed model has fallen to the populist Right rather than to the popular Left. 

[15] This was a very serious concern at the time - at a point where the structures imposed on society by the rather spurious 'war on terror' overlapped with the panic in the system about a crisis in the very means of production and distribution. The legislation is still in place but the middle classes themselves started to baulk and fight back at the implications of the security agenda - at least in the UK and Europe if less so in the US. The moment has probably passed for the worst to be imposed, It is fascinating to note in this context that the attempt by NATO to drive public support for its forward policy against Russia has failed in the West of the Continent, including usually militaristic Britain, and that the heavy lobbying for guarantees on defence spending achieved nothing but the opportunistic appropriation of the policy by UKIP. 

[16] Since this was written, we have taken an interest in the rise of transhumanism and the formation of Transhumanist Parties across the West. Our judgment is that these are single issue parties that repeat the intellectual errors of the Greens but the application of technology for the benefit of humanity is a serious issue that deserves being higher on the agenda as a matter for community action. The anti-technological position of the neo-conservative (not in the US sense of the term) environmentalist Left has gone too far. 

[17] I think this fear of the people is the defining aspect of the politics of our time. Though the 'system' has a monopoly of force and could do terrible things if it wished, the complexity and interdependence of society has made the risks of doing so far too great for the safe survival of elites and States.  It is not that the people can do much about their situation in a positive sense at this point in history but the disruption caused by non-compliance, selective resistance and sheer bloody-mindedness to a weak and vulnerable system gives it a sort of negative power based on its lack of predictability. This helps to explain the State's obsession with surveillance, Big Data, nudge and behaviourial psychology ... it hopes to manipulate rather than force us into compliance. It is probably a forlorn hope because complexity is not only built into the system but is growing exponentially - the arrival of artificial intelligence is expected by the authorities to be a means of exerting control again but this is to be doubted. AI merely adds another layer of complexity. 

[18] This should not be misunderstood as socially conservative statement - quite the opposite. The fact of an increasingly sex-positive culture is to be applauded. The argument is the opposite - that repression has merely been replaced by voyeurism and that a form of cultural self censorship in the population means that people are still hiding behind the curtain watching others have fun rather than having fun themselves.