I have been fairly quiet over the last six weeks, watching the political preliminaries to the invocation of Article 50 unfold and finding myself, despite being a committed democratic socialist, increasingly drawn to Theresa May's robust approach. The reality rather than the media-driven simulacrum of what is happening is a power struggle between a left-liberal 'radical centre' that is used to having its hegemony over information flows, culture and policy unchallenged and a rather moderate form of nationalism that is actually outward-looking and inter-nationalist and filled with potential for radical change if only the moment can be seized when it arrives.
The thrashing around of the tails of the Clintonist, Blairite and Liberal Democrat dinosaurs while challenged not, as they should have been, from the Left but from the Right - conservatives in the UK and populists and conservatives in alliance in the US - indicates a tragic failure of socialism since the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of building a democratic eco-sustainable economicism, it has collapsed into a mish-mash, a soup of eco-conservatism, rights theory, liberal constitutionalism, cultural politics and identity nonsense.
Watching this unfold, my patience is at an end with the sight of an unelected House of Lords stuffed with creatures of the old liberal hegemony seeking to defy the essence of a simple national vote under conditions where the official 'Left' is clearly seeking to create the conditions for a reversal of a democratic mandate. Forty years of acting as foot soldiers for this failed system must come to an end at some stage. To take a Soviet analogy, fighting in the Great Patriotic War is one thing, loyally arguing for the sclerosis of Brezhnev is another. The liberal Left have become an artery-clogging part of the politically sick patient, resisting the surgical solution of Brexit.
For some weeks, I have been contributing to debates on Left Futures where I would say that the debates in the Labour Movement have been fairly represented, a majority clearly taking the Remain position at face value with a vocal minority wanting a programme of action almost indistinguishable from that of the Liberal Democrats. On the other side a robust minority making the solid arguments for a Left-Brexit which tend to be evaded and avoided as to their substance in favour of a rather woolly-minded aspirational idealism about a Socialist Europe. This is my reply to one of the stronger Remain advocates from that source:-
" ... I have agreed that the 'middle way' is probably the best that could be done under the circumstances for the party but it is not an adequate long term strategy.
" Take the votes in the House of Lords. The first amendment (EU citizens) is a matter of relative indifference. Although the Government is probably technically correct in terms of negotiating position, Labour 'values' do suggest that EU citizens should not be treated as hostages and there is an argument that middle class expats should not expect EU citizens creating wealth in-country to be pawns in their interest. That is a fair Labour fight.
"The second amendment (Parliamentary vote) is not what it seems (an issue of Parliamentary sovereignty) but is an obvious attempt by Remainers to create sufficient uncertainty that time can be bought for a reversal of position.
"This is not necessary because the matter has been decided, the negotiation is executive, the uncertainty advantages the other side in the negotiation (which is 'treachery' to a great degree) and Parliament will get full scrutiny of the Great Repeal Bill which is the point where resistance to the type of Brexit is best handled.
"The population, aided by the mid-market tabloids, is not stupid. It knows that a clique of radical centrists is conspiring to reverse a democratic vote. The only saving grace is that their Second Referendum was knocked out of the water.
"If and only if Labour in the Commons, using Parliamentary sovereignty as cover, supports the second amendment in the Commons, even if it loses, then many otherwise fully socialist and labour-supporting people who sincerely believe in the priority of democracy and of national sovereign power against neo-liberalism really do have to 'consider their position' with Labour on two grounds.
"The first ground is one of trust - by supporting the second amendment in the Lords, Labour has indicated to democrats that it cannot be trusted but by doing so in the Commons, it will demonstrate that it cannot be trusted to maintain democracy along the lines that the Chartists initiated so long ago.
"The second ground is that, even if it loses and especially if it wins, it will have indicated what it is not to be trusted on - that is, the attempted reversal of the democratic vote and, above all, the de facto attempt to reintegrate us into the neo-liberal European model in alliance with Tory business remainers and liberal democrats.
"This latter is a very serious matter that has not yet been fully understood by many activists. In effect, it sets up the condition for the splits that are now taking place across Europe in the socialist movement between socialists and liberals (on which I have written elsewhere) but where socialists are ready to associate with democracy and national sovereignty along traditionally British lines.
"The fissure will not happen over night but, with two years to prepare and many minor elections on the way, once Labour goes down the road of resistance to the 35% of its voters' wishes (and I share the acceptance of that number) then it is a road that it cannot go back from.
"Since its economics and defence policies are not trusted by many others and university students, wobbly middle class professionals in the south and public sector workers are not sufficient base for a national majority, Brexit will have done for Labour in the long run much as the First World War did for the Liberals.
"Personally, being in a minority of a minority, I shall be studying the conduct of the Leader and the PLP with great interest. My own Party membership extends to September but decisions on the future by me and others, and then others, will start to inform themselves on that conduct in the next few weeks.
"Since the issues are existential, any emergent force, oppositional to the ignorant populism of UKIP as much as to the weasel ways of the liberal centre, is not likely simply to be a withdrawal or a a slightly disassociated component of a liberal-led Labour. It is likely to become an intellectual implacable enemy and then gather around itself others with a similar commitment to radical democracy (neo-Chartist) and to socialism.
"I tend to have a fairly good track record on predictions though things always happen more slowly than expected - but they do happen. By 2020, such a force might be only an irritant to a Labour that cannot break through and win an election.
"By 2025, it could be a mortal threat (the equivalent to the threat of UKIP to the cosy elite liberalism of the Tory Party) if Labour persists in being a pale version of a European Socialist Party seeking 'enosis' with a failed dream or prepared to act as a pseudo-socialist grunt provincial assistant to a European 'socialism' that is about as radical as Clinton's Democrat Party."
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Labour Movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Labour Movement. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 March 2017
Monday, 2 November 2015
The Labour Party Today - Impressions of a Rejoiner
Returning to the Labour Party after a decade away has been a fascinating experience, Naturally things have changed a lot since 'my day'. The emergence of genuine popular demand within the party for something akin to democratic socialism would have been unthinkable in 2004/2005. So how about some preliminary impressions and some analysis to keep the debate going?
The first comment is how impressed I am with the organisation and good will of our local Constituency Labour Party in Tunbridge Wells. It has seen over a doubling of membership from re-joiners and new members. Its positive response to this was to hold a reception for all party members which saw an excellent turn-out, much comradely good humour and, above all, an effective mini-education on how the local party worked for newcomers. I have heard similar anecdotal stories across the South and West but depressing countervailing stories of near-dormant and depressed CLPs in some of the Labour heartlands. It is as if some traditional Labour areas are exhausted and shell-shocked.
The surge of energy that we have seen arriving with the Corbynistas seems to be happening, paradoxically, in the very areas that Blairism claimed for its own at the end of the 1990s. What is becoming clearer is that a lot of this new support is coming from those disillusioned with New Labour and then with the Coalition (after a drift from Labour to the LibDems who have royally screwed up here). They like an honest if slightly chaotic 'new politics' that gives a voice to 'ordinary people'. They are unimpressed with the mainstream media, with big corporations, pontificating leaders and austerity.
The second comment is that the more things change, the more things seem the same. Within days of rejoining the Party, I was back with my old crew who ran the original Centre Left Grassroots Alliance debating the future of the soft Left, the possibilities for the sensible Left and how moderate democratic socialists should respond to Corbyn. I tend to the collaboration camp, others do not perhaps so easily. But, again, the debates on e-mail are comradely. There is a meeting at mid-month in London where we will thrash out our differences (if there are any) and develop a strategy geared to the possibility of a sensible democratic socialist Britain under a Labour Prime minister by contesting or collaborating with Corbynista populism to the degree that we think it is in the interests of the country and our value system.
The third comment is much more negative. The aggressive irrationality of a few Labour activists on social media is shocking but not surprising. Sentiment and emotion are ruling over realism on social media and against evidence-based policy discussion. One suspects that some of these trolls will chase off some of the people who joined the Party if they are not brought to heel in some way. They are often, and this is a taboo within the Left to say such things, amazingly stupid. Stupid people are to be found in all parties but it is time that the Labour Party stopped believing its own propaganda about intellectual equality and realised the damage stupid people do to policy debate in forums and platforms. The issue here is the collapse of political education within the Party because the Blairites preferred to give orders rather than listen to people. The lid has been taken off a boiling pot. The new Leader is going to have to find a way of encouraging and then imposing his own standards of decent behaviour on his own followers, showing respect for all members equally as persons but judging ideas by agreed standards of evidence and coherence.
The Party has changed in other more fundamental ways - it is not only more active, mostly more decent (though infected with some trolls online) and filled with more lively debate than a decade ago, it is also on the way to becoming something very different again over the next few years. We can see elements of this change happening across the West - Bernie Sanders, Podemos and Syriza all represent variants of a change that is based on a new breed of intellectual, new communications technologies and a new determination by people affected by State policies to be heard. I tried to analyse this for Party friends based on our many shared observations and came up with the following model, based on a simple difference between the old politics and the new politics rather than the traditional difference between right and left.
The starting point is to say that, though there is a hard core at the centre of Corbynism that is derived from the 1970s and 1980s Left, the Corbynista Left is definitely not to be identified with the history of their elders. Many of them were small children during the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. Others would be politicised by Iraq, Anonymous, Occupy and Fracking which all happened long after New Labour came to power . The ones who stuck with the Hard Left turned into people more like Livingstone and McDonnell … pragmatists.
The Old Politics
The New Politics
And Then There Are The Opportunists ...
In addition, we have noisy special interest constituencies created by Blairism (after Marx got revised in the mid-1990s) and are now trying to find a way to exploit the new situation and ensure the maintenance of their various minor hegemonies – feminism, ethnic minorities, LGBT, university activists.
These have actually done quite well out of Blairism but they are also part of the back-bone of Corbynism. They also provide a lot of the trolling, often aggressively placing right thought and right behaviour before evidence-based policy and even open discussion. They want their cake and eat it: business as usual only more so against the pressures emerging from the anti-identity politics of the workerists and the new anarcho-socialists.
This is just a rough picture - a work in progress - but it gives a sense of the complexity of the Corbyn revolution, partly the revenge of the Old Hard Left, partly a genuine upsurge of the vulnerable end of the Southern educated, partly a response to the world from young academics from a generation who were the first to suffer in 2008, partly a serious self-organising worry about the effects of austerity on working people and partly a response to the rise of a populism of the Right led by an adaptable UKIP with some quasi-socialist characteristics.
Trying to come to terms with this or opposing it are the bulk of professional political class who owed their jobs to the democratic centralism of Blair, confused longstanding activists who stuck it out for a Labour Government no matter what and know in their hearts that the Corbynistas will walk away if they do not get what they want, the heavyweight anti-socialist Atlanticist beasts and a cosmopolitan and intellectually arrogant liberal intellectual class that is watching power and influence slip from its grasp as a new form of the Left emerges.
Yes, a counter-revolution is theoretically possible but I think it increasingly unlikely. The old guard hold the high ground by inheritance but they are surrounded by hordes of insurgents, some slightly potty but most very sensible and committed, who just want a better world and think it is possible. The old guard's political model looks increasingly shaky as liberals, greens, returning 'Red UKIP' and previously despairing democratic socialists give the new model some critical mass and as it becomes clear that the trades unions have more to gain than lose from the new politics after the utter failure of New Labour to guarantee their position against an incoming Tory Government.
The trades unions have got more support out of Corbyn in a few weeks than they got from Blair in thirteen years. The clever element in the Old Guard is now accommodating Corbyn but putting in the systems of control that will hold things together for the long haul - Prescott and Burnham sent a signal that the new politics and traditional Labour values were perfectly compatible and the hard boys of Labour's radical middle class Right have been left dangling. Watson is a radical but not a Leftist and it is he who will be at the heart of reform of the party organisation, not the Leftists. So long as Corbyn and Watson can work together, so long as the 'Trot' element at the top retains its pragmatic approach and so long as the trades union feel that the new Leadership structure can deliver a Labour Government eventually, this revolution will hold together despite all the swinish lies in the mainstream Press, the bleating of the political class and plots by Atlanticist dinosaurs.
The first comment is how impressed I am with the organisation and good will of our local Constituency Labour Party in Tunbridge Wells. It has seen over a doubling of membership from re-joiners and new members. Its positive response to this was to hold a reception for all party members which saw an excellent turn-out, much comradely good humour and, above all, an effective mini-education on how the local party worked for newcomers. I have heard similar anecdotal stories across the South and West but depressing countervailing stories of near-dormant and depressed CLPs in some of the Labour heartlands. It is as if some traditional Labour areas are exhausted and shell-shocked.
The surge of energy that we have seen arriving with the Corbynistas seems to be happening, paradoxically, in the very areas that Blairism claimed for its own at the end of the 1990s. What is becoming clearer is that a lot of this new support is coming from those disillusioned with New Labour and then with the Coalition (after a drift from Labour to the LibDems who have royally screwed up here). They like an honest if slightly chaotic 'new politics' that gives a voice to 'ordinary people'. They are unimpressed with the mainstream media, with big corporations, pontificating leaders and austerity.
The second comment is that the more things change, the more things seem the same. Within days of rejoining the Party, I was back with my old crew who ran the original Centre Left Grassroots Alliance debating the future of the soft Left, the possibilities for the sensible Left and how moderate democratic socialists should respond to Corbyn. I tend to the collaboration camp, others do not perhaps so easily. But, again, the debates on e-mail are comradely. There is a meeting at mid-month in London where we will thrash out our differences (if there are any) and develop a strategy geared to the possibility of a sensible democratic socialist Britain under a Labour Prime minister by contesting or collaborating with Corbynista populism to the degree that we think it is in the interests of the country and our value system.
The third comment is much more negative. The aggressive irrationality of a few Labour activists on social media is shocking but not surprising. Sentiment and emotion are ruling over realism on social media and against evidence-based policy discussion. One suspects that some of these trolls will chase off some of the people who joined the Party if they are not brought to heel in some way. They are often, and this is a taboo within the Left to say such things, amazingly stupid. Stupid people are to be found in all parties but it is time that the Labour Party stopped believing its own propaganda about intellectual equality and realised the damage stupid people do to policy debate in forums and platforms. The issue here is the collapse of political education within the Party because the Blairites preferred to give orders rather than listen to people. The lid has been taken off a boiling pot. The new Leader is going to have to find a way of encouraging and then imposing his own standards of decent behaviour on his own followers, showing respect for all members equally as persons but judging ideas by agreed standards of evidence and coherence.
The Party has changed in other more fundamental ways - it is not only more active, mostly more decent (though infected with some trolls online) and filled with more lively debate than a decade ago, it is also on the way to becoming something very different again over the next few years. We can see elements of this change happening across the West - Bernie Sanders, Podemos and Syriza all represent variants of a change that is based on a new breed of intellectual, new communications technologies and a new determination by people affected by State policies to be heard. I tried to analyse this for Party friends based on our many shared observations and came up with the following model, based on a simple difference between the old politics and the new politics rather than the traditional difference between right and left.
The starting point is to say that, though there is a hard core at the centre of Corbynism that is derived from the 1970s and 1980s Left, the Corbynista Left is definitely not to be identified with the history of their elders. Many of them were small children during the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. Others would be politicised by Iraq, Anonymous, Occupy and Fracking which all happened long after New Labour came to power . The ones who stuck with the Hard Left turned into people more like Livingstone and McDonnell … pragmatists.
The Old Politics
- A hard core of post-Trotskyist Marxists – capable but working within a system that works against them more decisively than is possible for them to defeat alone.
- An aging activist heartland which is loyalist but confused by the revolution, even a little depressed, and might tend to see the new members and re-joiners as potential threats to their hegemony. It is very different in different parts of the country. Based on what has come in to my circle to date, the growth in the Party seems to be skewed to the South, West, university and small towns rather than the old heartlands.
- A middling sort of political operator who cannot really understand the new politics and thinks it will all die away and normal business will be resumed – the traditional union activist is in here as possibly is the loyal but confused MP (from Cruddas to Burnham perhaps but I may be unjust here)
- A grumbly New Labour elite that wants to speed up the counter-revolution but has no significant base in the country and is finally getting it that Blairism is as busted a flush as Thatcherism and Wilsonian Socialism before it.
- A tiny minority of hard line Blairite Atlanticists who plot and scheme and pretty openly would rather see defeat in 2020 than a Corbyn Government.
- An old intellectual class that is completely at sea because its world is falling apart – mainstream journalism is losing its grip, the Guardian and NS are disconnected from the change in wider sentiment and social media creates world views that are both hyper-critical of intellectual authority and highly emotive.
The New Politics
- An enthusiastic and unstable liberal left re-joiner and young claque for Corbyn, some of whom might as easily be in the Greens or Lib Dems and many of whom have come from those camps
- A group of Labour voters angry about the way the country is going, drifting to the national-populist Right and being courted by UKIP - some of these hate Corbyn as allegedly anti-patriotic, others love him for backing the working population and are drifting back to Labour. These have to be accommodated but are in permanent creative tension with the Southern and university Corbynistas.
- A split in the trades union movement between public sector unions (who are inclined to Corbyn or the soft end of the old guard according to situation) and ‘industrial’ and general unions who are being driven by sentiment to become either Labour Firsters/workerists or Leftists according to taste and position. The intellectual struggle within the Labour Movement over issues such as Europe, Trident and socialism is the unreported key to the future of the Labour Party. What all trades union are united on is their intense dislike of Cameron's union-busting and austerity as an intrument of policy.
- A new academic-based intellectual class that is interested in the failed Syriza experiment and new forms of politics that sometimes blend into anarcho-socialism. They certainly are fundamentally critical of the neo-liberalism of New Labour (and, above all, the ‘State’).
And Then There Are The Opportunists ...
In addition, we have noisy special interest constituencies created by Blairism (after Marx got revised in the mid-1990s) and are now trying to find a way to exploit the new situation and ensure the maintenance of their various minor hegemonies – feminism, ethnic minorities, LGBT, university activists.
These have actually done quite well out of Blairism but they are also part of the back-bone of Corbynism. They also provide a lot of the trolling, often aggressively placing right thought and right behaviour before evidence-based policy and even open discussion. They want their cake and eat it: business as usual only more so against the pressures emerging from the anti-identity politics of the workerists and the new anarcho-socialists.
This is just a rough picture - a work in progress - but it gives a sense of the complexity of the Corbyn revolution, partly the revenge of the Old Hard Left, partly a genuine upsurge of the vulnerable end of the Southern educated, partly a response to the world from young academics from a generation who were the first to suffer in 2008, partly a serious self-organising worry about the effects of austerity on working people and partly a response to the rise of a populism of the Right led by an adaptable UKIP with some quasi-socialist characteristics.
Trying to come to terms with this or opposing it are the bulk of professional political class who owed their jobs to the democratic centralism of Blair, confused longstanding activists who stuck it out for a Labour Government no matter what and know in their hearts that the Corbynistas will walk away if they do not get what they want, the heavyweight anti-socialist Atlanticist beasts and a cosmopolitan and intellectually arrogant liberal intellectual class that is watching power and influence slip from its grasp as a new form of the Left emerges.
Yes, a counter-revolution is theoretically possible but I think it increasingly unlikely. The old guard hold the high ground by inheritance but they are surrounded by hordes of insurgents, some slightly potty but most very sensible and committed, who just want a better world and think it is possible. The old guard's political model looks increasingly shaky as liberals, greens, returning 'Red UKIP' and previously despairing democratic socialists give the new model some critical mass and as it becomes clear that the trades unions have more to gain than lose from the new politics after the utter failure of New Labour to guarantee their position against an incoming Tory Government.
The trades unions have got more support out of Corbyn in a few weeks than they got from Blair in thirteen years. The clever element in the Old Guard is now accommodating Corbyn but putting in the systems of control that will hold things together for the long haul - Prescott and Burnham sent a signal that the new politics and traditional Labour values were perfectly compatible and the hard boys of Labour's radical middle class Right have been left dangling. Watson is a radical but not a Leftist and it is he who will be at the heart of reform of the party organisation, not the Leftists. So long as Corbyn and Watson can work together, so long as the 'Trot' element at the top retains its pragmatic approach and so long as the trades union feel that the new Leadership structure can deliver a Labour Government eventually, this revolution will hold together despite all the swinish lies in the mainstream Press, the bleating of the political class and plots by Atlanticist dinosaurs.
Saturday, 9 May 2015
Why the British Labour Party is in a Tail Spin ...
A simple view of the problem of the Labour Party, expressed from both within its own Left and from middle class observers looking at it from outside, is that Labour
has (in the words of one correspondent) "transformed from a party of the trade unions into a party of the
metropolitan, largely London-based opinion-shaping set and new clerisy." In this model, the
party that was born to represent working people’s interests "is now
little more than a kind of political
safe haven for a new elite that [is] cut off both from traditional
politics and the masses." Labour politicians, largely raised in tight networks of middle class public service, activism, professional public affairs, NGO and charity work, see
themselves "as providers of public benevolence, operating from a
metropolitan milieu, well away from any of the problem areas to which
they minister."
I believe that, while there is some truth in this, it is not the whole truth by any means - the symptom is being mistaken for the disease. It is all little more complicated ... after all, some areas increased or solidified their Labour vote: Wales, The North East and so on. The Labour vote actually went up more than the Conservatives (by 1.5%) yet they were down 26 seats. Core Labour areas seemed to become more Labour (excepting Scotland), especially if one takes into account the fact that UKIP was stripping out some working class Labour votes (which means they were being replaced by regional middle class votes). Losing one major sectional interest (Scotland) 'did for' Labour in Parliament but the hidden story is that the reason that this is a disaster is that Labour is little more now than a coalition of interest groups and, if the Labour representatives of the interest groups that make up that coalition can no longer command the constituencies they claim to speak for, Labour faces the problem that each time political reality breaks the back of one bit of the chain that holds it together, the Party drifts further and further away from office.
What you are seeing here is not merely a metropolitan matter but a strategic issue that embraces the whole nation ... because the core model for New Labour was never so centralised as it appeared. It always was a federation but New Labour turned it from a federation operating as a 'national socialist' force into one that was far more coalitional. Yes, national politics in terms of the State were increasingly centralised and the Party itself as organisation (hitherto the expression of Labour's 'national socialist' culture) effectively gutted as an independent force but power was now delegated to sub-elites within a range of linked 'satrapies'. In other words, New Labour did not adopt a command' model so much as an 'imperial model' in which local Rajas kept the faith and administered things on behalf of the centre in return for favours and being left alone within their area of concern.
The model depended on de-socialising its interest groups, unravelling the belief in a single unified nation (multiculturalism being only the most obvious part of a much more widespread phenomenon) and then turning these groups into a coalition of interests which developed mutual dependency. We had a) small nations and regions, b) trades unions and c) identity groups. The idea was that these three combined under the leadership of a liberal intellectual class (which had always historically been treated not as superior but as agents of the Party) would always give a permanent majority against conservatism, defined as the dominant inchoate sentimental mass that the old elites ruled through rhetoric and lassitude. But this model is now falling apart. How? Why?
We have already mentioned that the core regional group - Scotland - has broken out of the programme for entirely local and historical reasons but one has to understand why this is so devastating to Labour. The Scots were central to the original Labour Project and they drove much of its radicalism right up until the formation of New Labour - represented by Brown and Cook. There is a line, believe it or not, from Jimmie Maxton and the 'Red Clydesiders' all the way through to Gordon himself. Brown and Cook represented different unionist and devolutionary models in the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s but, when it came, devolution (Brown's preferred strategy against independence) redirected the attention of Scots back on to Scotland itself, Scottish problems no longer demanded a unionist and London-centred perspective. The Imperial model no longer applied. The Scottish Labour elite found itself detached from Scotland even while it held high office in London, looking increasingly like a bunch who would go off to the Imperial Capital to rule the world and simply throw Scotland into the pot without considering its needs.
To counter this, Wales, the North East, South Yorkshire and the North West retained an interest in the Union as a means of getting advantages for their various Labour-dominated largely urban and densely populated local authorities so it was logical to continue to vote Labour. Remnants of British industrialisation, these areas are only viable economically so long as they are sucking the South as dry as they can of the additional revenues that come out of London as global trading city. These areas are now stuffed in terms of direct access to the centres of power for half a decade, although Tory One Nation thinking will try to sustain some balance here, seeking to reward those areas that realise that localities cannot just gamble every five years on a Labour victory for their sustenance and so pull at least their business classes into some sort of accomodation with Conservatism.
Crossrail, even with its risks to votes in the Conservative corridors through which it passes, is very much part of that strategy of engagement. Patronage is now fully in the hands of the centre-right ... and it will be used to chip away at Labour hegemonies. The effect on segments of the white working class will not mean that they will hold tighter to their Labour mother for fear of something worse but that they may, as in Scotland, look for new patrons - and this is where UKIP, if it can mature, comes in. UKIP ousted the Tories as second party in much of the urban North East and was clearly picking up Labour votes just as Labour was picking up Liberal votes.You can expect the Labour side to try to revive 'regionalism' as a solution ... Prescott's original vision ... but the people just do not care enough, it all looks too self interested now (like any sudden interest in electoral reform) and the Tories could trump it easily enough with a bit County, City and Parish decentralisation.
There is a certain historical dead weight that will ensure certain areas will remain Labour strongholds all things being equal for a very long time, bases from which perhaps an opportunistic neo-Blairite strategy might expand again, but, with the loss of Scotland, the Party cannot afford to lose another fortress. As much energy will be spent on holding these territories in the two years leading up to a European Referendum, when the metropolitan love of Euro-socialism may not chime with the Party's roots as the arguments develop, as in building the policies for a recovery of credibility in Middle England.
The second element of the Coalition, the trades unions, also expected highly focused goodies (full employment and worker's rights, often vectored through the EU) from its support for Labour as a political movement. In return, in 1996 and then again in the middle of the Blair regime as the Warwick Agreement of 2004/5, the trades unions gave up on their historic association with 'socialism' (already attenuated compared to the Marxist versions elsewhere) to concentrate on a restricted range of policy imperatives, only a few of which were about interests outside their own. The deal with the devil was that the Labour Movement would get all it wanted as a special interest but not worry its pretty little head about the context - the broader cultural, economic, freedom, national security and even social justice (insofar as this meant transforming society rather than amelioration of targeted abuses) aspects of the case.
The special interest that once meant all workers now increasingly meant only workers employed by the State. This drew it inevitably towards the Brownian model of a moderated capitalist economy from which a surplus was to be extracted - to serve not the people but the State and the special interests that served the State under cover of 'improved public services'. In the recent period, this has meant that the two heirs (Milliband and Balls) to a decent social justice-driven Scottish ideologue found themselves offering little more than to sweat the private sector a little to benefit only (in the eyes of the very many working people who are in the private sector) the public sector and regional and state sub-elites. Irritation at Scots and other regional claims to more money for their support of a Labour Government during the campaigning of the weeks before the vote on May 7th may be read as code for irritation about all such diversion of funds from 'hard working families' in the South, still struggling to return to prosperity levels of pre-2008, to a range of special interests who were only more needy in their own eyes.
On top of this two-layered sponge of interest-group regionalism and trades unionism, both neutered by their lack of interest in anything other than their own sectional interests, was overlaid a mish-mash of London-based rainbow identity politics managed by a professional political class seeking, in a consciously Gramscian model, to control the culture in order to control the politics of society. There was a history to this - a transformation of the student revisionist Marxism of the 1970s into a sort of radical centrism that merged with the rise of middle class activists representing neglected identities, part neurosis, part performance art and part genuine grievance packaged as a shrill set of demands for victims who clearly did not include their own representatives. It was an ideology that presumed to speak for others and denied agency - it also intruded into private life and private custom.
The horror of the Rotherham child abuse case exposed the falsity of the pose although this would scarcely have had an effect on the national election. It did not occur to many enthusiastic Left-liberals that a twentieth century Italian Marxist model might be intellectually creative but could not represent political reality in a highly developed country of largely prosperous and free but anxious households. Nor that the triangulations of American liberals trained within the tradition of Saul Alinsky spoke to very different social conditions and histories. The sponge cake has every sort of pretty bon bon on it now but each was merely that - a bon bon with no serious base in the country even if it made a very good fist at asserting cultural hegemony while it held the reins of State.
So, for example, the metropolitan feminist element could lay claim to the pages of the Guardian but alienated many women in the country as much as it mobilised others. It also irritated many men otherwise tending to tolerance and liberalism. Cameron, instead of trying to placate this activist class with positive discrimination in favour of second rate ideologues as Labour did, began to promote fewer but infinitely more able women into office - Theresa May and Justine Greening are simply more impressive than Yvette Cooper and who? (we can't even remember their names!). Who Labour should have remembered were Barbara Castle and even latterly Margaret Beckett and nurtured similar strong fighters for economic equality within the trades union movement and broght them into public life. Instead, it emphasised cultural and social activism.
Similarly, the LGBT element in society often felt patronised by their own activists. Many, actually quite socially conservative (it was always presumptuous to think that someone who liked other men or was black or was a woman or was a Muslim could be corraled into a coherent liberal-left 'line'), were pleased at Cameron's struggle against his own Right to push forward civil marriage. On the Left, strong and courageous individuals like Peter Tatchell noticeably preferred the Greens to Labour which may have been flaky but did tend to attract some of the more creative individuals in radical politics.
Perhaps the only vote captured for New Labour that 'worked' in the mass for it was the ethnic minority vote and then only selectively. Only now has Labour ousted Respect in Bradford but the suspicion (apparently admitted to friends of mine by Labour officials in a state of inebriation) amongst the white working class who worried about these things grew that migration was partly engineered to create this bloc. Whether conspiracy theory or not, the very rise of such minority groups and the compromises required in terms of a faith-based agenda to ensure their votes (often at the expense of their own more vulnerable members) eventually alienated many liberal-minded middle class people as much as they did the demonised white working class.
What was striking about the Middle England vox pops after the election on Newsmight was that there were evidently traditional Labour voters uncomfortably moving to the Tories. The message was 'my Gran would be spinning in her grave' but it needed to be done. The Tories spoke to economic anxieties outside Labour's core areas and public sector but that would be matched by anxieties inside their core vote - it would be a numbers game. What may have tipped the balance was a mounting sense of cultural resentment which was far from illiberal - indeed, a deep resentment that the resentment was merely dismissed as illiberal is an explanation for some part of that swing. If certain votes moved to UKIP, that cultural discomfort moved other votes to the Conservatives as LIBERAL protectors of the homeland culture.
With the fortress areas under siege from within by cultural discomfort and from without by selective patronage, with the organised trades union movement lacking any strategy that does not require a liberal Labour Government to enact it and with the cultural model promoted by the 1970s Generation looking threadbare, Labour has some serious issues to address, issues that may not be sufficiently addressed by simply offering Blair-lite when Cameron is doing that so much better.
More to the point, Labour may now be structurally 'stuffed' because it allowed itself - in its hunger for power in the late 1980s and early 1990s - to adopt a coalitional American style politics that works in a Presidential system and one where Congressman wear their party discipline lightly but which hollows out the organisation that forgets that the United Kingdom is still small in area, with a distinct and shared national culture that places 'shared values' and household interest ahead of, or alongside at worst, special group interest. The point about socialism (in its national form which is the old British form) is that it could genuinely trump individualism and create a dialectic between the nation and the personal expressed in two great parties of state offering different visions of the national interest.
By removing socialism and replacing it with an eighteenth century concept of 'interest', Labour has undercut its only means of undermining conservatism and the ruling elite in the long term, even if it could carry it off well in the short term. New Labour was an unsustainable political model. We may be about to see the Strange Death of Labour as a coalition that may never get traction again for majority government, one that now stands in the way of radical national alternatives as dead weight, whose base is now either aging and tired or young and inexperienced and which has sentenced its own support base to second class status for a generation.There may be no solution other than the failure of its opponent.
I believe that, while there is some truth in this, it is not the whole truth by any means - the symptom is being mistaken for the disease. It is all little more complicated ... after all, some areas increased or solidified their Labour vote: Wales, The North East and so on. The Labour vote actually went up more than the Conservatives (by 1.5%) yet they were down 26 seats. Core Labour areas seemed to become more Labour (excepting Scotland), especially if one takes into account the fact that UKIP was stripping out some working class Labour votes (which means they were being replaced by regional middle class votes). Losing one major sectional interest (Scotland) 'did for' Labour in Parliament but the hidden story is that the reason that this is a disaster is that Labour is little more now than a coalition of interest groups and, if the Labour representatives of the interest groups that make up that coalition can no longer command the constituencies they claim to speak for, Labour faces the problem that each time political reality breaks the back of one bit of the chain that holds it together, the Party drifts further and further away from office.
What you are seeing here is not merely a metropolitan matter but a strategic issue that embraces the whole nation ... because the core model for New Labour was never so centralised as it appeared. It always was a federation but New Labour turned it from a federation operating as a 'national socialist' force into one that was far more coalitional. Yes, national politics in terms of the State were increasingly centralised and the Party itself as organisation (hitherto the expression of Labour's 'national socialist' culture) effectively gutted as an independent force but power was now delegated to sub-elites within a range of linked 'satrapies'. In other words, New Labour did not adopt a command' model so much as an 'imperial model' in which local Rajas kept the faith and administered things on behalf of the centre in return for favours and being left alone within their area of concern.
The model depended on de-socialising its interest groups, unravelling the belief in a single unified nation (multiculturalism being only the most obvious part of a much more widespread phenomenon) and then turning these groups into a coalition of interests which developed mutual dependency. We had a) small nations and regions, b) trades unions and c) identity groups. The idea was that these three combined under the leadership of a liberal intellectual class (which had always historically been treated not as superior but as agents of the Party) would always give a permanent majority against conservatism, defined as the dominant inchoate sentimental mass that the old elites ruled through rhetoric and lassitude. But this model is now falling apart. How? Why?
We have already mentioned that the core regional group - Scotland - has broken out of the programme for entirely local and historical reasons but one has to understand why this is so devastating to Labour. The Scots were central to the original Labour Project and they drove much of its radicalism right up until the formation of New Labour - represented by Brown and Cook. There is a line, believe it or not, from Jimmie Maxton and the 'Red Clydesiders' all the way through to Gordon himself. Brown and Cook represented different unionist and devolutionary models in the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s but, when it came, devolution (Brown's preferred strategy against independence) redirected the attention of Scots back on to Scotland itself, Scottish problems no longer demanded a unionist and London-centred perspective. The Imperial model no longer applied. The Scottish Labour elite found itself detached from Scotland even while it held high office in London, looking increasingly like a bunch who would go off to the Imperial Capital to rule the world and simply throw Scotland into the pot without considering its needs.
To counter this, Wales, the North East, South Yorkshire and the North West retained an interest in the Union as a means of getting advantages for their various Labour-dominated largely urban and densely populated local authorities so it was logical to continue to vote Labour. Remnants of British industrialisation, these areas are only viable economically so long as they are sucking the South as dry as they can of the additional revenues that come out of London as global trading city. These areas are now stuffed in terms of direct access to the centres of power for half a decade, although Tory One Nation thinking will try to sustain some balance here, seeking to reward those areas that realise that localities cannot just gamble every five years on a Labour victory for their sustenance and so pull at least their business classes into some sort of accomodation with Conservatism.
Crossrail, even with its risks to votes in the Conservative corridors through which it passes, is very much part of that strategy of engagement. Patronage is now fully in the hands of the centre-right ... and it will be used to chip away at Labour hegemonies. The effect on segments of the white working class will not mean that they will hold tighter to their Labour mother for fear of something worse but that they may, as in Scotland, look for new patrons - and this is where UKIP, if it can mature, comes in. UKIP ousted the Tories as second party in much of the urban North East and was clearly picking up Labour votes just as Labour was picking up Liberal votes.You can expect the Labour side to try to revive 'regionalism' as a solution ... Prescott's original vision ... but the people just do not care enough, it all looks too self interested now (like any sudden interest in electoral reform) and the Tories could trump it easily enough with a bit County, City and Parish decentralisation.
There is a certain historical dead weight that will ensure certain areas will remain Labour strongholds all things being equal for a very long time, bases from which perhaps an opportunistic neo-Blairite strategy might expand again, but, with the loss of Scotland, the Party cannot afford to lose another fortress. As much energy will be spent on holding these territories in the two years leading up to a European Referendum, when the metropolitan love of Euro-socialism may not chime with the Party's roots as the arguments develop, as in building the policies for a recovery of credibility in Middle England.
The second element of the Coalition, the trades unions, also expected highly focused goodies (full employment and worker's rights, often vectored through the EU) from its support for Labour as a political movement. In return, in 1996 and then again in the middle of the Blair regime as the Warwick Agreement of 2004/5, the trades unions gave up on their historic association with 'socialism' (already attenuated compared to the Marxist versions elsewhere) to concentrate on a restricted range of policy imperatives, only a few of which were about interests outside their own. The deal with the devil was that the Labour Movement would get all it wanted as a special interest but not worry its pretty little head about the context - the broader cultural, economic, freedom, national security and even social justice (insofar as this meant transforming society rather than amelioration of targeted abuses) aspects of the case.
The special interest that once meant all workers now increasingly meant only workers employed by the State. This drew it inevitably towards the Brownian model of a moderated capitalist economy from which a surplus was to be extracted - to serve not the people but the State and the special interests that served the State under cover of 'improved public services'. In the recent period, this has meant that the two heirs (Milliband and Balls) to a decent social justice-driven Scottish ideologue found themselves offering little more than to sweat the private sector a little to benefit only (in the eyes of the very many working people who are in the private sector) the public sector and regional and state sub-elites. Irritation at Scots and other regional claims to more money for their support of a Labour Government during the campaigning of the weeks before the vote on May 7th may be read as code for irritation about all such diversion of funds from 'hard working families' in the South, still struggling to return to prosperity levels of pre-2008, to a range of special interests who were only more needy in their own eyes.
On top of this two-layered sponge of interest-group regionalism and trades unionism, both neutered by their lack of interest in anything other than their own sectional interests, was overlaid a mish-mash of London-based rainbow identity politics managed by a professional political class seeking, in a consciously Gramscian model, to control the culture in order to control the politics of society. There was a history to this - a transformation of the student revisionist Marxism of the 1970s into a sort of radical centrism that merged with the rise of middle class activists representing neglected identities, part neurosis, part performance art and part genuine grievance packaged as a shrill set of demands for victims who clearly did not include their own representatives. It was an ideology that presumed to speak for others and denied agency - it also intruded into private life and private custom.
The horror of the Rotherham child abuse case exposed the falsity of the pose although this would scarcely have had an effect on the national election. It did not occur to many enthusiastic Left-liberals that a twentieth century Italian Marxist model might be intellectually creative but could not represent political reality in a highly developed country of largely prosperous and free but anxious households. Nor that the triangulations of American liberals trained within the tradition of Saul Alinsky spoke to very different social conditions and histories. The sponge cake has every sort of pretty bon bon on it now but each was merely that - a bon bon with no serious base in the country even if it made a very good fist at asserting cultural hegemony while it held the reins of State.
So, for example, the metropolitan feminist element could lay claim to the pages of the Guardian but alienated many women in the country as much as it mobilised others. It also irritated many men otherwise tending to tolerance and liberalism. Cameron, instead of trying to placate this activist class with positive discrimination in favour of second rate ideologues as Labour did, began to promote fewer but infinitely more able women into office - Theresa May and Justine Greening are simply more impressive than Yvette Cooper and who? (we can't even remember their names!). Who Labour should have remembered were Barbara Castle and even latterly Margaret Beckett and nurtured similar strong fighters for economic equality within the trades union movement and broght them into public life. Instead, it emphasised cultural and social activism.
Similarly, the LGBT element in society often felt patronised by their own activists. Many, actually quite socially conservative (it was always presumptuous to think that someone who liked other men or was black or was a woman or was a Muslim could be corraled into a coherent liberal-left 'line'), were pleased at Cameron's struggle against his own Right to push forward civil marriage. On the Left, strong and courageous individuals like Peter Tatchell noticeably preferred the Greens to Labour which may have been flaky but did tend to attract some of the more creative individuals in radical politics.
Perhaps the only vote captured for New Labour that 'worked' in the mass for it was the ethnic minority vote and then only selectively. Only now has Labour ousted Respect in Bradford but the suspicion (apparently admitted to friends of mine by Labour officials in a state of inebriation) amongst the white working class who worried about these things grew that migration was partly engineered to create this bloc. Whether conspiracy theory or not, the very rise of such minority groups and the compromises required in terms of a faith-based agenda to ensure their votes (often at the expense of their own more vulnerable members) eventually alienated many liberal-minded middle class people as much as they did the demonised white working class.
What was striking about the Middle England vox pops after the election on Newsmight was that there were evidently traditional Labour voters uncomfortably moving to the Tories. The message was 'my Gran would be spinning in her grave' but it needed to be done. The Tories spoke to economic anxieties outside Labour's core areas and public sector but that would be matched by anxieties inside their core vote - it would be a numbers game. What may have tipped the balance was a mounting sense of cultural resentment which was far from illiberal - indeed, a deep resentment that the resentment was merely dismissed as illiberal is an explanation for some part of that swing. If certain votes moved to UKIP, that cultural discomfort moved other votes to the Conservatives as LIBERAL protectors of the homeland culture.
With the fortress areas under siege from within by cultural discomfort and from without by selective patronage, with the organised trades union movement lacking any strategy that does not require a liberal Labour Government to enact it and with the cultural model promoted by the 1970s Generation looking threadbare, Labour has some serious issues to address, issues that may not be sufficiently addressed by simply offering Blair-lite when Cameron is doing that so much better.
More to the point, Labour may now be structurally 'stuffed' because it allowed itself - in its hunger for power in the late 1980s and early 1990s - to adopt a coalitional American style politics that works in a Presidential system and one where Congressman wear their party discipline lightly but which hollows out the organisation that forgets that the United Kingdom is still small in area, with a distinct and shared national culture that places 'shared values' and household interest ahead of, or alongside at worst, special group interest. The point about socialism (in its national form which is the old British form) is that it could genuinely trump individualism and create a dialectic between the nation and the personal expressed in two great parties of state offering different visions of the national interest.
By removing socialism and replacing it with an eighteenth century concept of 'interest', Labour has undercut its only means of undermining conservatism and the ruling elite in the long term, even if it could carry it off well in the short term. New Labour was an unsustainable political model. We may be about to see the Strange Death of Labour as a coalition that may never get traction again for majority government, one that now stands in the way of radical national alternatives as dead weight, whose base is now either aging and tired or young and inexperienced and which has sentenced its own support base to second class status for a generation.There may be no solution other than the failure of its opponent.
Friday, 3 April 2015
The Indiscipline of Protest
There have been at least
two great intellectual failures in the last hundred years - the first
is Marxism-Leninism and the second has been the liberal rejection of
some of the central insights of the Marxists.
Class But Not As We Know It, Jim
This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined conditions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy which has been quite historically effective for seizing power. But idealism is intellectually sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.
The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.
Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.
Where Should We Be Looking
For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the continuing economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria. We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.
It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act. Liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (Wyndham Lewis' phrase).
In this context, the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinated and appalled the establishment some years ago. It alternately tried to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model). In the end, these 'protest movements' seem to have collapsed of their own volition, achieving very little.
Who Are These People?
But who were these failed protestors as a class? Not who was behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' (some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt) but who was participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weakened? We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we were not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.
This was a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even middle class liberals can resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents. We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.
It is an old theme of these postings. The new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to create value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making intermediaries of all sorts potentially wholly redundant.
Paul Mason's Analysis
The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, were starting to use new technologies to combine and protest in ways that were entirely new. Their failures hide the fact that methods may have failed but the intent and the revolutionary potential for technology remain. A February 2011 analysis by Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight gave a number of reasons why this needed to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work after four years had passed.
As for protest as 'fun', this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest seemed to permit people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists. But four years on, the fun has gone out of protest - in the non-Western world, it is clear that people can get killed and, in the West, the magistrates are minded to take a dim view of carnival that destroys property
The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears and has learned a lot since 2008. Most of it has been a repetition of the lesson of the 2003 Iraq protests - that the system is not responsive and will do anything to ensure its own survival, including violate whatever human rights are to hand if necessary.
The alternative is a level of commitment to organisation and discipline that just does not seem to be worth the effort compared to having fun, mating and building tradeable skills for the future. The young do not run on hope any more but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents - it is just that they are choosing to re-direct those skills now to the game of life rather than political change.
There are mobilising exceptions - such as the Scottish Referendum - but the exceptions point up the problem: elites have to concede the opportunity for change. The moment cannot be seized independently. There is no ideological movement seeking to mobilise the masses for change, just minorities of 'activists' ducking and diving between methodologies and compromising with the very system of power they claim to despise.
Internal Contradictions
The fluidity and lack of ideology is the central weakness in the street. Occupy events proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression. It also brings us back to class because young activists are driven by some understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.
The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see. I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation. We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'. The protestors rarely seemed to understand their own condition - they could soon become manipulable mobs.
The intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation from a French intellectual that Mason offered. Foucault advised Deleuze:
This is at the very heart of the debates already current in the British trades union movement at the turn of this century. The decision to go the way of a dogged turning around of the official Left (which has nothing much to say to the wider population as we can see in the lack of enthusiasm for Ed Miliband the front man of the movement) rather than recreate a socialist-labour movement to challenge capitalism was inevitable under such conditions. The Labour Movement might effectively and ideologically 'run' the next British Government and yet, while many individuals will benefit in the short term, nothing will have fundamentally changed at the end of their Party's' term of office. The objective conditions for change are simply not present.
The New Anarchism?
The logic of recent protest was different from that of the 'insider' approach but it is was soon very unclear how it could 'organise' anything at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggest that their primary tools are little more than their effect on the market (the rhetoric of action) and withdrawal from the law.
By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and potentially more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceable in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind. But it still requires courage and involves risk in dealing with a system that likes to make examples of people and frighten the rest by publicising their exemplary law enforcement actions.
Solidarity is required to resist the tactic of control through exemplary fear. The fate of recreational drug users provides the template for the failure of an element in the community to challenge their masters through evidence-based analysis and organisation. The protests of 2011, we were told by Mason, were based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets. But this was the autonomous behaviour of very few people.
Four years on, nothing (and we mean nothing) had changed in regard to those ultimate power relations. Where the agenda had changed (as in the tax avoidance campaigning), it turns out that the prime beneficiary of increased taxes was only indirectly the people - the prime beneficiary was to be the State in its fight to deal with deficits and maintain social cohesion and its war machine.
This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots around the same time (2011) were also about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.
Syriza has proved to be far more interesting since then, offering perhaps the opportunity to structure an anti-corrupt anti-austerity model but it has had to do so by taking on the Goliath of the Franco-German European Project as a David looking for a Deus ex Machina to emerge out of the hearts of stern-faced Teutons and the opportunists in Moscow. This is David without a catapult.
The young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to the public service workers at home expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous was with the first and Occupy was increasingly representing the last. This was an internal contradiction within the Western protests that was never resolved, any more than the contradiction was resolved between young liberal middle class liberals in Tahrir Square and young and hungry working class Islamists wanting bread and wives.
Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy
On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. On the one side, bourgeois liberals wanting a comfortable freedom and, on the other, traditionalists wanting a legal system and socio-economic structure based on Iron Age texts. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together. The 'neo-socialists', for example, tried appealing to the police by saying that they were protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians were wondering what the police were doing there anyway.
The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order. Reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have a serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs. Scarce resources were looking at solving the wrong problems - social cohesion and warlord organised crime are now more of a threat than the pleasures of layabouts. There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threats to the State and about public intrusion into private life.
States & Protest
In both the West and the emerging world, it is likely that States and foreign powers quickly started to identify elite operatives in protest networks and became busy in not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. Some of the operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit other new entrants to rise rapidly. There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. As we noted above, State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set on exposing.
We noted this as a possibility three or four years ago and the populist assault on HSBC suggests that we were right - and there is more to come. Radicals are easily diverted into a global rights and anti-corporate agenda that neuters any serious opportunity for changes in the structures of power at home and helps to extend markets for domestic corporations. We predicted that an alliance with liberal NGO-based coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital so that the heirs of the Occupy and Anonymous movements might become useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards auctoritas. And this is what was to transpire.
But, yet another issue identified at that time for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want? The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base. Here we have another possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.
Liberty or Jobs?
In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appeared to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasised state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed). This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It represents the difference between left-libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis. We certainly saw libertarians moving away from the British Occupy Movement as it fell into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).
The real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states without the investment in infrastructure to support it. When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they eventually want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security. But States do not do the right thing. They never do the right thing. They exist to exist and aggrandise power. This is a lesson the Left should have learned from 1917.
Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?
This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether a new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting big capitalists so that communal self-organisation can take place in 'safe space'. Occupy people reluctantly vote Labour or Democrat (or possibly Green) but Anonymous people probably don't bother to vote at all. Anonymous may be the wiser when faced with rule by a Clinton or a Milliband ... The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason back in 2012 - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and dissatisfied older citizens can draw. Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.
This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe. Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also mean difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice. In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible. We are in flux.
Class But Not As We Know It, Jim
This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined conditions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy which has been quite historically effective for seizing power. But idealism is intellectually sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.
The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.
Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.
Where Should We Be Looking
For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the continuing economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria. We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.
It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act. Liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (Wyndham Lewis' phrase).
In this context, the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinated and appalled the establishment some years ago. It alternately tried to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model). In the end, these 'protest movements' seem to have collapsed of their own volition, achieving very little.
Who Are These People?
But who were these failed protestors as a class? Not who was behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' (some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt) but who was participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weakened? We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we were not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.
This was a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even middle class liberals can resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents. We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.
It is an old theme of these postings. The new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to create value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making intermediaries of all sorts potentially wholly redundant.
Paul Mason's Analysis
The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, were starting to use new technologies to combine and protest in ways that were entirely new. Their failures hide the fact that methods may have failed but the intent and the revolutionary potential for technology remain. A February 2011 analysis by Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight gave a number of reasons why this needed to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work after four years had passed.
- Young graduate women are emerging who are not stuck in the specific feminist resentments of the older generation but simply get on with practical organisation in their own interest and what they believe to be right. Mason was right that educated women were at the core of protest but what is interesting to observe since his analysis is that the 'feminisation' of protest, conducted in 'feminist' language has developed a counter-reaction from young males not in terms of reactionary politics but political disinterest, a sort of 'why bother?'
- Ideological formulations are dead as organising principles. There will be Marxists, conspiracy theorists, faith-based loons, environmentalists and liberals but none of them can control a propaganda process or impose an organisational model that can stifle internal dissent or insists on a 'line' to assert political discipline. The very fact of seven party leaders with different interests and ideologies sitting in a row on TV last night (in the UK) to present their wares to the public when only two realistically represented the possible ideology of governance for the next five years (and both of those agree on more than they disagree) tells you something about the emergence of hyper-real politics disconnected from the actual levers of power.
- An international 'elite' of protesters seemed to be emerging in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 'crash'. They operated quasi-professionally across borders or supplied technical skills across a borderless internet. This is an analogue with the intellectual diaspora dissidents who fuelled the rise of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism. Unfortunately, it became clearer that their history was not only one of political development a decade before (that is, they were ideologues exploiting a situation rather than emergent from the situation) but that a proportion of them were trained and managed during the Arab Spring by State actors seeking easy wins over rival States.
- The central economic issue remains State and personal debt at a time of lack of employment opportunity. The protests might rapidly disappear with job creation or free education and debt forgiveness but States are in no position to deliver these during the current crisis. The resentments of the young are real but it is not being expressed in revolutionary politics but in evolutionary democratic politics if at all. The real impulse here seems not to be engagement but gritting teeth, getting on with the job and waiting for a righteous revenge when the old codgers start to die off and inflation transfers wealth from the old to the young as recovery gets under way. It may be easier to get on a boat and plane and find a new home than stay in the old one and be left with the burden of paying for the profligacy of parents. Many young people are just voting with their feet.
- If this problem of a generation without prospects and with old codgers getting in the way is causing difficulties in the West, then it is boiling up to violent proportions in the many countries where there is now a massive demographic bulge of frustrated urban young. And yet this explosive material which might have been assumed to have been progressive because it was young, now turns it to be just as likely to be traditionalist, nationalist and even fascistic when it decides to get off its behind and do something. It is not just that ISIS and other insurgencies are fuelled by the young but that a 'fascist' Maidan 3 lurks around the corner and that the student leaders of the Hong Kong revolt are not modern secular atheists but as likely to be Christians with a hot line to the local CIA man.
- Organised labour is pretty well bankrupt as a revolutionary force. It has been a conservative force against 'clercs' (socialists) since the 1940s but it has degenerated further into being representative largely of those who are already ensconced within the State since the 1980s (in the UK) - a truly conservative interest at this time. Yes, there is a slow, steady movement by which a new generation of trades unionists (including a strong feminist element linked to the low paid private and public sectors) is reasserting their position on the centre-left but this is happening just as the official centre-left is beginning to crumble under the burden of managing austerity-lite because of the trap it has got into as the primary promoter of 'capitalism with a human face'.
As for protest as 'fun', this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest seemed to permit people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists. But four years on, the fun has gone out of protest - in the non-Western world, it is clear that people can get killed and, in the West, the magistrates are minded to take a dim view of carnival that destroys property
The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears and has learned a lot since 2008. Most of it has been a repetition of the lesson of the 2003 Iraq protests - that the system is not responsive and will do anything to ensure its own survival, including violate whatever human rights are to hand if necessary.
The alternative is a level of commitment to organisation and discipline that just does not seem to be worth the effort compared to having fun, mating and building tradeable skills for the future. The young do not run on hope any more but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents - it is just that they are choosing to re-direct those skills now to the game of life rather than political change.
There are mobilising exceptions - such as the Scottish Referendum - but the exceptions point up the problem: elites have to concede the opportunity for change. The moment cannot be seized independently. There is no ideological movement seeking to mobilise the masses for change, just minorities of 'activists' ducking and diving between methodologies and compromising with the very system of power they claim to despise.
Internal Contradictions
The fluidity and lack of ideology is the central weakness in the street. Occupy events proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression. It also brings us back to class because young activists are driven by some understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.
The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see. I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation. We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'. The protestors rarely seemed to understand their own condition - they could soon become manipulable mobs.
The intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation from a French intellectual that Mason offered. Foucault advised Deleuze:
The problem of organisation is a profound one because the current model of power relations only offers inclusion within liberal democratic coalition-building or the sort of bureaucratic organisational ability that allowed socialists to out-manouevre the anarchists between 1910 and 1940.We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation [a nod to Marx], and, to this day [second half of the twentieth century], we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.
This is at the very heart of the debates already current in the British trades union movement at the turn of this century. The decision to go the way of a dogged turning around of the official Left (which has nothing much to say to the wider population as we can see in the lack of enthusiasm for Ed Miliband the front man of the movement) rather than recreate a socialist-labour movement to challenge capitalism was inevitable under such conditions. The Labour Movement might effectively and ideologically 'run' the next British Government and yet, while many individuals will benefit in the short term, nothing will have fundamentally changed at the end of their Party's' term of office. The objective conditions for change are simply not present.
The New Anarchism?
The logic of recent protest was different from that of the 'insider' approach but it is was soon very unclear how it could 'organise' anything at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggest that their primary tools are little more than their effect on the market (the rhetoric of action) and withdrawal from the law.
By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and potentially more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceable in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind. But it still requires courage and involves risk in dealing with a system that likes to make examples of people and frighten the rest by publicising their exemplary law enforcement actions.
Solidarity is required to resist the tactic of control through exemplary fear. The fate of recreational drug users provides the template for the failure of an element in the community to challenge their masters through evidence-based analysis and organisation. The protests of 2011, we were told by Mason, were based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets. But this was the autonomous behaviour of very few people.
Four years on, nothing (and we mean nothing) had changed in regard to those ultimate power relations. Where the agenda had changed (as in the tax avoidance campaigning), it turns out that the prime beneficiary of increased taxes was only indirectly the people - the prime beneficiary was to be the State in its fight to deal with deficits and maintain social cohesion and its war machine.
This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots around the same time (2011) were also about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.
Syriza has proved to be far more interesting since then, offering perhaps the opportunity to structure an anti-corrupt anti-austerity model but it has had to do so by taking on the Goliath of the Franco-German European Project as a David looking for a Deus ex Machina to emerge out of the hearts of stern-faced Teutons and the opportunists in Moscow. This is David without a catapult.
The young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to the public service workers at home expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous was with the first and Occupy was increasingly representing the last. This was an internal contradiction within the Western protests that was never resolved, any more than the contradiction was resolved between young liberal middle class liberals in Tahrir Square and young and hungry working class Islamists wanting bread and wives.
Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy
On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. On the one side, bourgeois liberals wanting a comfortable freedom and, on the other, traditionalists wanting a legal system and socio-economic structure based on Iron Age texts. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together. The 'neo-socialists', for example, tried appealing to the police by saying that they were protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians were wondering what the police were doing there anyway.
The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order. Reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have a serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs. Scarce resources were looking at solving the wrong problems - social cohesion and warlord organised crime are now more of a threat than the pleasures of layabouts. There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threats to the State and about public intrusion into private life.
States & Protest
In both the West and the emerging world, it is likely that States and foreign powers quickly started to identify elite operatives in protest networks and became busy in not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. Some of the operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit other new entrants to rise rapidly. There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. As we noted above, State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set on exposing.
We noted this as a possibility three or four years ago and the populist assault on HSBC suggests that we were right - and there is more to come. Radicals are easily diverted into a global rights and anti-corporate agenda that neuters any serious opportunity for changes in the structures of power at home and helps to extend markets for domestic corporations. We predicted that an alliance with liberal NGO-based coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital so that the heirs of the Occupy and Anonymous movements might become useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards auctoritas. And this is what was to transpire.
But, yet another issue identified at that time for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want? The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base. Here we have another possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.
Liberty or Jobs?
In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appeared to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasised state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed). This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It represents the difference between left-libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis. We certainly saw libertarians moving away from the British Occupy Movement as it fell into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).
The real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states without the investment in infrastructure to support it. When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they eventually want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security. But States do not do the right thing. They never do the right thing. They exist to exist and aggrandise power. This is a lesson the Left should have learned from 1917.
Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?
This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether a new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting big capitalists so that communal self-organisation can take place in 'safe space'. Occupy people reluctantly vote Labour or Democrat (or possibly Green) but Anonymous people probably don't bother to vote at all. Anonymous may be the wiser when faced with rule by a Clinton or a Milliband ... The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason back in 2012 - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and dissatisfied older citizens can draw. Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.
This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe. Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also mean difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice. In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible. We are in flux.
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