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.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Saturday 9 May 2015
Saturday 2 May 2015
Utopianism and Anarchism
(The following paper was to be given at the London Anarchist Forum
Meeting on June 12th, 2009 but, circumstances beyond the control of the
organisers meant that it could not be presented. However, I was grateful to the LAF for triggering this paper which looks at anarchism from a
contemporary democratic socialist point of view, with special thanks to
Steve Ash now deceased who suggested it. It is really here just as a matter of record and I have added notes in italics where I have changed my mind in the intervening half decade or have something to add or something needs contextualising or explaining)
The Current Crisis - A Challenge to the Utopianism in Anarchism
I am not going to speak as an anarchist but as a mainstream democratic socialist who is sympathetic to the anarchist tradition from the libertarian Left - and who thinks that far more was lost than was gained when the Left made its successive turns towards sole concentration on Parliamentary action on the one hand and towards Marxism and vanguard parties on the other.
I do not think that the decision to organise in political parties was entirely wrong but the nature and purpose of those parties has clearly become corrupted so that what passes for the Left has become degraded into a professional political class seeking to administer the state for its own benefit - far more than for that of its own constituents.
Similarly, the impatience and a-morality of Marxism created a monstrosity in the consequent management of the 1917 Revolution, even if a lot of the terror must be put down to the determined attempt by the Western liberal powers to strangle what started as a people’s rising. In the pantheon of cowards, Kerensky must go down in history as a man who failed to seize the moment for peace and land redistribution.
In other words, the victors over the nineteenth century anarchist tradition have proved worse than flawed, they have proved themselves either self-regarding opportunists or vicious tyrants. But what do both have in common that gave them the energy to overcome the fluid leaderless resistance of early anarchism? They had a commitment to hierarchical organization.
They introduced both solidarity and a fixed ideology and this allowed some to step over others to acquire the sort of centralized power epitomized by Blair in the one tradition and Stalin in the other. The similarities between these monsters are greater than we may think – centralization led to sclerosis and ultimately to failure.
Greed for power and office and incompetence are built into institutions that set the rules for themselves. Just as the Communist Party of Russia set the rules for a whole society, so Parliament sets rules that allowed its members, in secret, to take what it wanted as if of right [1]. In both closed societies, the perpetrators had no consciousness of their having done any wrong.
They had literally become institutionalized into crime – the Vatican gives us another example. Think of the link between the Catholic Church and the Inquisition or the Ustase and then think of the ideals in the Gospels. This is the common theme of institutionalisation – the perversion of fine theory into cruel practice.
But this is precisely where anarchist utopianism gets challenged.
First, if anarchism is so good why does it rarely win a straight fight and then, if it does, not for long. The experience of the communards and of POUM in Spain suggests that others tend to win in a fight and, unless you are prepared to rely on some abstract theory of evil, there must be some reason for this in history. It may be different in the future and we will come on to that but history tends to show that anarchists don’t win for long [2].
Second, the conduct of MPs in modern Britain and of Communist Party cadres in twentieth century Russia shows very little sign of human nature being benign. Of course, the anarchist argument is that the system makes the man and that if you removed social and institutional pressures on man, the natural co-operative spirit of mankind will out. Unfortunately, this sounds rather like the essentialist fallacy of human nature that the Communists themselves held to when they stated that a New Man would arise from a change in the conditions of the working class.
This was perhaps Marx’s own transfer of the romantic imaginings of Rousseau via German Idealism - a nod to anarchist ideals - when he proposed that the state would wither away when the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established. It is not that there is no evidence for this misreading of our animal aspects but that the evidence of psychology in recent years is in precisely the opposite direction.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated what cruelties we will undertake if sufficient authority is applied to us. To the anarchist mind, this might merely show that we should seek a state of no authority, yet other experimentation and observation tends to tell us that differential intelligence and personality will lead to manipulative exploitation. Some will always fall into that class of sociopath that is so problematic for those who believe that humans are intrinsically good.
(I don’t want to get into the problem of evil, sin and the fall of man here because these are just attempts to create a moral explanation from outside of man for contingent facts about what it is to be human.)
Perhaps the most devastating account of human cruelty does not lie in the bare account of bureaucratic murders in the last century or the savage conduct of so-called barbaric peoples but in the most disturbing book that I have read in a long time because it is made up of the testimonies of individuals who were victims and perpetrators on all sides of what happens when the rule of law really is removed completely – the conditions of the second world war in two theatres.
This is Laurence Rees’ 2008 book, ‘Their Darkest Hour’, which demonstrates the co-existence of great altruism and exceptional sadistic cruelty but certainly gives no cause to believe that a society without law would not be anything other than a vicious jungle. Human beings are complex and only contingently ‘good’ (if good means co-operative and engaged in non-exploitative conduct, without us even getting into the possibility of altruism).
There is no reasonable condition of life, including the unlikely situation of no competition for basic resources, which would not involve some form of psychic vampirism or exploitation by some over others because our minds are structured to be limited in perception and to react to events according to past experiences – unless, that is, we are prepared to countenance some drug-induced social control such as that envisaged by Aldous Huxley in ‘Brave New World’ or see the ‘withering away’ being undertaken as a massively long evolutionary process. Unfortunately, politics is immediate and messy ....
So we have the problem that progressive anti-anarchisms have failed because the human condition expresses itself as egotism within theoretically otherwise benign systems, but that anarchism itself cannot succeed in political practice for long because of that same human nature in its competitive and reactionary mode. There are even libertarians who would claim to be brothers and sisters of anarchists but are in direct opposition to them as persons who see the good society as one of dynamic competition rather than collaboration.
Are we to be left with conservative pessimism then? Is the Left project, essentially one of liberation, equality and of fraternity, doomed on the altar of our animal nature. I think not, not because I am a utopian but because I am an anti-utopian. The findings of psychologists about the unthinking or limbic aspects of human nature and their ineluctability and their ‘unknownness’ (we cannot know other minds and we are certainly not fixed essentially in any particular moment of time) provide an argument for a politics that is much closer to anarchism than it is to organized socialism as it exists today within (say) the British Labour Party or the European Socialists [3].
It is socialism that has to adapt to anarchism more than anarchism to socialism to create a workable Left project. The introduction [4] referred to my co-ordination (over a decade now ago) of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. Its failure was instructive on two grounds.
First, it did not fail from within. Very disparate left-wing groups with a radical democratic model of party reform were able to collaborate on a very limited programme and operate against the party machine to a very high level of propaganda success (including a supportive editorial in the Guardian) through using new technologies. The campaign was an early user (1995/6) of e-mail as a consultative and decision-making tool.
It failed eventually because a deal was made in a smoke-filled room between the rising faction in the party and the political officers of the union backers of that party. The rising politicians were engineering a deal to remove themselves from membership scrutiny, indeed from all constraints. They traded a special interest agenda with executive officers who operated without reference to their own union members.
The lesson is that people can self-organise effectively BUT that they are soon faced with structures that hold power so tightly that no protest, demonstration or campaign can break the hold of those few who command it. This was brought home to people in the massive anti-war protests at the beginning of the century - the public was simply ignored by the decision-making calculation of, in fact, one man and those close to him. A traditional revolution, under these circumstances, merely replaces one set of the few with another … the control systems remain.
This coup by New Labour gave us twelve years or so of the most viciously anti-libertarian non wartime government since Castlereagh and the most war-mongering government since Salisbury or perhaps Palmerston. The harvest was reaped only in the last few weeks [5] – not only in a devastating defeat for it in the political field, the democratic equivalent of the Fall of Berlin, but a defeat that has given legitimacy not merely to the centre-right and to the propertied interest but to a vicious racist rump (the BNP)
What happened in 1996 when the CLGA failed and events today are intimately connected [as argued in Lobster 55]. Political recovery on the democratic socialist Left is going to require the spirit of the anarchic to overcome it. Let me explain. The current crisis is a crisis of big-ness and centralization. Globalisation has created a need for technocratic institutions at a global or regional level that can never be properly scrutinised by anything other than other experts of a similar degree of alleged sophistication [6].
An argument that such institutions cannot be democratic and must work against democratic and popular accountability does not need to be made to this audience. The people becomes a mob mediated by, yes, the media. This is the politics of Berlusconi yet, in a sense, it is more authentic than the cod-progressivism served up by contemporary liberals.
The strategy of post-Soviet socialism has been to try match the technocracy blow for blow, to capture its commanding heights and to turn it to ‘progressive ends’. But such a strategy means bigger and bigger trades unions, NGOs and political parties whose ruling membership is self-appointed, and often interchangeable with each other and even with the big business that it purports to contain and restrain.
For example, a typical career path today might involve a young trades union bureaucrat getting into Parliament in early middle age and then advising a corporation as a public affairs consultant to a corporation. Another might involve a young public affairs consultant entering Parliament and then running an international NGO. Under such conditions, group think and acceptance of the status quo must be the normal way of doing things. It would be like the flow of think tank professionals, military men and party officials in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
Through the Parliamentary and party process, State, progressives and institutions become one liberal totalitarian whole. Since the totalitarian process is nearly indistinguishable after a while between ‘progressives’ (whether called Democrats or PES) or ‘conservatives (whether called Republicans or the EPP) [7], it is no wonder that effective resistance to this cold machinery comes only from the Far Left and the Far Right or from the many differing types of economic, political and social libertarian.
The Ayn Rand worshipping radical free marketer, the polyamorous or transgendered sexual revolutionary and the political anarchist or dissident democratic socialist, let alone neo-pagans and thelemites, will have more in common as dissidents against liberal orthodoxy than they do with the system against which they struggle.
Excessive regulation that levels people down and assumes that no one can be trusted, a sexual culture of licentious imagery and commodity fetishism instead of natural sexuality, centralized power and bureaucracy and the presumption that unaccountable theocratic appointees can represent more than themselves … all are part of the same general culture which turns people into stereotypes, none worse than that of leftist identity politics.
The socializing tendencies of the machine means that the real resistance will now always tend to come more effectively from the Right [8]. David Cameron may be more acute than liberal commentators think in associating himself with euro-critical Polish and Czech parties than with those who take all this at face value. Berlusconi adopts yet another model of resistance – nationalist populism that operates with almost carnival flair to pinprick the po-faced political correctness of his dull opponents [9].
Since entrepreneurs, artists and dissidents are generally ineffective political organizers, the bureaucratic Left steadily cedes ground to the populist Right which offers a moderated social and economic freedom in return for authoritarian state governance.
Berlusconi may protest at pictures of his nearly erect willy in a Spanish newspaper but it does no harm to his electoral fortunes anymore than racism did to the BNP’s or Jobbik’s. When excluded from any power, the public starts to get a taste for sex and violence. As Disraeli said of old Palmerston when it was revealed that he was allegedly having an adulterous affair, “Let’s hope that it does not get out or he’ll win by a landslide”. In despair at progress or under threat, bloodlust soon becomes normal – give me an imposed Roman Peace and I shall soon give you the slaughter in the Coliseum.
Socialism has thus lost the plot for the third time in history. The first time was when it dropped its international trousers in 1914 and allowed itself to become the catamite of militarists. The second was when it adopted vanguardism and cornered itself into state terror and trying to explain complex political philosophy to peasants. The third moment is now – when it tries to enforce good on a population that is not ready to be bored in heaven by choirs of angels.
So let’s get back to anarchism. While socialism has made three attempts at changing the world – in one country, through global revolution and through progressive internationalism – anarchists have contemplated their navels or engaged in hobbyism. Read any text on anarchism and you see nothing but the small scale up to a point. This is good. This is of the essence of anarchism but it is not doing anything to drag the mass of the world’s population out of poverty or redistribute wealth and power in the first world.
What is happening is that anarchists are pauperising themselves to live a dream, abstracting themselves from a wasteful and incompetent global system and perhaps hoping it will all go away. But be warned, if the fascists, communists or even progressive liberals seize the organs of state and the monopoly of force, then the fate of anarchists is extinction - whether by aggression or stealth.
The general population will be sucked into the totalitarian mind-set and, for them, it will be just a case of waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn again and give them some new noble lie, some totalizing world view that tells them what to think and what to be.
So, if anarchists have a wrong-headed view of the essential niceness of the human condition and seem incapable of moving far beyond stunts, localised insurgencies and happenings and if socialists have proved malign, incompetent and authors of their own destruction, where do we go from here …
My proposal is that anarchism does NOT change its essential nature, which is self-organisation, nor its default position in favour of collaboration and altruism. What it should be looking at now is having the courage to return to the experience of POUM in Catalonia which was snuffed out by force and to the techniques (though not the ideology) of urban welfare systems like those of Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, you heard me right. Though common sense suggests that guns should not be part of the equation.
The BNP has overlaid its gangster class on very real distress and anxiety amongst the weakest sections of the urban working class. The Labour Movement, though not the socialists (i.e. the 3% of the vote that emerged last week), has abandoned them and no longer has the will or the manpower to organize them. If the Left does not adopt an organizing approach to these communities, they will turn to fascisms or populisms with more determination than we have seen to date.
This is a rare opportunity to apply anarchistic organizational principles, even along the original rather than the debased model of the Soviets, to real social problems and to create an organizational structure that, in non-sectarian alliance with democratic socialists, can create a non-racist and non-authoritarian model for localities under pressure – one that can put the fear of the people into the liberal establishment, the opportunists in the political class, the State and the fascists. [10]
This is true revolution from below and it has a place for direct action strategies. Indeed, direct action strategies like Raven’s Ait and the Tyting Farm Community [11] and the organization of economic and anti-war protest, will be more effective to the degree that they have a sea of support in which to swim. The alliance underpinning the campaign against the third runway at Heathrow in which middle class residents and street environmentalists is one to watch [12].
In the event, Raven’s Ait was re-occupied with impunity and its bland Liberal Democrat MP reduced to mildly sympathetic impotence because the assumption in society was that the island involved could only be administered through procedures far distant from the community in which it was situated.
But there is a price anarchism will have to pay … It will have to cease to be hobbyist. It will have to cease to be utopian. It will have to cease to be an aesthetic position. It will have to realize that the dispersal of power means the acquisition and management of power and that the control of opportunists, incompetents and exploiters from below needs to be, yes, institutionalized in a demotic form of the original liberal vision of 1688.
What we are talking about here is the next stage in the slow evolution of that long revolution from Magna Carta through 1688 and on to the welfare state that started to go into reverse under Thatcher and which reached criminal levels of reaction under Blair.
The point is that positive democratic, social, economic and legal reform was bought at the cost of the steady centralization of the State and of culture. This has proved to be a devil’s pact, the sort of devil’s pact that could order its young to die for diplomatic misjudgements, listen to only four national radio stations and take that as arbiter of culture and give, in return, decent welfare provision. Bismarck did something similar without having to piddle around worrying about democracy.
National welfare was traded, quite legitimately up to a point for many working people, for decreasing freedom. The pact was a balanced one, a social democratic one. But when the system decided to start to remove key freedoms and community institutions in order to permit market-led social and economic changes, the pact was broken. Working people have got neither welfare nor democracy and our Roman Peace is now inclining them towards a limbic rage about their condition [13].
Yet the collapse of the shared social democratic (or was it national socialist?) political structure also meant the collapse of strategies of moderate resistance. Freedom is not a matter of liberal constitutional reform, of proportional representation, republicanism and bills of rights, or the current tinkering of Gordon Brown – these merely lock in the power of the propertied. It is about the seizure of power from below in an orderly and sustained way. It is truly revolutionary, preferably bloodless.
There is a great deal at stake here. An established constitutional state, such as the US, can apparently lance the boil of mass discontent with a decisive victory for a President but the UK’s informal constitution and Europe’s half-baked constitution provide an unusual opportunity for constructively disruptive action. If the liberals get their way and impose a written constitution or the Lisbon Treaty is imposed on the constituent states of the EU through the rank treachery to the people of their political classes, the game is probably up.
If either happens, anarchism may as well abandon any pretensions in the developed world to a political life and revert to alternative lifestyles, aestheticism and community work. So the urgency is clear. Anarchists, if they have a political sense, need to work in an organized way with libertarians and socialists against both the Lisbon Treaty [14] and similar attempts to create a federal state and against the liberal elite’s attempt to give itself cover through regulation and legal structures that will enable a permanent state of manipulation of us by them.
If they succeed in these plans, political anarchists, libertarians and 'true' socialists will become neutered or forced into insurgency – or, in modern parlance, they will become ‘terrorists’. And, before you think this fanciful, consider the amount of effort going into intelligence-based policing against dissidents and protesters, often at the expense of the basic maintenance of social order in the inner cities [15].
But what I have not referred to is the ‘good society’ and what it comprises. I have taken a fairly negative view of human nature but this is not a true reflection of my views. My view is similar to that of many sensible anarchists – that we are neither good nor bad in essence, just human, and that our actions are directed, by chance and necessity (including poverty and history), down channels that may be good or bad for others or for ourselves.
We are good and bad only in contexts and in relation to others and our own true will. This is where society comes in because it is the context against which we measure our true will. It can enable and it can repress. It can be fair or it can be exploitative. The good society is one where all are equally enabled and none are exploited. And the best judge of what is good for me is me and not some cod-progressive in an office in Whitehall or Brussels.
The difference between me and many anarchists is only in emphasis and means, The libertarian in me sees the only structure for the good society as being one in which I have a voice and a stake and which minimizes its interference in my life and that of others.
However, the issues surrounding enablement and resistance to exploitation require, for me, some sort of governance, a framework with a rule of law. That is where we may agree to disagree because at the end of the day that framework has to be democratic (based on the collective will of the population at large) and socialist - or at least welfarist (representing the interests of the whole community).
The great political parties are broad churches and there is no reason why the resistance to them, to the state and to exploitation should not be a non-sectarian broad church as well. Contemporary technology – from contraception through medical intervention to internet communications – provides much greater opportunities for self-awareness, self education and self determination than at any other time in history [16].
This is the essence of the current potential for revolution. We are not now free because we are told that we are free – whether by Rousseau or Marx – but we are free because we are actually free, not potentially but actually, sexually and in our right to self-expression as much as in any other respect. We are not beyond good and evil but we are beyond convention and custom.
For some reason, the ‘authorities’, perhaps existing as no more than a neurotic authoritarian mind-set, are becoming deeply frightened by what this may mean in terms of our willingness to be taxed and told what to do [17]. Their entire machinery is designed to constrain and contain our free spirits. Our freedom is contained within a ready-made mass culture of titillation and received ideas, an overt sexual culture that is observed rather than lived [18], and a rhetoric of rights and democracy without the practice.
Now is the time to say that we will not take any more and that anything, I say again, anything, is permissible to preserve our real freedoms.
So I shall end there … if you think I have a point, then it is time for anarchists to start to consider how they will organise themselves at this critical time.
And if you do not, then I thank you for your time and advise you to abandon political dreaming and make pots or take up flower arranging.
NOTES
[1] The reference here is to the then-recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.
[2] A current case study in this is going on, while we write, in the streets of Greece where a non-anarchist neo-socialist movement is facing the might of institutional capital after serious errors of judgment by pseudo-socialists in the preceding administrations. If such an organised alternative to anarchism and to neo-liberalism fails to achieve anything at all in defending the Greek people from the past mistakes of their own ruling classes, then we are in very murky waters indeed, driving, perhaps, populations to total submission to undemocratic technocracy, to neo-communist alternatives or to social and political breakdown.
[3] Close but not identical with - Syriza seems to have some anarchistic elements within an essentially socialist structure while the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has recently offered us a Marxism that makes significant concessions to the anarchist position on social structures.
[4] This refers to an introductory political biography to the talk.
[5] This was a reference to political conditions at the time which saw a rapid rise in the vote for the Fascist BNP and its subsequent rapid fall. In fact, I was on record in other papers as dismissing the BNP threat and condemning the liberal-left hysteria surrounding, as, more recently, I have comndemned the hysteria surrounding the Charlie Hebdo hysteria. However, June 2009 saw massive falls in electoral support for Labour in the European and local elections and, although not sustained for the 2010 Election, Labour lost power to a Conservative-Liberal coalition a year later. I probably over-egged the crisis for the Left for the audience but it was a shock that eventually resulted in a slight shift to the Left in the Party with the election as leader of Ed Miliband.
[6] Events since 2009 appear to have confirmed that the international institutional infrastructure that was being built up in the decades before the 2008 crash was coming under severe strain half a decade later. This 'not fit for purpose' aspect of the attempt to contain and control globalisation through liberal institutional structures is self evident to anyone observing the cracks in the system appearing in every direction - political, social and economic - and yet the liberal centre ground persists in avoiding and evading analysis of the facts placed before them by history.
[7] To some extent we are seeing changes in the cosy situation where global governance is a matter of the competition betwen two bourgeois factions of the same global centrist party. In the years since the talk was drafted, the main revolt has been on the national populist Right represented by non-fascist entities such as the Tea Party, UKIP and the National Front in France as well as national and more neo-nationalist and quasi-fascistic operations in Eastern Europe and Greece. Only recently have we seen a countervailing Left populism emerge with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Italy and perhaps signs of incipent organisation in Italy and in the US. Taken together, the liberal bourgeois centre faces a war on two fronts but one where the Right is more destabilising and driving power to the liberal-left whose instincts are to ignore reality and expand provocatively their international liberal internationalism - at obscene cost in terms of human suffering on the Western periphery.
[8] This was definitely true in 2009, especially as Occupy and Femen represented the height of middle class liberal posturing. However, there are signs that the Left is now beginning to even up the resistance score as the centrist model continues to fail to deliver economic growth, the posturing liberals dig themselves into ever deeper holes and the centre appears to have no option left according to its own rules of engagement but to drive an austerity programme that seems to be unfairly directed at the weakest and most vulnerable.
[9] Berlusconi, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, eventually fell victim to a centrist liberal strategy of using the law to discredit inconvenient persons and there was a natural end to his tenure because of age but the principle he represented not only persists but flourishes in the smaller European countries whether directed at neonationalism (as in the Czech Republic or Hungary) or a curious form of hyper-liberal Westernism linked to NATO (as in the Baltic Republic and Poland).
[10] The point I would have made more strongly here (and bear in mind that the rhetoric at this point has moved into persuasive mode designed to shake up anarchists from their torpor) is that the liberal Left took a dramatic wrong-turning with the adoption of identity politics as the basis for coalition-building to the exclusion of locality, family, cultural tribe and work-place organisation. It 'went against nature' by encouraging the attribute of a person instead of the person as the core unit of society.
[11] A matter of local concern to London Anarchists at that point in history.
[12] This, resistance to Cross Rail and the Gatwick extensions are still ones to watch. Fracking would have been added to the list except that Cameron suddenly back-tracked from the aggressive promotion of the shale gas industry in anticipation of its effect on the Southern English vote in core Tory areas. The plan was to come back to it after the election with a solid majority and damn the hides of the English middle classes. If he had not drawn back, the Greens might be more of a threat than they are and built up a 'Blue' Green support much as UKIP has defied its right wing tag and built a 'Red' element.
[13] In fact, as the last 2015 Election TV Debate showed, the limbic rage has moved up the social scale to the articulate middle classes.
[14] Unsurprisingly, the Lisbon Treaty came into full force at the end of that year (2009) and the post-Crash European Union has looked increasingly ramshackle ever since, hanging on to its constitutional position as substitute for any form of policy that would offer democratic solutions for problems to its population. Needless to say, it was the bankrupt centre-left (or rather 'radical centre') that engineered this farce and so the resistance to its failed model has fallen to the populist Right rather than to the popular Left.
[15] This was a very serious concern at the time - at a point where the structures imposed on society by the rather spurious 'war on terror' overlapped with the panic in the system about a crisis in the very means of production and distribution. The legislation is still in place but the middle classes themselves started to baulk and fight back at the implications of the security agenda - at least in the UK and Europe if less so in the US. The moment has probably passed for the worst to be imposed, It is fascinating to note in this context that the attempt by NATO to drive public support for its forward policy against Russia has failed in the West of the Continent, including usually militaristic Britain, and that the heavy lobbying for guarantees on defence spending achieved nothing but the opportunistic appropriation of the policy by UKIP.
[16] Since this was written, we have taken an interest in the rise of transhumanism and the formation of Transhumanist Parties across the West. Our judgment is that these are single issue parties that repeat the intellectual errors of the Greens but the application of technology for the benefit of humanity is a serious issue that deserves being higher on the agenda as a matter for community action. The anti-technological position of the neo-conservative (not in the US sense of the term) environmentalist Left has gone too far.
[17] I think this fear of the people is the defining aspect of the politics of our time. Though the 'system' has a monopoly of force and could do terrible things if it wished, the complexity and interdependence of society has made the risks of doing so far too great for the safe survival of elites and States. It is not that the people can do much about their situation in a positive sense at this point in history but the disruption caused by non-compliance, selective resistance and sheer bloody-mindedness to a weak and vulnerable system gives it a sort of negative power based on its lack of predictability. This helps to explain the State's obsession with surveillance, Big Data, nudge and behaviourial psychology ... it hopes to manipulate rather than force us into compliance. It is probably a forlorn hope because complexity is not only built into the system but is growing exponentially - the arrival of artificial intelligence is expected by the authorities to be a means of exerting control again but this is to be doubted. AI merely adds another layer of complexity.
[18] This should not be misunderstood as socially conservative statement - quite the opposite. The fact of an increasingly sex-positive culture is to be applauded. The argument is the opposite - that repression has merely been replaced by voyeurism and that a form of cultural self censorship in the population means that people are still hiding behind the curtain watching others have fun rather than having fun themselves.
The Current Crisis - A Challenge to the Utopianism in Anarchism
I am not going to speak as an anarchist but as a mainstream democratic socialist who is sympathetic to the anarchist tradition from the libertarian Left - and who thinks that far more was lost than was gained when the Left made its successive turns towards sole concentration on Parliamentary action on the one hand and towards Marxism and vanguard parties on the other.
I do not think that the decision to organise in political parties was entirely wrong but the nature and purpose of those parties has clearly become corrupted so that what passes for the Left has become degraded into a professional political class seeking to administer the state for its own benefit - far more than for that of its own constituents.
Similarly, the impatience and a-morality of Marxism created a monstrosity in the consequent management of the 1917 Revolution, even if a lot of the terror must be put down to the determined attempt by the Western liberal powers to strangle what started as a people’s rising. In the pantheon of cowards, Kerensky must go down in history as a man who failed to seize the moment for peace and land redistribution.
In other words, the victors over the nineteenth century anarchist tradition have proved worse than flawed, they have proved themselves either self-regarding opportunists or vicious tyrants. But what do both have in common that gave them the energy to overcome the fluid leaderless resistance of early anarchism? They had a commitment to hierarchical organization.
They introduced both solidarity and a fixed ideology and this allowed some to step over others to acquire the sort of centralized power epitomized by Blair in the one tradition and Stalin in the other. The similarities between these monsters are greater than we may think – centralization led to sclerosis and ultimately to failure.
Greed for power and office and incompetence are built into institutions that set the rules for themselves. Just as the Communist Party of Russia set the rules for a whole society, so Parliament sets rules that allowed its members, in secret, to take what it wanted as if of right [1]. In both closed societies, the perpetrators had no consciousness of their having done any wrong.
They had literally become institutionalized into crime – the Vatican gives us another example. Think of the link between the Catholic Church and the Inquisition or the Ustase and then think of the ideals in the Gospels. This is the common theme of institutionalisation – the perversion of fine theory into cruel practice.
But this is precisely where anarchist utopianism gets challenged.
First, if anarchism is so good why does it rarely win a straight fight and then, if it does, not for long. The experience of the communards and of POUM in Spain suggests that others tend to win in a fight and, unless you are prepared to rely on some abstract theory of evil, there must be some reason for this in history. It may be different in the future and we will come on to that but history tends to show that anarchists don’t win for long [2].
Second, the conduct of MPs in modern Britain and of Communist Party cadres in twentieth century Russia shows very little sign of human nature being benign. Of course, the anarchist argument is that the system makes the man and that if you removed social and institutional pressures on man, the natural co-operative spirit of mankind will out. Unfortunately, this sounds rather like the essentialist fallacy of human nature that the Communists themselves held to when they stated that a New Man would arise from a change in the conditions of the working class.
This was perhaps Marx’s own transfer of the romantic imaginings of Rousseau via German Idealism - a nod to anarchist ideals - when he proposed that the state would wither away when the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established. It is not that there is no evidence for this misreading of our animal aspects but that the evidence of psychology in recent years is in precisely the opposite direction.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated what cruelties we will undertake if sufficient authority is applied to us. To the anarchist mind, this might merely show that we should seek a state of no authority, yet other experimentation and observation tends to tell us that differential intelligence and personality will lead to manipulative exploitation. Some will always fall into that class of sociopath that is so problematic for those who believe that humans are intrinsically good.
(I don’t want to get into the problem of evil, sin and the fall of man here because these are just attempts to create a moral explanation from outside of man for contingent facts about what it is to be human.)
Perhaps the most devastating account of human cruelty does not lie in the bare account of bureaucratic murders in the last century or the savage conduct of so-called barbaric peoples but in the most disturbing book that I have read in a long time because it is made up of the testimonies of individuals who were victims and perpetrators on all sides of what happens when the rule of law really is removed completely – the conditions of the second world war in two theatres.
This is Laurence Rees’ 2008 book, ‘Their Darkest Hour’, which demonstrates the co-existence of great altruism and exceptional sadistic cruelty but certainly gives no cause to believe that a society without law would not be anything other than a vicious jungle. Human beings are complex and only contingently ‘good’ (if good means co-operative and engaged in non-exploitative conduct, without us even getting into the possibility of altruism).
There is no reasonable condition of life, including the unlikely situation of no competition for basic resources, which would not involve some form of psychic vampirism or exploitation by some over others because our minds are structured to be limited in perception and to react to events according to past experiences – unless, that is, we are prepared to countenance some drug-induced social control such as that envisaged by Aldous Huxley in ‘Brave New World’ or see the ‘withering away’ being undertaken as a massively long evolutionary process. Unfortunately, politics is immediate and messy ....
So we have the problem that progressive anti-anarchisms have failed because the human condition expresses itself as egotism within theoretically otherwise benign systems, but that anarchism itself cannot succeed in political practice for long because of that same human nature in its competitive and reactionary mode. There are even libertarians who would claim to be brothers and sisters of anarchists but are in direct opposition to them as persons who see the good society as one of dynamic competition rather than collaboration.
Are we to be left with conservative pessimism then? Is the Left project, essentially one of liberation, equality and of fraternity, doomed on the altar of our animal nature. I think not, not because I am a utopian but because I am an anti-utopian. The findings of psychologists about the unthinking or limbic aspects of human nature and their ineluctability and their ‘unknownness’ (we cannot know other minds and we are certainly not fixed essentially in any particular moment of time) provide an argument for a politics that is much closer to anarchism than it is to organized socialism as it exists today within (say) the British Labour Party or the European Socialists [3].
It is socialism that has to adapt to anarchism more than anarchism to socialism to create a workable Left project. The introduction [4] referred to my co-ordination (over a decade now ago) of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. Its failure was instructive on two grounds.
First, it did not fail from within. Very disparate left-wing groups with a radical democratic model of party reform were able to collaborate on a very limited programme and operate against the party machine to a very high level of propaganda success (including a supportive editorial in the Guardian) through using new technologies. The campaign was an early user (1995/6) of e-mail as a consultative and decision-making tool.
It failed eventually because a deal was made in a smoke-filled room between the rising faction in the party and the political officers of the union backers of that party. The rising politicians were engineering a deal to remove themselves from membership scrutiny, indeed from all constraints. They traded a special interest agenda with executive officers who operated without reference to their own union members.
The lesson is that people can self-organise effectively BUT that they are soon faced with structures that hold power so tightly that no protest, demonstration or campaign can break the hold of those few who command it. This was brought home to people in the massive anti-war protests at the beginning of the century - the public was simply ignored by the decision-making calculation of, in fact, one man and those close to him. A traditional revolution, under these circumstances, merely replaces one set of the few with another … the control systems remain.
This coup by New Labour gave us twelve years or so of the most viciously anti-libertarian non wartime government since Castlereagh and the most war-mongering government since Salisbury or perhaps Palmerston. The harvest was reaped only in the last few weeks [5] – not only in a devastating defeat for it in the political field, the democratic equivalent of the Fall of Berlin, but a defeat that has given legitimacy not merely to the centre-right and to the propertied interest but to a vicious racist rump (the BNP)
What happened in 1996 when the CLGA failed and events today are intimately connected [as argued in Lobster 55]. Political recovery on the democratic socialist Left is going to require the spirit of the anarchic to overcome it. Let me explain. The current crisis is a crisis of big-ness and centralization. Globalisation has created a need for technocratic institutions at a global or regional level that can never be properly scrutinised by anything other than other experts of a similar degree of alleged sophistication [6].
An argument that such institutions cannot be democratic and must work against democratic and popular accountability does not need to be made to this audience. The people becomes a mob mediated by, yes, the media. This is the politics of Berlusconi yet, in a sense, it is more authentic than the cod-progressivism served up by contemporary liberals.
The strategy of post-Soviet socialism has been to try match the technocracy blow for blow, to capture its commanding heights and to turn it to ‘progressive ends’. But such a strategy means bigger and bigger trades unions, NGOs and political parties whose ruling membership is self-appointed, and often interchangeable with each other and even with the big business that it purports to contain and restrain.
For example, a typical career path today might involve a young trades union bureaucrat getting into Parliament in early middle age and then advising a corporation as a public affairs consultant to a corporation. Another might involve a young public affairs consultant entering Parliament and then running an international NGO. Under such conditions, group think and acceptance of the status quo must be the normal way of doing things. It would be like the flow of think tank professionals, military men and party officials in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
Through the Parliamentary and party process, State, progressives and institutions become one liberal totalitarian whole. Since the totalitarian process is nearly indistinguishable after a while between ‘progressives’ (whether called Democrats or PES) or ‘conservatives (whether called Republicans or the EPP) [7], it is no wonder that effective resistance to this cold machinery comes only from the Far Left and the Far Right or from the many differing types of economic, political and social libertarian.
The Ayn Rand worshipping radical free marketer, the polyamorous or transgendered sexual revolutionary and the political anarchist or dissident democratic socialist, let alone neo-pagans and thelemites, will have more in common as dissidents against liberal orthodoxy than they do with the system against which they struggle.
Excessive regulation that levels people down and assumes that no one can be trusted, a sexual culture of licentious imagery and commodity fetishism instead of natural sexuality, centralized power and bureaucracy and the presumption that unaccountable theocratic appointees can represent more than themselves … all are part of the same general culture which turns people into stereotypes, none worse than that of leftist identity politics.
The socializing tendencies of the machine means that the real resistance will now always tend to come more effectively from the Right [8]. David Cameron may be more acute than liberal commentators think in associating himself with euro-critical Polish and Czech parties than with those who take all this at face value. Berlusconi adopts yet another model of resistance – nationalist populism that operates with almost carnival flair to pinprick the po-faced political correctness of his dull opponents [9].
Since entrepreneurs, artists and dissidents are generally ineffective political organizers, the bureaucratic Left steadily cedes ground to the populist Right which offers a moderated social and economic freedom in return for authoritarian state governance.
Berlusconi may protest at pictures of his nearly erect willy in a Spanish newspaper but it does no harm to his electoral fortunes anymore than racism did to the BNP’s or Jobbik’s. When excluded from any power, the public starts to get a taste for sex and violence. As Disraeli said of old Palmerston when it was revealed that he was allegedly having an adulterous affair, “Let’s hope that it does not get out or he’ll win by a landslide”. In despair at progress or under threat, bloodlust soon becomes normal – give me an imposed Roman Peace and I shall soon give you the slaughter in the Coliseum.
Socialism has thus lost the plot for the third time in history. The first time was when it dropped its international trousers in 1914 and allowed itself to become the catamite of militarists. The second was when it adopted vanguardism and cornered itself into state terror and trying to explain complex political philosophy to peasants. The third moment is now – when it tries to enforce good on a population that is not ready to be bored in heaven by choirs of angels.
So let’s get back to anarchism. While socialism has made three attempts at changing the world – in one country, through global revolution and through progressive internationalism – anarchists have contemplated their navels or engaged in hobbyism. Read any text on anarchism and you see nothing but the small scale up to a point. This is good. This is of the essence of anarchism but it is not doing anything to drag the mass of the world’s population out of poverty or redistribute wealth and power in the first world.
What is happening is that anarchists are pauperising themselves to live a dream, abstracting themselves from a wasteful and incompetent global system and perhaps hoping it will all go away. But be warned, if the fascists, communists or even progressive liberals seize the organs of state and the monopoly of force, then the fate of anarchists is extinction - whether by aggression or stealth.
The general population will be sucked into the totalitarian mind-set and, for them, it will be just a case of waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn again and give them some new noble lie, some totalizing world view that tells them what to think and what to be.
So, if anarchists have a wrong-headed view of the essential niceness of the human condition and seem incapable of moving far beyond stunts, localised insurgencies and happenings and if socialists have proved malign, incompetent and authors of their own destruction, where do we go from here …
My proposal is that anarchism does NOT change its essential nature, which is self-organisation, nor its default position in favour of collaboration and altruism. What it should be looking at now is having the courage to return to the experience of POUM in Catalonia which was snuffed out by force and to the techniques (though not the ideology) of urban welfare systems like those of Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, you heard me right. Though common sense suggests that guns should not be part of the equation.
The BNP has overlaid its gangster class on very real distress and anxiety amongst the weakest sections of the urban working class. The Labour Movement, though not the socialists (i.e. the 3% of the vote that emerged last week), has abandoned them and no longer has the will or the manpower to organize them. If the Left does not adopt an organizing approach to these communities, they will turn to fascisms or populisms with more determination than we have seen to date.
This is a rare opportunity to apply anarchistic organizational principles, even along the original rather than the debased model of the Soviets, to real social problems and to create an organizational structure that, in non-sectarian alliance with democratic socialists, can create a non-racist and non-authoritarian model for localities under pressure – one that can put the fear of the people into the liberal establishment, the opportunists in the political class, the State and the fascists. [10]
This is true revolution from below and it has a place for direct action strategies. Indeed, direct action strategies like Raven’s Ait and the Tyting Farm Community [11] and the organization of economic and anti-war protest, will be more effective to the degree that they have a sea of support in which to swim. The alliance underpinning the campaign against the third runway at Heathrow in which middle class residents and street environmentalists is one to watch [12].
In the event, Raven’s Ait was re-occupied with impunity and its bland Liberal Democrat MP reduced to mildly sympathetic impotence because the assumption in society was that the island involved could only be administered through procedures far distant from the community in which it was situated.
But there is a price anarchism will have to pay … It will have to cease to be hobbyist. It will have to cease to be utopian. It will have to cease to be an aesthetic position. It will have to realize that the dispersal of power means the acquisition and management of power and that the control of opportunists, incompetents and exploiters from below needs to be, yes, institutionalized in a demotic form of the original liberal vision of 1688.
What we are talking about here is the next stage in the slow evolution of that long revolution from Magna Carta through 1688 and on to the welfare state that started to go into reverse under Thatcher and which reached criminal levels of reaction under Blair.
The point is that positive democratic, social, economic and legal reform was bought at the cost of the steady centralization of the State and of culture. This has proved to be a devil’s pact, the sort of devil’s pact that could order its young to die for diplomatic misjudgements, listen to only four national radio stations and take that as arbiter of culture and give, in return, decent welfare provision. Bismarck did something similar without having to piddle around worrying about democracy.
National welfare was traded, quite legitimately up to a point for many working people, for decreasing freedom. The pact was a balanced one, a social democratic one. But when the system decided to start to remove key freedoms and community institutions in order to permit market-led social and economic changes, the pact was broken. Working people have got neither welfare nor democracy and our Roman Peace is now inclining them towards a limbic rage about their condition [13].
Yet the collapse of the shared social democratic (or was it national socialist?) political structure also meant the collapse of strategies of moderate resistance. Freedom is not a matter of liberal constitutional reform, of proportional representation, republicanism and bills of rights, or the current tinkering of Gordon Brown – these merely lock in the power of the propertied. It is about the seizure of power from below in an orderly and sustained way. It is truly revolutionary, preferably bloodless.
There is a great deal at stake here. An established constitutional state, such as the US, can apparently lance the boil of mass discontent with a decisive victory for a President but the UK’s informal constitution and Europe’s half-baked constitution provide an unusual opportunity for constructively disruptive action. If the liberals get their way and impose a written constitution or the Lisbon Treaty is imposed on the constituent states of the EU through the rank treachery to the people of their political classes, the game is probably up.
If either happens, anarchism may as well abandon any pretensions in the developed world to a political life and revert to alternative lifestyles, aestheticism and community work. So the urgency is clear. Anarchists, if they have a political sense, need to work in an organized way with libertarians and socialists against both the Lisbon Treaty [14] and similar attempts to create a federal state and against the liberal elite’s attempt to give itself cover through regulation and legal structures that will enable a permanent state of manipulation of us by them.
If they succeed in these plans, political anarchists, libertarians and 'true' socialists will become neutered or forced into insurgency – or, in modern parlance, they will become ‘terrorists’. And, before you think this fanciful, consider the amount of effort going into intelligence-based policing against dissidents and protesters, often at the expense of the basic maintenance of social order in the inner cities [15].
But what I have not referred to is the ‘good society’ and what it comprises. I have taken a fairly negative view of human nature but this is not a true reflection of my views. My view is similar to that of many sensible anarchists – that we are neither good nor bad in essence, just human, and that our actions are directed, by chance and necessity (including poverty and history), down channels that may be good or bad for others or for ourselves.
We are good and bad only in contexts and in relation to others and our own true will. This is where society comes in because it is the context against which we measure our true will. It can enable and it can repress. It can be fair or it can be exploitative. The good society is one where all are equally enabled and none are exploited. And the best judge of what is good for me is me and not some cod-progressive in an office in Whitehall or Brussels.
The difference between me and many anarchists is only in emphasis and means, The libertarian in me sees the only structure for the good society as being one in which I have a voice and a stake and which minimizes its interference in my life and that of others.
However, the issues surrounding enablement and resistance to exploitation require, for me, some sort of governance, a framework with a rule of law. That is where we may agree to disagree because at the end of the day that framework has to be democratic (based on the collective will of the population at large) and socialist - or at least welfarist (representing the interests of the whole community).
The great political parties are broad churches and there is no reason why the resistance to them, to the state and to exploitation should not be a non-sectarian broad church as well. Contemporary technology – from contraception through medical intervention to internet communications – provides much greater opportunities for self-awareness, self education and self determination than at any other time in history [16].
This is the essence of the current potential for revolution. We are not now free because we are told that we are free – whether by Rousseau or Marx – but we are free because we are actually free, not potentially but actually, sexually and in our right to self-expression as much as in any other respect. We are not beyond good and evil but we are beyond convention and custom.
For some reason, the ‘authorities’, perhaps existing as no more than a neurotic authoritarian mind-set, are becoming deeply frightened by what this may mean in terms of our willingness to be taxed and told what to do [17]. Their entire machinery is designed to constrain and contain our free spirits. Our freedom is contained within a ready-made mass culture of titillation and received ideas, an overt sexual culture that is observed rather than lived [18], and a rhetoric of rights and democracy without the practice.
Now is the time to say that we will not take any more and that anything, I say again, anything, is permissible to preserve our real freedoms.
So I shall end there … if you think I have a point, then it is time for anarchists to start to consider how they will organise themselves at this critical time.
And if you do not, then I thank you for your time and advise you to abandon political dreaming and make pots or take up flower arranging.
NOTES
[1] The reference here is to the then-recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.
[2] A current case study in this is going on, while we write, in the streets of Greece where a non-anarchist neo-socialist movement is facing the might of institutional capital after serious errors of judgment by pseudo-socialists in the preceding administrations. If such an organised alternative to anarchism and to neo-liberalism fails to achieve anything at all in defending the Greek people from the past mistakes of their own ruling classes, then we are in very murky waters indeed, driving, perhaps, populations to total submission to undemocratic technocracy, to neo-communist alternatives or to social and political breakdown.
[3] Close but not identical with - Syriza seems to have some anarchistic elements within an essentially socialist structure while the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has recently offered us a Marxism that makes significant concessions to the anarchist position on social structures.
[4] This refers to an introductory political biography to the talk.
[5] This was a reference to political conditions at the time which saw a rapid rise in the vote for the Fascist BNP and its subsequent rapid fall. In fact, I was on record in other papers as dismissing the BNP threat and condemning the liberal-left hysteria surrounding, as, more recently, I have comndemned the hysteria surrounding the Charlie Hebdo hysteria. However, June 2009 saw massive falls in electoral support for Labour in the European and local elections and, although not sustained for the 2010 Election, Labour lost power to a Conservative-Liberal coalition a year later. I probably over-egged the crisis for the Left for the audience but it was a shock that eventually resulted in a slight shift to the Left in the Party with the election as leader of Ed Miliband.
[6] Events since 2009 appear to have confirmed that the international institutional infrastructure that was being built up in the decades before the 2008 crash was coming under severe strain half a decade later. This 'not fit for purpose' aspect of the attempt to contain and control globalisation through liberal institutional structures is self evident to anyone observing the cracks in the system appearing in every direction - political, social and economic - and yet the liberal centre ground persists in avoiding and evading analysis of the facts placed before them by history.
[7] To some extent we are seeing changes in the cosy situation where global governance is a matter of the competition betwen two bourgeois factions of the same global centrist party. In the years since the talk was drafted, the main revolt has been on the national populist Right represented by non-fascist entities such as the Tea Party, UKIP and the National Front in France as well as national and more neo-nationalist and quasi-fascistic operations in Eastern Europe and Greece. Only recently have we seen a countervailing Left populism emerge with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Italy and perhaps signs of incipent organisation in Italy and in the US. Taken together, the liberal bourgeois centre faces a war on two fronts but one where the Right is more destabilising and driving power to the liberal-left whose instincts are to ignore reality and expand provocatively their international liberal internationalism - at obscene cost in terms of human suffering on the Western periphery.
[8] This was definitely true in 2009, especially as Occupy and Femen represented the height of middle class liberal posturing. However, there are signs that the Left is now beginning to even up the resistance score as the centrist model continues to fail to deliver economic growth, the posturing liberals dig themselves into ever deeper holes and the centre appears to have no option left according to its own rules of engagement but to drive an austerity programme that seems to be unfairly directed at the weakest and most vulnerable.
[9] Berlusconi, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, eventually fell victim to a centrist liberal strategy of using the law to discredit inconvenient persons and there was a natural end to his tenure because of age but the principle he represented not only persists but flourishes in the smaller European countries whether directed at neonationalism (as in the Czech Republic or Hungary) or a curious form of hyper-liberal Westernism linked to NATO (as in the Baltic Republic and Poland).
[10] The point I would have made more strongly here (and bear in mind that the rhetoric at this point has moved into persuasive mode designed to shake up anarchists from their torpor) is that the liberal Left took a dramatic wrong-turning with the adoption of identity politics as the basis for coalition-building to the exclusion of locality, family, cultural tribe and work-place organisation. It 'went against nature' by encouraging the attribute of a person instead of the person as the core unit of society.
[11] A matter of local concern to London Anarchists at that point in history.
[12] This, resistance to Cross Rail and the Gatwick extensions are still ones to watch. Fracking would have been added to the list except that Cameron suddenly back-tracked from the aggressive promotion of the shale gas industry in anticipation of its effect on the Southern English vote in core Tory areas. The plan was to come back to it after the election with a solid majority and damn the hides of the English middle classes. If he had not drawn back, the Greens might be more of a threat than they are and built up a 'Blue' Green support much as UKIP has defied its right wing tag and built a 'Red' element.
[13] In fact, as the last 2015 Election TV Debate showed, the limbic rage has moved up the social scale to the articulate middle classes.
[14] Unsurprisingly, the Lisbon Treaty came into full force at the end of that year (2009) and the post-Crash European Union has looked increasingly ramshackle ever since, hanging on to its constitutional position as substitute for any form of policy that would offer democratic solutions for problems to its population. Needless to say, it was the bankrupt centre-left (or rather 'radical centre') that engineered this farce and so the resistance to its failed model has fallen to the populist Right rather than to the popular Left.
[15] This was a very serious concern at the time - at a point where the structures imposed on society by the rather spurious 'war on terror' overlapped with the panic in the system about a crisis in the very means of production and distribution. The legislation is still in place but the middle classes themselves started to baulk and fight back at the implications of the security agenda - at least in the UK and Europe if less so in the US. The moment has probably passed for the worst to be imposed, It is fascinating to note in this context that the attempt by NATO to drive public support for its forward policy against Russia has failed in the West of the Continent, including usually militaristic Britain, and that the heavy lobbying for guarantees on defence spending achieved nothing but the opportunistic appropriation of the policy by UKIP.
[16] Since this was written, we have taken an interest in the rise of transhumanism and the formation of Transhumanist Parties across the West. Our judgment is that these are single issue parties that repeat the intellectual errors of the Greens but the application of technology for the benefit of humanity is a serious issue that deserves being higher on the agenda as a matter for community action. The anti-technological position of the neo-conservative (not in the US sense of the term) environmentalist Left has gone too far.
[17] I think this fear of the people is the defining aspect of the politics of our time. Though the 'system' has a monopoly of force and could do terrible things if it wished, the complexity and interdependence of society has made the risks of doing so far too great for the safe survival of elites and States. It is not that the people can do much about their situation in a positive sense at this point in history but the disruption caused by non-compliance, selective resistance and sheer bloody-mindedness to a weak and vulnerable system gives it a sort of negative power based on its lack of predictability. This helps to explain the State's obsession with surveillance, Big Data, nudge and behaviourial psychology ... it hopes to manipulate rather than force us into compliance. It is probably a forlorn hope because complexity is not only built into the system but is growing exponentially - the arrival of artificial intelligence is expected by the authorities to be a means of exerting control again but this is to be doubted. AI merely adds another layer of complexity.
[18] This should not be misunderstood as socially conservative statement - quite the opposite. The fact of an increasingly sex-positive culture is to be applauded. The argument is the opposite - that repression has merely been replaced by voyeurism and that a form of cultural self censorship in the population means that people are still hiding behind the curtain watching others have fun rather than having fun themselves.
Saturday 25 April 2015
A Disquisition on Time
Augustine went about things
the wrong way in dealing with the problem of time but he was only following the way of most men. The
tripartite division of time (past, present and future) is a social and
individual convenience but any attempt to investigate it more truthfully within those
terms is going to fail. Why? Because there is no present that can be
a part of consciousness if it can exist at all. Scientists
have measured, it would seem, time to 250 billionths of a billionth of a
second. There is no reason to believe that this is the end of the
matter. Time is already past when the much slower processing power of
the human mind has done its job and called it 'the present'.
There is only a functional and useful illusion of present-ness, made up of two processes that relate to one another and which create this illusion of the present where they interface - that which has happened and that which is to happen. It is this interface that is interesting because, constantly moving attosecond by attosecond, it is simply a perceptual set of instant choices between memory and habit on the one hand and modelling and anticipation on the other. This is 'us' - the object of perception that has been created facing events that create the subject perceiving its own past.
This is why all philosophies of 'present-ness' or fixity are absurd and only philosophies of change and adaptation can make sense of what we are. Time can be dealt with conservatively - as an attempt to control the future through fixing events in a pre-set model of the future - or progressively - as a flowing into the future without fixity. Neither approach is wise in itself - one is a noble lie that leads to a sclerosis that cannot cope with new events outside the control of the person while the other is an impossibility, leading to self-destruction based on a lack of respect for the role of experience in managing events. Each type of mind wars on the other because there is no point of agreement.
One must choose one's balance of models for the conquest of time - traditionalist (the day, month and year like every previous unit), social (measured time and socialised time designed to construct collaboration between persons) or creative (following the rhythms of the body and desire in which the modelling mind constructs its time). Sun and moon are 'facts on the ground' (or in the 'ether'), planetary motions can be constructed into a magical socialisation of time and clocks from a scientific one, but, with all due regard to the facts of nature and of culture, the most interesting time is the personal one.
Personal time is a constant coming-to-be as it-ceases-to-be horizon of events - we are vehicles moving in a straight line with no stopping off point except our own extinction. Our most essential clock is the inner one, a clock made up of living tissue, honed by evolution, connected to both the natural and the social but driven by will. Our experience of time is neurological. Our use of time is social. We cannot command the process but we can command our choices - of what things in the past to use for the future (perhaps this is a definition of fearless intelligence in itself) and what things in the future that we wish to attain (the desire).
Intelligence and desire in forward flow are what we are at our best. Philosophies of stasis operate against both desire and intelligence - worse, since the flow is what is, they are the path to a death-in-life, an attempt to reach the goal by stopping the train long before it comes to its final station.
There is only a functional and useful illusion of present-ness, made up of two processes that relate to one another and which create this illusion of the present where they interface - that which has happened and that which is to happen. It is this interface that is interesting because, constantly moving attosecond by attosecond, it is simply a perceptual set of instant choices between memory and habit on the one hand and modelling and anticipation on the other. This is 'us' - the object of perception that has been created facing events that create the subject perceiving its own past.
This is why all philosophies of 'present-ness' or fixity are absurd and only philosophies of change and adaptation can make sense of what we are. Time can be dealt with conservatively - as an attempt to control the future through fixing events in a pre-set model of the future - or progressively - as a flowing into the future without fixity. Neither approach is wise in itself - one is a noble lie that leads to a sclerosis that cannot cope with new events outside the control of the person while the other is an impossibility, leading to self-destruction based on a lack of respect for the role of experience in managing events. Each type of mind wars on the other because there is no point of agreement.
One must choose one's balance of models for the conquest of time - traditionalist (the day, month and year like every previous unit), social (measured time and socialised time designed to construct collaboration between persons) or creative (following the rhythms of the body and desire in which the modelling mind constructs its time). Sun and moon are 'facts on the ground' (or in the 'ether'), planetary motions can be constructed into a magical socialisation of time and clocks from a scientific one, but, with all due regard to the facts of nature and of culture, the most interesting time is the personal one.
Personal time is a constant coming-to-be as it-ceases-to-be horizon of events - we are vehicles moving in a straight line with no stopping off point except our own extinction. Our most essential clock is the inner one, a clock made up of living tissue, honed by evolution, connected to both the natural and the social but driven by will. Our experience of time is neurological. Our use of time is social. We cannot command the process but we can command our choices - of what things in the past to use for the future (perhaps this is a definition of fearless intelligence in itself) and what things in the future that we wish to attain (the desire).
Intelligence and desire in forward flow are what we are at our best. Philosophies of stasis operate against both desire and intelligence - worse, since the flow is what is, they are the path to a death-in-life, an attempt to reach the goal by stopping the train long before it comes to its final station.
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