The aim of socialism

The downside of capitalism, it seems to me, is that it denies to many sufficient resources and/or financial security as well as providing a horrible time at work. This is true even though the resources of the economy are sufficient to abolish these evils.

A socialised economy is not an end in itself, but merely the economic base on which liberal freedoms can become available and meaningful for all. It is not the job of socialists to tell people how and for what purposes they should live, or to try and mould human personality, but to provide the means by which they can be free.

Confronting New Labour's authoritarianism

In the Labour Party, now in opposition, there is talk about moving on but one aspect of their term in office needs careful examination. It is easy to explain how New Labour presided over the highest levels of social inequality in Britain since 1945: Labour sought political power, but in reality existing capitalist power found Labour. Blair et al were the ideal instruments.

Harder to explain, though, was New Labour’s assault on civic and personal freedoms. People incarcerated without trial or public evidence. Wide scale intimidatory use of stop and search powers against people on the street, especially photographers. People threatened with prosecution for criticising religion. Mass registration of people on the pretext of combating paedophilia… and so on. By 2009 it was possible to talk about the lights going out on liberal democracy in Britain.

Many of these measures were due to a cynical populism (detention of supposed would-be terrorists) or a desire to outflank the Tories and the Daily Mail. The security industry is a strong lobby (ID cards and E-Borders); yet there is something else, something more fundamentally rotten.

When the Tories managed Thatcherism 1979-97, they defeated the trade unions and local councils and imposed market fundamentalism. What happened to the victims did not worry them too much; they had scraps of welfare thrown at them and lived in junk estates. New Labour, using the language of ‘responsibility’ and for Blair ‘communitarianism’ attempted to weld everyone into their place in Britain's class-divided capitalist society. This, I believe is the true origin of New Labour’s would-be totalitarianism, and is a foul ideology which needs to be exposed and trashed.

My point is this: the left has the task not just of confronting capitalist power in the economic domain to secure a greater share of the social product for ordinary working people, but it needs to assert universalism (as opposed to cultural relativism) and political liberalism, both of which have been so stained by New Labour.

Nick Cohen: worth reading even if you don't agree

Information can be valuable even if it originates from a person who has diametrically opposed views to ones own. Indeed had Marx not used the works of non-Marxists, Marxism would never have been born.

In recent years one of my favourite political commentators has been Nick Cohen, and in fact I am in the middle of his latest offering “Waiting For the Etonians” – who have now actually arrived. I don’t agree with Cohen on several points (his justification of the Iraq and Afghan wars, of course, or his carte blanch rejection of Historical Communism 1917-89). Nevertheless mentally arguing against him on these points is more intellectually stimulating than having what one already believes recited back in a text. On other matters – such as Cohen’s criticism of the cultural relativism that permeates the left today – I do agree with him.

Jon Cruddas: friendly critic of New Labour

Jon Cruddas is a man who has always liked to straddle the official New Labour line and flirt with the left as his voting record in Parliament shows.

It is no surprise that he did not wish to run for Labour leader. His personality seems to dispose him to be friendly critic of the Labour establishment only.

• Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.votes
• Voted moderately against laws to stop climate change.votes
• Voted moderately against introducing student top-up fees.votes
• Voted very strongly for a stricter asylum system.votes
• Voted a mixture of for and against a transparent Parliament.votes
• Voted strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws.votes
• Voted very strongly for more EU integration.votes
• Voted very strongly for removing hereditary peers from the Lords
• Voted strongly for a wholly elected House of Lords.votes
• Voted very strongly for the hunting ban.votes
• Voted a mixture of for and against introducing a smoking ban.votes
• Voted very strongly against replacing Trident.votes
• Voted very strongly for allowing ministers to intervene in inquests.votes
• Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.votes
• Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.votes
• Voted strongly for equal gay rights.votes
• Voted moderately for introducing ID cards.votes
• Voted strongly against greater autonomy for schools.

Public Debt and Expenditure Cuts

Much of the debate is constructed around false alternatives: unsustainable public indebtedness OR cut the services and incomes of the least well-off.

Yes, public debt levels do need to be reduced, but that can be done in ways that do not leave the worst-off relatively worse off. There should be tax increases on wealth and income and cuts in those areas which do not injure the worst-off or impede future economic growth; e.g. tax rebate on private pension contributions, or the defence budget.

Real differences of class interest are being hidden behind a false alternative, an alternative which is repeated again and again by the media.

Diane Abbott

The trouble is that Diane Abbot is not going to win. If she stood a chance and had a powerful movement behind her, then David Miliband, Jack Straw and Harriet Harman wouldn’t have nominated her. Her role seems to me to legitimise the election.

Yes, if were still in the Labour Party I would vote for her, even though I wasn’t satisfied with her lining up behind those in the Party insisting that Cameron should be Prime Minister rather than try to build a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

The fact that she’s female and black doesn’t concern me much. I’m interested in her politics and I would like to be convinced that she adhered to a liberal universalism and not the currently fashionable pseudo-left cultural relativism. We’ll see.

The dream and nightmare of revolution

There are circumstances where a mass of people want change of some kind and those in power prevent reform, so the only step forward is the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. Revolutions are rare, painful and destructive, always throw up unintended consequences, but are sometimes necessary.

Interestingly, though, in human history to date, the most humane societies that we have ever seen were those in northern Europe in the latter part of the twentieth century. None resulted from revolution; each was the product of sustained social-democratic struggle for reform. Yes, their successes resulted from favourable conditions, but as Marx taught social conditions are everything.

I know that this next point will make Geoff angry, but I will say it anyway: reliance on revolution as the only real means of advancing human-kind has all the features of a religion. In this view whatever happens in the here-and-now is somehow artificial, ephemeral and inadequate; and only through maximum upheaval, preceded by maximum strife and suffering, can the golden age be ushered in.

Marx was wrong about two things: he underestimated longevity and power of capitalism, and he underestimated the ability of capitalism to reform when under pressure. The problem today in Britain and elsewhere is that popular pressure is disorganised and disoriented.

The hoplessness of the left

My point was first and foremost an observation of how political society is, rather than a prescription of how to change it. The following three points seem to me indisputable, at least in the short to medium term:

1. Thanks to Blair and New Labour, transforming the Labour party so that it becomes a left-leaning social democratic party is today nearly impossible.

2. The historical communist movement has disappeared and is now irrelevant.

3. The Trotskyite groups are smaller and more marginalised than ever before.

Therefore every possible agent of socialist advance has diminished almost to the point of irrelevance in Britain and in most other European countries.

Green parties, though progressive in some respects, are hardly socialist; no new parties of the left have appeared in the major European countries to counteract the major shift to the right and the hegemony of market fundamentalism. The one major exception is the German Left Party and I have devoted some time to looking at the circumstances in which this party has arisen and enjoyed minor success. (See the link in my initial contribution)

Now, because I said that the new social movements couldn’t be an agent for socialism, this does not mean that I oppose them. As sites of social and political activity they undoubtedly have an educational effect and are therefore beneficial as progressive pressure groups. Maybe I was wrong to call them rabble, but many do include some very silly people who are experts at self-marginalisation.

I do not subscribe to the end of history hypothesis, but I do not accept the argument that capitalism is doomed in the coming decades. Capitalism is structurally condemned to periodic crisis, but these crises have not so far destroyed capitalism, and there is no reason to believe that capitalism can’t surmount these crises in the next century as it did in the last. In fact, capitalism today looks in a far stronger position than it did at several points in the twentieth century.

Organisational set backs for the left since the 1980s

The diminution of working class and social democratic pressure is indeed in part due to legal restrictions on trade unions, their de-politicisation and marginalisation in most of the economy and in politics.

To that one must also add two further domains in which social democracy was squeezed out.

First the Labour Party itself. The rise of New Labour was both cause and effect of de-democratisation of the party structures, choreographed conferences, top-down control and consultation replacing elections. The fact that there has not been a contested election for leader since 1994 speaks for itself.

Second, in the 1980s much was made of municipal socialism. The centralisation of power started by Thatcher was continued by New Labour.

2010 British General Election (after)

I thought I would just make a couple of remarks about the 2010 election.

On the eve of the election I outlined three possible outcomes: Conservative majority rule, Tory minority government (leading to a second election later in the year) and a Lib/Lab pact. I was right about one thing and wrong about another.

I was right in thinking that the authoritarians in New Labour (Straw, Blunket, Reid, Burnham, etc) would reject any alliance with liberalism preferring instead a Tory government. Labour would not offer the one thing that would ensure Liberal Democrat support and something that progressive should support anyway, namely proportional representation.

Much is made after the event of the fact that a Lib/Lab coalition would have been a minority government requiring 7 votes for a majority from the 13 nationalists, Green and SDLP to pass legislation. While that is true, accepting the challenge would have been better than the only other option, letting the Conservatives into office.

I was wrong in thinking that the Conservatives would prefer minority government to a formal coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Yet Cameron had clearly read the writing on the wall: the start of every period of Tory or Tory-dominated government since 1931 has enjoyed a lower share of the vote than the previous period. Cameron was not sure that a second election would give him the majority he needed.

Britain now has a fully bourgeois government. New Labour certainly abandoned social democracy and threw in its lot with capitalist power; yet always it was impeded by the fact that its core vote (and now its only vote) came from less well-off ordinary working people. No such impediment restrains the current government. Britain’s economic problems can be solved at the expense of its ordinary working people.

And something else. Since the 1980s the Liberal Democrats positioned themselves as part of the progressive majority in Britain and as an anti-Tory party. All those Liberal Democrat voters and activists who see themselves in that light have no future in the Tory-led coalition and will tend to drift away. The Liberal Democrats will become what they in fact are: the Tories junior partner.

It seems that the revolution against the forward march of labour that began in 1979 will have at least three parts: High Thatcherism (1979-97), New Labour (1997-2010) and now the Tory-Liberal coalition. Not optimistic stuff, I’m afraid.