Our situation today

We are condemned to live out our lives in the market fundamentalist variant of capitalism or perhaps something worse. Let’s see ourselves as the fools who bother to describe the cage we live in and dare occasionally to look outside it at the world that might be. Formally, socialists sought to change the world, today we seek only to interpret it.

The meaning of community

I think we need to be careful and not expand the meaning of ‘community’ to include any form of human association or relationship. Community involves both social and geographical attachment.

Community entails a network of human contacts arising from daily life. These will typically include neighbourhood, school, work and leisure activity. To the extent that relationships with and within these institutions are regarded as belonging to the people as opposed to being merely commercial transactions, one has community. Community is further evidenced and reinforced by the voluntary formation of civic organisations and initiatives (e.g. parties, pressure groups, clubs, etc)

The geographic element is a sentimental attachment to place (Heimat). “This place is where I live; it’s mine although I share it with others and I care about it”

A community is universal/secular to the extent that anybody living in the area is considered as a potential member of it.

(The use of the word “community” in the sense of “the gay community” is something else entirely; i.e. to describe a collection of people who share a common characteristic.)

There was no golden age of community, if only because community was never 100 percent and the community of yesteryear also maintained repressive and conservative values. I believe, for example, that the rapid advancement of gay rights and acceptance in Britain after 1997 (which I support) owes something to the diminution of community.

The end of social democracy

Following on the idea of the left becoming proficient at losing, I would just add this.

There is a double bind. First, not in half a century have the left been out of office simultaneously in Britain, France and Germany. Worse still today we see conservative governments in northern Europe from the Netherlands to Scandinavia. The failure of social democracy is in no way specific to Britain; it is a European phenomenon.

Second, we have witnessed the passing of social democracy within formally social democratic parties: New Labour in Britain, or the Harz package in Germany. Often the main party of the left today is little more than a cosmopolitan elite capturing the vote of public employees who depend on a ‘big state’ and poorer sections of the working class who have nowhere else to turn.

Why is the left politically weak?

Left of centre parties are out of office in most European countries. Why? Here are two reasons.

First, globalised systems of production have left large numbers of people in the advanced capitalist countries superfluous to requirements. In the credit boom they could be absorbed on low wages in the service sector, but not today. Those working people who are reasonably secure at the moment under capitalism tend in large numbers to identify with the system against its victims.

Second, the end of communism has removed the political need in Western Europe of attempting to satisfy and integrate the working class by means of social democracy. No clearer example of this exists than in Germany; during the Cold War Western Germany's social market model was held up as an example to the capitalist world; today it is portrayed as an impediment.

New Labour's Repressive Legacy

Labour can never be a progressive party again unless it confronts its flirtation with authoritarianism while in office.

Since his election to the Labour leadership,Ed Miliband has attempted to shut the door on the excesses of New Labour. Muffled criticism has been heard on Iraq, social inequality and the demise of civic and personal liberties. Nevertheless the overall tone of the Labour leadership is that we should move on. But can the sins of New Labour be so readily forgotten even if not forgiven?

If the left can easily explain, but not forgive, the Iraq fiasco and the boosting of social inequality, there is one aspect of the Blair-Brown years (1997-2010) which needs careful examination, namely New Labour’s assault on civic and personal freedoms. This was no small matter: 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.

The reflex response of some on the left, namely that all this was prompted by the future necessity of repressing the working class, who would rise up in response to the capitalist crisis is surely nonsense. The organised working-class had never been weaker. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies elsewhere.

Many of the repressive 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 (technology for ID cards and E-Borders); yet there is something else, something more fundamentally rotten.

When the Tories ran Britain (1979-97) they had obvious political and economic objectives, but no clear social one; didn’t Mrs Thatcher say that there was no such thing as society? Politically, the Tories destroyed the institutions of working-class resistance: the trade unions and local councils, many of which, and especially so in urban areas, were in Labour hands. Economically they imposed market fundamentalism on Britain, but socially they cared little about what happened to the swelling ranks of the unemployed. The jobless had scraps of welfare thrown at them and lived in junk estates.

New Labour made minimal attempts to empower and/or ameliorate the conditions of ordinary working people, other than the ephemeral palliative of permitting the intoxicating and ultimately disastrous credit boom. Instead, using the language of ‘responsibility,’ and for Blair ‘communitarianism,’ they deployed state repression to weld everyone into their ‘place’ in Britain's class-divided capitalist society. This, I believe is the true origin of New Labour’s authoritarian statism, and it is something that needs to be fully explored and rejected.

Some notes on a housing policy

On Walter’s post on housing: my suggestions

Mortgages of over 50 percent of purchase price prohibited. Result: collapse in demand and of land prices.

Building of public housing for rent. Rent level to recoup building cost over 25 years.

Public housing made available to pre-defined groups (e.g. workers earning under 15K, workers with children, etc.)

How to ration within the group? Through money: the one who buys the most expensive saving bond, gets the tenancy. Housing bond cannot be redeemed during tenancy. Housing bond used to provide credit for new house building.

New Land tax. 1% of property value per year. Every person gets a land tax credit of 1000 pounds.

E.g. couple in 180 000 house. Tax: 1800; credit 2000: land tax nothing.

Person in 450 000 house. Tax: 4500, credit 1000 – Land tax 3500 per year.

The social democratic test for Ed Miliband

There is a lot of piffle being written in the press about Ed Miliband.

One central question confronts socialists: would a Miliband Labour government elected in 2015 bring about a meaningful shift in wealth and income in favour of ordinary working people AND (not or) expand democracy, along with greater civic and personal freedoms.

If you believe the answer is yes, then we should join him in the Labour Party and help strengthen that agenda. If you think, on the contrary, that the main role of Labour in government would be to further entrench the power of capital in Britain, then we need to build an alternative movement for socialism, however hard that task may be.

New Mexico abandons the death penalty

The death penalty is wrong because the universal right to life (even for the most evil) is the building block upon which all other rights are constructed or derived. The right to life is conserved not primarily for the benefit of the criminal, but for the benefit of the moral structure of society.

That New Mexico has abandoned the death penalty is to be welcomed, even if the state is acting for financial reasons rather than ones of principle.

This point should be made: every case of the death penalty is wrong, not fundamentally because it is expensive or that it fails to act as a deterrent, but because the right to life, even of the most evil, is a moral absolute, just as the right not to be tortured is – or at least in theory.

More precisely, the right to life is the building brick upon which other rights (e.g. the right to be treated with dignity) are built. Abolishing the death penalty does not of itself guarantee a civilised society, but it is not possible to have a civilised society in which people are sentenced to die.

Labels and terms

Labels and terms become much clearer when a simple piece of logic is applied to them.

“Labels are vital. Without them we would have no idea of what will come out of any tin or jar. But in our field we should apply with care.”

It is correct to stress this point and he goes on to give several examples in which misguided labelling can lead us astray.

At the point of being pedantic let me introduce a distinction. For every term, for example chair, we can talk about the terms intention and extension.

The intension of a term refers to all those elements that a phenomenon must contain to make the application of the term valid. Let us take a very simple case: a bachelor must be male and unmarried. Unless we can apply both attributes we may not use the term bachelor.

The extension of a term is the listing of all those phenomena to which a term can apply: in the case of ‘bachelor’ all the bachelors in the world.

It is fair to point out that this simplicity becomes much less so when we consider phenomena in nature (e.g. gold, oak tree). Nonetheless clarity is never lost by considering the intention and extension of a term.


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Marxism as science

I adopt a broad definition of science: a paradigm of concepts and a system of propositions related thereto which have claim to truth value on the basis of reason and evidence. (I avoid the Popperian definition of science, if only because I can see no inherent dependency between the truth of a proposition and our ability to disprove it).

Within the definition of science that I have just outlined, I do see a historical materialism as scientific. There is a Marxian paradigm of concepts; there are related propositions which stand on the basis of evidence and reason.