Birthday Blog!

AVPS is one year old today - hooray! And what better way to celebrate this happy occasion than plastering the blog with porn ... stat porn that is! Here is the graph for page views, individual visits and returning visitors from December 8th, 2006, to December 7th, 2007.

As you can see, after a flying start visitor numbers dwindled as real life took a bite out of my blogging time and robbed me of my inclination to post. But now AVPS is back to normal service, averages are creeping up again. The average number of daily visits for 8th December - 7th April were 57; 8th April - 7th August was 28; and finally 8th August - 7th December is 47. The overall average for the year is 44, though cheating a bit, from October, when regular posting was resumed gives us an average daily hit rate of 65. These are by no means massive numbers, but from a tiny acorn mighty trees grow, etc. etc.

Not enough smut for you? Allow me to raise the temperature with some more explicit figures. 4th February saw the heaviest traffic, with 240 page views and 180 visits. And rock bottom was hit on 18th July with a massive nine page views and six visitors! It comforts me to know the IBT website can only aspire to such lofty numbers.

Each post receives on average 5.2 comments (the .2 comes from Brother S's attempts at commenting, which usually fall foul of his inability to handle the interface). The most highly commented-upon post by far was Conspiracy Watch: 9-11, not least because I chose to give a particularly annoying racist troll a jolly good fisking in its comment box. In contrast, 12 posts have received no comments. Perhaps I should post more about the SWP, anti-imperialism, political Islam, and Israel/Palestine.

In true Stalin fashion, readership targets have been set for next year, to get all three groups of figures into three digits. Can it be done? There are no fortresses blogging bolsheviks cannot storm!

Cheat Neutral and Baked Alaska

The regular 'Green Screen' slot at the Keele Postgraduate Association bar yielded up two films for us on Monday night. The first of these, Cheat Neutral, was a short documentary following the exploits of two lads who'd come up with a novel idea. For a small fee, they can arrange for you to offset the guilt of your cheating ways by paying someone to remain monogamous on your behalf. The film makers pointed out they were inspired by carbon offsetting, where polluters can salve their environmental consciences by paying someone in the developing world to plant a few trees to soak up their emissions. Just as Cheat Neutral does not decrease the sum total of infidelities, carbon offsetting fails to reduce emission levels. Overall, it is a searing satire on the absurdity of what is touted as a serious strategy for dealing with climate change.

The second screening was Baked Alaska, a 2003 documentary looking at the climate change impacts on Alaska, as well as the state's environmental politics. It reported a four-degree Celsius rise in average temperatures since 1960. As a result the thawing ground has seen lakes drain away, and increasing incidences of houses and infrastructure sinking into the earth. The damage from melting permafrost was put at $35 million/year. On Alaska's western coast, Inuit villagers explained how sea ice thickness has decreased on average from four inches to one. Weaker sea ice has meant fewer places for walruses - an Inuit staple - to bask, and therefore affecting community self-sufficiency. If this wasn't enough, storms are more frequent, their winds are stronger, and surges tend to be higher. In the 40 year period, around 500 metres of land have succumbed to the waves.

Alaska happens to be the USA's primary centre of domestic oil production. On average, the film calculated oil production accounts, on average, for $1,500 worth of income per annum for each Alaskan. Small wonder Bush's plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are backed by around 80% of residents. The very spot where Bush and his oil friends want to begin pumping is ecologically sensitive because they take in the breeding grounds of one of North America's largest caribou herds. This just isn't a matter of animal welfare - the self-sufficiency of Inuit communities across the border in Canada depends on the herd's migration. If caribou numbers are affected, as seems likely, these communities will wither on the vine. In addition, Inuit within Alaska but outside ANWR's boundaries are opposed on spiritual grounds, though interestingly, the community nearest to the proposed site endorse the project, believing it will bring much-needed jobs and economic growth to their settlements.

The discussion afterwards addressed several issues. Right now, drilling in ANWR has been held up by the Democrats in the senate, who follow the position adopted by Clinton in 1992, when he vetoed the proposals. The one criticism of the film that emerged was despite pressing home the message that climate change affects us all equally, it (positively) undermined this message by showing how the poor and the marginalised - in this case the Inuit - disproportionately suffer. The experience of climate change is classed, and the intra-Inuit conflict over ANWR drilling is a case in point. Opposition to it came from communities who would lose out from any decline in caribou numbers, or, for those who fielded theirs on spiritual grounds, were already self-sufficient. The on-site Inuit were very different - they were not self-sufficient. They constantly faced year-on-year funding cuts for their school and local government apparatus, and unemployment was a problem - small wonder they supported the oil companies' case. Here we have, in all cases, social being conditioning (environmental) consciousness.

Another interesting observation was how Alaska as a whole serves as a case study. The environmental consequences of global warming will be felt more severely here than before the chickens come home to roost in the rest of the world's advanced capitalist states. The disruptions and dislocations Alaskan society could suffer may offer the rest a vision of their own future. Unless there is serious concerted global action - which immediately puts the necessity of democratic socialist planning on the agenda - in time, we will suffer the whirlwind capitalism has reaped for us.

Introducing Antonio Gramsci

At the risk of doing much violence to Antonio Gramsci, I presented an introductory look at his life and ideas to the Stoke Socialist Party branch meeting, last Thursday.

After giving a brief precis of his life, I turned to Gramsci’s key contributions to Marxism. The starting place for this was his theory of hegemony. Put simply, this is the view that as well as resting on the bodies of armed men organised through the state, bourgeois power equally depends on mass consent. This doesn’t mean the bulk of the population have to agree that capitalism is great or the best possible social system. Gramsci's understanding of hegemony is subtler than that - he points to how culture is so thoroughly permeated with bourgeois values to that it's mostly taken for granted. For example, not many workers are articulate defenders of neo-liberal philosophy, but it is common sense to accept the wages system, mortgage payments, the existence of rich and poor, etc. Therefore, alongside the bourgeois monopoly of force and the economic compulsion to sell our labour power, we have a capitalist consensus culture that generates and reinforces certain habits of mind. In a famous passage of the notebooks, Gramsci evokes a battlefield metaphor to describe the problem bourgeois hegemony poses. In it, he says the state is just an outer ditch of the defence. Once captured, one can see beyond it a complex system of redoubts, earthworks, machine gun nests, and foxholes. What he means by this is for socialism to be established, the party must wage a political and a cultural struggle, of counterposing bourgeois hegemony with our own socialist counter-hegemony. For Gramsci, the success, the depth, and the permanence of a revolution rests upon winning the battle of ideas and displacing their hegemony with our own culture of resistance.

To win this cultural struggle, the working class have to win over other classes and class fractions to its intellectual and moral leadership. In other words, socialism has to speak to more than just the material interests of the working class, it has to show how others would benefit. What our counter-hegemony needs to do is weld together these forces into a system of class alliances that Gramsci terms a ‘historic bloc’. Now, this is often taken to mean he was an early advocate of class collaboration and the Popular Front, but this need not be the case. Small business people and where it exists, the peasantry can be won over to socialism, not by watering down socialist objectives but through persuasion, argument, and practice showing how these classes can benefit from the building of the democratically planned economy. The bourgeoisie play a similar game in defence of capital. Hegemony in Britain has traditionally welded together a ruling historic bloc comprising of capitalists, aristocrats, state bureaucrats, and sections of the petit bourgeoisie and layers of the working class. These webs of alliances in turn reinforce bourgeois hegemony, as was explored by Stuart Hall and some of the thinkers grouped around Marxism Today in the 80s. What is clear is for socialism to be successful in Britain, the ruling historic bloc has to be broken up. Central to his ideas of hegemony and counter-hegemony are the roles played by intellectuals in articulating them. Gramsci defines two types. There are the traditional intellectuals who appear as a class apart but have interests tied to the defence of the existing order. This includes layers of professors, politicians, priests, professionals, pundits, celebrities, etc who by their actions disseminate ideas and promote modes of being that may appear autonomous and independent in themselves, but when connected up articulate and strengthen bourgeois hegemony in a variety of contradictory and complex ways. Counterposed to these are the organic intellectuals, the thinking groups that arise from within the dominated classes and through political and cultural activity articulate the experience, the feelings, and the demands of those at the sharp end of capitalist society. For us, these organic intellectuals are activists, trade unionists, left politicians, and so on. In other words, organisers. For Gramsci, it falls to organic intellectuals to organise and disseminate counter-hegemonic ideas as widely as possible not only to challenge the establishment, but also encourage the development of other organic intellectuals.

What is the role of the party in all this? In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci speaks of the ‘Modern Prince’. This is a reference to the 16th century Italian political thinker, Niccolo Machiavelli whose best known work, The Prince, has long been seen as a handbook for political elites. This is a work of statecraft, and particularly addressed to the petty but semi-absolutist princelings who ruled the Italy of his day. In modern capitalist societies, politics are a mass phenomena - the time of the single absolutist political actor is long passed, it is now the province of the modern prince - the political party. For socialists, the revolutionary party acts as a factory for concentrating the experience of the working class and generating through multiple interventions in politics and civil society more organic intellectuals, and a counter hegemony capable of winning over the working class, cementing a historic bloc, and challenging the bourgeoisie.

M thought Gramsci's work is vital because he makes clear the breadth of the struggle socialists are engaged in, and how complicated the tasks are that lie before us. The ditch and earthworks metaphor is important because it shows how our job doesn't end with the assumption of power by the working class: the construction of the new society is a continuation of the struggle against generations of bourgeois ideas settled like a sediment upon the the collective consciousness of our class. D noted one key battle for socialists is to invest socialism and communism with new meaning, and make the perverse associations bourgeois hegemony has helped articulate around them meaningless. He also noted with their monopoly on the means of production, their dominant cultural position shouldn't come as a surprise. P added Gramsci is useful because the notion of hegemony gets us away from viewing capitalist culture as a monolith that swallows up workers and spits them out as drones. Hegemony is dynamic because it always seeks to absorb the new and the challenging. For example, contemporary multiculturalism has become a central component of British bourgeois hegemony partially due to changes within the composition of the ruling class and the state, and partially due to the struggles of oppressed and marginalised groupings from below. The fact these struggles have been reconciled and absorbed into bourgeois hegemony stands testament to the failure of making these struggles a constituent part of our socialist counter-hegemony.

Summing up, I looked at two bastard offspring of Gramsci's ideas. Beginning with Eurocommunism, I discussed how they were taken up by 'modernising' layers within the official communist parties on the continent to build a strategy where talk of hegemony and historic blocs provided a sophisticated gloss to their outright collapse into parliamentary reformist strategies. This was abetted by the inclusion of an element of the capitalist class itself within their mapping of the socialist historic bloc - an element supposedly in an antagonistic relationship with monopoly forms of capital tied to the state and extra-national interests. In Britain, where the Eurocommunist wing captured the bulk of the decaying CPGB apparatus, the party was wound up in the name of a self-styled Gramscian strategy. All it managed to achieve was the hitching of many a career onto what later became the New Labour bandwagon.

The second was the fate it suffered at the hands of many an academic. Gramsci's ideas proved attractive to many in the universities because of a superficial understanding of the role he allotted to intellectuals. Some went on to take this to an elitist extreme. In Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's much-celebrated Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, their at times willful misunderstanding of the Marxist conceptualisation of the proletariat argued one could not meaningfully speak of the working class having interests - therefore there was no necessary correspondance between class interests and socialist ideas. By disassociating socialism from real tendencies present within capitalist society, Laclau and Mouffe have essentially reduced it to being just a good idea. But to fight for that idea, a new socialist counter hegemony has to be created, where coalitions and alliances are built between a multiplicity of small, localised struggles and constituencies. The job of articulating the counter-hegemony, falls, as in Gramsci, onto the shoulders of the intellectuals. But because there cannot be a class component, these intellectuals are free floating and potentially unaccountable. Because of their position in articulating the counter-hegemony, they can presume to speak for the coalitions gathered beneath its umbrella - they assume a privileged position vis a vis the rest because they can only speak for themselves. Thus socialism, instead of growing organically out of the development and antagonisms of capitalist society becomes something divined by a political elite, who then hand down socialism from on high.

As far as I was concerned, the ambiguity of the Prison Notebooks left a space for the bastardisation and debasement of Gramsci's legacy. But his concepts only failed to become weapons precisely because their revolutionary qualities were expunged and his ideas twisted by those whose interests lay in securing position for themselves under the present system. In the hands of socialists, of unashamed partisans of the working class, they're dynamite.

Sunday Round Up

It's been a pretty bleak week for top tunes as far as I'm concerned, so the AVPS track of the week, that bright spanking accolade record companies would sell their grannies for has gone to something a little old. I missed TC's 'Drink' when it squeaked out on general release at the beginning of October, so better late than never.

Old tune-wise, it's back to the 80s. Paul Hardcastle's '19' is that rarest of beasts; a dance track with a little bit of politics. Enjoy.

Lately the AVPS blogroll has been in a state of constant flux. I've added too many to mention, but unfortunately I've had to take the axe out to defunct blogs. So it's goodbye to Badmatthew, Carnival of Socialism, Cliffism, Labour's Fightback, and Theft is Good. If any of these blogs become active again, their return to the hallowed gallery of counter-hegemonies is guaranteed.

Also, a few contributions have caught my eye this week. I really liked Dave Osler's take on the Labour party finance scandal. I see the press have dug up another story on a wealthy Labour backer today. It makes you wonder how many more skeletons Brown has got in his funding closet.

Of the other big issues hitting the mainstream press this weak, Janine provided a short but thoughtful post on Mohammed-the-Teddy rumpus, followed by an interesting debate. Duncan has provided a much needed antidote to the liberal hand-wringing over Irving and Griffin's appearance at the Oxford Union. Madam Miaow has presented her considered opinion on pubes, by way of reflecting on Rome. The People's Republic of Teeside poured scorn on Morrissey's latest attempt to be controversial, and the Respect fall out continues here, here, and here. Finally, John Hutnyk provides us an excellent meditation on chapter 16 of Marx's Capital.

All being well, AVPS should this week see a post on Gramsci, the long overdue Harry Potter post, and the usual odds and sods. Brother S is threatening to blog too!

Grilled

Never afraid of flogging a dead horse, yesterday I presented my short paper on some problems of partisan social movement research again. I've summarised the main points in an earlier post, so I'll dwell on perceived problems that came out through the questioning, questions that are likely to resurface wherever the research is presented.

The first question was on the decision to look at the life histories of Socialist Party and Socialist Workers' Party activists. If my research is supposed to be an intervention within the academic social movement research field, then to what extent can both organisations, as rather small groups, be considered relevant movement actors? Second, why go for Trotskyists when other fringe groups, such as Islamic radicals like Hizb ut-Tahrir command greater attention? The third question addressed the problem of validity - given the small number of people who took part in the life history interview process, to what extent can any arguments based on the data be generalised?

Responding to the first question, as well as producing research that hopefully will reflect well on British Trotskyism as a whole, there are several issues within the social movement literature that the work seeks to address. For example, historically a lot of attention has been paid to the origins and mobilisations of movements, but typically these theories operate at the level of collectives. As the late social theorist, Alberto Melucci, often noted, this typically meant treating collectives as discrete units of analysis without any thought going into how collectives themselves are constituted. So one objective is to look at the existing models of mobilisation in light of how my sample lived their radicalisation to get a finer conceptual grip on this process. The second objective is to contribute toward a dynamic model of commitment, which again requires breaking from the kind of thinking critiqued by Melucci. The SP, the SWP, and their forerunners have more or less had existences spanning roughly 60 years, and my sample have a collective membership in excess of 160 years. But this continuity cannot be taken for granted. Given the ups and downs of the left political environment  plus the tendency of their memberships to historically have a high turn over, how do the organisations perpetuate themselves and how do long term activists retain and live that commitment? The life history data in my interviews are full of examples of lifestyle shifts, decisions that needed to be taken, and so on, which in conjunction with not dissimilar work on environmentalist, 'official' communist, and feminist activists could help flesh out existing conceptual work on the topic.

Strictly from the perspective of academic social movement research, British Trotskyist activists present an interesting case study. But this is not the only reason for selecting the SP and SWP. In the case study literature, it is often the weird and wonderful anti-capitalist/anarchist activist fauna that have, since the initial ritual mobilisations against World Bank, IMF, G8 etc. meetings, been commanding most attention. But not only are Trotskyists an important, if overlooked contingent on these actions, both the SP and SWP can and do play significant roles in other mobilisations. These roles are not immediately apparent because they are "hidden" to an extent. Also, most public activity appears to consist of Saturday stalls and paper sales, which further obscures their true contributions to movements of various kinds. An accurate appreciation of SP and SWP activity requires sustained contact and in-depth study. Trotskyists might not command the kind of media attention Militant once attracted, or the panics surrounding domestic Islamic radicals, but they do occupy an important place in the British social movement landscape.

The final point, validity. Like most work of qualitative sociology, owing to the character of the data gathering process (in this case, two 90 minute interviews and a further session lasting 45-60 minutes per respondent) large sample sizes are not practical if there is a single researcher. Secondly, qualitative sociology is well aware making generalisations based on its rather specific findings is problematic. The work makes no claims to speak of Trotskyist life histories beyond the project's volunteers. The problem of validity here is different. Any scientific claims rest not on the wide applicability of the findings, but on the content of the interviews. How are we to know respondents didn't seek to portray themselves or their organisation in a favourable light at the expense of the truth? Of course, there is no real way of knowing, though consistency in accounts and revisiting particular topics are a good indicator. Also, if a rapport is established between researcher and researched and respondents are convinced of the project's utility, the truth claims of their narrative are more likely to be stronger. Finally, accounts can be checked against those of other contemporaneous activists engaged in the same struggles and mobilisations. 

Union Renewal

Brother S forwarded me this this morning after having a rant about social movement trade unionism yesterday over coffee. Union Renewal is a new blog based in the Netherlands and carries stories from across the globe as well as promoting the idea that trade unions need to broaden their range beyond the workplace. I urge everyone to add this new site to their blogroll.


Dear colleagues,

I would like to invite you to visit our new weblog, Union Renewal. If you would like to receive the weekly email newsletter, please register at the right-hand column of the weblog.

The trade union movement needs to organise new groups such as young people and minorities and to find ways to deal with developments such as globalisation, outsourcing and decreasing job security. In various countries, there are examples of unions that have found innovative ways to meet these challenges. Sometimes, they are surprisingly successful.

The FNV has collected examples of such successes in the booklet Innovative Trade Union Strategies, that was presented at the ETUC Congress in Seville. However, we do not want to leave it at that. In order to promote the exchange of successful examples, we have now launched a weblog on union renewal.

The weblog offers news on issues including: What is the trade union movement doing to organise young, minority and flex workers? How does it cope with globlisation? What are its activities at the local level? How does it put social justice on the agenda?

Please help us further develop this weblog:

* Give us feedback. Do you think this is a good initiative? How can the weblog be improved?

* Do you have suggestions or contributions? Please send them to dirk.kloosterboer@NOSPAMvc.fnv.nl or tonny.groen@NOSPAMvc.fnv.nl

* Do you know other people who might be interested? Please forward this email.

Thank you very much,
Yours truly,

Agnes Jongerius
President
Netherlands Trade Union Confederation FNV

In the Tracks of the Ecological Citizen

Another day, another Keele seminar. The latest I attended was a presentation by two Swedish researchers, Sverker Jagers and Johan Martinsson. Theirs was very much a declaration of intent rather than a presentation of findings (though it did involve this). Their ambitious aim is to put empirical flesh on the abstract bones of an increasingly important concept in green political thought: the ecological citizen.

What is an ecological citizen? This concept has come out of the work of the well-known green theorist and Keele-resident, Andy Dobson. At the risk of doing some violence to his work, his idea of the ecological citizen is someone who is motivated by green values and a concern for social justice. This can be manifested in many ways through political practice and/or personal behaviour. Jagers and Martinsson have taken upon themselves is to try and operationalise this concept to see if the concept has any analytical purchase.

Jagers began by describing his previous work. His completed PhD thesis was on liberal democracies and sustainable development, where he argued for their potential to adopt comprehensive environmental policies, but enacting them is dependent on institutional development, political will and public support. His second major piece of research looked at the popularity or otherwise of green policy instruments. Unsurprisingly, punitive tools such as Sweden's carbon tax were not popular whereas measures such as subsidised green fuels or an expansion of public transport were more preferable. However, Jagers pointed out that of the sum total of Sweden's taxes, the carbon tax was more popular than other forms of taxation. But if taxation in general is unpopular, then the funding of a greener transport policy is called into question.

This is the context in which Jagers and Martinsson want to go hunting for (Swedish) ecological citizens. They intend to produce a battery of questions for web-based surveys with the aim of identifying this constituency, and start to build an understanding of how their values affect their behaviour. Common ideology, lifestyle, socio-economic status, and education will all be looked at to determine what the key factors are that help explain why some people become ecological citizens. The survey design will also measure levels of altruism, awareness of the consequences of one's behaviour, willingness to adjust behaviour, and openness to environmentally-friendly policy instruments.

Martinsson then moved on to consider research on Swedish environmental attitudes and their relationship to media coverage. The first study he cited indicated a strong relationship. Since 1988, the number of Swedes who perceived the environment as a vitally important political issue has declined from around the 40% mark to approximately 10% ten years later. Here it bumps around this percentage for six years, until 2003-2006, when it jumps from 6% to 13%. It's also worth noting that 1988 was a peak figure, growing from a very low base in 1979. If you compare the recent growth with media coverage of environmental issues, the number of newspaper and magazine articles jumped between February 2005 and January of this year. But is there really a correlation?

A very recent piece of research they've done on the shaping of green opinion by media coverage suggests a very weak relation. In May this year, Sweden saw a major green awareness media campaign featuring regular slots on TV and radio, and presumably a good deal of press coverage. It took place over the space of a week. Through phone canvassing before and after the event, they recorded the following results from their sample. Interest in green issues went from 16-20%, willingness to pay environmental taxes climbed 14-18%, and concern over climate change grew 36-44%. Compared with the massive quantity of green media content, all these increases are quite small. They also found those of a higher educational background, with high political interest, and women generally were most responsive to the coverage. For the old and those with no political interest, there was no measurable effect. The conclusion therefore was the media is not as powerful an instrument as is commonly supposed, and somewhat frustratingly achieving behavioural change was easier among those with positive environmental attitudes already - in other words, the ecological citizen constituency.

There followed a series of questions concerning methodological issues, and particularly what set of attitudes can be said to approximate ecological citizenship. One participant proposed Jagers and Martinsson should perhaps look into a scale that measures ecological citizenship traits, which could go some way to capture the different and complex ways it can be thought and practiced. One example is the tension between intentionality and behavioural outcomes - the "doing good but thinking wrong" problem. For instance, in Sweden many people routinely recycle and pay their carbon taxes without consciously being ecological citizens. Can they therefore be regarded as such? Another problem that was highlighted were how people felt about their capacities to change things - would people do more if they felt what they did already achieved something?

There are some problems from my point of view - not least the way liberal democracy has been abstracted from its capitalist context and an uncertainty whether ecological citizenship can be reconciled to a system amorally concerned with profits - but the research has every chance of putting the definition of 'green constituencies' on a firmer footing. Also, the media findings were particularly fascinating, if a little gloomy from the standpoint of radical politics. But then again, green, like any other political conclusions, tend to be an outgrowth of experience, which to their credit is what Jagers and Martinsson seek to quantify.

Getting Anal About Books

When I nipped into my email account yesterday, waiting for me was a message from my old mucker, Madam Miaow. In it, she challenged me to have a go at the sort of literary atrocities her and brother Splinters have been inflicting on leftyblogland. As the comrade puts it:

The challenge: to tell the story of the tragic demise of the Respect party through satire and vulgar abuse of the literary classics or whichever other cultural medium floats your boat.

As much as I'd like to participate, I'm afraid I'm far from qualified to do so. Whereas some comrades are deeply steeped in literature and verse, I couldn't begin to tell the difference between an iambic pentameter and a haiku. In short, I am too much of a Philistine.

That said, I have been endeavouring to affect the appearance of a cultivated literary type. Nearly five years ago, I started reading genres beyond my then usual staple of sci-fi and academic works. I even joined a book group run out of the local library, where we consumed such classics as Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, The Old Wives Tale, etc. So, keen to see how my progress from a canonical point of view was going, I recently picked up 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Leaving aside the arbitrary and problematic nature of producing a canon, this at least was compiled by figures heavily involved in the literary field. There are some dodgy entries (Ardal O'Hanlon, anyone?) but at least there isn't any Jeffrey Archer. You can see the entire list here.

I'm partly satisfied to learn I've worked my way through 111 of the books, so still some way to go before I can effortlessly perform any kind of literary atrocity. How many have you read? If you want to retain your modesty or are ashamed, the comments box is open to anonymous contributions ...

New Labour, New Capitalism

On Wednesday, Keele's Industrial Relations dept hosted a talk by Robert Taylor, a well known freelance journalist who has worked as industrial correspondent for a whole host of mainstream papers. The theme of his paper was the legacy of New Labour.

He prefaced his discussion with how Labour has come to embrace the very things it spent time railing against in the 1980s. Its neoliberal love affair with markets, privatisation of public services, swingeing cuts in the social wage, the proliferation of PFI schemes, and so on have been the social policy side of the monetarist coin. Economic policy has seen the maintenance of a deregulated and hitherto relatively stable climate for finance capital, not least assisted by a complex web of tax loopholes. As a result, the global super rich have migrated to London in droves. The IMF lists London along with the Seychelles and the Cayman Islands as a top international tax refuge.

At a 10th anniversary/legacy tour lecture in Manchester last April, Blair argued such outcomes were achieved because of the different policy focus of New Labour from previous Labour governments. According to Blair, the latter were mainly concerned with the state and institutions, whereas New Labour's priority was work. The government's job was to provide the education and training necessary to equip Britain with a labour force that can compete in the global economy. For Blair, this was an emancipatory vision. Workers would be empowered not through legislation guaranteeing workplace rights, but by making them through training more powerful in relation to the marketplace. Decoding the Blairspeak, the idea was to make employees so marketable they could pick and choose where they sell their labour power, and with a highly skilled and motivated workforce British capital could not fail to benefit. What did Blair use as evidence to back up this era of individual emancipation? The obscene growth in inequality between the haves and the have-nots.

For Taylor, this was an post-facto theorisation of the New Labour mission. The neoliberal "achievements" of Blair/Brown were more or less pragmatic responses to the free market climate rather than the result of a coherent programme. This can be shown by a cursory examination of the 1997 manifesto. Though accepting the primacy of the market as the engine of wealth creation, the first government nevertheless implemented a windfall levy on the privatised utilities, a minimum wage, (weak) mandatory union recognition, and signed up to the Social Chapter. Therefore, Taylor argues this was a broadly pro-worker platform. But nevertheless, in 1997 and every general election since, Labour have circulated a special manifesto for business to reassure them of their economic competence, and how any ostensibly pro-worker measure will be watered down. After that first election victory, as if to underline Labour's pro-business credentials, No.10 refused to see any TUC delegations for the first six months but made clear its door was always open to business leaders.

This has meant despite the meagre crumbs thrown to the working class in 1997, the last 10 years have been a grim experience. Not only has the government attacked state benefits to the most vulnerable sections of the class as a crusade against dependency culture, the continued impotence of the unions - often hiding behind the anti-union laws - have seen workplaces become a breeding ground for bullying managers and long hours. Small wonder absenteeism and ill-health have become increasingly serious problems.

But in one respect, New Labour has been off-message. Taylor argues there has, in congruence with the Blair/Brown 'empowering employees' vision, been a real extension of individual rights for workers on paper. Unlike rights around collective bargaining, the CBI has been forced to concede the provision of maternity and paternity rights, compassionate leave, and so on because, in an untypically honest moment, it knew it would have a hard time arguing against them.

In conclusion, though Blair and Brown have consolidated and extended the grip capital has over British society, from the standpoint of the New Labour vision the project has been a failure. Productivity is not increasing, education and training are no better, and the numbers of NEETs are growing. And despite the language, neither is New Labour particularly modern. Blair and Brown have jettisoned social democratic politics and returned to a time before the working class made its weight felt in political systems. But now, in a global situation characterised by increasing turbulence, New Labour is passing over from Hubris into Nemesis. Its days are surely numbered.

Among the batch of questions Taylor took, the first asked about the relationship between New Labour and the Democrats. He responded there were mutual influences around the uses of rights and responsibilities rhetoric when Clinton and Blair's administrations overlapped. But since the ascension of Bush and neoconservatism, New Labour's adoption of neocon positions has gone beyond a hawkish foreign policy. A key influence on Blair and Brown has been the right wing economist and Murdoch stooge, Irwin Stelzer. His message of more deregulation and more privatisation of public services have fallen on very receptive ears.

I asked a question about the Conservatives. As the Tories have traditionally been the organic party of capital, has New Labour been successful robbing it of this role? Taylor replied there can be no doubt that it and big capital in general are in cahoots. The Tories, for their part, are now overwhelmingly the party of small capital, of small business. Furthermore and despite Cameron's attempt to Blairise his party, the issue of Europe runs like a crack down the middle. Its submerged Europhobia constitutes a major problem from the standpoint of big capital, so it is unlikely to back the Conservatives as a whole in the near future.

Given the talk was mostly about the adoption of right wing ideas by the government, another questioner asked if there was any influence on its practice coming from the parliamentary left and the unions? Taylor's response was to what extent can we speak of a left now? The mobilising capacities of the unions are very different today than 30 years ago, and the conditions that gave rise to this combativity them are gone and are not coming back. For example, most unions do not have even the potential strategic muscle they once had. It is pointless blaming the various leaderships for this state of affairs. They are pragmatic beasts who are governed by what they perceive to be the ability of their members to fight.

The final question ended on a gloomy note. The questioner observed that while New Labour might be on their way out, neoliberalism appears to be sticking around for some while longer. Where can we expect opposition to come from? Taylor replied that if we were looking to the unions, then we have to recognise they are in crisis across the developed world. The only places where they are holding on to their memberships and positions are the Nordic countries, and possibly Australia. The situation in the global south is different, where unions are important actors in broad social movements. For this situation to change, the context must change, but this will be difficult.

There were very few reasons to be cheerful, but there's no point trying to fall ourselves about the power of capital or the state of the labour movement. The question, as always, is what we can do about changing the present state of affairs.

Socialism 2007: China

Entitled 'Can China Save World Capitalism?', Lynn Walsh began his lead off by noting how one cannot treat China as a discrete unit of analysis, Its development must be placed in the context of a global economy, which at the moment revolves around the axis of US-China trade and capital flows. The relationship between the two states is so intimate that it has become a structural feature of both economies, but it is increasingly a structure prone to instability and decomposition.

What is the character of this relationship? China has become the workshop of the world, producing commodities from textiles to high value technical goods. Their low global market prices is sustained by Chinese industry sucking in vast amounts of cheap labour power as peasants and the "old" working class are displaced from the land and closures of state enterprises. Unsurprisingly, the US trade deficit with China stands to the tune of $300bn/year. The burden of this debt, strangely enough, is sustained by Chinese banks. As the USA remains industry's primary export market (despite the growing importance of the EU), , Beijing has a strategic interest in effectively subsidising the US consumer market to keep its economic growth on the road. However, the debt cannot be financed indefinitely and has only really been possible for so long with the proliferation of cheap credit. With the contraction of the US housing market and rising oil prices, conditions are changing, and over a period of time the relationship will prove to be unsustainable.

The development within China itself has been extremely uneven. The coastal Special Economic Zones combine some of the most advanced industry with the more backward interior, a backwardness not helped by the flow of peasants and workers to the more prosperous cities. The sharp contradiction between (coastal) town and (landlocked) country is but one aspect of the inequalities development has thrown up. Quoting estimates from the boss's rag, Forbes Magazine, 200 of the worlds billionaires are Chinese citizens. This sits side by side with peasant and worker struggles over land seizure, closures, environmental despoliation, and rapid rusting away of the iron rice bowl. However, the state has ridden out these struggles so far thanks to their localisation and economic growth. If a downturn comes, it wouldn't be surprising if the instruments of repression are ratcheted up.

Turning to the class character of the Chinese state, Lynn argued this was no academic question because it has programmatic implications for any revolutionary movement that may arise. At the moment, the Beijing Stalinists pretend to socialism, but all that really remains is the repressive command and control apparatus of the bureaucracy. What planning exists is geared toward the managed reintroduction of the law of value, and with it the transformation of the bureaucratic elite into a fully fledged bourgeoisie. Therefore China is a state in transition - what exists is a messy hybridised mix of private, semi-private, and state capitalism speedily moving away from the bureaucratically planned economy of old.

Summing up, the comrade outlined two scenarios. The first is premised on continued stable global economic growth, and is therefore in his opinion, least likely. But if it comes to pass, the whip hand of the market would be strengthened in China and with it continued (uneven) development. With this, the spectre of an increasingly coherent and articulate working class with its own set of democratic and economic demands, appears. But in the more likely event of a downturn, the state could move to reassert more control over the economy and concentrate on a more rounded internal development. However, a return to planning of the "classical" Stalinist variety is not on the cards.

Responses to the lead off came in two varieties, reflecting his remarks on political economy and characterisation of the state. Comrade Neil opened by noting how already Chinese capital is keeping away from Wall Street thanks to the sub-prime debt crisis. Pete offered the observation that in the event of a downturn, possessing a non-exchangeable currency, the absence of capital markets, and the role of the state puts China in a good position to insulate itself from crisis. On the other hand, the export sectors are heavily integrated into the world economy and cannot escape any global recession. Another comrade looked at the contradictory position it occupies in international relations. On the one hand, the Chinese working class needs defending from imperialist capital flowing in and hammering their living standards, while on the other Beijing's investment projects in the semi-colonial are similarly exploitative.

On state characterisation, Robert of the IBT made a typically dogmatic contribution. He claimed the Chinese state remained a deformed workers' state and not some transitional half-way house as its fundamental property relations remained "proletarian" (an aside, surely proletarian property *relations* can only ever pertain under conditions of workers' control, where political and economic relations become fused and any distinction between them is rendered meaningless. Surely the comrade meant proletarian property *forms*, but in China as in other Stalinist regimes these were as much a legal fiction as equality before the law is in developed bourgeois states). He then went on to point to tensions within the Chinese bureaucracy, and an unease among peasants and workers over the restoration of capitalism. He concluded with an attempt to score sect points over the CWI's intervention in Russia in 1991. Pete replied that the complexity of the transition can only now be adequately grasped by assigning China a transitional status, and then filling the category with data and analysis. To regard it as a deformed workers' state under present conditions is divorced from reality. Ben from the Sparts provided some entertainment by attacking the IBT's position on Yeltsin, and ranting about the crimes of their guru, Bill Logan. But like their mini-me, he believed the gains of the 1949 revolution remain, and now it is being encircled by imperialism, and therefore requires defending from counterrevolution from within and without. Cloud-cuckoo-land stuff. Dan argued neither of these arguments look at the content of the remains of the plan, which is a plan for restoration, and is of a different character to that in Cuba, for example. Ross also took the ultra-lefts to task for lining up with the bureaucracy - the precondition for revolution, under capitalism or Stalinism, is the political independence of the working class. This is what the CWI sought to achieve in Russia in 1991. As for tensions in the bureaucracy, he challenged the IBT and Sparts to identify who exactly in it was defending planning? The task for revolutionaries is not to cheer lead a section of the bureaucracy, but to connect with the working class and peasantry.

Responding to the discussion, Lynn agreed that state-led investment is the core driver of development, but exports remain crucial because this is how it acquires the foreign currency to purchase the capital intensive goods and plant essential to its plans. On China's class character, he agreed the deformed workers' state category was far too doctrinaire. The ultra-lefts pointed toward state planning, but in the USSR itself the plan became a political fiction as it broke down in the 70s and 80s, and state firms were forced to barter with one another. China experienced similar problems, and the bureaucracy was faced with the decision to either move towards capitalism or be consigned to history. It's therefore nonsensical to defend Stalinism with reference to "the plan". As for the state, one must remember that as different forms of capital operate in bourgeois states, the same is true in China. State vs private capital, national vs international capital, manufacturing vs service and knowledge-based capital - these are increasingly the social bases of the state, and the plan is there to facilitate their contradictory interests. The transformation of the state into a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" becomes ever more likely ... unless the Chinese masses march onto the stage of history and inflict a mortal blow on capital everywhere.