Showing posts with label Socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socialism. Show all posts

Saturday 3 December 2016

Narrating The Current Crisis - What Trump May Mean

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States is a fact on the ground. Even if Jill Stein somehow succeeded in overturning the result through recounts, it is to be doubted that the populist movement would accept the revision. A Hillary Clinton Presidency would be a wounded beast, facing an angry Republican Congress and probable civil strife and under vicious and continuous internet attack. The world beyond the United States, having congratulated Trump once, will be embarrassed to have to become partisan by subsequently congratulating Clinton. The deeper truth is that Trump has won even if he loses a recount. He has destabilised liberal America and mobilised populist America. That clock cannot be turned back. Nor is Trump's victory is an isolated event. A number of similar political events across the West suggest that a radical change affecting international relations is under way and that the process has not yet concluded. Let us provide a new narrative of contemporary history and see where it leads us.

We can start by saying that the neo-liberal model and its ameliorative liberal internationalist and post-Cold War international socialist variants have improved conditions for many millions outside the West but they have arguably also enriched up to half of domestic Western populations at the expense of the condition, security and identity of the other half as well as created oligarchical minorities elsewhere. Neo-liberalism and its variants have also not brought peace. On the contrary, a forward expansion of liberal values by force has destabilised many countries, leading to mass movement of peoples (which brings free movement of peoples into disrepute amongst those who have not benefited from globalisation), has created new security threats, has forced non-Western sovereign states into defensive militaristic postures and has even recreated the conditions for superpower competition and confrontation only a quarter of a century after the ending of the Cold War.

There have been benefits from quasi-socialist and liberal ameliorative strategies operating at a global level, especially in terms of the mobilisation of progressive forces outside the West and the engagement of young activists in progressive politics within it but regulatory regimes have tended to pay only lip service to democracy and to have preferred corporatist structures in which activist minorities collaborate with corporate CSR departments and government agencies to impose legal and regulatory solutions to global problems without consultation with or the political education of those in the West left behind. They also tend to treat emerging country populations as ‘subjects’ of action rather than as independent actors engaged in their own liberatory struggle.

The role of the United States has been ambiguous. The promotion of a progressive liberal agenda has often operated alongside a militaristic and expansionist agenda. This has created a class of international NGO activists ‘who mean well’ but it has also created alliances with faith-based obscurantists who feign democracy and, in turn, also created its own obscurantist and reactionary oppositionism prepared to engage in armed struggle to defend identity against what they see as cultural imperialism. National liberation has moved from the progressive Left to the reactionary Right, the United Nations has been diminished and, at its worst, the reaction to Western ideological expansionism has created cause for new threats of asymmetric warfare operated by terrorists allied with organised crime.

Globalisation, in collapsing borders, has also permitted massive capital accumulation by organised crime, free riding the increase in international trade, in facilitating illegal economic migration (often willing but sometimes enslaved), piracy, online fraud and the trade in narcotics and banned substances as well as in armaments and illicit untaxed funds. The liberal internationalist regulatory strategy has scarcely made a dent in this expansion of non-state activity which may be classed as criminal by state moralists but, in some areas, represents the developing world’s own rational exploitation of globalisation.

The negative response to this situation was originally restricted to two distinct movements. The first was the rise of a domestic Western anti-war movement which split progressive forces into those who supported liberal values expansion and those who saw it as imperialistic. The second saw the co-emergence of neo-nationalist resistance to the claims of the West. Both appeared in the wake of Western intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East. During this period, the Liberal Establishment of the West was in a strong enough position to ignore the anti-war movements and to place continued pressure on non-Western nations, not excluding attempts at regime change by stealth, often indirect through 'Foundations'. The prospect of a global hegemony for the West, based on market economics, oligarchical democracy and rights ideology, was considered real by the liberal’ hawks’. At this time, right wing national populist forces in the West were largely marginal.

In 2008, a major economic crisis transformed the situation. The capitalist system teetered briefly on the edge but proved resilient. However, its resilience was purchased at the price of a strategy of domestic austerity which continues to this day. This coincided with growing acceptance that liberal interventionism using force had been a disaster that had not achieved its ends although the full fruits of that disaster would still not be seen for some time (exemplified by the Syrian tragedy). Confidence in the elite was shaken but the solution of the voters was, at this stage, to grumble but change the captains of the fleet, not the direction of the navy.

The Coalition Government of 2010 in the UK and the Obama Administration which came to office as the recession of 2008’s effects were unfolding continued governance much as before but a series of developments shook confidence in the elite: above all, the economic crisis itself and the associated fact that, though economies were stabilised, growth did not return. The self-identifying middle classes (actually the middling and lower middle classes and upper working class) were disproportionately hit by the consequences. The rich appeared to get richer. Austerity measures were increasingly judged to be applied unfairly to keep elected officials in power by appealing to the half of the population fearful of taxation. Elected officials were increasingly seen as self-interested and even corrupt or certainly beholden to the economic interests who had caused the crash. In foreign affairs, incapable of winning wars, democratic states proved perfectly capable of war crimes and out of touch with public distaste for foreign adventurism. Since progressive governments had either presided over the conditions that led to the crash or were presiding over the failure to deal with the consequence of the crash, public discontent tended to move to the right rather than the left (although populist movements appeared of both types). This was compounded by a new factor - the pressure of mass migration as 'free movement of peoples' turned from a dream into a nightmare that liberal ideologues failed to recognise as such.

The failure of the Arab Spring and other democracy movements saw a hardening of state power across the emerging world and in the communist and former communist states. These latter states also took a more neo-nationalist stance, fully aware of the role of Western elites in attempted regime destabilisation. Noting Russia’s successful incursion into Georgia, they began the process of resisting liberal Western incursion and then turning back the tide of Western expansion, a process in which Russia took the lead with its acquisition of Crimea and its own intervention in defence of the existing order in Syria. If the liberal internationalists continued to pursue their strategy either directly or indirectly through ‘philanthropic’ foundations, these not only made little headway but created further instabilities which neo-nationalists could exploit. A huge class, an 'industry', of otherwise unemployable graduates created a special interest bloc in the West of 'activists' and 'campaigners', appealing to that part of the electorate with a deontological view of international affairs where the exclamation of a 'should' would be sufficient to demand an action that would then become an 'is' - life is rarely so simple! This was faith-based and not evidence-based politics. While the Left began to split into its liberal left and socialist components with increasingly bitter recriminations between the two over austerity, identity politics, liberal economics and foreign policy, the real beneficiary of this break down in the liberal Western paradigm was the neo-nationalist and populist Right which now began to grow rapidly within the West.

The negative populist reaction to liberal elite failure was both a Left and a Right phenomenon but it was the Right that was enabled to remain united in its opposition. Most of the establishment Left were implicated in the failures and errors of the current regime. This has been symbolised well in the last week by the unprecedented decision of an incumbent French Socialist President of France not to put himself forward as the candidate of his Party in next year's Presidential Election. Liberal elements on the Left had refused to compromise with public anger because of liberal ideology and so saw their side split into factions and their acceptability diminish except among special interest groups who had nowhere else to go (such as public sector white collar employees and NGO workers). Meanwhile the populist Right, taking overt inspiration from the effective opposition to liberal hegemony of Putin (Russia), created an alliance of the lower middle class with national trading and financial interests and discontented working class people whose economic interests had been ignored and whose culture had been disrespected by urban liberals. These latter created a network of interconnected national populist movements that claimed democracy and freedom (not without reason in some cases), seizing power quite quickly in Hungary and Poland but increasingly setting the terms of debate elsewhere and posing material threats to the established order in countries as different as the UK, France and Italy.

The first major breakthrough for populism against the elite was not on the Right but on the Left with the surprise election of a marginal figure (Jeremy Corbyn) to the Leadership of the Labour Party, Instead of accepting the result, the liberal wing of the party undertook a war of attrition against their new Leader. This halted any chance of Labour becoming the voice for British populism instead of UKIP. By the time he was established firmly as Leader (even then clearly being undermined despite that), the initiative had long since passed to UKIP and thence to the Leave Campaign for Brexit. This same opportunity was lost more recently in the US when the DNC conspired to halt the rise to power of the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, confident that their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton would have the confidence of the American people. This split on the Left and widespread economic discontent presents us with weak versions of Lenin’s famous three pre-conditions for revolution. All that were missing were the cadres to seize power. These were provided by ruthless well-funded populist machines, wholly dedicated to achieving power, in successively the Brexit Vote and the 2016 Presidential Election and strong enough to push aside even the mainstream media which had been arbiter of politics for the bulk of post-industrial history.

The victory of these forces is truly revolutionary for the following reasons:-
  1. They have forced conservative forces to accommodate the key populist demands of the neo-nationalists – we see this in the strategic commitment of the May Government to Brexit and the degree to which previously negative conservative Republicans have offered their full support to the incoming President
  2. They have given encouragement strategically and tactically to national populists elsewhere, most notably in Europe where there are real fears amongst liberals that their last major stronghold (the European Union) may fall to neo-nationalism or implode under pressure from neo-nationalism
  3. They have not merely out-manoeuvred the progressive Left but have forced it into a crisis with the two factions (the socialists and the liberal) now engaged in a bitter existential struggle for dominance as the primary opposition force – a process that may take many months or even years to result in victory for one side. It is just as likely that these forces will split into separate ‘parties’, dividing the Left for a generation.
  4. Moreover, they have managed to ‘detourne’ the liberal left so that it appears to be increasingly anti-democratic and irrational as well as arrogant and narcissistic, the historical attributes of the Right. This latter may be the populists’ greatest achievement in the long run.
  5. They have introduced other apparently left-wing strategic policies – including variants of Keynesianism and anti-imperialism/peace – into populist discourse leaving the liberal (rather than the democratic socialist) Left as justificatory spokespeople for austerity, corporatism and even war (which in itself fuels the civil war within the Left).
  6. They have adopted a paradoxical inter-nationalism in which strong nation states collaborate as they compete, concentrating on trade relations and deal-making rather than war – again, this is a ’detournement’ of traditional Left positions which have abandoned inter-nationalism and national liberation for supra-nationalism and trans-nationalism.
  7. Above all, they have appealed over the heads of the Left beyond their traditional lower middle class base to the non-public sector working class (at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries), adopting their values, respecting their culture and (at least superficially) supporting their economic interests. This has split the working class from the Left in a decisive historical shift that saw a third of working class votes go for Brexit despite Labour backing for Remain and the Democrat’s white working class support dramatically hollowing out on November 8th.
The importance of the Trump phenomenon is that whoever commands the United States of America commands the general thrust of international relations policy. It is now clear that a national populist agenda is in charge of that thrust, directly or indirectly (in the event of a disputed result) for at least four and probably eight years and maybe twelve years That is sufficient time (as Reagan showed) to transform the condition of the world for good or ill. It is likely that a more moderate but allied Conservative Government will be in office in the UK for at least four years and possibly nearly a decade and that the European Union will see a major transfer of power to the national populist right in several major nations and possibly the implosion of the liberal model for the Union as a whole.

This is as strategically important as the arrival of communism and fascism in the 1920s. Even if states were not communist or fascist by the 1930s, they often adapted their politics not merely to challenge these forces but to appropriate aspects of them in order better to challenge them. National populism in a number of variants, including liberal and Left variants, are likely to become the hegemonic form of international relations discourse for at least the next decade and probably much longer This does not mean the Left does not represent a challenge to the new Right. Neither of national populism’s great victories (the US Election and Brexit) were overwhelming – the Democrats still (barely) won a majority of the popular vote and we have noted the theoretical possibility of the result being overturned by recounts. Similarly, Brexit is accepted by both major parties but the debate over whether the UK is to have a 'soft' or 'hard' Brexit permits Remainers to believe they can overturn the mandate through stealth or attrition. But the Left now has a major problem of credibility – it is associated with arrogance, incompetence, corruption and hypocrisy and, increasingly, with a rather dubious attitude to democracy.

Another problem the Left has is one of division – there are now two major competing visions for defeating neo-nationalism, the liberal and the socialist, which are fundamentally incompatible. The former will not adapt, compromise and let go of power while the latter sees the former as equally if not more problematic than the populists (who inconveniently will not go all the way to being fascists or official racists or xenophobes despite intense attempts by liberal propagandists to make these connections). Moreover, many socialists have more in common with Trump on key aspects of foreign and economic policy than they do with their own liberal ‘allies’ while many liberals are clearly highly emotional about single and identity issues that socialists see as part of the problem and not part of the solution. Given that Jill Stein only got 1% of the vote and 40% of women voted for Trump, the environmentalist and feminist commitments that lead Left thinking are also probable barriers to recapturing working class support.

To all intents and purposes, November 8th was a devastating blow to the liberal internationalist project. Funding will continue from European (at least until 2018) and from Liberal Foundation sources but US and UK Government sources are likely to dry up quite rapidly in the coming months. More to the point, the US and UK Governments are no longer going to be available to promote many liberal causes with emerging world Governments even if the British Government appears to remain committed to some important international rights-related treaties. UK Government action will be redirected at trade deals forcing European countries to follow suit. Major international agencies will have their role questioned with expectations that policy be in accordance with national populist values. The Business & Human Rights Treaty is unlikely to make progress until the current cycle is over - unless it is made more business-friendly.  The balance of power has shifted.

Corporate reactions fall into various special interest categories with many welcoming the new populism, others (with large urban liberal customer bases) nervous of boycotts and politicisation and others concerned about the collapse of the existing liberal internationalist order. One likely result is that all but the bravest corporation will start to withdraw funding from social liberal projects that might be classed as political where once they were simply classed as CSR (corporate social responsibility). Public affairs departments are reeling under the shock because they tend to be staffed by ‘urban liberals and liberal conservatives’, people who have had a stake in the preceding order and a career path that might include political office. Now, they have to consider their options as business splits into camps according to their relationship to various factions in the culture wars. However we look at it, independent funding is likely to decrease or shift into obviously charitable projects where those charities are not engaged in political lobbying. Radical capitalists like Soros and Branson are swimming against the tide. They are also not getting any younger.

Culturally, the liberal internationalists are faced with the problem that they are no longer ‘hegemonic’ within the West. Half the population rejects their hegemony. A significant part of the leadership of the 'hegemonic half' is questioning the strategy of arrogance towards the working and lower middle classes. Globalisation is in question intellectually. Liberal internationalists no longer hold all the commanding heights of power (and may not recover ground until 2020 or even 2024 or 2028) and, if they do recapture them, it will be a much weakened position - Weimar or Leon Blum's Popular Front to all intents and purposes. Their funding is about to fall except from highly politicised Foundations who are now in a confrontational relationship with the sources of power that can deliver what liberal NGOs want. Soros, for example, has openly declared war on the Trump Administration which places the Trump Administration alongside every 'regime' that Soros wants to overturn - their enemies' enemy is Trump. Every attempt to assert radical liberal values now has a countervailing, often cogent and aggressively positioned, alt-right argument. As liberal social media platforms try to cut out the alt-right, new platforms appear to serve it.

Two cultural opponents within the West are now evenly matched for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union and this has happened in under a year. As in all such struggles in the past, it will be hard for anyone to stay out of the fight and stay in public life. The old Right/Left conflict is changing into a conflict between democratic nationalism and inter-nationalism on the one side and supra-nationalism and liberal internationalism on the other. A third of the Left, mostly working class, will find itself moving into what will be positioned as the New Right and a third of the Right, mostly managerial business and white collar professionals, will find themselves moving into the Liberal Left. The former have the old media, the universities, the 'intellectuals' and the scribblers. The latter may have the most innovative parts of the new media, the public meetings, the bulk of social media sharers and the people who discuss public affairs in the pubs rather tham the wine bars. And we are only at the beginning ...

Friday 30 September 2016

Position Reversed ... The Labour Party Is Worth Backing ...

I do not have a tribal approach to politics. Parties like all other human institutions are tools and nothing more. Is a political Party more or less likely to express my core values and implement policies that accord with those values? If so, I can give my allegiance. If not, I must look elsewhere. Solidarity in a shared common cause is not the same thing as blind loyalty or faith. 

This leads me to the unconventional position that I might prefer the solid soft 'one nation' nationalism of Theresa May to the neo-liberal internationalism of the Blairite Right or of the pre-Brexit Tory Party and Liam Fox - and the inter-nationalism and socialism of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to either. Few would follow me on that but it is my position and that is my right.

The Radical Centre was never what it claimed - that is, the squaring of differences in the common interest. Rather, it was a coup by a professional political, bureaucratic, media-based and quasi-academic elite. The recent reaction on both Right and Left and across the West to rule by provenly incompetent 'experts', technocrats and political professionals is nothing but good if you are a true democrat (which I am) and are prepared to work for your values once functional democracy has been restored.

Back in May, I said I would quit the Party though, of course, I had paid my dues to September and was not going to give up on my vote for its Leader, albeit somewhat pessimistic that the sheer dead weight of the professional elite's war on Jeremy Corbyn would eventually break him. I was wrong on that expectation - to my surprise.

The Alienating Old Labour Party

The reasons I gave then for walking away were real enough: a lack of respect for dissent within the Labour tradition (on the European issue); a lack of respect for evidence-based debate; and the infiltration of the party by identity-based politics, especially those with a gender angle. These were all real concerns and things appeared to get worse rapidly - there was the dirty campaigning against Party Brexiters (a campaign which was humiliated in the event as an estimated third of Labour voters voted for Brexit), the filthy campaigning to denigrate and humiliate Jeremy Corbyn by the Labour Right and in the mainstream media; and the increasingly ridiculous 'war on antisemitism' which showed just how degenerate the Party had become in its snowflake identity wars.

What became clear by the beginning of this month was that the Party was riven by two competing  'matrices' (to adopt a term from a popular Hollywood sci-fi film), that is, two ways of interpreting reality neither of which was entirely true to the life experience of most people. Both represented different sets of core values and class interests but those differing core values were material and important in their difference.

On the 'old' side was a professional party apparat and political class backed by a complex claque of special interest and metropolitan media networks who laughingly asumed that their path was 'electable' when there had been nothing but slow decline since the regime of Tony Blair. They appealed to the triumph of the Labour Right politician Sadiq Khan not understanding that the numbers who actually voted for him were actually less than the numbers who voted for Brexit in London. The Tories had had a weak campaigner in Goldsmith and Khan could role out the inner city identity vote and not frighten the horses. London is not simply a mini-version of England, let alone Britain.

Yes, much valuable reform was undertaken in the Blair-Brown years in a programme of amelioration to correct the worst excesses (or rather the sclerosis) of the Thatcher-Major years but this was offset by the embedding of our local elite into a much broader international elite, wholly detached from the population at large, engaging in war-mongering for which that elite should never be forgiven and committed to a failed economics of 'enrichissez-vous' and cheap labour that had failed to deal with the infrastructual consequences of mass migration and regional decline.

The New Labour Movement

On the 'new' side was a surging movement from below, still naive about international relations (which runs itself on the principles of the jungle) but actively questioning elite power and austerity-based neo-liberal economics and, in that process, beginning to question the international economic arrangements that had led to trading agreements and those institutions like the European Union that were increasingly placing capital ahead of the people. The very viciousness of the attacks on that new movement from the Right and the attempt to use 'spin' rather than political education to counter its admitted naivetes indicated just how decadent and even cruel the Labour Right had become.

Basically, those who wished to destroy Corbynism descended to black propaganda of the worst nature and yet their leading candidate - not necessarily himself implicated in the excesses of his side - ended up by adopting much of the Corbyn-McDonnell economic programme because, well, it was popular. Cynical Blairites stood aside during the attempt at counter-revolution confident they could reverse that platform later if the anti-Corbyn candidate won. Even now, they continue to plot regardless of two clear democratic mandates within what is now the largest membership party in Europe.

The Labour Right and Soft Left existed on fear and anxiety while the new movement lived on hope - neither was entirely right or wrong in some black and white way but one had failed and was unimaginative in its solutions to the real problems of the people eight years after the crash of 2008, while the other was opening doors to new ideas and the political education of the masses. One distrusted the people - the road that led to the referendum revolution of June 23rd - and the other trusted the people. One was led by middle class people who feared the mob as they have done since time immemorial and the other was the mob transforming itself into a movement.

In mid-July after the Referendum vote we saw Remainers become Remoaners, threatening to reverse the vote of the people by all means possible in a surge of underhand anti-democratic thinking that was clearly closely associated with the organisation of the Labour Right assault on Jeremy Corbyn in method and intent. I analysed what a Left Leaver could do next in July with not a little despair. I found no one to argue against me in my harsh analysis. I laid out a trajectory for Left Leavers in four stages over some six months:
  • that Corbyn might win and reaffirm national democracy so that the Labour Party could remain a vehicle for Left Leavers (which has happened); 
  • that Corbyn might lose and a new Party be created that was sensible and which reaffirmed national democracy so that this might be the vehicle of Left Leavers (which was always going to be difficult and proved not to be necessary); 
  • that UKIP would became sensible in its protection of national democracy so that, with no alternative, Left Leavers could cross the water to the populist right (which would be the triumph of hope over reason); or, last of all, 
  • that nothing sensible was left out there to protect the workers from international neo-liberalism and the wise Left Leaver would go into private life or support Mrs May, assuming she stayed firm on national sovereignty, as, at the least, a national neo-liberal. 

Resolving The Issues

This final phase was brutally presented to Left Leavers by me as a final existential choice between being Left or being a leaver. I (though I suspect not so many others) would have put national economic sovereignty and national democracy first only because these were preconditions for effective socialism and an informed and engaged population. Socialism could not be imposed through the barrel of a Commission Directive and the Varoufakis belief that the European Union could be democratised in any reasonable political time scale was frankly ridiculous.

Nothing could be done over the summer - until the political wheel had turned another quarter. Corbyn might be defeated. He might, if he won, adopt the hard-line Remainer position (outlined pre-emptively by Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats) simply to ensure a peace deal with the Labour Right and preserve his anti-austerity economics. Most unlikely of all, UKIP might sudddenly become humane in its attitude to foreign nationals and adopt its own version of anti-austerity but geared to Labour voters.

And, of course, Theresa May might shift her position to a Brexit position so 'lite' that we may as well have not voted on June 23rd. As I write, we are in the midst of a PR war between the City and business Remainers (no doubt backed by the civil service) on the one side and sceptic Brexit Ministers (no doubt backed by the voters who voted for Brexit) for influence on the content of May's speech at her Party Conference. Nothing is certain in this soap opera until the thin lady sings. 

Meanwhile, Momentum is not a Party within the Party as the Labour Right claim but a parallel operation challenging and potentially renewing an undemocratic Party apparat against which I and others had fought and which we had failed to reform in the mid-1990s. It is not, despite claims, like Militant because it is not sectarian or restricted to one major locality for its effect. Momentum is nationwide and is drawing in many new people to politics. I am not a member and do not intend to become a member of Momentum but I respect its role as mobiliser of political engagement for people otherwise excluded by the system. It now needs sensible 'realist' challengers rather than the sinister and pig-headedly opportunistic Progress or the atavistic Labour First. Whatever it is, it needs to be respected as better organised, more directly connected to the population and more intelligent in its methodology than any of its rivals.

Half Way Between Old and New

Perhaps what the old guard cannot forgive is that Momentum helped massively increase party membership, despite the best efforts of party officials. A mass membership is not what the Right has ever wanted. Before 1996, Blair used to talk of the million member party but it was the last thing his lot wanted. The professional political class survived very well on moribund local parties, nerd-like rulebook activists, trades union fixing and deals, parachuted-in metropolitan dogsbodies as candidates in safe seats and little or no questioning of policies (except where the unions asked for their pound of flesh on employment rights which was often conceded with great reluctance).

The question then became whether, having now been fought twice and won against people desperate to keep their gravy train going and having been traduced repeatedly, Corbyn would be so exhausted and troubled that he would compromise on key policy areas. He had already done so on Trident. Why not on national sovereignty? The Right had already undermined the Labour Party by talking it down just as the Remainers had undermined the British economy in the run-up to June 23rd.

These counter-revolutionaries may have lost and now be surplus to historical requirements but they appeared not to understand their predicament. They had played to win with utter ruthlessness, uncaring of the damage they did to the institution they claimed to support. Existentially and professionally they had serious skin in the game of controlling the Party and in the pork barrel of the European Union. It is interesting that, to satisfy the soft left of this alleged centre ground, the first post-mandate announcement was, indeed, pure pork barrel - that the EU regional funding would continue after 2020 with a new Labour Government.

No analysis, no discussion. Just a political bid to win over the professionals at the centre of a patronage network involved in disbursing large amounts of funds in the depressed regions. The Party was making blanket commitments to the regions without asking questions or offering policies that would be geared to the efficacy of the spending, instead just offering what had simply been EU-directed money without new and clear socialist strings attached. This was how the SNP and European Socialists operated not a responsible British Socialist Party. This had been money that had been largely directed to EU ends or the ends of special interests linked to EU strategy. The expenditures need some analysis before depriving the poorest classes in the richest areas to feed the middle classes in the poorest areas.

To Renew or Not To Renew - That Is The Question?

In the meantime, a request for renewal of membership to the Labour Party arrived. A year ago, it would have been renewed automatically. In May, it would have been binned. When it arrived, it was put aside to see how things fared between its arrival and the Leader's speech at Conference. September 24th had offered hope - not just an increased mandate for Corbyn but signals being sent beyond the pork barrel message. The new Movement would persist in its radical democratisation of the Party. I have some confidence in this if it can be pushed through over the heads of a sclerotic and less than competent and defensive apparat. It will be a struggle.

To some extent, such policies will be the continuation of the work that my old crew started in the mid-1990s when we created Labour Reform and then co-ordinated the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. It would mean a rolling back of the democratic centralist Partnership in Power model and create the opportunity for ordinary members to get control of their hired hands - the elected politicians - and (I hope) policy under sound technical advice in which the trades unions should have a role. In the process, a naive movement would turn into a politically educated movement based on core socialist values able to face a renewed and revived Tory Party which, in the meantime under Prime Minister May, also has returned to some its core values and ceased to be the creature solely of the City and business (much to the latter's clear frustration). The country cannot but benefit but through an existential struggle over values conducted within the democratic process and rule of law. The Left will make mistakes and sometimes behave ridiculously but it will learn by doing and create a better world in doing so.

Similarly Momentum has started to explain itself and to challenge the 'matrix of lies' against it from special interests. I draw attention to only one item - the fight-back over accusations of antisemitism, a vicious slur as dangerous as the cruel and cynical manipulation of the death of Jo Cox by Remainers. The Jewish Chair of Momentum pointed out that the Vice Chair was Jewish as well and that Jews were active at every level in the organisation. Ironically, this might simply create new conspiracy theory on the Far Right but I think the Left can live with that and counter it on first principles. The issue remains sensitive and Momentum seems to be trying to draw back a little. It is under constant pressure to concede to the totalitarian culture of the Right Zionist lobby but, from where I sit, Jackie Walker's head-on assault on the Right is spot-on and needed to be said. Questioning the conduct of Netanyahu's Israel is not antisemitism.

So, the Labour Right is in the same position as the Remoaners - engaged in noise and fury, with access to friends in the mainstream media, with the advantage of easy access to wine bars and dinner parties in the metropolis - but they lack any power now except to be destructive. If they have not shot all their bolts, they seem determined to unload them as quickly as possible, leaving themselves unarmed before too long. Instead of engaging in rational evidence-based questioning of some of the more naive positions of their opponents, they make hysterical claims that quickly prove to be unfounded, discrediting themselves in the process. They use propaganda techniques worthy of Goebbels and they come to look aggressive in ways that fuel engagement by people like myself who were otherwise happy to leave things to others. The Labour Party apparat has proved itself problematic as well - appearing untrustworthy probably more from lack of imagination than from outright malice, stuck in the old matrix. It too needs radical reform.

The McDonnell Speech and Its Virtues

Then came John McDonnell's avowedly neo-socialist speech on Monday. First the Referendum result was accepted (no hitching the Party to the wagon of a second referendum alongside the Liberal Democrats). Second, if the European Union is to be a neo-liberal project, Labour clearly won't play ball - the preconditions for re-engagement are that neo-liberal trade deals will not be signed and sovereign nations can implement interventionist socialist economics (in other words, the Tories and UKIP have opened the door to socialism in one country until collaborating socialists can create a socialist Europe). Third, Labour now wants to work with and not against the financial services sector but on its terms - meaning no more casino economy and the finance sector's participation in the neo-socialist investment programme: if it supports that programme, Labour will support it in Europe and elsewhere (subject elsewhere to the war on tax avoidance). 

Fourth, Labour will not be inactive on the Brexit negotiations - it is going to try and drive them further to the Left, not in order to scupper them but to scupper the Tories and their austerity economics. Fifth, Labour is not going to get sucked into the migration debate (though Corbyn two days later appeared to reverse that) but it will seek protection for workers whilst fighting xenophobia (the pitch to the Polish vote was all-too-obvious here) - in other words, Labour should speak for mildly conditional free movement of labour as a sovereign British decision (an international socialist decision). Herre, we saw a definite difference of emphasis from Corbyn two days later. In other words, taken all in all, Europe is positioned as 'second order' to the struggle over economics (in good Marxist fashion). 

Overall, this was a measured pro-European but not pro-EU speech (the difference is significant). It was far more pro-people internationalist socialist position than we have ever heard before from a Labour politician, one that accepted Brexit as a necessary possibly temporary pause before a Socialist Europe of internationally co-operating nation states is to hand. I can live with that ... I just needed to hear what Jeremy Corbyn had to say before renewing my membership ...and I let Emily Thornberry's somewhat waffley contribution to BBC World at One on Monday and her unsophisticated speech at Conference pass since it merely told me that she had not yet got all her marching orders and had yet to get her feet under her table. 

The game now was clearly one of being pro-European by being challenging to the neo-liberal European Union and that is all many of us Leavers wanted in the first place. The Yanis Varoufakis strategy of change from within was never going to work without a shock to the EU's system and Brexit was part of that shock treatment. A Socialist Europe is best achieved through ensuring that a major G7 country outside the European Union can prosper as a Neo-Socialist Economy in its own right - demonstrating neo-socialism by example. The alternative was simply accepting ameliorative but ineffective restraints on neo-liberalism through a flailing European Social Democracy run by less than effective men and women in grey suits, always looking over their shoulder at Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan and the IMF.

The Corbyn Speech and Its Faults

This brings me to the excellent (from a traditional socialist point of view) speech by Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday. He captured the very soul of a movement when that soul desperately needed to be recovered. Of course, from the point of view of a cynical realist like myself, there was a bit of magical thinking here and there and an idealism that might have a bucket of cold water thrown over it by harsh economic and political reality further down the line but the speech was a starting point, the establishment of some core principles from which Labour Party socialists could draw heart and against which they could test their inevitable compromises. 

Perhaps I felt that both John McDonnell and Andy Burnham, much more to the Right, had a greater grasp of reality and that some of the relatively new Shadow Cabinet were lost and waffling in an idealistic day dream but Corbyn's aspirations were ultimately my aspirations and that of many Britons. One and only one set of policies made me pause before committing to renew - the excessively naive and counter-productive position on migration. 

In this area, as on Trident (where I agree with him) Corbyn was essentially being a faith-based politician, much like Tony Benn at his most narcissistic.  There are aspects of socialism that regrettably mimic religion - its Methodist aspect. I don't hold to it. I have no time for religion but I recognise that a 'broad church' (an interesting cliche in this context) has to hold many people who are predisposed to believe in magic to the Party because half of our species actually do 'need to believe' in ways that Fox Mulder would understand and they are voters too.

Corbyn's statement "But we will also be pressing our own Brexit agenda including the freedom to intervene in our own industries without the obligation to liberalise or privatise our public services and building a new relationship with Europe based on cooperation and internationalism." is precisely why Brexit is important. In effect, this is the quintessential Left Brexit position since the entire European Project is built on a neo-liberal commitment not to permit this degree of economic freedom, one that is not going to change because a couple of socialist governments in London and Athens ask it to change. This restoration of national sovereignty must, of course, be implemented responsibly and it is legitimate to ask whether the huge number of interventionist and spending promises actually do stack up but this was a first motivational speech after a gruelling period of division. There are four years now to refine the policies into workability.

Where Corbyn Gets It Wrong on Migration

On the other hand, Corbyn's strategic errors on migration must be exposed. First he does not get that cultural identity is as important to English workers as it is to Palestinians. Nor is it necessarily 'fascist. As others have pointed out to me "[an] emphasis on cultural identity is founded on a solid [Left] intellectual tradition: from Raymand Williams to Gramsci, from the work of Genovese to that of Charles von Onselen, and so on". From a practical perspective, being concerned about cultural identity should not be spun as being essentially 'rightist' - after all, Labour lost Scotland for a lot of reasons but one was a failure to understand cultural identity and respond to it instead of trying to accomodate it positively as an expression of discontent and then 'detourne' it into inter-national socialism. It is ironic that the Left accepts non-locality based identities like gender, race and sexual orientation so readily and yet turns its nose up at national and historical identities.

Second, the political economics of increasing taxes on the indigenous upper working and lower middle class to fund improved services for migrant areas is political suicide. It is these people who vote in Governments. We may not find that comfortable but it is a fact on the ground. Certainly the soft liberals and NGO snowflakes won't find this comfortable but failing to understand the economic pressures on the middling sort (which includes Labour's upper working class voters) is a serious block to power unless Corbyn has some damn fine arguments for more taxation that go beyond moral exhortation. With limited funds available (no matter the borrowing claims of the Shadow Chancellor) and with lots of perfectly reasonable promises being made to a variety of special interest groups (regions, NHS, public service workers, the low paid, students, the 'hardworking families' of political discourse and so on), taxing the anxious and struggling middling sort more highly in order (it would seem) to improve the infrastructure of migrant areas becomes a gift to the populist right wing media. You may as well send them membership cards to UKIP in the post.

Third, the sheer scale of incoming migration to Europe and thence to the UK is being treated as an inconvenience rather than a truth. It may well overwhelm the kindness to strangers offered by Corbyn - and we have a precedent in the chaos folowing Merkel's humanitarian gesture in Germany. To the economic migrant, even the slums of the West offer levels of wealth that to them are worth taking immense personal risks. To go on to promising a ready-made welfare infrastructure that will exceed the highest expectations of the middle classes of Addis Ababa and Khartoum is irresponsible to say the least. And be assured, we have scarcely understood the scale of economic migration to come - the next wave is from the Horn of Africa through Egypt. The international institutions that have just offered half a billion Euros for job creation in Ethiopia understand this only too well.

Although sentimental liberals may have no problem with any of this, many natural Labour voters will. Migration has become to many people who are natural Labour voters and who are neither cruel nor stupid an issue about respect for their own needs as citizens. It is not about the other, it is about themselves. Idealists may bemoan such selfishness but it is not for them to dictate terms to the electorate. We are a democracy and the people should dictate terms to politicians. It is certainly not about hating the foreigner - which is the malign myth peddled by Remain propagandists - but about voters being under severe social and economic pressure in their own right and wanting Government to relieve that pressure directly and even personally.

Treating Voters With Contempt?

The implicit characterisation in Corbyn's speech of Left Brexiters as stupid people who voted on peddled myths and did not have minds of their own is a little insulting and clumsy. The inclusion of the phrase "the referendum campaign a campaign that peddled myths and whipped up division" was foolish. It oversimplified matters and was deeply insulting to the third of Labour voters who voted Brexit in order to pander to Labour Remainers. We noticed. It dampened our enthusiasm. The campaign was being characterised by Corbyn in terms dictated by the mainstream media (an irony here) on the basis of campaigning by just one element in the campaign - UKIP. 

Left Brexiters in no way endorsed that position and were deeply active in campaigning for Brexit on socialist grounds. This unfortunate turn of phrase will be resented especially since the mainstream Remain campaign peddled fear through exaggerating economic threats, something (to his credit) Jeremy Corbyn did not do. Fanatics engaged in lies and half truths but most sensible people on both sides fought on issues of principle in good faith and that should be recognised.

The one third of Labour voters who voted Brexit should not be treated as deluded fools unable to make up their own minds without the help of North London intellectuals ... they voted rationally and in their own interest and they should be respected. All Emily's advisers on foreign policy (according to her speech) are from Inner London North of the Thames and East of Uxbridge which is not a healthy state of affairs.. If you do not respect people, all the people, you cannot expect to win their votes and those votes will be needed in 2020. Remain had depended on middle class votes in the South interested in their pockets and those voters are unlikely to be voting for John McDonnell's socialism come the day - so Labour needs that 30%.

The need to improve infrastructures (central to Corbyn's migration policy) is certainly vital but it should be person-blind and be geared to any community who needs it, not be presented as favouring incomers or special interests or being a cause to encourage more incomers before the infrastructure has been put in place. His policy is topsy-turvy. We should be assessing what this country needs and can take (not, by the way, unilaterally 'stealing' talent from countries that need nurses and teachers even more than we do), pre-building the necessary infrastructure and then welcoming migrants to join a safe and secure welfare economy where they either have a role to play in the greater good or because space has been made for people suffering exceptional risk to life and limb. We should not be sending a signal that this small island is a land of opportunity, like America in the nineteenth century. It is not and such an attitude could place our welfare economy under intolerable strain.

The Blunder on Migration & The Decision to Renew

Although a decent speech that touched every socialist button, Corbyn also failed to recognise the logic of May's position - that positive humanitarian intervention overseas might stop migration at source by improving conditions for the poorest in their own country (which should mean not gutting their health and social services to ensure the security of our own). 

Corbyn's position on migration represented a sentimental flaw in an otherwise good speech and one that UKIP and the right-wing media will seize on and exploit at every opportunity with a corresponding silence from Leftists like me that will become deafening. Nor will we allow ourselves to be characterised as callous or un-socialist - it is we who have the interests of the poor of the emerging world and the indigenous working class (and those from overseas already in our country) at heart. It is we who have an analysis that encompasses social and political sustainability. 

On this one, he is on his own. Was this blunder on migration, almost as daft as his blunder before Brexit in kow-towing opportunistically to the Remain machine on the Labour Right and Soft Left, sufficient to disengage me from the Labour Party and start moving through that trajectory outlined by me on July 16th? No, it was not, and I can give three reasons.

Let us get one out of the way quickly. Migration is potentially existential but it is not primarily existential like the Brexit vote. The voters still have the chance to teach the naive idealists inside and outside the Party. In the end, there will be a lesson taught Labour on the ground to which Corbyn and the idealists must adjust if they want to achieve the rest of the programme outlined in the McDonnell and Corbyn speches of September 26th and 28th. Anti-austerity outside London is one helluva a lot more important than pleasing the luvvy NGOs in London if the new team wants to prove that neo-socialism can work in one country and then export the model elsewhere by example.

Pragmatism is No Vice

Secondly, no political programme is ever going to be perfect. The core values underpinning Corbyn's programme are consistent. There is a means of openly arguing for alternatives where there are disagreements. By offering to smash Blairite democratic centralism, Corbyn permits me and others to challenge him on this and other policies without seeking to overturn the general commitment to democracy or necessarily being disloyal to the total programme or to him. The policy may be wrong-headed but it can be placed before the Party before it is placed before the electorate and people like me may have the chance to argue our case in a way not possible under the dictatorial rule of Blair, Brown and Milliband. Voices are already speaking out about the foolishness of the migration position without making this a leadership issue.

Thirdly, perhaps most important of all, critics can recognise that Corbyn's position arises from a sincere moral, perhaps faith-based, position that is in perfect accord with the values of socialism and which represents an ultimate position (the borderless world) that even his critics would like to reach. Just as Left-Brexiters did not object to a truly democratic socialist united Europe but only to the feasibility of one under neo-liberalism (and so can find themselves in agreement with John McDonnell's subtle economics) so critics of Corbyn's migration politics can critique the practical naivete of his approach on pragmatic grounds without in any way impugning his integrity, decency and, frankly, moral superiority all things being equal in a perfect world. But then you do not need socialist parties in a perfect world, do you?

And so the conclusion is simple - my negative position on renewal must be reversed. The Labour Party and Labour Movement are now in decent and moral hands. Corbyn is wrong on migration and may be naive in other areas but 'his heart is in the right place' as is that of the new movement. He stands for values that desperately need reviving and are being expressed in a political movement that challenges the reactionary essentialism of UKIP and its opportunistic and cynical equivalent in Scotland (SNP), the gross and equally cynical opportunism of the Radical Centre and Liberal Democracy and the special interests of the undeniably effective but class-based Tory Party. 

Therefore, with only a little hesitation, I shall renew my membership of the Labour Party.


Friday 29 April 2016

Enough is Enough - When You Are In An 'Ole, Stop Digging ...

I have been weighing up whether the Labour Party is worth the candle after around nine months of re-engagement, having, once again, observed it from the inside. I decided to try and be as objective as possible - does it match what I believe and is it good for the people of this country? These are the only two considerations for me. There is another consideration: is it good for my petty personal interest but, frankly, I would probably never have been a Labour Party supporter if that was so. Politics is about interest but it is also about values and I place values before interest while others (which is their right) do the opposite. Let us weigh up the evidence.

FOR THE LABOUR PARTY

1. There is no other party that at least purports to protect the interests of the most vulnerable in our society although a) the least worst is perhaps not the best, b) the record of Labour in office under Blair was chequered to say the least with its distracted interest in international issues, and c) there are 'conservative' forces that are equally evidentially concerned with the causes of poverty and with solutions (represented within the Labour Party by the increasingly isolated Frank Field).

2. A significant element in the leadership including the Leader represent the forces of peace and redistribution although a) the rest of the leading networks in the Party seem determined to oust it by fair means or foul and b) this values-driven element (of which I approve) seem to be consistently politically inept and naive.

3, It still represents the bulk of the Labour Movement although a) the trades unions seem no longer to be concerned about society as a whole but only with their special interests and b) the trades union movement is now largely associated (with exceptions such as the sterling work done in the transport, construction, retail, banking and manufacturing sectors) with a defensive strategy to maintain a large and often inefficient state sector as producers rather than having much concern with the services to be supplied.

AGAINST THE LABOUR PARTY

1. It is not organisationally fit for purpose. It has hollowed out in the North. It has lost Scotland and is under pressure in Wales. In the South, it has become dominated by naive cultural activists of the liberal-left in a state of alternating outrage and despair. In some urban areas, its structures are controlled by ethnic feudal elites. Its elected representatives are narcissists and out of control. Its leadership is weak, though not always a weakness of its own making. The party apparat (the professionals) have far too much influence and control within a supposedly democratic party. It is collapsing from within.

2. It has become dominated by cultural and identity politics for short term urban electoral reasons at the expense of class and national interest politics. Its European policy - thrust upon it by the apparat - alienates much of its working class base and is deeply flawed in its analysis of the nature of the European Project, aligning it further with the international liberal economic system. It has allowed itself to become distracted by urban culture wars between ethnic groups. It has also aligned itself with the movement to control thought and language and avoid free debate ('liberal totalitarianism') and it connives in the rewriting of history for political purposes. It has refused to face the very real problems created by global flows of migrants and tried to suppress all debate on the matter. Parts of its apparat have been taken over by sectional identity elements, most notably radical feminism (which is not to be confused with the commitment to social and economic equality between persons of all genders).

3. It has totally neglected any form of political education nor has it encouraged critical thinking and open debate (although the Leader has made moves in this direction on Trident and other matters though signally not on Europe). It has confused political organisation and building a party with issues campaigning as if it was little more than a giant NGO. It has acted as claque for the campaigning of NGOs that collude with other political interests. If its policies are coherent (which is to be doubted), they are poorly communicated.

In short, on the debit side, the democratic socialist and labour party of the early twentieth century has turned into a chaotic and naive liberal-left party that floats on the tide of history instead of creating it. It became little more than a mass of aging tribal loyalists supporting a small number of paid opportunists and cynics (amidst which men and women of integrity are undoubtedly to be found), all of limited horizon and education, but also without or with decreasing experience of mass social and political organisation.

The 'Corbyn revolution' merely brought all this out into the open - within a party that has been rotting for decades - by introducing a new and unstable force of passionate and inexperienced people who contain within their cohort ideologues as their most active element, an element even further disconnected from those in the working class whose livelihoods do not depend on the public sector.

From being a national working class party, the Labour Party has become an inchoate coalition of sectional special interest groups including urban ethnic groups and ideologues with increasingly little to say to a people who are suffering not only from austerity in the short term but neo-liberalism in the long term. The commitment to a subsumption under a European ameliorative neo-liberal project should be the last straw for many natural supporters of a genuine class and community-based democratic socialism.

The positives for the Party would be enhanced if a) it ceased its trajectory towards a civil war organised from the Right and unified itself around a national redistributive and democratic programme that eschewed culture wars and identity politics and offered a viable anti-austerity strategy or b) it was simply destroyed and replaced by a national democratic socialist party that could undertake this programme more effectively.

To recover ground would require a) the re-imposition of party discipline at every level around a programme that mediated between the party members and the general public where the party apparat and elected representatives were subject to the authority of a Leader elected by the members, b) the intellectal content of the party's programme to be radically upgraded to rely on only evidence-based solutions to value-driven problems instead of rhetorical and cultural position-taking c) the trades union movement either returned to a socialist position or partially sidelined as a special interest group and d) the liberal internationalist programme to become secondary to a pragmatic national democratic and redistributive programme.

None of these changes seem likely. To maintain and vote for the Party in its current condition is irresponsible. Placing values to one side, the national interest would not be served by having a Government of half-baked thinkers with ill-thought out policies and a propensity to legislate in the direction of thought and language control, let alone behaviour control. Worse, this Party would have half its eye on the absurd dream of transforming the European Union into a socialist paradise and be subject to the whims and fancies of whichever faction demanded some life-denying ideological policy to maintain a Parliamentary majority.

So, as Lenin, put it - 'What Is To Be Done?'. First, when one is in an hole, the first rule is to stop digging. This mess is not something that ordinary members can possibly have any control over. There is no sign that the Party Leadership has a grip on things and can make the necessary changes. Across the Party and the Labour Movement, the ruling elite are like ferrets in a sack or large rats fighting over a small cake. There is nothing to be done within the Party. It is degenerate in the most fundamental sense.

All the ordinary person can do who has the values that should have been expressed by a strong Labour Party is to stand back and not only let it implode but hope it implodes quickly so that something can take its place or that, perhaps, one or other of the 'civil war' wings of the party can be transformed into something that can represent the aspirations of the mass of the population while not being led by some maniacal cuckoo in the nest like the unlamented Tony Blair, the Conan of the Middle East.

The argument that anything is better than the Tories does not stand up any more. Idealism is not enough. Politics is about power and that means the competent control of a powerful and dangerous State, including the deep state aspects of it. It does not mean getting office in order to be taken over by the State as happened under the last Labour Government. Whoever is incompetent at controlling the State leaves the Deep State to control us. A competent democratic force that challenges the State is always preferable to an incompetent one that is the creature of the State. The Tories need to be challenged by something far more competent than they are, tougher, disciplined, even brutal in its support for core values of redistribution, democracy, community and individual freedom, including the freedom to dissent.

The Labour Party has become a waste of the space given to a radical, progressive, democratic force in this country. It will cease to have my membership. It will cease to have my support until it deals with the key issues of organisation and discipline, cultural and identity politics and values-deriven political education. None of these changes are likely and so I await something new that can do practical things for our poorest and most vulnerable, ensure maximum freedom and opportunity for the majority, maintain our national identity along progressive lines and control and limit the State and other institutional forces. I look forward to seeing pigs arrive at Terminal 1 Heathrow ...

My text of my resignation letter to the Party will follow in due course. This farrago was not what I signed up for.

Tuesday 8 March 2016

The Naive and the Cruel - The Ideological Struggle for the Heart of Europe

Part of the pro-European Union pitch relies on the promotion, mostly from Marxist intellectuals and fellow-travellers in the Academy, of a naïve anti-Atlanticist economic model which is designed to appeal to the younger generation. Needless to say, both the Atlanticist neo-liberal and this neo-socialist European model are deeply flawed but the latter is naïve where the former is cruel. Because the former is cruel, the latter becomes attractive and so it must be ripped apart by serious democratic socialists before it gets traction.

The two key issues neither side are addressing are a) the massive impending flow of refugees this year and possibly in subsequent years and b) the economic instability of the Eurozone in the context of a global slowdown not only in Europe but also in China and the US.

These people are not getting it – a perfect storm of an economic system on the edge and massive population shifts for which there has been no preparation does not lead to democratic socialism but to authoritarianism and national populism. And eventually to violence which can only be handled by the surveillance society (and not that either).

The only real solution is the restoration of flexible and responsive national democracies in a framework of internationalism (not supra-nationalism) in which democratic socialists (not neo-socialist liberals) restrain the forces of reaction and maintain ‘civilisation’ before returning to effective long term power and the rebuilding of the welfare commonwealth - and then perhaps returning to the construction of a new collaborative Europe from the ground up.

The economic projects of the European neo-socialists are doomed on massive welfare costs and the revolt of the Middle European middle classes from the taxation and inflation required. A system built on the assumption of constant high economic growth relying on cheap labour and minimal infrastructural investment has been called out by history. Eight years after the 2008 Crash, the reliance on the 'inevitable' up-turn looks more futile than ever. There will eventually be a massive structural up-turn on technological innovation (biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI/robotics) but it will be fiercesomely disruptive and our elites are simple not competent enough to handle it.

Even if they get into power, like the French Popular Front in 1936, our backwards-looking soft Left will be out of it within a year or two. The logic that destroyed Tsipras still exists within the European Project and Varoufakis can appear on TED as many times as he likes with his 'alternative strategy' but it is little more than the same old intellectual failure re-packaged for dim-witted liberals.

Worse, this is not the way to help the refugees or the working population most threatened by break down. Both deserve better - they deserve realists and not idealists, a political class prepared to get stuck in and bring peace to troubled regions, fund reconstruction for destroyed territories, turning camps into viable townships where return is not possible. We must match migration aspirations to labour shortages and not rely on spurious human rights claims and the demand for ever cheaper labour to feed the maw of late capitalism. Liberal internationalist idealism (as opposed to democratic socialist internationalism), the deontological impulse of the cultural studies departments, is at the very root of the murder and mayhem we see across the peripheries of the West.

The liberal idealists who now sit, like Cnut before the waves, at the leading edge of European 'socialism' are worse than simply naive, they are potentially destructive in that naivete, part of a failed elite instead of the vanguard of a new democratic socialist political elite (there I have said it) that will transform the condition of the people under conditions of democracy, technological innovation and socio-economic redistribution within an internationalism of free democratic welfare states.

Saturday 22 August 2015

So Who Is The Author of Position Reserved?

[It occurred to the Author that regular readers had no frame of reference for the personality behind the postings. This is a slightly edited version of the Facebook Profile I use and may act as a sort of reference point.]

Existentialist, Anti-Trancendentalist Mysterian Supermaterialist and Politically Non-Euclidean with Chaotic, Possibilian, (cautiously) Trans-Humanist, Gothick, Nietzschean, Antinomian, Discordian/Erisian, Zen & Tantric Tendencies. Believer in Wu Wei and Wyrd and not much else. Looks on the species as work-in-progress likely to take another 30,000 years to become basically secure and so decent.

Politically into personal liberty (all things being equal, especially in cognitive and sexual matters), anti-bureaucratism (above all, that of the European Union which is the 'monstre sacre de nos jours'), good order mixed with compassion and common sense (the 'way of the decent copper'), sustainability for future generations and maintenance of the natural environment (which is not to be confused with any support for the Greens who are as mad as hatters or professional environmentalism which is little more than a job-creating racket), the primacy of the young over the old who usually are responsible for screwing things up in the first place, national self-determination (though never ethnicist which means that Israel worries me), against German-led Europeanism (as opposed to liking Europeans) and American-led Atlanticism (as opposed to liking Americans even though I go into hiding when they 'get God'), secularism (big time! anyone who believes in fairies and is in politics is a threat to me and mine), evidence-based policymaking, respect for difference (it is the outliers who ensure the progress and survival of the species), kindness to people who believe in fairies except in politics, anti-feminist, anti-identity politics (you are a person not an hysterical attribute) and anti-Frankfort School ideology which precisely means that I support the rights of women to make their own choices and that I support socio-economic and political equality, above all against the matriarchal top-down busybodies of the Academy.

All in all, a classic pre-1970s rational, pragmatic liberal socialist who still believes in the democratic nation state (not that the UK is really one any more) - very much an endangered species amidst the hysterics, posturers, hypocritical moralists, opportunists and downright liars of modern media-driven democracy. Not currently party-affiliated: the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? Oh, and past contributor to Tribune, The Chartist and Lobster and founder of www.exaronews.com over which I have no editorial control or influence whatsoever.
 

Instinctively polyamorous like most men if they were honest but married to a remarkably interesting woman with two very bright and likable kids ... I really like women a lot and my sympathies are wholly with Emma Goldman on 'feminism'. I do not like sport or engines. I rather like fashion and art.

However, my aversion to ideology, identity politics (which has destroyed and fragmented the intelligent distributionist Left) and post-Frankfort School idiocy suggests that if you are a dim-witted femi-nazi who denies men their fulfilment as anything other than pale imitations of themselves, an ethnicist or traditionalist or a happy-clappy rights liberal or activist, you might be a helluva lot happier not entering into my circle..

Philosophy

My philosophy in life is existentialist (as if regular readers had not guessed). Life is a path that leads to death and no other end. There is no point in believing that you will be pulled from the pit by some great God. You climb out yourself.

The only meanings are those you make for yourself. But, actually, life is good, very good, if you feel the fear and make it work for you. I am passionately anti-anti-natalist and all philosophies of death and the death instinct. I prefer Catholicism for all its evils and mistakes to a Buddhism which negates.

Sometimes, things will go very wrong but these can be good times in retrospect, though you may regret that you had to learn the hard way.

But no regrets is part of the rule-book. Just live with it and move on ...

Philosophers who are admired include Heraclitus, Socrates, Kierkegaard (without the God bit), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Foucault. I respect Wilhelm Reich and Jack Parsons not for their thought but for their good will. I find the philosophers of the Far Right challenging, fascinating and instructive - their critiques of contemporary liberalism resonate even though I oppose them. There are dangers in these thinkers and they require contesting with respect.

Philosophers who are despised include Plato, anyone deluded enough to think that meaning subsists outside ourselves, Hegel and all Hegelians (though with a sneaking respect for Marx's use of Hegel to create a dynamic political movement which, though it went wrong, still gave hope to the hopeless and still has things to say today) and guilt-ridden post-Nazi 'liberals' like followers of Kojeve and Habermas. Zizek drives me up the wall - did he and others not see that Tsipras was engaged in a doomed enterprise. I have no time for German Idealism more generally, analytics who dance on the head of a pin or who invent elaborate ethics in order to avoid personal despair or ensure tenure. My current bug bear is the fashion for extreme scientific speculation which is taken too seriously - it is an enjoyable stopping off place between real philosophy and science fiction.

Matters of the Spirit

I was never interested in the idea of some ghostly spirit, internal or external, animating us and then merging with some abstract Great Beyond. The mind is materially embedded in the body and the mind-body in society and all is fundamentally matter. We are emergent from matter but we cannot say we understand precisely what we mean by matter in this context. Functionalist materialism is simply an interpretation of materialism and there may be more here yet to be uncovered - or never recoverable.

There remain great mysteries in the functioning of society, about the nature of ourselves and about the workings of minds which may as well be regarded magically as undiscovered, and possibly undiscoverable, science.  If there have to be gods, then I choose Dionysos and Aphrodite, Odin and Freyja ...

But you cannot escape the drag of matter, of others or of your own carcase. A Luciferian rebellion, in the end, makes it all worthwhile because it asserts the working of your own deeper matter against the matter worked on you by the laws of physics and by the burden of social organisation. The imagination, a creative irrationality, is what makes us able to move beyond being mere walking stones, shuttled around by blind necessity and previous chance.

If I could rebel against matter I would but I cannot, so, instead, I reserve the right to rebel against social convention and the dead weight of history to free the mind-body for new experiences and pleasures, for individual psychological transcendence (not to be confused with claims about the universal) and for the benefit of those I love.

God certainly need not be involved. Past texts, especially those 'revealed' in the Iron Age, are useless. As are all socially constructed abstracts ... I very much prefer the realist Foucault to the delusional Habermas.

Politics

I used to be involved in politics a great deal. I wasted much of my life and time on the 'official' Left. It achieved little and all I learnt was that the few will always command the agenda of the many, not because they are strong but because we, the many, are weak. Recent events surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's candidature for leadership has exposed to the gaze of all what I learned in the struggles of the 1990s - the main Party of the British Left is deeply dysfunctional, staffed by second and third rate minds with no strategy beyond the 'next election'. The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)

On the other hand, anarchism tends to the naive, riddled with the naturalistic fallacy, deviant forms of religion and hidden communitarian terrors. One sinks back into a soft sort of left-libertarianism, a social liberalism or libertarian socialism created out of justifiable pessimism tempered by good will. I would prefer even Baathist order to the killing fields created by enthusiastic and naive armchair liberal outrage, at least when push comes to shove on taking the AK47 out of the broom cupboard.

I have certainly come to dislike the self-regarding political class and the lies of the 'international community' (aka professional fixers) but equally those who afford them loyalty out of an ignorant tribalism, corporatist cowardice or a refusal to think about the nature of power and how the power of the few depends on the willing servitude of the many at home and their disregard abroad ... evil lies so often in obeying orders provided by those same second rate people who naturally rise to the top of political institutions.

The foot soldiers of domestic left-wing politics have been continually digging while in a hole. Solidarity, once it has served its initial purpose, tends to become slavery. The networks of people determined to collaborate to get the cattle trucks from place to place without asking about the destination, combined with the awful truths of social psychological experimentation by our elites, suggested to me that evil was well embedded in the human species by its very socialisation strategies long before we were born.

And so I am a peculiar form of pessimist of the anarcho-Left, owing more to Rabelais, De Sade (the philosopher), Nietzsche (again), Paine, Shelley, William Morris and the incomparable Oscar Wilde than the current degenerate crew of rascals serving special interests, overseas and domestic, who have passed by the moniker of 'New Labour' and who owe more to Lloyd George than Keir Hardie.

These became mere statist war-mongers who have run the economy into the ground for the sake of power, and whose supporters are a rump of dangerous post-Marxist ideologues. In the end, they rise like scum to the surface to get their well-paid jobs in an international system that they created. In that context, it is billionaire wealth creators who deploy capital well to create jobs and build economies that impress me more than the Atlanticist and European clowns who do the opposite. The real talent is at the front end of capitalism nowadays and the leaders of the people should be ashamed of themselves for letting this happen.

The problem may be with Parliamentary Democracy itself, with the prerogatives of the Crown, with the dominance of Party and with institutional special interests that stand in the way of the people's own ability to develop their capabilities in collaboration with others. The way that the priestly class of public intellectuals and third-rate journalists dictates the terms of politics in the Atlantic system and the way modern graduates lap up the nonsense is a lot of the problem ... closed cosmopolitan (a classic contradiction) elites believing their own lies about the nature of the world and existence.

I stand against the bureaucratic State, the Crown as State (though I quite like the Windsors out of sentiment), foreign wars, federalism of all types, the corporate mentality (while appreciating the innovations supplied by genuinely free Jeffersonian markets and even intelligent State infrastructural investment), managerialism as cult, neuroscientific manipulation and tenured technocracy.

Science, technology and innovation are mostly very very good indeed but have to be kept out of the hands of the fruits and the nuts. The market and the State do inspire great works of progress as well as great evils.


Malatesta,Tucker, Rocker, Kollontai, the Kronstadt Mutineers, Zapata, Makhno and, of course, Goldman all had a point and the naive Jack Parsons makes that point likeable: freedom and personal autonomy within a society of free individuals is our highest aspiration ... but I would still trust a weak democratic State over any number of self-righteous activist enthusiasts who weedle their way into the bureaucratic corporatism of social democracy under self-righteous liberal cover.

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.