In the last of three posts going out to mark the new decade, Socialism or Barbarism reviews the political context for struggle facing those seeking a way forward to socialism.
The last two articles reviewed the global strategic circumstances in which revolutionaries find ourselves; as should be clear, at this time and like no other question, the issue of building a viable left-wing alternative is central to the politics of socialism today. This is clearly the case from an Irish perspective.
Building a Left Alternative
From a brief review of many of the left-wing sites and forums online there would appear to be huge levels of confusion on this issue. This article aims at the clarification of this matter and the identification of guidelines for building a left-wing opposition capable of changing Ireland.
The role of Trade Unions
Many of those who seek to build left-wing alliances seek to do so by prioritising the building of working relationships with trade union leaderships. Working with these people is an essential part of all left-wing organising but it is essential to be clear about what is aimed at so as not to lose course.
Trade Union bureaucrats in Ireland often have come up through the ranks and many have histories involving successful organising and even strike actions. As such, it is easy to be mistaken when dealing with them. Their achievements of the past are no guide to their current political disposition.
It is no coincidence that many trade union leaders would be only too happy if Labour were to form the next administration in coalition with Fine Gael. Their aspirations extend no further than delivering marginal pay increases to their memberships. Few in senior trade union positions view such reformist goals as necessary precursors to a fundamental transformation of society but most see them as essential to career advancement and re-election. Few in senior trade union positions actively work for those falling outside their ranks and there is little sense of a wider political agenda.
Again, this is not merely ideological or the result of institutionalisation in perennial social partnership negotiations. Most trade union leaders receive very large salaries much higher than the bulk of their memberships and have often lost any sense of urgency that arises from material disadvantage.
The role of revolutionaries in Trade Unions is to build them into what they were established to be: mass organisational structures for the advancement of working class people. The role of socialists as Lenin put it is to politicise the work of trade unions: to lift them out of the natural limits set by the economic struggle for marginal pay increments. We do that through working with the most competitive elements and expanding awareness of the nature of the system and the need and possibility for change. This work is often thankless, always difficult and does not yield easy results. The tendency to work with leaderships as a substitute for such difficult work can be simply the result of a moral lethargy on the part of revolutionaries in addition to a lack of clarity.
However, at leadership levels reformist politicians do not want to develop the trade unions into fighting organisations of the working class. They do not need them to be that and this they share in commonality with trade union leaderships. Trade Unions can be marched up a hill for the narrow political agenda of one set of reformist politicians to enable them to replace a sitting government or to secure piecemeal rewards in high-level negotiations involving well-paid union bureaucrats. Going beyond this however is only a risk to these well-sated groups. This is the reason why both reformist politicians and most trade union leaderships fear grassroots militancy and work continuously to isolate and remove revolutionary socialist organisers from their midst. Many workers with any experience of real industrial action will confirm this reality.
The role of Social Reformist Parties
Many on the left will also seek a shortcut by means of working with or engaging alongside social reformist parties as a means to securing small gains. Again, it is imperative that socialists are fully aware of the correct orientation in this work in order not to get blown off-course in the process of this work.
It is important for socialists to engage with any political manifestation of labour. We must seek to work with those who share our demand for change even when they don’t agree that such change must be fundamental. We must seek to unite all who can be united. But in doing so we must not lose our freedom or ability to project an independent course and to wage sustained struggle against such reformists when their political opportunism can be effectively juxtaposed to a viable revolutionary course.
Working with political representatives of social democracy is particularly difficult because such elements usually stand to the right-wing of their parties if only because of their long-term experience ‘working’ the structures of the existing order. They are often institutionalised and again suffer from the tendency to live lives much different from the needy in our society. They aim is not to advance change if that change is to destabilise what they are used to but instead to seek the achievement of a number of short-term ‘wins’ that they can project come re-election time.
Building alliances with such parties can only be done through developing relationships built on grassroots struggle not through bureaucratic arrangements at a political level. It is only through working alongside activists in other left-wing parties at a grassroots level that socialist unity can be achieved. Such unity must be predicated on the achievement of fundamental change irrespective of how ‘unreasonable’ this might appear to the media or the commentariat. It is change that is focussed on making real improvements to the lives of those at the base of society and demands the political empowerment of working people not through the prism of an electoral-representative class but through direct democratic forms.
Socialist Unity
Unity of the left means unity of struggle. That struggle is not primarily through the institutions of power but in the communities and in the workplaces. Those reformists who reject such approaches because they have been conditioned by the failures of the past (explained in the previous posting) will come unstuck in the future as globalisation produces fundamental change.
Electoral institutions are not mechanisms to achieve real change. They are only vehicles to popularise socialist demands, to expose the limitations of the current system and to raise the demands of working class people and communities. In steadfastly promoting such an agenda, revolutionaries will wring concessions from the business class and their government beyond the ken of reformists as the bourgeoisie seeks to undermine the growth of revolutionary forces. As Connolly said so correctly one hundred years before revolutionaries will achieve much more for the workers than reformists ever will.
Now is not the time to discard the revolutionary tradition of Connolly, Lenin or Marx but to rediscover it and develop it on the ground. Socialists must join with those millions of others around the world who believe in real change and advancing fundamental change in our society is our greatest contribution to their struggle. We must resolutely counter xenophobic and sectarian tendencies that only act to further divide the working class.
At this time, it is particularly imperative that revolutionary socialists find ways to work together in struggle despite our many differences. Clarity on strategy and the role of institutional struggle are essential to such unity but these are not merely ideological arguments to be won but concepts realised in wider social consciousness through struggle. Winning a foothold in electoral contests is essential in raising the profile and perceptions of the viability for socialist change in the future years.
Read more...
Friday, 8 January 2010
The 2010s: A New Era for Socialism (Part 2)
In the second of three posts going out to mark the new decade, Socialism or Barbarism reviews the political context for struggle facing those seeking a way forward to socialism.
This part attempts to investigate the economic forces which provided a material basis for the failure of socialism to take hold in the working class of imperialist countries. It is essential to understand what Lenin termed the Labour Aristocracy in order to understand the point at which revolutionaries find themselves at the current time.
The Economic Underpinnings of History
Economics (understood in its wide Marxist sense) is the final determinant in historical development, other factors play a significant role but the social ramifications arising from technological change cannot be withstood indefinitely. Wider societal superstructures will become harmonised to a lesser or a greater degree to the underlying new technological base and the social systems that it engenders.
The history of the twentieth century in the first world is one of the failure of socialist ideas. With the exception of those few episodes identified in the first part of this series the question of the class nature of the state in advanced imperialist societies has not been raised to any significant extent. In each case, the struggles were enabled by external stimuli challenging the viability of imperialism in those countries. In Italy, Spain and Hungary this was the direct result of World War I; in Britain and Spain the effects of the war took longer to make themselves felt. In many countries, the impetus for change was channelled across much of western Europe into the mass reformist parties of the second international (parties which make current reformist trends look conservative). The resistance against the Nazis led to massive growth for socialism across Western Europe but this was stymied only gaining expression as the process of decolonisation in both French and Portuguese empires reverberated into the motherlands. But in few cases did the upsurge have a purely economic character – probably closest was the British general strike of 1926.
The failure of Socialism in the first world in the twentieth century reflected a fundamental change in the social relations of production. The relative privilege enjoyed by large layers of the western working class provided the material underpinning for the dominance of the bourgeois political outlook and the maintenance of strong imperial garrisons. Only at the peripheries of this privilege in underclass’s sustained by race or sectarian hatred could socialists gain a hearing.
The dominance of pro-capitalist media and culture has been well documented as early as the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci but it was this relative material privilege that gave it substance. It is this privilege which lies behind fear and hatred of immigrants in many quarters. “They are coming here taking our jobs” is its perfect verbalised expression.
Hope for the Future
It is our contention that it is this relative material privilege which is being undercut by the current economic crisis. The fact that workers in the west enjoy considerably levels of remuneration than those in the east means that it is far more profitable to invest in the east (or global south). Western workers have long moved away from productive to unproductive employment in the service industries. Although there remains a massive productivity gap (not least maintained by unfair conditions of trade and debt repayment but also generated by differential levels of productive investment) between the two virtually all production is now offshore. There is a growing imbalance caused by this fundamental disjuncture in production-consumption. The Western populations are net consumers and the Eastern/Southern populations are net producers. This is being expressed in the ballooning of trade deficits and the possession of massively expanding credit in the third world.
The relationship of the USA and China can be viewed as the simplest expression of this new form of economics. US consumption is facilitated through the purchase of US Treasury bonds by Chinese companies and the Chinese Government. But this system is unsustainable and chronically unstable. The ballooning of credit is progressively undermining the status of the US dollar as global reserve currency (this is the lynchpin of the system as US treasury bonds retain their value only through confidence in the value of the dollar). The ability of the US to print dollars without any marginal impact on their value maintains the system but it remains highly unstable.
The financial crisis represented the possibility that this system could come unstuck but so far the US Treasury has been able to ride out the storm with only minor devaluation of the dollar. The situation has stabilised for now but at the cost of an even greater deficit and debt mountain building.
The threat for other economies exposed to the financial crisis was much more significant; specifically those without the ability to print their own currency to pay off bills. Such is the situation in Ireland and Greece which have been forced to take the medicine and lower the price of labour power to capitalists through significant cut-backs to social provision. The impact of the crisis on the UK was met by a steep devaluation of the pound sterling and mass issuance of sterling bonds and notes but again it is unclear whether this has been sufficient to deal with the situation.
The reality is that the global imbalance in trade must be addressed. There is only one way this can be achieved in the long-term and that is a significant narrowing in the cost of labour power in the imperialist core as opposed to the third world. This means large-scale cutbacks. This course has already been forced onto some smaller states but others have enjoyed the ability to delay their impact. All the same devaluations have acted to reduce the gap.
It is not necessary for the gap to be closed only to narrow sufficiently to allow the wider imbalance of trade and investment to enable balance to be achieved. One problem is that these factors are also diminishing as third world countries gradually catch up through more aggressive national development strategies.
As these trends continue, the potential for working class people in the first world to return to socialist ideas en-masse will arise ever more steadily. This trend can only be augmented by the high levels of alienation from mainstream politics in these countries and by the added pain of losing benefits that were once taken for granted. One has only to look at the tens of thousands of economic competitors living in small rented cages in Hong Kong to realise that western populations will grow more prone to revolutionary ideology as the gap narrows.
The risk is not that revolutionary consciousness will rise; that we can be confident about. The risk is that as conditions deteriorate as a result of globalisation the forces of isolation and xenophobia will grow. The growing demand for the imposition of tariffs on imported goods and applying trade barriers are already apparent. That they have the support of trade unions is disconcerting. Similarly, the issue of immigration is likely to be stirred up by those who seek scapegoats for the failure of the imperialist consumptive model in the era of globalisation. Working class people are particularly open to such reactionary ideologies given their position as direct competitors with immigrant populations and industries in the third world. Educational work against racism and xenophobia has been inadequate among working class communities who have largely been ignored by their own governments with the exception of four-yearly election broadcasts and canvasses.
In such circumstances, the rise of reactionary forces would appear likely. The greatest risk is of linkages developing between conservative forces projecting protectionist economic thinking aligning themselves with lumpen social movements focussed on the politics of difference (with a specific focus on immigrant groups). So far this has been countered by the dominance of internationalist priorities of multinational corporations who seek to erode trade barriers but this situation could change. Such linkages could develop if a radical socialist opposition were to emerge in response to the continued failure of government in the face of these challenges.
The nature of this period is one of extended change. There will at some point be an economic recovery but it is quite clear that it is likely to be jobless one. In all circumstances pressures will continue to mount to push back the hard-won concessions to the working class. Privatisation, cutbacks and tax hikes will be the order of the day for the next period. This has implications for all those who believe in the possibility of achieving reforms through government at this time. The complete failure of such approaches to deliver for populations in the face of these wider global trends will open the way for a blossoming of the Marxist revolutionary tradition once again.
Read more...
This part attempts to investigate the economic forces which provided a material basis for the failure of socialism to take hold in the working class of imperialist countries. It is essential to understand what Lenin termed the Labour Aristocracy in order to understand the point at which revolutionaries find themselves at the current time.
The Economic Underpinnings of History
Economics (understood in its wide Marxist sense) is the final determinant in historical development, other factors play a significant role but the social ramifications arising from technological change cannot be withstood indefinitely. Wider societal superstructures will become harmonised to a lesser or a greater degree to the underlying new technological base and the social systems that it engenders.
The history of the twentieth century in the first world is one of the failure of socialist ideas. With the exception of those few episodes identified in the first part of this series the question of the class nature of the state in advanced imperialist societies has not been raised to any significant extent. In each case, the struggles were enabled by external stimuli challenging the viability of imperialism in those countries. In Italy, Spain and Hungary this was the direct result of World War I; in Britain and Spain the effects of the war took longer to make themselves felt. In many countries, the impetus for change was channelled across much of western Europe into the mass reformist parties of the second international (parties which make current reformist trends look conservative). The resistance against the Nazis led to massive growth for socialism across Western Europe but this was stymied only gaining expression as the process of decolonisation in both French and Portuguese empires reverberated into the motherlands. But in few cases did the upsurge have a purely economic character – probably closest was the British general strike of 1926.
The failure of Socialism in the first world in the twentieth century reflected a fundamental change in the social relations of production. The relative privilege enjoyed by large layers of the western working class provided the material underpinning for the dominance of the bourgeois political outlook and the maintenance of strong imperial garrisons. Only at the peripheries of this privilege in underclass’s sustained by race or sectarian hatred could socialists gain a hearing.
The dominance of pro-capitalist media and culture has been well documented as early as the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci but it was this relative material privilege that gave it substance. It is this privilege which lies behind fear and hatred of immigrants in many quarters. “They are coming here taking our jobs” is its perfect verbalised expression.
Hope for the Future
It is our contention that it is this relative material privilege which is being undercut by the current economic crisis. The fact that workers in the west enjoy considerably levels of remuneration than those in the east means that it is far more profitable to invest in the east (or global south). Western workers have long moved away from productive to unproductive employment in the service industries. Although there remains a massive productivity gap (not least maintained by unfair conditions of trade and debt repayment but also generated by differential levels of productive investment) between the two virtually all production is now offshore. There is a growing imbalance caused by this fundamental disjuncture in production-consumption. The Western populations are net consumers and the Eastern/Southern populations are net producers. This is being expressed in the ballooning of trade deficits and the possession of massively expanding credit in the third world.
The relationship of the USA and China can be viewed as the simplest expression of this new form of economics. US consumption is facilitated through the purchase of US Treasury bonds by Chinese companies and the Chinese Government. But this system is unsustainable and chronically unstable. The ballooning of credit is progressively undermining the status of the US dollar as global reserve currency (this is the lynchpin of the system as US treasury bonds retain their value only through confidence in the value of the dollar). The ability of the US to print dollars without any marginal impact on their value maintains the system but it remains highly unstable.
The financial crisis represented the possibility that this system could come unstuck but so far the US Treasury has been able to ride out the storm with only minor devaluation of the dollar. The situation has stabilised for now but at the cost of an even greater deficit and debt mountain building.
The threat for other economies exposed to the financial crisis was much more significant; specifically those without the ability to print their own currency to pay off bills. Such is the situation in Ireland and Greece which have been forced to take the medicine and lower the price of labour power to capitalists through significant cut-backs to social provision. The impact of the crisis on the UK was met by a steep devaluation of the pound sterling and mass issuance of sterling bonds and notes but again it is unclear whether this has been sufficient to deal with the situation.
The reality is that the global imbalance in trade must be addressed. There is only one way this can be achieved in the long-term and that is a significant narrowing in the cost of labour power in the imperialist core as opposed to the third world. This means large-scale cutbacks. This course has already been forced onto some smaller states but others have enjoyed the ability to delay their impact. All the same devaluations have acted to reduce the gap.
It is not necessary for the gap to be closed only to narrow sufficiently to allow the wider imbalance of trade and investment to enable balance to be achieved. One problem is that these factors are also diminishing as third world countries gradually catch up through more aggressive national development strategies.
As these trends continue, the potential for working class people in the first world to return to socialist ideas en-masse will arise ever more steadily. This trend can only be augmented by the high levels of alienation from mainstream politics in these countries and by the added pain of losing benefits that were once taken for granted. One has only to look at the tens of thousands of economic competitors living in small rented cages in Hong Kong to realise that western populations will grow more prone to revolutionary ideology as the gap narrows.
The risk is not that revolutionary consciousness will rise; that we can be confident about. The risk is that as conditions deteriorate as a result of globalisation the forces of isolation and xenophobia will grow. The growing demand for the imposition of tariffs on imported goods and applying trade barriers are already apparent. That they have the support of trade unions is disconcerting. Similarly, the issue of immigration is likely to be stirred up by those who seek scapegoats for the failure of the imperialist consumptive model in the era of globalisation. Working class people are particularly open to such reactionary ideologies given their position as direct competitors with immigrant populations and industries in the third world. Educational work against racism and xenophobia has been inadequate among working class communities who have largely been ignored by their own governments with the exception of four-yearly election broadcasts and canvasses.
In such circumstances, the rise of reactionary forces would appear likely. The greatest risk is of linkages developing between conservative forces projecting protectionist economic thinking aligning themselves with lumpen social movements focussed on the politics of difference (with a specific focus on immigrant groups). So far this has been countered by the dominance of internationalist priorities of multinational corporations who seek to erode trade barriers but this situation could change. Such linkages could develop if a radical socialist opposition were to emerge in response to the continued failure of government in the face of these challenges.
The nature of this period is one of extended change. There will at some point be an economic recovery but it is quite clear that it is likely to be jobless one. In all circumstances pressures will continue to mount to push back the hard-won concessions to the working class. Privatisation, cutbacks and tax hikes will be the order of the day for the next period. This has implications for all those who believe in the possibility of achieving reforms through government at this time. The complete failure of such approaches to deliver for populations in the face of these wider global trends will open the way for a blossoming of the Marxist revolutionary tradition once again.
Read more...
The 2010s: A New Era for Socialism! (Part 1)
In the first of three posts going out to mark the new decade, Socialism or Barbarism reviews the political context for struggle facing those seeking a way forward to socialism.
This part provides a review of Twentieth Century history through a marxist lens with a perspective of reviewing key events to better understand our present and plan for our future. We consider it imperative for socialists to oppose the 'official' presentation of twentieth century history to ensure a new generation of socialists have an adequate understanding of what happened and why it happened.
Part 1: A Brief Marxist Assessment of the Twentieth Century and the Curve of Capitalist Development
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were proved wrong by history. Their forecasts for imminent revolution made confidently in the peak of 1848 in the famous Communist Manifesto written after that revolutionary upsurge already seemed somewhat jaded in the final decades of their lives. The historical record preserves evidence of their growing awareness of the impact on the revolutionary capacity of the English working-class as a result of the pervasive adoption of the mindset of the English (Imperial) bourgeoisie. Indeed, as early as the mid 1850s both Marx and Engels had revised downwards their expectations and it was for this reason that Marx isolated himself to study the circulation of capital and its social structure and development.
Yet, others preserved a practical commitment towards the possibility of revolution long after that time. The first fully blown revisionist trend began in the advanced working class movement in Germany (attacked by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme) and reached its zenith in the theoretical works of Eduard Bernstein and later with the Austro-Marxists. A central leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Otto Bauer, varied Marx’s analysis of expanded capitalist production to argue against Rosa Luxemburg and to demonstrate that a rising organic composition of capital did not necessarily mean a falling profit rate.
Against this backdrop and the ideological collapse extending to voting for war credits for the inter-imperialist slaughter that was to be World War I, VI Lenin steered a determined and at time isolated course maintaining loyalty to the revolutionary essence of Marxist thinking. The Bolshevik-led revolution, which he was instrumental in effecting, appeared to justify both wings of the Marxist tradition. To those of the old Second International, it represented the desperation of the revolutionary wing forcing them to adopt Louis Blanqui’s methods and ditching the gains of parliamentary democracy. To the newly established Third-international (the Bolshevik’s response to the ideological collapse of mainstream social democracy), it represented the concretisation of the legitimate revolutionary tradition of Engels and Marx against those who had watered it down with hopes of the possibility of change being enacted through bourgeois parliaments.
The early soviet experience represented the flowering of proletarian revolutionary hopes across the world. Subject peoples and the working-class everywhere were reinvigorated in their struggles – the literature and arts of the early 1920s is filled with expressions of hope at this new beginning. Classical music produced by composers in the early Soviet Union exhibited the same modernist hope that permeates the works of art, design and architecture by artists across the world at that time. This was the decisive event of the twentieth century and represented the validation of Lenin’s strategy to break the weakest link in the imperialist chain.
However, the story in the rest of Europe was not so rosy. In the last days of 1918 when the defeat become undeniable in both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, revolutionary forces masses huge demonstrations demanding socialism. The Provisional Bourgeois government with Social Democrat support aided and abetted the murder of both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and thousands of socialists in early 1919 in a successful attempt to drown the revolution in blood. In Italy, mass factory seizures and the advance of worker’s councils in cities like Turin were crushed by reactionary forces backed with the power of the state and church as the first outright fascist dictator Mussolini was ensconced in power. Successful revolutions in Hungary and the independent Soviet State of Bavaria were also crushed by force of arms.
The tide of revolution turned decisively against the workers following the Soviet Union’s defeat in the disastrous invasion of what was to become known as Poland. The reverberations of this defeat primarily generated through the code-breaking successes of the Poles were felt within the Soviet Union. Democracy was an early casualty. Under the pressure of invasion by nineteen imperialist nations the Soviet Union won but at a huge cost. The death of Lenin sealed the fate of the first proletarian state as Josef Stalin consolidated a vice-like grip on politics and eliminated all opposition vigorously at first bureaucratically and in the late 1930s in the gulags.
Before that reaction could gain a hold and as the initial hopes for the growth of revolution throughout Europe faded, the Soviets turned their eyes towards the colonies of the imperialist nations. The first congress of Baku represented the first anti-imperialist impulse to reverberate into the global periphery and awoke revolutionary movements in many countries, most importantly were those in India and China.
By 1921, there was a successful revolution in Mongolia inspired directly by the Russian experience. By 1927 the Chinese Communist Party represented such an existential threat to the national bourgeois forces of the Kuomingtang that they attempted to drown their revolution in blood killing many tens of thousands in the process and initiating the Chinese Civil War. The Indian Communists grew so powerful in the 1920s that British imperialism attempted to cow the rapidly rising population and sought a decolonisation agenda built upon negotiations with ‘reasonable’ nationalists.
Meanwhile in Europe, the third period of Stalinism, the impact of the economic depression of the 1920s, the imposition of unrealistic reparations on Germany and the failure of reform under the Social Democrats let the Nazis seize power in Germany: the second most significant event of the Twentieth Century.
After long years of war, the defeat of Germany albeit coming with great glory marked another low point for the Soviet Union. 30 million citizens were killed and industry brought to the edge of destruction in the effort. Soviet arms were pre-eminent in the defeat of the Nazis: a fact evidenced by the kill and capture ratio across all German forces in the eastern front. The impact of this victory removed many memories of the dreadful mass murders in pre-war years and this strengthened the moral legitimacy of the Stalin regime. The imperialist powers who largely avoided the damage from the war adopted the time-honoured strategy of sitting idly by as the Soviets and Nazis weakened each other. They only shelved their plans for invading the Soviet Union in 1945 at the end of the war as a result of the startling victory of the huge soviet army in the Battle for Berlin and the threat of revolt rising from their own soldiers ranks.
The planned hot war became a factual cold war. The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and the expansion of socialism (from above) into the east of Europe put paid to any hopes of vanquishing socialism outright. The 1947-48 revolutions in Greece and Vietnam were put down in blood while the incipient revolutions in Italy, Spain and France were avoided through military coercion and the self-interest of the Soviets enabling the disarming of the communist parties.
The 1950s were the decade of decolonisation as states around the world used the political space created by the bipolar balance to free themselves from the chains of military or political bondage. But many immediately replaced them with new chains forged from economic post-colonialism. A few declared allegiances to the Soviet bloc and the contention between the West and East took the form of proxy wars in these countries. The list is extensive including Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel/Palestine, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique to name but a few (indeed virtually every country in Africa was affected by such conflicts). Across the third world states both right and left adopted the deficit financed expansionary policies promoted by Keynesian-inspired economists to develop economic bases on the back of import-substitution and import duties.
The lack of socialist democracy in the Soviet Union was compounded by a similar situation developing in China. Cuba had a largely autonomous route to socialism: Castro’s forces rejected the conciliatory approach of the mainstream Communist party there. However, the successful revolutionaries were compelled to adopt more and more top-down approaches to implementing socialism as Soviet methods were increasingly adopted (a course only partially reversed in the latter years of the 1980s in the ‘rectification’ campaign). This lack of democracy reduced the content of socialism and disempowered the workers relative to a large managerial bureaucracy. The resulting disengagement brought poor productivity and low levels of efficiency in production largely directed to quotas set from above.
At the same time, the Soviet Union pursued an economic growth strategy that sought to maintain worker’s states in a dependent relationship and not to diversify production or create a more balanced productive economy. It was primarily this policy which resulted in splits between the Soviet Union and China and Albania as clashing bureaucratic layers sought nationalist agendas at other’s expense.
The attempts by the Soviet bureaucracy to re-engineer their system in the 1980s and introduce more flexibility and address the inefficiencies caused by top-down planning failed and spawned the collapse of the soviet state and most of its client regimes. The Chinese had already pursued a more effective transitional process after the death of Mao when the ‘capitalist-roaders’ seized control of the state and instigated widespread and ever-deepening reforms. Across the third world, states right and left, under the tutelage of the IMF and World Bank now adopted doctrines of right-wing neo-liberalism to deal with the debt burden and inflationary pressures caused by Keynesian economics implemented without price controls. Ideologically, the ‘Thatcherite’ revolution and ‘Reagonomics’ were dominant.
The western powers celebrated their relatively bloodless victory over the first proletarian revolution and pressed the attack using the opportunity to divest themselves of some less than edifying friends e.g. the South African Apartheid regime and Iraq. In Ireland, this was viewed as an opportunity to resolve the ongoing conflict in the north. The dominant USA pushed for the break-up of the Soviet Union and even initiated moves to break up Russia itself through sponsoring proxy wars. The European bourgeois class reacted by pursuing ever-greater unity with the hope of countering US hegemony. The Chinese Communist Party leaders proceeded to channel market forces and foreign direct investment to develop an economic challenge to US imperialism, which would underpin the multi-polar politics that would characterise the twenty-first century.
This brief review of the key events in Twentieth Century history misses one critical factor – the role of the people has been largely excluded. It is assumed as understood that working-class people and working-class parties often led the revolutions in Russia, China and India. But what about the working class in the first world? What were they doing when their imperialist governments were so busy invading and killing abroad? How should we view the 1919 revolutions in Hungary, Germany and Italy and the 1926 General Strike in Britain, the struggle in Spain in the 1930s, the largely socialist resistance movements in Western Europe in the 1940s, 1968 in France and 1974 in Portugal and Spain? The next post in this series will investigate this issue further.
Read more...
This part provides a review of Twentieth Century history through a marxist lens with a perspective of reviewing key events to better understand our present and plan for our future. We consider it imperative for socialists to oppose the 'official' presentation of twentieth century history to ensure a new generation of socialists have an adequate understanding of what happened and why it happened.
Part 1: A Brief Marxist Assessment of the Twentieth Century and the Curve of Capitalist Development
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were proved wrong by history. Their forecasts for imminent revolution made confidently in the peak of 1848 in the famous Communist Manifesto written after that revolutionary upsurge already seemed somewhat jaded in the final decades of their lives. The historical record preserves evidence of their growing awareness of the impact on the revolutionary capacity of the English working-class as a result of the pervasive adoption of the mindset of the English (Imperial) bourgeoisie. Indeed, as early as the mid 1850s both Marx and Engels had revised downwards their expectations and it was for this reason that Marx isolated himself to study the circulation of capital and its social structure and development.
Yet, others preserved a practical commitment towards the possibility of revolution long after that time. The first fully blown revisionist trend began in the advanced working class movement in Germany (attacked by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme) and reached its zenith in the theoretical works of Eduard Bernstein and later with the Austro-Marxists. A central leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Otto Bauer, varied Marx’s analysis of expanded capitalist production to argue against Rosa Luxemburg and to demonstrate that a rising organic composition of capital did not necessarily mean a falling profit rate.
Against this backdrop and the ideological collapse extending to voting for war credits for the inter-imperialist slaughter that was to be World War I, VI Lenin steered a determined and at time isolated course maintaining loyalty to the revolutionary essence of Marxist thinking. The Bolshevik-led revolution, which he was instrumental in effecting, appeared to justify both wings of the Marxist tradition. To those of the old Second International, it represented the desperation of the revolutionary wing forcing them to adopt Louis Blanqui’s methods and ditching the gains of parliamentary democracy. To the newly established Third-international (the Bolshevik’s response to the ideological collapse of mainstream social democracy), it represented the concretisation of the legitimate revolutionary tradition of Engels and Marx against those who had watered it down with hopes of the possibility of change being enacted through bourgeois parliaments.
The early soviet experience represented the flowering of proletarian revolutionary hopes across the world. Subject peoples and the working-class everywhere were reinvigorated in their struggles – the literature and arts of the early 1920s is filled with expressions of hope at this new beginning. Classical music produced by composers in the early Soviet Union exhibited the same modernist hope that permeates the works of art, design and architecture by artists across the world at that time. This was the decisive event of the twentieth century and represented the validation of Lenin’s strategy to break the weakest link in the imperialist chain.
However, the story in the rest of Europe was not so rosy. In the last days of 1918 when the defeat become undeniable in both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, revolutionary forces masses huge demonstrations demanding socialism. The Provisional Bourgeois government with Social Democrat support aided and abetted the murder of both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and thousands of socialists in early 1919 in a successful attempt to drown the revolution in blood. In Italy, mass factory seizures and the advance of worker’s councils in cities like Turin were crushed by reactionary forces backed with the power of the state and church as the first outright fascist dictator Mussolini was ensconced in power. Successful revolutions in Hungary and the independent Soviet State of Bavaria were also crushed by force of arms.
The tide of revolution turned decisively against the workers following the Soviet Union’s defeat in the disastrous invasion of what was to become known as Poland. The reverberations of this defeat primarily generated through the code-breaking successes of the Poles were felt within the Soviet Union. Democracy was an early casualty. Under the pressure of invasion by nineteen imperialist nations the Soviet Union won but at a huge cost. The death of Lenin sealed the fate of the first proletarian state as Josef Stalin consolidated a vice-like grip on politics and eliminated all opposition vigorously at first bureaucratically and in the late 1930s in the gulags.
Before that reaction could gain a hold and as the initial hopes for the growth of revolution throughout Europe faded, the Soviets turned their eyes towards the colonies of the imperialist nations. The first congress of Baku represented the first anti-imperialist impulse to reverberate into the global periphery and awoke revolutionary movements in many countries, most importantly were those in India and China.
By 1921, there was a successful revolution in Mongolia inspired directly by the Russian experience. By 1927 the Chinese Communist Party represented such an existential threat to the national bourgeois forces of the Kuomingtang that they attempted to drown their revolution in blood killing many tens of thousands in the process and initiating the Chinese Civil War. The Indian Communists grew so powerful in the 1920s that British imperialism attempted to cow the rapidly rising population and sought a decolonisation agenda built upon negotiations with ‘reasonable’ nationalists.
Meanwhile in Europe, the third period of Stalinism, the impact of the economic depression of the 1920s, the imposition of unrealistic reparations on Germany and the failure of reform under the Social Democrats let the Nazis seize power in Germany: the second most significant event of the Twentieth Century.
After long years of war, the defeat of Germany albeit coming with great glory marked another low point for the Soviet Union. 30 million citizens were killed and industry brought to the edge of destruction in the effort. Soviet arms were pre-eminent in the defeat of the Nazis: a fact evidenced by the kill and capture ratio across all German forces in the eastern front. The impact of this victory removed many memories of the dreadful mass murders in pre-war years and this strengthened the moral legitimacy of the Stalin regime. The imperialist powers who largely avoided the damage from the war adopted the time-honoured strategy of sitting idly by as the Soviets and Nazis weakened each other. They only shelved their plans for invading the Soviet Union in 1945 at the end of the war as a result of the startling victory of the huge soviet army in the Battle for Berlin and the threat of revolt rising from their own soldiers ranks.
The planned hot war became a factual cold war. The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and the expansion of socialism (from above) into the east of Europe put paid to any hopes of vanquishing socialism outright. The 1947-48 revolutions in Greece and Vietnam were put down in blood while the incipient revolutions in Italy, Spain and France were avoided through military coercion and the self-interest of the Soviets enabling the disarming of the communist parties.
The 1950s were the decade of decolonisation as states around the world used the political space created by the bipolar balance to free themselves from the chains of military or political bondage. But many immediately replaced them with new chains forged from economic post-colonialism. A few declared allegiances to the Soviet bloc and the contention between the West and East took the form of proxy wars in these countries. The list is extensive including Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel/Palestine, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique to name but a few (indeed virtually every country in Africa was affected by such conflicts). Across the third world states both right and left adopted the deficit financed expansionary policies promoted by Keynesian-inspired economists to develop economic bases on the back of import-substitution and import duties.
The lack of socialist democracy in the Soviet Union was compounded by a similar situation developing in China. Cuba had a largely autonomous route to socialism: Castro’s forces rejected the conciliatory approach of the mainstream Communist party there. However, the successful revolutionaries were compelled to adopt more and more top-down approaches to implementing socialism as Soviet methods were increasingly adopted (a course only partially reversed in the latter years of the 1980s in the ‘rectification’ campaign). This lack of democracy reduced the content of socialism and disempowered the workers relative to a large managerial bureaucracy. The resulting disengagement brought poor productivity and low levels of efficiency in production largely directed to quotas set from above.
At the same time, the Soviet Union pursued an economic growth strategy that sought to maintain worker’s states in a dependent relationship and not to diversify production or create a more balanced productive economy. It was primarily this policy which resulted in splits between the Soviet Union and China and Albania as clashing bureaucratic layers sought nationalist agendas at other’s expense.
The attempts by the Soviet bureaucracy to re-engineer their system in the 1980s and introduce more flexibility and address the inefficiencies caused by top-down planning failed and spawned the collapse of the soviet state and most of its client regimes. The Chinese had already pursued a more effective transitional process after the death of Mao when the ‘capitalist-roaders’ seized control of the state and instigated widespread and ever-deepening reforms. Across the third world, states right and left, under the tutelage of the IMF and World Bank now adopted doctrines of right-wing neo-liberalism to deal with the debt burden and inflationary pressures caused by Keynesian economics implemented without price controls. Ideologically, the ‘Thatcherite’ revolution and ‘Reagonomics’ were dominant.
The western powers celebrated their relatively bloodless victory over the first proletarian revolution and pressed the attack using the opportunity to divest themselves of some less than edifying friends e.g. the South African Apartheid regime and Iraq. In Ireland, this was viewed as an opportunity to resolve the ongoing conflict in the north. The dominant USA pushed for the break-up of the Soviet Union and even initiated moves to break up Russia itself through sponsoring proxy wars. The European bourgeois class reacted by pursuing ever-greater unity with the hope of countering US hegemony. The Chinese Communist Party leaders proceeded to channel market forces and foreign direct investment to develop an economic challenge to US imperialism, which would underpin the multi-polar politics that would characterise the twenty-first century.
This brief review of the key events in Twentieth Century history misses one critical factor – the role of the people has been largely excluded. It is assumed as understood that working-class people and working-class parties often led the revolutions in Russia, China and India. But what about the working class in the first world? What were they doing when their imperialist governments were so busy invading and killing abroad? How should we view the 1919 revolutions in Hungary, Germany and Italy and the 1926 General Strike in Britain, the struggle in Spain in the 1930s, the largely socialist resistance movements in Western Europe in the 1940s, 1968 in France and 1974 in Portugal and Spain? The next post in this series will investigate this issue further.
Read more...
Monday, 21 December 2009
Environmental Destruction and the Religious Mind
Socialism or Barbarism has focussed on political or economic subjects to this point but it is difficult to avoid issues of wider concern to the future of humanity not least of which being the range of environmental, existential threats which pose themselves to humanity.
The failure of the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change to agree a set of reductions in CO2 emissions was not unsurprising. Indeed, Hugo Chavez Frias, President of Venezuela indicated that Fidel Castro the former President of Cuba had forecast ahead of time that it would close in ignominy in his final statement to the conference.
The threat of rising CO2 concentrations has been well documented at this stage and despite lacking a comprehensive causal theory the overwhelming evidence would suggest that it risks causing a significant rise in global temperatures with an off-side risk of substantial and possibly run-away overheating developing.
But it is not the only ominous threat passing over the horizon and into clear view. There are a wide range of environmental catastrophes approaching. The massive degradation of the global pure water supplies, the pollution of land and sea, the crisis of overfishing, the long-term detrimental impact of monoculture, the degrading of readily available sources of hydrocarbons, continued deforestation of the Amazon and remaining virgin forests in Siberia and Southeast Asia, desertification, rapid threat of extinction for the unique eco-systems existing along the coral reef systems and the potential long-term pollution security issues posed by the retention of spent nuclear materials. The fact that today every single eco-system in the planet is in retreat should cause everyone to pause and think about the need for change.
These and many more threats hang like a sword of Damocles over the heads not just of humanity but every other species on this planet. As first analysed by Karl Marx himself, capitalism has resulted in a breakdown in the social metabolism of production between town and country. This was expressed in his time by the imperialist competition for cloacae on the islands of XX which brought about the intervention of British imperialists in South America for almost 100 years. He was enthused by the studies of Leibnitz on soil fertility and while that environmental crisis was averted by discoveries of Haber and Bosch in producing Ammonia (producing massive increases in soil productivity but leaving food production dependent on a highly energy intensive process).
Socialists after Marx largely ignored the concerns he raised about production and under Stalin Soviet production places the emphasis on large-scale production processes with little concern about the environmental cost (which led to the environmental disaster which was the shrinking of the Aral Sea and the large scale dumping of nuclear waste in the Baltic Sea). The basic lack of accountability was a critical factor. Of course, the Soviet Union’s pollution was in the interests of production for the people. That under capitalism was in the interests of capital albeit limited to some extent by the need to counter the risk of revolutionary upheavals from the people.
Socialism or Barbarism: An Environmental Truism
What is needed is a fundamental realignment of production and distribution onto a more sustainable path. Irrespective of whether global warming is caused by man-made activities there is a need for production to be more efficient and the world’s limited supply of crude oil to be retained for more useful purposes than simply burning it.
Production needs to be planned, redirected and reduced to enable a better balance to be achieved. Modern consumer society has reified the commodity fetish as a result of advertising directed in many cases by multinational corporations desirous to expand sales through greater volumes of production rather than efficiencies in production.
None of this can happen so long as the market is maintained as a false god determining man’s every action. What is needed is a fundamental realignment of production onto a new footing. Necessarily that will involve a substantial reduction in the aspirations of many for the commodities of the super-rich. Yet for billions more it will involve a substantial improvement in their living conditions.
Yet, capitalist governments are hoping that they can induce the market to resolve the environmental crisis associated with global warming through introducing a market mechanism which will pay companies for energy reduction and efficiencies. In effect, they are attempting to privatise the solution to a problem generated in large part by the wholesale privatisation of production and distribution.
One problem for this approach is that the costs will be substantial yet there is no evidence that governments are willing to invest substantially to redress the carbon intensive mode of production we are currently involved in.
The other problem for this approach is its implications for the third world.
Third World – Shafted Again
The delegates of sub-Saharan Africa and many Latin American states verbalised what many eco-socialists have been thinking for many years. The reality is that a two degree increase in global surface temperatures will result in the death and displacement of hundreds of millions of people in Africa, parts of South America and southeast Asia. The deal which was meant to be agreed at Copenhagen was widely acknowledged even by its authors to not address the cuts necessary even to stay within this bandwidth. Not surprisingly some African countries wanted a tougher set of commitments to maintain the average global temperature increase to within one degree.
Given the amorphous nature of the agreement concluded at Copenhagen it is highly likely that the increase will be substantially more than two degrees. The implications for life in much of Southeast Asia and southern China if the glaciers atop the Himalayas melt are well enough known. In effect, there is a substantial risk that up to two billion people could be directly affected and endangered simply by dint of inadequate water (and as a result rice production).
The impact of such an increase will be substantial in the imperialist countries too. Rising global temperatures will result in creeping desertification spreading across Australia, southwest Europe and the Southwest USA. At the same time, rising temperatures will result in the melting of the planetary ice caps and this will raise sea levels (not to mention the impact on wildlife there).
Yet, the imperialist countries calculate that they have the resources to deal with these threats and they may well do. Third world countries obviously do not. Hugo Chavez’ statement ‘do the rich think that they will be able to move to another planet after they destroy this one’ rings true, however, given the number of positive feedback mechanisms that could be released if global temperatures rise considerably (notably methane depletion in Siberian bog and potential oceanic algal blooms undercutting CO2 absorption).
Environmental Sustainability: A Twenty-first Century Weapon of Imperialism
Despite the nature of the risks posed by these threats, the imperialist countries are keen to use the issue of environmental threat as a weapon in their imperialist positioning relative to each other and the developing world.
Despite its per capita CO2 footprint being less than 30% that of the west, China has been accused of being a global polluter. This is even worse when it’s considered that much commodity production has been moved to China from the now de-industrialised West and that much of that total arises due to the production of commodities which are bought on the strength of continued Chinese purchase of US Treasury bonds.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa production of CO2 per capita is only a fraction of that in the west, yet these countries which are struggling to provide their people with the basic necessities of life are being asked to restrain industrialisation to save Western populations. The offers to pay these countries for remaining underdeveloped are wholly inadequate to address the likely impact of such policies on future generations.
The first world has no right to lecture the third world on their development. If someone had told the English at the beginning of their industrial revolution to curtail smoke production they would be sent to Bedlam – indeed, those few who protested pollution in Britain in the nineteenth century were ignored and undermined.
Third world populations have the right to electricity and the social gains that makes possible. They have the right to adequate food and fresh water. Those are fundamental rights of man. It is a duty on the first world to address those. The reduction in consumption must happen in the first world and if there is a desire to ensure a global reduction then the first world must pay for renewable energy production to be established throughout every village and town in the third world. But does anyone think that will happen?
Religion and Environmental Crisis
The attitudes of western consumers to the pending ecological crises might be considered less than sane. This is undoubtedly true to some extent. In their pursuit of the consumerist dream, many wish to ignore it and just get on with life. Many others feel so alienated and disempowered that they feel that they can do nothing more about it than change their old Argon light bulb to a lower energy alternative.
Yet such is the extent of the threat posed – the very survival of humanity may be at question – that this behaviour is not intelligible without understanding the wider cultural dynamic at play.
The root of this laissez-faire attitude to environmental destruction is the continued strength of religious belief in society. This, itself, reflects the alienation at the heart of modern consumer society. People are not encouraged to contemplate their own potential mortality let alone the potential mortality of the entire planet. Instead they rest in an unconscious contentment that things will remain thus. The idealised viewpoints expounded by a belief in a fixed deity and its interaction with humanity results in a failure to see the dialectical relationship between man and his environment.
Seen like this it was no accident that Karl Marx was the first to contemplate the environmental destructiveness inherent in the modern capitalist productive process just as he was one of the first to recognise the significance of Darwin’s work on Evolution. Someone who’s thought was dialectical would recognise that the very existence of humanity was not a given and that it could be superlated by a higher contradiction.
Western religion today stands as a bulwark to consciousness of the threat of environmental self-destruction. In the past, this same attitude has justified the rapacious exploitation and destruction of habitats and species in the interests of the ‘manifest destiny’ of the bourgeoisie. It was also embellished to justify slavery and the slave trade the profits from which built the major cities of Western Europe and North America.
Read more...
The failure of the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change to agree a set of reductions in CO2 emissions was not unsurprising. Indeed, Hugo Chavez Frias, President of Venezuela indicated that Fidel Castro the former President of Cuba had forecast ahead of time that it would close in ignominy in his final statement to the conference.
The threat of rising CO2 concentrations has been well documented at this stage and despite lacking a comprehensive causal theory the overwhelming evidence would suggest that it risks causing a significant rise in global temperatures with an off-side risk of substantial and possibly run-away overheating developing.
But it is not the only ominous threat passing over the horizon and into clear view. There are a wide range of environmental catastrophes approaching. The massive degradation of the global pure water supplies, the pollution of land and sea, the crisis of overfishing, the long-term detrimental impact of monoculture, the degrading of readily available sources of hydrocarbons, continued deforestation of the Amazon and remaining virgin forests in Siberia and Southeast Asia, desertification, rapid threat of extinction for the unique eco-systems existing along the coral reef systems and the potential long-term pollution security issues posed by the retention of spent nuclear materials. The fact that today every single eco-system in the planet is in retreat should cause everyone to pause and think about the need for change.
These and many more threats hang like a sword of Damocles over the heads not just of humanity but every other species on this planet. As first analysed by Karl Marx himself, capitalism has resulted in a breakdown in the social metabolism of production between town and country. This was expressed in his time by the imperialist competition for cloacae on the islands of XX which brought about the intervention of British imperialists in South America for almost 100 years. He was enthused by the studies of Leibnitz on soil fertility and while that environmental crisis was averted by discoveries of Haber and Bosch in producing Ammonia (producing massive increases in soil productivity but leaving food production dependent on a highly energy intensive process).
Socialists after Marx largely ignored the concerns he raised about production and under Stalin Soviet production places the emphasis on large-scale production processes with little concern about the environmental cost (which led to the environmental disaster which was the shrinking of the Aral Sea and the large scale dumping of nuclear waste in the Baltic Sea). The basic lack of accountability was a critical factor. Of course, the Soviet Union’s pollution was in the interests of production for the people. That under capitalism was in the interests of capital albeit limited to some extent by the need to counter the risk of revolutionary upheavals from the people.
Socialism or Barbarism: An Environmental Truism
What is needed is a fundamental realignment of production and distribution onto a more sustainable path. Irrespective of whether global warming is caused by man-made activities there is a need for production to be more efficient and the world’s limited supply of crude oil to be retained for more useful purposes than simply burning it.
Production needs to be planned, redirected and reduced to enable a better balance to be achieved. Modern consumer society has reified the commodity fetish as a result of advertising directed in many cases by multinational corporations desirous to expand sales through greater volumes of production rather than efficiencies in production.
None of this can happen so long as the market is maintained as a false god determining man’s every action. What is needed is a fundamental realignment of production onto a new footing. Necessarily that will involve a substantial reduction in the aspirations of many for the commodities of the super-rich. Yet for billions more it will involve a substantial improvement in their living conditions.
Yet, capitalist governments are hoping that they can induce the market to resolve the environmental crisis associated with global warming through introducing a market mechanism which will pay companies for energy reduction and efficiencies. In effect, they are attempting to privatise the solution to a problem generated in large part by the wholesale privatisation of production and distribution.
One problem for this approach is that the costs will be substantial yet there is no evidence that governments are willing to invest substantially to redress the carbon intensive mode of production we are currently involved in.
The other problem for this approach is its implications for the third world.
Third World – Shafted Again
The delegates of sub-Saharan Africa and many Latin American states verbalised what many eco-socialists have been thinking for many years. The reality is that a two degree increase in global surface temperatures will result in the death and displacement of hundreds of millions of people in Africa, parts of South America and southeast Asia. The deal which was meant to be agreed at Copenhagen was widely acknowledged even by its authors to not address the cuts necessary even to stay within this bandwidth. Not surprisingly some African countries wanted a tougher set of commitments to maintain the average global temperature increase to within one degree.
Given the amorphous nature of the agreement concluded at Copenhagen it is highly likely that the increase will be substantially more than two degrees. The implications for life in much of Southeast Asia and southern China if the glaciers atop the Himalayas melt are well enough known. In effect, there is a substantial risk that up to two billion people could be directly affected and endangered simply by dint of inadequate water (and as a result rice production).
The impact of such an increase will be substantial in the imperialist countries too. Rising global temperatures will result in creeping desertification spreading across Australia, southwest Europe and the Southwest USA. At the same time, rising temperatures will result in the melting of the planetary ice caps and this will raise sea levels (not to mention the impact on wildlife there).
Yet, the imperialist countries calculate that they have the resources to deal with these threats and they may well do. Third world countries obviously do not. Hugo Chavez’ statement ‘do the rich think that they will be able to move to another planet after they destroy this one’ rings true, however, given the number of positive feedback mechanisms that could be released if global temperatures rise considerably (notably methane depletion in Siberian bog and potential oceanic algal blooms undercutting CO2 absorption).
Environmental Sustainability: A Twenty-first Century Weapon of Imperialism
Despite the nature of the risks posed by these threats, the imperialist countries are keen to use the issue of environmental threat as a weapon in their imperialist positioning relative to each other and the developing world.
Despite its per capita CO2 footprint being less than 30% that of the west, China has been accused of being a global polluter. This is even worse when it’s considered that much commodity production has been moved to China from the now de-industrialised West and that much of that total arises due to the production of commodities which are bought on the strength of continued Chinese purchase of US Treasury bonds.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa production of CO2 per capita is only a fraction of that in the west, yet these countries which are struggling to provide their people with the basic necessities of life are being asked to restrain industrialisation to save Western populations. The offers to pay these countries for remaining underdeveloped are wholly inadequate to address the likely impact of such policies on future generations.
The first world has no right to lecture the third world on their development. If someone had told the English at the beginning of their industrial revolution to curtail smoke production they would be sent to Bedlam – indeed, those few who protested pollution in Britain in the nineteenth century were ignored and undermined.
Third world populations have the right to electricity and the social gains that makes possible. They have the right to adequate food and fresh water. Those are fundamental rights of man. It is a duty on the first world to address those. The reduction in consumption must happen in the first world and if there is a desire to ensure a global reduction then the first world must pay for renewable energy production to be established throughout every village and town in the third world. But does anyone think that will happen?
Religion and Environmental Crisis
The attitudes of western consumers to the pending ecological crises might be considered less than sane. This is undoubtedly true to some extent. In their pursuit of the consumerist dream, many wish to ignore it and just get on with life. Many others feel so alienated and disempowered that they feel that they can do nothing more about it than change their old Argon light bulb to a lower energy alternative.
Yet such is the extent of the threat posed – the very survival of humanity may be at question – that this behaviour is not intelligible without understanding the wider cultural dynamic at play.
The root of this laissez-faire attitude to environmental destruction is the continued strength of religious belief in society. This, itself, reflects the alienation at the heart of modern consumer society. People are not encouraged to contemplate their own potential mortality let alone the potential mortality of the entire planet. Instead they rest in an unconscious contentment that things will remain thus. The idealised viewpoints expounded by a belief in a fixed deity and its interaction with humanity results in a failure to see the dialectical relationship between man and his environment.
Seen like this it was no accident that Karl Marx was the first to contemplate the environmental destructiveness inherent in the modern capitalist productive process just as he was one of the first to recognise the significance of Darwin’s work on Evolution. Someone who’s thought was dialectical would recognise that the very existence of humanity was not a given and that it could be superlated by a higher contradiction.
Western religion today stands as a bulwark to consciousness of the threat of environmental self-destruction. In the past, this same attitude has justified the rapacious exploitation and destruction of habitats and species in the interests of the ‘manifest destiny’ of the bourgeoisie. It was also embellished to justify slavery and the slave trade the profits from which built the major cities of Western Europe and North America.
Read more...
Thursday, 10 December 2009
More Cuts coming North and South!
Yesterday saw the publication of both the British Government's 2009 Pre-Budget Report and the 2010 Budget by the Dublin Government. Both represented attempts by their respective states to respond to the rising economic challenges presenting themselves.The policies announced in both capitals were quite different in approach and this reflected the point in the representative electoral cycle in both states. In Britain, the New Labour government is desperate to avoid a devastating loss in the forthcoming election in May next year and sought to position itself politically vis-a-vis the main opposition Conservative Party. As such, the budget was largely opportunist attacking public sector workers and threatening massive cutbacks across public expenditure on one hand but balancing that with fairly punitive extensions of taxation to well paid workers in Banking Institutions.
The budget announced by the Irish Minister for Finance was in a qualitatively different position. Ireland's inability to control both the quantity and value of its currency has necessitated an immediate response to the economic crisis. The Dublin Government has decided that the only solution is to attack public expenditure in an attempt to reduce working class pay.
These attacks reflect the historic weakness of the labour movement in both countries and the ideological collapse of the parties of the left since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reversing this course of cuts will require a reinvigoration of socialist consciousness and the development of effective structures of class struggle not just in Britain and Ireland but in Europe. The tasks facing revolutionary socialists are manifestly daunting but the critical factor is never the skills and experience of activists but their ideological clarity and favourable objective conditions. Revolutionaries can be confident that the onslaught on worker's conditions heralded by these budgets will radicalise society as hard-won social provisions are rolled-back in the interests of private capital.
The British Budget Reviewed
The main elements of the British Government's Pre-Budget Report included:
- Public Sector borrowing ballooning to £178bn for the current tax year with a further £176 bn borrowing forecast as necessary the next. The net result is that debt to GDP ratio is estimated to rise to 56% by 2013/14 before coming down thereafter
- A one-year 50% pay-roll tax on bonus payments to all financial institution staff ahead of the introduction of a 50% higher tax rate in 2011/12
- A 0.5% increase in Employers National Insurance Contribution payments for all workers earning more than £20,000 a year from April 2011
- The pay freeze on higher paid public servants for 2010/11 to be extended to a generalised 1% inflation ceiling for all public sector workers for the two years after that
- Ring-fencing of funding for Health, Schools and Policing with the bulk of public expenditure cuts (amounting to at least 10% of total current expenditure over the three years from 2011) concentrated on all other provision
- The standard rate of VAT to rise to 17.5% from its one-off reduction to 15% this year.
- A Freeze on all tax allowances and the closure of a few tax loopholes
- A 2.5% increase in the standard pension, 1.5% increases to children's benefit and higher disability allowances.
The British Chancellor clearly has eyes fixed on the next election and included some relatively low-cost commitments e.g. increases to pensions and children's benefit as these will reinforce support in traditional Labour heartlands. The move against the London bonus culture has caused greatest reaction and plays on the populist opposition to bankers but risks potentially threatening the City of London's status as a leading financial centre.
Quite why the Chancellor is willing to potentially sacrifice the 'holy of holies' for the wider British economy is hard to discern. It may be that he has calculated that Labour have no hope of winning the next election and so this will not threaten the British cash cow. The move will certainly mobilise the traditional vote but could well be another sign that Labour has given up the battle for middle England. On the other hand the announcement tonight that France will introduce a similar provision and that German bankers are already attempt to pre-empt a similar announcement in Berlin may reflect a wider trend in terms of global approaches to the banking sector at this time.
All the same the measures put a gloss on the situation ahead of an election which Labour would be happy coming out of losing but able to contest the next one in 2015. All the tough decisions are put off until after the election, none of the major cuts beyond a further £5 billion in 'efficiency gains' are identified. It is, in short, an attempt to avoid the realities of austerity that are around the corner.
Dublin - No Avoiding the Pain
The Budget issued by Brian Lenihan was remarkable for its unerring determination to push the bulk of the cost of the recession onto working people. There is no doubt a sense of fear among some in the political commentariat and establishment in Dublin; so much so indeed that radio station Newstalk FM issued a pro-government pre-budgetary editorial justifying the forthcoming cuts ahead of time.
The main items of note included:
- Slashing Public Sector pay by 5%, 7.5% and 10% on a sliding scale
- The introduction of a 'carbon tax' of €1000 per tonne of carbon produced applied to car and home fuel
- €760 million of cuts to benefits specifically jobseekers allowance rates, children's benefit and maternity benefit
- An increase in family income supplement
- The introduction of new charges and restrictions in medical expenses (including an introductory charge for medical card holders)
- Cuts in student grants and allowances
- Reduction of VAT to 21%
- A one-off levy of €200,000 on all Irish nationals earning more than €1 million a year in income
- A new car scrappage scheme of €1,500 on cars of over ten years old
- Reduction in excise rates on beer, spirits and wine to offset loss in revenue through cross-border shopping
The neo-liberal bias of the Irish government has been exposed in this deeply reactionary and conservative budget.
The overall aim is coherent with a long-term economic development strategy predicated on export-oriented growth - as such, the opportunist criticisms from all opposition parties in Leinster House rings hollow.
The Dublin government have to implement these cuts unless they are move outside the current capitalist paradigm. The cost of borrowing is becoming excessive, increasing taxation drastically on businesses and the super rich will result in catastrophic job losses at a time when the Irish economy is already reeling.
Like the British Government, Dublin faces the challenges of a fiscal regime running on empty. But unlike London, the Irish Government does not have the power to vary interest rates, engage in monetary expansion (i.e. printing money) or engage in predatory devaluation. Brian Lenihan was clear in his commitment to retain the 12.5% corporation tax rate and to leave income tax rates where they are - this was to reassure the market.
So it had to be that they found the cuts through reducing public sector provision, slashing public sector wages and social welfare benefits. But that is not all the story.
Race to the Bottom Economics
The reality is that both Britain and Ireland are now caught in the crosshairs of a global phenomenon which has afflicted many nations for quite some time. The globalisation of investment has resulted in a significant downward pressure on wages. In the past, Western Governments have reacted to this by cutting loose on unsustainable employment and restructuring their economies by moving up the 'value-added chain'.
The problem for this strategy is that as fast as they climb up the ladder it is sinking into the sands below faster. London's dependency on financial services was a mechanism to channel third world wealth back into a largely unproductive economy propping up a standard of living unsustainable without a productive base. Ireland's growth model was to tap US FDI into Europe becoming an off-shore entry point to the European and British markets.
Unfortunately, in both cases, the strategies proved unsustainable. Britain's over-dependence on financial services exposed it to massive levels of default in the context of the global credit crisis the steps taken to prevent a more fatal reoccurence of this threat is likely to prove excessive to footloose bankers and London's status as a world financial centre looks increasingly under threat.
As has been analysed on this site repeatedly, Ireland's strategy came unstuck a few years ago but the state managed to inflate beyond the natural limits through the free availability of low interest credit through the euro and a construction bubble.
In both cases, the governments are keen to reinvigorate their productive bases. Britain's late turn to green energy and high technology sectors is a necessary consequence of the realisation that London's lustre is rapidly losing its brilliance. In both cases, but that of Ireland most pressingly, there is a need to reduce the cost of labour in order to compete with business overseas.
The collapse of the private sector has reduced wage levels considerably but insufficiently. Workers are inspired by tales carried by the pliant media to accept 'voluntary' days off or days without pay.
These recent moves however are to break the back of the public sector to reduce their standard of living and thereby effect more far-reaching reductions across the wider workforce. This is the true meaning of yesterday's Irish budget and in Britain the Tories are clearly relishing their future role in re-enacting Thatcher's victory over labour with a new generation of union leaders.
A Rotten Leadership - Trade Unions and Social Democracy in a state of decay
In ordinary times it might be expected that with such cuts generalised throughout society the left would pose a potentially deadly threat to such an agenda. However today finds the Trade Union and traditional left-wing parties in a state of absolute ideological collapse. They have become conditioned to the ideological priorities of the ruling caste and many have been bought off through positions traditionally recognised by revolutionaries as the 'Aristocracy of Labour'.
The behaviour of ICTU leadership who marched their members up the top of the hill only to march them back down on the back of a one-day strike has been educational for any who retain any illusions in their capacity to act as champions of working people. Yet their public spurning by the Dublin Government and the massive pressure building up within the ranks of the trade union membership will force their hands to take up a more aggressive course in the coming months. It is to be hoped that this failure may occasion grassroots organisers and convenors closer to their membership to join with socialists in the ranks in an assault on those coseted at the top of the trade union bureaucracy. The unions need to become organisations of struggle once more.
An Ideologically Vacuous Social Democracy
Whereas trade union leaderships sharing the corporatist ideology of the political mainstream is not a new thing, the complete absence of even a socially significant revolutionary or even socialist opposition is relatively new to modern politics. In Ireland the only consistent socialists are to be found in the small yet ideologically robust Socialist Party, the vocal yet ill-defined People Before Profit and the largely marginalised and anachronistic Communist Party. The same situation obtains in Britain albeit with a greater number of militants in some of the leading trade unions.
In such a situation taken alongside the defeat suffered by socialists following the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union (both before and after its political collapse) would suggest that the case for a realistic socialist opposition challenging the right-wing agenda of cuts looks bleak.
However, history does not stay standing. Francis Fukayama's End of History may have been proclaimed almost twenty years ago but looks undeniably anachronistic today. The cutbacks will force working people to revisit their adherence to ruling class ideology. Their experience of struggling against the coming cutbacks and the whole political class behind them - whether that's in Britain, the Republic or Northern Ireland - will teach them of their own power and authority. The experience of defeats and victories in struggle will reinvigorate an awakening of the spirit of democratic and socialist ideals.
Socialists today must be more resolute than ever, more steadfast in upholding the lessons which were so hard-won and earned by former generations. Not for nothing has the entire political class, including his alleged descendents in Sinn Féin and Labour, dispatched Connolly of all revolutionary content. Socialists in Ireland must be resolute, determined and strain every nerve in attempting to build a mass working class opposition in these times. Every battle lost today will make it harder tomorrow, every victory will bring closer the day of liberation from the yoke of capital.
Read more...
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Sinn Féin’s Response to the Economic Crisis – A Naive Social Reformism
Sinn Féin recently published its pre-budget submission with some fanfare yesterday. This exercise being the latest attempt by the party’s representatives in Leinster House to appear as a government-in-waiting. In the past, these submissions have been marked by a curious mixture of timidity in relation to offending the market alongside proposals which are so outlandish as to undermine their own credibility – yesterday’s offering was no different.
The current crisis offered the opportunity for the party to re-establish itself as a socialist opposition. Prior to this it had moved back from openly backing the bank bailout after exposure by the equally cynical opportunism of Labour and the loss of some of its few remaining socialists from its ranks. Yet, it is with some disappointment that Socialism or Barbarism has to report this exercise represents nothing but another missed opportunity to present the case for the socialist economic alternative. Worse still, it is grounded on poor economics and will merely reinforce perceptions that the party does not understand the first thing about the subject.
Yet social reformists from labour and within the party have welcomed the announcement prefiguring as they see it a neo-Keynesian alternative to the current Government’s course. This article seeks to dissect the approach, why it is wrong and what is the real socialist alternative a party associated with Connolly should seek to present.
Fianna Fáil and Irish Business
Few would doubt that Fianna Fáil has long been the party of Irish business. From its first beginnings the party was associated with big business and the small farmer. Its early policies were based on a classical import-substitution strategy behind a protectionist trade policy. When these failed, due in large part to the inadequacy of domestic capital, the party eventually suffered an ideological collapse and agreed to pursue an export-oriented growth strategy predicated on open markets and a higher rate of industrialisation. In its early era the party could count on the support of radical bourgeois nationalists whereas in its later departure it could count on the support of the few but influential group of pro-soviet socialists in the Worker’s Party who saw in the country’s industrialisation a speeding of the day of a fully developed proletariat and consequent revolution. At all times, this agenda was amenable to elements of the labour movement’s leadership as the agenda was always to create employment as a means to create growth.
This history should come as no surprise to any student of developmental economics as these were the two strategies adopted by virtually every dependent and neo-colonial society outside the ambit of the socialist system. Ireland was an underdeveloped ex-colony which the national bourgeoisie was seeking to develop so it was only natural that they would pursue these paths. What is perhaps less common is that the same party managed to pursue both at various stages – a fact finding its origins in the exceptional nature of Irish politics. It is essential that any analysis of today’s situation recognises that this is the beginning point for economic strategies in Ireland.
Unlike many other third world economies, Ireland’s adoption of neo-liberalist export-led growth worked as large amounts of FDI were attracted into the country due to a variety of causes not least of which being the predatory low rate of corporation tax.
The history of this approach is of interest. The problem with simply introducing a low corporation tax rate and trying to retain decent social welfare was that it created a pressure on fiscal receipts and so the country placed the burden of taxation onto the workers through higher income taxes. Late in the 1970s this approach collapsed under a tidal wave of anti-tax protests. The burden of taxation was reduced through large scale privatisations and austerity measures and a considerable proportion was transferred to relatively higher rates of indirect forms of tax such as VAT and stamp duty.
The logic of the fiscal environment which underpinned the Celtic Tiger era was growth predicated on low corporation tax levels, low labour costs maintained by low rates of taxation with relatively high rates of indirect taxation. The consequence was low levels of public expenditure and two-tier public services. With the growth of the property bubble, the rates of pay increased beyond the point at which the model worked (largely due to a newly integrated global labour market) and to make matters worse other countries adopted similar predatory corporation tax levels. The model didn’t work any more but the expansion continued for a few years stimulated by positive feed-back loops and a massive expansion in credit.
So now it has all come down and Sinn Fein is advocating a return to a high tax social democratic model unaware that the economic capital base, although significantly expanded, is insufficient to allow the adaption of such an approach. As a matter of fact, the collapse has severely damaged the capital base that the country did build up over the period of the Celtic Tiger and most businesses are suffering from a rapid deleveraging which will not simply re-inflate in the long-term let alone the immediate future. There is no room for manoeuvre.
A Better Form of Capitalism
The first question Sinn Féin and other social reformists should ask themselves is why is it if an alternative exists, an easy option, that does not involve massive structural change to the Irish economy (change necessitating the overthrow of capital itself) why wouldn’t Fianna Fáil pursue it now? Do you think them stupid? Do you think they want to destroy their political base when an easier alternative exists?
They are not stupid and they are not unnecessarily suicidal. The reason Fianna Fáil does not pursue the neo-Keynesian alternative is that it is a pipedream and anybody bar an economic illiterate knows that. The history of the party demonstrates that it has no ideological aversion to that policy and indeed anyone knows that they have few ideological hang-ups of any kind.
Of course the leadership of Sinn Féin themselves know this too. This is not an exercise in putting forward a credible alternative policy but just playing the game like Labour did when it opposed the Bailout outflanking Sinn Féin in the process; it is a piece of political opportunism. Unfortunately, this realisation has not dawned on activists on the left who are allowed to delude themselves that Sinn Féin would somehow implement this policy if they were in government refusing to look at how the same leadership continue their years old policy of rapidly expanding privatisation through PFI/PPPs and call for lower corporation taxes north of the border in order to stimulate FDI-led growth.
The reality is that Fianna Fáil would dearly love to pursue a course which reinvigorates the Irish economy and creates growth. That they of all parties could secure widespread agreement from domestic business to pay more tax if it would work – but it would not. The model is built on export-led growth and this is dominated by multi-national investors such as Dell who have already pulled out with such devastating regional consequences.
If the state could borrow its way out of the recession, then Fianna Fáil would surely adopt this approach as they did back in the 1930s but it is no more reasonable today than it was in the 1950s when that policy collapsed.
Critique of Sinn Féin’s Alternative
The failure to grasp the context for an Irish economic development strategy marks the paper and results in a huge layer of poorly formulated policies. The party hides behind comparisons of public spending to GDP and debt to GDP being lower than European equivalents. But surely they know that GDP is the most inappropriate denominator in a country where the economy is built around foreign direct investment. Instead on measures based on GNP (which allow for repatriated profits) Irish expenditure and debt are outliers. What’s worse is the figure of debt to GDP excludes the value of the Bank Bailout which the party supported.
The party finally appears to have absorbed at least part of the essence of the Keynesian argument but has misunderstood another part. A Keynesian stimulus is based upon borrowing not taxation. Taxation merely results from a recycling of value within the economy. There is no stimulus associated with what is proposed – in fact due to excess of taxation over spending – it is in fact deflationary. The party again has exposed its embarrassing lack of economics to the public. It is only because they are not taken seriously that this has not been more widely exposed.
The party argues that taxing the rich and spending the money on consumption is stimulative. This used to be a Keynesian mainstay but in today's Irish economy the case for it would appear marginal in the extreme given the scale of leveraging in the banking system. The party spokesperson clearly does not realise that money in banks does not simply sit there doing nothing but is used to leverage investment amounting to maybe 25 or 30 times its value. Given the dominance of the domestic construction market in the credit books of the Irish banks it is highly likely that taxing the rich actually reduces overall consumption many times more than what results from paying money to poorer consumers. This is even more likely if you add in the leakage associated with consumption in the modern import-dependent Irish economy in comparison to the very high economic multiplier associated with the construction industry.
A Capital Tax - A Revolutionary Demand?
The proposal of raising a 1% tax on all non-residential and non-agricultural property is perhaps the most radical but naive of all the recommendations. In the hands of a revolutionary working-class movement such a demand should be supported every step of the way but unfortunately Sinn Féin present it largely without understanding its implications. If and when they realise just what it would cause the leadership would run away from it faster than they ditched raising corporation taxes ahead of the last election.
At a time when businesses are struggling to maintain cash-flow (let alone achieve break-even) the application of this tax would probably break the economy. Investment would dry up and operations would close as businessmen calculate that they were losing money on already tight margins. Unemployment would shoot up and capital would fly out of the economy by every means at its disposal. And that’s before the ECB started to raise interest rates as the core EU economies begin to lift a measure which would further increase the impact of this move. It is unlikely that Sinn Fein representatives realise just how radical a 1% property tax would be. For the sakes of comparison perhaps they shoud look at the uproar and threats that have compelled the whole array of EU governments to beat a hasty retreat over proposals to introduce a 0.1% tax on financial transfers. How much worse would the reaction to a 1% wealth tax in a small country like Ireland be?
Let's look at it another way. Businesses operate to make profits above the rate of interest. If they don't make such profits it's better to save the money and get interest paid direct. That's how the market decides to allocate investment. More profitable sectors get greater investment at the expense of less profitable ones. More investment lowers operating costs and increases competition resulting in more production and lower prices. Eventually, the average profit rate lowers with the entry of more suppliers and more supply into the market. It's the essence of the market. To apply a 1% capital tax would make investing in the Irish economy profoundly less attractive to the global market. It would raise the break-even point for businesses to the rate of interest plus one percent. One percent on the margin is a lot at the best of times let alone the worst of times. That's why a 0.1% Tobin tax is so important. It's deployment is not primarily fiscal (the revenue raised will be large but pale into significance alongside its impact on how the economy operates) but economic. It would reshape business around the world. So a 1% property tax would also reshape Irish business but not in the way that Sinn Féin 'economists' might anticipate.
Perhaps revolutionaries in the party would celebrate such a radical turn but the reality is that there’s no way the party would ever implement this measure. It would be sufficient to collapse the capitalist economy in Ireland at this time. It's likely that they just don't know what they're after proposing.
From a revolutionary perspective the party would be better to join the Socialist Party in arguing for a set of immediate, transitional demands setting out actions on behalf of the working class than to make such a proposal which would probably result in more damage than simply nationalising the commanding heights of the economy.
The arguments presented that capital is not mobile and is inflexible stand against economic realities of the last 20 years. The reality is that capital is very mobile that transportation costs are historically low in comparison to the costs of production. Indeed, in the current climate there is less reason than ever for companies to be attached to investments when they are operating at such low capacities (and consequently obtaining significant productivity increases with marginal growth).
Effective Taxation, Spending and Borrowing
Sinn Féin reiterates its focus on eliminating tax breaks again in an attempt to present a populist policy yet forgets about the issue of salary levels in the public service. The reality is that closing tax loopholes is very difficult to do, would have significant unforeseen implications for the wider economy, would result in capital flight and would likely raise very little additional revenue (in terms of what’s required).
Some of the measures proposed are sensible such as hitting the Pension Reserve Fund although it is unclear why the party didn’t go all the way with this. Again, however, it is not clear that taking money from this reserve would actually result in a net stimulus depending where that money is invested at present.
The party's position is more solid when it comes to spending with its suggestions for a useful job retention proposal and the recommendation of harmonising VAT on an all-Ireland basis both of which are good suggestions (and would likely cost a lot less than they anticipate due to unforeseen savings elsewhere in the economy). It is perhaps indicative that the party does not seek to address the differential in the minimum wage and social welfare payments either side of the border as this would likely expose the realities of its stance on these matters in the north. Arguments about the need to maintain the gap between the minimum wage and social welfare fail to understand that it is likely that both are to be reduced proportionately in the onslaught on workers.
In a step forwards from its earlier position and the naive positions of other reformist economists, it recognises that the cost of borrowing will increase due to the interests of international lenders. But this concession undermines the ethos of a package which is meant to act as a stimulus to the economy since funding has to be sought from taxation itself which produces a potentially greater deflation in the economy. It is precisely for this reason that more consistent and better economists from the Keynesian tradition have not conceded that the cost of borrowing must necessarily increase.
The Socialist Alternative and the historic conflict with Reformism
Sinn Féin are desperately trying to find an alternative to today’s free-market capitalism; a fairer capitalism but one which does not involve any radical social change. They are doing so with the same degree of naivety as they approach the question of Irish reunification where they are neither capable of engaging Protestants effectively nor presenting an economic answer to the unavoidable questions presented by the economics of Irish unity.
But they are not alone. Lefts within Labour wish to present the possibility of a better, kinder capitalism – one that does not necessitate a revolutionary overthrow of the state such as suggested by such figures as Marx, Lenin, Connolly and Guevara. We are told continuously that their politics has become dated by history and instead of their revolutionary socialism we must ditch it to join with the followers of Bernstein, Kautsky, MacDonald, Jaures, O'Brien, Ebert and in today's world Tony Blair in seeking a third-way of accommodation with capital. It is, of course, beyond these people who wish to ignore history that the very same arguments were raised by the opponents of Lenin, Luxemburg and Connolly in their lifetimes by reformists in their day. Socialism has always been out of date. It might interest readers to note that the very earliest democrats were assailed by the same means before the necessity for democracy was accepted by all and sundry. The likes of Bismarck and the British argued against the simplicity of the French model which did not take into account the historic particularities of their era.
The reality is that there are no easy answers within capitalism in today’s globalised economy no more than there have ever been. The market dictates the terms of social provision in each country forcing countries to compete in a race to the bottom. This crisis is about achieving a new balance between the net consumer economies in the west and the net producers of the east. Ireland has been caught in the middle of that 'correction' with an export-oriented economy built on FDI unable to compete with new market entrants.
Socialism or Barbarism! - the choice for a new generation
There is no solution to this conundrum within the system of capitalist production. Indeed, due to the operation of the law of value there is no solution outside of it for one country – no more than there was when de Valera gave up on the import-substitution approach. Socialism must be international and it must be based on a democratic conquest of power. It is only by taking control of production and distribution outside the control of the market that a humane solution to this economic impasse, the crisis of the third world and the environmental catastrophes facing humanity is to be found.
Many have given up on this alternative but it is more necessary than ever to consciously reiterate the demands of past generations of socialists. There is no better form of capitalism. You cannot make a cake without cracking the egg.
In the absence of that alternative Ireland’s eventual rebound will be built upon mass emigration of surplus labour, a reduction in the living conditions of Irish workers to a level where domestic capitalists can compete in the global market and widespread privatisation. It doesn’t matter whose in government or whether they call themselves revolutionaries, socialists or communists for that matter, the economics of austerity will be the agenda and those parties in government will find themselves forced to enact those policies by the forces of the global marketplace.
Only by extracting ourselves from this system can we address the problems associated with the global race-to-the-bottom and environmental catastrophe associated with globalised capitalist production. The revolutionary path today is to set out and popularise a series of transitional demands on which workers can begin the task of transforming society.
Read more...
The current crisis offered the opportunity for the party to re-establish itself as a socialist opposition. Prior to this it had moved back from openly backing the bank bailout after exposure by the equally cynical opportunism of Labour and the loss of some of its few remaining socialists from its ranks. Yet, it is with some disappointment that Socialism or Barbarism has to report this exercise represents nothing but another missed opportunity to present the case for the socialist economic alternative. Worse still, it is grounded on poor economics and will merely reinforce perceptions that the party does not understand the first thing about the subject.
Yet social reformists from labour and within the party have welcomed the announcement prefiguring as they see it a neo-Keynesian alternative to the current Government’s course. This article seeks to dissect the approach, why it is wrong and what is the real socialist alternative a party associated with Connolly should seek to present.
Fianna Fáil and Irish Business
Few would doubt that Fianna Fáil has long been the party of Irish business. From its first beginnings the party was associated with big business and the small farmer. Its early policies were based on a classical import-substitution strategy behind a protectionist trade policy. When these failed, due in large part to the inadequacy of domestic capital, the party eventually suffered an ideological collapse and agreed to pursue an export-oriented growth strategy predicated on open markets and a higher rate of industrialisation. In its early era the party could count on the support of radical bourgeois nationalists whereas in its later departure it could count on the support of the few but influential group of pro-soviet socialists in the Worker’s Party who saw in the country’s industrialisation a speeding of the day of a fully developed proletariat and consequent revolution. At all times, this agenda was amenable to elements of the labour movement’s leadership as the agenda was always to create employment as a means to create growth.
This history should come as no surprise to any student of developmental economics as these were the two strategies adopted by virtually every dependent and neo-colonial society outside the ambit of the socialist system. Ireland was an underdeveloped ex-colony which the national bourgeoisie was seeking to develop so it was only natural that they would pursue these paths. What is perhaps less common is that the same party managed to pursue both at various stages – a fact finding its origins in the exceptional nature of Irish politics. It is essential that any analysis of today’s situation recognises that this is the beginning point for economic strategies in Ireland.
Unlike many other third world economies, Ireland’s adoption of neo-liberalist export-led growth worked as large amounts of FDI were attracted into the country due to a variety of causes not least of which being the predatory low rate of corporation tax.
The history of this approach is of interest. The problem with simply introducing a low corporation tax rate and trying to retain decent social welfare was that it created a pressure on fiscal receipts and so the country placed the burden of taxation onto the workers through higher income taxes. Late in the 1970s this approach collapsed under a tidal wave of anti-tax protests. The burden of taxation was reduced through large scale privatisations and austerity measures and a considerable proportion was transferred to relatively higher rates of indirect forms of tax such as VAT and stamp duty.
The logic of the fiscal environment which underpinned the Celtic Tiger era was growth predicated on low corporation tax levels, low labour costs maintained by low rates of taxation with relatively high rates of indirect taxation. The consequence was low levels of public expenditure and two-tier public services. With the growth of the property bubble, the rates of pay increased beyond the point at which the model worked (largely due to a newly integrated global labour market) and to make matters worse other countries adopted similar predatory corporation tax levels. The model didn’t work any more but the expansion continued for a few years stimulated by positive feed-back loops and a massive expansion in credit.
So now it has all come down and Sinn Fein is advocating a return to a high tax social democratic model unaware that the economic capital base, although significantly expanded, is insufficient to allow the adaption of such an approach. As a matter of fact, the collapse has severely damaged the capital base that the country did build up over the period of the Celtic Tiger and most businesses are suffering from a rapid deleveraging which will not simply re-inflate in the long-term let alone the immediate future. There is no room for manoeuvre.
A Better Form of Capitalism
The first question Sinn Féin and other social reformists should ask themselves is why is it if an alternative exists, an easy option, that does not involve massive structural change to the Irish economy (change necessitating the overthrow of capital itself) why wouldn’t Fianna Fáil pursue it now? Do you think them stupid? Do you think they want to destroy their political base when an easier alternative exists?
They are not stupid and they are not unnecessarily suicidal. The reason Fianna Fáil does not pursue the neo-Keynesian alternative is that it is a pipedream and anybody bar an economic illiterate knows that. The history of the party demonstrates that it has no ideological aversion to that policy and indeed anyone knows that they have few ideological hang-ups of any kind.
Of course the leadership of Sinn Féin themselves know this too. This is not an exercise in putting forward a credible alternative policy but just playing the game like Labour did when it opposed the Bailout outflanking Sinn Féin in the process; it is a piece of political opportunism. Unfortunately, this realisation has not dawned on activists on the left who are allowed to delude themselves that Sinn Féin would somehow implement this policy if they were in government refusing to look at how the same leadership continue their years old policy of rapidly expanding privatisation through PFI/PPPs and call for lower corporation taxes north of the border in order to stimulate FDI-led growth.
The reality is that Fianna Fáil would dearly love to pursue a course which reinvigorates the Irish economy and creates growth. That they of all parties could secure widespread agreement from domestic business to pay more tax if it would work – but it would not. The model is built on export-led growth and this is dominated by multi-national investors such as Dell who have already pulled out with such devastating regional consequences.
If the state could borrow its way out of the recession, then Fianna Fáil would surely adopt this approach as they did back in the 1930s but it is no more reasonable today than it was in the 1950s when that policy collapsed.
Critique of Sinn Féin’s Alternative
The failure to grasp the context for an Irish economic development strategy marks the paper and results in a huge layer of poorly formulated policies. The party hides behind comparisons of public spending to GDP and debt to GDP being lower than European equivalents. But surely they know that GDP is the most inappropriate denominator in a country where the economy is built around foreign direct investment. Instead on measures based on GNP (which allow for repatriated profits) Irish expenditure and debt are outliers. What’s worse is the figure of debt to GDP excludes the value of the Bank Bailout which the party supported.
The party finally appears to have absorbed at least part of the essence of the Keynesian argument but has misunderstood another part. A Keynesian stimulus is based upon borrowing not taxation. Taxation merely results from a recycling of value within the economy. There is no stimulus associated with what is proposed – in fact due to excess of taxation over spending – it is in fact deflationary. The party again has exposed its embarrassing lack of economics to the public. It is only because they are not taken seriously that this has not been more widely exposed.
The party argues that taxing the rich and spending the money on consumption is stimulative. This used to be a Keynesian mainstay but in today's Irish economy the case for it would appear marginal in the extreme given the scale of leveraging in the banking system. The party spokesperson clearly does not realise that money in banks does not simply sit there doing nothing but is used to leverage investment amounting to maybe 25 or 30 times its value. Given the dominance of the domestic construction market in the credit books of the Irish banks it is highly likely that taxing the rich actually reduces overall consumption many times more than what results from paying money to poorer consumers. This is even more likely if you add in the leakage associated with consumption in the modern import-dependent Irish economy in comparison to the very high economic multiplier associated with the construction industry.
A Capital Tax - A Revolutionary Demand?
The proposal of raising a 1% tax on all non-residential and non-agricultural property is perhaps the most radical but naive of all the recommendations. In the hands of a revolutionary working-class movement such a demand should be supported every step of the way but unfortunately Sinn Féin present it largely without understanding its implications. If and when they realise just what it would cause the leadership would run away from it faster than they ditched raising corporation taxes ahead of the last election.
At a time when businesses are struggling to maintain cash-flow (let alone achieve break-even) the application of this tax would probably break the economy. Investment would dry up and operations would close as businessmen calculate that they were losing money on already tight margins. Unemployment would shoot up and capital would fly out of the economy by every means at its disposal. And that’s before the ECB started to raise interest rates as the core EU economies begin to lift a measure which would further increase the impact of this move. It is unlikely that Sinn Fein representatives realise just how radical a 1% property tax would be. For the sakes of comparison perhaps they shoud look at the uproar and threats that have compelled the whole array of EU governments to beat a hasty retreat over proposals to introduce a 0.1% tax on financial transfers. How much worse would the reaction to a 1% wealth tax in a small country like Ireland be?
Let's look at it another way. Businesses operate to make profits above the rate of interest. If they don't make such profits it's better to save the money and get interest paid direct. That's how the market decides to allocate investment. More profitable sectors get greater investment at the expense of less profitable ones. More investment lowers operating costs and increases competition resulting in more production and lower prices. Eventually, the average profit rate lowers with the entry of more suppliers and more supply into the market. It's the essence of the market. To apply a 1% capital tax would make investing in the Irish economy profoundly less attractive to the global market. It would raise the break-even point for businesses to the rate of interest plus one percent. One percent on the margin is a lot at the best of times let alone the worst of times. That's why a 0.1% Tobin tax is so important. It's deployment is not primarily fiscal (the revenue raised will be large but pale into significance alongside its impact on how the economy operates) but economic. It would reshape business around the world. So a 1% property tax would also reshape Irish business but not in the way that Sinn Féin 'economists' might anticipate.
Perhaps revolutionaries in the party would celebrate such a radical turn but the reality is that there’s no way the party would ever implement this measure. It would be sufficient to collapse the capitalist economy in Ireland at this time. It's likely that they just don't know what they're after proposing.
From a revolutionary perspective the party would be better to join the Socialist Party in arguing for a set of immediate, transitional demands setting out actions on behalf of the working class than to make such a proposal which would probably result in more damage than simply nationalising the commanding heights of the economy.
The arguments presented that capital is not mobile and is inflexible stand against economic realities of the last 20 years. The reality is that capital is very mobile that transportation costs are historically low in comparison to the costs of production. Indeed, in the current climate there is less reason than ever for companies to be attached to investments when they are operating at such low capacities (and consequently obtaining significant productivity increases with marginal growth).
Effective Taxation, Spending and Borrowing
Sinn Féin reiterates its focus on eliminating tax breaks again in an attempt to present a populist policy yet forgets about the issue of salary levels in the public service. The reality is that closing tax loopholes is very difficult to do, would have significant unforeseen implications for the wider economy, would result in capital flight and would likely raise very little additional revenue (in terms of what’s required).
Some of the measures proposed are sensible such as hitting the Pension Reserve Fund although it is unclear why the party didn’t go all the way with this. Again, however, it is not clear that taking money from this reserve would actually result in a net stimulus depending where that money is invested at present.
The party's position is more solid when it comes to spending with its suggestions for a useful job retention proposal and the recommendation of harmonising VAT on an all-Ireland basis both of which are good suggestions (and would likely cost a lot less than they anticipate due to unforeseen savings elsewhere in the economy). It is perhaps indicative that the party does not seek to address the differential in the minimum wage and social welfare payments either side of the border as this would likely expose the realities of its stance on these matters in the north. Arguments about the need to maintain the gap between the minimum wage and social welfare fail to understand that it is likely that both are to be reduced proportionately in the onslaught on workers.
In a step forwards from its earlier position and the naive positions of other reformist economists, it recognises that the cost of borrowing will increase due to the interests of international lenders. But this concession undermines the ethos of a package which is meant to act as a stimulus to the economy since funding has to be sought from taxation itself which produces a potentially greater deflation in the economy. It is precisely for this reason that more consistent and better economists from the Keynesian tradition have not conceded that the cost of borrowing must necessarily increase.
The Socialist Alternative and the historic conflict with Reformism
Sinn Féin are desperately trying to find an alternative to today’s free-market capitalism; a fairer capitalism but one which does not involve any radical social change. They are doing so with the same degree of naivety as they approach the question of Irish reunification where they are neither capable of engaging Protestants effectively nor presenting an economic answer to the unavoidable questions presented by the economics of Irish unity.
But they are not alone. Lefts within Labour wish to present the possibility of a better, kinder capitalism – one that does not necessitate a revolutionary overthrow of the state such as suggested by such figures as Marx, Lenin, Connolly and Guevara. We are told continuously that their politics has become dated by history and instead of their revolutionary socialism we must ditch it to join with the followers of Bernstein, Kautsky, MacDonald, Jaures, O'Brien, Ebert and in today's world Tony Blair in seeking a third-way of accommodation with capital. It is, of course, beyond these people who wish to ignore history that the very same arguments were raised by the opponents of Lenin, Luxemburg and Connolly in their lifetimes by reformists in their day. Socialism has always been out of date. It might interest readers to note that the very earliest democrats were assailed by the same means before the necessity for democracy was accepted by all and sundry. The likes of Bismarck and the British argued against the simplicity of the French model which did not take into account the historic particularities of their era.
The reality is that there are no easy answers within capitalism in today’s globalised economy no more than there have ever been. The market dictates the terms of social provision in each country forcing countries to compete in a race to the bottom. This crisis is about achieving a new balance between the net consumer economies in the west and the net producers of the east. Ireland has been caught in the middle of that 'correction' with an export-oriented economy built on FDI unable to compete with new market entrants.
Socialism or Barbarism! - the choice for a new generation
There is no solution to this conundrum within the system of capitalist production. Indeed, due to the operation of the law of value there is no solution outside of it for one country – no more than there was when de Valera gave up on the import-substitution approach. Socialism must be international and it must be based on a democratic conquest of power. It is only by taking control of production and distribution outside the control of the market that a humane solution to this economic impasse, the crisis of the third world and the environmental catastrophes facing humanity is to be found.
Many have given up on this alternative but it is more necessary than ever to consciously reiterate the demands of past generations of socialists. There is no better form of capitalism. You cannot make a cake without cracking the egg.
In the absence of that alternative Ireland’s eventual rebound will be built upon mass emigration of surplus labour, a reduction in the living conditions of Irish workers to a level where domestic capitalists can compete in the global market and widespread privatisation. It doesn’t matter whose in government or whether they call themselves revolutionaries, socialists or communists for that matter, the economics of austerity will be the agenda and those parties in government will find themselves forced to enact those policies by the forces of the global marketplace.
Only by extracting ourselves from this system can we address the problems associated with the global race-to-the-bottom and environmental catastrophe associated with globalised capitalist production. The revolutionary path today is to set out and popularise a series of transitional demands on which workers can begin the task of transforming society.
Read more...
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
20 Years of Collapse
With the bourgeois media reliving the now distant glories of 1989 in a patent attempt to undermine any popular sense of an alternative, Socialism or Barbarism has decided to afford a platform to one of the most profound contributors to modern thought, the well-known marxist critical theorist Slavoj Zizek. This is an article written by him on the wider significance of the end of communism.
20 Years of Collapse
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the
miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream
seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house
of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been
inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever
have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was
dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted
with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in
turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as
rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated
anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists
who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now
often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the
Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from
expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality,
it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past.
As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern
European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught
in the vortex of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism
from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large
protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for
weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule
by successors of the Communist party. They denied the very
legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through
democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil
order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the
1956 anti-Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June
2008, Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of
Communist images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the
playing of the Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government
proposed expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include
Communist books, clothing and other items: one could even be
arrested for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist
right to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the
old Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new
problems and challenges are reduced to the repetition of old
struggles, up to the absurd claim (which sometimes arises in
Poland and in Slovenia) that the advocacy of gay rights and legal
abortion is part of a dark Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength
from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many
young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new
anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If
capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our
lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we
do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the
same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of
former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s
really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be
repeated.
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the
image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the
most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in
which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy
minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get
that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism
simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the
disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to
run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While
the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in
their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity,
the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate
themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of
market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks
and corruption.
A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists
allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political
power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal
capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won
over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that
Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always
seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the
explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts
still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself
to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal
capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and
natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?
If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism
in the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a
simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who
didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism.
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the
large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the
freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come
together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of
simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological
indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters
were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology
itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately
be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this
attitude deserves a second chance.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the
Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to
Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose
Freedom.” His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism
included a detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s
Ukraine, where Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the
system — helped enforce collectivization.
What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he
sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist
weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his
memoir was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris
courtroom, Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness
stand to debate the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial
grew from a personal suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole
Stalinist system.
But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was
still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had
the courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s
witch hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the
struggle against Communists and their organizations ... we cannot
and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the
Communists.” His warning to Americans: to fight Stalinism in such
a way was to court the danger of starting to resemble their opponent.
Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the
inequalities of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose
Freedom” that was titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He
devoted himself to finding less exploitative forms of
collectivization and wound up in Bolivia, where he squandered all
his money trying to organize poor farmers. Crushed by this
failure, he withdrew into private life and shot himself in 1966 at
his home in New York.
How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and
disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for
new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the
search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They
will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced
as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the
utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities in London, is the author, most recently, of
“First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”
Read more...
20 Years of Collapse
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the
miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream
seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house
of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been
inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever
have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was
dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted
with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in
turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as
rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated
anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists
who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now
often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the
Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from
expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality,
it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past.
As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern
European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught
in the vortex of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism
from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large
protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for
weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule
by successors of the Communist party. They denied the very
legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through
democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil
order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the
1956 anti-Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June
2008, Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of
Communist images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the
playing of the Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government
proposed expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include
Communist books, clothing and other items: one could even be
arrested for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist
right to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the
old Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new
problems and challenges are reduced to the repetition of old
struggles, up to the absurd claim (which sometimes arises in
Poland and in Slovenia) that the advocacy of gay rights and legal
abortion is part of a dark Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength
from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many
young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new
anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If
capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our
lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we
do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the
same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of
former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s
really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be
repeated.
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the
image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the
most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in
which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy
minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get
that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism
simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the
disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to
run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While
the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in
their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity,
the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate
themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of
market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks
and corruption.
A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists
allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political
power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal
capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won
over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that
Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always
seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the
explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts
still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself
to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal
capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and
natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?
If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism
in the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a
simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who
didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism.
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the
large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the
freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come
together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of
simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological
indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters
were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology
itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately
be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this
attitude deserves a second chance.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the
Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to
Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose
Freedom.” His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism
included a detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s
Ukraine, where Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the
system — helped enforce collectivization.
What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he
sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist
weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his
memoir was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris
courtroom, Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness
stand to debate the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial
grew from a personal suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole
Stalinist system.
But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was
still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had
the courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s
witch hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the
struggle against Communists and their organizations ... we cannot
and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the
Communists.” His warning to Americans: to fight Stalinism in such
a way was to court the danger of starting to resemble their opponent.
Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the
inequalities of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose
Freedom” that was titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He
devoted himself to finding less exploitative forms of
collectivization and wound up in Bolivia, where he squandered all
his money trying to organize poor farmers. Crushed by this
failure, he withdrew into private life and shot himself in 1966 at
his home in New York.
How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and
disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for
new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the
search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They
will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced
as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the
utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities in London, is the author, most recently, of
“First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”
Read more...
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
The Economic Shock Doctrine for Northern Ireland
Citizens across the Republic have been inundated by a deluge of announcements of pay cuts, job losses, tax increases, public sector cutbacks and widespread threats of privatisation. In its attempts to provide a pretext for this assault on its electorate, the Government have raised the spectre of even greater threats on the horizon such as a threatened IMF intervention recently discussed by Mary Harney. It remains to be seen whether the McCarthy report was another such threat or whether it presented a wide array of measures which may eventually be implemented.
Recently, the government have highlighted the unsustainability of borrowing as a proportion of overall spending with figures as varied as repaying borrowing amounting to €2 in every €3 in income tax if the current deficit was to continue. Of course these threats are full of spin.
Firstly, borrowing at the downturn of the industrial cycle as a proportion of total income appears significantly worse at this point because the costs of increased benefits and social expenditure peak precisely when revenues are lowest from lower consumption and corporate tax receipts. A second sleight of hand is involved in extending these ratios forwards indefinitely beyond the current crisis and then projecting them as a fraction of a much reduced income tax stream.
It should be noticed in any case, that it is the neo-liberalist path chosen by the Republic that has resulted in it being identified by the IMF as the worst affected developed economy anywhere in the world. The extent of its current borrowings demonstrates the exposure resulting from a dependence of government receipts on a bubble in the housing sector and the disproportionate size of the speculative financial services sector in the relatively small Irish economy.
From South to North
There is no one in the Republic who has not already felt the sting of job losses, wages cuts or public sector cutbacks associated with the downturn. In working-class areas, anger is palpitable at the fact that, yet again, they will have to carry the can of paying for the inevitable and cyclic collapse at the end of the capitalist industrial cycle. No one is under any illusions but that things will get worse and that the only way to combat this assault is to get active, to get organised and put the pressure on the Government.
Not so the north, where there is a largely a 'phony' recession. While many in border areas have lost their jobs from the collapse of the construction sector in the Republic and property developers are feeling the heat, the bulk of the population in this economy (which is hugely reliant on the public sector) have largely been unscathed. In some border areas, the boom in retail sales have actually generated employment for younger workers. Indeed the deflation in consumer goods and interest rates may have actually resulted in medium income families feeling relatively well off despite seeing the negative impact elsewhere.
So far so good, but things are not looking rosy in the next few years. Despite the recent announcements of a measly 400 US stock exchange jobs (built on the distribution of surplus value largely super-exploited from third world producers) and a pathetic 100 run-of-the-mill low-wage call centre type jobs in Derry the wider economy has already experienced a rise in unemployment of 2.2% since the beginning of the recession. It would appear, however, that the local political parties are completely unaware of the scale of the challenges that are gathering like a perfect storm.
Sammy Wilson's unilateral announcement of a need to fill a £370 million funding gap pointed towards a harsh reality facing him but looks more like providing political cover for the decision to introduce water rates which might provide for £260 million towards that.
Socialism or Barbarism want to take this opportunity to expose the devious lie at the heart of this suggestion. Sammy Wilson is pleading that these decisions have been forced by the recent downturn in the British economy whereas the truth is that the issue of water rates has hung over politicians in the North like a sword of damacles since they all agreed not to introduce them ahead of the last Assembly election.
As evidence of his astounding lack of economic understanding, his suggestion that he might partially meet the shortfall by cutting £150 million out of the capital expenditure budget would only further exacerbate the downturn's impact on the construction sector causing further contraction across the economy through a negative multiplier impact. Such a move would also be incredibly short-sighted as it would miss the opportunity offered to the public sector to award infrastructural contracts at a relatively low-cost period.
The real tsunami approaches
Sammy is finding it difficult just making ends meet within his existing budget but this was set long before the current downturn due to the unchanging Barnett formula and the 3-year budgeting system adopted in the Comprehensive Spending Review. But the real problems are just starting for him and his fellow Ministers.
One sign of their scale is the growing number of reports coming out of think-tanks making quite outlandish suggestions to enable the UK to meet its funding gap (the British had a particular dependence on a bloated Financial Services sector which now has collapsed leaving them in terrible difficulty). Yesterday, the CBI proposed €120 billion extra spending cuts and the privatisation of every aspect of government up to and including a significant proportion of the defence 'services'.
When asked how far government should be privatised, the CEO of Interserve was quoted by the Financial Times as saying:
Clearly, a massive privatisation tsunami is heading its way to all the local politicians irrespective of any paper commitment to socialism they may retain.
Will NI's local politicians push up the retirement age?
Today, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research recommended four measures to deal with the UK shortfall. The first was to raise the pension age to 70 and getting rid of income support for those aged over 60. Other suggestions were to freeze public sector pay for five years, cut 120,000 public sector jobs a year for the next five years, increase the basic income tax rate by 7% and applying VAT to everything barring food and children's clothing. The NIESR noted that taking even two of these latter steps in tandem would be insufficient to meet the shortfall!
Now some may attribute these comments to a British equivalent of the pretext setting statements provided by the Irish Government listed above but that would be to miss a very significant difference. These statements are not by a government or its civil service who are setting up 'straw men' to provide cover for harsh but smaller cutbacks, rather these are the statements of a conservative party on the brink of power. These statements are to gear the people up for what is coming and to secure a mandate to face down opposition on the other side of an election.
The Tory shadow chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has already publicly faced up to being the most unpopular man in Britain in six months time. All this is setting the stage for a scale of cutback that have not been experienced since the first half of the 1920s when the Geddes report led to cutbacks of up to 25% across the public sector.
If anything the scale of the cuts being identified by the Conservative party are considerable below those identified as necessary by right-wing economic think-tanks. The conservatives have conceded the need to raise the retirement age to 66 but have not envisaged anything more severe. Instead of the £120 billion of cuts recommended by the CBI, the Conservatives are considering £7 billion. Obviously, these figures will inflate if, and when, the Conservatives finally 'get sight' of how serious the economic crisis is that is facing them (no doubt immediately after a successful general election).
In any case, the impact of these cuts on the Northern Ireland 'economy' if that is what you can call it will be apocalytic. It is known that in addition to the direct employment in the public sector the economic impact of public spending percolates through the economy supporting many more jobs in the local service sector. In total it is estimated around 70% of all jobs in the north depend on public sector expenditure either directly or indirectly.
As such, a widespread collapse in public sector spending such as is being planned in Westminster will have a dramatic adverse impact on the Northern Ireland economy. The conservative party have already begun to sell this as a positive thing (bringing balance to an unsustainable economy) and this has been echoed by the First Minister himself. Parallel to that funding for the community and voluntary sector has already began to dry up and the size of the subvention for the agricultural sector is likely to collapse on the back of any global trade deal.
All of this means more privatisation, more closures, more cutbacks and much more deprivation. Of course there will be difficulty in getting local politicians to agree just where the axe falls first and the experience of decisions such as the agreement on the safeguarding of the rates cap (at the expense of lower-income families), the decision to adopt a planning policy poorly attuned to the needs of rural communities and the protection of funding for private sector profits through Invest NI is not encouraging. We can be sure that the axe will continue to fall disproportionately on working class communities, irrespective of their communal identity.
Turning a blind eye to these realities is already becoming ever more difficult for those on the left it will become impossible as these cutbacks and neo-liberalist shock therapy 'house-trains' the local politicians. The only way to counter these cuts is to organise working class resistance to these neoliberal policies across communal lines and against a Stormont Executive built on sectarian pillars.
Read more...
Recently, the government have highlighted the unsustainability of borrowing as a proportion of overall spending with figures as varied as repaying borrowing amounting to €2 in every €3 in income tax if the current deficit was to continue. Of course these threats are full of spin.
Firstly, borrowing at the downturn of the industrial cycle as a proportion of total income appears significantly worse at this point because the costs of increased benefits and social expenditure peak precisely when revenues are lowest from lower consumption and corporate tax receipts. A second sleight of hand is involved in extending these ratios forwards indefinitely beyond the current crisis and then projecting them as a fraction of a much reduced income tax stream.
It should be noticed in any case, that it is the neo-liberalist path chosen by the Republic that has resulted in it being identified by the IMF as the worst affected developed economy anywhere in the world. The extent of its current borrowings demonstrates the exposure resulting from a dependence of government receipts on a bubble in the housing sector and the disproportionate size of the speculative financial services sector in the relatively small Irish economy.
From South to North
There is no one in the Republic who has not already felt the sting of job losses, wages cuts or public sector cutbacks associated with the downturn. In working-class areas, anger is palpitable at the fact that, yet again, they will have to carry the can of paying for the inevitable and cyclic collapse at the end of the capitalist industrial cycle. No one is under any illusions but that things will get worse and that the only way to combat this assault is to get active, to get organised and put the pressure on the Government.
Not so the north, where there is a largely a 'phony' recession. While many in border areas have lost their jobs from the collapse of the construction sector in the Republic and property developers are feeling the heat, the bulk of the population in this economy (which is hugely reliant on the public sector) have largely been unscathed. In some border areas, the boom in retail sales have actually generated employment for younger workers. Indeed the deflation in consumer goods and interest rates may have actually resulted in medium income families feeling relatively well off despite seeing the negative impact elsewhere.
So far so good, but things are not looking rosy in the next few years. Despite the recent announcements of a measly 400 US stock exchange jobs (built on the distribution of surplus value largely super-exploited from third world producers) and a pathetic 100 run-of-the-mill low-wage call centre type jobs in Derry the wider economy has already experienced a rise in unemployment of 2.2% since the beginning of the recession. It would appear, however, that the local political parties are completely unaware of the scale of the challenges that are gathering like a perfect storm.
Sammy Wilson's unilateral announcement of a need to fill a £370 million funding gap pointed towards a harsh reality facing him but looks more like providing political cover for the decision to introduce water rates which might provide for £260 million towards that.
Socialism or Barbarism want to take this opportunity to expose the devious lie at the heart of this suggestion. Sammy Wilson is pleading that these decisions have been forced by the recent downturn in the British economy whereas the truth is that the issue of water rates has hung over politicians in the North like a sword of damacles since they all agreed not to introduce them ahead of the last Assembly election.
As evidence of his astounding lack of economic understanding, his suggestion that he might partially meet the shortfall by cutting £150 million out of the capital expenditure budget would only further exacerbate the downturn's impact on the construction sector causing further contraction across the economy through a negative multiplier impact. Such a move would also be incredibly short-sighted as it would miss the opportunity offered to the public sector to award infrastructural contracts at a relatively low-cost period.
The real tsunami approaches
Sammy is finding it difficult just making ends meet within his existing budget but this was set long before the current downturn due to the unchanging Barnett formula and the 3-year budgeting system adopted in the Comprehensive Spending Review. But the real problems are just starting for him and his fellow Ministers.
One sign of their scale is the growing number of reports coming out of think-tanks making quite outlandish suggestions to enable the UK to meet its funding gap (the British had a particular dependence on a bloated Financial Services sector which now has collapsed leaving them in terrible difficulty). Yesterday, the CBI proposed €120 billion extra spending cuts and the privatisation of every aspect of government up to and including a significant proportion of the defence 'services'.
When asked how far government should be privatised, the CEO of Interserve was quoted by the Financial Times as saying:
"You don't want private armies, no, but...if you look at the American model of military logistics support it is, you know, contractualised virtually up to the finger on the trigger."
Clearly, a massive privatisation tsunami is heading its way to all the local politicians irrespective of any paper commitment to socialism they may retain.
Will NI's local politicians push up the retirement age?
Today, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research recommended four measures to deal with the UK shortfall. The first was to raise the pension age to 70 and getting rid of income support for those aged over 60. Other suggestions were to freeze public sector pay for five years, cut 120,000 public sector jobs a year for the next five years, increase the basic income tax rate by 7% and applying VAT to everything barring food and children's clothing. The NIESR noted that taking even two of these latter steps in tandem would be insufficient to meet the shortfall!
Now some may attribute these comments to a British equivalent of the pretext setting statements provided by the Irish Government listed above but that would be to miss a very significant difference. These statements are not by a government or its civil service who are setting up 'straw men' to provide cover for harsh but smaller cutbacks, rather these are the statements of a conservative party on the brink of power. These statements are to gear the people up for what is coming and to secure a mandate to face down opposition on the other side of an election.
The Tory shadow chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has already publicly faced up to being the most unpopular man in Britain in six months time. All this is setting the stage for a scale of cutback that have not been experienced since the first half of the 1920s when the Geddes report led to cutbacks of up to 25% across the public sector.
If anything the scale of the cuts being identified by the Conservative party are considerable below those identified as necessary by right-wing economic think-tanks. The conservatives have conceded the need to raise the retirement age to 66 but have not envisaged anything more severe. Instead of the £120 billion of cuts recommended by the CBI, the Conservatives are considering £7 billion. Obviously, these figures will inflate if, and when, the Conservatives finally 'get sight' of how serious the economic crisis is that is facing them (no doubt immediately after a successful general election).
In any case, the impact of these cuts on the Northern Ireland 'economy' if that is what you can call it will be apocalytic. It is known that in addition to the direct employment in the public sector the economic impact of public spending percolates through the economy supporting many more jobs in the local service sector. In total it is estimated around 70% of all jobs in the north depend on public sector expenditure either directly or indirectly.
As such, a widespread collapse in public sector spending such as is being planned in Westminster will have a dramatic adverse impact on the Northern Ireland economy. The conservative party have already begun to sell this as a positive thing (bringing balance to an unsustainable economy) and this has been echoed by the First Minister himself. Parallel to that funding for the community and voluntary sector has already began to dry up and the size of the subvention for the agricultural sector is likely to collapse on the back of any global trade deal.
All of this means more privatisation, more closures, more cutbacks and much more deprivation. Of course there will be difficulty in getting local politicians to agree just where the axe falls first and the experience of decisions such as the agreement on the safeguarding of the rates cap (at the expense of lower-income families), the decision to adopt a planning policy poorly attuned to the needs of rural communities and the protection of funding for private sector profits through Invest NI is not encouraging. We can be sure that the axe will continue to fall disproportionately on working class communities, irrespective of their communal identity.
Turning a blind eye to these realities is already becoming ever more difficult for those on the left it will become impossible as these cutbacks and neo-liberalist shock therapy 'house-trains' the local politicians. The only way to counter these cuts is to organise working class resistance to these neoliberal policies across communal lines and against a Stormont Executive built on sectarian pillars.
Read more...
Friday, 16 October 2009
The Decline of Militant Irish Republicanism
Ideologies are not issued self-developed and completed into the aether of the idea rather they are generated by the development of specific historic processes in the real world. Ideas are not primary but secondary reflections back into reality through the mediation of the mind. Material reality is primary in the evolution of thought just as it is primary in the wider process of the evolution of the species.
It was primarily this supercession of the German Ideology which underpinned Marxism as a Critique of Philosophy. For Marxists, like Hegelians, the Kantian duality of mind and reality is bridged through Praxis or activity on the part of the knower but for Marxists this activity itself is conditioned by reality.
For Marxists, therefore, the Republican ideals which flowered in France and England in the late 18th Centuries only developed and found wider social resonance because society was not only sufficiently developed to generate them but that it was sufficiently developed to give them a social force. The ideals of equality, fraternity and liberty were the idealistic outworkings of the demand of the rising business class to overturn the power of the traditional aristocratic ruling class and the domination of the church.
If there is a crisis in Irish Republicanism then it reflects changing material realities. This post seeks to identify the causes of this historic decline.
The first thing to note is that there is an undeniable decline. The largest militant republican movement, Sinn Féin, has largely ditched what has been understood as traditional republican values. They participate and work in a system based on the principle of consent (i.e. consent of a majority in the north-eastern six counties), they act as Ministers in a partitionist parliament owing its sovereignty to the British crown and they promote support for a police service which enforces British laws in Ireland. All this when British troops continue to be based in the north.
Now many Republicans will say that this is a strategic compromise akin to De Valera taking the oath to the British King only to establish the Republic and that it may be to them. But De Valera's actions were considered treacherous by traditional comtemporary Republicans just as they are by today's equivalents. Moreover, De Valera wasn't long from swearing that oath to the point of hanging IRA men during the emergency.
Today's Sinn Féin operates in a similar system and with a similar strategy to the SDLP of the past. Gone is its radical socialism instead it has a soft social reformism, which if it has meaning at all in its contact with reality, is largely ineffectual and mostly symbolic.
But there are others within Republicanism who have not gone so far. Traditionally the second biggest group would have been the Irish Republican Socialist Party which has groups in some towns in the North and a scattering of activists in Dublin and other cities in the Republic. The recent announcement that the INLA was to disband and engage with General de Chastelain's decommissioning body was unexpected but reflected their analysis that the war was over. The argument justifying this decision to go further than their old cessation is the need to engage in wider left-wing politics through groups such as the People Before Profit Alliance.
This should be seen for what it is: further evidence of the historic decline of militant republicanism.
Traditional Militant Republicanism
The main groups remaining outside this trend are the inappropriately named 'dissident' republicans. These groups really should be termed traditional republicans given their consistency with republican ideological beliefs going back to the 1910s and 1920s. They believe in the achievement of Irish unity through force of arms and reject any form of participation in governmental structures predicated on partition or the principle of consent.
These groups are enjoying something of a renaissance of late. Their attacks on crown-forces and bomb attacks are growing in regularity and they are clearly gaining a hearing with some in grassroots republican communities. The causes of this must be sought in the chronic failure of the mainstream 'republican' political agenda as evidenced by the one-sided government in Stormont and the collapse of a cross-border economy enormously reliant on the construction sector.
In the absence of a strong socialist alternative, traditional republican militants are successfully projecting themselves as the real alternative to Stormont and they are finding it somewhat easier to recruit young nationalists.
The problem for these groups is that they are largely a reaction to the political development that has occurred in the last 20 years in Northern Ireland; the times have changed. Today, for the first time in the history of the northern state, most Nationalists recognise its legitimacy and accept the principle of consent. While many Republicans may have viewed this ideological rubicon as a realpolitick concession to devour the northern state from the inside-out, the reality is that the wider population have now normatized the concept. This will not be easily undone.
There is, thus, a huge barrier standing in the way of the traditional republican militants. They cannot succeed and it is clear that most of them realise this fact but view their resistance as an existentialist refusal to the system. Yet this is always an inadequate justification for revolutionary action. Che did not go to Bolivia considering his actions to have no hope - he believed he would succeed but realised the risk. Connolly went out in 1916 hoping for the best but conscious that it was madness given the odds of defeating the British. Indeed, the secret history of militant republicanism has often been just how close to victory risings were if they only realised at the time the weakness of the British. But there are no such hopes for traditional republican militant struggle.
The Changing Material Conditions
Irish Republicanism was initially a bourgeois nationalist movement; hence, Griffith's attachment to the concept of a monarchy and an Irish empire. The situation in Ireland was complicated by the colonial nature of its relation to Britain. Nationalism, which in the imperialist centres of mainland Europe demonstrated its reactionary nature in the revolutions of 1848, remained objectively progressive in Ireland a situation reinforced by the politically-engineered Great Hunger of 1847/48.
With the coming of the new Free State in 1923, Irish nationalism faced a number of challenges. Not least was the growing demands of the new, progressive, socialist working-class politics developed by the likes of Connolly and Larkin and finding military expression in the ICA. But equally, it was presented with the realities of partial liberation. The Civil War confirmed the dominance of the conservative trend within Irish nationalism south of the border yet north of the border the situation remained complex.
The Irish Catholics living north of the border were oppressed alongside working-class Protestants - both groups were largely denied the vote. Nationalism reflected the legitimate demands of Irish Catholics (in particular its middle-class who felt themselves particularly disadvantaged) but it risked alienating a Protestant working-class who were enticed to support unionism through such hegemonic structures as the Orange Order and the panoply of advantageous arrangements established under the 'Protestant state for a Protestant people'. The Belfast Rates Relief Strike of 1932 held out the opportunity for unity of action for the first time and it is highly instructive how it was put down by the selective targetting of Catholic strikers for murder by the forces of the state.
The growth in a youthful generation educated on the back of the 1948 Education Reform, generated the civil rights campaigns which had the potential to bridge the gap between nationally oppressed Catholics and economically exploited Protestants. But it was not to be - the reaction of the state rekindled militant republicanism - and broke down the ability to develop a more powerful cross-community resistance.
Structural reforms to take off the worst edges of discrimination were implemented in the period of direct rule and the general standard of living rose as the north was more fully integrated into the global economy as an appendage to imperial Britain. The rise of the Celtic Tiger in the historic bargain to big business offered by the Dublin Government(of low taxes in return for employment) resulted in a reduction in the poverty of the Republic and a further consequential erosion in support for militant republicanism.
In these conditions and against the backdrop of a falling level of support for the faltering military campaign of the IRA, the leadership had to look for a way out. They chose a negotiated process which they felt held out the prospect of victory down the road. That this has not transpired or likely to transpire may seem obvious to the casual observer today but it clearly was sufficiently obscure at early stages to hold the entire Republican movement together through the bulk of the process itself.
Having got to this stage, the material conditions for the success of militant republicanism no longer exist. However, the growth in unemployment and the perception that discrimination continues in the north through more subtle means than before there is a potential for the tradition to attract young recruits. But with no viable strategy it is hard to see where it can go.
From this viewpoint, the move by the IRSM to dismantle its military operation is sensible. They perceive the need to move forwards. They realise that holding a military structure or weaponry will only prejudice that opportunity and warp their own internal democracy. Their voice will be of importance to the left-wing across Ireland although it is imperative for them to resolve their own position in relation to northern Protestants.
The Need for the Left to Engage with Protestants
The greatest failure of Republicanism has been its inability to effectively engage and transcend the divisions 'carefully fostered' with northern Protestants. The revolutionary opportunity heralded by the cross-sectional 1798 Rebellion was never realised in the period after it. Again and again, when individual Republicans have engaged with Protestants they have ditched their own nationalism, Sinn Féin the Worker's Party being the classic example of this trajectory. Republicans should consider just why it is that some of the most capable republicans, some of its most consistent socialists, have moved away from Nationalism after an engagement with Protestants as Unionists as opposed to simply Protestants as other.
Irish nationalism may unify northern Catholic communities against the British but this is insufficient to achieve Irish unity in a context where the principle of consent is embedded in the constitutional standing of the north. The lack of viability of any military strategy to overthrow that constitutional situation should make any traditional Republican militant reconsider what they're about. However, we need at this point to reiterate our opinion that working with unionists as parties at governmental level is even less likely to achieve Irish unity as it ends up reinforcing unionist hegemony in their own communities.
The conclusions from this analysis are that the tradition of Irish Republicanism has often collapsed to the tradition of Irish Nationalism and that Republicans have failed to find common ground with Protestants as a result of their prioritisation of nationalism over socialism.
The risks of Nationalism
Irish Nationalism is often simply collapsed to anti-imperialism in a broad approach akin to that adapted in colonial revolutions elsewhere in the world but the situation in no two contexts is exactly the same. Ireland unlike most colonial states is partitioned and Ireland has a large non-national minority consisting a majority in one of those states. It cannot simply be concluded, therefore, that the same strategic orientation is correct in all cases. That is to fetishise such a strategic orientation. Whilst anti-imperialism is always justified, nationalism is not.
In the concrete case of Ireland, we have to ask how is it advancing anti-imperialism best by retaining nationalism if all that does in reality is to further reinforce the union?
Furthermore, anti-imperialism is meaningful precisely because it is a necessary condition for the self-emancipation of the working class or socialism. As Connolly said merely raising the Green flag is a worthless achievement in and of itself.
Yet, in reifying nationalism (and thereby cementing the union), we are undercutting its logical justification from a Socialist Republican perspective.
The only possible arguments that can be presented to this is that unity cannot be achieved through socialism alone or is required as its pre-requisite. The first argument is a preposition and must be tested. Socialism or Barbarism argues that it is precisely this preposition that must be tested through struggle. It is akin to arguing against socialism on the basis that socialism is not possible. Such specious telelogical arguments are insufficient to justify a course of 'do nothing' particularly when their proponents are often 'doing something' which is demonstrably setting back the cause of socialism.
The second argument is more substantial but we believe that it is precisely this understanding, that national self-determination is a condition for the full realisation of socialism which gives content to the national liberation struggle (if it deserves to have a content at all). So in fact, it is only through actively pursuing socialist demands which fail to be delivered by a London-government that unity can ever gain traction in unionist communities. To the extent that such unity is necessary, that is the extent to which that unity is progressive.
The historic failure of the Republican tradition to engage northern Protestants has been its Achille's heel for 200 years. Nationalism acts as a barrier to unification and acts of traditional republican militancy will only further undermine the ideological validity of republicanism not just with Protestants but with a growing section of northern Catholics. Socialism or Barbarism calls for revolutionary socialists to work together to develop a new vehicle capable of challenging the neo-liberal consensus and finally resolving the nationalist-socialist dialectic.
Read more...
It was primarily this supercession of the German Ideology which underpinned Marxism as a Critique of Philosophy. For Marxists, like Hegelians, the Kantian duality of mind and reality is bridged through Praxis or activity on the part of the knower but for Marxists this activity itself is conditioned by reality.
For Marxists, therefore, the Republican ideals which flowered in France and England in the late 18th Centuries only developed and found wider social resonance because society was not only sufficiently developed to generate them but that it was sufficiently developed to give them a social force. The ideals of equality, fraternity and liberty were the idealistic outworkings of the demand of the rising business class to overturn the power of the traditional aristocratic ruling class and the domination of the church.
If there is a crisis in Irish Republicanism then it reflects changing material realities. This post seeks to identify the causes of this historic decline.
The first thing to note is that there is an undeniable decline. The largest militant republican movement, Sinn Féin, has largely ditched what has been understood as traditional republican values. They participate and work in a system based on the principle of consent (i.e. consent of a majority in the north-eastern six counties), they act as Ministers in a partitionist parliament owing its sovereignty to the British crown and they promote support for a police service which enforces British laws in Ireland. All this when British troops continue to be based in the north.
Now many Republicans will say that this is a strategic compromise akin to De Valera taking the oath to the British King only to establish the Republic and that it may be to them. But De Valera's actions were considered treacherous by traditional comtemporary Republicans just as they are by today's equivalents. Moreover, De Valera wasn't long from swearing that oath to the point of hanging IRA men during the emergency.
Today's Sinn Féin operates in a similar system and with a similar strategy to the SDLP of the past. Gone is its radical socialism instead it has a soft social reformism, which if it has meaning at all in its contact with reality, is largely ineffectual and mostly symbolic.
But there are others within Republicanism who have not gone so far. Traditionally the second biggest group would have been the Irish Republican Socialist Party which has groups in some towns in the North and a scattering of activists in Dublin and other cities in the Republic. The recent announcement that the INLA was to disband and engage with General de Chastelain's decommissioning body was unexpected but reflected their analysis that the war was over. The argument justifying this decision to go further than their old cessation is the need to engage in wider left-wing politics through groups such as the People Before Profit Alliance.
This should be seen for what it is: further evidence of the historic decline of militant republicanism.
Traditional Militant Republicanism
The main groups remaining outside this trend are the inappropriately named 'dissident' republicans. These groups really should be termed traditional republicans given their consistency with republican ideological beliefs going back to the 1910s and 1920s. They believe in the achievement of Irish unity through force of arms and reject any form of participation in governmental structures predicated on partition or the principle of consent.
These groups are enjoying something of a renaissance of late. Their attacks on crown-forces and bomb attacks are growing in regularity and they are clearly gaining a hearing with some in grassroots republican communities. The causes of this must be sought in the chronic failure of the mainstream 'republican' political agenda as evidenced by the one-sided government in Stormont and the collapse of a cross-border economy enormously reliant on the construction sector.
In the absence of a strong socialist alternative, traditional republican militants are successfully projecting themselves as the real alternative to Stormont and they are finding it somewhat easier to recruit young nationalists.
The problem for these groups is that they are largely a reaction to the political development that has occurred in the last 20 years in Northern Ireland; the times have changed. Today, for the first time in the history of the northern state, most Nationalists recognise its legitimacy and accept the principle of consent. While many Republicans may have viewed this ideological rubicon as a realpolitick concession to devour the northern state from the inside-out, the reality is that the wider population have now normatized the concept. This will not be easily undone.
There is, thus, a huge barrier standing in the way of the traditional republican militants. They cannot succeed and it is clear that most of them realise this fact but view their resistance as an existentialist refusal to the system. Yet this is always an inadequate justification for revolutionary action. Che did not go to Bolivia considering his actions to have no hope - he believed he would succeed but realised the risk. Connolly went out in 1916 hoping for the best but conscious that it was madness given the odds of defeating the British. Indeed, the secret history of militant republicanism has often been just how close to victory risings were if they only realised at the time the weakness of the British. But there are no such hopes for traditional republican militant struggle.
The Changing Material Conditions
Irish Republicanism was initially a bourgeois nationalist movement; hence, Griffith's attachment to the concept of a monarchy and an Irish empire. The situation in Ireland was complicated by the colonial nature of its relation to Britain. Nationalism, which in the imperialist centres of mainland Europe demonstrated its reactionary nature in the revolutions of 1848, remained objectively progressive in Ireland a situation reinforced by the politically-engineered Great Hunger of 1847/48.
With the coming of the new Free State in 1923, Irish nationalism faced a number of challenges. Not least was the growing demands of the new, progressive, socialist working-class politics developed by the likes of Connolly and Larkin and finding military expression in the ICA. But equally, it was presented with the realities of partial liberation. The Civil War confirmed the dominance of the conservative trend within Irish nationalism south of the border yet north of the border the situation remained complex.
The Irish Catholics living north of the border were oppressed alongside working-class Protestants - both groups were largely denied the vote. Nationalism reflected the legitimate demands of Irish Catholics (in particular its middle-class who felt themselves particularly disadvantaged) but it risked alienating a Protestant working-class who were enticed to support unionism through such hegemonic structures as the Orange Order and the panoply of advantageous arrangements established under the 'Protestant state for a Protestant people'. The Belfast Rates Relief Strike of 1932 held out the opportunity for unity of action for the first time and it is highly instructive how it was put down by the selective targetting of Catholic strikers for murder by the forces of the state.
The growth in a youthful generation educated on the back of the 1948 Education Reform, generated the civil rights campaigns which had the potential to bridge the gap between nationally oppressed Catholics and economically exploited Protestants. But it was not to be - the reaction of the state rekindled militant republicanism - and broke down the ability to develop a more powerful cross-community resistance.
Structural reforms to take off the worst edges of discrimination were implemented in the period of direct rule and the general standard of living rose as the north was more fully integrated into the global economy as an appendage to imperial Britain. The rise of the Celtic Tiger in the historic bargain to big business offered by the Dublin Government(of low taxes in return for employment) resulted in a reduction in the poverty of the Republic and a further consequential erosion in support for militant republicanism.
In these conditions and against the backdrop of a falling level of support for the faltering military campaign of the IRA, the leadership had to look for a way out. They chose a negotiated process which they felt held out the prospect of victory down the road. That this has not transpired or likely to transpire may seem obvious to the casual observer today but it clearly was sufficiently obscure at early stages to hold the entire Republican movement together through the bulk of the process itself.
Having got to this stage, the material conditions for the success of militant republicanism no longer exist. However, the growth in unemployment and the perception that discrimination continues in the north through more subtle means than before there is a potential for the tradition to attract young recruits. But with no viable strategy it is hard to see where it can go.
From this viewpoint, the move by the IRSM to dismantle its military operation is sensible. They perceive the need to move forwards. They realise that holding a military structure or weaponry will only prejudice that opportunity and warp their own internal democracy. Their voice will be of importance to the left-wing across Ireland although it is imperative for them to resolve their own position in relation to northern Protestants.
The Need for the Left to Engage with Protestants
The greatest failure of Republicanism has been its inability to effectively engage and transcend the divisions 'carefully fostered' with northern Protestants. The revolutionary opportunity heralded by the cross-sectional 1798 Rebellion was never realised in the period after it. Again and again, when individual Republicans have engaged with Protestants they have ditched their own nationalism, Sinn Féin the Worker's Party being the classic example of this trajectory. Republicans should consider just why it is that some of the most capable republicans, some of its most consistent socialists, have moved away from Nationalism after an engagement with Protestants as Unionists as opposed to simply Protestants as other.
Irish nationalism may unify northern Catholic communities against the British but this is insufficient to achieve Irish unity in a context where the principle of consent is embedded in the constitutional standing of the north. The lack of viability of any military strategy to overthrow that constitutional situation should make any traditional Republican militant reconsider what they're about. However, we need at this point to reiterate our opinion that working with unionists as parties at governmental level is even less likely to achieve Irish unity as it ends up reinforcing unionist hegemony in their own communities.
The conclusions from this analysis are that the tradition of Irish Republicanism has often collapsed to the tradition of Irish Nationalism and that Republicans have failed to find common ground with Protestants as a result of their prioritisation of nationalism over socialism.
The risks of Nationalism
Irish Nationalism is often simply collapsed to anti-imperialism in a broad approach akin to that adapted in colonial revolutions elsewhere in the world but the situation in no two contexts is exactly the same. Ireland unlike most colonial states is partitioned and Ireland has a large non-national minority consisting a majority in one of those states. It cannot simply be concluded, therefore, that the same strategic orientation is correct in all cases. That is to fetishise such a strategic orientation. Whilst anti-imperialism is always justified, nationalism is not.
In the concrete case of Ireland, we have to ask how is it advancing anti-imperialism best by retaining nationalism if all that does in reality is to further reinforce the union?
Furthermore, anti-imperialism is meaningful precisely because it is a necessary condition for the self-emancipation of the working class or socialism. As Connolly said merely raising the Green flag is a worthless achievement in and of itself.
Yet, in reifying nationalism (and thereby cementing the union), we are undercutting its logical justification from a Socialist Republican perspective.
The only possible arguments that can be presented to this is that unity cannot be achieved through socialism alone or is required as its pre-requisite. The first argument is a preposition and must be tested. Socialism or Barbarism argues that it is precisely this preposition that must be tested through struggle. It is akin to arguing against socialism on the basis that socialism is not possible. Such specious telelogical arguments are insufficient to justify a course of 'do nothing' particularly when their proponents are often 'doing something' which is demonstrably setting back the cause of socialism.
The second argument is more substantial but we believe that it is precisely this understanding, that national self-determination is a condition for the full realisation of socialism which gives content to the national liberation struggle (if it deserves to have a content at all). So in fact, it is only through actively pursuing socialist demands which fail to be delivered by a London-government that unity can ever gain traction in unionist communities. To the extent that such unity is necessary, that is the extent to which that unity is progressive.
The historic failure of the Republican tradition to engage northern Protestants has been its Achille's heel for 200 years. Nationalism acts as a barrier to unification and acts of traditional republican militancy will only further undermine the ideological validity of republicanism not just with Protestants but with a growing section of northern Catholics. Socialism or Barbarism calls for revolutionary socialists to work together to develop a new vehicle capable of challenging the neo-liberal consensus and finally resolving the nationalist-socialist dialectic.
Read more...
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