More copies of our pamphlet series, many of which had sold out, are now available. The text of each of  the seven pamphlets is online (see the list of subjects below), but you can also order paper copies – £1 +50p postage per copy.

Write to uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to place your order. We take payment by cheque (addressed to ‘The Commune’, at The Commune, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St. John Street, London EC1V 4PY) or by transfer to Co-op account S/C 089299, A/C 65317440.pamphlet no. 7, march 2009 – the revolution delayed: a decade of hugo chávez

pamphlet no. 6, february 2009 – the meaning of communism today

pamphlet no. 5, december 2008 – the movement for workers’ councils in germany

pamphlet no. 4, november 2008 – the economic crisis: an interview with andrew kliman

pamphlet no. 3, october 2008 – strategy for industrial struggle

pamphlet no. 2, october 2008 – nationalisation or workers’ management?

pamphlet no. 1, september 2008 – bolivia: class struggle and social crisis

february 2009 – £1 + postage and packing, email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to order

click here for pdf or see individual articles below

barack obama is lipstick on a pig – by Ernie Haberkern

civil service pay dispute: defeat or victory? – by Steve Ryan, Wrexham PCS

class struggle on the london underground – interview with Vaughan Thomas, RMT London region chair (LUL)

occupations: the way to win? – guest editorial by Gregor Gall

the people’s charter: a charter for change? - by Chris Kane (online only)

militancy and mobilisation in the anti-war movement

the mindset of israelis in the gaza conflict – by Solomon Anker

anti-semitism and the war – by Aled Thomas

unemployment: a view from the front line – by Christine Hulme, PCS DWP

welfare ‘reform’, the brown premiership and the recession – by Chris Grover, Lancaster University

what does ’socialism or barbarism’ mean today? – by François Chesnais

call centres: the workers’ enquiry – review by Jack Staunton

ukraine’s ‘new left’ and the russian ‘gas war’ – by Milan Lelich

the socialist movement in iran – by Sam Parsa

political platform of the commune

Jack Staunton reviews Hotlines: Call centre – Inquiry – Communism

When we pick up a left wing paper or magazine and scan its contents we can be fairly sure that its editors will not have failed to offer a piece on shifts in the world’s stock markets, analysis of the businesses felled by the recession, and a take on the latest wheeling and dealing by the world’s statesmen. Whether dry, rational and down-to-earth commentary, or grandiose predictions of the final crisis of capitalism and vast forces of chaos sweeping across the globe, we can be sure enough that developments in the activities of the ruling class will be recounted in some detail.

But ours is not a movement which limits itself to attacking the dominant system: it is a movement for the self-emancipation of the working class. To put that in the language of the current crisis: no-one simply wants capitalism to ‘collapse’ chaotically in a heap of bankruptcies and mass redundancies. Quite obviously, the unravelling of the irrationalities of capitalism will not in itself create a better society. Rather, we have a better, alternative vision for humanity: we want the working class to organise to displace those who control the levers of political and economic power and re-organise society from below on an egalitarian, collectivist and democratic basis.

So surely it should follow that the left ought to privilege understanding the state of the working class – the people and the movement who are actually going to revolutionise society.  This is all the more the case since although no-one would deny the existence of capitalism, for the last two decades it has been a commonplace assertion of much of academia and the media that the working class no longer exists.  For such ‘commentators’, the term ‘working class’ is itself merely a label for a narrow cultural stereotype: for example, in March 2008 the BBC’s White  season featured a documentary ‘Last Orders’, detailing the lives of white working-class pensioners in northern working men’s clubs, proclaiming that a few of this “endangered species”, the working class, do in fact still exist.

Back on Earth, the majority of the world population, and the vast majority in the most developed countries, are working class, and are not about to disappear into the annals of history. Let us be quite clear: anyone whose livelihood relies on their selling their capacity to work to an employer is working class, and the entire basis for the capitalist system is the exploitation of this class. Capital, along with money, the stock exchange, ‘the market’ etc. did not descend from heaven and thus create means of investment and ‘wealth creation’: they are themselves the product of human labour and the value exploited from working class people, and have no independent or autonomous existence. The point is, however, that human labour changes, and so the conditions and make-up of the working class as a whole develop, not only in workplace relations but also as regards the community, the state apparatus, people in other countries and even the natural environment. It is impossible to project a vision of our class revolutionising society unless we properly understand the developments our own class’s composition in the here and now.

One central development has been the rise of casualisation: less job stability and less rights. This is not simply a product of the decline of manufacturing, mining etc. and the fact that far fewer people keep the same job for their whole life than in decades past, but also that allied to such changes in the economy under Thatcher there came a massive onslaught on working-class organization and our rights in the workplace.  This is most obvious when we look at the 750,000 people working in the UK’s call centres, a workplace and job role which covers different sectors of the economy – sales of a wide range of products; customer service for retailers, electronic goods suppliers, etc.; market research both of consumers and of businesses; charity cold-calling; to name but a few. In these workplaces there tends to be a very high level of staff turnover, with most employees only lasting a few weeks or months; pay, although better than sitting on a till, is low; employment rights are scarce; and unionization is close to nil.

“Because of their rapid development call centers are a good example for the relation between changing composition of capital (new technologies, new work organisation, new regional focus) and proletarian behaviour and demands. Call centers themselves emerged as a new concentration of work force which proletarianised the ‘white-collar-workers’, washed away strong-holds of bank-branches and the working standards of office work. Within a few years call centers mushroomed in deprived ex-industrial areas of Europe, the USA and elsewhere. During this boom-time some of us undertook a collective workers‘ inquiry in some call centers, trying to understand how these new conditions of work are being turned into subversive conditions of struggle.” [1]

But csualisation does not just mean shorter hours or an increased likelihood of losing your job, but also impacts on relations within the workplace: indeed in the call centre setting it means close regulation and surveillance, including timing of the time spent off the phone and listening in on your calls, and a clamp down on saying anything not written in the industrial-strength script on your screen. The worker is used as an automaton… but one with the ability to resist. The objective of the German activist network Prol Position was to study the composition of this workforce (across Europe and North America) and so facilitate the organization of this workforce to resist their employers, and in 2002 they published Hotlines: Call centre – Inquiry – Communism.

“In the summer of 1999 we decided to start working in call centres in order to meet people who work there and understand what’s going on. We wanted to combine our rage against the daily exploitation with the desire and search for the struggles that can overcome it. Therefore we had to understand the class reality at this point, be part of the conflicts and intervene.”

Consciously drawing on similar research by the Quaderni Rossi group in northern Italy’s car plants in the 1960s[2], the book is an extremely detailed look at the hierarchies and relations in different call centres. There appear to be three main areas of study here: (i) the conditions of employment, including but not limited the control of work by the employer, such as phones which relentlessly and automatically dial, having to read out scripts off a computer screen to the person on the other end of the phone, and strict quotas for the workers’ productivity and time-keeping; (ii) the employees’ day to day methods of evading these means of control -”workers think of ways to take breaks, oases of quiet that let them breathe” – such as meddling with equipment to break up the rhythms of work,  wasting time on calls, or a group of workers endlessly passing round calls until they die in the system; (iii) the possibility of organizing more effective and long-term resistance to the employers such as strikes, and the barriers presented by trade union and works’ council[3] bureaucracy, as well as the threat that the employer will simply up and leave at the first sign of trouble and move the call centre elsewhere, in the process getting rid of the entire workforce.

I myself was particularly interested by the Prol Position book because I have been a call centre worker for the last two years, mostly conducting market research surveys but also indulging in a few weeks of charity cold-calling, which was even more unpleasant. So there was much I recognized but also much which seemed new to me.

One thing which struck me in particular was that the degree of control the workforce were able to exert over their time in the call centres where Prol Position activists intervened was far greater than in my own experience, such as the example of people working on a computer company’s customer service line setting up an application that allowed them to ‘chat’ with one another online during working time. Most of the forms of ’sabotage’ and ‘resisting work’ recommended in the Hotlines book, which largely involve time-wasting, would be impossible to implement in ’my’ market research call centre where one’s right to get shifts week-to-week is reliant on making a high number of calls (the gaps between calls are timed) and completing as many surveys as possible. In fact, since the call centre I work in has far more employees registered than it does available shifts, even when at full capacity, the workers are basically competing with one another to get shifts, and even long-standing employees often call in to book their hours and are told to try again some other week, as if in our unpaid “time off” we could put our food, bills and rent on hold.

So while endlessly making cups of coffee and chatting with the person in the two-foot-wide booth on either side of you is necessary to relieve the drudgery of reading out the same script again and again to hundreds of people (and indeed, as the Hotlines book mentions, the employer is well aware that employees who do not have such pressure valves will be less productive), a worker forced to compete with her/his employees and who is subject to constant surveillance is in a far weaker position to ’sabotage’ than someone fielding incoming calls who is permitted more freedom to operate and control their working rhythms. Indeed, reading about the experience of workers who could get away with ’sabotage’ brought to mind a comment by a participant in our ‘uncaptive minds’ forum on workers’ control, who said that “workers’ control is the extent to which the workers know what’s going on and management don’t.”

I can’t help but feel that such means of day-to-day resistance are less relevant to my own workplace than more conventional means of organizing the workforce, even though the fact that the workforce is unstable and dozens of people come and go each month through the doors of a ninety-booth call centre creates similar problems for efforts at unionization. Although the book has a mass of raw data and quotes from different workers, and details the minutiae of the aims and methods of the workers’ enquiry itself, there are few practical lessons about organizing strikes. The industrial actions reported in the book, such as the 1999 British Telecom strike or the 2000 stoppage by 86,000 call centre workers and technicians for Verizon in the USA, presuppose a high level of organization which is hardly second nature to the young people coming into call centre jobs. Of course , precisely the problem is that there are no blueprints and it is difficult to abstract generalized lessons from specific struggles in other call centres, which is certainly a weak point of the Hotlines book.

Indeed, the Prol Position activists are constantly guarding against being seen to “represent” workers, but rather want to “promote” self-organisation, and so their leaflets and materials are of a largely descriptive character, while also making sharp criticisms of trade unions and pointing to the limits of different forms of struggle. They furthermore take part in activist initiatives set up with the aim of ‘supporting’ working class struggles, for example in the Call Centre Offensive outlined in the book. The chapter on trade unions, ‘base unions’, petitions and strikes has much of interest on the different means of resistance employed by workers, such as in the 1999 BT strike, “Large amounts of overseas phone calls were reportedly made, apparently totaling over £15,000. One call was claimed to have been made to the speaking clock in Zimbabwe with the receiver left off the hook overnight; as well as this, top of the range stock was sent out to householders with faulty BT equipment”.

But this part of the study seems to have a somewhat artificial character: the Marxists get jobs in a call centre in order to find out what is going on and relay it back to the workforce, but stop short of giving any practical advice for how to advance struggles. To a limited extent, this seems to recreate a mirror image of the crude “Leninist” form of “intervening” in a workplace from the outside and giving lectures on the lessons of history: i.e. the revolutionaries see themselves as separate from the workforce and with different objectives, using their enquiry to inform their own theories, understand how the working class resists work and to help them(selves) reflect on the world, but not actually doing much to test the water of organizing tactics which could actually succeed. It is no surprise that they report that their materials about working conditions often meet with the response “OK, so what? We know that already. What can we do?” Indeed, the chapter on organizing initiatives concludes with the questions “how can we relate to strikes and conflicts and thus support some kind of learning process? What kind of means do we need to be able to hear about the important developments? What can we learn within strikes and other struggles? How can we participate in the discussions of the workers?…”, the Prol Position activists presenting themselves as outsiders. They hope to promote the values of self-organisation (solidarity, democracy, serious focus on the workers’ own most pressing concerns) within the class, but in fact the book tends towards merely discerning to what extent resistance is taking place already.

Nevertheless, the Prol Position activists have the best of intentions and are right to privilege self-organisation and avoid lecturing the workforce, and the workers’ enquiry, understanding the concerns most important for the workers, helps to avoid substitutionism or giving the lead in a crude manner. This reflects the reality that organizing this workforce is extremely difficult and even significant actions are often isolated and fail, such as by causing the employer to outsource. The lesson is surely that strike action as such should not be fetishised or placed as the central objective of workplace organizing: the very process of slow, patient (and rarely open) building of a trade union may itself do far more to improve workers’ position by increasing their confidence to stand up to overbearing supervisors; time waste and sabotage; and know their rights and resist moves such as unfair dismissals.

The workers’ enquiry is a useful tool in the early stages of such organizing work. Whether by deliberate “intervention” or not being able to get a better job, a worker who goes into a call centre already a revolutionary ought to understand the ins and outs of the workplace and the views of her/his colleague. But its value is premised not merely on sociological analysis and personal reflection on the results of the study, but rather as a means to an end. The working class understanding itself not merely in terms of the work it does and the conditions to which it is subject, but rather as an agent of transformative change which examines its force and rights all the better to change them. Workers’ self-inquiry, not an inquiry about workers.

[1] http://www.prol-position.net/nl/2005/03/editorial/

[2] See ‘Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Enquiry’, chapter 2 of Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven: Class Composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Pluto Press, London, 2002. Perhaps the original such ‘Workers’ Enquiry’ was that organised by Karl Marx in 1880, a list of a hundred questions about a worker’s pay and conditions, for example “Is your work permanent or casual?”; “What conditions are laid down regarding dismissal?”; “Do any resistance associations exist in your trade, and how are they led? Send us their rules and regulations”. See http://marxists.kgprog.com/history//etol/newspape/ni/vol04/no12/marx.htm

[3] In several European countries, all workers in workplaces of a given size are (by law) represented in collective bargaining by works councils composed of trade union delegates, whether or not the workers are themselves trade union members.

A review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. By Oksana Dutchak.

             …the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic [...] the more powerless the reader comes to feel…

Fredric Jameson

Naomi Klein is a famous contemporary socio-historical journalist, master of scandal journalist investigations, one of the most outstanding popular critics of the important tendencies in modern society. Klein became popular after publishing her first bestseller No Logo which had attracted a lot of attention in academic, political and broader circles. I find The Shock Doctrine just a logical continuation of her critical interpretation of the modern neo-liberal capitalism, presented in the first bestseller.

It is often stated nowadays that we are living in the shocking epoch or in the epoch of shocks. This atmosphere gets a new and very interesting perspective in Klein’s book: she develops the idea of shock to the level of hegemonic politico-economic logic of the past several decades. The subtitle of the book is an appropriate material for the first insight into the topic of long and detailed historical journey which Klein conducts. It is mainly about neo-liberal capitalism as a disaster for the modern world of shocks and about disaster as a way of shocking neo-liberal development. From Chile to Iraq, from Russia to the USA, from South Africa to Great Britain, Klein provides a logical link between the neo-liberal economic policy and tragic historical events: coups and massacres, civil wars and natural disasters, dramatical social changes and economic crises.  This logical link should be explained in more detail.

To provide any radical institutional changes in history successfully, the specific concentration of power should take place: economic and political power in this respect. There are three institutions or groups which Naomi Klein mentions from this perspective and all of them can be easily presented as representatives of the transnational class (e. g. Kalb 2005:195-196) or hybrid cosmopolitans elites (Friedman 2003) which received a lot of attention in modern sociology of globalization. However, Klein adds one new dimension to the perception of ruling elite which is rarely mentioned in contemporary debates about hegemony: the academic or think-tank dimension.            Milton Friedman and his followers are the first key figures of the book, the “men to blame” from authors point of view. As representatives of the Chicago School of Economics, they have devoted their academic and political lobbying to promote neo-liberal doctrine by all appropriate means. True believers, as Klein describes them, these economists firstly concentrated their challenges on the main question: how can unpopular measures be applied without provoking popular revolt? The author names “the shock doctrine” as the answer they found. She provides psychological  experiments of the 1950s as an analogy for the economic logic of the shock doctrine: the logic of using electroshock, sensor deprivation and injections in order to weaken psychological resistance in order to conduct interrogation or treatment. Like psychological experimenters, the Chicago School followers had powerful believe that society, like the mind, can be regressed to some kind of tabula rasa, so it can be totally recreated and cured in a desired way. In order to weaken the resistance of the society both direct intervention and indirect use of existent crises were considered to be appropriate methods. However, having no power in the post-war time of Keynesianism, the Chicago School could hardly test shock theory in practice.

A path to the practical implementation was found in a newly emerged strong alliance between transnational capital and government. For this reason Klein devotes a lot of space to researching direct and indirect relations between the two institutions which concentrate both political and economic power through this alliance. However, she does not present these connections clearly as acting during the first practical implementation of shock doctrine: Pinochet’s coup and aftermath Chile in 1970s. Corporatism, as Klein calls this alliance, emerges in details on the pages of her book mainly when she analyzes the latest events, such as the war in Iraq or hurricane Katrina; for this reason the Chicago School and its shock doctrine look like the main cause of disaster capitalism from the 1970s till the turn of the  century. Moreover, while reading the book, it is hardly understandable what were the processes which led to the realization of shock doctrine logic. Modern scholars (e. g. Turner 2003) often name the crisis of 1973 as the reason of the neo-liberal turn, but Klein does not present it like that. That was the reason why I had a strange feeling of Friedman’s shadow after reading the book.

This kind of problem with structural causes in The Shock Doctrine can be also demonstrated through another example: how the author describes economic side of neo-liberal shock doctrine approach. She clearly refers to privatization, deregulation and liberalization as the main aspects of this approach but she does not explain why precisely these measures became so preferable in the second part of the 20^th century. While reading the book, it looks like this course was taken because of  Friedman’s true faith in it and because these measures seemed to be extremely profitable for the power alliance. However, contemporary sociological analysis provides more sophisticated vision of cause-effect relations in structural changes of that time. For example, David Harvey (2003:156) introduces the concept of accumulation by dispossession through which he explains that neo-liberal measures were implemented as “compensation for the chronic problems of overaccumulation arising within expanded reproduction” . This concept can be criticized for many reasons, however, through such interpretation one can clearly see deep processes behind the economic project; in Klein’s book there is often only the  feeling of Friedman’s shadow.

This notion raises the question of the starting point, meaning the main concept of any socio-historical research which determines its explanatory power. In Harvey’s case this is accumulation by dispossession – rather structural phenomena which makes it possible to see structural cause-effect relations behind social processes he describes. In Klein’s case this is the shock doctrine – idea but not a structural phenomena which hardly allows uninitiated reader to see deeper cause-effect relations beyond concrete personalities or personal interest such as passion for money.   Still The Shock Doctrine has plenty of masterly socio-historical analysis: it contains a great many contemporary debates on neo-liberal globalization. One of the most important pieces refers to ethnic and religious conflicts as an outcome of disaster capitalism. In this respect Klein speaks directly about the modern system of apartheid in post-war Iraq or Israel and indirectly about some kind of economic and power apartheid, produced by increasing inequality in incomes and authority. All of this, she argues, leads to the increase in tensions between both different groups of local citizens and on local-foreign dimension; in this way the neo-liberal  system reproduces the particular type of conflicts. Johnathan Friedman (2003) makes to some extent similar conclusions in his analysis of polarization between indigenous identity and economic perspective on the one side and cosmopolitan on the other. Another point of view on such kind of reactionary tendencies can be found in Harvey (2005, chap. 3) where he posts rise of nationalism as an outcome of the dilemma of neo-liberal state in the global competitive market. In Klein’s book this notion of systematic outcomes of the disaster capitalism in combination with others, such as stock market reaction on governmental action, allows her to make the conclusion about system that generates disaster (Klein 2007:426). It should be noted that the power of modern financial market (Hirst 2000) or neo-liberal system as a whole (Harvey 2005, chap. 3) to generate instability is widely presented in the contemporary academic debates. By adding these structural factors, Klein manages to go beyond determinative shadows of personalities and personal or corporate interests in the last pages of her book.

Klein  also refers to another interesting debate regarding the power of nation-state in the disaster capitalism epoch. Among others she presents the case of the South Africa where this power appears to be minimal after the collapse of the apartheid system. She reasonably explains it through the combination of factors, provided by the power-outsourcing logic of the structural adjustments program which became possible or even inevitable because of debt and general economic crisis. Such an interpretation can also be found in analysis of the South Africa case by James Ferguson (2006:38) who writes about “outsourcing” and “rolling back” of the state. However, he emphasizes the role of NGOs as a recipient of power; Klein speaks partly about NGOs but mainly about the role of private corporations. Moreover, she mentions not only those countries where structural adjustments are applied, but general tendency even in the most developed countries such as the USA; however, in the later it has a deliberate form. So, the concentration of politico-economic power within corporatism gets new shift toward not only the alliances between the state and corporations, but to even more increasing role of the later in this new project of distribution of authority.

Being a journalist, Naomi Klein does not often use academic concepts in her works and The Shock Doctrine is no exception; this is the weakest point of the book as it leads to some simplification and lack of a systematic vision of the explored picture. However, it should be taken into consideration that her bestseller was written not just for academic circles, but also for the common reader. Still she manages to accumulate a great part of contemporary sociological debates on globalizaton without referring to them directly.

The Shock Doctrine is itself a shocking book. Like No Logo it provides an image of the total, omnipresent, over-rational and powerful system with ruthless logic which is led by mercantile interests. It shocks you slowly with the vision of the disaster capitalism system and its consequences by adding more and more ugly facts. If you do really care, by the end of the book you can find yourself hopeless and powerless before the face of the shock doctrine logic. However, if the reader is attentive enough, he or she can easily observe peculiarity of the epigraphs: through the whole book they reflect some kind of dialog between the positive and negative views on disaster capitalism logic. So, one can assume that this dialog takes place in reality and therefore some challenges against the shock doctrine exist. But Klein describes practical implementations of these challenges only at the end of her book, referring to both grassroots and regional self-organizing processes which attempt to withstand shocks and rehabilitate after them. This is her powerful style of creating tension and she really knows how to deal with the emotional dynamics of the reader. The weak point of this style is that it potentially creates “winner loses”[1] logic, to which I referred to in the epigraph: the author wins by describing a terrifying system, but he or she also loses because after such a description any challenges against this system look powerless.

References

Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Friedman, Jonathan. 2003. “Globalization, Dis-integration, Re-organization: The Transformation of Violence.” Pp. 1-34 in Globalization, the State and Violence, edited by J. Friedman. Walnut Greek: Altamira Press.

Harvey, David. 2003. The new Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—————– 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hirst, Paul. 2000. “The Global Economy: Myth or Reality?” Pp. 107-24 in Don Kalb, et. al. The Ends of Globalization. Oxford: Rowman & Littelfield.

Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kalb, Don. 2004. “Shifting Conjunctures: Politics and Knowledge in the Great Globalization Debate.” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London.

Turner, Terence. 2003. “Class Project, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of ‘Globalization.’” Pp. 35-66 in Globalization, the State and Violence, edited by J. Friedman. Walnut Greek: Altamira Press.

by David Broder

Recently I have engaged in a fair degree of research into working-class resistance during the Second World War, and so at yesterday’s Anarchist Bookfair I was interested to pick up a copy of the Anarchist Federation’s pamphlet ‘Resistance to Nazism’ (subtitle ‘Shattered Armies: How the Working Class Fought Nazism and Fascism 1933-45′), reprinted this May.

The stated aim of the pamphlet is to present an alternative ‘history from below’ discussing the struggles and experiences of working-class people rather than looking at the world through the prism of competing governments and military figures. This is a worthy aim indeed.

However, the terms used to describe the war in this vein are unusual: “The Second World War is remembered as a struggle between freedom and oppression, and so it was…” – even though it is quite clearly the case that the workers’ movement as an independent political force was effectively marginalised by the overarching conflict – and furthermore comments “in social terms it was also a struggle between two different forms of capitalism – authoritarian vs. bourgeois – in which progressive forces in society were almost entirely destroyed”. This is a highly inaccurate description of the war, not only in that the bourgeoisie remains the ruling class even when capitalism resorts to fascist repression, but also in that other forms of capitalism, such as the state-monopoly capitalism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, are also very authoritarian!

Furthermore, the pamphlet focuses on just five anti-fascist campaigns: The Edelweiss Pirates, a youth group in Germany during the war; the Zazous, a sort of beatnik movement in wartime Paris; the Arditi del Popolo, a militia who fought Mussolini’s regime in the 1920s; the FAUD, a 1930s German anarcho-syndicalist organisation; and the 43 Group, who organised Jewish ex-servicemen after 1945. What is immediately striking, therefore, is the political heterogeneity of the anti-fascist forces under discussion, five organisations with highly dissimilar tactics and objectives, from subculture on one hand to armed resistance on the other.

And yet at once it is also clear that an awful lot has been missed out: it is unsurprising that the editors chose not to refer to the Spanish revolution, given that its history is already well-documented and its scale dwarfs that of the five groups I have mentioned, but a great deal of the little-known working-class struggle which took place during the war also goes without mention in the Anarchist Federation pamphlet.

The most obvious case in point would be the huge strikes which took place in countries under fascist rule, most prominently the strike waves in Northern Italy in spring 1943 (the first major industrial actions for 18 years), which so threatened the war effort and the stability of the regime that Marshal Badoglio and the monarchy led a coup to remove Mussolini. Strikes were not only launched as a response to wartime deprivation, however: the February 1941 general strike in the Netherlands against Nazi raids on Jewish areas; the August 1942 general strike in Luxembourg against conscription into the Wehrmacht; and the many strikes in France and Belgium against forced deportations; all pointed to the continuing resilience and internationalism of sections of the European working class. This article on the Dutch ‘Marx-Lenin-Luxembourg Front’ offers an insight into one of the groups involved in the struggle to maintain a communist working-class camp independent of both the Allies and the Axis.

Of course, such ideas were far from dominant in the European labour movement. Stalin’s Soviet regime and its satellite Communist Parties had considerable prestige in the labour movement, and used this to mislead and suffocate working-class struggle. Not only did the Stalinists oppose all strikes in the Allied countries after Hitler’s summer 1941 invasion of the USSR and enthusiastically promoting pan-Slavic and French chauvinism in nationalist partisan/resistance movements, but also led their own comrades into terrible and bloody defeats. Much as the French CP laid down its hundreds of thousands of weapons and entered government with Charles de Gaulle; the Italian CP under Palmiro Togliatti was ordered by Stalin to support the Italian monarchy and the restoration of capitalist order… with the effect that around 2,500 Italian communists believed Togliatti to be disobeying Stalin (!), and set up their own party (Movimento Comunista d’Italia); and Stalin sold out the Greek Communist Party, who were preparing to take power, and gave Churchill and the Greek Monarchists free rein to butcher the labour movement.

But the Anarchist Federation pamphlet in fact says little about the state of the workers’ movement in the period. Instead it focuses on a few small groups, therefore offering a sectarianised version of history in which the actual struggles waged by working people are held to be less important than certain groups who happened to hold the politics of anarchism, or in the case of the Zazous, took to anti-establishment subculture. Of course, given the safety of the passage of time it would be grossly unfair to criticise those whose instinct in the war was self-preservation, but certainly it is not the case that this was a particularly heroic period for anarchism, particularly when compared to anarchists’ brave record of struggle during the Spanish revolution of 1936-39. For example, the largest French anarchist group, Le Libertaire, effectively suspended its activities with its August 31st 1939 issue, as Yvan Craipeau writes:

“Le Libertaire planned to continue appearing legally. Under the title ‘Le Libertaire goes on’ it declared: “Because of the difficult times we are living through and the reintroduction of censorship, our paper is going to find more and more difficulty in maintaining its already precarious existence. We have a choice: either to suspend publication, say nothing and wait for better times, or to try and continue appearing all the same [...] The censor will be there to stop us saying what we think. But you can be sure that we will never say what we do not think. Le Libertaire will therefore try and continue publication. Le Libertaire will remain the link between our comrades as we wait for things to settle down”. As we have seen, its revolutionary ambitions were modest. It added “In whatever fashion, whatever they say, we shall continue publishing!”, which suggested the possibility of illegal publication. But this issue would be the last. During the war, or rather, during the occupation, the anarchists would devote themselves to producing a few issues of an internal bulletin, Lien, of which the sole objective was to maintain communication between anarchist activists. Le Libertaire would not again appear until 24th December 1944, five and a half years later, when things started to “settle down”.”

Whatever my sharp disagreements with Trotskyists (who almost without exception supported the USSR’s war effort, even if not the western Allies), I cannot fail to be moved by the efforts of those Trotskyist activists who stuck their necks out in organising in workplaces and among conscripted troops, for example those French Trotskyists who produced Arbeiter und Soldat, a newspaper for German troops, and those who went as far as to continue meeting and organising even in the concentration camps. David Rousset, a prisoner at Buchenwald, where an internationalist and communist manifesto was produced, wrote a true-to-life novel Les jours de notre mort. Commenting on his survival, he writes: “I want to shout as loud as I can “We have won our lives back!”. I want to call to my wife so loud that she can hear me across these dead lands. In the four weeks since we left Helmstadt we experienced the worst experience of ruination. The society of the camps has been defeated: men have burst through the floodgates. I did, we did, everyone did. The abjection we knew can never be explained. Poor and wretched though we are, nevertheless we have won a victory not just for ourselves but for the entire human race. We never gave up the struggle. We never denied ourselves. We never blasphemed against life. Our ways of looking at the world are hardly similar, but at a deeper level, in more important ways, we kept intact our belief in the great creativity of human life, its power, and our faith in its triumph. Never did we think the final disaster of man had come. Together we have made the highest and the most forceful expression in world history of the will to live.”

Of course most workers, whether living under governments affiliated to the Axis or the Anglo-American Allies, did not have the choice of opting out of struggle and waiting for everything to calm down, but had to fight tooth-and-nail to defend their livelihoods and save their lives when faced with bombings, ethnic cleansing, conscription, deportations and wartime military production and speed-ups. These were the people who were most directly on the receiving end of fascist and anti-working class repression at its most severe. All of this is missing from a pamphlet whose aim is to glorify the work of certain groups and to hold up a “tradition” rather than to look at the Second World War through the eyes of working people who fought for their class.

Building the new common sense: Social ownership for the 21st century, Ed. Andrew Fisher

Reviewed by Chris Kane

The publication of Social ownership for the 21st century by the Labour Representation Committee on behalf of the Left Economics Advisory Panel is a significant development.  For the first time in nearly three decades an important section of the labour movement is at last developing a discussion on the questions of forms of social ownership, workers’ control and workers’ self-management.  The Tragedy of the historical moment is that at a time when the inadequacy of capitalist society is so glaringly apparent, there is a lack of confidence in the viability of an alternative society fit for humanity.  Amidst all the declarations that ‘another world is possible’ the traditional left has failed to conceptualise what that other world means.  Without developing an idea of what we want to replace capitalism with, the struggle of the labour movement is trapped in a spiral of fighting to ameliorate the conditions of life within capitalism.   In that regard this series of seven articles is a breath of fresh air in the arid plains of English socialism.

The fact there has been no serious discussion of these matters since the upsurge of working class struggle in the 1970s means that a lot of the lessons to be learnt from that period still remain to be worked out.  That is apparent in this pamphlet, for many of the old ambiguities clearly remain to be cleared up.  This is especially important in light of ideas of Social Partnership which are the official policy of the TUC and have had a corrosive effect in the labour movement.

Within the context of the British labour movement industrial democracy/workers’ control has become popularly defined as meaning several things, such as:

1 : Greater consultation – where management retains the final decision-making rights, but workers have direct input to the decision-making process, exercising greater influence beyond the set parameters of collective bargaining.

2 : Worker participation – where management and workers jointly participate in the decision-making process, the workers’ representatives having parity with the management and shareholders.

3 : Full workers’ control – where workers take over the responsibility of management and hold exclusive decision-making rights, overall control being the responsibility of workers’ representatives, elected from and by those working in the industry.

Clearly industrial democracy/workers’ control cannot be all these things.  Clarity is therefore necessary if we are to develop the struggle for workers’ self-government in the 21st century.  During the discussions on industrial democracy in the 1960s and 1970s these ambiguities were being ironed out, it was however an unfinished debate. We believe it is necessary to overcome these ambiguities: in light of historical experience it would more helpful to make a clear distinction between forms of workers’ control and workers’ self-management, these can be broadly defined as:

1 : Workers’ control – whose variants stretch from a lower range –  with the extension of the scope of collective bargaining and increased influence over the labour process and erosion of the managerial prerogatives –  to a higher range, with wide-scale involvement of the workers in actual decision-making.  Whilst preserving the distinction between the workers’ representatives and the management, this would mean in its highest level a form of dual-management in the workplace.

2 : Workers’ self-management – the workers would have total control: managers as such would be abolished, and management would be eliminated as a function separate from the workers themselves.  It would be a system of direct democracy: everyone would participate in the decision making and the workplace would take on a communal form, collectively run at the various levels.

The relationship between workers’ control and workers’ self-management is that of a process of struggle to realise the forms of workers’ self-management latent in capitalism today,  which can be developed in the fight to extend forms of workers’ control into workers’ self-management.   The new pamphlet by LEAP opens the discussion again on these issues and rightly links it to the question of social ownership and seeks to put the questions back on the political agenda.

Gregor Gall opens the discussion with his essay The case for industrial and economic democracy, pointing out that there is a “democratic deficit” in British society. “While there are some limited forms of political democracy through representative institutions, such as Parliament, there are no corresponding bodies for governing workplace relations.”   Gall includes in his argument for industrial democracy a point that the traditional left has largely ignored – the limitations of trade unions. Whilst workers have traditionally sought to promote their interests through unions he writes “….but unions are dependent upon other parties, namely employers and the state for acceptance, legitimacy and recognition, so workers have no automatic inalienable or inviolable rights for exercising some form of control over their working lives”.

Industrial democracy as such should not be dependent on the changing influence and power of unions.  A further point that could be made of course is that many unions now are even less democratic and do not necessarily provide a democratic channel for workers to run their workplaces.

Gall considers that it is generally accepted in liberal democracies that “workers should have a right to participate in the making of decisions that affect their working lives”. What prevents this is “the imbalance of power between “labour (workers), on the one hand, and capital (employers) and the state, on the other.”  In the UK this has take the form of de-regulation of employment relations, a hallmark of industrial relations since Thatcher, except in the case of regulations to curb union powers and discipline labour.   Gall also highlights how this system actually achieves the opposite of what capital wants –  raising productivity –  instead it leads to low productivity, “waste and duplication.”

There are problems with this analysis. Firstly this imbalance is not unique to the ‘collective laissez-faire’ form of capitalism: it is a problem of capital itself. Capital’s proclaimed equality in the contract between a worker and employer is a myth and the worker is a wage-slave with no alternative but to sell his/her capacity to work – labour power.  As such the imbalance of power is integral to the system of producing capital.

Gall holds out the possibility of change not only to make work more effective and democratic but “more fulfilling and enriching”. It is heartening to hear anyone on the left pointing to the possibility of eradicating the alienation of work. This is to be achieved by a system of “joint-control and co-determination”.  This must be of “considerable depth and breadth” and not merely the use of the existing frameworks already established by senior management.  The conditions for “democracy and participation” which are set out combine elements of existing negotiating frameworks, such as rights to information and initiative proposals, and also new rights to “impose obligations on management” and restrict their ability to unilaterally impose their will.  In a nutshell, this would amount to representative structures “balanced between workers and employers”.

Gall’s proposals would represent a major step forward compared to the current situation in which the labour movement accepts collective bargaining and social partnership as the most we can ever achieve.  But Gall’s proposals cannot be an end in itself.  If workers do not manage production then clearly someone else does, and such is the nature of our class-divided society, inevitably capital will re-assert itself with new techniques of control. This is similar to what happened when the working class gained access to Parliament: more and more power was centralised, away from Parliament itself.

Achieving new forms of workers’ control will require a real cultural shift: this is addressed in Rosamund Stock’s Why we need a Culture of Social Ownership. This starts with a precondition which undermines her own proposals.  That is that she will “not deal with the forms of social ownership” but starts with the assumption that “social ownership will take many forms, from state ownership to small co-operatives”.   It is difficult however to see how we can develop the “supporting culture of social ownership” necessary for its success separate from conceptualising  what social ownership means. This is no small matter.

From our 21st century vantage point, from all our experience of the last century of failed state-socialist models, we need to take a firm stand to exclude, not include, the equation of state-ownership with social ownership.  These days many socialists use the term “social ownership” instead of nationalisation.  But whether “public ownership” or “social-ownership” – they both mean the same things – state-ownership.  But they are in fact two very different things.  One cannot equate the state with society, social ownership with state ownership, without advocating the recasting of the capitalist system.

Stock, to be fair, does pose various forms of social ownership, such as cooperatives. Her aim is to build a counter culture to that of anti-cooperative capitalist ideas.  Her conception is of social ownership which is very different from just membership of an association but truly participatory.  This is an important question and her plea for a cultural revolution to enable social ownership is an important question.  The process of developing workers’ self-management does involve a cultural revolution: this is directly linked to how social-ownership is created. If it is developed through the solidarity of struggle from below then by its very nature it involves cooperation in its very foundations.

The other forms, both state-socialist and the “cooperatives”, are something brought about externally to workers themselves. For example she writes that:  “people learn from doing: if people are put into a structure of co-operative relations, they will not only start to co-operate more, see others as more similar to themselves, and support egalitarian outcomes such as redistribution and equality of outcome”.   In fact experience has shown otherwise: for real lasting social ownership cannot come from above.  As she herself writes “you have changed the concept of ownership from being an individual one to an inherently social one. Such accountability would be a spur to grassroots organisation.”  This is precisely what we need to do.

The essay by Jerry Jones, former economics correspondent for the Morning Star, is entitled The economic case for worker-owned co-operatives.  In his opening line he states that: “An economy based on worker-owned co-operatives would not look much different from the economy we now have”.  The reader won’t be disappointed: the economy he depicts is indeed not much different.  Essentially what Jones conceptualises is a worker-controlled capitalist economy, where “the major difference would be that the profit would go to the workers rather than the capitalist owners”.  The political economy is Keynesian, “it is likely that workers would choose to pay themselves more” which “in turn, would stimulate more investment and employment in production”, etc.  Jones knows the dangers inherent in this system, such as the drive to reduce labour costs to be more competitive: his solution to the workers engaging in such practices is minimum wage legislation.   This is partly connected to Jones’s mistaken view of the crisis which can occur in capitalist society as being caused by the workers not earning enough to buy goods and the bizarre idea that capital is accumulated because of it having nowhere else to go due to lack of investment opportunities.

Jones’s problem is he sees the importance of production relations and the need to change them but does not see the market as a manifestation of these production relations.   Marx long ago showed that crisis is not caused by a shortage of consumer demand. On the contrary, it is the crisis that causes a shortage of demand. A crisis occurs not because there has been a scarcity of markets but because from the capitalist viewpoint there is an unsatisfactory distribution of income,  Marx, based as he was on the capital-labour relationship, saw the decay in capitalist production in the tendency in the rate of profit to decline, which has nothing whatever to do with the inability sell.  On the other hand, like Jones, the bourgeois economists see the decline in the rate of profit merely as a result of a deficiency in effective demand.

Jones seems to think these problems are overcome by placing the workers in control in a profit share system.  It is basically Market Socialism, reminiscent of the form practiced in Yugoslavia, which actually undermined workers’ self-management.   Capital lives by obtaining ever more surplus value from the worker who produces it.  For this reason any effort to control capital without uprooting the basis of value production is ultimately self-defeating.   What is entirely missing in the views of Jones is the idea of transforming the economy – to end value production and exchange.  Instead with Jones we have simply capitalism with some socialist flavouring.

If Jones repeats the errors of Market-Socialism, the essay by Communication Workers’ Union activists Maria Exall and Gary Heather Telecommunications of the future under public ownership disappointingly repeats those of state-socialism.  They make a well researched indictment of the post privatisation set-up in the telecommunications industry, however their statement that “Under public ownership surplus was used to finance social investment for the many, while under privatisation was used to finance social investment for the few”, is a more than  exaggerated view of the previous forms of state-ownership in the UK.

The authors advocate a re-integration of the telecommunications industry into the state-sector and explain the tangible benefits that could thus arise. This would be achieved by the exchange of shares for interest bearing bonds. One can understand this as an ameliorative programme within an overall drive for something far better but it is not presented in that way at all.  Instead “this bright future will only become reality if communications industries are, planned, organised and democratically controlled under public ownership to serve the public good along egalitarian lines”.  But instead of painting the picture splendid the authors leave us on the arid plains of state ownership. This is far from a “bright future”.  A call centre worker remains alienated and exploited whether in a state owned or private owned call centre: this vision offers little hope to the wage slave. This proposal by the CWU activists is far cry from the views of their predecessor union the UPW who in 1956 organised a campaign to foster support for the “principles of Industrial Democracy and an appreciation of how those principles can be applied to our everyday working lives.” What they said in The Business of Workers’ Control presents a far brighter future to the generation of today:

“We believe that industry should be so organised that its social purpose should be recognised by all those who engaged within it as paramount.  In other words, while we must recognise and accept the importance of production techniques, this must not blind us to the essential importance of man as man.  This makes us hold fast to a basic belief that industry provides us with an opportunity to develop our qualities not only as producers, but as human beings and as citizens.”

The vision outlined by Bob Crow of the RMT in Rail privatisation – a failed experiment contrasts sharply to that of the CWU comrades. Crow similarly presents clearly the utter failure that privatisation has brought in the railway industry, with £1 billion being extracted each year by the private operators in guaranteed profits delivered by the government from tax-payers’ money.   But Crow makes clear that “there can be no desire to repeat the mistakes of the BR era”.  He wants a rail re-nationalisation which would see trade unions “involved at the ground floor of change, drawing up and delivering an integrated and environmentally sustainable national transport plan”. Furthermore he does not rely on government bonds, calling for re-nationalisation “without compensation”.

His immediate form of ownership would be a combination of “trade unions, national, regional and local authorities, passengers, and the industry itself”.   But he goes further: “Public ownership and democratic accountability must go hand-in-glove, but also in the context of wider social and economic change.” Crow traces the long history of the rail unions’ demands for greater workers’ control from 1914, 1917 and 1945 – in 1953 they argued that nationalisation should be a “preliminary to socialism, and it is in that context that democratic self-management becomes a realistic proposition.”  In this regard Crow stands head and shoulder above the other contributors to the LEAP pamphlet.

The essay by Gerry Gold, The Growing Case for Social Ownership, does take the pamphlet to a different level in stating clearly that “ethical production and capitalist production for profit are mutually exclusive opposites”. Gold recognises the long and often neglected history of co-operatives, which in the world provide over 100 million jobs. He does go out of his way to emphasise that lessons must be learned from the “failures of the bureaucratic, state-run forms of social ownership of the Stalinist period”. Instead – “new forms of participative democratic control and accountability will be needed“.

But he goes one step further, recognising that “self-managed organisations” will have a role in a new form of economy:  “The campaign for social ownership and control should explore ways to distribute the income from the operation of an organisation.  The key issue is the replacement of the wages-for-labour employment contract which along with ownership by investors interested solely in profits are the foundations of the failing social and economic system. Gold calls for a new kind of government resting on an independent social movement, and concludes that it is necessary to recognise “that the old politics is finished and that creative, new solutions must be found.”

The LEAP pamphlet concludes with an appeal by John McDonnell MP that now is the time to “reinvigorate the debate about a new role for social ownership in the 21st century”. From this debate he argues “we need to take forward a campaign for a worker controlled economy, accountable to our communities” into the whole labour movement.

In 1953 The TUC published an Interim Report on Public Ownership which bemoaned criticism of existing structures of industry by advocates of ‘workers control’. They were branded “out-of-date ideas” and it said that a “determined effort ought therefore to be made by education and propaganda” to rinse them out of the movement.  Fifty-five years later communists can celebrate their failure: the ‘good auld cause’ is rising again and to that end the LEAP pamphlet is a most welcome contribution.

]]> http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/social-ownership-for-the-21st-century/feed/ 0 internationalcommunist http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/review-of-a-classic-giovanni-arrighis-the-long-twentieth-century/ http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/review-of-a-classic-giovanni-arrighis-the-long-twentieth-century/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:33:09 +0000 internationalcommunist http://thecommune.wordpress.com/?p=741 ]]>

by Dan Jakopovich

In The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994), Arrighi centres his attention on the examination of systemic capitalist cycles of accumulation: their immanent logic, the interplay between the emerging and old powers (elements of systemic continuity and discontinuity), and the factors of hegemonic consolidation.

Arrighi identifies the birth of the modern inter-state system in the Italian late medieval sub-system of states, which prefigured the four main features of the modern, capitalist world: the impulse for profitability or capital accumulation, the operation of the “balance of power”, “protection-producing industry” (war-making and state-making, self-perpetuating system of military “Keynesianism” or commercialized violence), and the extensive networks of diplomacy (initially mostly employed for trade-related information-gathering and the management of the balance of power, backed by “gunship diplomacy”).

Throughout the book, Arrighi interweaves the analysis of two major forms of power extension – “territorialism” (which perceives territorial expansion as central) and capitalism (which considers territorial expansion primarily as a possible instrument for capital accumulation). The Italian city-states were the first to illustrate this new capitalist logic, basing their power on the dominance of trade circuits, or, more specifically, their European monopoly over commercial exchanges with India and China (with the Islamic world as a mediator). The Dutch United Provinces, with their focus on strengthening their trading position rather than expanding their colonial territories, are another clear example of this non-territorialist capitalist logic (early modern mercantilism).

Arrighi is also quick to clarify these differences do not have any a priori bearing on the intensity of coercion, as the history of capitalist violence all too clearly illustrates. Furthermore, “the capitalist and the territorialist logics of power have not operated in isolation from one another but in relation to one another (…) As a result, actual outcomes have departed significantly, even diametrically, from what is implicit in each logic conceived abstractly.” He goes on to confirm this by pointing out that the most expansionist society proved to be capitalist Europe, rather than territorialist China for instance. However, it is important to note how the new territorial discoveries and colonial conquests of West-European powers developed in pursuit of trade circuits and in accordance with the newly unfolding profit logic. In turn, these conquests strengthened and generalized the very logic that created them in the first place. From its inception, capitalism threaded over the bones and souls of millions of “lesser” (i.e. weaker) humans. Modern slavery itself was the product of the same capitalist logic which later universally codified wage labor. While slavery existed long before classical antiquity, it was further extended and intensified under capitalism, which fully integrated it in its processes of capital accumulation (eg. the triangular trade), primarily as a method of compensating for the scarcity of adequate colonial labor force. Arrighi points out that “the earliest beginnings of the nineteenth-century free trade movement can be traced to the Atlantic slave trade” (p.244).

He argues that the Habsburg failure to embrace the new post-medieval modernity led to Spain’s relatively swift demise as the dominant power. The second half of the 16th and first half of the 17th century were marked by a sharp increase in militarization and violent power balancing. This systemic chaos led to popular class revolt, as well as religious (ideological) strife, a series of religious innovations and restorations. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia finally inaugurated the beginning of “ordered international anarchy” based on inter-state “law”, state sovereignty, and the balance of powers. Considerable freedoms for commerce across political borders were also established. It is this “reorganization of political space in the interest of capital accumulation” which, for Arrighi, signifies the birth of capitalism as a world system. In contrast to the Italian city-state system which functioned well as a regional subsystem within a larger medieval system, the systemic struggle of the 16th and 17th century (especially the Thirty Years War) forced European powers to rationalize their relationships in order to preserve their common class interests.

As the colonialist “latecomers had radically to restructure the political geography of world commerce” (p.49), they adopted a new strategic synthesis of “territorialist” and “capitalist” approaches. Britain, geographically protected from the self-destructive continental conflicts, channeled its resources towards overseas colonial conquest, relatively quickly attaining global supremacy and establishing a new inter-state system which came to be known as “free-trade imperialism”. One major consequence of the new system was that “(u)nder free trade and equal exchange Indians perished by the millions”, Arighi notes in passing (quoting Polany).

A major violation of the established Westphalian inter-state principles occurred during the rise of expansionist Napoleonic France, both through its direct attack on state sovereignty and its limitations of commercial and property rights. Arrighi describes how the British leadership of the victorious anti-Napoleonic alliance, and the subsequent restoration and supersession of the Westphalia System (formalized in the Settlement of Vienna of 1815 and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1818), reaffirmed and deepened British hegemony after the destabilizing American secession, as well as the French Revolution.

Echoing the concepts of Machiavelli and Gramsci, Arrighi points to the “coalitional” nature of international hegemony, which is based both on coercion and consent, and a system of states. In addition to leading the world in its direction, a power’s dominance can be manifested in its ability to draw “other states into its own path of development” (p.29). This is precisely what he sees as something that had largely characterized the British strategy (eg. with its unilateral and self-serving introduction of non-restricted, “free” trade).

Particularly after the demise of the overtly reactionary Holy Alliance (the “age of Metternich”), the British-directed Concert of Europe came to the forefront as a new “system” of international governance. Arrighi claims that the British dominance over the new transcontinental economic markets supported the development and exporting of a liberal capitalist ideology in which the “wealth of nations” concept served to legitimate an emerging global system that eroded old national boundaries through “invisible instruments of rule over other sovereign states” (p.56). The revolutionary upheavals brought forward a renewed interest in the preservation of common ruling class interests (furthermore, it could be argued, the rebellions led to the rise of the bourgeoisie, which was more interested in business activities than commercially unproductive forms of nationalist power struggles). Still, “the creation in the nineteenth century of a part-capitalist and part-territorialist imperial structure (…) shows that the formation and expansion of the capitalist world-economy has not involved so much a supersession as a continuation by other, more effective means of the imperial pursuits of pre-modern times.” (p.58)

Combined with the German maturation as a major force, beginning in the 1870s, the emergence of the United States – superior in size and resources – further destabilized the existing “Pax Britannica”. It was largely these two counter-hegemonic challenges which pushed the world system into a new stage of systemic chaos. In particular, the new externally expansionist nature of German imperialism led to bloody outcomes in the 20th century. Germany was a latecomer to the expansionist colonial agenda, which was already brutally initiated in earlier epochs both by Britain (mostly) overseas and the US continentally. In fact, the birth of the United States as a new hegemon cannot be separated from the horrific genocide against the Native American population.

The US kept the doors of its domestic market closed to foreign products for a long time, focusing on an endogenous, auto-centric developmental strategy. It fully engaged in international affairs only in the Second World War, ”leading the inter-state system towards the restoration of principles, norms and rules of the Westphalia System, and then went on to govern and remake the system it had restored” (p.65), and accumulating huge war credits in the process. Again, similarly to post-Napoleonic Britain, the hegemonic power came to embody a perceived general interest. This unified vision led to the construction of the Bretton Woods institutions, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, as well as the international dollar system. In addition to these innovations (along with the remarkable rise and spread of large scale, vertically integrated transnational corporations), the principle of absolute state sovereignty was informally limited in the course of the Cold War, which was a major source of US political legitimacy in the post-war period (especially since it was the only force capable of defeating the Soviet Union), but often also a rationale for forceful integration into the capitalist world, which led to major conflicts and a crisis of US legitimacy (1960s and 70s). Furthermore, the US initiated regulatory thrust (largely a response to the British deregulatory period) and the Marshall Plan created another opportunity for broadening the global markets and remaking the developed world according to its own image, while the creation of a military-industrial complex represented a new means for sustaining and internalizing demand. The military-industrial complex, in turn, has provided a major incentive for an aggressive US foreign policy.

In the latter part of the book, Arrighi also deals with a new global development – the rise of neoliberalism, though he perhaps does not give it quite the attention it deserves. The specificity of the US system of global governance is that it had presided both over the regulatory thrust after the Second World War, and the neoliberal transformation which emerged out of the systemic crisis of the 1970s. Furthermore, it could be theorised (as David Harvey’s famous argument about ”accumulation by dispossession” in The New Imperialism seems to corroborate) that we’re witnessing a return to a more territorialist policy of the world’s leading power, a partial ”reversal” as a result of resource wars and the rise of non-cooperative regimes.

Arrighi concludes his overview of systemic cycles of accumulation and world governance, their tendencies and counter-tendencies, with an analysis and speculative narrative of the rise of Japan and the “Asian tigers” (but not China). He contemplates the possibility of Japan’s development into a hegemonic power (a popular notion in the early 1990s), which has not materialized. However, Japan’s “membership” in the dominant Triad (along with the US and EU) does point to some important facts, namely Japan’s continued economic strenth, as well as its deep integration in the main global political and cultural trends (as “an honorary member of the West” – p.353), which puts it at a distinct advantage in front of politically and socially less-integrated China, which has so far been unable to construct a strong and comprehensive system of international alliances (and therefore seemingly “disinterested” in relation to this).

Arrighi’s account of capitalist development is striking not just for its apt portrayal of vast and rapid systemic innovations and alterations; it also depicts the underlying continuity of its basic profit-making agenda and basic modes or rules of operation. However, Arrighi repeatedly questions the limits of its growth, seemingly evoking Marx’s belief in change and the potential for systemic supersession. He warns: “there is no reason to suppose that in the present just as in past hegemonic transitions, what at one point appears unlikely or even unthinkable, should not become likely and eminently reasonable at a later point, under the impact of escalating systemic chaos” (p.76). It is, at least, a call for openness and reflection, if not action.

on friday 29th david broder posted a review of revolutionary strategy, a new book by the cpgb’s mike macnair. this provoked more than seventy comments, and mike himself has written a response, which we reproduce here.

1. Political economy and changes in the working class

The reasons for the historical cast of my book are given in two places: on page 5: “Humans have no guide to action in the future other than theorising on what has happened in the past, and we do it all the time we are awake.”. And on page 26: “When you are radically lost it becomes necessary to retrace your steps.” To offer yet another version: the left is currently screwed up; in part it is screwed up by clinging to ideas which have been tried and failed. “How far are the fundamentals of Marx and Engels’ political strategy still relevant to us today? What should we maintain, and what should we throw out, from the subsequent elaboration of strategy by socialists and communists from the late 19th to the late 20th century?” (p19).

This exercise is largely an exercise in clearing the ground in relation to strategy – long term politics. Assessing the present political economic dynamics and the dynamics of the immediate class struggle comes after this exercise.

That said, my overall judgment is that present global conditions are not in an absolute sense new, and are more like the later 19th century than they are like any part of the ‘short 20th century’ (1914-1991). The exception to this judgment is, however, the dead weight of Stalinism and Social-Democracy (and, to a lesser extent, syndicalism) which still weighs down on the workers’ movement. The US is, as Britain was then, in relative decline but still dominant: we are not, I think, on the verge of a new 1914. Globally, capitalism, and with it the proletariat – the class dependent on wage-earning – has grown dramatically at the expense of peasant and artisan production. There has been a major shift to financial globalisation. These features were also characteristic of the later 19th century. So – as you quote me – is the fact that workplaces are commonly smaller than the giant factories of the 20th century. (Richard Price, Labour in British Society (1990) is a mine of relevant material). Hence, the ‘new’ is less new than it appears.

Overall patterns and dynamics, of course, have their limits and are translated into differing forms at more local levels. Jamie Gough’s Work, Locality and the Rhythms of Capital (2003) demonstrates brilliantly on the micro-scale of London how geographical shifts and forms of organisation of production are adapted and re-adapted by capital to address the problem of controlling the workforce.

As to a couple of particular points in your comments on changes in the working class. (i) On migrant workers, in fact what is involved is a permanent dynamical contradiction of capitalism, not a novelty. More in my 2006 Yürükoğlu lecture, ‘Fortress the West’ (http://www.t-k-p.org/yazarlar/ry/lectures/Fortress%20the%20West.pdf). (ii) Your statement that “manufacturing and mining are in sharp decline” is obviously true of the UK, but certainly not true of the global economy.

On the London Underground cleaners’ strike, this seems to me to be atypical rather than typical. The reasons are, first, that the underlying institution – the Underground – is public monopoly infrastructure, whatever ‘contracting out’ arrangements have been made in the legal forms, and Tube shut-downs by industrial action are very seriously disruptive to the City finance capitalist core of the UK economy. Second (and connected to the first) the railworkers are one of the best organised sections of the British working class and among the most militant. The cleaners are at the fringe of this system relative to drivers, etc, but they are nonetheless in a very different position to workers in small factories, offices, shops, etc., who form the clear majority of the UK working class.

Your emphasis on this point seems to me to contain an implicit syndicalism, which is the common coin of the far left: workplace organisation of the employed workers is to be the centre of any revival of the class movement. The economic conditions between the opening of the arms race around 1900 and the 1920s, and again from the beginning of rearmament in the mid 1930s, through the ‘Keynesian’ period, down to the crisis of 1981-2 and Thatcherism, strongly favoured trade union organisation at the point of production and shop-stewardism. But we are not in those times now, and the cases where workplace organisation alone will build the movement are limited. In order to rebuild the class movement from its present weak situation we are going to have to relearn lessons from a much earlier stage of its history.

2. Chávez and Mao, or “What is the left for?”

These are extremely secondary issues. My discussion of Chávez is addressed to the Chávez fan-club among leftists who take Chávez’ leftist and “Trotskyist” rhetoric as representing a political alternative. Now it may be that (as you appear to argue) Chávez is merely a bonapartist demagogue who doesn’t believe what he says. I don’t think this is proved: for all I know, Chávez himself may be sincere in his belief in his “21st century socialism”. The point I am making is that even if he is, it still doesn’t lead anywhere – precisely because it is about moral sentiments rather than strategy. “Create two, three, many Venezuelas” is rather less compelling than “create two, three, many Vietnams” (which was always an illusory strategy, but at least looked like a strategy).

The stuff about Mao is even more secondary. My primary point is that Trotsky’s argument for automatic defencism in colonial and semicolonial countries attacked by imperialism does not hold water. The defencist line, and even ‘pointing your guns in the same direction’, might merely result in tying the workers’ movement to a collapsing state regime ¬- however much the left took political distance from the regime. Secondly, the far left has been recently faced with choices like those that faced Chinese communists. Taleban-defencism in Afghanistan, joining ‘the resistance’ in Iraq, are roads to extermination of the left however much the left took political distance from the Taleban or ‘the resistance’. (Quote-marks because ‘the resistance’ in Iraq is a variety of separate warlord groups with opposed interests and opposed political ideas.)

However, though I reject automatic colonial-country defencism, I do not reject revolutionary defencism as a tactic in all circumstances. Revolutionary defencism does not mean supporting the existing state or bourgeois leadership. It means addressing masses who are want to defend their country against a foreign invasion or liberate it from foreign occupation, where this attitude is justified (i.e. we are not merely in a war for redivision of the world between rival imperialists) with the idea that in order to defend against attack, it is necessary for the working class to take power away from the existing capitalist (etc.) regime.

On this I agree with Trotsky’s turn to the ‘proletarian military policy’ after the fall of France partially reshaped the political character of World War II (in Writings 1939-40). The point is that the question is in each case one of tactical judgment of how to get over to the broad masses in the concrete situation the idea that the working class needs to take power. In no case is political support for the capitalist, etc., government/ state acceptable. In some cases ‘pointing your guns in the same direction’ is right. It’s a matter of tactical judgment. In the particular case of the Hitler-Stalin pact and its subsidiary aspects, the occupation of the Baltics and eastern Poland and the invasion of Finland, it would have been right for any Russian left opponents of the regime who were able to do any sort of political work to call these scab acts even if the regime was a workers’ state. On the other hand, in the case of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 I think it is blindingly obvious that the only way any such left opponents could reach the masses would be by a revolutionary-defencist policy, even if the Stalinist regime was properly characterised as ‘state capitalist’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ or whatever.

I don’t think that such tactics compromise proletarian class-political independence from the bourgeoisie. Equally, pointing out that the bourgeoisie, or whatever, are inconsistent or vacillating in the defence of what needs to be defended does not amount to giving them political support.

3. The state

This is the central question. It involves some historical issues (the first four paragraphs of this part of the review) and some theoretical ones (the remainder of the section, including the Marx quotes selected by Cyril Smith).

(A) Historical evidence

(a) “Revolutions where parties based themselves on the existing state machinery, or the existing organisations of the workers’ movement took power, have also all failed.” True, but the Russian revolution got further than others: the earliest point at which it can really be said to have failed is the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the turn at this time to overriding the working class majority and alliance with the spetsy to create a bureaucratic state; IMO it was still possible down to 1921 that the Russians could be saved by the revolution in western Europe, in which case the Red Terror, and so on, would be remembered merely as regrettable but unavoidable emergency measures.

(b) “there is no evidence that revolutions with workers’ councils failed because these organs are unable to assert their authority: despite enjoying high degrees of authority across Germany and Russia in their brief existence, these organs were crushed by counter-revolutions.” The Hungarian Soviet Republic was indeed crushed by counter-revolution. The German and Austrian Räte were, on the contrary, in their large majority incorporated behind the Social-Democrats. (The Berlin uprising of January 1919 was a ‘July Days’, i.e. localised; the Bavarian ‘Soviet republic’ was merely a short-lived minority putsch, not a mass movement.) Most other revolutionary movements (Italy, Spain, etc.) have not got even this far with the council form.
In this respect, my point about the Russian soviets’ form of organisation is that a Congress of Soviets which met infrequently could not hold its Executive Committee to account – let alone the Sovnarkom which was theoretically accountable to the Executive Committee. In order to hold the government to account, the congress would have needed to become a standing body which met every weekday apart from holidays, like a parliament. But the form (infrequently meeting congress/ soviet – more frequently meeting executive committee, + daily meeting government) is copied from the form of workers’ organisations (trade unions and parties). The point is that the organisations of struggle are inappropriate in their forms to the task of exercising power, i.e. taking coordinating decisions for the whole society.

(c) Sovnarkom “was an undemocratic manoeuvre against the soviets and grassroots power”. This is illusory. OK, Rabinowitch argues that Lenin wanted an all-Bolshevik government and manoeuvred to seize power before the Congress of Soviets in order to get this. But in fact – as he makes clear – Lenin did not win his proposals in the Bolshevik CC; and the Left SRs and others agreed to the October pre-emptive strike against Kerensky, because there was a real risk that Kerensky would prevent the Congress from meeting. All parties at the Congress except the anarchists, who were numerically trivial, wanted a government to be formed. The majority certainly favoured a government of the ‘broad left’, but it was the Mensheviks and Right SRs who refused to participate in a government which included the Bolsheviks (who were either the majority or the largest minority) and therefore made such a government wholly impossible.

(d) Sovnarkom “within months – before the civil war – had bureaucratically centralised economic control and pulled the rug from underneath the factory committees.” False, for two reasons.
The first is that the civil war started with the attack of Krasnov’s Cossacks on 28-29 October, or the beginning of the operations of Alexeev’s Volunteer Army and Kaledin’s Don Cossacks in December 1917. Allied military intervention against the revolution arguably began with British political and (attempted) military support for Kornilov’s attempted coup in September 1917; certainly, the British secret service was supporting efforts to organise White military forces and paying for industrial sabotage operations from the end of October (Kettle, The Allies & the Russian Collapse).
Second, Lenin’s (and Trotsky’s) turn away from workers control is datable to March-April 1918, i.e. is intimately connected with the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the associated (i) removal of Left SR support, (ii) Menshevik political revival in soviet elections, and (iii) expansion of White military operations (which is taken by anarchist and Liberal/ social-democratic critics of the Bolsheviks, though not by open rightists and military historians, to be the start of the civil war).

(e) “The author has also elsewhere criticised workers’ councils as undemocratic on the grounds that they do not represent working-class people who do not have jobs (students, pensioners, disabled people, the unemployed etc.): but in fact there is no reason why workers’ councils should just be composed of workplace delegates, and in Russia such people as Mike mentions had every right to vote in soviet elections.” My point is not directed primarily against the Russian Soviets – which were, in substance, (as Trotsky says, below) united fronts of all sorts of class organisations (parties, factory committees, trade unions, and some sorts of campaign groups). It is primarily directed against western interpretations of these bodies as purely delegates of workplaces.
Both the 1918 Soviet constitution, and Marx’s interpretation of the Commune constitution, propose self-government of localities (including the workplaces in those localities) through universal-suffrage councils, with the central decision-making body government taking the form of delegates from the local councils.

(f) “The point about workers’ councils is not some organisational fetish – indeed, “workers’ council” would be a somewhat inaccurate characterisation of the 1871 Paris Commune, but it was still an organ of workers’ power – but that they have in history arisen in struggle and proven to be armed organs of working-class power counterposed to the bourgeois state machinery.” Actually, however, this is still a fetish, in this case a fetishism of ‘organs arising from the direct class struggle’.
Compare Trotsky on Spain (1931): “We succeeded in creating Soviets in Russia only because the demand for them was raised, together with us, by the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries, although, to be sure, they had different aims in mind. We cannot create any Soviets in Spain precisely because neither the Socialists nor the syndicalists want Soviets. This means that the united front and the organizational unity with the majority of the working class cannot be created under this slogan.” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain09.htm). Trotsky’s judgment was confirmed by the later events of the revolution and civil war: though the workers created militias and in places seized factories, etc., they did not create soviets. What was missing was “a party, a party, and again a party” (Trotsky).
Subsequent events have in my opinion confirmed and reconfirmed this judgment: the mass desire for revolutionary change after 1945 was overwhelmingly expressed through the revived workers’ parties and trade unions – who, of course, betrayed the masses either by restoring capitalist order, or by creating Stalinist regimes; the Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956 did not even aspire to take power; the role of the ‘committees for the defence of the revolution’ in Cuba was entirely secondary (and in any case they were created in response to government appeals); David’s own work on 1968 shows that any tendency towards the creation of workers’ councils was completely secondary in the course of events; and so on …

(B) Theoretical

(a) The core of the issue is this. Is the proletarian revolution the immediate abolition of all states and classes and the leap into the kingdom of freedom and truly human relations? Or is it merely a moment in transition in this direction, one which ‘sets free’ the logic of development:
“The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.” The Civil War in France, ch 5, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm).
Or a moment in which the working class becomes strong enough to employ general means of coercion:
“[Bakunin]: If there is a state [gosudarstvo], then there is unavoidably domination [gospodstvo], and consequently slavery. Domination without slavery, open or veiled, is unthinkable — this is why we are enemies of the state. What does it mean, the proletariat organized as ruling class?
[Marx:] It means that the proletariat, instead of struggling sectionally against the economically privileged class, has attained a sufficient strength and organization to employ general means of coercion in this struggle. It can however only use such economic means as abolish its own character as salariat, hence as class. With its complete victory its own rule thus also ends, as its class character has disappeared.” (Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm).
In the first case – that the proletarian revolution is the immediate abolition of all states and classes and the leap into the kingdom of freedom and truly human relations – an essentially spontaneist or Bakuninist approach is appropriate. The mass movement, set free of the constraints of the capitalist state system, will work out its own solutions.
In the second case, the revolution is merely the creation of “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor” and “a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.” (both from The Civil War in France, ch 5). The revolution is then not in itself the abolition of classes, but the creation of stronger means for the proletariat to fight for its interests – to expropriate the capitalists where they have already socialised production, as in the natural monopolies and the giant oligopolistic corporations, and to subordinate the petty proprietors, (including managers, etc.) to the proletariat. The result is that it is necessary to consider the question of what political forms will have the effect of subordinating – primarily – managers and bureaucrats to those they manage.

(b) Marx is ambiguous on this issue. Alongside the quotations I have just given are those used by Cyril Smith, which you cite. My opinion is that these probably mean less than Cyril made them mean.
In the quotation from the Poverty of Philosophy Cyril cut out a large part of the passage which is about coercion, as distinct from the immediate passage to the end of classes: see the text at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm.
The quotations from The Civil War in France are not from the published text but from the first draft (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch01.htm#D1s1). The published version reduces considerably the idea of the Commune as representing the immediate transition beyond the class order, as opposed to the beginning of the proletariat working out this transition. Since the published text was sufficiently ‘scandalous’ it is unlikely that the changes in question are made in order to ‘tone down’ Marx’s ‘real’ positions: more likely that Marx concluded that the original text overstated the point or was too close to Bakunin’s views.
The remark on Bakunin is from the Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874) (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch01.htm#D1s1). A full reading of this text is in my opinion flatly inconsistent with the use Cyril makes of it in the passage quoted. More generally, the reading of Marx as proposing the proletarian revolution as an immediate leap beyond class society seems inconsistent with Marx’s practical politics in the First International, in the various correspondence with the Germans including the Critique of the Gotha Programme, and in the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier.
Nonetheless, a reading of Marx in these terms is a possible reading.

(c) The underlying reason for supposing that the proletarian revolution is not in itself and immediately the abolition of classes is the limits – to date – of the capitalist socialisation of small-scale property and production, and particularly of small-scale intellectual property in the form of specialist skills and its concomitant, the proletarianisation of intellectual labour.
We have progressed a long way forward on this front from winter 1917-1918, when the resistance of the managers, civil servants and peasants completely dislocated the Russian economy. The Bolsheviks were then forced – and any regime whatever would also have been forced – to make major concessions to spetsy in order to get access to the information the spetsy possessed so as to get production started again, the cities supplied with food, etc. Otherwise the cities would have starved and the Whites would have won the civil war. The concessions were both in wages/ salaries/ rations, and in authority relations in the workplace and the army. That was the real reason, not ‘elitist’, ‘partyist’, or ‘vanguardist’ malevolence, for Lenin’s April 1918 turn against workers’ control.
But though we have progressed a long way, we are not yet in a place where any group of train drivers could jump into the role of general managers of a renationalised railway and run it without assistance from the technical staff – or, equally important, where any group of urban workers could go out to take over the running of a family farm (whose owner has cut production in order to coerce the workers’ regime). We are moving in that direction, both through increased general education, and through the production of books (and web materials) through which technical information can be picked up. Probably, even in a full socialist system training periods will be needed for particular tasks as well as general education and access to published information.
But let us assume for the moment that the fall of the US world-hegemony turns out to be the fall of capitalism also and the working class takes over in the coming century. It is clear that there will still be major skills and training bottlenecks, and that large areas of production will still operate on the basis of small family enterprises. The small un-socialised private ownership of information, therefore, will continue to be the basis of a class of petty proprietors separate from the proletariat – including managerial and bureaucratic specialists (and probably also one of small capitalists). The problem is how to subordinate these groups to the interests of the working class.
In fact, this is also a present problem of the workers’ movement before it gets to the point of overthrowing the capitalist state regime (as I argue in the book at pp 45-47, 62, 90-98, and 108-110). We can’t do without trade union, party, etc., full-time or part-time officials: the result of trying to do so is the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’. But the officials – even of the SWP or LCR or AWL – have common interests with managers and state bureaucrats antagonistic to the interests of the working class. The capitalist class rules through the support of the labour bureaucracy. So the problem is how to subordinate the bureaucrats to the ranks. Marx clearly thought it was easy, as can be seen in several points in the Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy. He was wrong …

(d) The idea of the “democratic republic” is shorthand – as, in fact, the ideas of ‘soviet power’, ‘workers’ councils’ or a ‘workers’ government’ also are. What is it shorthand for? It is not a rigid blueprint for a new state, but shorthand for a set of political principles and some relevant institutions.
Republicanism is a body of political ideas, distinct from, prior to, and opposed to Liberalism, which was current between the late 17th and the mid 19th century. In the course of the 19th century fell out of favour, first among bourgeois politicians, and then (in the generation of Kautsky) in the workers’ movement. It has been revived as a modern academic political theory, alternative to Liberalism, by Philip Pettit (Republicanism (1997) and others. The reason for taking it seriously in connection with Marxism is that Marx and Engels grew up when Republicanism was still politically current and were part of the ‘democratic’, i.e. democratic-republican, movement in their youth; the Chartists were certainly Republican in their political ideas; and the republican principle of freedom from domination is a recurrent theme in Marx and Engels’ work. It’s one which they don’t, however, often refer to explicitly: the reason is that modern Liberal political theory, as distinct from Liberal political economy, was only beginning to emerge during their lives.

The central idea of Republican political theory is opposition to permanent relations of domination and subordination among humans: the lifelong authority of kings and aristocrats, and in modern times that of permanent general secretaries and ‘cadres’. Unlike Liberalism, Republicanism does not seek to escape from this problem by creating a ‘private sphere’ in which the individual is free, but by creating generalised participation in political decision-making and accountability from below.

Classical 17th-18th century republicanism held that this was only possible in a society composed of small owners. It therefore opposed large concentrations of landholding and wealth as tending to corrupt politics; but also supported the exclusion from political rights of ‘dependents’, i.e. women and wage-workers.
Democratic Republicanism broke through this barrier to advocate a republican polity which included all adults. The class fear this engendered among the capitalists led them to break off from Republicanism in favour of Liberalism. Consistent democratic republicans – like the part of the Chartist left, and like Marx and Engels – meanwhile became communists, seeing that private property in general tended to oppose the republican principle of opposition to permanent relations of domination and subordination among humans.
The core democratic republican political principles are therefore at the heart of the Marxist communist goals – as opposed to the hierarchical socialisms of Saint-Simon, etc. Democratic republican institutional forms – like the militia and the election of all state officials – also formed part of the common core programme of the early ‘Marxist’ socialist parties, the French Parti Ouvrier and the Eisenach, Gotha and Erfurt programmes.
We need to retrieve this inheritance of the past of our movement, not out of traditionalism, but because the principles and institutional ideas of democratic republicanism are powerful weapons in the battle of ideas against both the capitalists’ rule-of-law state, and against the labour bureaucracy which supports it.
Some secondary points in this context:
(i) “Mike’s alternative is only vaguely defined: he calls for a “democratic republic” with a “people’s militia”.” In fact, at pp128-129 I give a list of five bullet points including not only demands about the military but also e.g. “election and recallability of all public officials; public officials to be on an average skilled workers’ wage” and “abolition of official secrecy laws and of private rights of copyright and confidentiality.” My five bullet points are themselves examples, and I cross-refer to the CPGB’s Draft programme.
(ii) “it is not clear whether the democratic republic is meant to be the product of the revolution, or whether it is a taking-over of the existing state bureaucracy.” In fact, it should be clear that the actual creation of the democratic republic would be, amount to, the smashing-up of the existing bureaucratic-coercive state. Here I follow Engels in describing the Paris Commune as a “democratic republic”. But, as with the minimum programme in general, individual democratic-republican demands could be won under capitalism – and, if won, would strengthen the position of the working class in future class struggles.
(iii) “Indeed, although he says he is opposed to the rule of law, throughout the book Mike again and again refers to “democracy”.” Democratic Republicanism is opposed to the rule of law. I have argued the point more extensively in an article on the Labor Tribune website: http://www.labortribune.net/ArticleHolder/republicanlaw/tabid/111/Default.aspx.
(iv) “the problem with state ownership in history has not just been a lack of democracy in the state, but the continuation of the law of value and wage labour.” I think arguments that the law of value operated internally within the USSR after the forced collectivisation turn, or in Maoist China, are so unreal as to end up destroying the explanatory value of the ‘law of value’ as a theory. I agree broadly with Ticktin’s argument that the wage in the USSR was something more like a pension (“we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”); or with the view that the relationship of the worker to the firm was analogous to the serf industrial production of 18th century Russia. My point in the passage criticised (p162) is that without accountability of the bureaucrats from below, state ownership is de facto private ownership by the relevant bureaucrats. It is not capitalist ownership (which would be subject to the law of value) but pre-capitalist ownership.

david broder reviews revolutionary strategy, a new book by the cpgb’s mike macnair

There is much of value in any serious attempt to talk about the tasks of the left today, and what exactly the purpose of its existence is: Mike Macnair’s new book, which carries the subtitle “Marxism and the challenge of left unity” is certainly this. The left sects are crying out for some ideas and some definition for their project: what we have at the moment is a maelstrom of sectarian and internally undemocratic groups, with philistine hostility towards discussion and utter disdain for ideas other than those quoted from the holy texts of Lenin and Trotsky.

Mike himself makes many apt criticisms of the left groups of today, for example in terms of their bureaucratism, their pretentious “internationals” and their fake “broad left” unity initiatives. He criticises statist ideas of workers’ power. Clearly there is much to say on these matters, and this book is an important contribution to the debate: or, should I say, it is to the extent that there is any debate, since none of the left groups concerned are likely either to respond to the book or take stock of its arguments. Furthermore, as I shall describe, Mike’s own vision for the strategy for communism is in several areas somewhat mechanical, and he says little about the tasks of communists in the workers’ movement – as opposed to the arguments to be had among the organised far left – in the here and now.

Economy

Surely a central part of elaborating a strategy for revolution should be some analysis of what is happening in the world economy and the objective changes in the British, European and world working class. This should include both commentary on the current crisis, and on broader changes in class composition. If I were to write a piece on Marxism today, or how the left should organise and what its objectives and project should be, this would be the first thing I’d write. But Mike does very little of this, and draws most of his arguments and conclusions from debates had during the revolutionary wave of 1916-21, and to a lesser extent, the period of struggles between the general strike in France in May-June 1968 and the Portuguese revolution. But a lot has changed even in the last thirty years.

The working class is ever more international, and the number of people who have to sell their labour power has massively increased and now represents a majority of the world population; in the most developed capitalist countries there are increased numbers of migrant workers; significant technological advances as well as outsourcing have shrunk the industrial working class, while activities like manufacturing and mining are in sharp decline; welfarism and state capitalism, both in the former Eastern Bloc and in the West, are much weaker than thirty years ago; and many jobs have been casualised. All of these changes, allied with attacks on the workers’ movement’s rights to organise, have impacted on working-class consciousness to the extent that there is a wide current of opinion believing that the working class either barely exists or has disappeared altogether.

My point is emphatically not that economic changes have put revolution off the agenda, and neither does the changed world situation automatically disqualify past arguments about what tactics we need. Similarly, I am far from being an economic determinist: certainly I do not believe that large economic crises necessarily lead to heightened class struggle and revolutions even if the working class lacks confidence in itself and ideas for change. Such – economistic – views of “spontaneous combustion” have nothing to do with Marx’s method.

Nevertheless, changes in class composition do mean that the workers’ movement has to organise differently and alter its priorities. I am sure that one of the main subjects of discussion at the commune’s upcoming series on class struggle in the 1970s will be what has changed since then, and in what ways it is possible to import lessons of that time to today. The only reference I could find in Revolutionary strategy to this subject was a paragraph (pp. 29-30) asserting that the “growing fragmentation of labour”, i.e. smaller workplaces, means that “the means of struggle need to change: they need to shift from workplace collective organisation to district collective organisation”. Mike writes that, in this vein, trade unions ought to organise the unemployed and furthermore “perform significant welfare and education functions rather than simply being an instrument of collective bargaining on wages and conditions”.

But although community organising is all very well and good, Mike just sidesteps the question of organising workers in their workplaces too, and how to do that today. The recent – successful – London Underground cleaners’ strike shows both the possibility and necessity of organising more diverse groups of workers than the ‘classic’ industrial working class. Indeed, to use a crude phrase, the Tube cleaners ‘tick several boxes’ in this regard, in that they work in small numbers, on shifts; they are almost exclusively migrant workers; they are mostly women; the job is badly paid and it is easy to get sacked, particularly when Tube bosses raise questions over their immigration status. Of course, despite the other political issues directly relating to the strike – activists from the Campaign Against Immigration Controls and Feminist Fightback were very much involved in organising and publicising it – it does not automatically lead to some sort of “revolutionary consciousness”: but this sort of struggle is extremely important for breathing energy into trade unions and facilitating the recomposition of the workers’ movement.

What is the left for?

Presumably the reason why Mike’s book about strategies for revolution is largely about the debates of yesteryear is that the left today simply has no strategy for revolution all, and so there is nothing much to argue with. It is barely even true that the SWP envisage a mass strike followed by a seizure of power by themselves, since in fact they never talk about revolution or communism and have hardly any perspectives beyond their latest electoral manoeuvre or activist initiative designed to party-build and give their students ’something to do’.

Similarly, although the supporters of Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” can at least claim to have some engagement with reality, given that Chávez is in power and enacting some meaningful reforms, they do not have any idea of what their “revolution” is actually for. All that matters is that Chávez is in power. The problem is not just, as Mike comments, that Chávez “offers no real strategic lesson for the left” (p.9) but rather that the “Bolivarian revolution” does not have any variant of the objective of working-class power at all – in fact, Chávez’s rule has not even seen expropriations and state commandism. The resurgence of the Venezuelan workers’ movement owes much to the response to the 2002 attempted coup and lock-out, but that does not reflect working-class control over the “Bolivarian revolution”. The way that Mike criticises Chávez – for not having a strategy – is off the point, and reminiscent of both the way in which Trotsky criticised Mao for not “participating actively in the front lines” of the Kuomintang and the way in which Mike has commented on that discussion in the Weekly Worker. In the WW article Mike does of course clearly assert his hostility towards Maoism and bureaucracy – much as Revolutionary strategy makes some apposite criticisms of bureaucratic ‘socialism’ – but the way he reads off tactical and military lessons from the Maoists is abstract and makes no attempt to differentiate between purely military tactics and the strategy for class struggle. Mao’s insistence on the independence of his forces is not parallel in any shape or form to third campism.

Indeed, a central difference between Mao’s ‘independent course’ and that of third camp class struggle politics is that, unlike a clique’s military efforts to seize control of government by force, which could take any number of forms and include any alliances, a working-class revolution necessarily relies on class independence (or at least vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie, if we assume that the petty bourgeoisie will just be pulled along by either the bourgeoisie or working class). If it is not an all-out class struggle, then it will not be able to abolish the state or reorganise the economy to overcome the law of value, but rather replace one set of rulers with another. As the Solidarity group once wrote in a different context, “Means and ends are mutually dependent. They constantly influence each other. The means are, in fact, a partial implementation of the end, whereas the end becomes modified by the means adopted.”

If Mao’s forces really had been a workers’ movement with a revolutionary project, then it would still have been wrong to ally with the Kuomintang – even regardless of military considerations – since it would have undermined the confidence of the working class in itself, derailed the objectives of the struggle, and the Kuomintang would have been able to ‘veto’ any manner of demands, most importantly the revolution itself. Indeed, this had more or less played out already, in 1927. But as we know, Mao was not leading a working-class or communist movement, and the problem with “surrounding the cities” was not its impractability, but that the objectives of the “people’s war” were reactionary! Obvious as it is that Mike Macnair is not a Maoist, he talks about Mao’s strategy with a somewhat detached air, and I find it hard to see any value in such discussion.

In his discussion of communist attitudes towards war, Mike writes as if a series of correct manoeuvres and alliances could bring the revolution to its conclusion. This is problematic since on the Trotskyist left undue stress is often laid on the idea that the problem with cross-class alliances is that they are inoperable and fail, as in the case of the Spanish civil war, rather than that they are unprincipled. In fact the problem here was not that popular fronts are inadmissible because the bourgeoisie will not consistently fight fascists – for sure they cannot be relied on, but may well do so, as in the case of World War II – but rather that the formation of the alliance is in itself puts the idea of fighting capital as such off the agenda. In the case of Spain, the working-class revolution was crushed thanks to the anarchist (CNT-FAI) and centrist (POUM) leaders’ participation in the popular front. Not only was there the problem that the bourgeois Republicans made tactical errors because of their class standpoint, for example their delay in arming the working class and their refusal to grant Morocco independence and thus curry favour with Arab troops, but also that to maintain alliance with them the far left had to demobilise the revolution.

The belief that we should not bloc with sections of the bourgeoisie to fight imperialism, fascism and so on just because they are inconsistent or vacillating lends itself to support for them when they are waging such struggles. The author writes that although Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR as a gain for the working class was wrong, and so a “revolutionary defencist” attitude towards its attacks on Finland, Poland and the Baltic States in autumn 1939 would be misplaced, he would take a revolutionary defencist attitude to the USSR “in some circumstances (like the 1941 German invasion)” (p.82). Quite why he would do so is not explained.

Without exception, support for bourgeois forces means a partial abandonment of class struggle. I will clarify that by saying that in some circumstances it may be temporarily useful to “point your guns in the same direction” as a section of the ruling class – it is interesting that Hal Draper specifically counterposes this to his idea of “military support” in the ABC of National Liberation movements. Doing this is not “support” though, in terms of propping up someone else’s fight: it is merely a tactic used when fighting your own struggle for your own objectives. There is an article by the International Communist Current about Lenin’s supposed “alliance” with Kerensky against Kornilov which is quite useful on this score.

The state

Mike is right to point out flaws with the “mass strike” idea of revolution, particularly in that the unravelling of the economy does not necessarily mean that any alternative centre of authority is posed. This was most obviously the case in the general strike in France in 1968, which I debated Mike on at the CPGB summer school this month. However, although the term “workers’ government” is abstract (indeed, the JCR, now the LCR, called for this in June 1968 while refusing to call for a vote for either major workers’ party), Mike’s alternative is not that far from it.

He criticises the left for its exaggerated interest in workers’ councils (this is hardly the case in Britain today), and argues “Workers’ councils and similar forms have appeared in many strike waves and revolutionary crises since 1917. In none have these forms been able to offer an alternative centre of authority, an alternative decision-making mechanism for the whole society. This role is unavoidably played by a government – either based on the existing military-bureaucratic state core, or on the existing organs of the workers’ movement” (p.49).

This is quite a conclusion to draw from history, given that – of course – revolutions where parties based themselves on the existing state machinery, or the existing organisations of the workers’ movement took power, have also all failed. And there is no evidence that revolutions with workers’ councils failed because these organs are unable to assert their authority: despite enjoying high degrees of authority across Germany and Russia in their brief existence, these organs were crushed by counter-revolutions.  It is not the case that “it was Sovnarkom, the government formed by the Bolsheviks and initially including some of their allies, and its ability to reach out through the Bolshevik Party as a national organisation, which ’solved’ the crisis of authority affecting Russia in 1917″: this was an undemocratic manoeuvre against the soviets and grassroots power, and indeed within months – before the civil war - had bureaucratically centralised economic control and pulled the rug from underneath the factory committees.

The author has also elsewhere criticised workers’ councils as undemocratic on the grounds that they do not represent working-class people who do not have jobs (students, pensioners, disabled people, the unemployed etc.): but in fact there is no reason why workers’ councils should just be composed of workplace delegates, and in Russia such people as Mike mentions had every right to vote in soviet elections. The point about workers’ councils is not some organisational fetish – indeed, “workers’ council” would be a somewhat inaccurate characterisation of the 1871 Paris Commune, but it was still an organ of workers’ power - but that they have in history arisen in struggle and proven to be armed organs of working-class power counterposed to the bourgeois state machinery.

Mike’s alternative is only vaguely defined: he calls for a “democratic republic” with a “people’s militia”. He criticises those who hold both that a workers’ government would incite class struggle and also that it would only be a workers’ government if it was created on the basis of class struggle: but it is not clear whether the democratic republic is meant to be the product of the revolution, or whether it is a taking-over of the existing state bureaucracy. I am opposed to the state monopoly of gun control, but the idea of a “people’s militia” has no particular relation to the working class or communism. We are not for popular sovereignty, but rather the smashing of the state machinery and of capital.

He says that ”workers’ control” cannot be imposed from above, and wants the working class “to lay its hands collectively on the means of production” (p.162), “this does not mean state ownership of the means of production, which is merely a legal form. Without democratic republicanism, the legal form of state ownership means private ownership by state bureaucrats”. But the problem with state ownership in history has not just been a lack of democracy in the state, but the continuation of the law of value and wage labour. We do not just want the working class to “control” capital “democratically”, but to uproot it. Indeed, although he says he is opposed to the rule of law, throughout the book Mike again and again refers to “democracy”.

Marx poses the question far better (I have lifted these quotes from Cyril Smith’s Marx at the Millennium):

“The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. … It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.” (Poverty of Philosophy)

“The Commune – the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression – the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organised against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies.” (Civil War in France)

“All France organised into self-working and self-governing communes … the suffrage for the national representation not a matter of sleight-of-hand for an all-powerful government, but the deliberate expression of organised communes, the state functions reduced to a few functions for general national purposes.

“Such is the Commune – the political form of the social emancipation, of the liberation of labour from the usurpations (slave-holding) of the monopolists of the means of labour, created by the labourers themselves or forming the gift of nature. As the state machinery and parliamentarism are not the real life of the ruling classes, but only the organised general organs of their dominion, so the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organised means of action.” (Civil War in France)

Smith also quotes Bakunin writing “There are about 40 million Germans. Does this mean that all 40 million will be members of the government?”, to which Marx responds “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities… When class rule has disappeared, there will be no state in the present political sense.”

Indeed, nowhere in the Civil War in France does Marx refer to the idea of a workers’ state, and for that matter doesn’t criticise the communards for their lack of a revolutionary party, much unlike Trotsky’s Lessons of the Commune which exaggeratedly fetishises the question.

Conclusion

A strategy for communism must not only be centred on a working-class struggle for power, but an understanding of what this power would consist of. The point is not to draw up blueprints – for example, it would be meaningless to draw up a grand plan for rule by workers’ councils unless these organs actually arose in the revolutionary struggle itself – but rather to overcome the terrible failures of the past and restore the idea that working-class rule, and thus communism, is still both possible and desirable.

There will be no “spontaneous combustion” crisis-followed-by-revolution, and nor do parliamentary “enabling acts” and Chávez-style statism have anything to do with working-class self emancipation. Both of these scenarios are élitist and deny the working class, i.e. the participants in the revolution, any subjectivity of their own. Arguing against these left commonplaces is an enormous challenge, and Revolutionary strategy, in parts, goes some way towards doing that.

But the starting point for strategy cannot just be analysis of where the left is at now. The left has poor ideas and poor implantation in the working class, and there is very little prospect of changing its sectism and sectarianism any time soon. We should not in the slightest abstain from that struggle, but two other important tasks also impose themselves: first to outline our vision for society and what alternative we actually have to capitalism, and second to take part in a recomposition of the workers’ movement which gives due attention to the changes in the working class that have taken place in recent decades.