Socialism- the s-word…

Just a thought…

I really wish I could be either enthused or appalled by the fact that Ed Miliband is now leader of the Labour Party. I know the ultra-Blairites, with their fellow travellers in the BBC and on the Murdoch Death Star, who rallied around his brother David as the next best thing to The World’s Favourite Money Grabbing War Monger, are shocked that their cunning plan failed (‘if it hadn’t been for you meddlin’ trade unions…’) Best make the best of a bad job chaps… and go and join the Conservative Party- Education Secretary Michael Gove for one seems pretty keen on embracing the Blair Legacy.

Anyway, ‘Red Ed’? Do me a favour! You may have heard the comment that his father Ralph Miliband claimed that socialism could not come through Parliamentary means and his two sons have gone around proving it in practice. Only in a country where most mainstream politicians are in such awe of a handful of  mindlessly Thatcherite newspapers with declining circulations could someone like Ed Miliband be called a ‘Red’.  It is a bit like Business Secretary Vince ‘privatise the Post Office’ Cable being called a ‘Marxist’ for criticising the City of  London. If there is any sort of ‘Marxist’ class war in this country it is the City of London and its patsies in the mainstream media and the main political parties  against the rest of us…

Now if Vince had walked  around the Square Mile with this placard…

Anyway, socialism is a real political swear word isn’t it? Sometimes I try and think if anything has not been tagged with the ‘s-word’ at some point. I realise that for a lot of people, ‘socialism’ is any form of state intervention in the economy. Sometimes this is expanded to include any state intervention in wider social life or state interventions abroad. I then wonder how it got to this. After all, most of the original socialists were often extremely anti-state…

Every couple of years or so I seem to repost this blogpost written in 2006 by Larry Gambone, a Canadian evolutionary anarchist who now lives in Nanaimo (that’s right isn’t it, Larry?), largely as a quick refresher for those who automatically think socialism = the state:

The Myth Of Socialism As Statism [May 6th 2006]

What did the original socialists envision to be the owner and controller of the economy? Did they think it ought to be the state? Did they favor nationalization? Or did they want something else entirely? Let’s have a look, going right back to the late 18th Century, through the 19th and into the 20th, and see what important socialists and socialist organizations thought.

*Thomas Spence – farm land and industry owned by join stock companies, all farmers and workers as voting shareholders.
* St. Simon – a system of voluntary corporations
* Ricardian Socialists – worker coops
* Owen – industrial coops and cooperative intentional communities
* Fourier – the Phlanistery – an intentional community
* Cabet – industry owned by the municipality (‘commune’ in French, hence commune-ism)
* Flora Tristan – worker coops
* Proudhon – worker coops financed by Peoples Bank – a kind of credit union that issued money.
* Greene – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Lasalle – worker coops financed by the state – for which he was excoriated by Marx as a ‘state socialist’
* Marx – a ‘national system of cooperative production’

Would that sound better on ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Dragon’s Den’, Karl?

* Tucker – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Dietzgen – cooperative production
* Knights of Labor – worker coops
* Parsons – workers ownership and control of production
* Vanderveldt – socialist society as a ‘giant cooperative’
* Socialist Labor Party – industry owned and run democratically through the Socialist Industrial Unions
* Socialist Party USA – until late 1920’s emphasized workers control of production.
* CGT France, 1919 Program – mixed economy with large industry owned by stakeholder coops.
* IWW – democratically run through the industrial unions.
* Socialist Party of Canada, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1904-05 program – common ownership, democratically run – both parties, to this very day, bitterly opposed to nationalization.
* SDP – Erfurt Program 1892 – Minimum program includes a mixed economy of state, cooperative and municipal industries. While often considered a state socialist document, in reality it does not give predominance to state ownership.

Well? Where’s the statism? All these socialisms have one thing in common, a desire to create an economy where everyone has a share and a say.

Why The Confusion

The state did play a role in the Marxist parties of the Second International. But its role was not to nationalize industry and create a vast bureaucratic state socialist economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to the national government, and backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, would expropriate the big capitalist enterprises. Three things would then happen:

1. The expropriated enterprises handed over to the workers organizations, coops and municipalities.

2.The army and police disbanded and replaced by worker and municipal militias.

3. Political power decentralized to the cantonal and municipal level and direct democracy and federalism introduced.

These three aspects are the famous ‘withering away of the state’ that Marx and Engels talked about.

The first problem with this scenario was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their program and adopt a lot of the statist reformism of the liberal reformers. Due to the Iron Law of Oligarchy the parties themselves became sclerotic and conservative. Then WW1 intervened, splitting the workers parties into hostile factions. Finally, under the baleful influence of the Fabians, the Bolsheviks and the ‘success’ of state capitalism in the belligerent nations, the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and worker ownership and control to nationalization and statism. The new post-war social democracy began to pretend that state ownership/control was economic democracy since the state was democratic. This, as we see from the list above, was not anything like the economic democracy envisaged by the previous generations of socialists and labor militants.

So there are ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ forms of socialism. I definitely identify with the latter type, while the former attracts the power hungry ‘socialist’, whatever his or her professed stripe (notice how many erstwhile ‘Bennites’ in the Labour Party thirty years ago became evangelicals for ‘Blairism’?). ‘Top-down’ socialists who identify with the Big State are a bit like ‘free marketeers’ who excuse Big Business rather than support independent trades people and the self-employed because, to use Kevin Carson’s mocking phrase, ‘Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.’ (Kevin A. Carson Studies in Mutualist Politcal Economyi, p.116)

Of course, to talk about a Non-Statist or Libertarian form of  Socialism throws a lot of people. Well, here another phrase to throw about: ‘market collectivism.’ That is:

‘a community of producer cooperatives. Each cooperative is owned and run by the workers themselves. Their products are sold on a market. They purchase the required raw materials themselves. There is little or no central planning….a market collectivist society is not capitalist because….workers are self-managed; they do not work under the direct or indirect control of a capitalist. In addition the workers (collectively) own the product of their labour, which they bring to the market for sale.’ Geoff Hodgson The Democratic Economy, p.177.

The nearest to a ‘market collectivist’ economy any of us have seen is Yugoslavia under Tito. Now that eventually collapsed in the wars of the 1990s but how much did market collectivism have to do with it? I suspect the lack of political freedom and the plunging of the whole country into deep debt during the 1970s and 1980s had a much more profound effect in bringing about the death of Yugoslavia.

The main theorist of market collectivism is Jaroslav Vanek. An interview with him from the early 1990s, in which he says why it has been hard for co-operatives to take off in the West, can be found here.

So what is a pore ole Market Collectivist to do? I cannot think of a British political party that is opposed to co-operatives per se. However, are any of them likely to say in the foreseeable future that co-operatives should be the dominant enterprise model for the economy? I doubt it. Even the Co-operative Party is hobbled by its links to the Labour Party. Perhaps one should just keep plugging away and things will change.  It is worth noting that the economic situation in recent years seems to have encouraged the growth of co-operatives in the US. This ‘bottom-up socialism’  is definitely better than the top-down ‘War Socialism’ which is encouraged by the Republican Party in the US:

The U.S. economy increasingly resembles the dual economy of the Soviet Union, with an overfunded military sector and a chronically weak, dysfunctional civilian sector. Like the Soviet Union in its decline, we are bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. The Soviet system was supported to the end, however, by Soviet military and intelligence personnel and defense factory workers and managers. Their equivalents exist in America. Conservatives are not being irrational, when they ignore the civilian economy while fostering the military economy that provides orders and jobs to many of their constituents. Theirs is the logic of Soviet-style conservatism.

‘Watch what we say, not what we do,’ Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell famously remarked. Out of power, the Republican Party preaches Ron Paul-style libertarianism. In power, the party practices Martin Feldstein-style military Keynesianism and military socialism — and Hank Paulson-style financial sector Keynesianism and socialism.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there. I do not expect to quickly change the minds of those who think socialism must always = the state, but I’ll give it a go!

Update: Suzanne Moore goes down memory lane with Da Brudders:

I have vague recollections of the Milibands thousands of years ago when I worked at Marxism Today. There were many young men around who made the tran­sition from Communist Party backgrounds to New Labour without much trouble. It ­simply required a degree of faith and opportunism.

There is still to be a good book written on how a load of erstwhile self-proclaimed ‘Marxists’ (whether from a Communist or Trotskyite background) and/or ‘Hard Left’ activists (Freud would have a field day) ended up supporting the largely pro-City of London/Big Business agenda of New Labour. They took on different ideals and goals but used the similar methods to achieve them. Discuss.

Early August Musings

There are various ways of looking at the world and coming up with pithy slogans to summarise what is going on. I am increasingly of the opinion that the Big State and Big Business are like a pair of  policemen. The problem is that too many people on the so-called ‘Left’ think the Big State is the Good Cop and Big Business the Bad Cop. Too many on the ‘Right’ take the opposite view- Big Business is the Good Cop and the Big State is the Bad Cop.  Too many people in the political ‘Centre’ tend to see both Big Government and Big Business as Good Cops, although both are prone to the occasional ‘excessive’ acts which cause ‘quiet concern’…

These thoughts came to mind on reading the thoughts of David Stockwell , who tried to control the Federal Budget in the early years of the Reagan Administration until the importance of ‘Military Keynesianism’, justified by the ‘Soviet Threat’, to Reagan’s Big Business backers overcame the concerns about debt professed by free marketeers like Stockwell. If Wall Street is ‘a ward’ of the Federal Government, as Stockwell maintains, why should anyone on the ‘Right’ prefer Wall Street to the Government? Similarly, why should anyone on the ‘Left’ prefer the Federal Government (currently teeming with Goldman Sachs alumni) to Wall Street? Surely, at best, we have a ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’ scenario, the goodness and badness of each ‘Cop’ is purely in the eye of the ideological beholder.

Over this side of the water, Airstrip One’s state-backed and taxpayer-guaranteed banks are in profit again. Peter Wilby comments:

Is there a word to describe the state we find ourselves in? It isn’t exactly capitalism, as the government is now part-owner of Lloyds and RBS – which seems to give it no powers whatever – and underwriter to other banks, while small businesses are virtually at a standstill because they can’t get bank credit. Nor do we have socialism or even social democracy, though many of us thought these would return after market liberalism was discredited.

Perhaps the word is feudalism. Medieval peasants received protection from their lords in return for a fixed proportion of their produce. That’s roughly the relationship we now have with financial institutions. They provide pensions, insurance, mortgages and so on – providing protection against, for example, accidents or poverty in old age – and they cream off a “tax”, estimated by some analysts at 25 per cent, from all transactions. Governments are largely powerless, as were medieval monarchs against feudal barons.

‘It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.’  -George Carlin.

While it is Happy Days again for Big Finance, the middle classes are getting crushed by those above them. This is happening both in the USA and over here. It would be good to think this will all end in economic and political disaster for those who are currently (re)lording over the rest of us- perhaps it will.

Closer to home, getting in by just 74 votes at the General Election seems to have concentrated the mind of Hampstead and Kilburn MP Glenda Jackson. Unless something dramatic happens (if only!), it looks like a straight Lab-Con contest here comes the next General Election. I doubt whether anyone here would take a ‘Only Lib Dems Can Win Here!’ flyer seriously next time around. In terms of the opinion polls, the Lib Dems are in trouble, although a real internal bust-up is only likely if there should be a ‘No’ vote in the referendum on the Alternative Vote scheduled for May next year. If the Lib Dems cannot achieve the goal of electoral reform (even in the feeble form of AV- which is NOT Proportional Representation) the question of what they are for will be increasingly asked of them.

Talking of opinion polls, the latest evidence does not suggest Call Me Dave’s ‘Big Society’ idea has caught the public imagination. Larry Elliott suggests co-operatives and mutualism could be a way forward towards a Big Society. However, although all three main parties make noises in support of co-ops and mutuals, they only back new enterprises to be co-ops or mutuals. They never suggest replacing the current owners or property relations inside existing enterprises. The idea of  workers owning their own existing enterprises and the management and boards of existing companies being answerable to the people who work there, not to some outside body or bodies, is too much. As a good idea for revitalising the Left though…

I think some of Satan’s Devils probably have the red-hot pokers ready…

I almost choked on my lunch a couple of days back when in the back pages of The Guardian’s G2 section I read ‘To be religiously illiterate is foolish.’ I then saw it was Tony Blair plugging his Faith Foundation. Well, the money-grabbing war-mongering fraud has a book to promote, don’t you know, which is already being plugged bigtime in the US, where I think a lot of Neo-Con Know-Nothings probably think he’s Margaret Thatcher’s son.

For those of you into NuLab memoirs, it is called The Journey, which might be a nod to his Messiah Complex. However, I do not think it is a reference to his post-Prime Ministerial globe-trotting.

I wonder how often Blair’s autobiography will mention his Sedgefield constituency and the Labour Club in Trimdon where he used to have regular photo-ops holding a pint when foreign dignitaries were visiting. It is now closed and up for sale- a metaphor for what TB did to the Labour Party and its supporters? As John Harris argues, only when Labour confronts the legacy of Blairism will it be able to move forward.

I think this was the RCP’s ‘Vote Conservative But Build The Fighting Socialist Alternative’ moment. Although it was no more daft than the SWP’s mid-90s slogan:  ‘Why Won’t Blair Fight The Tories?’ Because he is one, you daft…?

Way back in the 1980s I used to occasionally see in the back pages of The Guardian an advert for a ‘Preparing for Power’ conference in London, illiustrated by a soldier falling after being shot. The meetings were organised by the Revolutionary Communist Party, which as I got older and more politically aware, realised on the whole  put the ‘Arse’ into ‘RCP’. Having said that, I did subscribe in the  early ’90s to their glossy monthly magazine  Living Marxism (which should have renamed itself Loaded Marxism: ‘For Trots Who Should Know Better’) before I got bored with their mindless cheerleading of  the Serbian side in the Bosnian War, support for whale hunting (logic being: the Japanese hunt whales, so you must be a racist to oppose whale hunting. What about Iceland and Norway though? However, putting hype before experience tended to be the LM way) and its general posture of being controversial for its own sake. I think its condoning of Imperial Japanese war atrocities in World War Two led to my final parting of ways with them (its automatically pro-Japanese stance on many issues made me wonder if the whole RCP/LM caper was funded by somebody- or some body- in Tokyo, but there’s no evidence….). Anyway, the RCP is no more. However, many of its former members (inmates?) are still out there, as Jenny Turner discusses.

However, as it is the height of summer I  won’t finish off with politics. That will come and get us all again, whether we like it or not, pretty soon. To be honest,  you  will find a lot more interesting stuff at the new breed of literary event than the average political meeting!

Dog Days of Summer Links And Stuff

Someone has got their priorities right!…

We are starting to approach the so-called Silly Season for news. This sounds a bit strange to me, when you consider it is the period two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War all started. These can be called many things, but ‘Silly’ hardly seems appropriate. It is also the period when the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev in 1991   and the 2008 Georgian attack on Russia all took place. Anyway, let’s hope nothing as dramatic happens this time around!

I’ve been out the loop four weeks or so. Hence, I’ve been catching up in the last few days  and  there is a bit to unpack…

‘All the experience of history demonstrates to us that an alliance concluded between two different parties always turns to the advantage of the more reactionary of the two parties; this alliance necessarily enfeebles the more progressive party, by diminishing and distorting its programme, by destroying its moral strength, its confidence in itself, whilst a reactionary party, when it is guilty of falsehood is always and more than ever true to itself.’ Mikhail Bakunin Marxism, Freedom and the State (Hat-tip: Paul Stott!)

Mikhail B and Vladimir L: one for those big into Dead Russians…

Well, I escaped the country to avoid George Osborne giving his first Budget speech. We will see what happens, although Boy George’s combination of public spending cuts and increases in VAT  has got the big thumbs up from the European Commission, which must have been somewhat disappointing to the British Centre-Left’s ‘My EU, Right or Wrong’ brigade. Nor can the likes of Will Hutton, Polly Toynbee, Denis MacShane et al have been much impressed by the suggestion that the best way for the EU’s various economies to get out of their various economic holes may be to give up on the euro.

Nothing is…

There still seem to be very big economic problems here and elsewhere, with serious talk that we could be hit by a ‘triple whammy’. Meanwhile, who is to say where the US economy is heading? What can be said without much doubt is that there will be financial pain for many in the years to come, even if economic activity here and elsewhere starts to pick up. There is no guarantee that economic austerity will lead to better economic confidence and performance, as the Irish experience shows. Perhaps, as the current Hungarian experience  suggests, economic rectitude does not have to mean economic misery.

Although I have seen the claim made more than once by Conservative supporters (including, I guess, the Minister quoted in Steve Bell’s cartoon above) that Call Me Dave’s General Election Manifesto launch based around the the ‘idea’ (if that is not too strong a term) of  the ‘Big Society’ cost them an overall majority, it looks like it’s back! Not, it must be said, with universal acclaim.

The problem I have with the whole ‘Big Society’ concept, if that is not too grand a term for it, is that in a period of severe financial austerity for many people, who will have the cash to keep voluntary services running, let alone replicate those services provided by the state at the moment? There is a non-statist tradition in the British Isles– co-operatives, friendly societies, mutuals- of running health, education and other social and welfare services in a collective manner. However, in the current economic climate, getting the state out of running services and leaving them to whoever has the time and resources to devote to run them is akin to sending troops with bayonets out of their trenches  and over the top towards the enemy’s machine guns in World War One. Indeed, as things stand, in many areas Big Business is the only alternative to the Big State. As Peter Wilby points out, Call Me Dave did not criticise Big Business in his latest ‘Big Society’ missive.

The suspicion that ‘Big Society’ rhetoric is only a way of camouflaging cutbacks in the public sector and handing the rest over to Big Business (subsidised by the taxpayer) is suggested by some coverage of  what may happen in the health sector. Not only will so-called NHS ‘reform’ not work, but it will also be  a boon for outsourcers and the current Health Secretary knows which proverbial side of his bread is buttered.

Will the Labour Party be able to argue that ‘Big Society = Big Business’? I have my doubts, believe it or not! Out of the five leadership contenders (BTW a big question for Labour Party supporters and/or those more familiar with Labour than me- why no Deputy Leadership contest this time? Or have I missed it?) Diane Abbott is the only one not totally implicated in the policies of the 97-10 years. The Other Four: they were Government Ministers until less than two months ago- are they going to repudiate everything they publicly supported  until they left office? The thought of Call Me Dave and whoever gets elected Labour Leader arguing over who is the true ‘Heir To Blair’ from October onwards is simply soul-destroying.  I don’t agree with everything Diane Abbott says or does, but she is the only thing stopping the Labour Leadership contest becoming a total bore-fest. Dispatches from braver souls than me who have been along to Labour Leadership hustings can be found here and here. Chris Dillow criticises the lack of proper politics (as opposed to politicking) in Lord Mandelson’s autobiography here, while Marina Hyde casts her eye over (totally self-unaware) reaction to Lord M’s magnum opus from other members of New Labour’s Glittering Gallery here.

For those of you glad we won’t have ID Cards (in my opinion, the current Government’s big A*- Plus) a note of caution from No2ID.

For those needing a reminder that capitalism does not always equal the free-market and socialism does not always equal the state, you may appreciate a bit of Kevin Carson.

It looks like BP have plugged the Gulf of Mexico leak, which, if it holds, has merely stopped a disaster becoming a catastrophe. There is now a lot of hoo-hah about the role BP played in getting the so-called Lockerbie Bomber out of jail. However, it comes across as a red herring for me, as I am pretty sure that Libya was not behind the Lockerbie bombing. Until the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and the US needed Iran and Syria on its side (or at least not hostile towards), the general consensus was Palestinians aligned to Iran and/or  Syria were behind the bombing, as vengeance for the downing of Iranian Airlines Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in the Summer of  ’88. Whatever else they may have got up to, I think  BP are innocent of that crime.

While I was away I read Andy Beckett’s book on the 1970s, which is a worthwhile read. Much of the material in it I have seen before, but he went out his way to visit people and places (Saltley Gate and/or the proposed Maplin Airport mean anything to you? Yes? You don’t look that old!) that were socio-cultural icons way back then. The one thing that really depresses me about Beckett’s account is that in 1978 then Energy Secretary Tony Benn proposed a national Oil Fund from North Sea oil to fund the modernisation of British industrial base. It was rejected (PM Jim Callaghan was probably worried by ‘Benn’s Power Grab’ headlines from the pro-Thatcher  press), then Beckett comments:

‘In 2008, the economist John Hawkesworth of the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers calculated that, had Britain’s tax revenues from North Sea gas and oil been invested rather than spent [on tax cuts and the dole during the 1980s under Thatcher], they would now be worth £450 billion, and would give the British government control of one of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds.’ (p.201)

A good review of Beckett’s book was written by Ian Jack, who concluded:

If greater equality nourishes happiness and the public good, as many have come to believe, then it should never be forgotten that in the late 1970s Britain became a more equal country than it had probably ever been and certainly than it has been since. Beckett’s book is not all out revisionism; the facts of industrial turmoil can’t be revised away. But that one fact of greater equality suggests that the received wisdom of the 1970s as Britain’s nightmare decade is little more than a politically convenient libel which suits a narrative of redemption. We must never go back to the 1970s? Perhaps we should be lucky. There are worse places, as we may shortly see.

If you got through all that, you deserve something lighter! For example, discover which famous writer you are with I Write Like. I was Cory Doctorow, so that’s my reading list sorted for my next trip abroad!

You may be also interested in the concept of Slow Reading.

I’ll leave it there for the moment. Short of a big event (ie a World War starting) happening in the next few weeks, I’ll keep it light- in terms of volume, and possibly content. I need to think…