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I’ve been meaning for a long time to write about the deep influence Buddhist thinking and practice has had on my life. I still haven’t written it. But this excellent piece about sums it up for now.
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Interesting piece here. See also here.
In a previous life and on a previous blog, I once wrote about the consensus decision-making process, as currently in operation in the “Occupy” movement. I’ve dusted it off and posted below. For “climate camp”, now please read “the Occupy movement”.
I’ve glimpsed the future… and it works
Anarchism: The name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
Peter Kropotkin, Encyclopedia Brittanica
The Climate Camps have been, for me, one of the most interesting and positive political developments of recent times (see here and here). I’ve long felt that, by not being involved, I’ve been missing out on something important and exciting. A couple of nights ago, I went along with a few anthropologist comrades to a Climate Camp planning meeting.
Chatting in the pub beforehand about what we could expect in the meeting, an anthropologist who has been along to the Climate Camp and other similar events before, told me that the way these anarchists organize is the closest thing she has ever seen to the communist egalitarianism of the Hadza hunter-gatherers she has lived and worked with. (This echoes the experience of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. In his Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology, he says that the way a direct action network in North America worked was very familiar to him as a result of his experience working with self-governing communities in Madagascar.)
So, we’re basically going into a soviet then? I asked jokingly. Oh yes, absolutely, she replied, totally seriously. She was not wrong and I was not disappointed.
The only people who ever really find what they’re looking for are those looking for faults, so let me beat them to the draw. Of course, the meeting I went to was far too small and over-represented by young, ‘middle-class’ students to truly deserve the title of soviet. But there’s two points to make in reply. One is that, whatever their faults, these meetings and the events they organise are still far bigger and more diverse – it was not dominated by men, for one thing – than any of the lefty meetings of my (admittedly limited) experience. The second is that dealing practically with such flaws is a major focus of the group’s activity. What was inspiring and encouraging to me was that the group’s efforts to ‘reach out’ to the wider community in which they work is not focused exclusively on propaganda (“you’re wrong, here’s why, come join our weird little group”). Instead, they try, like good anthropologists, to come to a serious and sympathetic understanding of the concerns of the people they’ve come into contact with, or those attacking them, or furiously ignoring them, and decide what practically can be done, if anything, to build links.
The group therefore contacts other groups not with a view to conversion or assimilation (or destruction!), but to learn what the group does and therefore discover whether there’s any common grounds for working together – or at least not annoying each other too much. A suggestion by someone in the meeting that links be built with the local church was not met with sneers of derision (as I expected, given my own political background), but real excitement at the possibilities if they could just get the odd trendy vicar on board.
The whole atmosphere was positive and non-confrontational (except with the Enemy of course) and non-ideological. The group also took itself and its own needs as seriously as it took its activities and activism. In other words, it was engaged in genuinely non-alienated activity. The group members were not sacrificing themselves to the needs of the organization, but asking instead how their organization could serve their own needs, as a group and as individuals. It therefore spent as much time thinking about organizing events for their own education and to acquire skills to increase their resources as individuals, and social events and so on, as it did organising activism.
The meeting I went to was a relatively short and boring planning meeting. And I was attending merely as an observer. And yet still I was bowled over by how much fun it all seemed. Here was a living, breathing answer to the complaint that socialism would involve endless meetings. People who say that can only have had poisonous experiences of what ‘meetings’ are like. Unalienated meetings, although I’m sure they have their ups and downs, are invigorating and fun. They’re not about listening to dull speeches and taking orders (or following majority decisions), but a forum where we bond with our fellows in solidarity and decide how we’re going to act together to pursue our common goals. Or, at least, that’s what they should be like, and if they’re not, you should ask yourself what you’re doing with your life. More meetings in socialism? Bring it on!
None of this, I’m sure, would be the case if it wasn’t for the group’s structure of democratic, consensus decision-making. Our theorist to help make sense of this is David Graeber. I must admit, impressed as I was by Mr Graeber’s article in the first issue of Radical Anthropology, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of what he was saying was mere rhetoric – the inflated self-image of what was probably just another tiny direct-action group. Well, I was wrong and Graeber is right. The criticism that these anarchist groupings and events are well meaning but lack a coherent ideology completely misses the point – the way they organize and act and treat each other is the ideology. It is the building of the new society in the shell of the old. This way of organizing is the practical answer to many of the left’s theoretical difficulties and false dichotomies – reform or revolution? Revolution first, or mass consciousness first? What to do in ‘non-revolutionary’periods’? David Graeber again:
A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about the revolution as a thing – ‘the’ revolution, the great cataclysmic break – and instead ask ‘what is revolutionary action?’ We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations – even within the collectivity – in that light. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.
It is not to my mind a naïve, rhetorical exaggeration or a theoretical mistake to say that the model of democratic decision-making pursued by the Climate Campers is the revolution. “Be the change you want to see in the world”, as Gandhi famously put it, and you’ll have much less need to worry about theory and ideology – the action and its methods are the ideology, and what theory you need, if any, will be obvious from what you are already doing. You won’t need to worry over much about the future society (what it will be like after ‘the’ revolution) because you will be building the future society in the shell of the old. You won’t need to agonise over the role of the state because you will be forced to deal practically with the state every time you do your best to ignore it.
Graeber again:
It is one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily. Perhaps the best way to start thinking about these organizations—the Direct Action Network, for example—is to see them as the diametrical opposite of the sectarian Marxist groups; or, for that matter, of the sectarian Anarchist groups. Where the democratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; it’s taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of view. The motto might be, ‘If you are willing to act like an anarchist now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own business’. Which seems only sensible: none of us know how far these principles can actually take us, or what a complex society based on them would end up looking like. Their ideology, then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay this way.
Graeber also says here that “it is difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result”. I know it’s probably because I’m too easily excited and impressed, but I didn’t even need to participate fully in an action to know that Graeber must be right. All I did was sit in on a relatively boring planning meeting to get a sense of the possibilities he was talking about.
Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun. I’m sure many of old political hands have heard these kind of arguments many times before. Indeed, such democratic arrangements would be no puzzle to the Hadza, for example, who been using such methods for millennia. In fact, they are probably as old as humanity itself. But still, the Climate Camps and the globalization movement that came before it (read David Graeber for more) are an inspiring revival and renewal of anarchist, libertarian-socialist practice.
I’m not old enough or wise enough or experienced enough to be giving out advice to the young – or to anyone else. But if I was forced to declare my hand now, this is what I would say.
First, you need to make a leap of faith:
[You] have to proceed from the assumption that, as the Brazilian folk song puts it, ‘another world is possible’. That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we’d all be better off as a result. To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith, since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible. But one could also make the argument that it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative*: since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wrong, we will get a lot closer.
Second, join the movement. Forget all the old parties of the left and ultra-left and all those who consider themselves above such distinctions.
The socialist parties are dead. Long live socialism!
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Just one month ago, we asked whether we were beginning to see the “red shoots” of recovery in the class struggle. At the time, the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) had just called for joint industrial action, street protests and a campaign of civil disobedience, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had warned that America and Europe were facing the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and an ‘explosion of social unrest’. We said then that there was no way of predicting with any confidence whether this expected ‘explosion’ would go off, or turn out to be a damp squib, depending, as it did and does, on what millions of people think and decide to do.
Since we wrote those words, you’d have to be a dour cynic indeed not to be heartened and encouraged by world events. Truly has it been said that there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. It’s hard to believe that, in just one year, we have seen a series of democratic uprisings across the Middle East and north Africa threaten or topple dictatorships; strikes and increasingly militant protests against austerity in Greece and across Europe; strikes, demonstrations and riots across Britain; and mass protests and occupations against anti-union legislation in Wisconsin, USA, to name just the most obvious and inspiring examples.
And then, in September of this year, the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters and the activist group Anonymous announced an occupation of Wall Street. The bourgeoisie – along with the older, more senile, battle-weary ranks of class warriors and socialists – barely had time for the sneers to settle on their faces before the ‘anarchism as usual’ action had morphed into what some commentators are already calling the most significant populist movement of the left since the 1930s. On Wall Street, a decade happened in just a few weeks, and a small activist action exploded into an ever-growing movement that the mainstream media and ruling class establishment eventually and reluctantly decided it could no longer ignore.
Ignoring it didn’t work, and neither did a rapid police attempt to supress it with violence. Every attempt to silence and repress the Occupy Wall Street movement – including mass arrests and rioting cops pepper-spraying young girls – merely led to new waves of support. More and more workers from all kinds of backgrounds – nurses, sacked cleaners, doctors, serving and former soldiers, unemployed graduates, poor youth from the city’s most impoverished districts, even sympathetic Wall Street traders – have poured into New York’s financial district to see what’s happening, listen to talks, take part in democratically organised general assemblies to plan actions and decide upon demands (if any), and generally build solidarity, communication, and mutual aid. (For good news reports, see the Democracy Now channel here.) The good example in Wall Street soon spread throughout the country, and there are now copycat occupations in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Wisconsin, and many others, and attempts to repeat the success are spreading around the world, soon to arrive in London and the rest of Britain.
With what result? Well, of course, no one but fake Cassandras and Nostradamuses know. It may be that the whole thing will have fizzled out before this journal hits your doorstep. Or perhaps the movement will turn lamely reformist and be bought off. Perhaps, like the civil rights movement, it will prove not at all lame, even if reformist, and win some essential gains for our class. Or perhaps, if some of the more radical demands and ideas put up on the Occupy movement’s websites become reality, we will see a working class revolution in the most powerful capitalist country on the planet. These are exciting times for socialists.
The key, of course, will be whether the protest movement can link up with the organised working class and begin to take democratic control of the whole of social life, including seizing upon the powers of government. With the potential for the Occupy movement spreading to this country, and a nationwide day of action, including strikes, on 30 November, organised by the TUC, these are days of precious opportunity for the British working class. It’s time, as the poet Shelley once put it, to rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number. We have a life to win.
Filed under Socialist Standard
Was Marx right? As Terry Eagleton points out in the preface to this book, of course he wasn’t. No thinker gets everything right, nor can any reasonable person expect them to. But was Marx “right enough of the time about enough important issues to make calling oneself a Marxist a reasonable self-description”? In this sense, Eagleton says the answer is yes. And Eagleton is right.
As Eagleton puts it, you can tell capitalism is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism – people become aware of capitalism in crisis, just as an illness or injury makes you newly aware of the body you always took for granted. Thanks to the crisis, people all around the world are talking about capitalism again. How can this discussion become deeper and better-informed? Well, in all kinds of ways, but we can hardly ignore Marx’s body of work, which has “for long [been] the most theoretically rich, politically uncompromising critique of that system”, as Eagleton puts it. Marx was the first person to “identify the historical object known as capitalism – to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end”. That must surely be of interest to those who are wondering whether capitalism has a future.
What, then, could be more welcome and timely than a book that demonstrates why Marx was right, in what ways he was right, and the relevance of his ideas for political action? And who could be more relied upon to write a witty, engaging and accessible account of this than Terry Eagleton, the author of many justly popular books on subjects related to Marxism, and of regular witty essays and polemics pricking the pomposity of many of our culture’s most unjustly respected liberal thinkers? It would seem to be the perfect book for our time, written by the person perfectly placed to do the subject justice. Sadly, Eagleton lets us down.
Marxists reading this book may think twice about just what it is they’ve signed up for. Virulent anti-Marxists will wonder where all (what they consider to be) the most devastating arguments against Marxism are to be found. But most importantly, non-Marxists, politically interested, anti-capitalist or disillusioned working-class readers, are highly unlikely to be convinced by it either. Eagleton makes no effort to carefully define what Marx’s thought was, nor to compare it with the reality of everyday life under capitalism. Marx’s supreme achievement, as Eagleton says at the start of his book, was to identify an historical object known as capitalism, and show how it worked. But in the book’s 258 pages, we do not hear a word about Marx’s thought on that subject. We do not hear once just what capitalism is, or how it works. Instead, we are just exhorted to believe, from various vague pronouncements and polemical swipes, that capitalism is mostly a very bad and unjust thing. Quite why it is bad, or quite why it leads to such results, we are none the wiser.
As for what socialism is, we hear much more about that. But anyone who is familiar with Marx’s arguments about what capitalism is will wonder just what the difference between capitalism and the various forms of socialism Eagleton champions is supposed to be. Even if you’re not familiar with Marx’s arguments on this, anyone who reads Eagleton’s apologias for the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia and Mao’s China would be quite justified in snapping the book shut and concluding that their prejudices were quite correct after all: that Marx and socialism were things to be avoided at all costs. For Eagleton, these socialisms were “botched experiments”, a disgustingly coy way to describe the blood-soaked, anti-working-class tyrannies that imposed state-led, capitalist industrial development on economically backward countries. Whenever Eagleton does bump up against the occasional sensible argument, he quickly dismisses it as “ultra-left”, and veers off to the right – to the rightwing deviation, the senile disorder, of Leninism. Perhaps that’s why Eagleton can find room to mention approvingly or critically just about everything that has ever been dignified with the name of socialism apart from the idea, put forward by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, of the “communistic abolition of buying and selling”. Genuine socialism is just too ultra-left for him.
This book is, then, a bitter disappointment and a wasted opportunity. The capitalist West is just emerging from a long period of illusion. As Eagleton points out, the illusion was not so much a deep belief in capitalism, but a disillusion about the possibility of changing it. “What helped to discredit Marxism above all, then,” says Eagleton, “was a creeping sense of political impotence. It is hard to sustain your faith in change when change seems off the agenda…” Change is back on the agenda. Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains as astute and relevant as ever. But if you want to know why, you’ll have to go to better sources than this book.
Filed under Book reviews, Karl Marx, Socialist Standard
Follow the story on the excellent Democracy Now, for example here and here.
And now, Occupy London, Occupy Britain, and more.
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The Marxist economist and author Paul Mattick Jnr talks to Stuart Watkins about his views on Marx, the economic crisis, and the prospects for socialism
Socialist Standard: In your recently published book, Business As Usual (reviewed in the May 2011 Socialist Standard), you give an account of the causes of our present economic situation. Could you summarise the argument for our readers? In your view, just what is this crisis all about really?
Paul Mattick: This crisis, like those that have punctuated the history of capitalism since the beginning of the nineteenth century, is due to the inadequate amount of profit produced by workers in the capitalist economy, relative to the amount required for a significant expansion of investment. This problem, which first made itself known in the post-World War II period in the mid-1970s, has been hidden by the enormous expansion of debt – public, corporate, and even private – since that time, which continued the expansion of debt in all capitalist nations in response to the long-lasting deep depression of the 1930s. The credit-money created by governments and spread throughout the system by financial institutions created the basis for an apparent prosperity, though one marked by the usual cyclical pattern of ups and downs. But the underlying problem made itself visible, for those who cared to look, in many forms – the persistent inflation of the 1960s, the ‘stagflation’ of the following decade, the debt crises of Latin America and eastern Europe, the currency crises, real estate busts, stock market crashes, and massive bank failures of the last thirty years, as well as the general tendency, worldwide, to substitute speculation for real capital investment. Finally, the capacity of the system to put off dealing with its underlying problem seems to have reached its limits at the end of 2007.
SS: According to most commentators in the mainstream press, the Great Recession, though serious, is now over. Do you agree that it is?
PM: Between the time you asked this question and the present moment, many have become anxious about the arrival of a ‘double dip’ recession. In my opinion, the so-called second dip is merely the continuation of the crisis that began in 2007. There are of course economic fluctuations throughout periods of depression as well as periods of prosperity; in addition the government stimulus after 2008, however inadequate, had a certain effect (for instance in China, where the state promotion of an enormous real estate bubble involved the importation of machinery and other goods from Europe and elsewhere). But the fundamental problem, the low profitability of capital, has not been overcome.
SS: And in your view, the low profitability of capital can be explained by Marx’s law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall? Can this law be demonstrated to be true empirically?
PM: Yes to your first question; your second raises complex issues. The theory Marx worked out in Capital is an extremely abstract one: it is an attempt to analyze the dynamics of capitalism as a global system, over the long term. It is couched in terms of the quantities of ‘socially abstract labour’ – labour performed in the production process as represented by money when products are bought and sold – because Marx looks as capitalism as fundamentally, like all social systems, an organization of the process of reproducing the human population (and its social relationships). But in the world of business, money is used to symbolise more than the actual activities of social production – it represents, for instance, claims on the social product based on the control of natural resources, and also – to a large extent, in fact – promises to pay in the future, promises to pay off bets made on the way production prices will work their way through the market. And national income statistics, even ignoring the enormous inaccuracies involved in calculating them, are drawn up on the basis of business accounting systems and orthodox economic theorising, which do not distinguish between actual productive activity and speculative hopes. As a result, the data available cannot really be used to prove or disprove Marx’s theory.
This is not to say that Marx’s ideas can’t be measured against experience. His predictions need to be compared with the history of capitalism over the last 200 years. From this perspective, Marx’s ideas come off very well, as the main tendencies he predicted for capitalism – towards the supplanting of human labour by machinery, the concentration and centralisation of capital, the spread of wage labour, the tendency towards widescale unemployment, and above all the recurrence of periods of depression – have been realised. In fact, I would say that Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over the long term is the only convincing account of the business cycle that there is. A particular aspect of this is of personal interest to me: in the 1960s, my father, Paul Mattick, wrote a book, Marx and Keynes, challenging the generally accepted view that Keynesian methods could control or eliminate the business cycle. He asked: if Marx is right, what will happen? And what he predicted has in general come about. This is one of the very few examples of a successful prediction in the social sciences!
SS: Could you expand on your claim that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is the only convincing explanation of the business cycle? Perhaps the most important new work to emerge from the Marxist tradition on crisis in recent years is that of David Harvey. He says, on the contrary, that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall cannot be made to work – it’s too compromised by the countertendencies identified by Marx, among other objections. He instead views all the conflicting Marxist accounts of the business cycle – profit squeeze, underconsumption, disproportionality – as possibilities that represent but don’t exhaust possible departures from balanced growth. What is your view of the competing Marxist accounts of crisis, including Harvey’s?
PM: Many Marxist writers have taken some version of the tack Harvey follows, invoking a variety of causal factors to explain crises. The problem with this is that these disparate factors are not operating on the same analytical level. If wages would really squeeze profits, accumulation will decline, putting downward pressure on wages, so this will quickly correct itself. This is why, so far as we can tell from statistics, there have been no notable profit squeezes associated with important downward movements of the economy, despite claims sometimes made that there have been. Similar considerations hold for disproportionality explanations: capitalism in fact is always developing disproportionally, as there is no central regulating agency, but this is also constantly subject to correction by market forces. The explanation of crisis by reference to underconsumption is one of the oldest – it dates back to Sismondi and Malthus in the early 19th century – but also one of the least convincing: clearly, not all the product can ever be consumed, or else there would be no capital accumulation; as well, a constant feature of the system cannot explain the crisis cycle. As Marx points out, of course there is a lack of effective demand in a depression period. But why? His answer is that accumulation – which equals as it determines demand (for consumer goods, via wages, and production goods) – slows in response to declining profitability. And this is in accord with what statistical information we have, as was demonstrated long ago by the American economist Wesley Mitchell and has been recently shown by a number of researchers. Of course, the profits of statistics are, as I have pointed out, not the profits of Marx. But Marx’s theoretical considerations provide an explanation for the fluctuations of observable business profits. What is odd is the resistance to Marx’s theory when it is in such good accord with the history of capitalism. I believe this is largely due to the fact that most theorists are still in thrall to the economists’ idea of capitalism as a naturally self-regulating system. Thus Harvey, for instance, needs to find a reason why it goes out of balance. In fact, however, capitalism is always in disequilibrium. On the broadest scale, it is the crisis that makes continued accumulation possible, just as it is accumulation that leads to a lowering of the rate of profit.
This highly abstract statement ignores the counteracting factors, the list of which Marx borrowed from J.S. Mill. It is not hard to show – it was done by Grossmann and others – that over the long run these factors cannot overwhelm the tendency of profits to fall. But we already know this empirically, since the history of capitalism demonstrates the effects of a periodically falling profit rate.
SS: You say your father was proved right and Keynes wrong. But many supporters of the system would say that Keynesian methods saved capitalism from a Great Depression in the 1970s, and led to the Great Moderation – with capitalism delivering generally and gradually improving prosperity for all and monetary policy moderating the ups and downs of the business cycle. Did that not prove Keynes right? Might the same tricks not work again and pull us out of our present crisis?
PM: I think it’s fair to say that Keynesian methods saved capitalism from a deep and long depression in the 1970s. But the cost was the rising level of government debt in all capitalist countries. In the 1980s and after this was joined by an unparalleled expansion of corporate and private consumer debt. What happened around 2007 was that this expansion of debt collided with the continuing failure of the capitalist economy proper to expand at a sufficient rate. So one could say that the chickens of 1975 have come home to roost in the current depression. And since the Keynesian card has already been largely played, capitalist governments are now torn between fears of further unraveling of the private-property system and the dangers of further increasing sovereign debt.
SS: Your father was connected with our American party, occasionally publishing in its journal. In a newly published biography of one its members (see http://wspus.org/2011/02/role-modeling-socialism), we see you as a child sat at your father’s knee while political discussions raged around you. Do you have memories of these times? What is your memory and present opinion of the WSPUS and our political tradition generally? You say in your book that the heydey of the left and the trade unions is over and there’s no hope of reviving them. So what can be done? What’s the alternative?
PM: My memories of the WSP are very good ones – I liked the people involved very much. I still remember going to classes in Marxian economics in Boston, taught by Rab and others, in some ways my real initiation into radical theory. I remember, with equal pleasure, the ‘socials’ – parties – when we kids moved around the legs of smoking, drinking, discussing, lovely adults. But I think these experiences, precious though they are to me as an individual, belong to the past. For most of today’s young people – and most of their elders – the political ideas of the past have little meaning. And not only ideas – the political movements of the past no longer exist as serious forces. The trade unions have long been in decline world-wide, and the political parties of the left are either fully integrated into the capitalist political system or have become minute, unimportant sects. To an extent, this is good, as it seems to me that leftwing political organizations have historically stood in the way of creative responses to social crises, obsessed as they have been with their own agendas. But in any case, the response to the coming depression and the suffering to be imposed on people by the world’s masters (and nature, as a result of the workings of the capitalist economy) is something people will have to work out for themselves, with little help from the past, in response to evolving conditions. To solve their problems, people will have to take direct, concrete action – occupying empty housing, seizing stocks of food and other goods, and eventually, if all goes well, occupying and beginning to operate the means of production and distribution. This lies in the future, but already one can see steps in this direction, in phenomena like the Greek cry ‘We won’t pay!’ and French occupations of defunded schools. Even the action of tens of thousand of young Spaniards, simply meeting in the centre of Madrid and other cities, like the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to discuss politics, is a step towards autonomy from the political wing of the ruling classes, a step towards an autonomous working-class control of social life.
SS: We see your point, but we would also say that as people begin to work these things out for themselves, they will also probably be drawn to some of our conclusions: namely, that state power will have to be reckoned with in an organised way, and alternatives to the present system discussed and agreed upon. That’s at least a possibility, isn’t it?
PM: Both of your points seem to me quite true. We can already see the state mobilising its forces in defence of capitalist social relations, even when they are barely challenged, and radical confrontation with the current social order will definitely involve finding ways to counter the military forces that will be deployed. Meanwhile, exploring alternatives to the present system, after a long period during which even the idea of an end to capitalism has been nearly unthinkable, is of great importance. This is especially true because earlier models of social change have been rendered obsolete by the development of capitalism as a system: for instance, an idea like that of the network of workers councils so important to revolutionary thought after the First World War requires thoroughgoing reformulation in a period when large numbers of workers have insecure jobs, and no longer identify themselves as workers within particular industries, not to mention workplaces, while gigantic masses of people all over the world struggle to exist without employment, and when many production processes involve workers and workplaces in different countries, as when Chinese workers assemble iPhones from parts produced in other places. Then, the developing ecological catastrophe raises novel issues which will require serious, large-scale efforts of a technological as well as a social nature. At the same time, the growing proletarianization of the world’s people and the greater level of international integration of populations and cultures, make the old slogan of “world revolution” in some ways more realistic than ever before.
SS: Thank you, Paul, very much for talking to us.
Also published here.
Filed under David Harvey, Karl Marx, Socialist Standard
The ‘Arab Spring’ flowered in Libya in February of this year. A series of protests against living conditions, then against the government, quickly escalated into a civil war aimed at removing the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. On 19 March, the British government, with its American and French partners, launched a bombing campaign, ostensibly to ‘protect citizens’ from Gaddafi’s troops. Just six months later, on 15 September, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, landed in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to declare, in effect, ‘job done’.
But what job is being done? If you’re gullible enough to believe the rhetoric of politicians, then Western intervention in Libya was all about protecting citizens from dictators and helping revolutionaries establish democracy. But the real reason for Nato’s concern is quite obvious. The real reason is oil.
You needn’t take socialists’ word for it. Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Gaddafi henchman and now chairman of the National Transitional Council, was anxious to assure Cameron and Sarkozy of the intentions of the new regime: “The supportive role of France and Britain will have a future influence. Until now we have signed no [oil] contracts and we will honour all previous contracts. But our friends will have a premier role according to their efforts in supporting Libya,” he said (Financial Times, 15 September).
Indeed, it’s so blindingly obvious that the Western intervention in Libya was about oil that it is instructive to watch commentators who are obliged, for ideological reasons, to deny it. George Friedman of Stratfor.com, for example, in one of his regular email reports (30 August), said that he “sympathised” with those who thought the war must be about oil and tried to find “a deep conspiracy” to explain it. But Friedman dismisses the “theory” for the simple reason that Gaddafi “loved selling oil”, that he would simply change the arrangements about oil if pressure was brought to bear because he “was as cynical as they come”,and it was therefore “not necessary to actually go to war to get whatever concessions were wanted”. Friedman then concludes that the official explanation is therefore “the only rational one”.
It’s a daft argument. Friedman is dismissing a silly theory no one believes in – that there was a “deep conspiracy” to start a war to steal Gaddafi’s oil – in order to discredit and dismiss a different theory which is obviously true, but socialist, and hence to be suppressed – the theory, namely, that all capitalist economies have a vital strategic interest in guaranteeing their supplies of raw materials, most crucially oil, and that therefore those countries’ states pursue foreign policies with such interests in mind. Formerly, that meant installing and arming the dictatorships the Arab Spring rose up to overthrow. Since the Arab Spring, it has meant scrambling to come up with some other way of installing or supporting regimes that will be subservient to Western capitalist interests.
And it is in this sense that, for now at any rate, the Nato intervention seems to be going so well. For a relatively low cost, and with relatively few Western casualties, Britain, France and America looks like it has got rid of a tyrant they had struggled to control for decades, staged a brilliant PR exercise supporting a democratic revolution in the Middle East, and are about to help install a regime friendly to its vital strategic oil interests in a country with the largest oil reserves in Africa. Job done indeed.
Also published here.
Filed under Socialist Standard
