Like most socialists, I follow the Sard, who said that he didn't like to throw stones in the dark.  That is to say, he always needed some opposition to stimulate his thinking about situations, philosophical problems, historical controversies, or political methods.  A few recent arguments with people who are wrong, prompted a few thoughts-in-progress about how to analyse the conjuncture.

I.  The primacy of politics.  This doesn't refer specifically to the Leninist thesis of the primacy of politics which has a general application; rather it refers to the dominant level at which the major social antagonisms are going to be fought over and resolved in one class or another's favour in the coming years.  But in what sense?  One perspective I have encountered is that the weakness of the trade unions is such that if there is going to be an upsurge it is going to happen first through a general political radicalisation, and only thereafter produce a revival of working class organisation.  I don't think such sequential schemas really respect the actual pattern of struggles.  Look at the relationship between the anti-war movement over Gaza, the student occupations and uprising over fees, the germinal feminist revival, and the very large but bureaucracy-led trade union protests and struggles.  I think what you find is not a sequence of 'first politics, then economics', but rather the unpredictable outbreaks of struggles on various levels of the social formation consistent with a system going through organic crisis, each having a reciprocal effect on the others.  The sense in which politics is dominant is that it forms the edifice within which economic and ideological struggles take place, securing their unity and coordination, determining their tempo and efficacy.

Of course it's always true that in the last analysis politics is decisive.  But it's not true that in every conjuncture political struggles are dominant.  The dominance of politics today derives from the centrality of 'austerity politics' as a spatio-temporal fix for capitalism's woes, conducted through the state and centred on the neoliberal reorganisation of the public sector and welfare state.  Mervyn King recently argued that in the short run it would necessary to restrain spending cuts, but in the long run there had to be a drastic rebalancing of the economy away from consumption and towards investment - in other words, put as much of the country's wealth as possible in the hands of the rich and hope they will put it into circulation as capital.  This could only be achieved through state action, which has to be mediated through the political parties and their relationship to social classes.  Therefore, politics predominates.

II. The crisis of authority.  I have referred to an organic crisis.  According to Gramsci, a crisis of capitalism becomes an organic crisis when it affects the state and its hegemonic apparatuses.  And that is exactly what has happened.  One of the significant insights of the state theorist Claus Offe was that this tendency for capitalist crises to become political crises is built in to advanced capitalism insofar as it has developed an expanded political administrative apparatus to cope with the dysfunctions of production and protect its legitimacy.  As soon as there is a serious crisis, not just a recession but something that puts into question whether the system can reproduce itself, it is more likely to radiate into the state and from there into every aspect of production, politics, and ideology, etc.,  reached directly or indirectly by the state.  This is just a tendency, not an inevitability - but for reasons mentioned above, the crisis has certainly reached the state.  The question is how far advanced this process is.

The British capitalist state has always been one of the more stable of its type.  Unlike continental rivals, it has not suffered revolution, invasion, occupation or defeat to a militarily superior rival for centuries.  Its colonial losses were, it is true, considerable.  And that loss of global power and prestige has been a source of constant axe-grinding on the right, the prism through which Northern Ireland, the Falklands and even Europe have been perceived.  But the adaptation was managed without disrupting the continuity of the state.  This matters.  It also matters that the British state is still, for all its losses, a leading imperialist state with considerable global advantages, aloof from the eurozone while enjoying the benefits of EU membership.  This confers a degree of independence of action not available to, say, Greece or Spain.  This government can, if it wants to, increase spending to temporarily dampen a crisis.  It can nationalise a company if it is too important to leave it to the market.  It can bring forward infrastructure investments.  It can even selectively increase benefits, or make certain tax concessions.  As of now, the government and the Bank of England prefers to print money to stimulate lending, which has certain distributive consequences, but basically it has a range of options.   The state also has a system of violence that, despite acute breakdowns, has effectively reinforced consent throughout its long duration.

Nonetheless, the concept of a 'crisis of authority' is a good criterion of historical analysis against which to measure the stability of the British state.  What does a crisis of authority look like?  One would ordinarily look for the withdrawal of consent on the part of the masses, the  mobilization of large subaltern classes against the ruling class, and the detachment of social classes from their representative parties.  Some of these tendencies are visible in the UK today.  There is, first of all, no doubt about the de-alignment of social classes from their representative parties.  This is a secular tendency that is becoming acute due to the successful rollback of representative democracy by means of neoliberal policy.  (Chapter One of The Meaning of David Cameron outlines some of this.)  Second, in some complex ways, consent is being eroded.  Certainly, over the long term there has developed a nebulous and politically polyvalent sense of dissatisfaction with authorities, with officialdom, with the main parties, and with parliament itself.  This doesn't by itself amount to antisystemic feeling, nor is it proof of political radicalisation.  And not all institutions suffer from this general decline in respect.  Trust in the police is resilient, despite constant disclosures of corruption, racism, brutality and murders.  On the immediate questions of austerity and related policies, the balance of popular opinion is against the government - but not on all planks of its agenda, and not necessarily on the worst planks of its agenda.  It is true that any presumed 'consensus' is very fragile, but the support for punitive welfare policies has been quite high.  The current state of the Labour party is substantially responsible for this.  Moreover, the way in which the state can mobilise consent against the enemy of the month (just recently, they used the face of Abu Hamza to conceal the crimes against Babar Ahmed and Talha Ahsan, and it worked a treat) does not indicate that its legitimating resources are running dry.  This is related to the question of state violence which I'll return to.

Finally, what is the state of popular mobilisation?  In and of itself, it is impressive - student occupations and 'riots', Tory HQ smashed up, coordinated strikes in the public sector, mass marches encompassing the breadth and depth of the organised working class and its periphery, even a 1980s-style youth uprising against the police.  Yet these are notable for a) being episodic and apt to lose momentum very quickly, and b) being totally unequal to the problem, to the scale of the ruling class mobilisation and its goals.  The credit crunch came just as the British social movements were abating, the left was entering a vicious downswing, and the Tories were pulling themselves back together as a fit team to replace the bruised, tired, shat-on-looking New Labour cabinet.  The popular movements since the winter of 2010-11 have really been playing catch-up, and not actually catching up thus far.

Greece: that is a full-blown crisis of authority.  If the British state does reach that condition, it will be catalysed by outbreaks of social struggles which are not visible today, and not possible to predict.

III. Violence and consent.  It is a mistake to think that a turn toward greater violence on the part of the state is a sign of weakness, that it signifies a crisis of consent and thus an erosion of the civil society basis of the state.  Violence and consent are not separate, opposed quantities; violence is one of the main ways in which consent is secured.  Take an example.  The British police, like no other police force, has embraced the tactic of kettling.  It works in three ways.  First, it is managed violence: it creates moving frontiers where a confrontation with angry crowds can happen within a predictable range of circumstances, with police able to concentrate their forces at certain points when necessary and according to the geographical terrain already incorporated into the kettling plan.  Second, it is biopower: it acts on the fact that people have biological needs and tendencies, that they need to excrete, that they become cold and tired, that they have caloric requirements which, unsatisfied, leave them physically weak and vulnerable.  Third, it is ideology.  The very act of 'kettling' people communicates that they are dangerous criminals, if not bestiary.  It also creates the scenario in which this point can be 'proved'.  Notwithstanding the problems it has had in the courts, this has been one of the most effective means of shutting down protest movements threatening to gain momentum.

  In this tactic, coercion and consent, violence and ideology, are combined.  The 'rule of law' is the dominant form of the dominant ideology, the main area in which consent is organised; and it is precisely through violence that it is materialised. Thus, it isn't that the state turns to violence when consent has been exhausted, but rather that it must reorganise violence in the constitution of social categories (race, culture, nationality, citizenship, criminality, subversion, entitlement, rights, etc), to found consent on a new basis.  It is therefore mistaken to see violence as 'making up for' a lack of consent, as a factor merely held 'in reserve' for when consent erodes.  Recall Gramsci's metaphor: "State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion".  This quite an interesting topography.  Rather than the core of the state consisting of repressive institutions, special bodies of armed men, etc., which is protected by the outward layers of civil society, the repressive institutions form an integument shaping and protecting the flesh of the body politic.  One way to read this is to relate it to the concept of hegemonic practices in which the dominant classes attempt to organise a cross-class coalition in support of the historic goals they have set themselves.  It would be mistaken to see hegemony as a state actually achieved for most of the time; it is best to see it as a tendency guiding the organisation of class domination in a capitalist democracy.  When some form of potentially hegemonic coalition is achieved, there is always an excluded remnant of classes and class fractions that aren’t incorporated.  In a genuinely hegemonic situation, the excluded remnant is an easily policed and suppressed minority; most of the time, it is actually a majority that must somehow be disorganised, stratified and divided.  The role of violence in this situation would be prove the implausibility of resistance to both the dominant bloc, whose unity is thereby secured, and to the excluded, whose acquiescence is thereby gained.

  One aspect of the complex political and ideological mix that was Thatcherism was its attempt to re-found consent on a new populist right basis, incorporating sections of the skilled working class alongside the petty bourgeoisie and big business in a new dominant bloc.  Rather than 'from cradle to grave' provision, the traditional state philosophy of Labourism, 'the discipline of the market' became the new basis of consent.  If the new regime was more violent, this was not to 'make up for' a lack of consent, though the regime was narrower in its social basis and had of necessity to disorganise a much wider coalition, but rather because the new regime had to simultaneously demolish the bases for militant leftist politics in order to viable, and construct a new form of consent based on penalising the poor.

  The purpose here is not to deny that the ruling class is weak and fractious, and the social basis of the dominant bloc narrowing dangerously from its point of view.  That is evident in the pathologies already mentioned, the degeneration of the main capitalist parties, the decline of legitimate institutions, and so on.  Rather, it is to say that an escalation of violence is not in itself indicative of weakness.  So long as the state’s violence is actually efficacious in securing consent, and disorganising the popular classes, and as long as it can be coupled with selective material incentives which are in themselves perfectly compatible with an overall increase in the rate of exploitation and a long-term material loss for most of the population, then it need not be.  And the reason why it has become necessary to Defend the Right to Protest is that this violence is proving extremely efficient in the short run.

IV.  The disorganisation of the popular classes.  Thus far, there has been no general unity on the immediate goals, tactics or politics of an anti-cuts movement, nor has a viable compromise between the rival perspectives been possible.  One result of this is that there is a vacuum in which fragmented groups and platforms are capable, at certain junctures, of projecting influence well beyond their real size and social depth.  We have seen this with UK Uncut and, in a different way, Right to Work; we saw it with various small, radical, student and education groups during the student riots; arguably, a similar type of dynamic was visible in last summer's riots.  (In localised situations, even smaller formations can acquire a significant role: eg, the campaign against the closure of Chase Farm hospital is now most visibly conducted by an infinitessimal sect, due mainly to the seeming collapse of the Save Chase Farm group since Nick de Bois was elected.)  The result of the vacuum is that adventurism and stunts acquire an exaggerated importance - not that I'm remotely snobbish about these things, but they can only advance us so far, and they tend to dissipate as quickly as they take off.  This state of affairs is a register of failure, to be sure, but it's not just a failure of initiative and leadership on the part of the radical Left.  It's a measure of the disorientation and demoralisation of the most advanced, radical workers during the New Labour era, and particularly in the wake of the worst global crisis since the Great Depression.

  In contrast to most continental equivalents, where there has been a left breakaway from the major social democratic formations fusing with Communists and the far left, resulting in some degree of electoral realignment, the political opposition to the Tories is hegemonised by the Labour Party in England and to an extent in Wales.  This is all very fragile.  George Galloway's breakthrough in Bradford was not a miracle; it reflected a wider volatility, a willingness to suddenly, sharply swing behind alternative reformisms where they appear to be viable - the SNP in Scotland, Caroline Lucas in Brighton, Galloway in Bradford, possibly Plaid Cymru in Wales, and it may well have been Kate Hudson or Salma Yaqoob next.  There is nothing inevitable or secure about Labour's electoral and political dominance in the working class, or the absence of an alternative.  The lamentable performance of Johann Lamont in Scotland seems to ensure that Labour will not recover there for some time, if it does. 

  Nonetheless, there is something different about the UK in this respect, which makes realignment a lot harder.  First of all, no left-wing opposition developed and split away from New Labour as it implemented neoliberal policies, because the defeat of the Left after 1985 was so severe and sweeping that the Blairite leadership was able to win acquiescence for the main lines of its policies in advance.  Even if the concrete realisation of those lines (tuition fees, PFI, etc) produced dissatisfaction, there was no underlying precept on which opposition could be founded.  Second, even when an issue (the Iraq war) did arise which could potentially divide the Labour Party, it did not.  Only George Galloway split away, because he was forced to rather than because he wanted to.  This is partly because the Labour machinery had been so tightly sewn up by the Blairites that an internal opposition was almost impossible to mount; most people left the party rather than fight within it.  Faced with this, there was no obvious basis for the small number of left MPs to lead a split-away, even if they were brave enough to do so.  The result is that the radical left formation that did emerge, Respect, made much of its small, locally concentrated forces, but was inherently limited compared to its most of its equivalents.  The SSP... oy.

  The only serious, national resistance to the Tories' programme is coming from the trade unions.  It is not being led by the rank and file.  Rather, the rank and file pressures the union bureaucracy for action, but remains dependent on the bureaucracy to actually take the initiative.  The shop steward movement hardly exists today.  It is not just that it is numerical depleted, both in absolute terms and relative to the unionised workforce.  It is that the role of stewards has changed dramatically, so that they end up as case workers rather than the people calling 'all out' when an issue arises.  So there isn't a basis for a rank and file movement - that would have to be painstakingly constructed in and through struggles.  Nor is there a big battalion of militant workers ready to take on the government by itself.  No one has the confidence after decades of neoliberal assault and diminishing strength and influence, to risk everything in a big set-piece dispute with the government.  This isn’t the 1980s but, alas, everyone still remembers the Miners.  The result is that strikes are seen by the union leadership as a bureaucratic manoeuvre to force the government to soften its bargaining stance. 

  This brings us back to the dominance of politics.  The unions, despite their relative historical weakness, have two potential significant strengths.  One is that their private sector membership is concentrated in clusters of high value-added parts of the economy.  The workers thus covered have considerable strategic power, as they can cut off crucial flows of surplus value very quickly.  The second, more significant, is that most of their members are based in the public sector and exercise real political power as a result.  It is not just that they can shut down vital processes in the extended reproduction of capital, thus indirectly disrupting the flow of surplus value; they can create a crisis for the state and for the government of the day.  Whereas the government can take a certain tactical distance from private sector strikes (‘hope this is resolved expeditiously, both sides need to get round the table’ etc.), it is directly implicated when nurses, teachers, civil servants and rubbish collectors go on strike.  This gives the unions the potential, and only the potential, to ascend beyond the ‘economic corporate’ mode of organising.  They are historically narrowly based, yet their immediate problems – pension and pay cuts, longer hours, etc. – can be swiftly and logically linked to the problems of other sections of the working and even middle classes.  They can create a broad system of alliances by fusing their struggles with those of students, pensioners, communities losing their hospitals and council services, and non-unionised workers suffering low pay and insecure work. 

  Recently, a motion was passed at the TUC supporting a general strike.  In its core, it would be a coordinated public sector strike with some private sector support.  But it could attract the wider support of social movements and those directly affected by cuts.  I note that while most people won’t support a ‘general strike’ call, according to polls anyway, most Labour voters will.  This is very interesting since it suggests that Labour’s voters aren’t necessarily persuaded by the leadership.  It suggests that there’s a section of the working class, I would guess including those who are not unionised, who belong to the most precarious, low-paid or unemployed sections of the working class, which is apprised of the seriousness of the situation and ready for a fightback equal to the threat.  For this to materialise, the ‘general strike’ call would have to be used as a lever to mobilise not just the rank and file of the unions but the most left-wing workers in general, and those involved in the social movements, while pressuring the union leadership into action.  Nothing about that is easy, as there will be strong counter-pressures coming from the Tories, and the press (the recent Hillsborough revelations about the collusion between Conservatives, the police and the media rather make the case for ‘Ideological-State Apparatuses’ in a nutshell).  But there is little else that is concrete, in the way of sustained resistance, to organise around.

V.  Petty Caesarism.  The consensual basis for the British capitalist state has been narrowed over the long-term by the  hollowing out of parliamentary representation inaugurated by neoliberalism, combined with the sharpening of social antagonisms, above all class antagonisms.  While social movements of one kind or another have become a more frequent feature of the landscape, there is a crisis in party-political organisation.  The Tories and Labour have been undergoing a long-term decline, and now the Liberals are likely to be reduced to a small rump (even if the exaggerated interest of media and activists during their spell in government persuades them otherwise).  The dominant political parties are poorly rooted in the population, and lack popular trust. Alongside party membership, voting levels have declined, particularly among the working class.  One effect of this during the crisis has been the manifestation of petty caesarist tendencies.  If, as Gramsci said, all coalitions are a first step in caesarism, the imposition of a Tory-Liberal coalition by civil service initiative is a typically British ruling class version of the type. 

  The decline and fragmentation of the traditional Right is an important, under-examined part of this situation.  The Conservative vote has gone through a long, spasmodic period of degeneration since the late 1960s, punctuated by the collapse in 1974, the partial resurgence under Thatcher, the crisis at the tail end of Thatcherism deferred under Major and returning with a vengeance after 1992.  This reflects not just a decline in traditional right-wing values, but the erosion by attrition of the social basis for even ‘secular’ Conservatism.  Moreover, several crisis points have arisen to threaten the traditional ‘British’ basis of Conservatism – the weakening of the Union, and the integration into Europe.  The Tories are badly placed to handle these crises, and the result alongside a sharp decline in the Tory vote is a fragmentation of the right.  UKIP is ascendant not just as the Thatcherite pressure group that it once resembled, its ‘Save the Pound’ stickers defacing Westminster lamp posts, but as potentially a serious challenger to the Conservatives based on significant sections of the Tory middle class and medium-sized capital.

  One outstanding fact about the British situation is that while racism remains at a historically high level, a result (as I have argued) of extensive state intervention to racialise social conflicts, the government would struggle far more than the last Labour government to use this advantage to re-organise its legitimacy in the crisis context.  In principle, racist paternalism would be one way to organise material incentives in a controlled way that reinforces the neoliberal accumulation regime and the attack on the welfare state.  Yet the Tories under Cameron are too hesitant and vacillating after years of being exiled as ‘the nasty party’, to really actualise such a strategy.   Another striking fact is that the far right, despite their surge over the last decade, never gained a foothold in the UK in the way that fascists in other European societies did.  Undeniably after Barking, Tower Hamlets and Walthamstow, the limit on the growth of the far right is primarily due to the successful model of antifascist action aimed at mobilising broad fronts to prevent and disrupt the local implantation of fascism.  The existence of other right-wing fragments ready to absorb Tory defectors is also plausibly a factor, although the past decade has shown us that it is quite possible for fascist and hard right parties to gain support concurrently.  But the effect of the current incapacity of the Right, coupled with the disorganisation of the popular classes, is precisely to reinforce the tendency toward petty caesarism.  The coalition government is an unstable combination, but it allows the leaderships of both coalition parties a degree of autonomy from their active base.  It renders acute the chronic insulation of parliament from the popular classes. 

  The final factor heightening caesarist tendencies is the division and uncertainty of the bourgeoisie proper.  They are not united by what to do about Europe, or about whether now is the time to start making the cuts, or about how deep they should be.  There is undoubtedly a significant section of bourgeois opinion that is gravitating toward Labour’s preferred solution of bringing forward spending now, and implementing the cuts later, in a way that is less egregiously offensive to working class interests.  In this situation, the apparatuses of the state itself – the higher civil service, the Bank of England, etc. – acquire an elevated role, and the parties of government enter a kind of coalition with them.

  Caesarism emerges because the contending classes have reached a stalemate.  What I referred to as ‘petty caesarism’, then, is just the expression of this tendency in a muted form: not exactly a total stalemate but certainly a state of disarray; polarisation but each side hesitating to enter the fray wholeheartedly; both sides almost running on empty.  One morbid symptom of this tendency is the emergence of rival hybrid forms of politics – ‘Red Toryism’, ‘Blue Labourism’ – in an attempt to short-circuit political polarisation and reconstitute the relationship between party and class.  When people say ‘no one voted for this, how do they think they can get away with it’, the answer is clear: caesarism in this case is a symptom of mutual weakness.  Yes, the ruling class is in crisis, yes it is divided and hesitant, yes it lacks political legitimacy; but as of now, its opponents are not in a better state.

The slave is not a proletarian; the proletarian is not a slave. For, under capitalism the dual freedom of the worker consists of her freedom from the means of production, and her freedom to sell her labour power to any buyer. The slave lacks both freedoms.  It follows that slavery and capitalism are incompatible.  What could be more straightforward than that?  Daniel Gaido points out, in a marxist historiograpical treatise on American capitalism, that this focus on the mode of exploitation involved in any mode of production is one that distinguishes marxism from bourgeois political economy.  For the latter, exchange relations are far more central.  Slavery is thus often (not always) defined as capitalist on account of its integration into commodity exchange.  For marxists, this is to focus on one small aspect of the totality of productive relations, which omits the social role of the worker and the relation of exploitation between owner and labourer.  This latter, Marx sees as central:

So, to repeat: the mode of exploitation comprising the innermost secret of the whole social formation, slave labour would seem to be a form of surplus extraction that belongs solely and exclusively to pre-capitalist modes of production (PCMPs).  Yet, of course, there is a tradition in marxist thought, which owes as much to W E B Du Bois as to Eric Williams, which sees plantation slavery as a capitalist form.  Contemporary advocates of this view would include David Roediger, for example.  In a classic essay, Sidney Mintz made what is in my view a compelling argument for not treating the issue of 'free labour' as decisive.  Wage labour is, like exchange relations, only one element in the totality of capitalist social relations, and has precedents in PCMPs.  I will return to Mintz's argument, but its polemical thrust is directed against the idea of slavery as the eternal other of capitalism.  Naturally, I have my view on the debate over slavery and capitalism which will become obvious throughout the post.  And for what it's worth, the latest issue of Historical Materialism carries a symposium on slavery, capitalism and the US Civil War, with contributions from Robin Blackburn, Eric Foner and others, which is mandatory reading on the subject.  But what I'm most interested in is trying to clarify the ways in which one would approach the issue, and attempt to resolve it.

First of all, it seems to me that the subject is modes of production, and the relations between them.  What does a 'mode of production' specify?  The mode of production consists of a conjunction of relations of production and forces of production.  This much at least is uncontroversial among marxists.  But precisely what each element of this conjunction consists of is a matter of intense, complex argument.  We have said that the mode of exploitation constitutes the inner secret of a social formation.  But Jairus Banaji in his recent collection, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, has a point when he complains of a tendency to conflate productive relations with modes of exploitation.  So, for the purposes of this argument, he insists on the distinction between slavery as a mode of exploitation, and the slave mode of production.  Not making this distinction, he argues, leads to the erroneous tendency to assume that wherever slavery exists there is a slave mode of production; and, as a corollary, it is assumed that wherever labour is 'unfree', there can be no capitalist mode of production (CMP).

In an enlightening essay, Banaji goes on to interrogate the notion of 'free labour'.  The idea of 'free labour' rests on a certain legal formalism in which 'free will' is assumed in the absence of direct political coercion, it logically leads to absurdities such as the assertion by US courts that "a servitude which was knowingly and willingly entered into could not be termed involuntary".  The point is not simply that behind formal legal freedom exists a realm of economic coercion; rather, it is that it is incoherent to speak of a free contract, particularly under capitalism where bargaining outcomes are determined by the wider politico-legal structure upheld through coercion.  The line between free and unfree labour is impossible to draw without collapsing into liberal mystification.  There are various kinds of labour which might be compatible with capitalism - debt-bound labour, hired labour, waged labour, etc - and in each case there are various mechanisms by which labour is subjected and unfree.

Just as much a source of controversy as the content of each element of the mode of production is the relation between the elements, eg whether the dynamic historical element in the mode of production is the forces or relations of production.  I won't go into this controversy here, but I have some sympathy with the argument that prioritising productive forces tends to collapse into a kind of techno-determinism.  Then there is the question of whether the concept of a mode of production needs to specify additional elements: should it, for example, specify the means of its own reproduction?   I don't think it has to, necessarily, but for a rigorous discussion of this and related questions, you should read Harold Wolpe's introductory essay in The Articulation of Modes of Production. 

With those questions still in mind, it becomes necessary to resolve exactly what the CMP is, and how does it relate to PCMPs?  When capitalism emerges, does it instantaneously obliterate PCMPs, gradually subsume them, incorporate elements of the old into the new, remain constrained by them in various ways... or what?  When we speak of "uneven and combined development" in relation to the development of capitalism, we mean that capitalism develops independently in a number of territories, but not in complete separation; and that it develops at a different pace in each zone.  The concept helps explain certain concrete effects in terms of class formations, national politics and culture, but it also implies something else.  It implies unevenness of development and a combination of different levels of development of capitalism in relation to PCMPs.  

To put this in a more concrete way, how might we understand the position of slavery in a capitalist social formation?  Must we see it as apart from capitalism, a PCMP in its midst?  Alternatively is it possible to think of slavery as a remnant of a PCMP that has been annexed by the CMP? Or is slave labour simply one mode of exploitation that is perfectly compatible with capitalism?  Not a remnant of a PCMP but simply one of the many ways in which the capital-labour relation can be expressed?  Returning to Mintz's argument, what he shows in his detailed survey of plantation slavery is the co-existence of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of labour not only in the same social formations, but often in the same sites of production; the same labourer could be both a slave and a proletarian.  From a very different position, Charles Post has made a strong case for seeing the cotton plantations in antebellum slavery as non-capitalist on the grounds of their lack of development of the means of production, low productivity and tendency to expand surplus value by crude absolute means such as territorial expansion: this clearly showed that pre-capitalist rather than capitalist imperatives were operative in antebellum slavery.  But as far as I can gather, the evidence on this is mixed depending on which sector of production you are looking at - for example, it depends on whether you are surveying evidence from cotton plantations, or from sugar plantations.  This would imply, perhaps, that different imperatives operated within the same regional system, that different modes of production were articulated together under a wider capitalist dominance.

Much hinges here on the distinction (derided as positivist by Banaji for reasons I don't follow) between the mode of production, and the social formation.  This is principally a distinction between different levels of abstraction.  The mode of production is an abstract set of determinations, whereas the social formation is the concrete site on which the mode of production is realised.  As such, or so Althusser and his followers would argue, one should expect to find an articulation of distinct 'pure' modes of production in any given formation.  And if that is correct, then it would be sensible to expect both capitalist and non-capitalist forms to co-exist in various complex ways; to mutually determine and restrict one another's formation and development; and when capitalism eventually triumphs, it would tend to have incorporate elements, remnants of precapitalist modes that are perhaps useful to its reproduction either at a political, ideological or economic level.

For Marx himself, the task of scientific history consisted in the determination of the laws regulating the movement of different epochs of history, their ‘laws of motion’ as they were called after the example of the natural sciences. Vulgar Marxism abdicated this task for a less ambitious programme of verifying ‘laws’ already implicit, as it supposed, in the materialist conception of history. ... Marx had been emphatic that abstract laws do not exist in history, that the laws of motion which operate in history are historically determinate laws. He indicated thereby that the scientific conception of history could be concretised only through the process of establishing these laws, specific to each epoch, and their corresponding categories. In other terms, through a process of producing concepts on the same level of historical ‘concreteness’ as the concepts of ‘value’, ‘capital’ and ‘commodity-fetishism’.

I was going to proceed with the series on Poulantzas, but to do so properly, I need to address the influence of Louis Althusser.  There is, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, a trajectory that can broadly be sketched with Althusser, Poulantzas and Laclau/Mouffe as its three compass points: from Maoism to Eurocommunism to 'radical democracy' and the abandonment of class politics as a 'fundamentalist', 'essentialist' error.

Yet to simply read the failings of his followers back into Althusser's project would be a travesty as unfair as E P Thompson's execration of the 'Stalinist' Althusser.  It is, in fact, a bitter irony that many of Althusser's followers ended up in the social-democratic camp, as this was precisely the fate that his audacious and original reconstitution of Marxism was intended to help avoid.  The fact that it didn't is not necessarily a reflection on the failings of the project; rather, it shows that Althusser was perhaps over-confident in the ability of revolutionary theory to overcome the deficiencies of political practice - particularly on the part of the French communist party (PCF) of which he was a member for most of his political life.  He was to acknowledge a "theoreticist deviation" among his failings when he came to review and rectify his work in later years.

For, the motivation for Althusser's 'return to Marx', and the attempt to found a 'left-wing' critique of 'theoretical Stalinism', was political and strategic.  As he put it, "that there can be no tactics that do not depend on a strategy – and no strategy that does not depend on theory".  So, I will recount, in a highly abbreviated form, the elements of this philosophical enterprise with an eye to its political context - while, in deference to the subject, respecting the autonomy of theory.  Also, since I will make no attempt to be original, I'll append a very short, selective bibliography at the end of this post.  For now, I'll just say that by far the best guide is Gregory Elliott's Althusser: The Detour of Theory, which is thankfully in print again.

Louis Althusser joined the PCF in 1948, just as the Cold War was commencing.  The party had emerged from its participation in World War II, however belated, with considerable prestige.  In the 1945 elections, it won the largest share of the vote, with 26% - 5m votes concentrated in the manual working class.  Its membership was at half a million, and would increase to about 800,000 in the next few years.  Its leaders joined the Cabinet, and did their best to direct popular radicalism into the reconstruction of French capitalism.  Yet, it was at just this point that it was about to be thrust into a political ghetto.  The marginalising forces were precisely those of the Cold War.  The Socialists under Guy Mollet joined the 'Atlanticist' camp, forced the Communists out of government, and led some brutal class struggles against French workers, not to mention vicious colonial counterinsurgency campaigns. At the same time, Moscow-oriented parties were being instructed to take a 'left turn'.  This meant breaking from the 'Popular Front' alliances, and polarising between the pro-peace socialist camp and the dupes of imperialism.  At an ideological level, it meant dusting off the shibboleths of 'Marxism-Leninism' which had been stowed for the duration of the 'Popular Front' period, and denouncing a host of ideologies (such as psychoanalysis, for example) as 'bourgeois', 'cosmopolitan' and 'reactionary'.  On a more positive level, it also meant that the party was more willing to side with workers in ongoing struggles.  But amid a wave of anticommunist hysteria, the PCF found itself increasingly isolated and unable to build on its previous successes.  The resulting loss of éclat saw the party retreat to an ideological fortress, with party theoreticians extirpating heresy and administering what Althusser would characterise as a "dogmatist night".

Yet, for him, the PCF was the party of the French working class, and the only party capable of posing a threat to French capitalism.  Therefore it was a duty of Marxist intellectuals to be members.  He was not unique in this judgment.  Sartre, no ally of Stalinism, nonetheless insisted at the height of the Cold War in 1952 that a defeat for Stalinism in France would be a defeat for the working class.  The PCF was the sole unifying instance capable of imparting "class-being" to the workers.  So, Althusser bore the long night of dogma in relative silence in acceptance of party discipline.  It was not until the événements of 1956 - in February, Khrushchev's 'secret speech' at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, attacking Stalin's legacy; and in November, the invasion of Hungary - that Althusser began to break the silence.  The glasnost following Khrushchev's speech allowed heterodox currents to emerge, most prominent among which were various strands of Marxist Humanism.

It was the fact that the regime itself was incorporating this humanism into its official ideology, and the fact that the PCF could do the same without skipping a beat - the PCF witchfinder-general Roger Garaudy was converted overnight into a humanist and supporter of theoretical pluralism - aroused Althusser's suspicions.  Moreover, this happened without affecting the underlying tenets of 'Marxism-Leninism' in the slightest.  This de-Stalinization, he inferred, was a right-wing de-Stalinization that would lead to the social-democratization of communism.  Already, the PCF had been attempting to navigate its way out of the ghetto via an alliance with the Socialists - "democratic adventurism" in Althusser's assessment - contributing to a political passivism, support for colonialism in Algeria, and eventually blank perplexity when General Charles de Gaulle established a dictatorship, the 'Fifth Republic', in May 1958.  In resisting this tide, Althusser aimed to strengthen the political practice of French communism.  As he put it:

Thus, he began work on his reconstitution of Marxism.  The hallmark of the ensuing period was tactical quietism and strategic offensive.  He forebore criticisms of PCF policy, while working to transform it in the longue durée by means of a theoretical assault on PCF dogma.

Before going any further, I should say something about Althusser's attitude to Stalinism.  First of all, his claim to be embarking on the "first left-wing critique of Stalinism" implies an ignorance of Leon Trotsky's work, among others.  This meant he initiated his critique from within the radius of Stalinism, cutting himself off from extant critical resources.  Inevitably, he had to make use of what was there 'in front of him'.  Thus, despite attacking Stalinist dogma and lamenting its victims, he did not hesitate to endorse aspects of Stalin's thought if it was useful to him in the theoretical struggle.  Despite Stalin's own theoretical dilettantism, he did not resile from attributing theoretical 'discernment' and 'perspicacity' to him at times.  And he obliviously championed 'Marxism-Leninism' against the regime, as if it was not the official ideology, and not therefore a caricature of both Marxism and Leninism.

Second, his ideological pole star throughout this period was the People's Republic of China (PRC), whose attack on Khrushchevite 'humanism'* provided much of the stimulus for this "left-wing critique".  (*Khrushchevism "substitutes humanism for the Marxist-Leninist theory of class struggle and substitutes the bourgeois slogan of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity for the ideals of communism. It is a revisionist programme for the preservation and restoration of capitalism".)  This obviously left him to some extent hostage to the credibility of the PRC.  One can also read into his theoretical work certain related political connotations.  Ellen Wood rightly points out that Althusser's insistence on the relative autonomy of the 'instances' is congruent with the politics of the Cultural Revolution.  Still, one must take care to avoid the tone of a health warning here: "the theoretical formulation of the 'relative autonomy' of 'instances', if taken in extreme quantities, can lead to Maoism".  It is not reducible to any such political context.  Less so is this theoretical innovation exclusively governed by the need to explain how a Stalinist bureaucracy can arise in a 'socialist' economy - various strands of dissident Marxism managed to explain this to their own satisfaction without recourse to Althusser.

For Althusser, the two dominant theoretical purviews, which he classed as 'humanism/historicism' and 'economism', were symmetrical in their teleological structure.  Economism was the "poor man's Hegelianism" shared by both Kautsky and Stalin, a Marxist version of technological determinism in which the development of the productive forces was the sole determinant of historical change and guarantor of the inevitability of socialism.  Humanism/historicism, in place of productive forces, posited 'Man' or the working class as the constitutive subject of history, whose progress would bring history to its communist terminus.  In an extremely schematic way, these errors could be understood respectively as a rightist and a leftist deviation.  As he explained to a New Left Review interviewer: "The rightist deviation suppresses philosophy: only science is left (positivism). The leftist deviation suppresses science: only philosophy is left (subjectivism)".

The chief problem with humanism/historicism was that it relativised Marxism and thus brought its epistemological status into doubt.  By describing Marxism as an ideology of the proletariat whose validity could be verified by its contribution to the historical advance of the class, it effaced the gap between science and ideology.  For Althusser, the scientificity of Marxism was what distinguished it from all speculative philosophies of history.  To compromise its scientificity was to weaken its explanatory power.  And there was no doubt for Althusser of its extraordinary power.  This "scientific revolution" had opened up the 'continent' of History to scientific knowledge, in exactly the same way that Thales had opened the 'continent' of mathematics and Galileo the 'continent' of physical nature.  Marxists were "only just beginning to explore" this new continent, but the explorations were already at risk from theoretical revisions. Althusser acknowledged the strengths of humanism as a rejection of an inhuman and dogmatic tyranny, and welcomed the intellectual thaw that it signposted. Nonetheless, as Gregory Elliot puts it, "it ultimately summed up to a romantic anti-capitalism and anti-scientism, as politically voluntarist as it was philosophically speculative".

Even Althusser's sympathetic reviewers are damning about Althusser's schema here.  His engagement with Marxist humanism was unidimensional, dealing only with the doctrine as espoused by the theoreticians of Communist parties after 1956 - "Stalinism with a human face" - and ignoring the work of those who left the Communist parties but remained Marxists.  The category of 'humanism/historicism' assimilates an incredibly diverse array of thinkers, from Lukacs to Korsch, Gramsci, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Goldmann and Della Volpe (avowedly anti-Hegelian).  He does not acknowledge the Frankfurt School, and despite his hostility to revisions which dilute Marxism, his own approach would involve vitalising Marxism with the supplement of rationalist philosophy in the form of Spinoza and Bachelard.  And it is a point repeatedly made, with justice, that Althusser's tendency to subsume qualitatively distinct theorists under a single category of theoretical error - the "Continent of Theoretical Error" as Norman Geras described it in his spirited joust with Laclau and Mouffe - is redolent of the tendency he discerned and derided in Hegel to characterise all the manifold phenomena of a conjuncture as mere expressions of a single moment in the development of the Idea.  

Nonetheless, this version of 'humanism' formed the negative reference point for Althusser's attempt to 'return to Marx', and this much may be said for it right away: it neither concedes a single thing politically to those using the critique of Stalinism to move to the right, nor does it simply lapse into a conservative fortification of dogma.  Althusser's response to what he saw as a crisis of revolutionary theory was to undertake a critical and robust re-evaluation of Marxism.  And the question he posed, in For Marx, was fundamental: "What is Marxist philosophy? Has it any theoretical right to existence? And if it does exist in principle, how can its specificity be defined?"

As should be clear by now, this philosophy was to owe little to Hegel.  Engels had attempted to extract the rudiments of dialectical materialism from Hegel's Logic, standing the dialectic 'on its feet' the better to "discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell", as Marx described it in an Afterword to Capital volume one.  The 'three laws' of the dialectic in Engels' Anti-Duhring were lifted straight from the Logic and applied to what were then the most cutting edge ideas in science.  Althusser argued that this formula of standing of the dialectic on its feet was utterly misunderstood if it taken to mean that one simply had to invert Hegel's postulates, putting matter in place of spirit: this "will merely produce a new materialist metaphysics".  Marxists who took this step had misunderstood what Marx was doing Capital, volume one, part one.  For here, the apparently Hegelian structure of Marx's exposition is akin to a process of peeling back the mystical layers of Hegel's approach to extract whatever is rational - though, contrary to the kernel/shell metaphor, he insisted that even the kernel had to be 'contaminated' by Hegelian idealism.  The major contributions of Hegel were his attack on Kantian subjectivism which could provide the basis for a materialist defence of scientific objectivity, and the concept, implicit in the Absolute Idea, of " a process without a subject" which informed Marx's analysis of Capital.  I should say that Althusser's critics justifiably point to his highly selective reading of Marx's writings, thus ignoring a great part of the 'mature' work that is still determinedly Hegelian.  In fact, however, this point rebounds to Althusser's advantage: the most Hegelian passages in, for example, Capital, are also the most liable to lapse into dogmatically deterministic assertions.  And Althusser, after all, never said that the 'epistemological break' separating the young from the mature Marx was a clean break - quite the contrary.

But, if Althusser otherwise rejected the Hegelian legacy, insisting that what Marx offered was more than a Hegelianised version of English political economy, from whence could this philosophy emerge?  It was implicit, he said, in "the logic of Capital".  It was also implicit in revolutionary practice, particularly in what he regarded as the two great successes of Marxism, the revolutions of 1917 and 1949.  This is what motivated the 'return to Marx', and it is why he could brush off charges of 'scholarly fetishism' with airy contempt.

Marxist philosophy, in Althusser's schema, is one of two distinct levels of Marxist theory.  These are: historical materialism, being "the Marxist science of the development of social formations"; and dialectical materialism, being the as yet unconstituted philosophy that is implicit in Marx's work.  This philosophy would, if elaborated, form the epistemological bedrock of historical materialism, point out its flaws, suggest solutions, and supply concepts adequate to its problems.  Above all, it would safeguard the theory as a scientific practice against debilitating ideological dilutions.  If historical materialism is the science of history, then, dialectical materialism is the "theory of science and of the history of science", or more broadly "a theory of theoretical practice".  One upshot of this conception of theory as a practice, is to render the problem of the unity of theory and practice unintelligible.

Among Althusser's first tasks is to discern what the "theoretical practice" is, of which dialectical materialism is the theory.  The concept of practice itself, the "primacy of practice" in Marx, is central: "We can assert the primacy of practice theoretically by showing that all the levels of social existence are the sites of distinct practices: economic practice, political practice, ideological practice, technical practice and scientific (or theoretical) practice."  But to speak of an undifferentiated "practice" is to succumb to ideology.  Marx's breakthrough was to provide a "theory of the different specific levels of human practice".  These different levels - economic, political, and ideological - are the 'relatively autonomous' 'instances' of the social totality.  Practice can nonetheless be defined as "any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of 'production')".  The determinant moment in this process is the labour of transformation itself.  Theoretical practice, then, is a form of production, divisible into three 'Generalities': Generalities I, a set of raw materials (concepts, abstractions) into relation with one another; Generalities II, the "means of theoretical production" which are brought to bear on the raw materials; and Generalities III, the end product, knowledge or the thought-concrete. 

Althusser proceeded to refine this understanding of knowledge-as-production against the empiricist conception of knowledge as vision.  For empiricism, knowledge begins with a relation between subject and object: the 'object' of knowledge is objective reality, on which the subject performs a labour of abstraction through which it separates the essence from the inessence of the object.  In so doing, the subject comes to possess the essence and thus has knowledge of it.  For Althusser, this was flawed on two accounts.  First, it was wrong to assume that the object of knowledge was objective reality.  The object of knowledge is what results from the labour of abstraction, which forms the raw material for the process of theoretical production.  Second, its two-ply model of reality actually inscribed the knowledge of reality (essence) within that reality itself, thus collapsing the distinction between thought and the real.  For Althusser, it was crucial for materialism that the independence of reality from thought should be maintained.

It follows that Althusser must reject the empiricist conception of knowledge as a 'model' composed of abstractions, a model which is necessarily a poor cousin of the reality which it tries to emulate.  If, in the empiricist view, the abstraction is always a hugely simplified 'essence' of the real object, and therefore theory can never be adequate to the complex reality it describes.  For Althusser, however, the object of knowledge is not a given (the 'real object') but rather a raw material consisting of previously worked on concepts and abstractions, and is therefore susceptible to continual refinement by the means of theoretical production.  There is no inherent limit to a theory fully adequate to its subject.  This is extremely important.  As Norman Geras put it, "if the object of knowledge in the strict sense is not the real object, the object which is known finally, via the object of knowledge, is the real object."

Following both Bachelard and Spinoza, Althusser insisted that science and ideology were wholly distinct kinds of knowledge.  Though the process of knowledge production in each case is formally equivalent, science is marked by a foundational rupture, an 'epistemological break' with common sense.  The opacity of the everyday is such that only such a profound break could found a genuinely objective knowledge.  But how is it possible to tell the difference, to verify that what one is doing is science and not ideology?  Althusser turned down the pragmatist option of judging a project by its successes: theory is successful because it is true, he argued; it is not true because it is successful.  The proper way to judge a science was by criteria immanent to it.  A research programme could only devise its own criteria of verification.  

If this seems circular, that is because it is: as Gregory Elliot puts it, "there is something inherently dogmatic and viciously circular in employing Marxist philosophy to guarantee the status of Marxist science".  Unable to avoid this problem, Althusser attempted to pose the question in another way: by what mechanism did theoretical practice, which took place exclusively at the level of thought, effect the cognitive appropriation of reality?  But that did not yield a satisfactory answer either.  As such, and given the manifest deficiencies of Marxism in the face of the last century's challenges, the claim for Marxism's scientificity looks shaky.  Althusser would abandon the idea that dialectical materialism was a science of sciences, arguing in Lenin and Philosophy that philosophy was not itself a science but the class struggle in theory.  Where that leaves the epistemological status of Marxism is something that is still open to debate.

Befrore proceeding, it's worth drawing out a few implications from this account of theoretical practice and its autonomy.  Althusser was defending "the right of Marxist theory not to be treated as a slave to tactical decisions".  But a quite different political consequence of this was a certain kind of elitism, in which Marxist theory was the work of specialists who should be left alone.  To be clear, Althusser understood that Marxist theory could not have emerged without the workers' movement (in conjunction with certain "theoretical elements".  His critics who ascribe to him a form of idealism in which the 'epistemological break' of Marxism is a purely theoretical phenomenon, estranged from class struggle, are wrong.  The autonomy of theory is only relative, after all.  Yet, for Althusser, the workers' movement did not, and by implication could not, produce Marxist theory "by its own devices".  He takes the Lenin of What Is To Be Done to argue that Marxist theory must be imported into the working class movement from outside it, a hypothesis with which he concurs.  Workers have a 'class instinct', which enables them to arrive at objectively correct proletarian 'class positions', but they are incapable of being spontaneously revolutionary.  So much the worse with theorists, who are instinctively petty bourgeois, and must constantly militate against these prejudices.  As it comes down to it, only the vanguard party provides the link between the class and revolutionary theory.  Without the party, revolutionary theory cannot be imported into the class; without revolutionary theory, the class cannot make a revolution.  And Althusser is insistent that the empirical data confirms this - revolutions have only been made where Marxist theory has been accepted by the workers' movement (Russia and China), whereas those situations where revolution is most distant also happen to be those where Marxist theory was never widely accepted in the workers' movements (Britain), or was adulterated in a social democratic fashion (Germany).  

Althusser was thus committed to a version of Leninism which has these days, and for good reason, fallen out of favour.  As Valentino Gerrattana argues, despite Althusser's intention to break with Stalin, he constantly evaded the question of the latter's relationship to Lenin and Leninism, never clarifying the issue of how much "theoretical Stalinism" was a break from Bolshevism.  As a result, he committed himself to certain 'Leninist' positions that more closely resemble what Hal Draper called 'Leninology' than historical Leninism.  Even so, I would again caution against using this political error to dismiss the theory.  There is in fact no good reason why one should infer from the autonomy of theoretical practice that the working class movement can produce no revolutionary theory by itself.  The fact that theoretical and political practices are distinct, does not mean that workers are incapable of performing both.

In addition to these epistemological concepts, and the extremely interesting account of knowledge that they sum up to, Althusser elaborated a set of historical concepts.  We have already introduced the idea of the relative autonomy of 'instances', that is of different levels of practice within a social totality.  But what does such a 'totality' consist of, and what constitutes its different levels?  Each level, precisely, is a structure, so that the social whole is a structure of structures.  

Something of the nature of the structure is imparted in Althusser's discussion of 'Generalities II', where he introduces the notion of the 'problematic'.  The problematic is a theoretical structure which brings the concepts and abstractions into a certain relationship with one another.  But it is rarely explicit in the theory that it regulates: it is submerged.  This is as true of Marxism as other doctrines, which is why it is necessary for Althusser and his followers to embark on close, symptomatic readings of Marx's texts to bring the problematic to light.  Despite being submerged, the problematic plays an active role, and this not in any metaphorical sense.  It is not the subject that 'sees' the objects that become known through theoretical practice; it is the problematic.  The subject does not play the determinant role in knowledge production; the structure does.  And this is typical.  This structure is not an audible, visible, tangible object, but rather a "process without a subject" discernible solely through its effects.   The only subjects pertinent to it are those constituted and governed by the structure.  This is Althusserian anti-humanism.  It is a commonplace that this total demotion of the subject was deeply problematic for any revolutionary praxis that might follow from it - after all, if subjects are constituted by the structure, wherein lies the possibility of their emancipation from it?  Althusser attempted to deal with this by stating that this was a necessary explanatory step; the theoretical reduction of subjects accounted for the practical reduction of subjects under capitalism.  Yet, this by itself didn't solve the problem of how subjects could escape this practical reduction.  Ultimately, to avoid a structural-functionalist account in which the structures merely perform in ways that are functional for their reproduction, Althusser relies on his concepts of overdetermination and contradiction, which we'll come back to.

Crucially, the social totality, the structure of structures, is quite unlike Hegel's 'expressive' or 'spiritual' totality, in that the structure has no centre, and no original essence of which its parts are mere expressions.  It is the sum of irreducible, multiple instances, each with its own history, each with its own complex structure and each governed by its own temporality.  Importantly, each also has its own specific efficacy, so that the political and ideological are by no means merely reducible to the economic.  In this sense, Althusser's account of the social has remarkably similar starting points to those of post-structuralists, albeit he draws radically different conclusions about the intelligibility of the structure, and his emphasis on "unity in difference" or "complex unity" distinguishes his difference from the free play of signifiers that is Derrida's différance.  And he rescues his analysis from simple pluralism by asserting the determining role of the economic level 'in the last instance'.  That is, though the social formation has no centre or essence, within it there is a "structure in dominance" in which one or other of the instances is dominant.  And, it is the economic level that determines which of these instances will be dominant in any social formation.  (I find it helps to think of the example of feudalism, in which mode of production the instance of politics was dominant, due to the specific mode of surplus extraction in the economic instance.)

It's also worth examining the difference between a social formation and a mode of production in Althusser's analysis.  The difference between the two is partially a difference in the level of abstraction.  The mode of production is the combination of the elements of a social whole at its most abstract; the social formation is the site in which those elements are concretely present in all of their specificity.  The 'elements' of the mode of production can be assigned to an elementary table, listing the labourer, the non-labourer, some means of production, etc.  Seemingly, these 'elements' are constant through all modes of production, with only their specific relationship in a given combination varying.  Yet, this conclusion has to be qualified by Althusser's stress on 'overdetermination'.

The concept of overdetermination is taken over from Freudian psychoanalysis, in which it refers to the condensation of potent dream-thoughts, wishes, etc., in a single image. The 'overdetermination' of a point in the structure means, analogously, the condensation of all of the relations and 'contradictions' within the totality in that single node.  'Contradictions' in Althusser's useage are purely 'historical', referring to a number of different kinds of complexity, such as paradox, antagonism, ambiguity, combined and uneven development, etc.  He does not subscribe to any of the materialist metaphysics of Anti-Duhring.  When he refers to an accumulation of contradictions in a given social formation, he is referring to just those tensions, antagonisms and ambiguities that undermine the unity and cohesion of the formation and make possible its disintegration and overthrow.  A consequence, at any rate, of overdetermination is that the elements in a mode of production cannot be the same regardless of how they are articulated.  Since each point is overdetermined by every other point in the matrix, the specific content of these elements must vary depending on their articulation.

The concepts of overdetermination, determination in the last instance, and the structure in domination, were cited by Althusser to repudiate critics who described his work as structuralist.  It is another matter entirely whether he succeeded in avoiding certain structural-functionalist temptations; certainly, his followers didn't always do so.  (I mentioned Poulantzas' tendency to collapse into such explanations, at least in his earlier work).  However, as Stuart Hall points out, by thinking systematically about the different levels and kinds of determination in a social formation, by locating this complexity and plurality in Marx, he enabled the thinking of concrete historical situations and ideological formations within the Marxist 'problematic', as well as the analysis of political situations in their specificity and lines of antagonism. Indeed, as we learn from Machiavelli and Us, one of the most important historical concepts for Althusser is the 'conjuncture' as an "aleatory, single case", comprising not merely a sum of elements but their unity in a 'contradictory' system.  In this respect, Althusser is quite close to Gramsci, whom he otherwise lumped in with the 'historicists'.

We have seen that he avouched a strict distinction between ideology and science which seems to be in some doubt.  Yet, one of the bases for this distinction is a suggestive analysis of the "lived relation" between "men" and their world.  To be more precise, ideology expresses, not the relationship between "men" and their conditions of existence, but the way they live, or imagine that relationship.  The idea of inhabiting the world without ideology is utopian and futile: "there is no practice except by and in ideology".  

By the same token, however, "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects".  The term 'imagine' alludes to Lacan's concept of the pre-symbolic 'imaginary order', and the associated doctrine of the 'mirror phase'.  In the 'mirror phase', subjects come to recognise themselves in reality, and to imagine their relationship to that reality as if they were fully autonomous, constitutive subjects.  This, according to Althusser, is what ideology does: it constitutes subjects so that they imagine themselves to be constitutive subjects; it "interpellates" them.  And in giving them an imaginary relationship to their actual relation with the world, it distorts their real situation and binds them to the social structure.  This concept of ideology as, not merely erroneous beliefs but a lived relationship to one's situation, has proven enormously fruitful.  Much of Hall's splendid repertoire is unthinkable without it, as he is the first to acknowledge. 

But it is not just this aspect of the interpretation of ideology that is relevant here.  Again, the 'relative autonomy' of the instances has some bearing here.  For, while it was a staple of certain crude, mechanistic Stalinism that certain ideologies had a necessary class belonging (this played a useful polemical role if one wanted to debate intellectual opponents), it has equally become a staple of poststructuralist ideologies that there is no correspondence whatever between ideological struggles, which are purely contingent, and the 'economic base'.  Thus, Laclau and Mouffe insisted that Gramsci's theory of hegemonic struggle was burdened by an essentialist remnant, which tried to anchor these struggles in a unified economic level - but only if contingency was expelled from the economy could this anchoring be effective.  So, Laclau and Mouffe denied any correspondence between classes and ideologies.  I think what you find in Althusser's conception, however, is quite different from both.  The 'relative autonomy' of instances allows that there is no necessary class connotation to a given idea, (Althusser was witness to all those futile attempts by the Stalinists to bissect scientific theories according to some imputed class position), but does not permit that there is necessarily no such connotation.  This allows for a certain open-endedness of political struggles and class practices, for the aligning of heterogenous interests and perhaps even antagonistic subject-positions.  Moreover, Althusser's stress on the practical aspect of ideology underlines that any successful articulation between different elements has to be constructed.

If there is no strategy without theory, it does not follow that a given theory is suited only to one strategic purpose.  The relation between political and theoretical practice is more complex, less determinate, than such a view would allow.  So, if Althusser did conceive of his theoretical innovations as political interventions, it doesn't mean that he followed what might be the expected path that his theoretical work would imply.  Politically, he was neither a Stalinist nor a reformist; theoretically, he was waging an attack on the practice of the French communists.  Yet, membership of the party was his sole route, as he perceived it, to an organic connection with the working class and thus to meaningful theoretical work.  And because he did not break fully with Stalinism, he could not break fully with reformism, and remained bound to a party moving perpetually in a social democratic direction.  Nor did he help renew PCF political practice along revolutionary lines.  Toward the end of his career, the PCF was embarking on a Eurocommunist route to the margins.

Althusser's career ended in a squalid tragedy when, under the influence of a mental illness that had grown more intense over the years, he strangled his wife, Hélène.  K S Karol's article, 'The Tragedy of the Althussers', listed below, is one of the few that remembers Hélène Althusser for something other than this horrible end - recounting her role in the French Resistance, as a Communist, and as a social scientist.  Louis Althusser was consigned to an asylum, before living more or less hermetically until his death.  Did Althusser's project fail?  By the scale of its own extraordinary ambition, it did fail in many respects.  It particularly failed to establish the absolute scientificity of Marxist theory, and thus its safeguard against party bosses, revisions and rivals.  Yet, given the real deficiencies of Marxism exposed by the twentieth century experience, there is perhaps only a Beckettian choice between failing and failing better.  Althusser failed better.

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Select bibliography:  Louis Althusser & Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, NLB, 1970; Louis Althusser, For Marx, Allen Lane, 1969; Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, NLB, 1971; Louis Althusser, 'On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party', New Left Review 104, July-August 1977; Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, Verso, 2003; Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Brill, Leiden & Boston, 2006; Norman Geras, 'Althusser’s Marxism: An Account and Assessment', New Left Review 71, January-February 1972; K S Karol, 'The Tragedy of the Althussers', New Left Review 124, November-December 1980; Alex Callinicos, Althusser's Marxism, Pluto Press, 1976; Alex Callinicos, Is There A Future for Marxism?, Macmillan, 1982; Valentino Gerratana, 'Althusser and Stalinism', New Left Review 101-102, January-April 1977; Stuart Hall, 'Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates', Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Vol 2, No 2, June 1985

Well, that was interesting. You can view the transcript of my talk below this post, but the debate deserves to be outlined, little as I can do it real justice. Nicola Livingstone of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh opened with a discussion of charity, specifically retail charity, in an attempt to theorise its role within late capitalism, so that we can better understand the kinds of organisation that the government supposedly wants to deliver public services.

The argument traced the development of retail charity from the salvage shops in poorer districts in the 1800s, through the launch of Oxfam, to the professionalised and 'profit-maximising' organisations of today. They have become very marketing conscious, and the proliferation of high street branches - increasingly in wealthy areas, where most volunteers can be attracted to work, and most revenues raised - is an aspect of this development, as retail shops are an efficient way of raising funds. Charity itself becomes commodified, as it is in the consumption of retail goods that one expresses social solidarity.

Based on voluntary labour, the organisations work - so it is argued - not by extracting value from the volunteers, but by using the volunteers to realise the exchange value in the merchandise itself. The volunteers themselves are typically not in employment. Only 5% of volunteers are in full-time employment, with the bulk either retired or unemployed. They also tend to be on lower incomes, with most on under £15,000 per year. There are antagonistic relations between managers and workers, the former under enormous pressure to get the most out of the volunteers with few resources. The workers have more leverage than in the typical capitalist firm, in that they are compelled neither by economics or direct coercion to be there.

When asked why they volunteer, a typical answer involves "giving something back to society", though it is never clear what exactly is being given. Another common phrase is "conscience salving". There is no particular attachment to any one charity. Most volunteers choose the retail charity outlet nearest to them. There is little questioning of the framework in which the charitable act takes place, how effective it is, what might be better than charity... certainly, there is little questioning of the capitalist social relations that make it necessary that some should give up their free time. These are organisations that, one would gather, are ill-equipped to run public services. Voluntary labour is no replacement for waged labour, and commodified "conscience-salving" is no substitute for social solidarity.

Marina Kaneti (I didn't get what institution she was from, but I think this is her), then gave a talk completely in contrast to the above, arguing that social entrepreneurs are not necessarily co-opted by capitalism, and can act as an oppositional force, challenging the structure in some ways. Arguing from Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, Kaneti argued that there were large parts of the world that were 'radically excluded' from the capitalist economy, where the activities of big populations do not feed into capital accumulation or generate profit. Among these would be the slum-dwellers who numbered 921 millon in 2001, and will number 2 billion by 2030.

It is in these areas that social entrepreneurs can build, channelling people's creativity, changing social patterns, impacting the structures of the system - and this, she maintained, does not have to be coopted by capitalism. To back up this point, she cited the patron of social entrepreneurs (and old Reaganite arch-capitalist), William Draper, pointing out that social entrepreneurs solve social problems, not economic problems. They engage in non-market activities to improve lives. They allow for local empowerment, and capability-development that may be able to elude capitalist enclosure. A short video clip from one of those TED talks was shown to illustrate the point. The 'Blackberry' logo appeared on screen, then a rather lively host with a headset spoke from a vast stage, inviting a guest to join him from the floor. The man, William Kambwamba, was from Malawi, and he had become a 'social entrepreneur' by building a windmill from instructions in a book found in a nearby library run by USAID. The story is, he just had this idea of building a windmill to electrify his home, so went looking for the information, found it, and built it with the materials available to him. He was eventually able to power his local community with the assistance of overseas investors.

I didn't agree with the talk, and I was squirming at the video. I thought it was patronising, racist rubbish. It was like an Israeli foundation getting a Palestinian to talk about social activism without mentioning the occupation. There was no mention of the famine which drove his father's farming business into the ground, the Washington Consensus which contributed to the famine, or the privatised secondary and tertiary education system which meant that Kambwamba could not afford to continue school. The whole semiotics of the clip was appalling, with the presenter smarmily gushing, and the audience whooping and hollering, and no mention of the social context in which this 'entrepreneurialism' took place - just this atomised individual, devoid of political views or any relationship to Malawi's trade unions or socialist left, which would be challenging capitalism in different ways. (And, by the way, Kambwamba does have a view on imperialism, the IMF, neoliberalism, exploitation, and so on.) I really disliked it. I think it's fair to say most of the audience did as well, as someone complained to me afterward that people were rather unfairly aggressive toward Marina.

On the other hand, John Holloway, speaking from the floor, loved the presentation. He was very enthusiastic about it, seeing it as an excellent antidote to the idea of marxism as a 'theory of domination', which I suppose he saw reflected in the presentations by Nicola Livingstone and myself. He argued that marxism had to be a theory of antagonism, and the key antagonism in capitalism is between use value and exchange value, between abstract and concrete labour. The key antagonism of capitalism, then, centres on despair, frustration and alienation, and social entrepreneurs by unleashing our capabilities can help overcome this. I was neither surprised nor particularly moved by this, considering...

Anyway, here's my talk:

Thoroughly Modern Tories? From 'One Nation' to 'The Big Society'
Richard Seymour

In search of tradition
The Tories have a habit of justifying whatever they’re doing in terms of an ancestral tradition, of which they are the legatees. Some examples. When Sir Robert Peel, in effectively founding the modern Conservative Party, embraced industrial capitalism and the Great Reform Act of 1832, he signalled his acceptance of the new order with the ‘Tamworth Manifesto’. It is a rather dull document to read, written for a bye-election. But it acknowledged the reform as both “a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question” and at the same time as nothing more than a “careful review” of existing institutions to root out “abuses”, the better to preserve “ancients rights” and “deference to prescriptive authority”.

When Benjamin Disraeli led the Tories toward the Second Reform Act of 1867, which enfranchised a section of the working class, he asserted that the 1832 Act had “abolished all the franchises of the working class” which were “as ancient as those of the Baronage of England”. Thus, adapting to mass democracy was not a reluctant last-ditch embrace of reform to mitigate its effects and claim its benefits, but the restoration of a tradition which the Tories had, mysteriously, forgotten about. Embracing the ideology of social reform, Disraeli asserted that raising up the condition of the people was one of the three pillars of the Tories’ historic mission. Stanley Baldwin, in turn, embracing certain fledgling forms of welfare and palliation, grounded his appeal in a ‘One Nation’ tradition going back all the way to Disraeli. Harold Macmillan, embracing social democracy, asserted that Toryism is nothing other than “paternal socialism”. He harked back to Disraeli. The New Right, whose rise coincided with some fresh thinking on Disraeli found that they were able to claim him as an ancestor too. And of course, David Cameron, positioning himself as a quasi-egalitarian, a social reformer concerned with poverty, considers himself an advocate of Tory radicalism in the tradition of Benjamin Disraeli.

There is in fact no coherent tradition here, no unbroken lineage that resolves the many turbulent shifts of official Tory doctrine and practise into a solid body of accumulated wisdom. There are constant commitments – but these are not to tradition, and the familiar, as so many Tory apologists vouch. Whether opposing mass democracy or acquiescing to it, whether red-baiting social democrats or mimicking them, whether raising spending or cutting it, the enduring ideological commitment of the Conservative Party is to inequality, hierarchy and domination.

Or, to put it in less abstract terms, the capitalist mode of production, the system of Burke’s veneration, the system that made the Tory landowning class rich (for it was still largely an agrarian system when the Conservative Party first emerged in its modern form), and the system whose technological expansion made the Peel family rich, as they were original investors behind the spread of the ‘Spinning Jenny’. In the marxist idiom, the Conservative Party is a bourgeois party, a party that exists to wage political struggles on behalf of the capitalist class into which it is integrated. And if this is right, then the shifting orthodoxies of official Conservatism will not merely express the changing interests, composition and cohesion of the ruling class, but also its relations with the rest of society, its relative power with respect to the working class, and so on.

So, it is on that basis that I want to outline the patterns of the shift, from the post-war consensus to Thatcherism, and now the post-Thatcherite neoliberal consensus that has a near monopoly on our parliamentary system.

‘One Nation’
The Tories’ acceptance of the social democratic state, which Labour constructed out of the materials of the war state, was at first reluctant. Lord Hailsham’s famous warning to parliament at the height of war in 1943 urged that: “If you do not give the people social reform they are going to give you a social revolution.” This was a recognition that the war-making state had mobilised millions of workers in a collective effort, under the direction of a state that had showed that it could engage in planning. It was also a recognition of the radicalism that was sweeping the country during the war, something that Paul Foot describes in his posthumously published book, The Vote. But while social reform was on the agenda, it was no part of the Tories’ agenda in 1945 to deliver social democracy.

There was bipartisan agreement, coming out of the war, that there should be some form of social safety net. Capitalism would be re-organised to integrate a labour movement with a specifically reformist, anti-communist orientation into the institutions of government – a process that really began in the 1840s in response to the challenge of Chartism. Importantly, there is nothing inherent in the welfare state that ‘free market’ Tories should oppose. Its basis is liberal, rather than socialist. The Beveridge report, composed in 1942, out of the work of an obscure reconstruction committee, builds on the Liberal reforms of 1906. Welfare was not conceived of as an obligation of a society to its members, but a commodity, traded between contracting parties. It was intended to provide a subsistence-level minimum income rather than to fundamentally redistribute the balance of wealth and power. But the idea of economic planning, of a corporatist state with a set of nationalised industries at its core enabling the government to orchestrate demand, and integrating the demands of the working class through the absorption of the trade union bureaucracy, was fiercely opposed at first.

Nor did their subsequent experiences automatically change their opinions. If the scale of the defeat in 1945, halving the Tories’ parliamentary representation, reducing their share of the vote from 53.7% to 39.8%, briefly empowered those in the Conservative Party who wanted to move in the direction of some moderate industrial planning, by the time the Cold War was being launched in 1947, the Tories, led by Winston Churchill, had lapsed into a red-baiting crusade for capitalist freedom. Churchill vituperated that social democracy was a half-way house to communism. His allies and advisors, such as Oliver Lyttelton, argued –in ways that foreshadowed the ‘New Right’ – that planning of the economy must involve planning the lives of individuals, not just in Britain, but in all those countries that Britain traded with (or possessed as colonies). According to such early neo-liberal thought, planning was absurd, tyrannical and unworkable. The 1951 election was fought on the basis of opposing government intervention, denationalisation, restoring capitalist freedom. “Set the people free”, ran the slogan. And had the distribution of seats been proportionate to the vote, the Tories would have lost the election, as Labour consolidated its support with 48.8% of the vote – proving itself to have a durable electoral basis.

In office, very little was done to reverse Labour’s reforms. Planning was maintained, unemployment remained minimal, below half a million for 8 of 13 years of Tory rule, public spending was kept up, a few abridgments notwithstanding. Working class wages kept up with productivity – in fact, when it comes to incomes policies, workers tended to do slightly better under Tory than Labour administrations. The reasons for the Tories’ acquiescence are varied. Such planning as had been institutionalised was not planning in any strong, radical Keynesian sense, but in the weak sense of evening out imbalances in the economy and manipulating proportions of activity in accordance with an overall strategy. Such industries as had been nationalised had been handsomely recompensed, were important to the UK’s industrial performance, and it was not obvious that they would survive in the private sector. Above all, the Tories did not want to risk being turfed out again in 1955. It’s important to recall how terrified they were of losing their hegemonic position. They were very well aware of the urgent need to consolidate a mass base – a problem the Tories had faced since 1867, and which manifested itself after 1945 with a poll-driven strategy to win over the lower middle class and the ‘skilled’ working class. So the modernisers around Harold Macmillan were able to win the argument for social democracy.

This did not, to repeat an earlier point, signal the accession of some ‘One Nation’ tradition to the leadership. The ‘One Nation’ faction in the Tory party has never been identical with its paternalist ‘left-wing’. Its early members included reactionaries such as Enoch Powell and, later, Keith Joseph. Its recent advocates have included Thatcherites like Ian Duncan Smith. Acquiescence in the social democratic state was a conscious adaptation to the strength and cohesion of the working class as a political force, the challenge of socialism, the relative weakness of the British ruling class, and the new needs of British capitalism in an era of global decline and bipolar international competition. Accepting the social democratic state enabled the Tories to continue to act as a hegemonic party of capital. Studies of working class support for the Tories carried out in the Sixties tended to interpret it as deferential, but an important component of that elusive phenomenon was the belief that the Tories ‘looked after’ the working classes.

However, the corporatist instruments refined under Eden, Macmillan, and Douglas-Home were unable to protect British capitalism from a number of endemic problems. First of all, the relative decline of Britain could not be overcome by corporatist modernisation projects adopted by both Wilson and Heath. The public spending projects embraced in the Sixties and early Seventies actually tended to produce lame ducks. Capital was also finding it increasingly possible to sidestep social democratic constraints, partly because of increased international mobility – this problem was one of the reasons for the reformist Left’s attempt to produce a new settlement, the Alternative Economic Strategy which formed the basis of Labour’s 1974 general election strategy. Secondly, social democracy could not overcome the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and that tendency did begin to manifest itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reduced profit rates meant lower private sector investment, slower growth, higher unemployment, and the beginnings of a crisis of the system. Lastly, corporatist institutions such as incomes policies, and repeated attempts at curbing the right to strike by both Labour and Tory administrations, could not contain labour militancy and wage claims. The explosion of radicalism, and the shop stewards movement, led to the second major crisis of the Tories’ ability to act as a hegemonic party, which the Heath administration crippled and ultimately broken by mass strikes. Out of this humiliating defeat, a combative new Right, eschewing the integument of social democracy, arose.

The restoration of capitalist freedom
Mrs Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative Party was seen by many big business advocates as a scandalous ideological deviation, a short sharp route to the dead end of being a middle class protest party, much as UKIP is today. There is an element of truth in this. There had been a growing revolt by the middle classes against high taxes since the Fifties. The ‘new Right’ that consolidated first around Powell and then Thatcher had its roots in the Freedom League and the Institute of Economic Affairs, and in the reactionary, petit-bourgeois rightist bedrock. Throughout the 1980s, moreover, the most solid Tories were the petit-bourgeoisie, 70% of whom consistently backed Thatcher – the only class to back Thatcher by a majority.

But the Hayekian doctrines guiding the Conservative leadership were not just the cri de coeur of the middle class. They contained a serious analysis of, and remedy for, the ‘British disease’. Powell had shown that it was possible for the Tories to build a mass base without accepting social democracy, by espousing an authoritarian politics of ‘the nation’ allied with economic liberalism –protecting national identity, restoring national competitiveness, asserting British national interests in Ireland and elsewhere, etc. But it would be no good doing so if the Tories could not by these self-same means effectively restore British capitalism and continue to act as a hegemonic party of capital. Since this ability was already in question, the Tory leadership was prepared to take a gamble on a radical new policy mix.

Thatcher knew that the corporatist state depended on healthy revenue streams, but that its ability to intervene and generate those revenue streams was by then seriously weakened. Higher public spending did not reduce unemployment. It just added to inflation. Price controls were ineffectual, and the ‘winter of discontent’ would later show that wage controls were just as ineffectual. Notably, it was during that period in 1978 that big business first rallied behind Thatcher in a major way. In their place, capitalist freedom would be restored. Collective bargaining was out, incomes policies and price controls were out, demand management and job-creation was out.

In the new neoliberal statecraft, the government would spend less, and such money as was spent would be channelled through market-based delivery mechanisms, and undemocratic bodies such as quangos. The boss of Sainsburys was brought in to write a report which led to the introduction of internal markets in the NHS, inflating administrative overheads dramatically. The major macroeconomic objective of government would be to control inflation, which meant controlling wages. That was to be achieved primarily through high unemployment, and a co-ordinated attack on the bargaining power of labour. Defeating the unions achieved this objective, of course, but it also had the intended effect of devastating the social forces best placed to resist Thatcher’s agenda and obstruct social democracy’s adaptation to the new order.

The rentier would be revived, and sound money would replace cheap money. The City’s speculative activities would drive capitalist investment by increasing the rewards of such investment, while integrating a section of the working class by allowing them to borrow against their property - which, owing to rationing in the provision of housing, would perpetually increase in value. Enough people would feel wealthy enough to form a viable political constituency in favour of the new settlement. Until about 1989, the politics of ‘the nation’ thus configured could command between 42 and 44% of the vote, a slight recovery from Ted Heath’s 1974 low of 35%, but still well below the post-war performance – in fact, votes of the Thatcher scale would have resulted in defeats in the 1950s and 1960s.

By the time of the poll tax riots, however, it was clear that Thatcherism could no longer command an electoral plurality. Not only that, but Thatcherite combativeness was exhausted as an option after the poll tax riots. The last major confrontation that the Tories risked with the labour movement, for example, was with the signal workers in 1993. The capitalist class threw hundreds of millions into supporting British rail in that dispute. The Institute of Directors and the CBI mucked in. But the strike was fairly solid, and the employers were defeated. This suggested that the militancy and cohesion had not been completely knocked out of the working class, and that the ruling class now had to turn to other means to get its way. Swinging behind New Labour was the main way it sought to do this. Some Tories lived in denial about this for years. They blamed John Major, and his pro-European allies for their difficulties. If he hadn’t joined the ERM, and been such a wet, the locomotive of the Thatcher revolution would still be charging through the polity today, they maintained. It took three successive election defeats, twice with hard right leaderships pandering to the petit-bourgeois base, saving the pound and stopping immigration, and all leaving the Tories with just over thirty percent of a shrinking vote, to disabuse them of this idea. The Tories had kept the petit-bourgeois base, but they had lost many of the skilled workers Cameron belongs to a faction of the Conservative Party that is loyal to Thatcher’s accomplishments, and has repeatedly paid verbal tribute to her legacy, but is realistic about the need to detoxify the Tory brand of those associations. And that’s how we get to the ‘Big Society’.

The Big Society
No one knows exactly what the ‘Big Society’ is. It is a childishly sunny locution, the sort of thing a children’s television presenter in dungarees and a stripy rainbow sweater might gush about. Before its emergence as an electoral talking point, though, Cameron was given to lachrymose jeremiads about the ‘broken society’. And if we look at the background to the ‘broken society’, it might disclose some of the contours of the ‘big society’. The first signs of the attempt to fashion a more ‘compassionate conservatism’ were evident under Ian Duncan Smith’s watch between 2001 and 2003. It was during this period, you’ll recall, that Theresa May warned Tories that they were seen as the “nasty party”.

The Tories believed that they had won the fight over the fundamentals of the free market economy, but now stood accused of being callous with it, of not having a compassionate social policy to complement their emphasis on capitalist efficiency. If anything, free market economics seemed most compatible with shameless elitism and social Darwinism. Keith Joseph’s bid for the Tory leadership against Ted Heath had floundered when he argued that “the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened” by high birth rates among the underclass; and that greater birth control was needed to contain it. Post-Thatcherite social policy would have to obliterate all traces of such ideology in the public mind.

The trouble for the Conservatives was that despite their attacks on the welfare state while in office, despite under-funding the public sector, and despite various reforms intended to make the public sector more like the market, they had not succeeded in keeping overall spending down. One reason for this was that the high unemployment resulting from their economic policies drove up the cost of social security. The other plank of their policy designed to cope with just this problem was workfare. This involved changing the benefits structure to ‘reward work’ and introducing welfare-to-work schemes designed to change individuals’ capacity to find work in the labour market. Such policies made no lasting impact on employment, and thus did not reduce the social security bill. As far as the Tories were concerned, the tax bill that paid for public spending was still a drain on capitalist dynamism, and the further erosion of the welfare state was essential: it was just not politically popular.

Fortunately for the Tories, New Labour’s acceptance of the neoliberal policy mix extended to accepting workfare, privatization and fiscal austerity. This automatically drew the sting out of any attack on such policies from the centre-left, leaving only the question of how to define the Tory brand, creating the perception of ‘clear blue water’ between themselves and New Labour. Staking out a traditionalist stance on homosexuality, the family, drugs, and race was not an option – though in truth, Cameron did try in his early days as an MP to do just this, his latter day reinvention as a social liberal notwithstanding. It wasn’t popular, and it divided the Tories - beyond the old Tory ‘left-wing’, there were a section of Thatcherite ‘mods’ (as distinct from the ‘rockers’), who later became known as the Notting Hill set, who believed that market liberalism should lead logically to social liberalism on drugs, race, sexuality and so on. So, it transpired that the best strategy for the Tories was to become cloyingly touchy-feely in public, lock the old hard-nosed self-made Thatcherite bruisers in the coffin, and hug a hoody.

Under Ian Duncan Smith, the new dispensation declared that society did exist. The centrist Tory intellectual David Willets was put in charge of welfare policy, with a remit of discussing how amid general prosperity there was such terrible deprivation in parts of the country. But IDS could not carry his party over support for gay adoption, and was unceremoniously chucked in favour of the charismatic old hawk, Michael Howard, who stuck to an old hard right script. After the glorious Howard interregnum, Cameron took over the process of liberalisation. He was instructed to do so by Lord Ashcroft, whose money it was he was playing with. He talked up the party’s green credentials, and promised to stick to Labour’s spending commitments if elected. IDS’s think-tank, the ‘Centre for Social Justice’ set up in 2004, provided the soundtrack on social policy.

The ‘broken Britain’ spiel, developed in successive reports by the CSJ, argued that the problems of poverty, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, crime, ill health, and economic inactivity, were the result of cultural habits that needed to be broken with. These cultural habits made the society more unequal by creating an environment that deprived the ‘underclass’ of opportunity. To overcome these habits, and thus distribute opportunity more equally, it would be necessary to undertake a number of reforms that would boost social virtue: improve school discipline and expand school places by allowing charities, parents and voluntary organisations to set up new schools (that’s ‘free schools’); workfare, with a new set of incentives and penalties to make the benefits system less attractive and thus erode ‘welfare dependency’; tougher policing of anti-social behaviour, with higher sentencing for knife-crimes and such, to attack an important environmental obstacle to opportunity; and give more support to families through the welfare system in order to boost social cohesion. All of this would be accompanied by official encouragement of charities, social enterprises and NGOs, whose flourishing would help restore a lost social solidarity. That’s the ‘Big Society’.

I think it’s plain from this list that very little distinctive in the way of policy is being offered here. Almost all of it is continuous with New Labour, who in turn were faithfully following Thatcher. The state would continue to be rationalised and downsized at roughly the same pace as under New Labour, and the reforms to welfare and the public sector would be roughly as New Labour intended. What is distinctive is the branding, and the problem it was supposed to remedy. Cameron sought to situate himself as a ‘progressive’, interested in equality, someone who could be trusted not to utterly savage the public sector, and someone who was open to trade unions as a potential partner rather than a punching bag. And in fact, his leadership saw bye-elections where the Tory candidate outflanked New Labour to the left on Post Office closures. This effort was very costly, and the results were ideologically incoherent and diffuse. But it did contribute soften the Tories’ image and, for the first time since ERM and the 1992 miners’ strike, the Tories found themselves with a sustained lead over Labour, their support hovering around 40%.

The Tories’ decision to ‘turn nasty’ again, using the issue of the deficit and New Labour’s compliance with City demands that fiscal rectitude be restored at the earliest convenience, cost them electorally. That they could still only get just over a third of the vote with a weak incumbency amid the deepest crisis since the Depression says a great deal. Only a fraction of the skilled working class and professionals returned to them. They did not get a mandate, even in the terms of this gerrymandered electoral system. Nevertheless, the decision of Nick Clegg’s Liberals to ally with the Tories, helped along by an ad hoc set of ‘rules’ contrived by senior civil servants, helped overcome this problem and has probably done more to detoxify the Tory brand than all the ‘Big Society’ stuff. But all this raises an important point, which I’ll finish on.

Cameron’s leadership is operating in a situation in which two key difficulties beset the party’s ability to act as, as I say, a hegemonic party of capital. First is the secular tendency for its electoral base to decline, which is actually obscured a bit by the declining turnout, which is concentrated mainly among former Labour voters. The actual share of Tories among the total electorate may be closer to a quarter than a third. To overcome this, Cameron has had to triangulate, pacifying the core vote while appearing to offer something to the centre and centre-left. The second problem is the growing gap between the interests of the hard right base, the lower middle class, and those of the capitalist class, particularly the dominant financial fraction. This demands a second triangulation, though where there is a conflict, capital tends to win. If it did not, big business would withdraw its support and its funding. Cameron’s position on Europe – allying with the parties of the far right, while implementing the policy of big business – is typical of this strategy.

These two difficulties are combining to produce a long-term crisis for the Tories, notwithstanding their present lead in the polls (which isn’t usually greater than 5%). Thus, the reinvention of the ‘Big Society’ as a mantra for spending cuts, welfare cuts, and faster privatization, is part and parcel of a gamble by the Tory leadership that a repetition and further entrenchment of the Thatcher revolution will revive British capitalism and restore their position in it, as the dominant party of business. It is, as the students have shown, a gamble that has the potential to backfire horribly on them.