LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, April 09, 2012

The state in capitalist crisis (part one) posted by Richard Seymour

In trying to think through the changes that we're going through, that are being imposed on us, we constantly find we have to account for the state's role in managing and mediating the crisis and the forms it takes. For what is happening now, unmistakeably, is the re-organization of the state's presence directly in productive relations; its provision of investment conditions; its socialization of the costs of investment; and its disciplinary apparatuses. In the terms used in a previous essay, it is a process of state re-formation, given the name of 'austerity' because of its implications for popular constituencies historically benefiting from the welfare state. And I wanted to know whether it was possible to say anything general about this subject; that is to say, whether there are principles governing marxist research into the role of capitalist states in specific crises that are distinct from those governing marxist research into capitalist states tout court. This is the first in a series of posts trying to work out what these might be.

Before proceeding with this, I want to point out that the return of 'the state' (or a theoretical concern with the state), however tentative at the moment, is the result of two developments: first, the anticapitalist movement and it sequel in the Occupy movement; second, the aggressive assertion of imperialism and thus the re-emergence of anti-imperialist critique during the last decade. This means that the discussion of capitalist state in crisis must be a strategic one, conducted with a view to confronting the state as a factor in our struggles over the social product. But it also means that we cannot begin to discuss the reorganization and fiscal down-sizing of welfare states without situating them in relation to the imperialist chain, and the patterns of exploitation of the dominated societies. To put it simply; the politics of austerity cannot be decoupled from the question of inter-imperialist rivalry between the US, EU and China, and their competitive alliances in the Middle East, and sub-saharan Africa. And since I intend to focus on austerity in the UK, its unique position as an 'Atlanticist' EU member, the once favoured 'link' between the US and Europe, must play a role here. Both of these issues will be raised in more detail in future posts.

***

First, I think it's important to say that while austerity has as its primary justification the imperative of reducing public spending, cutting the deficit and thus maintaining the fiscal 'credibility' of the British state with financial markets, and while suppressing the growth of the state budget is a real institutional commitment, the policies introduced under its rubric are much broader than those which could plausibly be related to cutting spending. Whether it is cuts to the minimum wage, the introduction of private provision in the NHS and schools, or changes in the tax structure to benefit the wealthy, these are policies whose overall thrust is unlikely to increase revenues to the Treasury. In fact, as regards the changes to public services, the involvement of private companies such as Virgin, as well as the wasteful 'markets' imposed on providers, will probably drive up costs and lead to further fiscal crises. No one is suggesting that the state will stop collecting the taxes to fund core services such as pensions, healthcare and education. And even if they are under-funded, and the provision is rationed in ways that favour residents of relatively wealthy, middle class areas, it is highly unlikely that the costs will stop increasing.

This isn't to say that the welfare system isn't being pared down drastically, with lamentable results for millions. But I think it is best, following Claus Offe, to characterise welfare state capitalism as a form of crisis management: or, more accurately, a crisis-ridden form of crisis management. And despite its limitations, capitalism cannot simply wish away this form of intervention. The fact is that, just as in the most controversial reforms being undertaken the state isn't so much withdrawing from the provision of public services as out-sourcing and marketising it, so in general the state isn't so much cutting its costs as shifting them around. No doubt there is an aim to suppress costs, and this commitment is institutionalized in various ways, but I would be surprised if the capitalist state in the UK cost much less in 2022, as a proportion of GDP, than it has over the last two decades. In the period from 1987-2007, during which there was only one recession of medium severity, public spending was generally kept at or below 40% of GDP, a feat last accomplished during the high growth years of the 1950s. In a period of sustained crisis, this becomes extremely difficult because not only is growth depressed and social overheads inflated, but the relative costs of investment are higher, and the capitalist class constantly needs incentives from the state to put its money into circulation. Even once the crisis recedes and a period of relative capitalist dynamism resumes, this particular neoliberal format of capitalist dependency on the state will continue to drive up costs.

Relatedly, it would be mistaken to conclude that what is happening is a de-regulation of capitalism; it is a re-regulation. This is true not only in the sense that even supposedly privatized utilities quickly accumulate a plethora of regulations and government interventions just to prevent the most egregious abuses and keep the system basically functional, but above all in the sense that the state's regulative powers are becoming all the more necessary to capitalism in a period of organic crisis, even as their limits are disclosed. For example, it is a well-known factoid that the number of financial regulations in the neoliberal period, and particularly after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, actually increased dramatically; because the financiers had more freedom did not mean that they were less regulated. The regulatory structure was simply reformed to increase their powers; this only appears to be a contradiction in terms if you assume that real freedom is 'negative freedom'.

So what is happening under the rubric of austerity is neither simply cost-cutting nor de-regulation, nor any kind of withdrawal of the state from 'the economy'. Rather, the combined effect of the measures will be to shift the balance of power between classes, as condensed in the institutional ensemble of the state, in such a way as to fundamentally enhance the advantage of capital, with the rationale being a 'growth model' in which such policies are said to improve the wealth of the whole society through a temporary tightening of the belt. The logic is clear, for example, from Vince Cable's argument for freezing the minimum wage for under 21s: lower wages equals (more profitable investment therefore) more growth and more jobs.

***

One of the arguments we have made against austerity is that the fiscal crisis isn't really real: the debt can be paid off through growth, which won't be assisted by austerity politics. And in a sense, this is true. The idea that the UK is in a situation like Greece, held over a barrel by bankers, the IMF and EU finance ministers, is palpably absurd. The UK's debt situation is far from unmanageable in either historical or comparative terms. Further, the UK ruling class has sufficient clout that were it, through the state, to embark on an alternative growth pact for one reason or another, few international creditors would be seriously alarmed. Actually, given the way speculators and lenders are responding to austerity programmes once they are imposed, a stimulus-based strategy might actually endow them with more of that fabled 'confidence'.

But there is nonetheless a 'rational kernel' in the notion of a fiscal crisis. The capitalist welfare state, even in the neoliberal period, demonstrates a tendency (note, tendency) to exceed in expenditures what it is able to collect in taxation. The reasons for this can be enumerated thus: i) the periodic crises of accumulation, which not only reduce tax receipts in the short-term but result in pressure from business, on pain of investment strike, to reduce taxes on profits and investment; ii) the pressure from popular constituencies for services and provisions, based on expectations raised by the welfare state itself, which acts as a limiting factor on any fiscal cut-backs that state personnel are able to make; iii) the tendency for long-term regulative and growth strategies coordinated through the state (and here I don't mean just the 'Fordist' corporatist strategies deployed in the post-war era) to fail in the context of unplanned, competitive and exploitative production relations. The latter results not just in sectoral imbalances within 'the economy', but more importantly sustained sectional struggles within the capitalist class, and class struggles over the social product which always upset any long-term calculations, and make it impossible for a capitalist state to impose a rational, planned growth strategy even through its considerable leverage as a factor in production.

The attempt to get this tendency under control has been an institutionalised commitment of capitalist states throughout the neoliberal era. In the United Kingdom, this has taken the form of constant class struggles with public sector workers to facilitate down-sizing, as well as the embedding of policies such as 'Compulsory Competitive Tendering' based on the orthodoxy of public choice economics, which holds that bureaucratic budget-maximising is responsible for spending increases. It has also, due to the first factor mentioned above, resulted in a shift of the structure of taxation so that employers pay less, and workers more, toward the 'social overheads' of capital - that is, the reproduction of labour power in its complex forms, as well as of the growing 'reserve army' of labour. With the increase in VAT and various indirect taxes, and the cuts in corporation tax and other taxes on profits, this trend is being amplified.

More broadly, the suppression of public spending, as an element in the austerity formula developed in West Germany, has been institutionalised in the EU since the Treaty of European Union, and certainly since the Stability and Growth Pact in 1997. How well has this gone? Well, the Pact ruled that member states should have a public deficit at no higher than 3% of GDP. Prior to the crisis, this was achieved by most member states, barring 'periphery' economies like Hungary, Greece and Portugal. We have seen that, despite being 'peripheral', such economies can nonetheless can have disproportionate significance, condensing all the weaknesses and instabilities of the system in one 'weak link'. At the moment, however, the problem is far more general: across the Eurozone at the moment, the public deficit is more than twice the permitted level. And the Merkozy axis aims to drive this back down by forcing punitive austerity measures on the weakest economies.

***

But there is another aspect of the transformation we are witnessing, and here we have to return to the commodification of health, education, and social security. The state is not just a political factor in the capitalist mode of production, securing the 'general conditions' for the reproduction of capitalism but otherwise abstaining from direct involvement in 'the economy'. In several respects, even if not in its totality, it acts as a capitalist.

The capitalist state doesn't only reproduce the capital-labour relation externally in relation to its action (infrastructural investment, social outlays), but also internally, through its exploitation of waged labour in nationalized or semi-nationalized industries. Whether it is in the direct ownership of post, banking, or railway companies, or in the heavily subsidised, incentivized and bailed out industries such as cars, energy, armaments and, of course, finance, the state is involved not just in appropriating surplus value through fiat, the better to invest it for the 'general good', nor just in realizing surplus value or redistributing it but, in a number of key instances, extracting surplus value. It is true that, in the neoliberal period, the British capitalist state has taken the lead in withdrawing from the direct or complete ownership of productive industry, but it has still been involved in putting part of the total surplus value back into circulation as capital in various industries. And even where it doesn't directly extract surplus value, it is involved in the realization of surplus value generated by productive labour, just as capital-intensive industries are.

What appears to be happening with the re-commodification of core services is that the government is giving capital-intensive industry sectors that work in the orbit of the national state - those involved in financial and other services particularly - the option of realizing a considerable share of the surplus value produced across the economy. This sort of action can temporarily act as a spur to investment, in a way that benefits the politically powerful sectors of capital, but it also contributes to solving the underlying crisis of profitability to the extent that the spread of 'market conditions', the erosion of 'spaces of resistance' in the welfare state, and the suppression of wages that it allows affects the general balance between capital and labour to the former's benefit.

***

Some general features of austerity, then:

1) the state is not withdrawing from 'the economy' - it is never absent from 'the economy' - but changing its mode of presence in productive relations.

2) the state's cost-cutting commitments are subordinate to its crisis-management commitments, the former tending to be defeated by the latter due to the growing relative costs of investment and the long-term tendency toward crisis.

3) state institutions act within a context of a class struggle between labour and capital, and as such their policymaking must respect the relative strengths of each (hence, the state acts as the material condensation of the balance of class forces), but the state also has a form-determined selectivity in favour of the capitalist class. These factors determine the form that crisis management takes.

4) nonetheless, the state acts not on behalf of capital 'in general', but in the interests of hegemonic fractions of capital, and any charge that state managers are behaving 'ideologically' and 'non-pragmatically' must be understood in those terms.

5) the relationship between the state and the social formation that it regulates and reconstitutes is permanently characterised by dysfunction and disequilibrium. This is not to take the absolutist position that there is in essence no distinction between 'Keynesian' and neoliberal remedies. The fact that 'Keynesian' solutions based on demand management and state investment, cannot resolve the crisis in the long term doesn't mean that they cannot play a role in abating the most egregious features of the crisis. But the fact is that 'Keynesian' welfare and nationalization policies, by raising expectations of the state, and by empowering resistances, can only in the long run deepen the dysfunctions of capitalism. As such, they make most sense in the context of a 'transitional' approach, of which more will be said in future posts.

These are not quite the theoretical principles that I sought at the beginning of the post, but rather theoretically informed descriptions. But in future posts, we can deepen these observations by drawing more on Offe's analysis of the 'contradictions of the welfare state', and the 'crisis of crisis management'.

Labels: austerity, british state, capitalist crisis, capitalist state, class struggle, marxism, neoliberalism, public spending, welfare

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Obama's deficit wars posted by Richard Seymour

I have been trying to decipher the ongoing wars over the 'deficit ceiling' in the US. Essentially, as you may have read, the Republicans in Congress are raising the prospect of forcing a default by refusing to raise the 'deficit ceiling', which would allow the US to borrow sufficient money to pay its bills. They insist that they will only support an increase if the administration assents to a plan to repay the deficit with 100% spending cuts and no increase in tax revenues.

There is precedent for this sort of conduct. The creation of fiscal crises in order to force a transformation of class relations (as mediated through the public sector) is a mainstay of neoliberal ruling classes since, perhaps, the New York City fiscal crisis. It's certainly how the Republicans have attempted to force through such changes in Wisconsin. Even so, playing chicken with the government's ability to pay its bills might strike you as insanely counter-productive even from the perspective of the US ruling class. A default would be deeply damaging to US capitalism. And certainly, Wall Street is not happy with the Republicans' conduct, despite the latter's claim that they are merely deferring to the mighty bond markets. It's important to appreciate just how far Obama has gone to meet the Republicans' demands. He is quite insistent that trillions of dollars of 'savings' (cuts) need to be found over the next decade, and recently offered the GOP a $4000bn 'grand bargain', comprising deep cuts to social security and medicare - which has further alienated his base and shocked some on the left of the Democratic Party. All the Democrats want is the ability to raise some of the money from tax revenues, and for a little bit of that to come from the richer tax payers. As Shawn Whitney points out, there doesn't appear to be a difference of principle between Obama and his Republican opponents, merely one of degree. In fact, the strident articulation of neoliberal orthodoxy by the administration is one of the reasons why centre-left economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich keep bashing their heads against their keyboards.

There is a rumour, being encouraged by the administration, that by supporting cuts Obama is cannily positioning himself as a 'moderate' to win over frightened independent voters. This seems superficially plausible, and feeds into the narrative, disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic, that Obama is trying to steer a sensible course between right and left whose silly ideological squabbles risks destroying the economy. Yet governments always claim a pseudo-democratic mandate for policies they intend to pursue anyway by claiming that they're beholden to the voters. The same governments, you tend to find, are quite happy to force through unpopular policies, while claiming that the issue is too important to treat as a political football (meaning it's too important for democracy).

Obama will probably have no difficulty being re-elected, not because he has delivered for his voters, but because he has delivered for capitalism. Yes, capitalism is now operating at a much lower growth rate, with a larger reserve army of labour. But profitability has made a recovery, and some of the worst has been avoided, even if this does mean that there is a glut of unproductive capital that hasn't been destroyed. (The Hayekians in the Republican Party are particularly exercised by this). Jared Bernstein, ~~a former Google exec who has moved through the revolving doors connecting silicon capitalism to the White House~~ (I am assured I'm wrong about this, see comment thread), points out that the distributive trends under Obama's watch have been as terrible for wages as they have been a boon for profits, and provides this graph:

Note what's happened here. Financialization has tended to mean not the dominance of financial corporations over industry, but rather the emergence of industrial and service firms as autonomous financial actors. They tend to fund their investments from their own retained profits rather than from bank lending, and those profits have been increasingly augmented by financial holdings. A classic example was GM making 40% of its profits from financial investments. So, though industry is still sluggish, productive investment is low, and unemployment is settling at a higher new plateau (notably, the Obama administration accepts that this reflects a 'natural' or 'structural' rate of unemployment), the revival of Wall Street has boosted profitability.

The result is that the US capitalist class is rallying behind Obama's re-election campaign. His 2012 campaign manager has recently announced that Obama raised "$86 million for the first quarter - shattering previous fundraising records by incumbents, dwarfing the totals of the GOP field, and besting the campaign's own $80 million target". The Republicans, as far as I'm concerned, are taking a dive this time. The candidates they are fielding are heavily weighted toward the lunatic right, and the grandees don't appear to be disciplining the reactionaries ahead of the election. As a consequence, no matter how much Obama disappoints his own base, his well-financed campaign, unchallenged in the Democratic Party, combined with revulsion over the Bachmanns, Santorums, Gingriches and Pawlentys, will probably ensure victory. So, I'm saying that the dance-off between Obama and the Republicans is not mainly about the election.

What's really happening is that Obama is using the Republican right as a weapon against his own base to deliver policies that his class allies favour. Yet he has no intention of allowing the GOP to force a default, and seems to be intent on avoiding a completely cuts-based approach to the deficit. And he has the class power of Wall Street backing him up. Apart from anything else, there's the strange relationship with Chinese capitalism to think about. The US hasn't completely gone down the route of austerity in the way that EU ruling classes have, in part I think because the US-PRC axis which has basically driven global growth depends on America borrowing to buy Chinese products, while China ensures a profitable investment climate for overseas capital. Defaulting, undertaking excessive or premature 'fiscal consolidation', or hitting consumer spending too hard, would presumably put that dynamic in some danger. In other words, I think what's happening here is a relatively sophisticated and partially choreographed example of class praxis, with the political conditions being created for the rolling out of an austerity project with a degree of flexibility and pragmatism built in. The deficit wars, from the White House's perspective, seem to be largely about putting manners on the Republican far right while using them to neutralise popular opposition to the coming capitalist offensive.

Labels: austerity, barack obama, borrowing, cuts, deficit, democrats, public spending, republicans, spending cuts, us economy, US imperialism, us politics, us ruling class

Thursday, June 16, 2011

The taxpayer posted by Richard Seymour

One of the advantages of CiF is that in the comments section you get to see the shibboleths of reaction condensed, vocalised, lyricised, even screamed in block capitals and exclamation points. One of the talking points that always come up whenever you discuss public sector workers is "the taxpayer". The sovereign taxpayer. The over-burdened, pushed-beyond-the-point-of-reason taxpayer, to be precise. It goes roughly like this:

You public sector workers always have your hand out. You get better pay than the rest of us, and you have generous gold-plated pensions. When anyone tries to take the slightest of your privileges away, you throw your toys out of the pram and go on strike. But I am not prepared to pay for your perky lifestyle any more. What we can't afford, you can't have. The taxpayer subsidises you to 100%, and the taxpayer isn't going to go on supporting your selfish, I'm-alright-jack lifestyles. A bit of hardship would do you lazy jobsworths some good. Market discipline. Let's see you and your red friends get by like the rest of us, uncoddled by the state and your friends in the meeja-hideen... (etc etc).

You think I'm exaggerating, don't you? Well, the point is how "the taxpayer" is invoked here as a relevant political category. You'll notice that, implicit in this is a suggestion that there are people who aren't taxpayers. But public sector workers pay taxes, not only on their income but on consumption. In fact, there is no one who doesn't pay taxes. The unemployed pay tax. Children pay tax. Prisoners pay tax. Even the homeless pay tax. To speak of "the taxpayer" is in this sense meaningless, since it includes everyone. And self-evidently, not everyone shares the political attitudes expressed by "the taxpayer" above. The question of what "the taxpayer" is willing to pay for is a political question, depending on who the taxpayer is, and what other social categories and classes s/he identifies as. But implicit in this is the idea that the taxpayer is supporting a public sector which is purely parasitic. Public sector workers are "subsidised" by "the taxpayer"; as if, in addition to not paying taxes, they add no value to the economy. "The taxpayer" is thus, by definition, always over-taxed (even if there are quite a few who are under-taxed). The subject-position expressed in this figure of "the taxpayer" is that of a lower middle class trader, shopkeeper or white van man, anxious to hold on to his wad and not pay for anything he isn't getting.

ps: It occurs to me that I've missed the most obvious point here. It's not just the penny-pinching petty bourgeoisie that "the taxpayer" identifies with. The whole point is that you're supposed to think of yourself as the employer in this situation. You're being asked to identify with the bosses.

Labels: austerity, conservatism, public sector workers, public spending, reactionaries, taxation, taxpayer, thatcherism, tories

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Big Society is a big load posted by Richard Seymour

Me in The Guardian on the government's "giving" white paper:

That this government should extend the logic of the market to charity is no surprise, and is congruent with their wider agenda of attacking the institutions that underpin social solidarity such as welfare and the NHS. Part of this goes back to the influence of Marvin Olavsky and the doctrine of "compassionate conservatism". Olavsky's role in moulding George W Bush's early public discourse is well known. Bush spoke of raising "armies of compassion" to unleash "an outpouring of giving" through a structure of incentives and neighbourhood initiatives supporting social entrepreneurs. The government had to "get out of the way" to allow people to give; taxes and public spending were no answer to social problems; only the transformative personal encounter between the social entrepreneur and the needful victim constituted genuine compassion.

Labels: austerity, big society, capitalist crisis, david cameron, neoliberalism, public spending, the meaning of david cameron, tories

Monday, May 09, 2011

Public sector pay myths posted by Richard Seymour

Me, in The Guardian, tackling the tired old myths about public sector pay, rehashed in a new Policy Exchange report:

According to a Policy Exchange report highlighted by the Telegraph, public sector workers are 40% better off than their private sector counterparts, if wages are taken on an hourly basis and pensions are included. This is a longstanding claim on the right, used to justify attacks on public sector pay and pensions. The problem is that neither the numbers, nor the narrative, are on the level.
1. The report doesn't compare like with like. Public sector workers are more skilled on average than private sector workers. This has always been the case, but the tendency has been increased in recent years as low-skill jobs have been contracted out, and the public sector incorporates more graduates...

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, neoliberalism, public sector pay, public spending, tories

Saturday, March 26, 2011

#26March posted by Richard Seymour

Of course, you should follow me on Twitter today, for updates and quick snaps from the march, which is conservatively estimated to be drawing about 300,000. I'd bet it'll be bigger than that. People are already arriving and thronging into Embankment. It shall be leaving at noon, in theory, but the TUC expects the last marchers to leave at 2pm due to the size of the thing. If you're coming, here's the route:

View March for the Alternative Route in a larger map

I'll try and post updates throughout the day but, really, Twitter is where to find me.

Labels: austerity, cuts, public spending, socialism, tories, trade unions, welfare, working class

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Education Activist Network teach-in posted by Richard Seymour

I'll be speaking at this tomorrow:

Education Activist Network - Teach-in for the resistance

On Wednesday 16 March 4-8pm, the EAN will have a teach- in at King’s College London and London School of Economics.

After the increase in tuition fees and abolition of EMA, a mass demonstration on 26 March could reinvigorate the fight for education – as could a lecturers’ strike, and protests and student action on Budget Day. But our movement also faces new challenges.

Universities have accepted blood money from dictators and invested heavily in the arms trade. Multiculturalism is under attack by those who would divide and undermine our movement, and students have been the target of horse charges, dawn raids, pepper spray and kettling for daring to protest for education.

Join students, education workers, academics, journalists and campaigners to debate the challenges facing our movement and the strategies to overcome them.

4pm – The fight for Education – Learning from Wisconsin – LSE SU Underground

Live video link-up with student and teacher from Wisconsin. Doors open 3:30pm

5pm Workshops

■Defending the Right to Protest (KCL)
Hosted by Stop Kettling Our Kids and Defend the Right to Protest – includes Alfie Meadows, arrested student Bryan Simpson, campaigning lawyer Matt Foot and Emma Norton from Liberty

■The role of social media in the movement (KCL)
Panel debate with Laurie Penny (journalist), Richard Seymour (blogger) and Aaron Peters (UK Uncut)

■Defending Multiculturalism (KCL)
Don’t let David Cameron divide us! With Liz Fekete, Institute for Race Relations and Martin Smith, Love Music Hate Racism

■Sleaze, Spooks and Saif Gaddafi: Can we make our universities ethical? (LSE SU Underground)
With LSE occupier Lukas Slothuus, journalist Simon Basketter and Hesham Zakai from KCL Action Palestine

6:30pm Rally – KCL Lucas Theatre

March 26th – Building for our Day of Anger

With:

■Billy Hayes CWU General Secretary
■Fightback author Guy Aitchinson
■Egyptian revolution eyewitness Wassim Wagdy
■Lois Clifton LSESU Environment & Ethics officer-elect
■Jim Wolfreys King’s College London UCU
■Krishna Sivakumaran, UCL student, Day X for the NHS
■Mark Bergfeld NUS NEC.

Labels: capitalism, cuts, education, events, neoliberalism, public spending, social media, socialism, socialism 2.0, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, tories

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Can councils resist cuts? posted by Richard Seymour

The deepest, cruelest cuts in public spending were made to council spending. The worst hit councils also happen to be in the most deprived areas. Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Newham, Liverpool and Manchester are among the worst sufferers. The Local Government Association expects to shed a total of 140,000 jobs, and the total cuts over the next few years will amount to a real terms cut of 31%. The Tory strategy seems to involve attempting to devolve blame for cuts onto local councils. Local councils then say "we have no choice, the government has cut our funding and we must set a legal budget, or risk having the process taken over by a section 151 officer, who will impose cuts in the most inhumane way". If they're a Labour council, they might say, as Lewisham Central councillor Mike Harris did in communication with the local anti-cuts campaign, that it's surely better to have "democratic socialist" cuts than Tory ones. A similar case was made by Islington councillor Charlynne Pullen at the Right to Work People's Convention this weekend. Local trade unions will be mobilising across the country with strike ballots, and working to pressure council leaders to stop cuts. In Lewisham today, there are protests at the town hall, and cops and crowd control barriers are out in force. So, it's really important to get this right.

While one understands the difficulties faced by councils, and while it would seem hubristic to expect the return of Poplarism in this day, it is worth considering exactly what the options are. First of all, it is true that a council has to pass a legal budget, or an appointed S151 officer can take over. Manchester City Council has drafted a legal document explaining some of the background (and basically justifying cuts) here. Secondly, it would seem improbable at the least that council tax could cover what is needed, even if that was a fair alternative. The tax covers only a small proportion of local council income. In Wales, trade unions and the local administration have reached a deal whereby they collectively consider all available alternatives, including raising taxes and charging for certain services. But, of course, that coopts trade unions in a cuts process and it's hardly fair that working class communities should have to pay more for services. On the face of it, unable to raise adequate money, bound by legislation to pass a balanced budget, councils are left with no option but to cooperate. But the trouble is that passing 'democratic socialist' or 'lesser evil' cuts is still imposing cuts - deep, savage cuts - and it still involves councillors who should be attempting to defend their local communities in savagely attacking them - which most of them don't want to do. What could a radical left-wing council do that would be different?

Previous instances of defiance include not only the Poplar rate-capping rebellion in 1921, but also the Clay Cross councillors, who refused to implement the Heath administration's Housing Finance Act. Most famous, perhaps, is the defiance of Militant Labour councillors in Liverpool, who took on the Thatcher administration in 1984 by passing an illegal budget. The context is the Thatcher government's war on local council spending. They cut the 'Rate Support Grant', which was essential to local councils to support services. They said that rents and rates would have to go up, or cuts would have to be made. They then imposed the Rates Bill, which capped rates to ensure that spending was kept low. This was all part of the neoliberal social engineering, to create a more conservative society, expanding the social bloc with an interest in opposing 'municipal socialism', and to transfer wealth to the middle classes and the rich.

The incoming Labour council in Liverpool, which was under strong Militant influence, had inherited an austere budget, but they were determined to increase spending on housing. In postwar administrations until 1979, no Liverpool council had built fewer than 1,500 council houses. The highest number built was by Labour in 1972-3, which built over 4,000. Between 1979 and 1983, the hung council built a miserly 127 houses. And since housing conditions were so terrible, the Militant councillors felt they needed to spend at least £25 million on top of what the council had already budgeted. So, against opposition from Liberals, Tories and right-wing Labourites, they pressed ahead. The government at that time was in the middle of a titanic fight with the miners and sent Patrick Jenkin as Environment secretary to look at housing conditions. Jenkin, who had pushed rate-capping legislation through parliament, insisting that he would resign if it wasn't passed, conceded that the government might offer the council £20m. The success can be over-stated. The number of houses that the Militant-led council succeeded in building was short of a thousand.

However, the example it set was immediately taken up by others on the Labour Left. The leaders of Labour councils in Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and Greenwich agreed to a strategy of non-compliance with the Rates Bill. John McDonnell, who was then chairing the finance committee on the GLC, also signed up. David Blunkett, leader of Sheffield council, participated in non-compliance. In some cases, councillors were willing to defy the law and risk being fined and disqualified. In July 1984, Labour's Local Government Conference resolved to defy rate-capping. Bastions of resistance were cropping up all over the country, and often gaining popular support.

Thatcher ranted and raved about how the enemies of law and order stretched from the IRA to the hard Left. But she would have found it far more difficult to defeat this campaign had not Kinnock been determined to break this policy. The mainstream of Labourism had always seen the law as a neutral force, which could be used by elected administrations . Kinnock was therefore not defying orthodoxy when he insisted that Labour councils should work exclusively within the law to defend local services - "better a dented shield than no shield at all", he said. Following the defeat of the miners' strike, he collaborated with Ken Livingstone to undermine any attempt by the GLC to resist rate-capping. Within weeks of the end of the strike, most left-wing councils gave up the ghost. Only Lambeth and Liverpool continued defiance and Thatcher, in a triumphant mood, instead of making concessions stuck the boot in. The councillors were 'surcharged' (fined), and disqualified. Meanwhile, the Militant were witch-hunted out of Labour, left-winger Eric Heffer was drummed off the executive, Labour Party Young Socialists was attacked and its paper shut down. By 1986, the atmosphere of defeat in Labour was such that most members were willing to go along with the witch hunts, an the 'new realism' favouring free market policies. The Labour Party that emerged from this process was one that ended up imposing the hugely unpopular Poll Tax, refusing to support non-compliance campaigns and prosecuting non-payers through the courts.

The lesson of the above would appear to be that the success of non-compliance campaigns depends on a mixture of political will and wider circumstances. If the government of the day is already experiencing difficulties, and if you are able and willing to mobilise grassroots support for your strategy, then it may pay off. But perhaps this seems academic. Today, even left-wing councillors are not promising defiance, but grudging compliance. This is despite the fact that they do not face fines any more, and are not really in danger of disqualification. The SWP's Preston councillor Michael Lavalette has been pressing for a non-compliance position but, despite the deep unhappiness of local Labour councillors with the cuts, they're all voting for them. Their mood is determined by their feeling of weakness. The political culture of the Labour Left has not survived Blairism, and the stranglehold of managerialism. Neither, in fact, has Labour's presence on local councils, which was seriously eroded over the last decade or so. So, Labour councillors are not feeling ebullient and combative. The coming struggle is therefore likely to resemble the Poll Tax campaigns more than the rate-capping campaigns, inasmuch as anti-cuts movements are likely to be operating in defiance of Labour councils more than in collaboration with them. There are some councillors who want to encourage public sector resistance to the cuts without actually leading that resistance themselves. But unfortunately the result is the same: they push through 'humane' cuts, finding 'efficiency' savings, and relying on 'voluntary' redundancies and 'natural wasteage'.

Some Labour supporters argue that one shouldn't criticise Labour councillors for imposing cuts this year, as they have to move in a very short space of time and aren't likely to be in a position to build extra-parliamentary resistance, even if they were so motivated. This is a comprehensible position. However, it is also a destructive and politically defeatist position. If arriving at a quick stopgap is the concern here, then councils are in a position to borrow and draw on reserves in the short-term. This is what the Socialist Party has been arguing in Lewisham. But that's obviously not the concern. There is also a tendency among those defending 'humane' cuts to snigger at the idea of opposing all cuts - should we really defend every white elephant project, every single manager's job, every single inefficient outlay? The answer is clear: we should oppose any cuts in the spending totals. If councils want to deploy resources more efficiently by shedding managers and stopping useless schemes, and spending more on the vulnerable, all well and good - but if so, shouldn't they have been doing that already? At its worst, this argument says that everything should be subordinate to getting Labour back in office. Only that will make a difference, and nothing else matters. This exact logic, which relies on the willingness of working class voters to put up with anything Labour does and keep voting for them, is precisely what cost Labour 5 million voters between 1997 and 2010. Yes, the legal position is clear. It is true that the government can resort to imposing a budget through section 151 officers. But do they actually want to have to do this? Or would they rather have the connivance of local councils giving the cuts the appearance of a democratic mandate? Is the difference between section 151 cuts and 'humane' cuts sufficient to justify going along with this attack? And is the fear of taking on the government not a little exaggerated? This isn't Thatcherism at the height of its powers, but rather a weak Tory-led government amid a generalised crisis of the system they're defending. Their cuts are deeply unpopular, and have already provoked tremors of resistance that caused a panic in Tory HQ. They can't even sell off the forests without encountering resistance big enough to force a retreat. If the obstruction of local councils were large enough, the campaign threatening enough to them, the Tories would make concessions, as they have been compelled to do before.

If Labour councillors aren't prepared to resist, it will fall to trade unionists and community activists to defend services. And if Labour councillors defy strikes and local community campaigns, as the logic of their position may compel them to do, then anticuts campaigns would be strategically justified in standing candidates in local elections, explicitly standing on a platform of non-compliance. That may alienate Labour activists, but the latter surely can't expect everyone else to tail the local Labour leadership.

Labels: austerity, cuts, labour, left, local councils, neoliberalism, public spending, socialism, tories

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Snow business posted by Richard Seymour

The economy shrank by 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010. If that continues into the next quarter, then the feared 'double dip' recession is on. So, what does the government do? They blame the weather. As Chris Dillow points out, the implication is that the bad weather stopped service sector workers from getting to work, but didn't inhibit industrial workers on their commutes. It's bollocks, in other words. The fall in the construction industry was particularly bad, but I wonder if, rather than being due to very bad weather, this wasn't in part because of 1) the cancellation of major public works by the government and local councils, and 2) the slump in the housing market resulting in a decline in house-building? The Federation of Master Builders, representing small-to-medium sized construction firms, puts it like this:

The construction sector has still not reached the bottom of the most savage recession for the industry in living memory. Cuts in government expenditure are making matters worse with more than half of building companies reporting falling levels of work in public repair and maintenance work. Our survey shows a sharp increase in those expecting workloads to contract once again in the first quarter of 2011.
The Government is pinning its hopes of economic recovery on the creation of new jobs in the private sector but its policies are having exactly the opposite effect in the building sector. The increase in the rate of VAT earlier this month will cost the construction sector nearly 7,500 jobs this year alone. Cuts in public sector spending on social housing are having a particularly adverse impact with nearly half of building companies reporting that work in this sector had fallen.
The construction sector has the potential to build Britain out of recession and we know that for every £1 spent on construction output generates a total of £2.84 in total economic activity. If this could be coupled with expenditure on infrastructure projects as well as tackling the growing housing crisis the Government would be building the real foundations for a sustained economic recovery.

There are some in the ruling class who aren't very happy. Though the CBI has generally been approving of the government's 'austerity' programme, its outgoing chief has said that: "It's not enough just to slam on the spending brakes. Measures that cut spending but killed demand would actually make matters worse." Like many of the bosses, he seems to want some sort of magical remedy whereby the government could cut spending and stimulate growth at the same time. Finance capital is also gravely murmuring about the "stunningly bad" GDP data - but they fucking asked for this, and it can't be long before they'll be demanding more money from the public purse, then pushing for another austerity budget to pay off the bankers and keep the financial assets of the rich afloat for another few months before the whole thing collapses again.

Despite the denials and the absurd, utterly feeble attempt to pin this on the weather, these figures represent a political problem for the government - especially if they're starting to lose sections of business and the petit bourgoisie on account of it. I expect the medium term effect might be to see more businesses swing behind Labour and its quasi-Keynesian remedies. For its part, Labour, in a bid to remain in capital's orbit, will constantly feel a gravitational pull to the right. Unless, of course, the student rebellions and the strike ballots being prepared in the public sector become a much more power countervailing force.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, economy, finance capital, labour, public spending, recession, tories

Monday, December 06, 2010

"Progressive nonsense" posted by Richard Seymour

It seems I was justified in treating the Blond-style pwoggy Toryism as of little ideological moment as far as Conservative Party policy is concerned. As I claimed:

"Of course, Cameron has no intention of making good on Blond’s progressive medievalism. Blond, in seeking the patronage of the Cameronites, has offered them one means by which to affect that strategic capture of the language of progress that I mentioned earlier. The idea that Cameron would break up the large enterprises that are supporting his election, expropriate the people who are funding his campaign (not to mention his friends and members of his shadow cabinet), or otherwise ‘Progress’ fundamentally attack the class structure in Britain is fantastical. The issue underlying these ideological torsions, which is not discussed in polite company, is the neoliberal state – or, the “competition state”, as Mark Evans has dubbed it.

Evans claims, correctly in my view, that Brown’s current use of Keynesian demand management and stimulus is no more than a transitory form of crisis management, and does not signal a paradigm shift. A neoliberalism with a tighter regulatory regime and a much diminished welfare state and public sector is far more likely in the future. The processes that have been ‘hollowing-out’ the state, depriving it of democratic capacity by devolving ministerial powers to unelected agencies or privatised entities, or to unelected EU bodies, will continue largely as a result of this underlying neoliberal commitment. That the Tories’ proposals to further erode representative democracy should themselves be expounded in the vernacular of democratic renewal reflects sensitivity on this issue. The Tories are aware, as Westminster’s mandarins are also aware, that the undermining of the state’s representative capacity is producing a severe decline in the public’s faith in, and thus the legitimacy of, the state. Their only logical way of handling this is to try to persuade the public that this undermining of democracy is precisely the kind of democratisation that they really want.

And for the Tories to do this credibly, they can’t do it as open Thatcherites. Hence, the need to find a ‘progressive’ idiom; hence the hopey-changey, touchy-feely, happy-clappy Sunday school rhetoric; and hence the painfully inept attempt by Cameron – and now also by Nick Clegg – at a kind of ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ Obama impersonation." (The Meaning of David Cameron, pp. 77-78)

The right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes is delighted to reveal that top Tory bosses thought it was all just "progressive nonsense" for the campaign trail. But why bother waiting for bloggers to spell out what an inexpensive book will tell you upfront? Do yourself a favour and buy your mum a copy of The Meaning of David Cameron this Christmas.

Labels: 'progress', 'progressive', austerity, conservatism, hayek, public spending, reactionaries, red toryism, the meaning of david cameron, tories

Saturday, December 04, 2010

Protests target tax avoiding corporate scum posted by Richard Seymour

We're the Big Society, and we're here to collect your unpaid taxes:

This is a good video from Press TV, wherein a protester explains the virtues of direct action:

Labels: austerity, capital, capitalism, cuts, public spending, taxation, tories

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Daily Mail goes after the disabled posted by Richard Seymour

Classy... Okay, let's just get a few things straight:

>The Mail's story is based on a DWP press release, and some rudimentary examination of this DWP report [pdf].

> The Mail's story is mince. It does not show that 75% of disability claimants are fit to work. It shows that 75% of those who apply for the benefit under a new system of testing introduced by the Department of Work and Pensions under New Labour, wherein outsourced medical professionals are incentivised to reject patients, are either rejected or withdraw their applications, which means that the new system is designed to exclude the vast majority of those who apply. Whether or not this means those rejected by the assessors are actually fit for work is not clear. Even if those rejected were indeed fit for work, this would tell us nothing about those currrently on disability allowance.

>The Mail does not discuss the failings of Atos Origin - the private sector assessment contractors whom they mention in their article. It is their assessments that are resulting in the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of people from incapacity and disability benefits. Yet, as they have been hired to help the government meet its target of driving 1 million people of disability rolls, they have a vested interest in finding people to be fit for work. The Child Poverty Action Group has written to Chancellor Osbourne complaining about "the woeful inadequacies in the design of the Work Capability Assessment and shortcomings in quality of assessments undertaken by Atos". The assessment quality is often a problem because the medical professional used by Atos to undertake medical examinations or review the evidence may not have the qualified experience necessary to make a judgment on complex medical problems that people can have. Just as often, it is a problem because the investigation is perfunctory, and unilluminating. (See this discussion). Because one has been deemed 'fit to work' by Atos does not mean that one has been properly examined, or that one is indeed fit to work.

> The Mail relies on the suggestion that people are 'trying it on', and that if the new testing system was applied, perhaps as many as 75% of those who receive the benefit would be rejected as workshy chancers. The evidence of past research shows that the vast majority of those claiming disability-related benefits are in fact disabled. Most such claimants are concentrated in former industrial areas where manufacturing and mining industries regularly produced crippling or disabling accidents. The research finds that at most the government could expect to remove half a million from disability allowance by introducing stricter definitions and procedures. That's not a negligible sum, but a) it's less than 20% of claimants, not 75%, and b) there's no evidence that those who would be removed are deliberately evading work or have trivial complaints. Rather, they would find themselves compelled to undertake various forms of education and training that would make them apt for some forms of work, so that they could be reclassified as jobseekers and put on lower benefits. Surveys of disability benefit claimants find that there are about a million of them who would like to return to work if properly supported. But there isn't such support in place, and there aren't actually millions of jobs waiting to be filled by such people, nor has the government made any indication that it will seek to create those jobs - quite the contrary these days - so the changes introduced by the last government, with Tory support, are actually about reducing the income and consumption of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

> The Mail relies on apparently shocking, but false, and irrelevant, claims to bolster its case. For example, the Mail thinks this is a right laugh: "Incredibly, 7,100 tried to claim because they had sexually transmitted diseases and nearly 10,000 because they were too fat." The DWP breaks up initial self-assessment claims according to the categories of the International Classification of Diseases. The Mail has, shall we say, taken liberties in decoding the technical jargon used. Let's start with the figure for being "too fat", which corresponds with the category in the DWP report labelled "Endocrine, Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases". This category includes all sorts of problems such pituitary, thyroid, and pancreatic disorders. These are not reducible to being "too fat". As it happens, however, obesity-related disability is a genuine problem and is about more than fatty tissue. There is a strong relationship between obesity and health problems limiting one's ability to work (see). Being obese is often a symptom of underlying problem - a sudden change in metabolism or rapidly diminished mobility. It can create severe functional impairments that prevent people from working. There's nothing in this to laugh at - unless you're a Daily Mail reader, or Top Gear fan. Now let's consider the claim concerning STDs and disability. This figure corresponds to the DWP category "diseases of the genitourinary system". This includes such problems as acute renal failure, renal tubular acidosis, bone and kidney diseases, breast hypertrophy, etc etc. These are not sexually transmitted diseases, but they can be serious disorders and highly painful and debilitating conditions. Again, the only humour available here is the comedy of the psychopath. The Mail's claim is absurdly, flatly false - a downright lie.

> The Mail seeks to give the impression that even those who have been turned down for incapacity or disability benefits have grabbed millions from the system: "Even so, those who have failed or avoided the test since it was introduced have managed to claim as much as £500million in total before being screened out." In fact, during the first three months in which the assessment takes place, claimants received £65 a week, exactly what they would receive on jobseekers' allowance. They have not duped the system out of money to which they are not entitled. In fact, jobseekers' allowance is a very small benefit that has been steadily declining in value since the 1980s, from about 16% of the average wage in 1987-8 to 10% in 2007-8.

> Last thing. I've picked on today's Daily Mail front page. It's actually the same as the Express front page from two weeks ago. And it's almost identical in the nature of its claims and basic agenda to recent Daily Mail articles, and to numerous other front page shock exclusive reports made for the last few years by the right-wing tabloids, inspired by DWP press releases. It's also identical to ignorant claims made by the former investment banker David Freud while he was working with the last government to 'reform' welfare. It is a propaganda line, constantly promoted by the state, business and the right-wing media. It fits in which the agenda of capital, but is rejected by trade unions, charities, and disability groups. The regularity of its appearance in widely read newspapers is more decisive as a factor in its acceptance than the reliability of its conclusions. Undoubtedly, this will have contributed to a situation in which most people, who lack access to the kinds of information that would expose the propaganda as a sham, will either endorse or acquiesce in cuts to such benefits. It is repeated far more often than any criticism of business, or of bankers, and certainly of the capitalist system which produces mass unemployment and incapacity. This is, in other words, a concrete example of the ideological power of capital.

Labels: austerity, cuts, daily mail, disabled, neoliberalism, new labour, public spending, reactionaries, tories, welfare

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Anti-cuts protests posted by Richard Seymour

Surprisingly large turn-outs outside of London, especially in Edinburgh which saw the biggest Scotland-wide protest since Gleneagles, with more than 20,000 in attendance. Socialist Worker reckons that a further 15,000 turned out in Belfast, 3000 in Bristol, 1000 in Manchester, 2000 in Sheffield, and hundreds in other towns and cities. London's RMT-led rally against the cuts saw 2000 turn out - though in fairness, today's efforts in the capital mostly involved bringing people out to mass pickets at fire stations.. See SW's pics and report.

Labels: austerity, cuts, neoliberalism, public spending, socialism, tories, trade unions

Thursday, October 21, 2010

A fake's 'progress' posted by Richard Seymour

The IFS have, predictably, torn the Tories' 'progressive' claims for their Comprehensive Spending Review to ribbons. The headline is: the spending review is overwhelmingly regressive, with the poorest 10% suffering most. The 'total consolidation', including Labour's measures, will bite more into the income of the richest 2% - but only because of the previous government's tax policies. (Follow Faisal Islam's tweets on the IFS's briefing). Far from being progressive, it's quite a deliberate assault on the poorest, and "risks" - so says this economist - "spiralling poverty". The cuts to social housing, for example, will result in a trebling of rent for new council house tenants. It's also worth mentioning that the bank levy, raising a miser's sum of £2.5bn, will coincide with corporation tax cuts, leaving the biggest banks better off. Note that even the solitary figure of £2.5bn is much lower even than the total sum of expected bonuses, which will rise to £6.8bn this year.

Relatedly, check out China Mieville's 'letter to a progressive Liberal Democrat'.

Labels: austerity, budget, cuts, david cameron, george osborne, neoliberalism, new labour, poverty, public sector workers, public spending, tories, trade unions

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Know your enemy: the Tories and the cuts posted by Richard Seymour

For readers in Oxford, I'll be doing a meeting on this subject tomorrow night in Wadham College, Oxford, at 7.30pm. Unlike that podcast at Housmans, I think the public are welcome to this meeting, so do come along. Bring money. And beer. And diamorphine.

Labels: austerity, budget, class struggle, cuts, george osborne, public spending, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the meaning of david cameron, tories, trade unions

Monday, October 11, 2010

The 'Big Society' and the strong state posted by Richard Seymour

What is the 'Big Society' for? Is there any evidence that it is a response to popular sentiments, that it actually resonates with any underlying political feeling, for example? The polling would suggest not. Most people have not heard of it, and most don't know what it means. There is little enthusiasm for the idea when it's explained to them. Certainly, the majority aren't anxious to volunteer for any 'Big Society' programmes - why should they perform for free what public servants can perform for a wage? I would hypothesise that the 'Big Society' idea isn't really supposed to resonate, and people aren't supposed to know what it's about. It is a deodorant, precisely intended to "decontaminate the Tory brand", surrounding it in a fragrant pot-pourri of sweet nothings. It does not explain the main policies advanced under its rubric, nor does it provide a coherent policy mix. At most it places a new inflection on old policies. We'll come back to this.

There is, of course, an intellectual penumbra surrounding the 'Big Society'. Nathan Coombs' dissection of Philip Blond [pdf] would suggest that at least one of its major advocates is an occult medievalist. As far as the Conservative Party apparatus goes, it would appear to derive from the 'compassionate conservatism' of Marvin Olasky, and its exemplars drawn from a whole range of corporate philanthropists, latterly including Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Childrens' Project, who bashed the teaching unions at Tory conference this year. More on this in a moment. But is the 'Big Society' a Thatcherite idea?

***

You may argue that in acknowledging that "there is such a thing as society" it constitutes a break with Thatcherism, but that is to buy into an Aunt Sally version of Thatcher. Her famous quote, including the phrase "there is no such thing as society", is wildly misread if it is taken to imply that there can be no mutualism, cooperation and charity, that is if it is taken to be simply a hardnosed declaration that everyone is out for themselves. In fact, Thatcher was being an orthodox Hayekian here in that, for this kind of liberal, all corporate entities beyond the individual are fictitious. In this sense, there is no 'company', 'class', 'school', etc. These are reducible to the individuals who make them up. But the context of the quote made it clear that for Thatcher, charity and mutualism were entirely appropriate forms of social solidarity, at times worthy replacements for state intervention.

But Thatcher was also a statist. She used the state not only to discipline labour, but to ringfence the national space and keep out immigrants, to wage war, to discriminate against gays and bolster patriarchy, to draw power away from local democratic institutions and centralise it (or disperse it among quangos), and so on. Is there a contradiction here? Is there something basically incompatible between a strong state and a free economy? Was Thatcher parting with her Hayekian premises here? In one sense, yes. Hayek was a liberal whose overriding concern was not with state sovereignty. Indeed, in some of his writing he confesses to hostility to the very principle of sovereignty. On the other hand, Hayek was far more profoundly influenced by Carl Schmitt than he found it convenient to acknowledge, and it was above all Schmitt's authoritarian liberalism that shaped his views on the liberal state. The role of the strong state in Schmitt's ideology is to protect the autonomy of civil society, as a zone where the rule of law alone restricts an individual's freedom - obviously, this freedom includes first and foremost the freedom of capitalist managers to operate outwith excessive regulation, and of capitalist owners to invest without excessive appropriations. So it was for Hayek, who saw a strong state as an at times essential bulwark against the encroachments of democracy. Thatcher's bolstering of the state in its disciplinary, coercive capacity is entirely consistent with her downsizing of the state in its welfare capacity.

Hayek insisted that he was not a conservative, and in a very antiquated sense this is true. He preferred to position himself in the 'old Whiggish' tradition of Edmund Burke. This would seem odd at first glance. Hayek's market-based modernism and rationalism would seem to be incompatible with Burkean empiricism and traditionalism. Hayek was a Kantian, while Burke was a Humean. Hayek was a methodological individualist, while Burke believed in an organic social totality. But their understanding of spontaneous social order was derived from the same classical political economy, and the political order that both defended was identical - 'free market' capitalism with a parliamentary system founded on some conception of natural law, and characterised by an amalgamation of political forms including monarchy, aristocracy and an elite democracy. There is thus enough shared territory for Hayek to claim some affinity with Burke, though the latter's conservatism was of a piece with his defence of the post-1688 Whig tradition - just as Schmitt's counter-revolutionary conservatism in Political Theology was continuous in fundamental ways with the authoritarian liberalism of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Today, conservatism has long since adapted to and incorporated liberal ideas, so that Hayek's insistence that he was not a conservative was anachronistic. The point I wish to underline with these observations is that a powerful sovereign state is not merely a central component of the conservative tradition, but is perfectly compatible with a certain kind of right-wing market-based liberalism. There is no reason why a 'Big Society' could not also have a strong state.

***

Back to the 'Big Society', then. Coming from a coalition government with a Liberal component and a 'freedom bill' in gestation, you might suppose that it will have a strong libertarian inflection. So let's look at the areas where the Conservatives have appeared to take a libertarian position relative to New Labour. The Tories in opposition sensibly positioned themselves against ID cards and the database state, having initially been supportive of the measures. They also took the side of publicans over the smoking ban, preferring 'voluntary' bans to be introduced by individual companies, though there's little sign that this ban will be reversed or even significantly modified.

Under David Cameron's leadership, the Tories expressed some scepticism about control orders on the grounds that they were both an affront to due process and wasteful. However, they did nevertheless vote for the renewal of the orders in 2007 (the legislation has to be renewed each year) before abstaining in 2008 and 2009. Since forming a government, the Tories have issued new control orders and have been engaged in a protracted conflict with the courts over the issue. The signs are that control orders will be retained in some form on the implausible grounds that the Tories were unaware of the security situation while in opposition. On asylum seekers, the Tories promised that they would move to end child detention, arguably a slight humanisation of a system that has resulted in systematic abuse - but since the detention system will remain in place, it will also involve breaking up more families.

The liberalisation that the Tories have reluctantly embraced has often involved endorsing New Labour reforms - on section 28 and gay adoption, for example. On the other hand, the Tories have firmly backed the government's anti-immigration legislation, just as they have backed the government on most 'anti-terror' legislation. The Tories have often wanted to go farther than the last government, demanding a tougher policy on crime (there are now noises that prisoners will have to work a 40 hour week in jail), and imposing a cap on non-EU immigration. Much of the legislation they have opposed, meanwhile, has been that which abridged sovereign power. For example, the Human Rights Act has been a Conservative bete noir since it was introduced. It has allowed the judiciary to inflict defeats on the government over issues such as immigration, deportation and rendition. Cameron argued for the repeal of this act precisely to prevent that from happening. Indeed, the Law Lords ruled last year that the use of control orders was in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights. All signals are that such libertarianism as does manifest itself with this government will be low key and relative - ie, relative to the last government, which set a high benchmark for authoritarianism. And it is not only in the area of civil liberties, crime and immigration that one expects the 'strong state' to persist.

***

The 'Big Society' has been pitched as a remedy for the 'broken society'. It involves a radical re-structuring of the welfare state and the public sector. Its intellectual basis has been in preparation since the Tories' devastating election defeat in 2001. In addition to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which had informed Tory social thought since Keith Joseph founded it in 1974, there has been the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), set up by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith in 2004 to provide conservative answers to the problems of poverty and 'social exclusion'. Iain Duncan Smith comes from the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party, a 'strong state and free economy' conservative whose campaign for the leadership was briefly set back when it transpired that one of his advisers was the father of BNP leader, Nick Griffin. The base and the parliamentary party had endorsed him precisely because of this vintage. But he couldn't restore the Tories to a decent standing in the polls, and lasted less than two years as leader.

Theresa May understood the problem: "Our base is too narrow," she told the party as its chairperson in May 2002, "and so, occasionally, are our sympathies". The Tories were seen, she warned, as "the nasty party". The politics of the free market and the strong nation were not enough to win elections any more. The Tories had lost votes among the professional middle class, the lower middle class and the 'skilled working class', which could not be mobilised on such a basis. Duncan Smith had tried to take this lesson on board and implement it, and David Willetts started to try to float a distinctly Tory response to poverty and social exclusion. But it wasn't enough to detoxify the Tory brand. However, the CSJ took this strategy forward and, after another failed interregnum, David Cameron took the Tory leadership. Acknowledging the advice of Lord Ashcroft and advisor Steve Smith, Cameron "smelled the coffee", staking out an ostensibly 'moderate' policy stance in order to "decontaminate the Tory brand".

Cameron's leadership succeeded to some extent, where Duncan Smith failed. Cameron, like his predecessors, comes from the Thatcherite right-wing, but he has persuaded many commentators that he belongs to the 'One Nation' tradition of Benjamin Disraeli - though he has never been a member of the 'One Nation' parliamentary group. He speaks the language of progress and social reform, and articulates concerns about inequality and poverty. It sounds a great deal more like the 'left-wing' Toryism of Macmillan and Butler than the hard-nosed Poujadism of Thatcher and Tebbitt. Yet, specific policies on welfare and the public sector are notable for being continuous with the legacy of Thatcherism. Indeed, many of the policies associated with the 'Big Society' are recycled from past Conservative manifestos, as well as camping on territory recently staked out by New Labour. 'Free schools' and 'GP-led' trusts advance the logic of partial privatization, academies and foundation hospitals. They are profoundly anti-democratic in thrust, just as the earlier transfer of public assets to quangos was an attack on democracy. The attempts to reduce 'wasteful bureaucracy' continues previous manifesto commitments, and follows from New Labour's battles with the civil service and public sector employment. 'Freeing' public sector workers from central oversight, and 'liberating' them to focus on targets is an old Thatcherite idea that was enthusiastically taken up by New Labour.

And for all that the Tories would pose as friends of liberty, when it comes to welfare reform the moral panic of the "broken society" authorises not less but more surveillance and bullying. It has been argued that the "broken society" will reduce the statist "chivvying" that has left "shards" of "vanished civilities" littering the political terrain. This is highly unlikely. A centrepiece of Cameron's election campaign in 2010 was that the government should cut off benefits for those who refuse jobs. The Tories under Cameron continued its policy of seeking to force claimants to work for their benefits, ending the "something for nothing culture" and "helping" people back into work. The morality behind this policy, implying that unemployment is the result of an individual moral failure and that those who claim benefits are parasites, is the same as that which drove the first tentative moves toward workfare under Thatcher, finally bearing fruit with 'Project Work' in 1996 and continuing under New Labour.

Indeed, the whole thrust of Cameron and Osborne's attack on the undeserving poor - because, as Cameron and 'fairness' means giving people what they deserve - is that the state should have more of a say in the lives of those claim benefits. It reflects the dominant values of a ruling class that is, pace Digby Jones, demanding ever more disciplinarian and intrusive policies for the poor, while claiming greater liberty for itself, principally from taxation and regulation. That the recipients of benefits are citizens claiming an entitlement, and not beggars, is conveniently bypassed in a discursive regime that criminalises the unemployed and disabled, just as the Tories and New Labour have successfully criminalised asylum seekers.

***

Now, I raise this because there is a debate between Anthony Barnett and David Marquand, old colleagues in Charter 88. It is a debate whose assumptions about the nature of Thatcherism, the Cameroons and the 'Big Society' I find deeply questionable. There is an assumption that the 'Big Society', however vague and inconsistent its concrete recommendations, is a genuine attempt to move beyond New Labour authoritarianism. There is an assumption that the attempt at finding mutualist, cooperative answers to social problems is real and meaningful, despite the incoherent mishmash of medievalist distributism, philanthropy, meritocratic dogmas and 'progressive' social thought that underpins it. There is even an assumption that the 'Big Society' answers to some popular demand for freedom from overbearing statist interventionism. But the evidence behind these assumptions is scarcely to be seen. The Tory instinct will always be to strengthen the state's repressive capabilities, because it is in this capacity that the sovereign state most effectively wards off popular democracy and upholds the interests of those class fractions that are most closely integrated into the Conservative Party leadership. To imagine otherwise is to leave oneself vulnerable to a sickening let down.

Labels: big society, conservatism, edmund burke, hayek, neoliberalism, new labour, public spending, thatcherism, the meaning of david cameron, tories, trade unions

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Ken Loach vs Michael Heseltine posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, cuts, david cameron, finance capital, neoliberalism, new labour, public sector pay, public spending, tories

Thursday, September 16, 2010

I want the Liberals to crash and burn posted by Richard Seymour

The poor must accept benefit cuts. The welfare system isn't there to compensate them for their predicament, but to catapult them into new opportunities. It's time to end welfare dependency. Thus Nick Clegg recites from the soiled manifesto of neoliberalism, with its tired catechisms about dependency. This stifling orthodoxy is a sure sign of the exhaustion of our governing institutions, the near complete enervation of their democratic potential.

Anyone who has been on jobseekers' allowance, for example, would be entitled to feel both insulted and threatened by Clegg's trite remarks. The amount given to those seeking work is just the bare minimum that the government deems will cover a 'basket of goods' (food, travel, toiletries) to enable an individual to live a relatively spartan life while seeking employment. No one is being compensated - they are being kept alive. The system prevents high structural unemployment from wiping out much of the population, or forcing it into criminal, black market activities. Cutting those benefits is an attack on the life chances of millions of unemployed workers.

On top of that, if it weren't for a whole network of other public goods, such as libraries with free internet access and newspapers, this level of income would indeed be a trap. After all, how can one compete for jobs in today's labour market without regular internet access? Few people on benefits actually have internet in their homes. Or public transport. How could one travel to and from job interviews, if it weren't for an effective public transport system? How could one afford the journey, or a suit to wear, if it wasn't for various kinds of reimbursement that one can claim from the job centre? And healthcare. People living on jobseekers' allowance tend to have poorer diets and are vulnerable to illness. If it wasn't for free GP access, and free prescriptions for those out of work, their life chances would be sharply reduced. Which makes it all the more ironic that this is a government that is attacking not just benefits, but all of the various components of the welfare state, while at the same time removing the public sector investment that is sustaining employment. At the same time, they will be seeking to raise the pension age, so that more people are in the labour market for longer, thus increasing the amount of structural unemployment. The spiel about 'welfare dependency' is a crock - they are knowingly making it so that more people find it more and more difficult to escape unemployment.

Before the election, Clegg was seen by many as an honest broker, a fresh face unbeholden to 'sectionalism' in the best tradition of liberalism. But he has emerged as yet another spokesperson for the interests of capital. He is part of a Tory government, therefore part of a government of big business. That was the basis of the coalition pact. And, moreover, this isn't an unnatural position for the Liberals to be in. It is alleged by certain parties to the Lib-Lab negotiations back in May that the Liberals proved even more hawkish in negotiations than the Tories were in public, pushing the agenda on cuts well to the right. I find this all too believable. And thus, the Liberal leadership grabbed with both hands the opportunity to shed that aura of centre-left probity painstakingly accumulated by Charles Kennedy in the tradition of Jeremy Thorpe and Jo Grimond. Their standing in the polls has for now stabilised at between 12 and 14% - still too high in my opinion, but, if it holds, their lowest standing since the 1979 general election when David Steel crashed to 13.8% in the polls. In short, the long-term benefit to the Liberals from the division in the Labour coalition in 1981 is being reversed by this apparently very short-sighted Orange Book leadership.

I take delight in the Liberals' woes. This is not just because of my burning hatred for this coalition, and my probably unwarranted shock at the Liberals' decision to team up with the Tories. It is mainly because the defection of millions of voters from the Liberals is most likely to be a class conscious act, by former Labour supporters in working class heartlands. I take heart from that, and from the prospect of the centre vote being destroyed by the worst capitalist crisis in living memory. The coalition's 'mandate' is weak. The majority of people do not support the coalition's plans. 22% of people back the government's cuts. 37% support the lesser, more gradual cuts that Labour proposed at the last election. 37% of people don't want any part of the cuts, and favour protecting jobs and the vulnerable above tending to the deficit. This suggests that the arguments of the Left and the unions are starting to have an impact, despite having precious little coverage in the media. These arguments, favouring a version of left-Keynesianism, are entirely incompatible with the official programme of any of the three major parties, but they provide a good basis for some sort of 'action programe' that the left can unite around, and which can inform the practise of community activists and trade union militants.

Of course, it helps that Labour's current leadership race is forcing some of the contenders to sound a little bit more left on the cuts than they actually are, adapting to Diane Abbott's argument that the cuts are not necessary. While the Milibands are sticking pretty much to the cuts package announced by Labour at the last election, hedged with a lot of mealy mouthed language about 'credibility', Ed Balls, who sunk his own campaign early on with his crass, racist intervention on immigration, has said that we shouldn't even be talking about cuts at this point. But as is often the case, opinion is solidifying against the government's austerity agenda without much lead from national politicians, and amid a near Orwellian campaign in the media to advise in the most shrill, strident terms that "there's no money left".

If 'public opinion' is turning against the government, industrial action is likely to weaken its position further. Polls have recently suggested that 35% of people at the moment favour industrial action to fight cuts, and 45% of people would oppose it. Caveats apply to these, as to all poll findings, and no industrial strategy should be exclusively based on such evidence. But in my opinion, this does mean that the argument is wide open. 35% of people saying they back strike action when, as the poll was taken, only the left-wing trade union leaders and the revolutionary left had openly called for it, is quite a good number to work with. All of the anti-cuts coalitions springing up locally can take heart in this, in the negative approval ratings for the coalition, in the polls showing majority opposition to the cuts, and in the growing but very substantial and potentially organised minority who advocate a completely different programme altogether.

National strike action, coordinated to some degree, is now inevitable. The coalition is making it so. Socialist Worker's analysis argues that the TUC is moving to the Left, propelled (all too slowly) in that direction by the sheer aggression of the Tory cuts and the anger of the rank and file. The conference in Manchester has been marked by almost complete unanimity on the seriousness of the threat, and the need for united action including joint industrial action as well as community campaigning to resist these cuts. Trade unionists recognise that they have a fight for survival on their hands. But so do the young, pensioners, the unemployed, students, and those workers who aren't represented by a union.

That is why it is essential that these anti-cuts coalitions continue to be built, from the ground up, involving all of those affected, and everyone who wants to fight, such that when the workers go out on strike they do so with established roots in local communities, as part of, with the support of, and on behalf of those communities. But they should not stop at the local level. The working class has been too divided and atomised over recent years to put up adequate resistance to the neoliberal agenda. The aim must be to combine all of these coalitions and groups into a national movement that can both defeat the Tories long before their term expires, and form a popular bulwark against sell-outs by whatever Labour leadership emerges after the elections. Because if labour history has taught us anything, it is that what the Tories fail to do by aggression, Labour can often do through cooptation. Whether or not the goal proves possible, it is unrealistic to aim for anything less. Either the left and the labour movement get their act together at this pivotal moment, or they will be destroyed by the coming onslaught, and we will have a future in which Nick Clegg occupies the farthest left of bourgeois politics, with a right-wing increasingly defined by petit-bourgeois reactionaries and fascist provocateurs. Imagine - it would be like living in America.

Labels: capitalist crisis, david cameron, lib dems, liberals, neoliberalism, nick clegg, public spending, socialism, the meaning of david cameron, tories, trade unions, welfare