A Song From 1981 (Or Earlier?)

In October 1981, 250,000 people joined an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. That summer, Tony Benn had come within 1% of being elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Me? I was unemployed in Brighton.  So unemployed, in fact, I volunteered to work as a steward at that Labour Party conference. As a consequence, I find I am the owner of the 'Phonetappers and Punters Club Official Songbook' (a Clause 4 Publication).

Clause 4, in this context, was a grouping in the Labour Party's youth and student movements who steadfastly opposed the various array of Trotskyists, especially the Militant Tendency, who would otherwise have dominated those youth movements. Because it was a reactive grouping - e.g. anti-Trotskyist - Clause 4 spanned a fairly wide political spectrum from traditional Tribunites to hardline 'Stalinists-in-all-but-party-colours' to 'Eurocommunists-in-all-but-party-colours' and even included a few libertarian leftist/feminist/proto-green types. In student politics they were in deep alliance with the CP. ( I only mention all this as I can't find any reference to  them on the web, so I'm filling in the background). For all this heterogeneity, not to mention a fair dollop of callow youthful sectarianism, they did, in my experience, at least have a sense of humour. Several of them went onto adult political careers, including Ministerial office in a couple of cases.
  
The Phonetappers and Punters Club was their 'end of the pier review' for Labour Conference. The songbook is a window into a different world. CND was being reborn as a truly mass movement.  The politics of nuclear weapons was being discussed with passion and mass involvement again, for the first time in almost 2 decades. & that meant the politics of nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain were up for debate. I don't actually know if the song below - intended to be sung to the tune of The Red Flag - was written by the Clause 4 crew in the early eighties or was an inheritance from an earlier age(1) but it captures something of the time , at least as I recall it.


Our cause is surely won this year,
Because 'the leadership' is here,
For Khrushchev's boys and Trotsky's too
Now guide us in the work we do.

Then wave the Worker's Bomb on high,
Beneath its cloud we'll gladly die
And though our critics all shout 'balls'
We'll stand beneath it when it falls.

While Western arms we'll strive to end,
The Russian bomb we will defend
Degenerated though it might be
it is the people's property


The King St comrades chant its praise,
In Clapham they love its blaze,
Though quite deformed politically
We must support it...critically

It will correct our errors past
And clarify with its blast
Deep in our shelters, holes and nooks
We'll all have time to 'read the books'

And when we leave this world of toil
And shuffle off our mortal coil
We'll thank the Bomb that set us free
To Socialist Eternity.


(1) King St was still, then, the HQ of the CPGB. But the reference to Clapham is presumably to the old Clapham grouping of Trotskyists which, in the 1950s, apparently included Ted Grant, Gerry Healey and Tony Cliff - whom by 1981 has most certainly gone their own ways. So the song may actually be older than I'm suggesting here. But there were still folk on both sides of the Stalinist/Trotskyist divide defending the 'Workers Bomb'  when I saw the review in 1981.

Occupy Has Nothing to Say? I Blame the Parents

 Socialism, or at least its 20^th Century version, collapsed for two main reasons: because it couldn’t find a political form which demonstrated at least much personal freedom and democracy as the Western liberal democracies it opposed, and because it failed to deliver economic progress at the same speed or to the same apparent degree of efficiency as capitalism. 

Like everyone else of a certain age I watched this collapse on prime time TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had a profound effect on me. I was, after all, a card carrying Communist at the time – a historical materialist stranded on what appeared to be the wrong side of history.  

It very quickly became clear that there was no ‘easy intellectual retreat’, as it were, to social democracy. Generations of refugees from Marxist parties had made that journey before The Fall, comforting themselves they were still pursuing the aims of socialism but by defensible, democratic means.

Actually, a very large slice of the Marxist tradition had, by the 1980s, made a serious attempt to make this shift within its own intellectual framework anyway. Classical Trotskyism had its own (to me, always unconvincing) version of this which ran broadly along the lines of laying stake to the heritage of a purified and re-claimed ‘democratic’ Leninism; the libertarian Marxists had a more root and branch version, and my own tradition, that of Eurocommunism, somehow accepted the theoretical inapplicability of much of Leninist political theory in the West ( I mean, what else was all that bigging up of Gramsci about?) whilst still maintaining an institutional allegiance to the broad hope encapsulated in the ‘moment’ of 1917. All three, were, in their different ways, quite keen on refusing the supposed gap between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ of course, and laying stress on the economic and workplace democratic element to a vision of socialism – something they held in common with ‘advanced’ social democracy, at least in Bennite/Livingstonian form. 

Yet none of these positions – not social democracy, not Trotskyism, not libertarian Marxism, not, most of all, Eurocommunism - survived the Fall in any meaningful sense. Sure, there are fragments of each of these traditions still knocking about the margins of the political scene - but the intellectual ‘oomph’ has gone from all of them. I don’t think this is because people looked at their political solutions to the evident lack of freedom in the Soviet bloc and rejected them.

I think this is down, in large part anyway, to none of them actually having a set of economic answers to the critique capitalism posed in 1989-1991: why aren’t you as rich as us ? It was the question that those glossy shop windows in West Berlin in 1989 shouted in the face of the newly arrived Ossi, still grasping the newly hewn piece of The Wall. It stubbornly remains as a question, even though most versions of leftism now have a critique of growth for its own sake and at least a Greenish tinge. The left lacks an economic policy, or even a vision of what a socialist economy might look like.

Given that the centrepiece of Marx’s own intellectual life was subtitled ‘a Critique of Political Economy’, there is a howling historical irony here. Capitalism is now in deep trouble – systemic trouble. So, to put it mildly, it is not immediately obvious to the average Greek that capitalism will make them richer - and fears of the same nature abound throughout the once triumphant West. But no one has any non capitalist economic language with which to discuss alternatives.

& that's down to my generation, not the predominantly young people who constitute the new foot soldiers of the Occupy movement. Good on 'em I say: they may not be practicing socialist politics as I understand it - in fact, it seems more like a usurping of the old religious tradition of 'bearing witness'. But they are practicing anti-capitalist politics, and perhaps such is the poverty of radical inheritance my generation of leftists have handed down to them that is all they can possibly do. But I'm very glad they're doing it.

The Centre Stirs...

David Marquand:

I'm worried, not because the Government is departing from New Labour's legacy, but because it's sticking to it. Here, I believe, both Government and Opposition are engaged in a phony war. Despite all the furious charges and counter-charges that echo through the Westminster air, they are both on the same side. They both want to return to business as usual as quickly as they can. They disagree furiously about the route, but they agree about the destination. They want to get back to the sunlit uplands of ever-rising material prosperity, fuelling and fuelled by ever-rising consumption, both public and private. Both are dominated by short-term policy wonkery. Neither seems to have grasped the need for a new politico-economic paradigm, post-Keynesian, post-socialist, post-Thatcherite, post-national and above all post-affluence. I don't carry such a paradigm in my knapsack, I hasten to add. But I feel in my bones that this is what used to be called the left should now be working on.

Now, ignoring for a moment the rather impressive number of usages of the prefix 'post' in that, er, post, isn't this interesting? We have the primary academic representative of the line that runs from Crosland to New Labour (via the SDP) saying the game is now up, and the current froth of politics represents little more than a churning of outdated verities.

I think he's right. I just don't think that prefixing the word 'post' before every previous paradigm is particularly helpful. Challenging the inherited meaning of 'affluence', for instance, seems to me to be pretty vital - re-defining it as meaning something different: an 'affluence' of equality, resource sustainability and greenery springs to mind as the objective. &, of course, I'm not willing to concede we're in a world that is, by definition, post socialist.

Famously - and I can recall getting a lot of stick for this 25 years ago - Marquand, despite being then in the SDP, wrote regularly for Marxism Today. Quite who was trying to exercise hegemony over whom might still provoke a pub argument or two with friends to my Left. But if the would-be generals of the -so far - imaginary armies that are supposed to resist the coming cuts are to put flesh on their 'strategic' posturings, they must find a language which calls people who conceive of themselves as 'centrist' to the banner, as well as the thin ranks of the more committed Left. So it is always worth maintaining that dialogue with people like Marquand in my view.

The Election About Anything But Telling The Punters How Horrible We’re Going To Be If We Win, Whilst Still Boasting We’re Going To be Quite Horrible

Off we go then. Eyes down for a full house.

What the election should be about, of course, is the long term economic future of the country and how to move forward from being a set of occupied territories controlled by the City of London. About what a post industrial country should do if it never wants to be held to ransom by International Finance again. But, no, it’s going to be about boasting who can do the required – but always so, so vague – cutting of public services in a way that won’t affect the particular demographic niche the politico happens to be addressing today.

What’s the best thing that can happen? The emergence of a fractured social democratic voice in Parliament. We’ve lived for too long, too unsuccessfully with the idea that social democracy can express itself through Labour alone – or, under Blair and Brown, can be expressed through Labour at all.

We need overlapping circles of social democrats, spread through different parties with different 'dog whistle issues' so they keep each other honest. We need a few Green social democrats and more than a few Plaid and SNP social democrats. Even perhaps an Islamic social democrat in the personage of Salma Yaqoob. David Henry, the Anti-Blears candidate in Salford. & of course we need some good, old fashioned Labour social democrats. (Folk like the ever entertaining Paul Smith, down in Bristol West.).

What I'm dreaming of is the opposite of a Popular Front, where differences are buried to fight the common foe: its the creation of conditions for a ramshackle 'family argument of the left' in Parliament, one where different members of the family remind each other what family loyalty is supposed to be about. & the social democratic family is - or should be - about defending the welfare state and ordinary people, not pruning it back to keep bankers happy.

Mind, when I stop dreaming I still think the Tories are likely to win.

Open Left? Let's Have An Open Hearted One...

The whole Open Left thing is a tacit acknowledgment that the New Labour government is about to go down to defeat. I’ve come across the idea of ‘getting your retaliation in first’ before but this may be the first time I've stumbled on the idea of getting your ‘post-defeat soul searching in first’. This is perhaps one reason why it’s all such an unsatisfying slurry of words and vaguely defined dangling questions.

I'd advise all these angst ridden wannabe 21st Century lefties to go read Orwell:

The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain......The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. ..... We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable. But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless Utopia? At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood.

I've always taken this to imply several things things:

1. Socialism doesn't depend on some idealistic concept of the perfectibility of human kind;
2. Socialism won't bring universal happiness (though there is no reason to imagine people will, on average, be any less happy than under capitalism);
3. The specific and distinctive policy objectives of 20th Century socialism - the predominantly social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; or significant resource distribution between individuals on the basis of need, not effort -were, in fact, only a means to an end: the end being what Orwell called 'human brotherhood', but what we might now describe as social solidarity or community inclusiveness, the lack of which is the key sickness at the heart of our society.

We need a 21st Century equivalent vision. I don't care whether it's called 'socialism' or not any more.

What's My Line?

A comment in the post below has just reminded me that the single most convincing outline of an alternative 'what-to-do-about-the-banks' policy was provided by Richard Murphy, back in October but no one, absolutely no one as far as I can see, ever took up the idea and ran with it. &, on the net, last October might as well be neolithic times, as we've all got the attention span of goldfish. So go read it now and see what you think.

It's not a strategy for socialism tomorrow. But it is a strategy for structural reform, for breaking the hold of Big Finance on our economy. It is, to use that well worn phrase, a 'modernization' strategy of the Left. (Remember when the Left used to think it knew how to surf the wave of the future? Ah, such memories....)

Now, think about it, what is the Left without a vision of a future? It is a group of people who fight, and quite often lose, defensive battles. Battles to stop things changing for the worse rather than battles to make things change for the better. & I've had a lifetime of it and I'm feeling really, really sick at the prospect of doing it over again when the cuts come after the election.

So let's have Richard's network banking; let's have Boffy's and Chris' self managed organisations (which are more productive anyway); let's have an industrial programme of arms conversion; let's have a Greening of the economy; let's have a different way of looking at public service value In short: let's have some reason to live through the economic pain. Let's have a future.

It is true that the Tories and their allies are trying to log roll the country into the default assumption that cuts must come, and must come quickly and severely after the election whoever wins it. No doubt all those Keynesians are right to say we should wait till the upswing to cut, but the gilt markets might turn at any point and give us very little choice. & whilst I agree with Duncan's newly discovered Texan Post Keynesian that it's about income and wealth equality in the long run, I detect no enthusiasm for an equality of national decline.

It ain't enough for the Left to say 'it-was-the-rich-wot-broke-it-so-they-should-fix-it'. We need a programme. A new AES.

New Tune Needed

Steph and Pesto are both carrying reports of Osbourne's recent speech which, if they are to be believed, would place the Tory post election economic policy a couple of notches to the left of Labour's. A end to bankers bonuses, tax breaks for equity not debt, priority given to long term investment, that sort of thing. Nothing desperately radical you understand - I think Steph is over-egging the pudding by drawing in Will Hutton as a comparator - but certainly a break from 'the pro-financial markets at all costs' approach which characterised the Brown/Darling policy line before the crash, and very distinct from their emergency programme of recapitalising the banks since. This might just be opportunism on the Tories part of course. Or it might reflect that, as an opposition, they're not totally tied up with dealing with the crisis and/or an interparty faction fight and can afford to think in the slightly longer term.

So Labour will have to respond. How? Mandelson might want to attempt to re-run the sixties dirgisme with the state perhaps not quite 'picking' winners a la Concorde, but certainly hot housing them - think of his general line as a kind of remixed Motown Chartbusters Vol 3 of economic policy. Others - Darling? Brown? - might go along with this to some degree, but still wish to re-establish the City in something like its status quo ante form, if only to reestablish a decent corporate tax base (not that the 'old' City actually paid that much tax compared to what it earned). Think of this as the economic equivalent of, say, a SpiceGirls comeback: it was huge once, but everyone doubts it can ever happen again in quite the same way.

As for the Left of the Party - and indeed the wider Left - it does rather now behove them to broaden out from particular tactical fights - like opposing Post Office privatisation - important as these are, to seeking a coherent economic vision of the future. They need a new tune as well.

Where's My Pitchfork ?

Tom over at Labour and Capital doggedly works his way through the smoke and mirrors provided by the financial sector to justify its own behaviour. His patient unravelling of their arguments about executive pay and 'agency' theory are a model of intellectual engagement and sheer hard graft. Despite once describing himself as a 'weedy social democrat' in my comments box, but I think what he does is more useful than almost all the stirring denunciations of the evil bankers and the rule of capital from the Marxist blogosphere.

Well , mainly I do. But every so often one come across something like this on Bloomberg's about Hedge Fund pay levels:

"The industry’s top earners last year were James Simons of Renaissance Technologies Corp., who took home $2.5 billion; John Paulson of Paulson & Co., $2 billion; John Arnold of Centaurus Energy LP, $1.5 billion, and George Soros of Soros Fund Management LLC, $1.1 billion, according to a survey published in the April issue of Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine.

Average pay at hedge funds was $794,000 in 2008, down from $940,000 a year earlier, Alpha magazine reported. ....Chief executive officers earned an average of $2 million last year, while chief investment officers made $1.4 million, according to Alpha’s survey. Senior portfolio managers took home $1.1 million and senior traders were paid $790,000."

This is a quote from an article about hedge fund pay falling by 25%.

At times like this Tom's social democratic patience is the furthest thing from my mind. I want a pitchfork, a burning brand and the rest of the peasantry to join me in in a Jacquerie. I really mean it. These levels of remuneration are beyond comprehension.

But even breaking a few windows seems a horrible crime of unpardonable magnitude according to the Press.

Hold the Front Page: Leftwing Blogger Does Some Basic Thinking..

I've used this blog to try to explore what it might mean to be a 'socialist' in these strange times. Its' title is an obscure reference to the fact I stopped party-political - though not community - activity almost 20 years ago, when the party of which I was a member, the CPGB, collapsed. So I felt like Captain Oates leaving the tent...but now, having somehow 'returned to the tent' as it were, I have found myself less than impressed by the Left of today, as I said here.

In particular I've been less than impressed by the Left's response to the current economic crisis and by the seeming poverty and purely rhetorical nature of their economic policies. So it's good to see Boffy's Blog coming up with a lengthy, detailed and austerely defended 4 part analysis of co-operatives. The key contemporary issues are covered in part 4 - but there are links to the three previous pieces on the subject which constitute a historical account of various Marxist views on the subject, going right back to Marx and Engels themselves.

He also provides a link to an Italian paper setting out a 'workable transition to socialism to be achieved through a system of producer cooperatives', from a partially Gramscian point of view.

I'm not saying I agree with any of this - I just don't know, I haven't had time to digest it. I suspect I'm much more prepared than Boffy is to think positively about consumer, as opposed to worker, controlled co-ops, since I no longer consider myself a Marxist (or nothing more than a 'ex-ish' Marxist anyway). But, my, I'm so pleased to see debate of this nature beginning....

That Old Time Religion: Socialism 101

Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Marxian View from UVC-TV 19 on Vimeo.

I love this - it's 40 minutes long but worth the time. Rick Wolff , heir of Baran and Sweeny, explains the origins of the crisis and makes the case for bottom up socialism in simple, clear, populist language in an authentically American idiom. He's like a character from a Jimmy Stewart movie or a Studs Terkel book.

Whereas most of his British would-be equivalents either sound like they're characters from the ladybird book of Leninism or have swallowed the dictionary at the Library of the Sorbonne.

It's on google and Youtube, but I found it at Rethinking Marxism.

"...& I'll Cry if I Want To.."

I've been trying to avoid it - no, honestly, I really have - but I can't stay away from the slow implosion of the SWP. It's being covered with perhaps rather ill-hidden glee by a website run by a former ally of theirs in Respect here, and here, and here and...well no doubt a lot of other places as well by the time you get to read this post. Across the Irish Sea Splinty's joined in as well - and the debate on his post is much more sophisticated than on the Socialist Unity site. Comrade Tom Cobbleigh and all are also having their say.

These are most definitely not 'my people'. When I was politically active they would have despised me as a reformist. Or possibly as a Stalinist. Or both. & the distaste, politically speaking, would have been pretty mutual, although that never stopped me being friends with and even sharing flats with SWP members when I was young. But I do accept that twice in my life time - around the Anti-Nazi League at the turn of the '70s/80s and in the Stop the War Coalition - they played pretty vital roles in popular front style movements. (Even if, for reasons of internal theology, they always describe these patently cross class initiatives as 'united fronts', sometimes qualified by the mirth inducing suffix '..of a special type'.)

I've posted before on how the problems within the SWP resonate with my experience in the 1980s Communist Party. & like the CP of old they now seem to have reached the point where they have many more ex members than actual current members. Membership is small and broadly stagnant - ours was dropping of course - and sometimes inflated for the purpose of keeping the troops' spirits up. Effective purchase on political developments is usually more imagined than real. So the question arises of how to make the organisation relevant. The argument gets wrapped up in all sorts of Marxist obscurantism - and is, initially, filtered through purely organisational disagreements and petty 'office politics' amongst the full timers - but it's basically about asking the question, " If we just keep on keeping on why on earth should we expect anything to be different?" The would-be grand priests of theory and of faction then march onto the polemical stage and offer finely honed analyses of Why You Lot Have Been Doing It All Wrong And Why You Should Take My Line (WYLHBDIAWAWYSTML*)

But it's over. In retrospect I can see the people running Marxism Today knew this a generation ago. A Party no longer feels like the correct organisational form from which to change consciousness and culture, even if it is indispensable for fighting elections and pretty helpful in organising demonstrations and the like. A comment from someone called 'ejh' in the Splinty discussion puts this eloquently:

"...it doesn’t really matter if whichever organisation you’re discussing has a better line on this or that, a healthier approach to party democracy, deeper roots in the working-class, a more bottom-up approach to policy-making, a more disciplined approach, a more flexible approach, a less opportunistic approach or whatever the criticism of choice may be. Nobody is making any meaningful progress at all with whatever approach they take, and that’s because the whole idea has come to a dead end. The political habits and ideas on which it depended have withered away."

He goes onto link this to a more general decline in the very idea of working class solidarity, which has clearly also occurred. The manual working class, both unskilled and, especially, skilled is much, much smaller than it once was. An awful lot of the psychic identity of the old organised Labour movement was built on that identification with (predominantly male) manual work alone. The new working class jobs are generally white collar and tend to involve doing repetitive tasks in a sterile environment (think about call centres, or various service industries). As yet, no organisational culture has grown up around such jobs that can be seen as anything like the old trade union workplace solidarity.

But even if it does I can't see a place within it for a 'revolutionary party' of supposedly tightly knit cadres holding the Truth. It's possible one day soon we'll find ourselves with a new 'culture of resistance' as different from what went before as, say, the 'New Unionism' of the 1880s was from the Chartist struggles of a generation previous. I'm sure many current and ex SWP - and Communist, and other left party - members will be part of that culture of resistance.But they won't be a party.

*Co-incidentally also the name of a small railway station that was one of the 'Little Moscows' in the 1930s Rhondda Valley. Dr.Beeching closed it.(N.B. Note for my more serious dialectical friends: this is a joke....)

Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom?

This is new - at least for me. Compass are asking all and sundry to propose new policies. People can organise their own meetings to discuss the ideas proposed. It's not a sudden outbreak of unmediated direct democracy however - they still have an 'expert panel' to judge the ideas before Compass members get to vote on them.

No doubt all this is a predictable outgrowth of the Howard Dean and Obama campaigns - and an attempt to link the 'flash mob' phenomenon into the political process. But what interests me is that it seems to be a step on a path to re-imagining what a political party might be in the internet age.

'Modern' political parties are all, in essence, run by their full timers. The only real difference between the Tories and, say, the SWP in this respect is that the Tories' full timers are mainly elected representatives. Much as I dislike the paraphernalia of democratic centralism - the list system, the absurd insistence on defending the line - in strictly sociological or organisational terms all political parties are deeply alike in this respect, however different their ideology, party rules or policy offerings. The membership - even if you call the membership the 'cadre base' - is there to act as a transmission belt of ideas and activities generated from the top. The members are 'amateurs', theoretically in democratic control of the 'professionals' but in reality almost always subservient to them. So being a member ain't much fun unless you're an election/ paper sales junkie - which many of them are - or very keen on endless policy wonkery.

This sort of initiative might well prove to be e-window dressing that still leaves the professionals firmly in control. Indeed, it is likely that many of the proposals submitted will come from other professionals in various campaigns and pressure groups. But I still think it is worth two cautious cheers. Who knows, one or two ideas genuinely originating from amateurs might actually make their way through the process. & in the ossified world of politics that really would be something new.

( Hat-tip Tom P)

Hamlet Without the (Modern) Prince

Robert Peston said this morning,
"£5,000bn has implicitly or explicitly been made available by central banks and governments since April 2008 to support wholesale funding by banks.

That is a genuinely big number. It's equivalent to about a sixth of the total annual economic output of the whole world." & Reuters reports that the Chinese are beginning to cut up rough about the dollar,

"The United States has plundered global wealth by exploiting the dollar's dominance, and the world urgently needs other currencies to take its place, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Friday.

The front-page commentary in the overseas edition of the People's Daily said that Asian and European countries should banish the U.S. dollar from their direct trade relations for a start, relying only on their own currencies."

I ain't at all sure there is any easy way back from this. Governments aren't getting out of the banking business anytime soon: they're too deeply enmeshed to realistically be able to extract themselves. The Swedish Empire is here to stay. In such circumstances governments are damned if they get the banks to lend and damned if they don't.

How can the dollar - the currency of the world's biggest debtor in a globe collapsing with debt - possibly hold as the international currency of last resort? If the Chinese really do move out of dollars in any kind of big way hyper-inflation in North America - and therefore here - becomes a real possibility. That, surely, is what this call for a 'new Bretton Woods' is all about.

Time for a new political economy (pdf) indeed. But we face a problem here: even the mild reformism of the Compass document I've linked to is seen as wildly Utopian and electorally unpopular.

This crisis, at the moment, is like Hamlet without the Prince; we have no organised alternative to capitalism. Even those isolated voices on the libertarian socialist Left like Chartist who saw this coming, can only offer solutions which, at the moment, sound as if they come from a science fiction novel. The vast majority of ordinary people would find them ridiculous.

Well - they'd find them ridiculous for now. Let's see quite how bad this is going to be....

The Limits of ‘I Told You So’ Leftwingery....

Via the blog with no name
Marx on the credit crisis
FromCapital (Volume 3, Chapter 30):

"In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realised again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values. Incidentally, everything here appears distorted, since in this paper world, the real price and its real basis appear nowhere, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in centres where the entire money business of the country is concentrated, like London, does this distortion become apparent; the entire process becomes incomprehensible; it is less so in centres of production."

Yeah, but I still can't work out prices/resource allocation decisions from the Labour Theory of Value...

So, tempting as all this "Hey, We're BACK!" stuff is, I have yet to see anything thing from the Left which shakes me in my view that the Marxist tradition still has a lot to offer in terms of sociological and historical perspectives - even, stripped of the absurd blind alley of 'democratic' centralism, something to offer in terms of political theory - but it really, really isn't helpful when approaching directly economic questions.I'm with Dave on this one.

What Are Banks For Anyway (pt 2)

I'm a bit disappointed that Richard Murphy's answer to this problem hasn't attracted more debate on the Left blogosphere.

He carefully distinguishes between banking functions (like the operation of a national payment system and creation of credit) which have to be centralised, and therefore should be taken over by the State, and those functions, like deposit taking and investment, which might reasonably be franchised out to a number of operators to create some degree of competition and thus generate some consumer choice and 'alternate providers' in the event of any one of them crashing. Strong regulation would also be needed. In essence it is a similar kind of approach to the one New Labour have taken to much of the welfare state. I can't help laughing a bit at seeing it applied, even theoretically, to the banking industry.

But let's review the underlying arguments as to why New Labour use this kind of approach in the Welfare State: foremost amongst such justifications is the theory that without competition organisations are liable to 'provider capture'- that is to being run in the interests of their workforces, not their 'customers' or 'owners'(e.g. the tax payer).

Now this is mainly bollocks of course - but not quite entirely. The fact that in the Welfare State such arguments are used as cover for 'privatisation by devolution' and the creeping invasion of financial privatisation through PFI like arrangements does not mean that 'provider capture' never happens in any circumstances. My previous post waxed indignant on the subject of City bonuses - the size of these would seem to suggest provider capture has happened in that sector.( This would also fit in with Stumbling's ongoing worries about principal-agent problems, I think) In which case there would seem to be grounds for setting up a system designed to discourage it....Co-incidentally, it would be a very British form of socialism, but let's not go shouting that from the rooftops just yet, eh?

I'd be really interested in hearing others' take on this.

Well Dug Old Mole?

"[Capitalism] "is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous — and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed."

A quote from Keynes, posted by Mick.

The Times- and therefore the blogosphere- are gnawing away at the old Marxist bone today. Stumbling even treats him like as proper economist but fairly points out that Capital itself didn't really deal too much with finance capital per se. That would be Hilferding's patch I seem to remember. Something about tending to create the conditions for war, and constantly seeking state help as I recall. Lenin nicked large parts of the theory to explain Imperialism.

So I'm not falling over backwards to resurrect ol' Karl. Saying that capitalism is unstable and unfair is not uniquely Marxist - as indeed Martin Jacques pointed out in the Times. Saying it can be replaced with a fairer system run by and for the majority of people is.

But right now we seem to have a gravedigger shortage. I blame the government's pathetic excuse for a skills strategy....

Capitalism in Crisis: So How Am I Going To Explain to My Kids What Socialism Is?

Hot news: today, like every other day of my life, capitalism didn't collapse. Which is perhaps just as well: I'm fairly certain now that there isn't a soul on the planet who would know what to do if it did.

The SWP remind us, in a Old Time Religion kind of of way, that Markets are Bad; Stumbling persists in his lonely but honourable quest to invent a sort of 'son of Yugoslavian style market socialism' by re-connecting collective ownership forms to market driven enterprise; and the parecon lot give us what the more hard-line Marxists would no doubt sneeringly refer to as 'utopian' socialism. More or less everyone else give us rehashed left Keynesian programmes of macro-economic policies, though often with an important Greenish twist.

I'm not sneering at any of this. I am attracted to aspects of all of these approaches, despite the fact they are clearly contradictory. But I am, wistfully, asking why is the Left so much better at analysis – as in this excellent Monthly Review piece – than prescription?

I think it is because we've lost an overarching story to tell, a meta-narrative as those clever folk who understand these things tend to say. The two traditions of 1917- not just the Bolshevik one, but the counter-veiling, legalist social democratic one that emerged in the West – are both effectively dead. I really don't think the material or historical conditions still exist to go back to the ways of that old, post 1917 Left in any of its 57 varieties, be they social democratic or Marxist.  I'm still convinced by the New Times people on that one.

I'm reminded of the High Victorian period. A 'Left' disappeared, more or less, during the mid nineteen century – a Left driven by a democratic, ultimately post French Revolution agenda, about electoral arrangements and the franchise (cf Chartism). The 'Left' which re-emerged afterwards was different - more focused on industrial struggles, more concerned with financial as well as democratic equality, more 'socialist' (or at least incipiently socialist) in a sense  those of us born in the twentieth century might recognise. 

I've often wondered if we're currently living through a similar period. The ideological foundations of the Left of my youth have crumbled. Something new has yet to emerge. My longer term hope of the coming recession is that it can act as the midwife to a new way of looking at the world in terms of framing a coherent Red-Green response to changing conditions.

Because the neo-liberal spell is now broken. It's not the only way of doing things, it's not 'the natural order'. We have the conditions for politics again, not just marketing and management write large as per 'triangulation' and 'the Third Way'. & , yes, the questions now before us are creating the politics of running capitalism differently. But if we do this well, other, more basic questions may emerge along the way.

The Commentariat Rearranges Itself

The world shifts: even the Telegraph is moved to suggest it would be nice if someone from the banking world said 'sorry'. Ahh, isn't that nice....and John Redwood - he of the Ming the Mekon stare – busies himself with details of the government's action in stabilising the markets, rather than launching a blood and thunder ideological criticism.

Back in the world of the grown-ups, Polly T, nose-peg hawker in chief and once of the Social Democratic Party for christssakes, tells us,

"Brown needs a severe committee of those economists who were right when he was wrong - people to frighten the City, not to soothe its frightened feathers. Appoint the Richard Murphys, Will Huttons and Larry Elliotts not as City tsars but as City Savonarolas to flush out tax avoidance and evasion, to close down tax havens, to appoint honest non-executives to company boardrooms and institute a regime built on public trust." I take this to mean that the principled section of New Labour is now thoroughly disgusted with the City and, finally - finally – prepared to occasionally say 'boo' to this particular goose.

Chris Dillow continues Stumbling and Mumbling towards a theory of market driven mutual ownership. Will Hutton grimly explains how much remains to be done. Richard Murphy unpacks Hutton's idea of 'putting all the debt in a bad bank' might actually work: interestingly, given his association with the Labour Representation Committee, he does seem to call for a fairly rapid sale of the profitable bits of the banks back to the private sector. So we're still talking, even on the apparent 'extreme Left' of the public discussion, about a rebalanced mixed economy.

Which allows Lenin's Tomb to draw a thick red line between his position and mainstream discussion, based on the abolition of scarcity and workplace, rather than representational, democracy. By abolishing scarcity ,of course, one more or less abolishes the need for any kind of 'bourgeois' economics: it's a long way from agreeing that capitalism creates 'artificial' needs , a view which I agree with, and saying scarcity itself can be abolished...which is perhaps why there is only a very desultory discussion over at Dave's Part on whether Marxist economics offers any particular insight to the crisis.

So, all in all, I think John Lancaster is probably right: capitalism no longer has a global antagonist.

Except, Monbiot tell us, capitalism and the globe may not be on speaking terms for very much longer...

(Hattip to L+C for the picture)

What’s Left?

John Lancaster in the upcoming LRB,

"So: a huge unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialised. That is literally nobody's idea of how the financial system is supposed to work. It is just as much an abomination to the free marketeer as it is to the social democrat or outright leftist. But the models and alternatives don't seem to be forthcoming: there is an ideological and theoretical vacuum where the challenge from the left used to be. Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more – if only to clarify thinking and values, and to provide the chorus of jeering and Schadenfreude which at this moment is deeply appropriate. I would be providing it myself if I weren't so frightened."

There's too much truth in this for me to be comfortable. There have been - isolated - left commentators who have put forward emergency or long term economic recovery plans - but few who have go to the root of the matter in proposing a different kind of society, other than those who simply repeat the same old mantras of 'worker's democracy'. It's not enough.

Richard Murphy Speaks for the Nation

Why? Because he said this, the most quotable bit of is as follows:

"I watched Digby Jones make a typical fool of himself on a news broadcast last night. He argued that he didn’t want to sit back.... and realise that all the financial services of world are in what from now on I will call the ‘Ais’: Shanghai, Dubai and Mumbai.

... he has not appreciated that the reason why these services have failed is simple: no one needs them. The activities that have caused the Crash are a giant Ponzi scheme that were, in the classical form of such schemes, dependent upon pyramid selling. That pyramid has now collapsed. No one will rebuild it: it has been proven to be without foundation.... he still does not realise that when these activities have brought our economy to our knees we should have no desire to recreate them. Isn’t that glaringly obvious?

Actually, I’ll suggest it’s so obvious that the Ais won’t want what we have created: they’ll realise that we created something wholly worthless in itself, but massively destructive to that which is of worth. And I’m going to credit them with the sense that they’ll not go near it with a bargepole.

.. Gordon Brown has kept him on his National Economic Council."

But this, ultimately, is moral revulsion, albeit well-informed moral revulsion. Surely there is a structural element to this: an inherent logic of capital?