All Fool’s Day

I had thought of writing some clever April’s Fool piece for today. After all even the Economist has come out with a story saying its establishing a macro-economic theme park with rides mirroring the ups and downs of markets. But, then I thought there were enough fools making stories today without adding to it.

The main Fools are those arriving for what must be one of the most expensive pointless exercises imaginable – the Heads of State coming to the G20 Summit. No one seriously believes that these summits actually achieve anything, no one believes that the real work of trying to come up with policies or actions to deal with the world’s problems is actually undertaken by the political figureheads wheeled out for such occasions. That work is done in the real corridors of Capitalist power by those who really exercise power under Capitalism, by the managers of the top bosses, by their counterparts and Executive Officers in the Capitalist State machineries, by the top Capitalists themselves through their personal and social relations with each. Whatever decisions are going to be made to rescue global capitalism from the current recession have already been made through those channels, and will continue to be so made. In fact, some of these things get in the way of that job. Take the position of the French and Germans. Germany has made several statements about opposing further fiscal stimulus. In fact, Germany has already spent 1% more on fiscal stimulus than has Britain. But, the main reason these statements are being made is that Germany has elections coming up, and traditionally German people remembering the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic are wary of such inflationary measures. German politicians with an eye on the elections are playing to the gallery, knowing full well that after the election is over they will by fiscally stimulating their economy like every other capitalist state. Sarkozy the showman already in trouble at home, is playing the traditional French Bonapartist card of populism attacking others for the present crisis and blaming the “Anglo-Saxon” model for the crisis, as though he didn’t fight the election on trying to implement precisely that model in France itself!!!

In fact, data out this morning again shows more green shoots even in Britain. The Purchasing managers Index was quite sharply higher against expectations from the previous month, and Reuters also had a note out saying that UK New Orders were up from around index 33 to index 39, the highest since August 2008. Korea has also announced its exports have at least stabilised with a modest rise last month, and sees further signs of stabilisation if not yet recovery. More on that when I’ve digested the figures – the sun’s out, and I’m planning a day out.

But, the G20 leaders aren’t the only fools in London today. No doubt Newsnight in its piece last night looked for all the wackos to interview for its piece on the G20 demonstration today. There was some woman wittering on about rain forest polyphonic chanting the relevance of which completely escaped me. Perhaps she was following up on the reactionary nonsense environmental guru Jonathan Porrit was coming out with earlier in the day. Porrit has followed the logic of environmentalism and arrived at the same reactionary politics as the Reverend Malthus at the start of the 19th century. He’s now condemning all newborn babies in the West for using up valuable Earth resources and polluting the Planet, and wants measures to restrict population growth in Western countries! One of the people interviews labelled “The Revolutionary” did say, “Capitalism has created this problem, and we the workers are going to get ourselves out of it by our own self activity”, which I thought sounded good. But, as we weren’t given any further information on what this self-activity was I can’t say whether I agree or not. Then there was the lovely but completely wacky Chris Knight who told us that “Tomorrow we won’t be demonstrating we’ll be overthrowing the Government”.

It’s the typical kind of statement from Chris. I remember back in late 1984 during the Miners Strike being at a meeting with Chris of the National Labour Briefing Editorial Board in Birmingham. At the meeting Chris confidently pronounced that we were in a dual power situation, if not a pre-revolutionary situation as a result of the actions in the coalfields. As I pointed out at the time I actually lived in a mining village, and in the North Staffordshire coalfield. I was on miners’ picket lines every day, and was the Secretary of the local Miners Support Committee. Chris lived in the middle of London, which if it has ever seen a coal mine in its history lost sight of it at least a couple of hundred years ago! In fact, all the Miners I spoke to had a much more realistic view of what was going on, and at that stage their prospects for success. Most couldn’t understand why they had gone into such a strike without first a long overtime ban to get rid of all the huge stockpiles of coal that had been built up in preparation for the Tories provoking the strike.

But, no doubt on the demonstrations today their will be lots of such people believing that they are playing their part in bringing down global capitalism. There will be lots who like many “Marxists” for the last 50 or more years have had an apocalyptic view of Capitalist collapse seeing with every downturn the final denouement, which “must” as one comrade suggested in a discussion recently force the workers to react. Not only do these apocalyptic views have nothing in common with the ideas of Marxism, but more commonly they simply reflect the frustrations of petit-bourgeois elements who seek just yet another short-cut to revolution without the need to do the more laborious and tedious work of sticking with the workers, and providing them on a daily basis with practical solutions to their problems. Instead they just want to go straight to the building of barricades. In fact, if there were a Capitalist collapse at the moment we can pretty much guarantee given the level of class consciousness within the class, and the absolute poverty of political leadership for the class, what would emerge would not be socialism, but some form of barbarism, whether it be a vicious fascism or something worse. It’s a good job that no such collapse is going to happen.

I was going to say that despite all that these kinds of protests are a good thing. Marx argued that although strikes by workers could never solve their problems, the strikes themselves were necessary because they were the basic means by which the workers maintained their dignity, defended their interests, and prevented themselves sinking into the mire. I was going to say that demonstrations like those today are similar, they allow workers to show their anger, to demonstrate their collective power and so on. Indeed, in a truly revolutionary situation such demonstrations would be a useful means of a revolutionary party gauging the mood and combativity of the masses. But, in truth, I doubt any of those things can be said of today’s demonstration. The main workers in London will probably not be on the demonstration, unless they join in during their dinner hour! The main workers in London today will be trying to get through the demonstrations of largely middle class people who can afford to take a day of work, some to travel from other countries to demonstrate, of students and so on, in an attempt to get into work. Quite a few will, in fact, be ordinary workers, clerks, typists, administrators, cleaners, porters and so on who work in those very financial institutions that many of the demonstrators would want to close down throwing those workers on to the dole, the same businesses that in the last ten years or so have earned billions in foreign currency earnings to finance the jobs in service industries, the Health Service and so on! The best that can be hoped for is that many workers when they get home from work tonight will following on from the general antagonism towards bankers, see the demonstration and think “Good someone is doing something.” But, I doubt it. More likely most workers having done a hard day’s work will get home, see the demo and say “Bloody students.” Just as they did in relation to the Anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the 1960’s.

We have to build a movement that really can challenge Capitalism rather than just plays toy town revolutionaries, more concerned with massaging their own egos, and romantic fantasies. We have to do the boring work of standing alongside workers in their daily lives, doing the same jobs, being in the same Trade Unions, in the same Labour Party, and in place of all the Utopian solutions to workers problems that rely on either calls to the bosses state, or else demand that if the workers really want a solution they have to overthrow capitalism now, we have to provide them with the real practical solutions to those problems that workers really need. Then we might convince them of the need for something more, then we might get them to take us seriously, then those workers might actually be confident and conscious enough to take their self-activity further and really challenge the basis of Capitalist power. Instead, the majority of workers will simply look at what is going on in London and see just Fools on both sides of the barricades. No better day for it.