On Dennis Skinner – Learn To Think

A number of people have been pondering the question of how to explain Dennis Skinner's decision to support the Tories in the vote over Brexit, and the open power grab by a right-wing, authoritarian government that has shown itself more than willing to ride roughshod over democratic norms of accountability. It comes down to Skinner's political methodology, a methodology, unfortunately shared by many others on the left.

Way, way back in time, in early 1974, I was a very, very young trades union militant. I had just become a shop steward for ASTMS, at Royal Doulton, in Nile Street, in Burslem. The offices where I worked, were not unionised, but within a few months of me moving there, around 60% of the workers had joined the union, much to the consternation of the management, who still operated on a Victorian, paternalistic model.

I saw myself following in my father's footsteps, who, when he was only 20, in 1939, was moved around nearly every car factory in the Midlands, at the start of the war, as he acted as spokesman for the grievances of his fellow workers. Eventually, he had his cards literally filled with black ink, so that he could not get a job, and so ended up in the army, despite having been in a reserved occupation as an engineer. I wanted to be as left-wing as I could possibly be, having not, at that time, read Lenin's “Left-wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder”. But, in order to achieve that goal, I did seek out and read what I thought, at that time, represented, such left-wing ideas.

In the adjoining office to the one I worked in, there were two blokes who sat together at a desk, a bit like you used to sit together at desks at school, in the 1960's. They dealt with export sales, although the rest of the people in that office dealt with data processing. The two blokes were both in their 50's, and had earned the nicknames Bill and Ben, one of them actually being called Bill, whilst the other was actually called Maurice. In many ways they were illustrative of the working-class in the Potteries, at the time they had grown up, in the 1930's.

Maurice, who lived in Lonsdale Street in Stoke, opposite the Victoria Ground, used to bring in copies of Tribune, and Socialist Worker, each week, which he passed on to me. Bill, on the other hand, admitted to having gone along, as a teenager, to the meetings of Oswald Moseley, in Longton, though mostly he claimed, to be able to take part in the social activities that the fascists organised.

As a large factory, Doulton's had a works canteen, or rather it had three. It had one, an executive dining room, reserved for the handful of Directors; it had a large one for all of the manual workers, and it had another, for the office staff. After eating, I would usually go to sit with Bill and Ben, and listen to “The World At One”, on Maurice's little transistor radio. The ideas I absorbed, were then those conveyed in the pages of Tribune and of Socialist Worker. And, despite the fact that these two organs represented what were supposed to be contending political ideologies of reformism and revolution, on the burning issue of the day, as 1974 progressed, and rolled relentlessly into 1975, the Common Market, the message that both conveyed was remarkably similar.

That message boiled down to the concept that the Common Market was a big capitalist club that was organised to strengthen the power of capital, and undermine the power of workers. The logic of that, was drawn out by the reformists of Tribune, along with their fellow travellers within the Communist Party, in the Alternative Economic Strategy. The ideological origins of the AES could be traced back to the Communist Party's “British Road To Socialism”, which was just one of a series of national roads to socialism developed by separate national Communist Parties, which took their lead from the national socialist ideas of Stalinism, and the theory of Socialism In One Country.

What the theory of Socialism In One Country really meant was an abandonment not only of the idea of the need for an international revolution, as the basic requirement for the development of socialism, but of the concept of international socialism itself. It really meant that the role of individual Communist Parties was to act primarily to defend the continuation of the Stalinist regime in the USSR, to act as its gatekeepers. They were no longer to seek socialist revolution in their own countries, which would have been to antagonise imperialism, and thereby upset the system of peaceful co-existence that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt/Truman had agreed on, at the end of WWII, at the conferences of Potsdam, and Yalta, and parodied in the conclusion of Orwell's “Animal Farm”, where the pigs and the humans sat down together, and it became impossible to discern one from the other. The role of the Communist Parties was merely to act as reformists, seeking to mollify the condition of the working-class, as the other reformist parties had done before them. There was, in fact, no justification in the continued separation of the Communist Parties from the various social-democratic parties, other than, often sections of those reformist parties were more radical, and more left-wing than were the Stalinists, who were often to be found, lined up with various Liberals.

The Alternative Economic Strategy, was such a nationalist, reformist, social-democratic document. Its centre-piece was the need to rejuvenate British capitalism, by measures undertaken conjointly between the workers organisations and capital. Capital was to be given various incentives to undertake the kind of investment it had conspicuously failed to undertake in the previous seventy years, or in the case of those new industries that had been developed in the post war period, had failed to undertake in the previous twenty years. That lack of investment had made British capital uncompetitive as against its European counterparts, particularly, Germany. The lack of competitiveness made Britain particularly vulnerable after the long wave post war boom came to an end, in the early 1970's, so that the conflicts between capital and labour over jobs, wages, and public services became more acute.

The means by which the rejuvenation would be undertaken would be for the state to provide capital with incentives to invest. An investment bank would be set up, and funds would be directed towards industry, via the National Enterprise Board. The social-democratic character of the strategy was encompassed in this joint activity by capital and labour, and the requirement for firms obtaining state aid, to agree to various commitments, such as planning agreements undertaken with the relevant trades unions. And, to give capital the incentive to undertake such investment, in the face of competition, British capital would be protected by the introduction of import controls on foreign goods and services.

As far as they went, the social-democratic elements of the programme were not objectionable. The point is that that is true only as far as they went. As part of a social-democratic strategy, there is nothing wrong with the idea of the state providing aid for industries, so as to enable them to develop, and restructure. Its not, however, what a socialist would advocate. What is objectionable is trying to do this on the basis of cajoling capital into investing, and agreeing to workers being represented on boards, by such bribes. What a progressive social-democratic strategy would have done, would have been to legislate to change the laws on corporate governance, so as to remove the privileges obtained by shareholders as against other creditors. It would have legislated directly to make company boards directly elected by the workers and managers within the company. They after all, are the ones who have a direct and immediate interest in the firm accumulating capital, and raising its efficiency, so as to be competitive, and to provide them with long-term job prospects.

But, even for the time, the other aspects of the AES were not practical, precisely because they were limited by its national and nationalistic perspective. Consider the situation where such a progressive social-democratic government did introduce such measures, that limited the power and influence of the coupon clipping money-capitalists. The consequences were depicted in Chris Mullin's, A Very British Coup. The first thing that would happen would be that before any such government could get legislation on to the statute book limiting the power of shareholders, those shareholders would already have been selling their shares, liquidating their assets, and shifting money out of the country. That alone, let alone the deliberate actions of international financial capital, would cause a run on the Pound. If even all of that did not work to undermine, and lead to the removal of the government, then those foreign capitals would begin to impose their own sets of financial and economic controls on Britain, nominally in retaliation for British import and other such controls. Very quickly the economy and polity of the country would begin to collapse. It requires, from the start that even such a limited social-democratic strategy has the potential to mobile other workers at an international level to actively support the workers in the country pursuing that strategy. It requires international not national socialism.

But, even more tepid social-democratic policies would fail within a national context. Multinational capital, as we have seen, is able to use all sorts of transfer payments, and tax loopholes to avoid paying tax. It can act to blackmail individual countries, particularly smaller economies, to provide it with such tax loopholes, and even direct subsidies, so as to set up in that country rather than some other. The whole reason that social-democratically minded politicians set up the European Coal and Steel Community, and then the EEC, after World War II, was a recognition that, in order to function rationally, to provide the scale and regulation that modern capital needed, a larger single market than the existing national economies provided, was required. In that sense, yes, the EEC was a big capitalist club, established to meet the needs of capital, but that was no different to the establishment of nation states, and national economies in the 19th century, as the rational basis for capital at that time to operate, and develop. You might as well, therefore, have argued that the British state was a capitalist club, and that it ought to be opposed, in favour of a break-up into separate economies based on each county! It is a thoroughly backward looking, and thereby reactionary perspective.

That the left nationalists of the Communist Party, or the Tribune Group could be happy with such a perspective was not surprising, but why would the International Socialists of Socialist Worker, adopt such a perspective. Well not many years before, they had not. Along with nearly all of the rest of the left outside the Communist Party, and its fellow travellers, they had supported the idea that British workers had no reason to choose a capitalist Britain, as against a capitalist Europe. For workers, in or out of the EEC, the fight would go on, not only against capitalism, but for a socialist alternative. Socialist Worker dropped that principled stance, because, at a time when large numbers of workers, like me, having come through the momentous events such as May 1968, or the victorious Miners Strikes of 1972, and 1974, which brought down Heath's government, were taking to the battlefield, the dominant ideas of the left, and its most prominent leaders, such as Tony Benn, in the heat of the debate over the EEC, was opposition to the EEC. It was not just IS/SWP that dropped its previous position, for fear of losing out on winning potential recruits, but the other large groups like the Militant Tendency.

But, at the time, in early 1974, I didn't know any of that. All I saw was that “The left” were uniformly against the EEC, and at the same time, the identifiable right, the Tories, and the right in the Labour Party, such as Jenkins, Williams, Owen, and Rogers were for staying in. What is more, just on a superficial level, the EEC seemed a ludicrous monstrosity. Every day, there were stories of wine lakes of millions of gallons, of butter mountains and so on, as the Common Agricultural Policy financed European farmers to continue producing in excess. It seemed only logical to oppose such a thing. It was only some months later, when I came into contact with other ideas that I was able to see what was wrong with the anti-EEC stance.

I had actually, applied to join the International Socialists, but my application had been picked up by members in IS, who belonged to the newly merged Workers Fight/Workers Power formation that became the International Communist League, who had quite a large presence in Stoke. By the latter part of 1974, I was already a well known militant in the area. I was representing ASTMS in spheres of influence agreements, with the manual workers union in the Pottery Industry, I was sent as delegate to the ASTMS Annual Conference, and I had got my branch affiliated to the local Trades Council, on which I played an active role. As result, I was approached by all the other left wing groups in the area, who sent their local members round to my flat on numerous occasions trying to get me to sign up with them, before, in the end, I joined the I-CL.

At the time I joined, it was in the brief interlude when Workers Power were still a part of the organisation, and they had about half a dozen members of the local branch. One of them, Rachel Needham, was a post graduate psychologist at Keele University. A few years later, I was talking to her in her office, and the discussion came around to the question of thought. As part of this discussion I made a comment that “I don't think that people actually do think.” It drew a justifiably hostile retort, because it was a particularly stupid and clumsy way of me trying to express what I was trying to say. What I was actually trying to say was that all new ideas, are never entirely new, because they are, in fact, amalgams, abstractions, and reorganisations of the ideas we already have in our head, and our observations of the world, including the observation of the ideas we obtain from others. Its why our prehistoric ancestors, no matter how much of a genius, any of them might have been, could never have simply come to the idea of a personal computer, because to do so, requires a whole series of intermediate ideas to be formed in the mind, and some of those ideas, themselves require that we are able to observe real things. Even a primitive computer is not possible, for example, without the existence of electric valves.

The point I am trying to make is that it is very easy to take our everyday observation of the world, and the set of ideas we have in our heads, and to arrive at a set of ideas that appear to be “common sense”. As Marx put it, if it was possible to understand reality by such simple observation, there would be no need for science. In order to actually understand the world, it is necessary also to learn to think. It is also the lesson that Trotsky gives in a 1938 article of the same name. It is a plea to at all times think for yourself, and to think critically, rather than to simply accept established dogmas, or “common sense”.

In the article by Trotsky, he is arguing against those who would apply such “ossified prejudices”, at the time, to abstain from struggle against a regime that was in alliance with the USSR. He argues that if fascist Italy provided arms to rebels in French Algeria, in order to obtain its own advantage against “democratic” France, the Italian workers should attempt to get the arms to the Algerian rebels, and the French workers should try to prevent arms going to the opponents of the rebels.

“Does this not signify, however, that the Italian workers moderate their struggle in this case against the fascist regime? Not in the slightest. Fascism renders “aid” to the Algerians only in order to weaken its enemy, France, and to lay its rapacious hand on her colonies. The revolutionary Italian workers do not forget this for a single moment. They call upon the Algerians not to trust their treacherous “ally” and at the same time continue their own irreconcilable struggle against fascism, “the main enemy in their own country”. Only in this way can they gain the confidence of the rebels, help the rebellion and strengthen their own revolutionary position.” 

In the case of the EEC, the same kind of “ossified prejudice” could only see in the EEC a capitalist club, and things that it opposed. And in order to oppose it, it turned instead not to thoughts of how to move beyond it, to link up with other European workers to move forward, but instead limited itself to thinking only in terms of what it opposed not what it was for. So, it ended up, in opposing the EEC being FOR, the even more reactionary British capitalism, and its state! It is a version of Sismondism. As Marx sets out, in Theories of Surplus Value, the ideas put forward by Malthus and Sismondi were very similar. The difference was that Malthus consciously argued against the development of capitalism, in the interests of the landed aristocracy, whose lackey he was, whereas, Sismondi argued for holding back the development of capitalism, in the mistaken belief that this would benefit the workers by protecting them from iniquities that capitalism brought with it. But, the consequence of both was equally reactionary, because the interests of workers could only be furthered by pushing forward the development of capitalism, not by trying to hold it back. As Trotsky, writes, the more capitalism develops, the easier the construction of socialism itself becomes, because the more the building blocks of socialist construction will already have been put in place.

The answer to the iniquities of capitalism is not a reactionary attempt to hold back its development. The development of larger economic blocs, and markets such as the EU, is a rational and necessary development of capitalism. The answer to the iniquities and deficiencies it brings with it, is not an attempt to hold back such development, or worse, to propose that such development where it has occurred, as with the EU, should be turned back, but to push forward from it, to utilise the advance it brings with it, to build a greater integration and solidarity of workers across the EU, to develop the kind of rational regulation and control that is only possible on such a scale, as opposed to the limitations of national economies and the nation state.

The methodology of Skinner, is that same ossified prejudice that he adopted in the 1970's, that simply takes existing dogmas and mantras and applies them unthinkingly. It starts not from what, as socialists we are for, and then asks how to go forwards to it, but from what we are against, and thereby plucks at the nearest symbol of opposition to it, to rally around. It is the same methodology that leads the “idiot anti-imperialists” into starting from their hostility to “imperialism”, and thereby lining themselves up with the reactionaries, who seek to hold back foreign capitalist investment in developing economies, and who line themselves up with the local reactionary representatives of opposition to imperialism, who in reality, represent the immediate enemies of the working-class in those countries. They are like those ultra-lefts in Trotsky's article who would, “interfere with soldiers who are extinguishing a fire or rescuing drowning people during a flood”.

Why on Earth would any Marxist seek to prevent capital being invested in a developing economy, when that very investment of capital is what the workers in such countries need in order to develop the productive forces, which is the precondition for the development of the working-class, and creation of Socialism? Why would any Marxist try to hold back the development of capitalism, when that very development is the precondition for workers being placed in the best possible condition to advance their own interests, to organise themselves to pursue those interests, and is the requirement for the creation of socialism itself. Why would any Marxist seek to reverse the logical development of capitalism on an international scale, as with the EU, which is itself the minimum scale upon which even social-democratic measures can be effective, let alone on which socialism becomes feasible?

In the case of Skinner, as with Tony Benn, that methodology is also driven by an irrational belief in the power of parliamentary democracy, although that makes his decision to support the overt power grab by the government, even harder to justify. Skinner, like Benn, like the Communist Party believes that Parliament can legislate socialism into being, and that it could simply establish something along the lines of the wartime economy, with the British state controlling and directing economic activity. Even were that possible, given that the British state is a capitalist state, which would do all in its power to frustrate such a government, the experience of that wartime economy is not one that is likely to enthral many people today, and nor should it. Marxists seek not to limit society's horizons to some equal, but miserably drab and uninspiring existence, but to lift it up, so that everyone can aspire to the kinds of living standards that today only the most affluent can enjoy. Skinner is so obsessed by his ossified prejudice against the EU, that he is willing to line up with the British workers' main enemy at home, in order to push Brexit through, at whatever cost. It is not even an exercise in lesser evilism, but in blind nationalist prejudice. It is an example of how not to proceed in politics. But, it does thereby illustrate, as Trotsky suggested why workers need to learn to think.