Lessons For The Left
Lesson 4 - The Central Question Is The Property Question (ii)
Paul not only sets out the demands he thinks should be raised, but also those he thinks should not.
“If you want a government that “smashes the state”, that pulls Britain out of NATO and the IMF, defunds the police force or adopts a policy of Open Borders — you are welcome to argue for all these things. But there will be no majority for them inside the Labour Party and — because of the dynamics outlined below — no possibility of Labour coming to power in 2024 if they were adopted.”
This seems an arbitrary list of things that socialists should not raise. First of all, it is not a government that “smashes the state” but a revolutionary – or alternatively a counter-revolutionary – class. I see no reason why socialists, nor for that matter progressive social-democrats, should not argue for pulling out of NATO, especially as the US, with or without Trump, is pulling away from Europe, and the EU, as a proto-state, will inevitably develop its own armed forces to promote its own distinct regional and global-strategic interests. Marxist are not pacifists. As part of a proletarian military policy, there is no contradiction with the development of a European Army, and we should argue for universal military conscription as part of it, as Engels said.
“Whether reorganisation means some slight increase to the military burden or not, will make little difference to the working class as a class. On the other hand it certainly cannot remain indifferent to the question of whether or not universal conscription is fully implemented. The more workers who are trained in the use of weapons the better. Universal conscription is the necessary and natural corollary of universal suffrage; it puts the voters in the position of being able to enforce their decisions gun in hand against any attempt at a coup d'état.”
In other words, the corollary of universal suffrage is universal conscription so that the workers defend their government arms in hand. Indeed, as part of smashing the state, such universal conscription and arming of the proletariat is essential. The difference, of course, as Marx described earlier, is that we demand that such universal conscription be on the basis of the development of workers' militia, under democratic workers' control.
I see no reason why socialists would argue for withdrawal from the IMF or World Bank, as central elements of a global, social-democratic, financial, para-state framework. On the contrary, they constitute the kinds of global organisations that will be required to build Socialism internationally, which initially will require global economic and financial planning, and the provision of money-capital and liquidity.
Defunding the police force is a simple liberal demand, if in its place is put the kinds of self-policing and democratic militias that were promoted as part of the US and French bourgeois revolutions. Such militia flow inevitably from the idea of universal military conscription. The importance of such is seen clearly at the moment in the US, in order to defend black communities from fascists and racist cops, as well as to combat the threat from the armed fascist gangs that stand behind Trump. If socialists cannot argue for even basic liberal bourgeois demands then it is an indication of just how much the threat to the present exists not from neo-liberalism, but from outright semi-feudal reaction!
The same is true in relation to Open Borders which was something never in question until the twentieth century, and particularly the 1960's. At the very least, a civilised Left should argue for the degree of open borders that the EU has enshrined. If Labour cannot come to power whilst arguing for such basic bourgeois liberal demands then it clearly should not be trying to come to power, because no such government would have a secure basis, and certainly could not, in any sense, be considered a “Left Government” let alone a Workers' Government.
More importantly, are the things that socialists should raise, but which Paul does not include in this list, or in his own set of vague proposals. So, for example, Paul completely fails to address the Property Question, which Marx and Engels stated in The Communist Manifesto is the question that communists must always raise. If the 2nd - 5th demands in Paul's shopping list are to be achieved, it requires that property question to be addressed. The reality is, today, that the majority of capital is socialised capital, i.e. capital that is not privately owned, but which is the collective property of the associated producers within the individual companies. But, those associated producers do not have control over their collective property. That control is exercised by shareholders. As a result, it is shareholders who decide how profits will be used – to pay out dividends, to return capital, to buy back shares to boost share prices and so on. Both in terms of the huge revenues in dividends, and in terms of capital gains from inflated asset prices, resulting from such control, the owners of this fictitious capital obtain a disproportionate amount of the wealth produced by society. It is not possible to address the questions of inequality, or of power, without addressing that control.
In the 1960's/70's, when the owners of fictitious capital obtained most of their revenue, and power from high levels of revenue, alongside high levels of interest rates, it was possible for them to be more sanguine about relinquishing some control over capital. Corporatism was a means of raising productivity, creating stability, and ensuring higher profits out of which dividends and interest could be paid. They had lived quite happily on that basis with the co-determination laws in Germany. When Wilson set up the Bullock Committee into Industrial Democracy, it again posed few fears for the owners of fictitious capital, as with the EU's Draft 5th Company Law Directive. Most of this comprises only corporatism, and a means of incorporating the workers into capitalism, and their own more effective exploitation. Its only when those continually rising profits, out of which the steadily rising dividends are paid, starts to end that the owners of that fictitious capital become more concerned to retain that control, so that they can divert more of what profits there are to those dividends rather than to capital accumulation.
Today, they have pushed up the proportion of dividends to a level that they cannot be increased further without beginning to actually liquidate some of the actual capital in businesses themselves – something which in some cases, as with BHS, has in fact been done, by asset strippers. But, today, the owners of fictitious capital, instead, rely on capital gains from asset price increases, rather than on revenues from profits and dividends. They can allow meaningless forms of industrial democracy, such as Theresa May's throwaway proposal to put some tame workers on Boards, but they are never going to peacefully agree to any real industrial democracy, because that would mean that companies would begin to expand real production, begin to invest in real capital rather than share buybacks and so on, and so wages would rise, and profits start to get squeezed, interest rates would rise, and asset prices crash, undermining the wealth and power, of the owners of fictitious capital, undermining their position as ruling class.
Yet, arguing for such industrial democracy does not mean Socialism. It is simply the rational extension of the existing productive and social relations based upon the dominance of socialised capital. If that capital is, and, as Marx describes, it is, the collective property of the associated producers, then the simple laws of bourgeois property law say that those owners of that socialised capital should be the ones that exercise control over it. Such a condition does not constitute Socialism, simply the rational political expression of social-democracy based upon that socialised capital. Nothing in this represents Socialism, because this socialised capital continues to be capital. It continues to operate on the basis of commodity production and exchange, albeit that this commodity production and exchange now takes place not in the context of an unconstrained free market based upon a myriad of small producers, but on the basis of an increasingly planned and regulated market, i.e. a transitional form of property moving inexorably towards Socialism, and the planned production of goods and services based upon need rather than profit.
Paul says,
“So let’s be under no illusions: a left government would not constitute “socialism”. The power of big finance, fossil fuel producers, property speculators and tech monopolies would be constrained; wealth would be redistributed; the 40 year preference for marketising all parts of social life would be reversed; power would be redistributed downwards. But the private sector would still constitute over 50% of the economy.”
The problem is that Paul's proposals not only do not amount to Socialism, they do not even amount to basic social-democracy or bourgeois liberalism, and to the extent they go beyond that, they amount to nothing more than pious wishes which are not in the gift of a government, but which require essentially a political and social revolution. He says, the power of big finance would be constrained, but how without the introduction of industrial democracy, and removal of the right of shareholders to control capital they do not own? He says, the power of fossil fuel producers would be constrained, but those energy producers are already moving into alternative energy production, and what is gained by simply exchanging the power of those producers engaged in one activity for the power of the same producers engaged in some other activity, or indeed for new energy monopolies engaged in nuclear, solar or other forms of alternative energy production?
How is the power of property speculators to be constrained? There is nothing in Paul's demands that deals with their activities, nor the inflation of asset price bubbles, as seen over the last 40 years. On the contrary, Paul puts forward the idea of funding much of his programme by resort to the Magic Money Tree (MMT), which simply means a continuation of money printing of the kind that has been the basis of inflating those asset price bubbles over the last 40 years. Nor is it clear how the power of tech monopolies would be constrained on the basis of the demands outlined. Indeed, with Britain outside the EU, it would be in a far weaker position to achieve any such result. In order to counteract the loss of capital and employment, tax revenues etc., resulting from capital moving out of Britain to the EU, it would have to engage in all sorts of deals to try to attract capital to Britain, offering them lower taxes, various opt outs of regulation, more lax labour regulations, consumer and environmental protections and so on. The plans for freeports are already an indication of that. Far from constraining the power of such large companies, Brexit will mean that a small, declining British economy will have to subordinate itself even more to them, especially as the EU develops its own high-tech industries and infrastructure, in competition with the US and China.
And Brexit also means that any hope of constraining or diminishing the power of the market can be forgotten, for the same reasons. Any large-scale capital setting up or being encouraged to move to the UK will demand such an environment, which is precisely why the Brexiters have been so keen to open up the NHS and other aspects of UK society to the market, in the hope of encouraging US corporations to move here in search of those profits. Yet, bizarrely, Paul wants us to accept Brexit as a fait accompli, whilst arguing for these other utopian schemas that fly in the face of the reality of it. This is simply a collapse into the delusions of the Lexiters.
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