The Dialectics of Delusion

Paul Mason, in his latest newsletter, argues that the Euro2020 Final, and its aftermath, represented a dialectical turning point. This is the dialectics of delusion.

Paul's argument is that the England football team had come to represent a series of progressive ideas and cultural values, symbolised by the multiracial nature of the team, the taking of the knee, as a statement against racism, and so on. The government, and its racist supporters had set itself against the team, precisely because of it acting as a symbol of these “woke” ideas, and values, even going so far as to brand it “Marxist”. The argument goes that by rallying “the nation” behind the England team, and the flag, a victory for this England team would be victory for all those progressive values it represented, and a defeat for the government, and all of the reactionary values it represents.

Although England did not, in fact, win, just getting into the final was enough, Paul now argues, to make this point, and the fact that the government was led to denounce all of the racist abuse that was unleashed, following the defeat, represents the dialectical turning point at which those reactionary cultural values and ideas are defeated, creating the conditions for forward movement. This argument is nonsense on stilts, clothed in elaborate, but ill-fitting, philosophical garb.

If Paul's philosophical framework were that of Hegel it would be bad enough, but its not even that. Marx and Engels described Hegel's idealist dialectic as standing on its head, in need of being set right way up. Hegel's dialectic is idealist, because it begins with the ideas in Men's heads, the values they adhere to. For Hegel, every idea contains within itself the germ of a new idea. The process of thought led to the revelation and growth of this new idea until it becomes the basis of the ideas and values in Men's heads. As these ideas develop, by this process, which Hegel saw as being the function of philosophers, so these ideas become the driving force for change in society, a function which Hegel saw as devolving upon the state. Its easy to see why elitists, statists and authoritarians like this concept.

Marx and Engels say this is upside down, because the ideas in Men's heads do not simply appear from nowhere. Even allowing for a process of thought based upon abstraction, its necessary to have a starting point, and something to abstract from. The idea of developing tools did not just pop into Men's heads, but required the existence of natural tools, even if just the human hand itself, or a stone, a stick and so on. The development of tools, as a means of raising labour productivity is itself driven by a natural law that of The Law of Value, which dictates that to increase wealth/use values, with any given amount of available labour, it is necessary to increase productivity, so that the individual value of each use value is reduced.

This process, continually driving towards higher productivity, goes on behind the back of society. It not only leads to the development of tools, but also to the social division of labour, to the development of settled agriculture, which is the basis of the creation of a social surplus, which enables industrial production to be separated from agriculture, as well as the creation of private property, the family and the state. It is thus changes in the material world, arising from changes going on automatically, driven by The Law of Value, much as the law of natural selection drives biological evolution, that leads to the ideas in Men's heads changing as they reflect these changes in the material world. As Marx puts it,

“Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.

Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.

There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement – mors immortalis.”

(The Poverty of Philosophy)

But, at least Hegel understood the dialectical process of development. Paul's version of the dialectic is closer to the garbled, half-understood version of Proudhon. As Marx described, during his exile in Paris, he spent many nights trying to explain the dialectic to Proudhon, but without success. Hegel at least understood that the process was one of development, of something new arising out of it. In that sense, it was revolutionary. But, Proudhon's version of the dialectic was, rather, one in which, instead of something new and revolutionary arising, the aim was simply to conserve what already existed, but shed of its unfortunate aspects. It was the same approach as taken by Sismondi, Malthus, Duhring and the Narodniks.

When it comes to trying to conserve the existing relations, ideas quickly move from being simply conservative to being reactionary. When material conditions have already changed, the ideas that developed upon those previous conditions are no longer consonant with reality, and become reactionary. It amounts to trying to turn the clock backwards.

So, for example, in the 18th/19th century, material development led to more rapid development of capitalism. Capitalist development originates in industrial production, in the towns. As this capitalist production increases, so it requires changed conditions in the form of larger single markets, standardisation of laws, and so on, and this leads to a need to go beyond the parochialism and provincialism of feudalism, to the creation of nation states as the basic politico-economic unit. Under these conditions, defence of parochialism and provincialism is reactionary, and nationalism became progressive. But, its progressive nature was purely a function of it playing this role of being the necessary form required for the rapid development of capitalism, at that time. The idea that nationalism, separated from those specific, objective, historical conditions, could be progressive is nonsense. It is idealist and subjectivist, reducing the categories progressive and reactionary to nothing more than the moral epithets good and bad. As Marx points out, slavery, under certain historical conditions, was progressive. It was the basis of the first class societies, and their development of the productive forces and science, upon which all subsequent development was founded.

“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

(ibid)

But, nothing in that requires us to describe slavery as “good”. That was the approach of Proudhon, for whom the dialectic amounted only to taking some phenomena and trying to conserve it by removing its bad elements whilst leaving the good.

“What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”

(ibid)

And, this is Paul's approach to the dialectic and nationalism. He wants to conserve nationalism, and its symbolisation by the flag, because he thinks that large sections of the working-class are inseparable from it, by stripping it of its bad side, whilst promoting a good side, by identifying it with new progressive cultural values, such as those identified with the England team. A similar mistake was made by the Stalinists and Socialists in Germany in the 1930's, who, for similar reasons, tried to present themselves as better nationalists than the Nazis. The result was rather that they legitimised the nationalism of the Nazis, whilst being seen as pale imitations of the real thing by those they sought to win over.

What Paul proposes is an impossibility. It is idealist and utopian, and as with all utopian schemes that seek to save the ideas whose time has past, as a result of changed material conditions, it is, thereby, reactionary, which is not at all to say that Paul himself is a reactionary, any more than was Sismondi or Proudhon. Far from it.

Nationalism long since ceased being a progressive idea, for the simple reason that the nation state long ago ceased being the appropriate politico-economic unit for capitalist development, let alone socialism. The US came into existence as a federation of individual states, as did Canada, Australia and so on. As Engels pointed out, the Federal nature of the US was already acting as a fetter on further development, even in the 19th century. The Civil War was fought to undermine the continued power of the states, and to enforce the power of the centralised federal state over them.

The rapid development of the productive forces, by industrial capital, meant that, by the end of the 19th century, capital was bursting out of its nation state integument. European capital needed a European state to put it on a competitive footing with the US, hence the two European wars of 1914-18, and 1939-45. As capital became even larger, and took the form of the giant multinational corporation, it becomes obvious that the nation state was doomed, a relic of capitalism's infancy. Its seen not only in the creation of the EU, but all the other multinational politico-economic blocs created across the global economy.

In the Weekly Worker, Paul Demarty argues that even today, nationalism can be progressive in some conditions. He cites Cuba where, he argues, its revolution was driven by a desire to remove the US boot from its neck. But, that nationalism is what is used by the Stalinist regime to continue to oppress Cuban workers, in the same way that Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, China, Korea and Vietnam did. Nationalism was the fundamental basis of the concept of Socialism In One Country, as against the idea of socialist internationalism and Permanent Revolution. It attempts to keep workers hermetically sealed away from their comrades in other countries, locked behind Berlin Walls, and Bamboo Curtains.

Even in the 1920's, when the Comintern developed its Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, it did not advocate such struggles on the basis of nationalism, but of International Socialism, and Permanent Revolution. The suggestion to the contrary is purely a confection of Stalinsm, Third Worldism and petty-bourgeois “anti-imperialism”.

Paul Mason, in some of his previous writings, has talked about “progressive nationalism”, in relation to Scotland. But, there is nothing progressive about the nationalism of the SNP, and all of those elements of the Left, in Scotland, that clung to the coat-tails of the SNP, during the referendum, whilst trying to proclaim their independence from it, have disappeared, much as the Lexiters have ceased any independent existence following Brexit, and in the worst cases, have been sucked into the red-brown Front of Galloway's WPB, or the ludicrous NIP.

What exactly does the turning point that Paul sees as significant amount to? What he offers is a form of lesser-evilism. A great deal of weight is placed upon the fact that the government and its supporters' attack on “wokism” had been turned back. For that to be significant requires that “wokism” itself be considered something more fundamental than being just liberal gesture politics. If we take the symbol around which the government focused its attack, taking the knee, it was itself the mildest of all possible gestures against what is, in contrast, a most pernicious aspect of society, in terms of overt discrimination and oppression of a section of society on the basis of ethnicity.

Of course, socialists support such gestures, just as we supported the clenched fist, black-power salute of athletes in the 1960's, but in doing so, we also have to make clear that such gestures do not change anything fundamentally. Only actual changes in society can do that, and those changes do not arise simply on the basis of the ideas in people's heads changing. But, did the ideas in people's heads, even, change here? No, they didn't. It has never been the case that mainstream politicians, or the Tory media have openly argued in favour of racist violence or abuse. That Johnson and Co., The Daily Mail and so on have condemned those racists that abused England's black players does not represent any change of position for them. The Daily Mail, the most racist paper in Britain, for example, also fronted a years long campaign to bring the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to book.

The proportion of hard core racists, in Britain, is small, and for those that seek to base themselves on the much larger proportion of soft racists, nationalists and xenophobes - pretty much the 30% plus of the population that also backed Brexit – these hard core racists are an embarrassment. There is nothing that has happened, in the last week, that has changed that. Paul's argument amounts to claiming a victory in the fact that the Tories did not commit political suicide by failing to oppose the hardcore racists, and the overt racist abuse! Its like Starmer's ridiculous attempts to claim the election win in Batley as some great triumph.

Whose views were changed in all this? Not the hardcore racists, who used the defeat as an opportunity to attack the black players; not the government or the racist media; not the soft racists and bigots for whom nationalism and xenophobia are necessarily linked. Even at the start of the final, there was widespread booing of the Italian Anthem, so whatever cultural change the team might be thought to have brought about, it certainly wasn't manifest amongst this section of society most closely associated with it!

And, again, this illustrates the element of lesser-evilism in Paul's argument, which basically trades off a defence of nationalism against overt racism. It basically says, in order to oppose overt racism against black British citizens, we need to unite all British citizens, black or white, under the flag, the same flag that was responsible for enslaving millions across the world. The trade-off minimises the manifestation of that reactionary nationalism, as it tries to pretend, as the populists do, that citizens can be united, on a progressive basis under the banner of nationalism. The trade-off is the potential undermining of the most overt racism against British citizens, against the promotion of a far more widespread xenophobia against the citizens of other nations, resulting from a conscious promotion of nationalism and patriotism, which, in the case of England, has been inseparable from its own claims of exceptionalism, superiority and oppression of others.

And, the problem is that, even in these pretty minimal and miserable terms, it cannot succeed.  The problem with Paul's approach is that of all Popular Fronts.  As Lenin noted, in his critique of the Russian Populists, the Narodniks, in the 1890's, it is only possible to talk about "the people", as a mass, in conditions where that people have not already been differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians.  Then the conditions of the peasant masses, and small producers was pretty homogeneous, and they could share a common hostility to feudalism/Tsarism.  But, as soon, as generalised commodity production begins to create a differentiation of this mass, it leads to the development of a bourgeoisie and proletariat, with a large petty-bourgeois mass in between, itself divided into multiple gradations and divisions, as its process of differentiation and disintegration continues.  Any attempt to talk about "the people", or "the nation", is then a reactionary delusion, because it ignores these actual material divisions and antagonistic interests.  Attempts to force different social elements into such a framework, therefore, is bound to fail, and to begin with, it means that the progressive elements within it, based upon the working-class, always have to subordinate their interests to those of the conservative elements within based upon the bourgeoisie, and liberal petty-bourgeoisie.  They have to do so, because were any such alliance attempt to put forward the actual solutions required to deal with the problems they confront, that liberal bourgeoisie would immediately detach from it!

In many ways, the epitome of the approach is Pritti Patel! Here she is an Asian woman, wrapped in the flag, in fact, more closely associated with the English Flag than the Union Flag. She was a spearhead of that symbol of nationalism – Brexit – that those like Paul, and Blue Labour now want to embrace, in their search for a progressive patriotism. And, Patel is also a champion of that other totem of the nationalists and patriots, a strict immigration and border policy, the corollary and part justification for Brexit itself. Indeed, those that want to promote a “progressive patriotism” will have to also promote that same strict immigration and border policy to be consistent, though they will try to disguise it with all the weasel words about “fairness”, and “non-racist immigration controls” and other such nonsense.

In other words, Patel, to pass as a honorary, white English nationalist, not only had to wrap herself in the flag, but also champion all those aspects of nationalism that are the antithesis of those progressive values that Paul sees as being promoted by the English team. Its why, no matter how well that team had done, it would not change the view of all those soft racists, bigots and nationalists – any more than has done the repeated success of Lewis Hamilton on the race track – that voted for Brexit, for Johnson, and who Paul, and the proponents of Blue Labour are seeking to win over. Even then, no matter how Brexitty how nationalistic, how racist Patel herself was, it didn't prevent her being the subject of racist abuse, any less than that directed at Lewis Hamilton, or the England Team's black players. Thinking that it would is to confuse the racism and xenophobia of bigots with rationality. Bigotry, by definition is based on a rejection of rationality.

And, that should be no surprise, because all surveys have shown an extremely high correlation between those that voted for Brexit and those that hold reactionary, bigoted views in general. In effect, they are the same group of people. That does not mean that this group is itself homogeneous. It includes white bigots who want to stop all immigration, as well as Asian bigots, some of whom want to pull up the drawbridge behind them, and others who wanted out of the EU, and its minimum rights, the better to increase the immigration from the sub-Continent of cheap imported labour, with few rights, the better to exploit it in their small businesses and sweat shops.

These contradictions amongst the petty-bourgeoisie are always what prevents it developing a coherent class consciousness, and becoming ruling class. Its what inevitably results in its blowing up, and those fascistic parties that base themselves upon it, blowing up along with it.  Rather than pandering to the same cross-class and contradictory concepts of nation, and nationalism, socialists must offer real solutions based upon the recognition of those class antagonisms, and our closer affinity with foreign workers than pour own bourgeoisie.  Our alternative must be based upon internationalism, class struggle, solidarity.  Against the illusory, reactionary appeals to unite under the national flag, our alternative is to unite under the red flag of international socialism, and the call for Workers of the World to Unite!