Out September 15th: “Syriza – Inside the Labyrinth”

By Pluto Press (200 pages | 5 x 7 3/4 | © 2015).

With a Foreword by Paul Mason.

In January 2015, Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, became the largest party in the Hellenic Parliament, winning 149 out of 300 seats and badly defeating the then-ruling conservative New Democracy party. In Syriza, Kevin Ovenden presents an in-depth analysis of the political events leading up to this seemingly sudden reversal of political power in Greece, exploring the origins of the turbulent Greek political climate, from the beginnings of the Communist Party of Greece and the Greek workers’ movement following the First World War, to the brutal civil war that shook the country in the aftermath of the Second World War; the rise and fall of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement and the growth of radical politics in the 1970s; and finally the crushing austerity demands following the debt crisis of the 2010s.

Ovenden also examines the far-right movements in Greece as well, focusing in particular on the negative impact that the xenophobic and nationalistic Golden Dawn party has had and continues to have to this day.

Syriza’s victory in Greece is a central event of the twenty-first century, whose ramifications are sure to be felt for decades.

Go to Pluto Press to order your copy.

Generalise the struggles: fight for anti-capitalist politics

The social crisis is already such in Britain that the real issue is not so much a campaign of non-payment of energy and other bills. In this respect the situation is very different from 1990 where there was not a social crisis and one bill replaced another: the rates.

Not paying in an organised way may have some impact and any collective fight like this is a step forward if it can attain a critical mass.

But the social reality is simply this and irrespective of how many sign up to a pledge not to pay: millions of people will not be able to pay come November. Full stop. *Millions*. Not choosing, but having it forced upon them.

Britain and Europe are going Greek.

Britain is set to face a version of the crisis that engulfed Greece in the winter of 2010-11. Independent pharmacists of 20 years standing suddenly finding that far from being reasonably secure and model citizens they had fallen through the floor – and from a higher storey than average.

That is before you get to the once securely employed worker or the already precarious household. And then there is in Britain the bottom 20 percent who already don’t pay on time, because they can’t. People who sit in darkness because they *cannot* top up the prepay meter.

Tens of thousands of families were immiserated in Greece. Utterly. Down unto the next generation and the one after. The most terrific political polarisation. The radical left grew, but this was also the seedbed of the Nazis of Golden Dawn (few noticed that in 2010). Local confrontations with the forces of the state to stop the seizure of property, goods and people were commonplace.

Further militarisation of the police. Rising street and inter-personal violence. Desperation.

The new Tory government in Britain will have to do something more to meet this crisis than it is doing now in zombie mode. That something looks to be a combination of existential confrontation with the unions on a much bigger scale than today and a bit of relief for some people, probably through the taxation mechanisms. In such a scenario even highly supported one-day strikes will not be enough to meet a generalised ruling class offensive.

The experience of the British trade union movement from 1979 to 1986 demonstrates that negatively: that of 1971 to 1974, in the positive.

Whatever limited relief measures the Tories bring in to quieten some discontent in order to prosecute their strategic battles elsewhere will be as nothing compared to what is already a huge crisis. And that is setting aside the immediate impacts on social life of the environmental catastrophes that are upon us.

That is why a pressing issue now is the greater unity in action, confidence and impact of the anti-capitalist left in the course of building a generalised fightback.

Doing so is both to demonstrate the relevance of the radical and revolutionary left and openly, in an anti-sectarian way, to engage what will be a full and sharply contested political field. In it will be all sorts of politics, not only nominally present but with their advocates and organisers.

The full range: fascism, national-conservatism, Tory authoritarian-populism, capitalist liberalism, vapid Labourism, left-Labourism, militant syndicalist trade-unionism, autonomism, anarchism, revolutionary anti-capitalism, Marxism… the lot. And those are already present before the deluge. It is not a case of postponing politics to some point of clarification in the future. By then, if history is any guide, it will have been too late.

People holding to these varied outlooks will fight for them and organise around them. Such activity is not some sectarian foible of the radical left. It is actual politics and political practice per se, as outlined since Machiavelli if not before.

None of that, of course, should stand in the way of socialists welcoming every serious initiative, and still more real struggle, against the government and the employers. No matter the formal leadership. (This holds whether or not the struggle is organised by traditional unions.) The central and critical thing is advancing the living class struggle and shifting the balance of forces towards the working class and the oppressed – as self-organised forces as much as possible.

But it is either naivety or something more calculated when there is the call at moments like this (and it is always directed at the most militant of the left and those independent of officialdom) to set *all* politics aside and to dissolve existing initiatives behind a more “official” setup.

Again, this was the experience of Greece. Exactly ten years ago there was a simplistic mantra repeated by most of the radical left internationally following the double general election in Greece. It saw Syriza emerge decisively as the official, left opposition to the austerity-imposing coalition government headed by Antonis Samaras.

Syriza’s rise was indeed welcome. It was a reflection of, and at that point fed back into, mass working-class and popular radicalisation in the country.

The breakthrough and the prospect of a party of the radical left becoming a future government within a couple of years had an enormous impact on the socialist movement internationally, its horizons and the debates among us.

It came out of a level of working-class and popular struggle – strikes, occupations of public space, refusal to pay tolls and charges, social solidarity networks… – that Britain, we hope, is just at the beginning of.

The crucial strategic debates arising from that were not enhanced by a lightminded call for all of the combative left – the Communists, the anti-capitalist and revolutionary left, the anarchists and autonomists – to just shut up shop and get behind Syriza and its allies in trade unions and structures of the labour movement, NGOs and so on.

For sure, there is always the pressure of sectarianism and sometimes whole groupings of socialists succumb to it. But this was not about refusal to play a constructive role in the general struggle and to forge the greatest unity in action where possible.

This was about resisting an attempt to liquidate a vital, revolutionary strand of the working-class movement that goes back to the great eruption of 1968 and before. It sought, whatever our mistakes and limitations, to apply lessons from the subsequent experiences in which enormous revolutionary hope gave way to stabilisation of the system: Reagan-Thatcherism and the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s. That is the truth of what happened. We cannot pretend that today and tomorrow are just blank sheets unencumbered by this recent history that we are still living in.

It should be clear from Greece over the last seven years that preserving an independent anti-capitalist left, not in aspic and separate from the living struggle but seeking to immerse in and to develop it, has been important.

The demoralisation in the wake of Syriza’s capitulation was huge and international. Still today many people who were so inspired by the Greek events of 2015 find it difficult to talk about – often out of pain. There are friends in Britain who were talking of a “pre-revolutionary situation” in Greece seven years ago now hoping that the soft left of the Labour Party in Britain might be able to mitigate that car-crash of Keir Starmer.

It is only in the last couple of years that there has been some political recovery on the radical left in Greece and a renewing working-class confidence. The weakness of a thoroughgoing anti-capitalist perspective and extensive organisation *at the base of the working class* seven years ago lost the movement in Greece half a decade. Repressing the memory of that will not bring back those five years. It invites losing another five and more. And we are running out of time.

There has been a similar impact from the defeat of “Corbynism” in Britain – that peculiar expression of left-governmentalism through the unexpected holding by a radical left figure of the office of leader of the exceptionally conservative British Labour Party.

Now – in Greece, Britain and elsewhere, not least in the global south – things are clearly turning for the better again, though in the face of murderous crises.

There should be some acknowledgement in this process today that it would be much weaker had everyone on the radical left followed the demand to fold their own outward-going initiatives and fall in behind either Labour or Syriza in 2015.

Naturally, the political dilemmas remain and it is not sufficient to say that you have survived a horrible and demoralising period for the left (though importantly, not in the same way for the working class). There remain pressures to sectarianism.

But even more apparent are the pressures to just look upwards to a different set of left figures. Miraculous leadership from above. From either the reformist party or the reformist trade union institutional expressions of the working class.

Instead of that, now is crucially the time for the politics, and organising based up it, of looking across to the base of the working class and the oppressed. To encouraging self-activity. To carrying off the art of working with every part of the movement (and it is not always those formally “left” incidentally) to advance the struggle, while building a 100 percent anti-capitalist, anti-systemic and uncompromising force.

That’s not done by sectarian propagandism. I imagine most reading this are not tempted by that.

But it is not done either by lightmindedly abandoning the political positions and initiatives that the anti-capitalist left has built up. It really is important that there is a fighting commitment to women’s liberation in Britain that no bureaucratic trade union conference can erase by a ritualistic show of hands.

We know this in Britain especially when it comes to one tradition that is something of a pride for the left and working class there: anti-fascism.

It has been so important to maintain an actual, combative workers united front of the working class and oppressed against fascism and racism rather than to tip-toe off the stage when something like the anti-left “Hope not Hate” is launched to exclude the anti-capitalists.

The contestation within the anti-capitalist movement 20 years ago between various political forces – NGOised, social democrat, anti-political, individualist-anarchist, radical left, Marxist… – was so present that its ripples could be seen on the surface of the great, and genuine, united gatherings and confrontations with the states of the capitalist G7.

The left is bigger now that it was in 1999. The crisis is deeper. The intervening experience has much to teach us.

There are more people who have gone through those experiences and have been forced to come to terms with major, unnecessary defeats.

So let’s not abandon all of that and once again slip either into sectarianism or – and this is the greater temptation in my opinion – close down operations behind yet another political force who we wish to work with, but not be led by.

We need to build the actually existing struggle – I mean real struggles including Amazon workers sitting in and food factory workers in Bury just walking out on strike with no ballot and no union.

But we also need to draw together the anti-capitalist left to do so effectively, and to contest politically and organisationally other strands which we know will not carry through the struggle to its necessary conclusion.

And that is the truth, not only of class struggles in the last century, but of those in the last decade.

Philosophical question for the weekend

Compelling arguments. And thank you, Kay, for using a little tweet comment of mine. I’m glad you think it helpful to the overall case.

Kay Green

The vast majority of women who get involved with Women’s Place, or go to its meetings, do so for these two reasons:

Reason one

They have experienced the mind-numbing horror of childhood sexual abuse, such as rape, manipulative sexual behaviour in the family or FGM; or the fear and frustration caused by sex discrimination and bullying in work, in sport, in politics or in their union; or the atmosphere of terror rising in women’s prisons and hostels, as news spreads of male sex-offenders successfully presenting as women in order to gain a transfer to a women’s institution, or the disgusting way lone female refugees are treated.

Reason two

With at least one of the above experiences jangling in their minds, they realise that the push from Stonewall and others to replace ‘sex’ with ‘gender identity’ in law, in order to firm up the practice of self-ID, will officially remove any…

View original post 943 more words

Die Linke’s defeat reopens the left’s strategic dilemma

A very bad defeat for the radical left Die Linke party in Germany in yesterday’s election. It has seen its number of MPs slashed by 30 to 39 and it slipped under 5 percent nationally.

Listening to friends in Germany it seems the major reason during the election campaign for the near halving of the vote was the emphasis from the party centre upon seeking to enter government by forming a coalition with the much bigger SPD (which narrowly won the election) and the Greens (who came third). That is a Red-Red-Green (RRG) coalition.

The problem that arose is this:

If the reason you give people to vote for you is that you hope to be the smallest, third party of a coalition (to form a government of the left and centre-left), then shouldn’t people vote for the SPD or the Greens? If not, why not? That is particularly so as over the last six months those two parties have jockeyed for first place with the centre-right CDU.

A voter who simply wants the CDU out – or even one open to an RRG coalition – is then encouraged to vote for the SPD to make sure it is the biggest party (as it now narrowly is) and thus gets the moral and procedural right to start the process of coalition talks, which is what is happening. The SPD leader cleverly played on this by refusing to rule out an RRG coalition (while indicating subtly that he was looking elsewhere for partners and attacking Die Linke on its anti-imperialist foreign policy) and thus squeezed radical left.

Most of the votes Die Linke lost went to the SPD. Die Linke’s election slogan of “here and now” was meant to put the emphasis on the party’s reform proposals and how it would use a place in the coalition to ensure the other parties’ promises of change were kept. But the slogan may just as likely have focused voters on the tactical voting to eclipse the CDU and the immediacy of a complex election.

Additionally, because the stated aim was to go into government with the SPD and Greens, there was no clear attack on those two parties.. The SPD leader Olaf Scholz was the finance minister in the outgoing government led by Angela Merkel. On his watch, as well as policies for big business and not workers, the biggest financial scandals in German history took place, exposing the lack of regulation by the finance ministry, at the very least. There are strong suspicions of outright corruption.

But ramming that home on an “ordinary people against the corrupt elite” basis would have run up against the obvious answer – but your strategy is to go into government with the man you accuse of turning a blind eye to massive finance fraud by his friends. There are other factors as well. One was the negative impact of former co-chair of Die Linke’s parliamentary fraction Sahra Wagenknecht. But it would be too easy to place the blame for the big decline mainly on that.

Her interventions over the last couple of years arose out of the party already plateauing and confronting a strategic impasse of how to go forward. Hers was a bad answer of dropping being radical left and becoming a more politically neutral populist force instead. This involved abandoning a militantly anti-racist position and replacing it with a supposed emphasis on bread and butter issues that in fact did not take up practical struggles and involved accommodating to xenophobic ideas, not challenging them.

But it was an answer to a real problem – that of Die Linke’s stalled and slipping level of support and what to do to have an impact on national politics. And Wagenknecht also had a strategy of going into government in coalition, just like most of her opponents in the party. It was just different in terms of the political complexion envisaged and how to get into office. So there is and was a deep strategic dilemma.

There are no glib answers to that, for they involve the big questions of how radical forces operate in a party which is reformist, not geared to anti-capitalist rupture. Ultimately, they involve the conception of radical politics itself: a left ginger group on Labour-type parties; a future junior coalition partner; or something based squarely not just on social struggles but aiming to rupture with the system, not govern it?

In a few areas of Berlin where anti-capitalist forces are most concentrated there were better results. Deep involvement in social movements and struggles has been very important to reaching and holding supporters looking for radical change in those districts and elsewhere. Yet there is no avoiding the big political question of strategy for the radical left. It cannot be answered just by pointing to social struggles.

A referendum in Berlin yesterday saw 60 percent vote to expropriate the big housing companies who have jacked up rents to unaffordable levels. It is a great victory out of a massive campaign and it will put pressure on the government of the city, which is actually a Red-Red-Green coalition. Still, Die Linke’s vote was just 14 percent, despite being the only party clearly for the proposal and its activists building the campaign over many months.

There is a lot to discuss and it is a relief that thanks to winning some first past the post constituencies in the mixed electoral system Die Linke has managed to sustain a presence in parliament despite being below the national 5 percent hurdle. The loss of a radical left presence in national politics would have been catastrophic.

AOC, the dress, the stunt and the real dilemmas beneath

The row over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunt with the “Tax the Rich” dress at the Met Gala strikes me as a frustrated displacement from dealing with some more fundamental and difficult issues.

Those are that the US left, of which AOC is a famous elected part through the Democratic Party, is bigger than it has been for over half a century, but at the same time the gap between its independent effectiveness and its size is also greater than ever.

A number of wise friends in the US describe a sense of paralysis and of being becalmed among swathes of left and liberal people now under a Biden administration with control of Congress. Already the argument is being trailed about the fabled Mid-Terms next year and the need to ensure a Democrat vote.

Those pointing out these pressures are not people who can be dismissed as desiccated sectarians fit only for purist denunciations or intoning verities about the class nature of the Democratic Party. They are all involved in practical organising and movement building. They are in a range of political organisations, with some in the Democratic-Party-aligned left.

Neither they nor anyone else I know are dismissing the huge growth of the Democratic Socialists of America and the left as a whole. Nor are they just reciting old catechisms.
But there is a real issue, and the intensity of what ought to be just a minor debate about AOC’s stunt is a perverse reflection of it.

This issue is that the huge strategic problem of sustaining and building independent social movements and a radical left that has been posed under one Democratic presidency after another is raised again today.

There is a deep problem. There are real dilemmas. If the Texas anti-abortion statute had gone through with Trump in the White House I have no doubt that there would be millions in the streets by last weekend following Labor Day. Millions.

There are protests. But in at least some instances those trying to build coalitions to support them report the big NGO- and Democrat-aligned organisations, and the left that sees itself as a radical wing of them, voicing reluctance to mobilise. Instead they in truth look to the Democrat-controlled arms of government to defend women’s rights.

The answer is not ritualistic denunciation of the Democrats, the graveyard of movements, and so on. But neither is it ignoring that this is the reality – there are huge pressures not to struggle. And when battles do take place there is even more pressure for them not to encourage an independent, radical socialist politics that seeks to build an alternative to the Democrats and the whole US political system.

Have no black people been killed wrongly by the police in the last eight months in the US? What is happening with the Black Lives Matter movement? And I’m not talking of when another learned disquisition about it will appear in the New Yorker or New York Review of Books. I’m talking about the actual, living movement.

There are struggles. You read about them: from teachers and school staff in Chicago to drives for a better minimum wage to efforts at union organisation.

But there is little sense, at least from Europe, of any unified effort by the historically large US left engaging wider layers of working people and having an impact upon national US politics.

It is not being pious or rubbing people’s noses in it to point that out. For it has been the great obstacle the left has faced in the US ever since the emergence of the modern state. It is in fact, I would say, the secret of the impotence of the anti-capitalist left in the US – the divorce between it and real political effect. And incorporation though the Democratic Party *is a part* of blunting the left’s political effect. The more one is involved alongside Democrat politicians on whatever basis the more firmly that truth should be held to.

So behind AOC and a dress we are talking about a big strategic dilemma and the current threat of passivity and demobilisation facing all the social fronts. The US does not have a social democratic reformist party. It has the Democrats. That gives rise to none of the benefits of having a reformist party (the assertion of a class divide in politics, however distorted), but to all of the deficits (an incorporating mechanism to capitalist rule).

That is why it is not good enough just to say that the dress highlighted a good immediate slogan of taxing the rich. It did. But the real problem in the US is that there is yet to be a grassroots surge around that position, agitating in neighbourhoods, towns and workplaces, and making it something much more than passively hoping that Congress will pass Biden’s modestly redistributive plan.

It’s not easy to solve that problem, as every US friend I know will attest. But it has to be addressed. Otherwise the whole enterprise of building a socialist left in the US turns into being fantastic activists and organisers to fight the reactionary Republicans, but then to have the fruit of all your efforts seized by another set of anti-socialist forces, the Democrats – particularly when they are in office and advancing their policy for maintaining the most rapacious capitalist and imperialist machine in the world.

No – Thatcher did not stop the fascist NF

Margaret Thatcher, January 1978: “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”

The book considered here by Kenan Malik doesn’t appear to offer much new to our understanding of British fascism or its successes and failures relative to European counterparts.

In fact, it appears to promote three well worn ideas that have been with us for at least 40 years. To its credit, however, it does seem to make the important distinction between fascism/neo-Nazism and other forms of far right reaction.

First is the claim that while European fascists in the 1970s were able skillfully to repackage as a form of national and racial identity politics masquerading as a defence of “indigenous culture”, hapless British fascism remained stuck in discredited inter-war ideologies of biological racism and Nazi racial superiority.

Second, that Britain’s second world war experience allowed space for a (uniquely) right wing politics and culture that was nationalist and pro-Empire but claiming an anti-Nazi mantle. Both sides of Churchill, if you will.

Third, the peculiar nature of British conservatism and the Tory party permitted it flexibility to absorb repeated – and failed – fascist breakthroughs. It could marginalise fascism while adapting to its racist agitation.

All three of these factors are one-sided and overstated. Even taken together they don’t account for the fate of British fascism or differential outcomes with counterparts in Europe, either in the 1970s or more recently.

The British National Party in the 1990s did try to reposition its propaganda and political initiatives around the identity claims of the New Right. The book acknowledges that. But in pointing out that that went hand in hand with a core commitment to cruder Nazi and biological racist ideas it gives the impression – on this account – that that was unique to British fascism.

But this was true also of the Front National in France. It was true of those strands of German fascism post-1991 that sought respectability by saying that they were just articulating a view of German history and culture that displaced responsibility for German fascism onto Russian Communism. That had been propounded by intellectuals of the conservative right.

All the while Jean-Marie Le Pen in France described the Holocaust as a minor detail of history, and neo-Nazi groups in Germany engaged in violent attacks.
More recently, the advance from 10 years ago of fascism in Greece was not in its eurofascist or alt-right intellectual form, but of an actual Nazi party – Golden Dawn.

If the claim is that Britain’s national story of WWII provides an inhibition upon fascism, then why not Greece’s – a country with a massive liberation movement and a resurgent mass left from the mid-1970s? Indeed, when activists formed an explicitly anti-fascist front a decade ago, many on the left thought it a waste of time. They pointed to the then marginalisation of fascist groups and to the “real problem” which was the incorporation into the political mainstream of authoritarian and racist ideas.

The conservative New Democracy party was no less adroit at absorbing far right strands than the British Tories. Indeed, like the Spanish Popular Party it institutionalised those forces to a greater extent than British conservatism ever has. The same could be said of the Austrian centre right and its state functionaries.

The book rehearses the well worn argument that instrumental to the decline of the National Front in Britain was Margaret Thatcher’s Granada interview on World in Action in January 1978. In it she said that “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”.

The argument is that this took the wind out of the NF’s sails and its voters went Tory 15 months later.

But why should it not have encouraged the NF? Jean-Marie Le Pen was to say two decades later when mainstream politicians adopted Front National themes that “people prefer the genuine article”. And that is what happened.

I rarely see British commentators who foreground Thatcher’s “swamping” interview cite the equally infamous intervention by another major leader of conservatism. Jacques Chirac in 1991 made his “Le Bruit et l’odeur” speech. In it he said people were right to complain about the “noise and the smell” of Arab and African immigrants in France.

He contrasted them to decent European and white earlier immigrants from Germany, Italy, Poland and so on. It was a naked racist appeal into working class and poor communities divided by state and popular racism while crammed into overcrowded tenements. It went further than Thatcher ever did – and in the 1980s it was anti-communism rather than racist themes that was central to her ideological propaganda.

Notwithstanding the reactionary Thatcher governments and the historic defeats she inflicted on the organised working class, there was less popular racist and anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain in 1989 than there had been in 1979.

Surely Chirac’s speech would check the rise of the FN, gaining in strength the previous decade to reach four million votes? Not at all. Chirac went on to face Le Pen a decade later in the second round of the French presidential election.

You must conclude that whatever impact Thatcher’s interview had was only out of a mass movement already isolating and hurling back the NF – a fact attested to by its national organiser who said the Anti Nazi League and associated massive agitation broke the British NF.

There are all sorts of national particularities, and of course all movements take place in and try to bend in their direction the particular national circumstances, contradictions and “traditions” at each stage.

But by the looks of this book it doesn’t advance our understanding of that. Rather, it seems in its core just another outing for some tired, objectivist ideas.

There are, for example, interesting questions over why, despite all its conservatism and sectional, reactionary strands, there was a stronger anti-racist and anti-imperialist (as in British imperialism) sentiment in the British labour movement pre-1968 than in the French. That is despite the French being formally more left wing and with greater permeation of Marxism in French society.

The British labour movement was far from brilliant over Ireland, Empire and nuclear weapons. The French was just appalling on Algeria.

There are important questions today about the interaction of fascist forces and wider crises of national political systems. The German grand coalition, the Greek equivalent, and the collapse of French social democracy are surely central to accounting for the advances of fascist and far right forces. So is the unravelling of historic centre right party blocs in several countries.

Above all, there is how movements have been able (or not) to respond and to shape the outcome of those crises – at least on the vital question of throwing back fascist advance.

These questions cannot be addressed adequately with a cardboard cutout account of British conservatism and the British far right.

Johnson’s opportunism and his divided cabinet

Johnson and Cummings – arch opportunist and his Rasputin 

The Boris Johnson who proclaimed in a speech on 3 February that Britain would champion laissez-faire global trade against an “autarkic” coronavirus shutdown is the same Boris Johnson briefing today that he is against an early exit from the lockdown.

Similarly, the Dominic Cummings who lets it be known that he is now in favour of a longer lockdown is the same eugenicist fascinated by the crackpot “herd immunity” policy.

That and the reported divisions in the British government tell us several things:

1) Johnson is, as most Tory MPs have said, a serial opportunist. Remember his two columns for and against Brexit? What matters above all for Johnson is the future of Boris Johnson.

2) His elitist ideology probably does mean that he believes in the laissez-faire approach. That certainly informed the catastrophic response to the pandemic which amplified all the problems brought by austerity.

But he is not going to let that get in the way of his own political survival. Thus he stands on the opposite side of this split over the lockdown to Iain Duncan Smith, with whom he might be considered ideologically close.
The Thatcherite ultra Tory Brexiters had reason to worry about Johnson’s reliability from their point of view.

3) Cummings, though deeply ideological, represents the triumph of political technique over belief. We can be sure that his apparent U-turn is driven by intense focus grouping and private polling by the Tories’ Anglo-Australian gurus.

The estimate must be that being seen to champion national wellbeing (however far fetched) above “business” is crucial to securing the long term strategy of cementing the Johnsonite popular and electoral coalition. Thatcher was prepared to go through intense unpopularity and take huge risks to carry through her programme.

It looks like the Downing Street operation is much more nervous about its success in last year’s election blowing up. It has a big majority and a weak Labour opposition. But it is cautious – and incompetent. The image of a vainglorious prime minister in it for the jollies may come to stick.

4) The fact that two sheet anchors of the British administrative state – the Treasury and the Cabinet Secretary – are (with the ever ambitious Michael Gove) on the opposite side to Johnson and Cummings is doubly revealing.

First, it intensifies the strategic division by overlaying administrative schism and the deep question of how the government and state should function.
Second, it undermines the claim by British liberalism that the permanent state is a force for rational good and must be supported against crazies like Cummings. The Treasury and cabinet secretary are pushing the more reckless line – in the name of UK PLC.

5) Despite whatever superficial similarities, the government split in Britain shows the differences between Trump and Johnson.
Trump is trying to rally the anti-state right wing Republican base, and the far right, claiming that the lockdowns are a communist plot against liberty and coronavirus simultaneously an exaggerated threat and an act of Chinese aggression. (Again, Iain Duncan Smith and some other hard right Tories are saying likewise.)

There is no similar substantial base for Johnson. A key part of his election message was increased NHS funding and public spending. The dishonesty is not the point. It is rather that Tory voters, especially in the seats won from Labour, do not think that the NHS is a Marxist death machine, as US shock jocks maintain.

As for China, already before this crisis the Johnson government was seeking to balance as it looked to expanding trade beyond the EU. Thus Tory MPs were divided on the question of Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s 5G network and Johnson was in conflict with Trump. There was never any substantial division between Thatcher and Reagan over the Soviet Union.

These tensions may be obscured by state of official politics and the line Keir Starmer has been taking. But they are very real and important.
They mean that Johnson’s government is far from being a juggernaut. They are divisions the movement should take confidence in exploiting.

Some socialist points on the Tory government’s anti-immigration offensive

So who will pick the fruit and ve? 

The answer to the Tories’ planned nasty immigration restrictions cannot be: we need a continuing supply of cheap labour to keep the economy going and to staff social care on zero hours contracts and, in effect, less than minimum wage.

That is the argument of the privateers, the farmers and large sections of business. It cannot possibly be the argument of the labour movement.

Nor can it be in any way to give credence to the propaganda by the Home Office and government that their policy will lead to a high wage, high skill economy.
It is the level of investment that is much more important in achieving those things. Britain has had a chronically low level of investment for a very long time. And Home Secretary Priti Patel is clear that any shortfalls in supply of labour can be made up from the “economically inactive” population in Britain.

But this is eight million pensioners, carers and students. Many in those categories are already doing paid work. Driving them into a greater relationship with the labour market is going to mean more lowering of the social wage and attacks such as universal credit, the hounding of disabled people and further attacks on pensions and pensioners.

The government claims that a tightened labour market among so-called unskilled workers (they are skilled) will lead to employers investing and paying higher wages.

Unfortunately, some liberal and centre-left figures have backhandedly endorsed the government’s claim in the course of rightly opposing its new immigration restrictions. So economist Danny Blanchflower says the Tory policy will lead to higher wages, which will lead to higher prices and inflation driven by a wage-price spiral. That’s his argument against it.

Leave aside the mistaken 1970s-style theory about what causes inflation, the critical thing that drives up wages is the organisation of labour. This is a crucial difference between workers and other economic inputs – steel, electricity, oil, etc do not organise themselves.

Whatever the immigration regime, employers are still going to look to suppressing wages and limiting workplace rights, notwithstanding niche areas of employment.

Some of the largest pay cuts in the decade after the 2008 crash were in the public sector. Wages fell in local government not out of some arithmetic consequence of migration from outside of Britain. They fell because they were cut by political decision and unions did not fight the assault.

The public sector is more densely unionised than the private and it is here that unions can make a strong impact in exposing the lie that Johnson’s government is introducing immigration restriction to increase workers’ pay and standard of living.

The immediate way to do that would be a 10 percent pay rise across the public sector, a living wage, scrapping anti-union laws and using the government’s purchasing power to drive up investment and to favour employers with better worker wellbeing.

The Tories want none of that. Instead they deploy a false economic argument that by restricting the movement of working people they can get bosses to improve workers’ pay. If that were the true goal, why not make bosses do that directly The socialist answer is indeed to move directly against the bosses.

Of course the major impact of the Tory policy is to press a divide deep into the working class on the basis of immigration status. It is to create new categories of migrant workers on visas, lacking the same rights as other workers and thus vulnerable to greater exploitation. Then that greater exploitation with fewer effective rights becomes the new norm for all.

That is a critical argument – divide and rule – that can be understood at a mass level and that cuts right into the Tory policy.

The labour movement cannot give any credence to the Tories’ arguments and must ferociously oppose this anti-immigration clampdown.

But to be effective that has to be on a class basis, marshalling socialist and anti-capitalist arguments – of which working class unity against racism and similar divisions is central. It cannot be on the basis of the National Farmers Union, the social care cutthroat companies, the Federation of Small Businessmen, Starbucks, Amazon or what have you.

It has to be connected with real struggle and organisation that shows that union and worker organisation, in the workplace and outside, are what improves pay and living standards for working people. That means not just in words but in practice extending union and class organisation and fighting for newly arrived workers to have exactly the same employment and citizenship rights as everyone else.

The labour movement has faced a choice at various moments in history over alliance with the capitalist state or not in seeking to improve workers conditions. Alliance with the state, be it over colonial expansion or greater immigration restriction, has not brought advances for working people but has severely weakened the key force that can: an independent, internationalist and militant working class movement.

(Here – rhetoric about the privileges of “native” workers is wrong and counterproductive. It is telling millions of workers in Britain that the Johnson government is right and they will be better off by keeping other workers out.)

There are enormous contradictions and absurdities in the Tory policy. They will lead to all sorts of clashes – including between parts of business and the government, within the government and so on.

The radical left needs its own independent position in opposing the Tory policy and exploiting those contradictions in the months and years ahead.

The myth of a ‘post-fascist’ present: contradictory trends on the European far and Nazi right

Fascism is neither remotely in the past, nor remotely in the future. Sadly, we do not live in a “post-fascist” present

Several commonplaces, almost cliches, have emerged from a range of journalists and intellectuals in the face of the rise of the far or radical right in parts of Europe and North America over the last six years.

One is to talk little about the far right as a category at all, but instead about “populism” assailing the rational liberal centre. This “populism” then has a right and a left face, but they are just aspects of a general substrate of evil.

Thus the frequent interventions of the US-based Dutch academic Cas Mudde and his efforts to define a discipline of “populism studies”. Unsurprisingly, it is very popular with liberal ideologues, such as the Guardian newspaper in Britain, who want to throw back the radical left while voicing opposition to the far right. This theorisation allows them to consider the former the conjoined twin of the latter and to slur it accordingly.

Another commonplace has been to collapse serious investigation of the range of forces and strategies on the radical right. Instead it has been to project a levelling generalisation in which there is a “new authoritarianism” or “authoritarian populism”. It is held to be a meeting point of traditional right wing forces dabbling in populist technique on the one hand, and once fascist forces moderating to the same convergence on the other.

That case was put a couple of years ago by the distinguished British historian of the Third Reich Richard Evans at a lecture in Athens.

There is not a fascist threat in Europe (at least west of the Danube), he said. That is due to radically different objective circumstances from the 1930s and to a profound shift in the nature of the far right compared with then and with as late as the 1970s and 1980s.

It has evolved into an essentially conventional and parliamentarist authoritarianism. Nasty, contaminating of politics, but not at all like the interwar insurgent threat to democracy. Parts of Eastern Europe may be different, he argued. His explanation was in essence the liberal theory that the Communist period had replaced one totalitarianism with another, thus preventing the post-war embedding of parliamentary democracy that happened in Western Europe (the Iberian peninsula and Greece have to be “non-western” here).

Even then, the threat in the East was from the governmental-authoritarian right of the likes of Viktor Orban, rather than from something closer to classical fascism. (Ukraine was not mentioned.)

Evans’ intellectual integrity is such that he readily conceded that Greece and the then very strong Nazi Golden Dawn did not quite fit his scheme. Others who have put cruder versions of his analysis have tended just to ignore the counter examples in posing a singular convergence of a new authoritarian right in which fascism is at most a fringe politics and strategy – a possible future threat, but not now.

There is a grain of truth in talk of a prominent “authoritarian right” model. But I think it is one-sided and overstated.

Fascism and a typology of the far right

The big problem is that it takes one trend, ignores others that are moving in a specifically fascist direction, over-generalises, and fails to grasp the contradictory dynamics and thus the complexity of the picture.

I tried to highlight some of that in this piece, which originally appeared in Jewish Socialist magazine in Britain. Though three years old, I think it is still of some use in how to approach a more integrated and dialectical analysis of the far right and its fascist components. It argues:

“There is a range of far right formations seeking to build out of the European crisis. The fact that they all consciously occupy a space to the right of the mainstream centre-right parties means they share a very general ‘radical right wing’ character.

“If you want to build in that political space you need constantly to demonstrate in word and in deed that you are ‘more radical’ than mainstream parties of the right. And those are increasingly turning to the politics of racism and scapegoating. The authoritarian centre-right governments of Poland and Hungary are but hardline variants of that wider phenomenon. Beneath the general character of the far right, there remain important differences of strategy and ideology.”

Among other examples in sketching a “typology of the far right” it looks at the AfD in Germany. Back in 2016 there was a widespread view in journalistic-political circles that in advancing electorally the AfD would evolve to a simple parliamentarist hard right force. It might be brutish, racist and with authoritarian tendencies, but not so substantially different from the Bavarian CSU, the profile of whose voter base it largely shares.

In fact what has happened is not a simple process of “domestication”. The AfD has simultaneously gathered electoral support and radicalised. There are two tendencies, not one. That has given rise to internal contradictions and schisms of various kinds.

But those have boiled up and produced actual splits only thanks to the pressure of the movements in Germany against fascism and racism. And at the heart of those movements is an analysis and related strategy that accurately capture the AfD as containing a big fascist cadre and having fascisising tendencies. It is not just another racist, neoliberal party with perhaps a dash more authoritarianism and a “populist” profile.

Further, it exists in a symbiotic, though contested, relationship with a significant, violent neo-Nazi, fascist scene. The German internal intelligence puts the number of “right wing extremists” at 24,000. The majority of them are relatively open in saying they are prepared to use armed violence for political ends.

Additionally – and this is a point also made very well in Ugo Palheta’s excellent book, The Possibility of Fascism – even fascist parties such as Marine Le Pen’s RN, which has publicly “domesticated” or “de-diabolised”, face a problem.

When they make big electoral advances they are still finding themselves locked out of wielding political and executive state power. For all Le Pen’s attempts to present herself as “everywoman” in 2017, and renaming her party, she got only a handful of MPs, fewer than each of the Communist Party and La France Insoumise on the radical left.

That feeds a potent argument from those who wish to promote more “militant”, directly fascist strategies – and those people exist at the heart of the RN. It is that conventional methods and seeking to hegemonise only the right can get you only so far. To break through you need additionally a much more combative street organisation in anticipation of further political breakdown and extreme polarisation. You need to demonstrate extra-parliamentary force if you are to crack open the old political system.

That means you have to harden a cadre in that direction, as Jean-Marie Le Pen used to do.

The immanence of fascism 

Similar dilemmas face the FPO, with its fascist roots, in Austria, or Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy. He did not succeed in forcing a new election by bringing down the previous government this summer. He has called on supporters across Italy to descend on the capital this month to protest against the new one, a kind of postmodern March on Rome.

That tactic is incubating of actual fascism and brings frustrated Lega supporters into a common space with the outright fascists of CasaPound and the Brothers of Italy.

A newly elected MP of Vox in Spain has resigned saying that what she thought was just a national conservative, Spanish integralist party turned out to have an “extremist, anti-systemic” core.

So there are both fascisising, radicalising dynamics and – in even the most hybrid “post-fascist” or “new authoritarian” formations – fascist cadres who want to push in that direction.

These are not future evolutionary potentials, but current objective and subjective actualities.

This entire aspect and the morphing affinities and networks on the fascist or fascistic right are flattened out of a picture painted as a simple convergence around a post-fascist, “new authoritarian” right that bundles together a range of phenomena in the manner of the theorists of populism.

Another aspect of that flattening is mainstream reception of Nazi terror atrocities such as in Halle, Christchurch, Pittsburgh, the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox…

There is commonly a three-fold separation from the fascisising or actual fascist forces of the far right.

First, the evident racism, misogyny, Islamophobia and anti-semitism are acknowledged (to varying degrees). But it is frequently put down just to bad ideas that are swirling around. The worst instance of this is how official politics in Britain treats the Nazi murder of Jo Cox as some simple extension of incivility in political discourse.

Second, where the wider far right is rightly put in the frame it is solely at the level of it emboldening through words, and thus legitimising, the “lone wolves” who then go “too far”. That is put in a way that everyone can safely condemn – even German interior minister Horst Seehofer, who says, “There is no place for Islam in Germany.” The actual material mechanisms between the Nazi violence and the fascising or fascist tendencies within the radical right as a whole are rarely investigated, unless there is something like the intervention into the Golden Dawn trial in Greece. We shall see if they are explored over the Halle terror attack, though the German state’s performance over the last 15 years suggests not.

Third is a frequent fixation upon the online mode of what the security state has termed “radicalisation”, coined at the start of the War on Terror. That this is a common factor from the Christchurch to the Halle Nazi terrorists posting livestream video of their murders is beyond dispute. It requires forensic examination, and I’m looking forward to Jeff Sparrow’s book this month that promises to do just that.

But we should be careful of exaggerating this novelty – which is but a product of technological development. The murderer of Jo Cox received through the post from US Nazis a copy of an infamous white supremacist tract, years before online chat rooms and the web.

The European neo-Nazi scene in the 1980s and 1990s networked through badly published pamphlets and books obtained from secretive PO Box numbers. Online communication accelerates enormously the speed of communication and dissemination.

But it is a simplistic picture to portray the outcome as just twisted, embittered young men getting radicalised online as isolated individuals in some grotty basement.

For the same media of communication mean that forces organised or aiming to be networked in real life have sophisticated methods to help them do so. What French activists have named the “fascho-sphere” means that those in far right formations who are frustrated at the slow pace of “legal-conventional” methods can more easily connect with others seeking “militant” radicalisation.

Not simply a passive process, but an active mechanism – and one which means that there is within even avowedly “constitutional” radical right forces a much greater porosity and intermingling with actual neo-Nazism than might outwardly be apparent.

The Christchurch Nazi terrorist networked online but also met in real life in Europe with the leader of Generation Identitaire and other fascists.

The “actuality” of anti-fascism

That the racist and far right poses a serious threat is common ground on the left, and among sincere democratic liberals.

If one mistake in responding is to regard all forms of reactionary radicalisation as fascism, another is to lose the category of fascism altogether. Or, which in practical politics approximates the same thing, to regard it as remote – remotely in the past or remotely in the future.

Rather, I suggest, it is better to recognise the immanence of fascism. By that I don’t mean the prospect of waking up tomorrow literally to find a fascist seizure of power in the manner of a Mussolini or Hitler.

It is instead that the processes producing actual fascist, material mechanisms are neither in the past nor at some point in the future, with us inhabiting a world of the “post-fascist right”.

They are generated now within the ugly family of the radical or far right – either under their own flag as distinct fascist forces, or as outgrowths of an authoritarian right running up against severe limitations and political dilemmas.

Halle, Christchurch, Pittsburgh… none of them are aberrations brought by “gamification” or the dark web. They are horrific expressions of a contemporary fascist dynamic within a wider far right, and in turn of reactionary efforts of all kinds to buttress a failing capitalist system against radical left insurgency.

That all calls for an “actuality of antifascism” in the course of the radical left confronting reaction and racism of all kinds.

That requires an acute analysis, alert to the shifting and conflicting currents in the situation, and rising above the conventional (and often faddish) over-generalisations of so much journalistic and academic analysis.

Trump’s Syria move, fossil fuels and growing crisis in Eastern Mediterranean

Mike Pompeo signed a deal in Athens on Saturday to extend US military bases in Greece. On Sunday Donald Trump moved to facilitate Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria

A summit meeting between Greece, Cyprus and Israel is taking place in Cairo today.

It comes amid mounting tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean which may intensify sharply when the expected Turkish invasion of northern Syria takes place, and with it an intensification of the Syrian regime’s offensive in Idlib.

The tripartite pact of Greece and Cyprus acting alongside the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt with Israel is a continuation of a deep policy pursued under Syriza and is at the centre of the Greek state’s strategic ambition in the region.

There is already an escalating standoff with Turkey. Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades has recklessly broken off the semblance of a peace process with Turkish northern Cyprus and has unilaterally moved to begin exploiting the gas fields off the island.

Despite control over the maritime zone being disputed, Anastasiades’ right wing government has been parcelling up the area and selling off drilling licences to France’s Total, Italy’s Eni and other fossil fuel giants.

Observers in Nicosia say the Cypriot government and its big business backers are behaving as if they have discovered Eldorado. They have been intimating that the involvement of French, Italian and US multinationals means they can rely on those states to back Cyprus in the face of strident objections by the Turkish state.

But the months of provocation have produced a reaction from Turkish president Erdogan. A couple of days ago he sent two Turkish ships into the middle of the zone to begin his own drilling.

There’s now a very dangerous crisis. Greek foreign minister Nikos Dendias flew to Nicosia to make theatrical noises that gunboat diplomacy “belongs in another century”.

But Erdogan’s move has exposed something of the bluff in the Cypriot position. Neither France nor Italy show any inclination to deploy naval force to confront the Turkish presence or pose as deterenace.

The Greek military and diplomatic strategy in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean has been to try to exploit tensions and divergences between the US and its other major Nato ally in the region, Turkey.

That is a continuation of a settled Greek state policy going back decades. This, incidentally, gives the lie to “left-patriotic” claims that Greece’s outsized military machine is somehow progressive because in confronting Turkey it is “challenging US imperialism”.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo signed a new defence deal with Greece in Athens on Saturday extending the licence of the Souda naval base on Crete and expanding the number of bases for US forces.

Greece is the only country other than the US to have the highest level of military cooperation with Israel – a policy secured by Alexis Tsipras.

Since Saturday it is not only the Turkish naval deployment that has brought this Greece-Cyprus expansionism up against reality. Even more so is Trump’s decision to pull back US forces from northern Syria, facilitating Erdogan’s planned huge military operation to destroy the quasi-independent Kurdish entity there.

Trump is running into opposition from hawkish Republicans, progressive Democrats and the Pentagon. The last time he tried to do this it brought the resignation of his defence secretary. The US opposition is nothing to do with loyalty to the Kurds. It is everything to do with fear that a drawdown and pullout from Syria would signal the collapse of any pretence of US hegemony in the region, already seriously wounded from Iraq onwards.

It’s also a major blow to Greece and Cyprus – hence the emergency summit with Sisi and Binyamin Netanyahu, facing possibly a third general election in a year. The Greek gambit has depended on Washington constraining Turkish ambition and Greece benefitting from the unstable balance. If Trump gets away with shifting that balance it will strengthen Erdogan, but in a more chaotic situation.

There are the flashpoints off Cyprus and also in the Aegean.

Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria are meeting with the EU to come up with more emergency and brutal methods to prevent a major refugee flow anticipated from the Turkish offensive in Syria and Damascus’ advance into Idlib. Erdogan is also using the Syrian refugees as an instrument. He wants to remove large numbers from Turkey.

He’s used the “threat” of them crossing the Aegean to extract billions from the EU in the infamous deal with Angela Merkel. Now he wants to repopulate the zone in northern Syria, ethnically cleansed of Kurds, with Sunni Arab Syrians dependent on Turkish military overlordship.

The impacts cascade from the north Aegean to Cyprus – home, of course, to Britain’s sovereign military bases that give it some prestige in the region.

Trump is running up against the same problem Obama did and, despite the erratic current administration, there is a continuity with what went before. Obama wanted a lighter touch in the Middle East, a “pivot to Asia”, and leaving the regional powers to stabilise things in concert.

But the regional powers have their own interests, overlapping sometimes but also in conflict. That is seen from Yemen and the Gulf, through the disaster of Syria, to Cyprus and the Greek-Turkish conflict in the Aegean. It has been suppressed over the decades only by the Cold War and then continuing US power holding the ring between its two allies.

This is all breaking down. And the EU is not going to fill the gap, except on the anti-refugee front.

The need for vigorous anti-war movements guided by the internationalist principle of confronting your own imperialist war machine is growing. That includes Britain, where thanks to the hangover presence in Cyprus from the days of Empire British governments still feel their interference in the region is required.

As climate change protests continue, it is also a point not lost on many that a critical centre of this morphing crisis is the exploitation by fossil fuel companies and rival states of massive gas deposits. One estimate that those under the sea between Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel (Palestine) rival Algeria’s, a major gas producer.

The case for leaving it in the ground is not only about future impact on the climate. It is about currently stopping the spread of war.

Brexit food crisis – a socialist approach

 

If Britain’s capitalist food industry says it cannot guarantee supply in a disorderly Brexit, then shouldn’t socialists put a radical and effective policy forward that can?

The Guardian reports:

“Britain’s food and drinks industry has said companies may have to choose between working together to avert food shortages or paying large fines unless the government steps in to suspend competition law in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

“Collaboration between large companies is controlled to prevent cartels harming consumers. The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) told the BBC that the government had not yet confirmed that companies would be able to work together to direct food supplies if there were delays as a result of crashing out of the EU.”

Isn’t that enormously revealing?

First, it is recognition that market competition is anything but free. It is regulated in all sorts of ways. Some of that is due to accumulated gains by working people reflected in regulation that benefits us.

Other aspects are capitalist regulation, imposed in pursuit of a general capitalist interest, to make things “work”. That is because it is not in fact true that blind capitalist imperatives of profit maximisation lead to a perfectly functioning market. It is an artificial market, not arising out of human nature or “natural economy”.

That’s rather a major admission.

Second, when confronted with a potential major economic and supply shock, the food and attached supermarket giants say there needs to be cooperation, not managed competition, in order to meet it.

Of course, they would use such a relaxation of rules against anti-competitive, cartel price-fixing to engage exactly in some form of that at the expense of workers as consumers.

But that shouldn’t blind us to the admission of truth involved in this. Market competition cannot secure something as basic as affordable, guaranteed food supply.

Third, instead of going down the dead end of championing a false market solution against the food industry’s proposal, shouldn’t socialists take it as a point of departure for pressing a more radical solution?

That is: yes, there needs to be massive coordination – rather than an artificially sustained market – to secure food supply and at affordable prices.

But that can’t be done by agribusiness cartels. It can be done through public oversight telling them that if they admit they can’t provide food for people, then they’ll be forced to come together under democratic state authority to do so.

Such an authority and battery of legal measures would also be a mechanism to push anti-capitalist and environmental policies on food production in Britain. It would mean breaking agribusiness and large landowner interests, rescuing small, poor farmers, ensuring good cheap produce, and driving a shift in diet towards greater consumption of locally and sustainably produced food.

Put Brexit to one side. Climate chaos, soil depletion, anti-bacterial and pesticide resistance, and food uncertainty are already upon us.

They are going to hit increasingly even advanced economies such as Britain’s.

The capitalist food industry is admitting it can’t solve this. But it will use a crisis to move to greater cartelisation to preserve profits. They won’t solve the crisis, but they won’t let it go to waste.

Why should socialists “let the crisis go to waste” and permit a failed capitalist pseudo-solution of one kind or another?

Shouldn’t the left put forward its own, radical and real solutions?

Ultimately, that does mean socialisation and the issue of ownership. But we also have practical, immediate answers that point additionally in that direction.

And the food industry has inadvertently opened the door to the argument for them.