Theory & struggle 2015

Journal of the Marx Memorial Library 2015 Number 116

theory & struggle Mary Davis Claudia Jones: her work in the USA

Jonathan White Ilyenkov and Dialectical Materialism

Jonathan Michie Economic theory and policy

Developments in 2014-2015 Alex Gordon Reflections Meirian Jump 2015 Marx Oration Yuri Emilianov Ilyenkov and dialectical materialism Jonathan White Vygotsky and Marxist artificial intelligence Leo Impett Economic theory and policy Jonathan Michie Chartism, democracy and Marx and Engels Malcolm Chase The International Working Men’s Association 1864 Harsev Bains Political education and the WEA Pete Caldwell and Peter Templeton On Marx’ method and the study of history John Foster Polemical Essays of E.P. Thompson John Ellison The right to strike John Hendy British Twenthieth Century history John Foster Charlie Hebdo Martin Rowson The National Question in Britain Pauline Bryan Claudia Jones Mary Davis Bypassing the choke points of world trade Alan Mackinnon Two Souls of Thomas Picketty Eric Rahim Language and Discourse Chik Collins Women Against Fundamentalism Mary Davis

theory&struggle 1

Marjorie Mayo

Editorial

Marx Memorial Library 37a Clerkenwell Green London EC1R 0DU UK 44(0) 207 253 1485 Editor: Marjorie Mayo Books for Review to the Reviews Editor, Marx Memorial Library theory.struggle@mml.xyz admin@mml.xyz archives@mml.xyz

Registered Charity Number: 270309 Views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Library.

All enquiries should be addressed to the Librarian. theory&struggle continues the series Marx Memorial Library Newsletter and Praxis ISSN 969-1154 ©Marx Memorial Library Free to members of Marx Memorial Library and to affiliated organisations; £30 to non members

Contents 4 8 10 12 18 22 32 36 44 52 60 66 70 74 76 80 82 86 89 94

2 theory&struggle

Developments in 2014-2015 Alex Gordon Reflections Meirian Jump 2015 Marx Oration Yuri Emilianov Ilyenkov and dialectical materialism Jonathan White Vygotsky and Marxist artificial intelligence Leo Impett Economic theory and policy Jonathan Michie Chartism, democracy and Marx and Engels Malcolm Chase The International Working Men’s Association 1864 Harsev Bains Political education and the WEA Pete Caldwell and Peter Templeton On Marx’ method and the study of history John Foster Polemical Essays of E.P. Thompson John Ellison The right to strike John Hendy British Twenthieth Century history John Foster Charlie Hebdo Martin Rowson The National Question in Britain Pauline Bryan Claudia Jones: her work in the USA Mary Davis Bypassing the choke points of world trade Alan Mackinnon Two Souls of Thomas Picketty Eric Rahim Language and Discourse Chik Collins Women Against Fundamentalism Mary Davis

Marjorie Mayo is an Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is editor of Theory and Struggle and a trustee of the Marx Memorial Library.

She can be contacted via MML.

Welcome to this 2015 edition of Theory and Struggle.

In response to our members’ requests, as expressed at the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School’s Annual General Meeting in 2014, we have expanded this issue, with enhanced coverage of Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism.

These are also themes that have been highlighted in the education programme over the past year, once again taking account of members’ suggestions.

As you will see, we have included articles based upon several of these education sessions. We very much hope that this will be appreciated by members who have difficulties in accessing the classes directly, in person. And we hope that this will encourage those who can travel to the classes to come to them in person, in the coming period.

Following the articles on theoretical debates and the articles that relate to current issues and struggles, we have included a section of reviews and review articles. The aim here is to highlight debates with particular relevance for our readers, as well as drawing their attention to specific publications.

Theory and Struggle aims to promote debate as part of the journal’s overall remit. So we welcome your contributions in response, whether these are responses to the review articles or whether they are responses to any of the preceding articles in this issue.

Finally we should like gratefully to acknowledge The Guardian and Martin Rowson’s permissions to reproduce his article on Charlie Hebdo, and we should also like gratefully to acknowledge the permissions to reproduce Mary Davis’ review of Women against Fundamentalism, originally published in Communist Review.

Picture: Karl Marx as a young man

theory&struggle 3

Alex Gordon

‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great array of morbid symptoms appear.’* Antonio Gramsci

Some developments in 2014-2015

Alex Gordon is former president of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union and is chair of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School

“The years of their lives waste away under the keys of typewriters, in the metal shavings from lathes, their youth burns up in the furnaces of boilers, melts in tears and sweat, dissolves away in the bubbling ferment which they have created and which creates them.

“In this whirlpool of matter-in-motion forces are at work creating history. These fragile shreds of flesh are protagonists of a battle, a battle where lives are wasted, territories destroyed and populations enslaved.

T

“Every true story of today is a story of this struggle.”

John Sommerfield, May Day, 1936; republished London Books (2010)

4 theory&struggle

HE STORIES OF class struggle in Britain in 2015 seem to be of people trapped in the morbid interregnum at the fag end of the neoliberal era. Cheap oil and cheap money, rather than providing an escape from capitalism’s global crisis, turn out to contain the seeds of its next and deeper phase.

At the very moment of its historic triumph, capital’s integrated, world economic system is trapped in a prolonged crisis that announced itself in 2008 with the onset of the longest recession since the Second World War. No viable alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxies of 40 years has emerged since 2008 able to prevent recession and depression developing into a full deflationary crisis.

Neoliberalism’s twin fallacies – wage competitiveness as the driver of economic growth, and commodity exchange as the source of value – lie behind the policy to marketise every aspect of economic and social life. In 2014 the British government’s hubristic obsession with privatisation ran from administration of prisons and probation, to health care and ownership of genetic information.

‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled

to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’

In this frenzy, the essential tools of an alternative capitalist strategy – full employment and fiscal policy (taxation and public spending) — are largely excluded from UK political debate — in a general election year.

EU political and economic treaties explicitly rule out fiscal, demand management, with powers to levy draconian penalties on member states for breaching EU borrowing and spending limits. Meanwhile, EU and US trade negotiators continue secretive talks to agree a worldwide system of so-called trade treaties (TTIP and TPP) facilitating the sovereignty of monopoly finance capital through so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms.

Keynesian counter-cyclical, demand management techniques, developed in the 1930s precisely to address a deflationary crisis that orthodox liberal economic policies created, are anathema to contemporary capitalism.

In consequence, economic policy makers have sought elusive economic growth by offering mindboggling quantities of cheap money as a supply side stimulus and the lowest interest rates since the Bank of England was founded in 1694, so far to little effect.

In March 2015 inflation – the holy grail of neoliberalism — hit zero in the UK for the first time since 1989 when current statistical methods were adopted, although it was 1960 (55 years ago) when real prices last fell in Britain, as they did in April 2015.

The UK’s consumer prices index first reached zero in February 2015, falling from 0.3 percent in the previous month, propelling the UK economy to the brink of deflation, as a global oil price slump precipitated a reduction in fuel price by 16.6 percent and food prices by 3.4 percent compared with a year earlier.

The causes of deflation are easy to identify but harder to address. The price of Brent crude oil fell an astonishing 44 percent (June to December 2014), in

January 2015 going below $50 a barrel for the first time since May 2009. The increase in US oil production from shale and tar sands, together with falling economic demand were partly responsible.

However, the critical cause of the plummeting oil price was the decision of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to reverse its policy of restricting output in order to maintain oil prices.

Instead, Opec announced it would maintain output at 30 million barrels per day irrespective of price.

Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi told the Middle East Economic Survey: “As a policy for Opec it is not in the interest of Opec producers to cut their production, whatever the price. Whether it goes down to $20, $40, $50, $60 is irrelevant”.

The end of cheap oil, as a consequence of Opec’s 1973 oil embargo, was an omen presaging 1970s price inflation, which served as the pretext for neoliberalism’s onslaught against rising wage levels, the institutions and social relations of the ‘Keynesian golden age’. The current energy price deflation of 2014-2015 will doubtless come to be seen as an equally pivotal moment.

2014-15 marked the 30th anniversary of the yearlong struggle by Britain’s miners, their families and supporters against the destruction of Britain’s mining communities. Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School celebrated the miners’ great strike in a series of discussions led by those who took part. The destruction of Britain’s deep-mine, coal industry was more than an attempt to destroy organised labour in Britain.

Thatcher’s war on the miners was intended as a strategic intervention to forestall the future possibility of socialism. A vengeful Tory elite understood that by transferring control of energy policy from elected politicians to global energy markets they could deal a blow to energy sovereignty through nationalisation of mining and future investment in clean coal research and development.

The outpouring of bellicose rhetoric during 201415 by Nato leaders aimed primarily at Russia, but extending to US threats against Iran, Syria and Venezuela reflect the weakening of imperialism’s monopoly of control over access to energy markets.

* Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971) Antonio Gramsci 1891-1937;

theory&struggle 5

These remain the most powerful material influence on the global economy with the ability to incite political developments as yet unforeseen.

An example of the collateral damage from today’s oil price collapse is the erosion of the fiscal assumptions on which the Scottish National Party based its appeal to voters in September 2014’s Scottish independence referendum. The SNP’s post-referendum demand for ‘full fiscal autonomy’ in the event of negotiations over a hung Westminster parliament in 2015 would cost Scotland an estimated £8 billion annually, by replacing the Barnett formula with a drastically reduced income stream based on volatile oil revenues.

Simultaneously with the spectre of looming asset price deflation, central bankers continued the doomed attempt to bribe capitalism’s animal spirits to adopt a more positive outlook on prospects for economic growth.

In January 2015 European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi announced a €1.1 trillion program of Quantitative Easing (QE) directly buying Eurozone member states’ sovereign debt.

This is the fourth major central bank to pursue QE since 2008. The US Federal Reserve Bank opened the door with its $3.7 trillion QE bond purchase in 2008, followed by the Bank of England’s £200 billion QE exercise in 2009. The Japanese Central Bank followed suit. These fabulous sums do not of course include the trillions spent in covering commercial banks’ toxic loans in 2008-9.

The ECB’s famously ‘tight money’ policy first began to shift, with a brief bout of bond buying in 2010, and then snowballed with Long Term Refinancing Operations (LTRO) beginning on Christmas Eve in 2011 — a trillion Euros of liquidity in exchange for promises to lend.

In July 2012 Mr Draghi said the ECB was “ready to do whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency.

Once again, as with the previous exercises in supply side stimuli, some cash was used to buy short-term government debt, but most ended up back in the accounts of banks and corporations and at the ECB. In anticipation of this latest cash bonanza, borrowing costs fell so far in eurozone countries in 2014 that German five-year bonds actually attracted negative interest rates — meaning investors pay the German central bank for the privilege of lending it money. This is a bond sellers’ market.

Banks and corporations are hoarding cash from QE, some of which must be invested in highly secure government debt, which consequently falls in price.

Thus, cheap money reinforces the paying down of debt (de-leveraging), rather than economic growth. Hence Keynes’ aphorism that using monetary policy to fight severe recession is like ‘pushing on a piece of string.’

Draghi’s public challenge to the ECB’s governing council, whose outlook is dominated by German ordoliberalism, simply confirmed the ECB’s primary

6 theory&struggle

adherence to the neoliberal goal of downward pressure on wages.

In a preemptive strike against misplaced notions that QE represents a Keynesian departure from the ECB’s neoliberalism, Draghi underlined, “it is crucial that structural reforms be implemented swiftly, credibly and effectively”.

Structural reforms include ending ‘indexation’ (pegging wage increases to RPI), opening services and industries to competition and privatisation, ending collective bargaining and defined benefit pension arrangements and encouraging member states to adopt ‘active labour market policies’ by reducing out-of-work benefits and the level of the minimum wage.

Draghi called on EU governments to build economic recovery through “decisive implementation of product and labour market reforms and actions to improve the business environment firms’ need to gain momentum in several countries.”

In February 2015, France’s Blairite-lite, Socialist government imposed the ‘loi Macron’ appeasing the European Commission by vetoing a parliamentary vote.

The new law, a creation of unelected Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron (a former Rothschild investment banker) and French PM, Manuel Valls, facilitates the sale of €5-10 billion of state assets and deregulates certain professions.

In local elections on 22 March voters relegated the French Socialists to third place (22%) behind the conservative UMP (32%) and National Front (25%).

Europe’s traditional social democratic parties continue to repudiate their historic constituency — working class voters — in their quest to be the party representing the European project.

The path from Jacques Delors’ Christian democratic advocacy of in Mitterand’s 1980s administration, to the German SPD government’s ‘Hartz 4’ program in the 1990s opens up a perspective for social democrat parties returning to the traditional role in a deep crisis.

Core EU states are increasingly marked by political struggles over workers’ and trade union rights, collective bargaining systems and privatisation. EU institutional demands for structural reform advanced in 2009 as the price for ‘bail-outs’ in Ireland, Portugal and Greece, are now made on Italy, France, Belgium and elsewhere as the price of QE bond buying. This is a clear sign that the crisis is moving from the periphery to the core.

Only Greece is excluded from new bond purchases until July 2015, and will qualify for future purchases only if it continues the austerity programme agreed in 2013 with the troika (henceforth renamed as ‘the institutions’).

ECB will purchase up to 25 percent of any bond issues, from 9 March 2015 up to €60bn (£43.5bn) per month for 18 months. An immediate consequence is that the euro dropped to an 11-year low against the US

dollar and sterling, lowering the cost of imports from the Eurozone to the UK and forcing UK inflation down further.

Vicky Redwood, of Capital Economics pronounced, “UK inflation is dead” and argues “the UK is now within a whisker of deflation. It looks odds-on that inflation will turn negative in March, when the cut in gas prices by British Gas will show up in the inflation figures for the first time. Inflation is then likely to remain around zero/slightly negative for the rest of the year.”

The key question, as always for Marxists, is what will be the response of the organised working class through its trade unions. The six years from 2008 to 2014 have seen the longest sustained fall in real wages in the UK since the nineteenth century (more than any other G7 nation) although the wage share in the economy rose as a result of the sharp increase in the size of the labour force without any increase in productivity.

The public sector pay freeze (real terms pay cut) announced in George Osborne’s 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review met a relatively low level of response from some public sector trade unions.

This is partly because wages have been eroded by a very significant increase in casualisation and flexibilisation of employment patterns, including the huge growth in short-term, agency and zero-hours employment, which the trade union movement has, albeit with some exceptions, been unable or unwilling to address.

While the total UK labour force increased to 30 million and the self-employed to 4.6 million, UK public sector employment at 5.4 million (18 percent) fell by 140,000 from 2014, its lowest level since 1999.

Employers increasingly favour agency employment, temporary and zero hours contracts as mechanisms to keep wages suppressed and reduce employer liabilities.

In the three months to January 2015, average earnings grew marginally by 1.6%, but deflation will reinforce the trend of falling real wages in Britain.

Deflation places increased pressure on the most indebted families since it erodes the value of prices and wages while debts increase proportionally.

Although overall trade union density has fallen from 32 percent in 1995 to 25 percent in 2013 — public sector union density is 55 per cent, private sector 14 percent (20 percent in manufacturing, lower in most service sectors) — the trade union movement in Britain still represents 6.5 million workers today.

There should be no doubt that trade unions retain the capacity to mount the concerted and generalised movement necessary to lead a movement against low and declining wages.

In 2011 and 2012 a series of TUC-coordinated strikes and demonstrations in opposition to government pay and pensions cuts received an enthusiastic response from trade union members.

However, since 2013 the most successful industrial action been taken by industrially focused groups of trade unionists; the inspiring fight by the Bakers’ Union (BFAWU) in 2014 against zero-hours contracts, agency labour and for permanent employment, the coordinated disputes by bus workers in London for equal pay and continuing struggles by professional groups such as firefighters, teachers and NHS workers.

Notably, there has also been the resurgence of popular protest over housing. Many small campaigns to defend affordable, public housing by residents such as those of the New Era housing estate in East London, or the ‘E15 Mums’ who squatted vacant residential council properties in Newham, have won wide support.

Nevertheless, the absence of a generalised political and industrial strategy at the highest levels in the labour and trade union movement is obvious. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

British finance capital’s strategy to protect the interests of British multinationals in petrochemicals, mining and arms production, depends on giving US banks the City of London as a trading platform and representing their interests in the EU. But Britain’s industrial viability is threatened by this feral financial sector with speculative funds switching since 2009 to ‘alternative investments’.

London now has biggest concentration of hedge funds in the world and is seen by the Bank of International Settlements and the IMF as a source of international instability.

The viability of Britain’s banking sector, of sterling as a trading currency and Britain political ability to influence the EU is increasingly incompatible with the German strategy of uniting the EU as a federal currency bloc with ECB control of finance and credit.

This conjunction brings us to a key political crossroads in this politics of crisis. As the crisis deepens the ECB has been forced against all previous instincts to deploy QE, predicated on radical labour market reforms.

The focus of EU neoliberal restructuring is moving from the peripheral member states (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) to the core (France, Italy, Belgium). No one can escape. The EU like the empire of the Czars is a prison house of nations.

The political parties that delivered welfare states have gone over to neoliberalism. The model for this development is Germany’s SPD, whose 1990s Hartz 4 programme (a response to post-unification recession) introduced cross-sectoral wage restraint between trade unions and employers.

The absence of mass political parties able to give consistent political expression to the defence of the post-war social gains is the pressing problem both in Britain and internationally.

There are particular challenges here, for the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School, in the coming period. n

theory&struggle 7

Meirian Jump

Reflections of the library’s new archivist and library development officer

M

8 theory&struggle

Y FIRST FEW months as Archivist at the Marx Memorial Library have been unforgettable. Highlights include: answering a knock on the door from an Argentinian whose great grandfather spoke at meetings of the London Patriotic Society on site in the 1870s; chairing a meeting with Joyce Sheppard of Women Against Pit Closures as part of our series of classes on the anniversary of the 1984-5 miner’s strike and, receiving the original 1938 British Battalion Banner on long term loan from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, on display in the Main Hall.

The Library is a very special place with a history rooted in Clerkenwell’s radical tradition. It was there, at 37a Clerkenwell Green, that the International Working Men’s Federation met; where Twentieth Century Press printed copies of Marx and Engels’ classic works and where Lenin worked in exile 1902-3 (visitors can still see the office). The Library was founded in 1933 on the fiftieth anniversary of Marx’s death by a group of socialists and trade unionists and in response to the book burnings in Nazi Germany. Ever since, it has collected published and archival material on Marxism,

the working class movement and trade unionism, making them available through education programmes and facilitating publication and research projects. Areas of specialism include the International Brigade and the Spanish Civil War; the Print unions; peace and solidarity campaigns and Chartism and the early trade union movement.

Eighty years on, the Library is imbued with the same proud history and sense of place. There is also a new energy about Marx House. With the twin goals of fulfilling its self-proclaimed role as Workers’ School and of reaching out to new audiences, the MML has a number of exciting projects underway.

A central task has been the inventory of all the phenomenal resources – library, archive and museum objects — in the building and logging them on our electronic catalogue, soon to be integrated on our redeveloped website. Teams of archive and library students, many from London universities, have been let loose on the collections. Some real gems have been uncovered including the autobiographical manuscript of Helen Crawfurd, anti-war and women’s suffrage campaigner dating from the 1940s and the papers of Wal

Meirian Jump was appointed Archivist and Library Development Officer at the Marx Memorial Library in December 2014.

She graduated from University College, London’s Masters Programme in Archives and Records Management in 2010, having pursued a research interest in twentieth century Spanish and British history at undergraduate level at the University of Oxford, and postgraduate level at Queen Mary College, University of London. She is contactable on archives@mml.xyz

Hannington, National Organiser of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, which document the plight and struggle of unemployed workers in the interwar years. This archaeology will facilitate the opening-up of our resources in innovative ways, including the creation of education packs and curation of themed exhibitions.

Easter closure will enable a complete sort of the Library’s unique poster collection, dominated by modernist soviet and Spanish Civil War designs. This resource has been added to in recent weeks with the donation of a number of 1980s anti-apartheid campaign posters, one of which memorably quotes Abel Meeropol’s ‘Strange Fruit’, attributed to singer Billy Holiday, who famously performed the song in New York in 1939. The proper storage, and eventual digitisation, of these visually striking items will ensure they are preserved for generations to come.

We are reaching out and making a fresh start. Artist Ed Hall is working on a design for a new Marx Memorial Library banner in traditional trade union style. Showing evocative images of Marx against the backdrop of the Library’s distinctive early eighteenth century building – originally a Welsh charity school — the banner will mark our presence at Labour movement festivals across the country including Tolpuddle and the Durham Miners’ Gala over the summer.

New connections are being forged. Working collaboratively with like-minded publishing houses the Library is hosting a number of high profile book launches, including David Rosenberg’s Rebel Footprints, a guide to radical walks in the capital. An artist – whose previous work at the Working Class Movement Library centred upon photographs of the Spanish Civil War – is working on site and plans are afoot to stage a performance of ‘Lenin in London’ in our Main Hall.

The Library will open its doors for special tours of the building twice weekly next month (Monday and Thursday 1-2pm – check our website for details). This will be an opportunity for visitors to go ‘behind the scenes’ with trained guides and view our displays, both old and new. The William Morris Hammersmith Socialist Society Banner, embroidered by the Morris family and recently returned from display at the National Portrait Gallery, can be seen alongside a newly acquired series of dynamic Communist Party equality campaign posters from the early 1970s. Miner’s plates, originally sold to raise funds for the victimised workers during and after the strikes, now adorn our walls.

Every year trade unionists, workers, students, pensioners and activists gather at Clerkenwell Green for the May Day demonstration. This year the MML and Morning Star will jointly host an open day, inviting people into the Library to view an exhibition of photographs of May Days throughout history. Many of these evocative images, showing banner-waving, capwearing crowds from the 1940s and 1950s, originally appeared in the Daily Worker. This sense of history will,

I hope, give context to the continued relevance of this festival of international solidarity.

Education has been at the core of the MML’s operation for decades. The Library’s archives testify to the continuity and adaptability of the Library’s work in this field. Syllabuses from the 1940s, including those for classes on ‘Women in Industry’, examining unequal pay and the problem of childcare provision, and the ‘Economics of Capitalism’, highlighting the everevolving nature of capitalism and its propensity for crisis, still resonate today. While courses on Marxist political economy were previously accessible through correspondence courses, students can now sign up to Online courses (see our website for further details).

The archival and educational functions of the Library should not be viewed as distinct. Listing resources behind closed doors is redundant, and educational programmes can only be enriched by an enhanced understanding of the movement’s context, history and lessons learnt. Efforts to weave these two strands of activity together have begun. On 3 March a panel discussion was convened at the Library to mark the anniversary of the end of the Miners’ Strike. MP and striking miner Ian Lavery; Mel Hepworth, striking miner and creator of anniversary Facebook page, and Brenda Nixon of Women Against Pit Closures spoke to a packed meeting hall. Attendees were invited to view a display in the reading room showing Plebs league’s pamphlets on the strikes of the 1920s; CP booklets on coal as a wartime issue in the 1940s and photograph after photograph of the 1980s strike.

Building on the success of collaborative exhibitions like the News International Wapping Dispute travelling display that showcased parts of the MML’s Printer’s Collection at St Brides Institute earlier this year, the Library is delving into its archives and looking ahead.

2016 will see the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Work is already underway to ensure that the Library’s International Brigade Collection is properly catalogued with digital images in time for a series of launch events. This forms part of a broader programme of digitisation taking place at the Library with newly acquired reprographic equipment. A core component of this activity will be liaising with teachers to ensure that the Civil War is addressed as part of the school syllabus, in its rightful place alongside analysis of the rise of fascism in Europe, appeasement and the Home Front in the 1930s and 40s.

It was this archive – the Spanish Collection — that first brought me to Marx House almost ten years ago. My grandfather, Jimmy Jump, was an International Brigader.

His experiences, and those of my grandmother, Cayetana Lozano Diaz who fled Spain as a refugee from the Civil War, inspired me to study the Aid Spain movement as an undergraduate. I sat at the back of the Marx Memorial Library’s Reading Room leafing through Daily Worker reports on grass roots support for the Spanish Republic.

I’ve been hooked ever since. n

theory&struggle 9

Yuri Emilianov

‘The decisive role of the USSR in the victory over Hitler’s Germany and its allies was provided by the socialist order which embodied Marxist principles of economic and social organization that proved superior to capitalism.’

2015 Karl Marx oration

Yuri Emilianov

Comrades!

As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany and its allies it is necessary to call attention to the crucial fact that before the Second World War was launched its instigators declared their rabid anti-communism and virulent anti-Marxism.

Out of 680 pages of Mein Kampf 110 were filled with vicious attacks on Marxism and Karl Marx himself.

(Only two topics – “Jews” and “National Socialist Party” – occupied more space in Hitler’s book.) Assaults on communists and assassinations preceded the ban on the Communist Party of Germany and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. The same happened in Italy and other European countries where fascists came to power.

The bloc of 12 fascist and militarist states was organised in the Anti-Comintern Pact concluded in 1936 by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Its participants pledged to destroy the international communist movement.

Although the USSR was attacked by Nazi Germany and its allies only in the 22nd month of the Second

10 theory&struggle

World War the fighting on the Eastern Front against the Red Army was the longest German military engagement.

73% of the combat casualties inflicted on the German military took place on the Eastern front. No other country attacked by the armies of the anti-communist bloc suffered as many human losses as the Soviet Union.

In my country 27 million were killed, tens of millions were wounded. The first victims executed by the invaders were the communists and the political commissars – the propagandists of Marxism.

The Nazis and their allies did their worst – to annihilate the Soviet people, who resisted with their motto – the last words of the Communist Manifesto – “Workers of all lands, unite!”. These words were written on the coats of arms of the USSR and its 16 Soviet Socialist republics.

Contrary to the Marxist theory – of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its replacement by the social order of human justice and fraternity of nations – Hitler and other Nazi leaders preached the advent of the “Millennium Reich” based on the principles of social,

political and national inequality.

They outlined plans for the enslavement and brutal extermination of those whom they considered “creatures of lower order”. In his speech to Wehrmacht officers the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, said in January 1937: “We are more valuable than others, who outnumber us… The next decades will be occupied by a prolonged struggle.

It will be terminated by the extermination of all those subhuman creatures which oppose Germans – the main nation of the Aryan race, the only standard-bearer of the world’s culture”.

These, and other pronouncements of the Nazi leaders, were practically realized in destructive wars against peaceful populations and the plunder of occupied countries which resulted in mass hunger. And in the construction of extermination camps.

The Second World War showed that the communists – who were the most consistent followers of Marxism – were also the staunchest fighters against these attempts to thwart the course of history and return the mankind to barbarism and the mass extermination of human beings.

In all the countries which were invaded by Nazi Germany and its allies communists were at the vanguard of those who fought the aggressors. This was true in China where the 8th army and the 4th army led by the Communist Party staged the most stubborn resistance to the Japanese invaders. This was the case in Vietnam, Malaya, Indonesia and Philippines.

The communists took the most active part in the Resistance movement of France and other European countries. They led the armed guerilla formations in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and Italy.

From 22 June 1941 – under the leadership of the Communist Party which in1917 had become the first Marxist party in power – the Soviet peoples defended their country and the whole of mankind from the threat of enslavement and genocide. Every second Red Army soldier or officer killed during the war was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Many newly enlisted soldiers and officers joined the party and by the end of the war every fourth person serving in the Red Army was a communist.

At the frontlines and behind them the study of Marxist theory continued. Despite wartime hardships 17

million copies of five hundred books by Marx, Engels and Lenin were published in the USSR. A collection of articles Marx and Engels against the reactionary forces of Germany was published and widely read. Every year anniversaries of the birth and death of Karl Marx were marked in the press. His biographies and the memoirs of his contemporaries were printed. Thus Karl Marx aided the fight against the invasion of Nazi barbarians.

The decisive role of the USSR in the victory over Hitler’s Germany and its allies was provided by the socialist order which embodied Marxist principles of economic and social organization that proved superior to capitalism. This is a reason why the USSR managed to overtake capitalist Germany and its European allies in armament production. Soviet engineers and workers produced a number of weapons which were superior to those of Germany and other Western European countries. By the middle of the war the Soviet war industry had overtaken the enemy in the quantity of arms production.

In his speeches during the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin said that the Soviet peoples – in defending their Fatherland and the conquests of socialist revolution – demonstrated their moral superiority over the aggressors. Whether fighting at fronts or toiling in factories or on collective farms the Soviet people withstood severe hardships and displayed heroic courage.

Despite the defeat of socialism in the USSR and other European countries the memory of the victory over Nazi Germany inspires the communists of Russia to continue struggle for the restoration of the Soviet socialist order. The communists of Russia are aware of the great part played by Karl Marx in the past victories of our country. This is a reason why every year the communists of Russia’s capital convene their meetings on the 1st of May and on the 7th of November at the foot of the huge monument of Karl Marx which stands at the center of Moscow.

Russian communists are aware that profound study of Marxism and active use of Marxist dialectical methods will again help them to pave the way for new victories. n

theory&struggle 11

Jonathan White

‘For Marx, because we are part of the material world and our thought is a product of that world, in order to know something and be able to act accordingly, we have to actively transform it into thought.’

Ilyenkov and Dialectical Materialism

P

Jonathan White researched, taught and published in history at the universities of Warwick and Southampton, before going to work for the AUT and is successor union, the UCU. He is editor of Building an Economy for the People, published

by Manifesto Press in 2013, and currently teaches on the Marx Memorial Library’s education programme. He can be contacted at jonathanwhite2@ hotmail.com.

12 theory&struggle

ART OF The Marx Memorial Library’s programme of educational events this year has been a short course on dialectical materialism. This meant returning to the classics of dialectical materialist thought, beginning with Marx’s inversion of Hegel and with Engels and Lenin’s development of dialectical materialism into the outlines of a science that could understand the priority of the material world as a complex, moving and internally contradictory whole, understand thought as an expression of contradictions in that material world, ‘reproduce’ it concretely in the form of thought and translate it into revolutionary practice.

In later classes we looked at the way in which British Communist Party writers and philosophers had popularised this body of thought, developing and applying it to the task of educating British revolutionary workers and help them to understand their struggles as part of a complex moving concrete that needed to be analysed using dialectical materialism.

Our course concluded with an examination of the work of Evald Ilyenkov, the Soviet philosopher who perhaps did more than anyone in the post-war period to develop dialectical materialism as a science and method. It is not particularly fashionable to look at the work of Soviet philosophers at the moment. Even in that part of the academic world that likes to describe itself as Marxist, or influenced by Marx, his work is rarely referenced. The reasons for this phenomenon are complex but in part, it reflects a Western liberal academic prejudice about the nature of intellectual production in the USSR. This is a massive subject and I do not propose to deal with it here. Suffice it to say, that while there were clearly problems with official orthodoxy at times, any sustained and sensitive treatment reveals that there was far more room for creativity and innovation in Soviet dialectical materialism than Western caricatures will allow. In fact, it’s at least arguable that dialectical materialism as a science and method was really only significantly developed in the socialist states. Recovering that work and examining its legacy for today’s socialists is a substantial labour that would repay a genuine Marxist,

dialectical materialist analysis. In this essay, I want to show some of the potential value of recovering Soviet philosophy by looking briefly at Ilyenkov’s work on dialectical method as contained in his 1960 book, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital.

Ilyenkov was born in 1924 and studied philosophy in Moscow before serving in the Great Patriotic War from 1942 onwards. After the war, he worked in Moscow’s university and then the Moscow Philosophical Institute. Ilyenkov has been described as part of a flowering of Soviet Philosophy in the period following Stalin’s death and at the time of Khrushchev’s early reforms.1 Events in Ilyenkov’s career and his eventual death by suicide have been used in acts of politically motivated disinfection, designed to portray him as a tragic embryonic dissident destroyed by Stalinism. This view, in particular, is one sided to say the least. Ilyenkov’s relationship with the dominant philosophical trends in the Soviet Union was strained at times and he did lose his position at Moscow University following what appears to have been a robust call for an overhaul and renewal of Soviet Philosophy.

Yet he continued to publish in the theoretical journal of the Communist Party, while his works were also translated into English and published by Progress Press. The attempt to paint Ilyenkov as a political opponent of ‘Stalinism’, whatever is meant by that, is embarrassingly one-sided, not to say trashy, and certainly shows nothing of the philosopher’s own commitment to concrete analysis.

Ilyenkov deserves a lasting reputation as one of the most important philosophical voices in the post-war Soviet Union, associated with a strong insistence on the importance of Hegelian dialectics in understanding Lenin’s thought and a strong insistence on the social creation of the higher forms of thought and mental ability, influenced by the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky.

Ilyenkov set himself against tendencies that he considered to lead away from dialectical materialism in Marxism Leninism, particularly those that he considered led toward reductionist accounts of human development and technological determinist accounts of socialist development towards communism.2 In The

theory&struggle 13

Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, Ilyenkov was concerned to demonstrate that Marx’s master work was not just a brilliant analysis of the inner working of capitalism but also was a consummate exercise in dialectical materialist method.

Within this, one of Ilyenkov’s key contributions was to show very clearly the particular work that thought and logic have to do in applying dialectical method.

Ilyenkov’s project: developing Marx’s dialectical materialist method

Marx’s dialectical materialism means that he treats the act of thinking in a particular way. For Marx, because we are part of the material world and our thought is a product of that world, in order to know something and be able to act accordingly, we have to actively transform it into thought. Because the material world is a complex, dynamic, constantly changing whole, we need dialectical thinking to be able to reproduce it in the form of thought. That’s why in the opening sections of the Grundrisse, during his meditations on methodology Marx talks about thought as ‘appropriating’ and ‘concentrating’ the concrete into the form of thought. The concrete is Marx’s term for the complex dynamic material world in all its relationships: ‘The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.’3 This is obviously a different language from the common sense ways in which we talk about thinking and it’s different from the ways in which philosophers traditionally talk about thought. Whether they view thinking as the act of a passive contemplating consciousness or of an active, world-creating consciousness, philosophers have tended to assume that there is a fundamentally unbridgeable gulf between us and things ‘in themselves’. For Marx, by contrast, that gulf does not exist. Instead, we are part of the material world and our consciousness expresses and reflects that world in all its complexity and dynamism, in the form of thought. Grasping the concrete is an act of ‘concentration’ in the form of thought. Effective knowledge is created by starting with the critical abstract categories and moving toward an understanding of complex, concrete realities by uncovering the dynamics within and relationships between them. That’s why he says, ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind.’ 4 When Marx talks about moving from the abstract to the concrete, he’s not dismissing abstract ideas as simply ideas, products of our minds. In most philosophy, our ideas and concepts are seen as ‘subjective’, originating and located in our minds or in language systems and getting between us and the an understanding of the world or. Alternatively, they are

14 theory&struggle

seen to structure the exterior world that exists beyond us. Marx’s introduction to Grundrisse gives us a very different picture of the relationship between the ideas with which we think and the material world. Marx argues that ideas and concepts are themselves the result of historical developments and they express material developments in the form of thought.

Accordingly, it makes no sense to see ideas and concepts as simply getting in the way of ‘making’ our world view. Instead even our most abstract categories and concepts express and reveal to us aspects, albeit partial and often distorted aspects, of the world and of its development.

These relatively brief passages of Marx’s in the Grundrisse, are Ilyenkov’s starting point in Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete. Ilyenkov was concerned to develop Marx’s dialectical understanding of abstraction and concreteness. On the one hand, he wanted to develop the insight that what we normally consider to be products of our brain, our thought, language and our most abstract ideas, are in fact social and historical products emerging out of a complex, preexisting concrete reality. On the other, he wanted to elaborate in more detail, just how thought which is properly conducted and understood can concentrate and ‘appropriate’ concreteness. In particular, he stressed the need to create seemingly abstract concepts which can uncover the inner essence of complex phenomena and reproduce them in the form of thought.

He calls these concepts ‘concrete abstracts’. To understand what he means by concrete abstracts, we need to look at how Ilyenkov develops dialectical materialist understandings of concreteness and abstraction through critical engagement with the dominant understandings of these categories in bourgeois thought.

The abstract and the concrete

Ilyenkov was particularly concerned to attack the common, mainstream notions of abstractness and the concrete, especially as it had become sedimented into dominant philosophical tradition and common-sense.

This can be briefly caricatured as the idea that concreteness is that which we immediately and directly sensually experience, while abstraction is the process of establishing relationships in our minds between things we directly encounter. We see, hear feel and touch things, and we build them up into a picture of the world by abstracting them into kinds and types and we establish relationships between them. Abstract concepts, according to this tradition are made out of those properties of a thing that are general or universal to many things. A swan is a concrete thing expressed in a concrete idea. Whiteness is an abstract property of swans, along with many other things. One way of thinking about the abstract and concrete in this tradition is to say that concrete concepts tell us a lot

about one thing and abstract concepts tell us a little about a lot of things. Some version of this view of the difference between the abstract and the concrete is common to the thought of English empiricism, eighteenth-century mechanical materialism and Kant’s German idealism, as well as later English and American philosophy. Ilyenkov argues that this is a poor account of the world, a poor account of how we experience and create knowledge and a poor account of how we use concepts in thought. Its fundamental weakness, he argues is that it relies on a ‘Robinson Crusoe epistemology’ in which ‘the subject of cognition is a separate human individual isolated from the concatenation of social links and opposed to ‘all the rest’.5 Drawing on the work of the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky, Ilyenkov instead shows that the most basic empirical experience is in fact a complex socially mediated and determined process. Every individual rises to consciousness within society and finds a preexisting, objective spiritual culture which they have to assimilate through its various forms: politics, law, morality, religion, social life, basic norms of conduct and so on. ‘As a result, each separate sensual impression arising in individual consciousness, is always a product of refraction of external stimuli through the extremely complex prism of the forms of social consciousness the individual has acquired. This prism is a consequence of social human development’.6 Ilyenkov follows Vygotsky further in arguing that human consciousness, experience and thought are fully social products and our capacity for empirical experience and higher reasoning emerge and develop in a dialectical process. Consequently, there is no Robinson Crusoe fairy tale in which the individual commences building their individual world view empirically and then working out their own higher concepts. Every experience is articulated through language, which is itself a social product, the sedimentation of social memory. Our most basic (and earliest) empirical encounters are given form through our acquisition of speech and language: “Owing to speech, one ‘sees’ the world not only and not so much through his own eyes as through millions of eyes…The content of a notion comprehends that which is retained in social memory, in the forms of this social memory as represented, first of all, by speech, by language…

Having a notion means having a socially comprehended (that is, expressed in speech or capable of being expressed in speech) contemplation. Neither I nor some other individual form a concept of some thing if I, through speech, observe this thing through the eyes of another individual or this other individual contemplates it through my eyes. We engage in mutual exchange of notions. A notion is precisely that – verbally expressed contemplation.”7

If the empirical stage of contemplating and knowing something is socially determined by social, human development, what about our abstract ideas? Ilyenkov shows that Marx viewed abstract categories and the tendency to think in abstractions as an expression of real developments. ‘Time and again’, Ilyenkov shows, ‘Marx uses this term to characterise real phenomena and relations existing outside consciousness, irrespective of whether they are reflected in consciousness’. Ilyenkov uses the example of abstract labour, which we looked at in Marx’s introduction to the Grundrisse. Abstract labour, Marx says, is a real phenomenon, a ‘real abstraction’ as previously differentiated forms of productive activity are thrown together by commodification and the growth of wage labour. 8 Ilyenkov is arguing here that for dialectical materialism there is no inherent difference in the level of concreteness of the basic notions that comprise our language and the abstract universal categories of ‘thought’. In actuality, both are materially and socially produced. Everyday notions and universal abstractions may be social, material and real but left as they are, they are of course, fragmentary, one-sided and incomplete aspects of concrete reality. In order to be made concrete, they have to be used to expose the real connections and relationships between things.

Concreteness can be endowed on these basic ideas or so-called ‘abstract’ universal categories according to how well they are combined in concrete analysis.

Ilyenkov follows Marx, Lenin and other dialectical materialists in viewing the objective of thinking as concentrating, reproducing and thereby ‘appropriating’ concrete reality to enable effective practice in the world. In any case where we want to know and understand something we have to be able to reproduce it in our thought as a unity of diverse aspects, a dialectical unity of connection, interconnection and interaction of phenomena within a certain system.

“The concrete (and not the abstract) – as reality taken as a whole in its development, in its law governed division – is always something primary with respect to the abstract (whether this abstract should be construed as a separate relatively isolated moment of reality or its mental verbally recorded reflection). At the same time any concreteness exists only through its own discrete elements (things, relations) as their specific combination, synthesis, unity… That is exactly why the concrete is reflected in thought only as a unity of diverse definitions, each of which records precisely one of the moments actually distinguished in its structure. Consistent mental reproduction of the concrete is therefore realised as ‘ascent from the abstract to the concrete’ that is, as logical combination (synthesis) of particular definitions into an aggregate overall theoretical picture of reality, as movement of thought from the

theory&struggle 15

particular to the general”.

The dialectical materialist study of language and its role in human and psychological development can uncover the real relationships underpinning the words and simple notions with which we encounter and appropriate the world, but the particular task of philosophy or logic, not as a discipline, but as a moment in the process of knowing something, according to Ilyenkov, is to turn abstractions into concepts. By concepts, Ilyenkov means something very specific. He is very precisely using Hegel’s idea of the concept as something which ‘expresses the essence of contemplated phenomana’. Concepts are the way in which dialectical science becomes concrete. The task of logic and complex thought can be posed as a question, Ilyenkov says: ‘How is one to work out an abstraction which would express the objective essence of facts given in contemplation and notion?’ The task of philosophical or logical thought is to work out what he calls concrete or universal abstract concepts. 10 Concrete abstract concepts

Working out a concrete abstract, Ilyenkov says is a process of identifying what he calls ‘the fundamental, primary, universal abstract definitions of the whole, with which a theoretical construction should always begin’, or ‘the undeveloped, elementary, ‘cellular’ formation, developing through contradictions immanently inherent in it into other, more complex and well-developed formations’.11 In Chapter 5 of Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete, Ilyenkov shows how Marx does this in Capital. Ilyenkov’s argument is that Marx’s concept of value in Capital is precisely a concrete abstract. You can’t touch it or see it, unlike money, as it has no immediate phenomenal form. Nonetheless, value is there at the heart of capitalism, containing the most fundamental relationships that make capitalism function.

To create his concrete abstract, Marx has to first of all initiate an analytical moment of abstraction in which he ‘breaks up the dialectic of reality’, to use Lenin’s phrase. This is why, Ilyenkov says, ‘Marx intentionally leaves out of account any other forms – money or profit or wages. All of these things are believed to be nonexistent’. Instead, Ilyenkov argues, Marx creates a concrete abstraction by a dialectical analysis of capitalism in its simplest, universal, cellular form – the commodity. The commodity is precisely the ‘the objectively simplest further indivisible element of a system of interaction, a cell of the analysed whole’. The task of any science that wants to understand how things work, Ilyenkov maintains, is to start with a concrete analysis of the composition and existence of an elementary manifestation of life and he argues by analogy with chemistry and biology and the study of hydrogen and proteins.

16 theory&struggle

Analysing the commodity in the abstract, away from many of its more complex phenomenal forms and relationships allows Marx to analyse value as logically prior to profits, wages and money, for example. Within the commodity, Marx finds value in two forms, use value and exchange value which allows him to analyse capitalism as a contradictory system in which social production creates use values for sale in a market on the basis of the exploitation of labour through the extraction of surplus value. On the basis of this concrete abstraction, the entire basic operation of capitalist production is explained, making possible analysis of the functioning of its more complex forms.

12

But one more thing is necessary to make value a concrete abstraction. It must be historically specific.

Ilyenkov’s argument, following Marx is that we can only make the abstraction fully concrete by analysing it through the entire history of human social practice.

Ilyenkov, following Marx, shows what happens when thought does not do this by looking at Political Economy and the writings of Ricardo and Smith. Both were able to recognise that labour was the source of wealth and value but they were unable to recognise the actual operation of capitalism through the value relationship and the specific logical priority of the labour theory of value because they assumed that the categories they were using and the relationships underpinning them were universal. Abstracting on the basis that they could see private property and labour as the source of wealth as universal facts around them, they were unable to theoretically synthesise this into a functioning system because these categories were plucked out of the process of historical unfolding through the totality of human history. Ilyenkov likens this process to the scientist who dissects the rabbit into all its component parts but having effectively destroyed the animal, cannot reverse the process to create something living.

By contrast, concrete theoretical analysis, Ilyenkov says, ‘means that a thing is divided into internally connected, necessary forms of its existence specific to it rather than into components indifferent to its specific nature’. 13 This can only be done, Ilyenkov says, by ‘a detailed analysis of the reality on which a theoretical judgment is being passed from the standpoint of the entire practice of mankind’, or again, on the basis of ‘a conscious historical view of the analysed reality, on the basis of the conception of any objective reality as a historically emergent and developed system of interacting phenomena’. 14 “It is only the practice of social mankind, that is the totality of historically developing forms of actual interaction of social man with nature, that proves to be both the basis and the verification criterion of theoretical analysis and synthesis.”15 Ilyenkov demonstrates this in the specific case of capitalism, showing that ‘it is not labour in general but

the concrete historical form of labour that was conceived as the substance of value’. It is precisely undifferentiated, commodified labour as it historically unfolds that creates value, not labour as productive activity conceived in its most general historically articulated forms. Marx’s analysis of value not just as a structuring abstraction but as a historically unfolding and specific abstraction makes it able to reconstruct the concrete living organism of capitalism in its most elemental form in the mind. At this point, value has become a concrete abstraction.

Conclusion

Ilyenkov’s work is of enduring importance for several reasons. Firstly, Ilyenkov makes a sustained and detailed argument about dialectical materialist method, about exactly how we think if we subscribe to the Marxist understanding of the relationship between thought and the material world. Taking Marx and Lenin’s insights based on their readings of Hegel, Ilyenkov develops this into a detailed argument that Marx’s Capital is a consummate exercise in dialectical method that repays close study.

Ilyenkov also conducts this discussion at a high philosophical level. Ilyenkov was not a dry, arcane academic and was quite capable of engaging and writing at a less theoretical level, but in Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete, he was making an argument that consciously took on Western bourgeois philosophy.

Throughout the book, Ilyenkov constantly contrasts the explanatory force of dialectical materialism with Western analytic philosophy, scepticism and with political economy. At a time when these philosophies appear, to an extent at least dominant once again, Ilyenkov’s exposure of their limits repays reading.

Finally, Ilyenkov’s focus on the abstract and the concrete and the particular role that logic and highly developed thought play in cognition is a major contribution to dialectical materialism. Ilyenkov makes the claim that dialectical science must involve a labour of creation — the creation of concrete abstractions that can ‘break up the concrete dialectic of reality’. Using the example of Marx’s concept of value, Ilyenkov argues that such abstractions can help us theoretically unlock phenomena, revealing the inner logical and historical relationships within the mass of empirical matter and existing abstract categories through which the concrete presents itself. Concrete abstractions help us concentrate and appropriate the concrete in the form of thought, enabling us to translate thought back into effective practical activity in the world. n

Footnotes 1 For the major Western study of Ilyenkov’s work, see the generally unimpeachable study by David Bakhurst. Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov (Cambridge, 1991).

2 This is the core of Bakhurst’s argument in Consciousness and Revolution.

3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin, London, 1973), p. 101.

4 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101.

5 E. V. Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital (Delhi, 2013), p.40.

6 Ilyenkov, Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete, p. 41.

7 Ibid., p. 43.

8 Ibid., p. 34.

9 Ibid., p. 58, 10 Ibid., pp. 48-50.

11 Ibid., p. 59.

12 See the discussion on pp. 223-226. Marx’s analysis of what Ilyenkov calls the ‘inner restlessness’ of the commodity is discussed in detail on pp. 254-268.

13 Ibid. p. 226.

14 Ibid., pp. 230-231.

15 Ibid., p. 229.

theory&struggle 17

Leo Impett ‘Artificial intelligence, perhaps more than any other technical or mathematical endeavour, is influenced by a host of underlying ideologies and values.’

Vygotsky and Marxist artificial intelligence This is an introductory review article on the increasing use of Vygotskian psychology for artificial intelligence and is intended for a nontechnical audience. It seeks to explain the role of Vygotskian Activity Theory in debates on artificial intelligence by understanding the cultural, historical and technical thinking behind artificial intelligence research.

The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky sought to establish a specifically Marxist approach to human thought and language that related the development of consciousness to tool-using social production and the role of language in enabling such collective, practical interaction. He argued that instrumental and abstract thought stemmed materially from the way humans collectively use tools, from the simple to the complex, to develop – both over time as a species and immediately for the intellectual development of each child.

Vygotsky died of tuberculosis in 1934 but his cultural-historical psychology was actively carried forward in the Soviet Union, among others, by A. R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev. In the West his work remained relatively unknown, or at least unestablished, until advances in the educational and developmental psychology of the 1970s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, his work – particularly Activity Theory (AT) — has become central to the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI), which had been to a large extent based on the mechanistic notions of cybernetics and cognitive science.

In the context of artificial intelligence, Activity Theory has passed through two opaque reappropriations: that of Western psychologists during the Cold War, and that of computer scientists in the last decade. Marxist elements of his cultural-historical psychology, of which Activity Theory forms a central part, have been largely ignored 1. At the same time, critiques of artificial intelligence tend to focus on cybernetic or cognitive-science models of computation, which are both philosophically and technically outdated. Very recent developments in deep learning have changed the technical field considerably — and might lead to a new era of self-critical technical research.

18 theory&struggle

Cybernetics, GOFAI, Deep Learning

Unlike Vygotskian theories, which emerged from his work on child development and the psychology of art, cybernetics grew largely out of American research into anti-aircraft gun control systems in the Second World War 2. Cybernetics is largely related to the control of industrial systems, feedback loops, and analogue control. Philosophically it was, for French cognitive scientist Jean-Pierre Dupuy: not the anthropomorphization of the machine but rather the mechanization of the human 3 With the advent of digital computing, artificial intelligence and cybernetics split into separate fields only at a special conference in 1956; with artificial intelligence moving into the digital realm of symbolic representation and rule-based thinking. This rule-based paradigm dominated work in artificial intelligence until after the fall of the Soviet Union. It considered intelligence to be replicable by the rule-based manipulation of symbols, which was also the technical base for digital computing at that time. Newell and Simon best summarised the major axiom of this view, naming it the Physical Symbol System Hypothesis: A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action 4 This move coincided with a similar trend in psychology towards cognitive science, a symbolic and representational understanding of the human mind.

This form of artificial intelligence, now called Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), was quite successful in solving symbolic problems for which a system had been especially designed — such as the famous game between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov. However, these systems of symbolic representation found it difficult to work in a real, physical environment, where signals were noisy and situations largely unpredictable. American roboticist Rodney Brooks became one of the strongest critics of GOFAI, most famously in his 1990 paper Elephants Don't Play Chess; instead, he proposed a system where: Physical interaction with the environment [is] the primary source of constraint on the design of intelligent systems 5

This emergent, situated understanding of intelligence has been the state-of-the-art since the early 1990s — even in systems that have nothing to do with the physical world (such as stock-market trading).

Intelligent systems are no longer encoded with specific rules, but are simply provided with large datasets and methods of pseudo-symbolic quantifiable encoding.

Machine Learning 6, now a more common term than ‘artificial intelligence’, is a statistical process of linking feature vectors (a series of numbers that encode something about a situation) to labels (manual annotations about the situation, which we would like to later predict).

In the simplest case, one might learn the relationship between wind speed (a feature vector) and rainfall, and learn to predict the probability of future rain based on wind measurements. Similar systems are used for very complex tasks, with a considerable level of success in linking simple calculable properties to complex high-level representations. A classic computer-vision task, for instance, is learning to classify images (a cat, a human, a car) between very simple feature vectors based on colour or gradient (see Figure 1 above 7) — which state-of-the-art systems can do with near-perfect accuracy, an unthinkable task for the explicit symbolic manipulation of GOFAI. An important development in artificial intelligence, enabled by a rapid increase in the speed of

Creative Commons

Leo Impatt is completing his Master’s Degree in machine learning at the engineering Department of the University of Cambridge, and will shortly start a doctoral fellowship in Computer Science at the Ecole Poytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and humancomputer interaction, focusing particularly on musical interaction, performance and the digital humanities.

Figure 1: an image detected as a human (left) and a gradient-based feature vector (right): adapted from Dalal et al

Lev Vygotsky

computation available to researchers, is deep learning.

Deep learning systems are based on large networks of artificial neurons, designed to emulate the most basic functions of biological neural intelligence. Deep learning systems are heavily related to classical machine learning, with an important distinction: under deep learning, it is frequently not necessary to explicitly encode a feature vector. High-level symbolic or representational structure is learned from raw data: in the example in Figure 1, we would learn to detect a human in an image based only on the raw pixel values (which, in the digital realm, is the image itself), and not explicitly specifying a lower-dimensional representation of colour gradients. In late 2013, DeepMind (now owned by Google) demonstrated the generalisable power of this approach, by teaching a deep neural network to play a series of Atari videogames based only on the pixel values of the computer-screen — training a single generic model to be able to play six different games 8.

The lack of an explicit feature poses an ethical problem in many applications of artificial intelligence.

In industry, computer vision techniques are frequently used for intelligent security and surveillance camera systems. Where classic machine learning techniques of feature encoding would focus largely on quite abstract hand-crafted feature encodings (such as Figure 1, right), deep learning systems take into account the totality of the information in an image. Indeed, it is technically very difficult — in some cases impossible — to have a deep learning system actively ignore any information it is fed.

Why does this pose an ethical problem? Because there is some information present in a statistical sense which we are ethically bound not to consider. In the US, a black male is 4.9 times more likely to be arrested than the population average. We might consider a situation where we feed such a deep learning surveillance system a ‘training dataset’ — a few hundred CCTV videos of arrested people, and a few thousand of non-arrested people. Such a deep learning system, designed to alert suspicious activity, would — by simple Bayesian inference — sound a false alarm 4.9 times more for black men than for the average

theory&struggle 19

passer-by. Previous generations of artificial intelligence have avoided this statistical and ethical dilemma through some degree of explicit encoding — either in rules (GOFAI) or in carefully-designed feature vectors (classical machine learning). With deep learning, the only obvious method of overcoming this problematic bias is to manually skew the ‘training dataset’ (such as selecting to balance gender, age or skin colour) — in practice this is unfeasible, technically impossible (as many systems learn on-the-go) and inexhaustive.

Critical Artificial Intelligence

As computers become more like us, a social and political understanding of human development is necessary to interpret their actions — which are often mathematically opaque, due to the very large number of artificial neurons used. Critiques of artificial intelligence have, to a large extent, been based on the GOFAI rule-based technical paradigm — Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics are essentially explicit symbolic rules for robots to follow.

Artificial intelligence, perhaps more than any other technical or mathematical endeavour, is influenced by a host of underlying ideologies and values. With historical development in (and significant economic backing from) the cold-war military research program of the United States, artificial intelligence has inherited a hegemonic worldview: in the words of Philip Agre, “AI has never had much of a reflexive critical practice”.

Agre, professor of Informatics at UCLA, was the most important cultural critic of artificial intelligence to have a significant influence on the field itself — due to his prominence as a researcher in the field. His work has sought to establish a (self-)Critical Technical Practice of artificial intelligence, taking into account the hidden social, cultural and ideological assumptions9. Although this call for a self-critical form of artificial intelligence is as relevant as ever, the bulk of his specific criticism sought to challenge GOFAI — which, as noted above, is a technically outdated paradigm of intelligence.

Activity Theory and Developmental Psychology

As the basis for artificial intelligence moves from explicitly-encoded symbols and rules to learned trends, the academic community has looked towards psychological frameworks that focus on development and learning. Activity Theory started to gain traction in the 1990s in the closely-related field of humancomputer interaction — and has more recently been considered by members of the artificial intelligence community.

Activity theory, as understood by the technical community, is a loose framework built not on fixed rules of symbolic manipulations, but on flexible and situated approaches to an activity. It is beyond the scope of this

20 theory&struggle

paper to discuss the psychological merits of Activity Theory over cognitive science, but one of the key technical merits of Activity Theory is that the basic mechanisms change according to the situation, key to the situated generation of artificial intelligence.

Leontiev provides us with a good example of these situated mechanisms: when learning to drive, gearshifting is a complex physical solution to some explicit conscious goal. In an experienced driver, gear-shifting becomes an operational act and “for the driver, gearshifting physiologically ceases to exist” 10.

In such a framework, subjects are actors engaged in an Activity, directed towards an object; this Activity is then mediated by artefacts, instruments, communities, rules (how the subject related to the community) and the division of labour (how the object relates to the community). The idea of mediation by artefacts and instruments is key: computer-mediated activity has been proposed as a way of understanding humancomputer interaction in terms of Activity Theory: where a human is understood not to interact with a computer as an object, but rather with the world through a computer as a mediator 11.

As intelligent systems moved towards being situated (in the real world), through the critique and technical work of Brooks, Agre, and others, a new paradigm of human intelligence was generally accepted: situated cognition. This model concerns itself with our ability to act in an emergent, improvisatory way from routine knowledge about our situation. In this case, ‘intelligence’ consists not only of conscious symbolic intelligence such as playing chess, but also physical or improvisatory intelligence, such as running through a park.

One of the concrete technical contributions of Activity Theory to artificial intelligence is the concept of social situatedness. By analogy to the physical situatedness proposed by Brooks, a socially-situated intelligence would learn from the social and cultural interactions around it — which, in Activity theory, are part of the context that shapes an Activity. Vygotsky talks specifically about cognitive development — which, in the case of machine learning and deep learning, seems a more useful concept than static cognitive intelligence. Under Vygotskian cognitive development, intelligence emerges explicitly from both physical and social situatedness.

A Vygotskian understanding of social cognitive development has already proved useful for the analysis and development of multi-agent systems 12,13 — that is, systems composed of individual agents (virtual or robotic), each of which is intelligent in some computational way. Multi-agent intelligent systems must be at the heart of technical research in sociallysituated intelligence: by creating an intelligent population (instead of an intelligent individual), social interactions form an explicit part of the artificial cognitive development process.

Mathematically, we are ill-equipped to deal with such social complexity. Advanced methods of machine learning on an individual level are already nearunsolvable — much work is done to create algorithms which approximate our mathematical models in a reasonable time. With even a small dynamic population of agents, each member of which is a learning individual, we soon find that the complexity of social and cognitive interactions makes analytical predictions impossible: we are forced to run computational or physical simulations.

Cultural-historical artificial intelligence

One of the major differences between the ‘expert systems’ of GOFAI and the machine learning systems of today is their deployment on a huge scale. Through Google and recommender systems, most of our internet news and information are mediated (in a Vygotskian sense) by machine learning systems. The industrial and economic role that machine learning algorithms play is already huge, from ‘Big Data’ in healthcare to automated high-frequency trading. In such a situation, Agre’s call for a critical technical practice is as relevant as ever, whatever his specific technical claims. Deep learning in particular, as an extremely recent development, has provoked relatively little informed criticism and no technical understanding of how intelligent machines might interact with each other.

Discussions in the technical literature of ‘social situatedness’ or ‘computer-mediated interaction’ frequently ignore the explicitly political nature of the works of Vygotsky and his circle — just as the militaristic and reductionist ideology of cybernetics and cognitive science was largely ignored, the MarxistLeninist basis of Activity Theory is mentioned only in passing.

Despite this, shifts in artificial intelligence towards an understanding of ‘situated’ cognition that emerges from physical and social interaction are perfectly aligned with a classical Marxist view of consciousness.

As Marx puts it in the German Ideology 14: Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct afflux from their material behaviour Vygotsky himself warned against applying quotes from Marx to psychology in order to bypass experimental work, arguing that a truly Marxist psychology would be distinguished by a methodology consistent with dialectical materialism — we must observe the same caution when treating artificial intelligence from a Marxist perspective, especially in his discussions of machinery. However, it is crucial that the technical community re-visits some of the political and ethical implications of Vygotskian psychology, and that future research can be informed by a historical and cultural understanding of previous attempts towards an artificial intelligence. n

Footnotes 1 There are 4890 academic papers artificial intelligence and Activity Theory, but only 143 on artificial intelligence and cultural-historical psychology (Google Scholar) 2 Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. Dark hero of the information age: In search of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics. Basic Books, 2009.

3 Dupuy, Jean Pierre, and MB DeBevoise. The mechanization of the mind: on the origins of cognitive science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

4 Newell, Allen, and Herbert A Simon. “Computer science as empirical inquiry: Symbols and search.” Communications of the ACM 19.3 (1976): 113-126.

5 Brooks, Rodney A. "Elephants don't play chess." Robotics and autonomous systems 6.1 (1990): 3-15.

6 Here we refer to supervised and semi-supervised Machine Learning 7 Dalal, Navneet, and Bill Triggs. "Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection." Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2005. CVPR 2005. IEEE Computer Society Conference on 25 Jun. 2005: 886-893.

8 Mnih, Volodymyr et al. "Playing atari with deep reinforcement learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.5602 (2013).

9 Agre, Philip. Computation and human experience. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

10 Leontiev, Aleksei N. "The problem of activity in psychology."

Soviet psychology 13.2 (1974): 4-33.

11 Kaptelinin, Victor. "Computer-mediated activity: Functional organs in social and developmental contexts." Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction (1996): 45-68.

12 Fuentes, Rubén, Jorge J Gómez-Sanz, and Juan Pavón.

"Checking social properties of multi-agent systems with Activity Theory." Advances in Artificial Intelligence–IBERAMIA 2004 (2004): 1-11.

13 Fuentes, Rubén, Jorge J Gómez-Sanz, and Juan Pavón.

"Activity theory for the analysis and design of multi-agent systems." Agent-Oriented Software Engineering IV (2004): 110122.

14 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology (1845), p.13. London, 1965.

theory&struggle 21

Jonathan Michie 1 ‘This domination of the shareholder ownership model, whose purpose is to maximise financial returns to the shareholders, proved a lethal combination with deregulation which led to the creation of new financial instruments, rising debt levels and a bloated financial sector – generally referred to as a process of financialisation.’

Economic theory and policy

Jonathan Michie is Professor of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Oxford where he is Director of the Department for Continuing Education and President of Kellogg College. He is contactable at jonathan.michie@ke llogg.ox.ac.uk.

T

HE OWNERSHIP of productive assets plays a crucial role in the functioning of any economy, and also has profound implications for other aspects of social life, such as the degree of wealth and income inequality, the quality of working life, and the functioning of democracy.

The rise of capitalism was based originally on private (and family) ownership of productive assets, and then led to the development of ‘limited liability’, which facilitated the creation and growth of shareholder-owned companies. This private ownership of the nation’s productive resources – the factories, farms, mills, mines, railroads and so forth – placed great economic power in the hands of the new class of owners, which in turn tended to bestow upon them political power and social influence. The resulting inequality of income, harsh working conditions, and economic instability – where economic downturns left the unemployed with no means to support themselves – led to various alternative visions for a non-capitalist society, where wealth and power would be more evenly distributed, crucially through some alternative to private ownership of the ‘means of production’. For Robert Owen this would be based on co-operative and mutual principles; for Marx it would be through the ‘appropriation of the appropriators’, with the means of production owned collectively by society – operating in the first instance through the state.

These alternatives to capitalist ownership led in the centrally planned economies to state ownership and planning, and across most Western European economies to the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy being government owned and controlled – the utilities (gas, electricity and water), major infrastructure industries (railways, post, telecommunications), and other large-scale enterprises such as coalmining, steel, and so forth. To these would be added companies – and even whole industries – that were seen to be failing in private hands, and which therefore needed to be nationalised in order to keep them operating – such as, in different countries at different times, shipbuilding and car production.

Alongside these forms of state ownership, co-

22 theory&struggle

operative and mutual ownership flourished to varying degrees – in the UK the co-op held a major market share in food retail up until the 1960s, before gradually losing out to the big supermarket chains.

From the early 1980s, Thatcherism in the UK led to privatisation, and this then spread globally. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this whole historical era of state ownership was pushed back significantly.

There followed an era of ‘capitalism unleashed’ (Glyn, 2007), with a shift back to private ownership (by individuals and shareholders) of companies, away from public and state ownership; a rolling back of public regulation of industries and sectors; a financialisation of society, whereby ever-more relations became marketised, with fewer and fewer free and subsidised goods; and with a resultant increase in inequality of wealth and income in almost every country of the world.

This new era of laissez faire capitalism led to the global financial crisis of 2007-08, which in turn created the first global recession since the 1930s, in 2009 – with world output and income levels actually declining (rather than just the rate of growth declining, as had happened in the downturns during the ‘golden age of capitalism’ of the 1950s and 1960s). Five years on, in 2014, the global economy had still not fully recovered, and the UK’s levels of output and income were still lower than they had been five years previously.

Yet despite this major failure of free market capitalism, there have been no major alternatives gaining widespread support along the lines of the above-described planned economies, or social democratic control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Neither has there been a generally accepted alternative to the failed ideology and theory of neoclassical economics and laissez faire capitalism which justified and promoted the era of capitalism unleashed, as had occurred in the 1930s with Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

It is true that the claims of ‘an end of history’ have been generally derided and disproved – most forcefully and convincingly by Milne (2012). And there have been socialist and social democratic governments elected across South America, and also in some

era which is sustainable environmentally, economically and socially. It will require a more equal ownership of wealth and productive assets than the extremely unequal situation that has been created by the past 25 years or so of capitalism unleashed. And it demands a greater degree of diversity of ownership forms – with stronger state, and co-operative and mutual sectors.

This is needed to make the productive system more resilient. It would also be a way of tackling the otherwise relentless drive to ever-greater inequality.

Failures of the current ownership model

European countries and even US cities. But in general, outside South America, whichever political party was in office at the time of the global financial crisis tended to suffer the political backlash. There has been no global consensus to replace capitalism unleashed.

This article considers what this sort of alternative might look like – for the UK and globally, in the short term and longer term. Just as the rise of capitalism led to the co-operative, Marxian and other critiques, and just as the crisis of the 1930s led to Keynesianism and social democracy across much of Western Europe and a new international order as fashioned at Bretton Woods, so the failure of capitalism unleashed needs to herald a new era of global economic development – an

The Ownership Commission was established in January 2010 by the Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell MP to review the state of ownership in the UK, to examine the extent to which it supports or inhibits successful, long-term value creation by business in all its ownership guises – recognising that given the scale of Britain’s economic challenges, it was time to reassess whether the balance of ownership obligations and rights had been struck correctly (Ownership Commission, 2012). The independent Commission recognised there was a growing awareness that in Britain one ownership type – the shareholder-owned PLC – dominates all others, to a degree not seen in other countries, nor seen in Britain prior to the privatisations and demutualisations that created an even greater dominance of the PLC model. This creates a two-fold problem. Firstly, this lack of corporate diversity creates systemic weaknesses. Secondly, the PLC model itself has become prone to short-termism, and a lack of proper stewardship has led to a series of problems including the ballooning of executive pay, often unrelated to genuine organisational performance (as opposed to financial returns which may be manipulated precisely to generate executive bonuses even when those manipulations are harming rather than supporting the underlying fundamentals of the business).

The Commission argued that there are three broad preconditions for good ownership. Firstly, a healthy economy needs diverse ways through which ownership can express itself and be applied to various business models. The consequent diversity will give the system

theory&struggle 23

more resilience and more opportunity to experiment with ownership forms as they are appropriate for different business models and purposes. It will also give investors and savers a greater diversity of choice.

Secondly, an ownership culture is needed which enables and encourages decisions to be taken on the basis of long-term results and outcomes, and takes its responsibility for good stewardship seriously. This will lift investment and innovation, and also create a richer ecology of more long-lived organisations. And thirdly, owners are needed to participate and engage in the strategies and behaviours of the firms they own: ‘absentee shareholders’ are bad for everyone.

Britain has disproportionately more PLCs than other economies, and concomitantly fewer small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), with nothing to compare with the German Mittelstand. Likewise, we have fewer customer-owned mutual and employeeowned companies than elsewhere. Different ownership structures are associated with different business models, and each needs a critical mass to be deployed effectively.

Capitalism unleashed

‘Capitalism unleashed’ – which reigned over the 25years or so from the early 1980s Thatcher/Reagan era through to its creation of the 2007-08 global financial crisis and 2009 international recession – tended to prioritise money-making through the financial markets, which alongside the bonus culture that encouraged speculative behaviour, and the lack of strong public ownership and regulation, created huge inequalities in income and wealth, and an inherently unstable economic system. Hence the calls to ‘rebalance the economy’, with more emphasis on the real economic activities of providing goods and services, investment and exporting, as opposed to the financial speculation of the banking sector, much of which has no economic or social use, and which on the contrary can prove horrendously costly in both economic and social terms once the speculation fails and the economy suffers.

The UK economy has suffered more than most countries from this dominance of the ‘City of London’, and from the resulting short-termism (Fine and Harris, 1985, Kitson and Michie, 1996). Hence Winston Churchill’s desire to see manufacturing more successful and the financial sector ‘less proud’, and Keynes’s critique of market contagion and economic stagnation.

The financial services sectors of all countries are characterised by a degree of diversity in terms of ownership types and business models. This variety of business models creates a corresponding diversity in forms of corporate governance, risk appetite and management, incentive structures, policies and practices, and behaviours and outcomes. It also offers wider choice for consumers through enhanced

24 theory&struggle

competition that derives in part from the juxtaposition of different business models. The diversity of ownership forms and business models, generally includes a balance between public and private ownership, with the private sector being distributed between shareholder-owned PLCs, other private ownership such as private equity, and a range of ‘stakeholder ownership’ models including co-operative banks, mutuals and credit unions. However, the UK financial services sector is dominated disproportionately by a single business model, namely the large, shareholder-owned plc.

The demutualisations of the late 1980s onwards withdrew around 70 per cent of assets from the mutual building society and insurance sectors, thus substantially reducing their critical mass. For an excellent discussion of the importance and role of corporate diversity in the financial services sector, and of the important role to be played by state-owned and by cooperatively and mutually-owned banks, see Butzbach and von Mettenheim (2014).

This domination of the shareholder ownership model, whose purpose is to maximise financial returns to the shareholders, proved a lethal combination with deregulation which led to the creation of new financial instruments, rising debt levels and a bloated financial sector – generally referred to as a process of financialisation. Ever greater risks were taken to drive up financial returns and ‘shareholder value’, culminating in the global financial crisis of 2007-08 which in turn created the first global recession since the 1930s, during 2009, from which the UK and global economies are only slowly recovering. As the Bank of England noted at the time: Policy action is needed to reduce the structural problems caused by banks that are too important to fail (TITF). Larger UK banks expanded much more rapidly than smaller institutions in the runup to the crisis and have received disproportionate taxpayer support during this crisis. That reflected a misalignment of risks on TITF banks’ balance sheets, due to implicit guarantees on their liabilities. (Bank of England, 2010, Page 11) This has left a substantial legacy problem, which is likely to constrain bank lending for some time to come (Llewellyn, 2010). Alongside the macroeconomic costs, the interests of individual consumers were sacrificed by managers who were focussed primarily on shareholder value. One of the original champions of shareholder value, Jack Welch, by 2009 had called it ‘the dumbest idea in the world’. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve – and described by the Financial Times as ‘a high priest of laissez-faire capitalism’2 – announced in 2008 that the global financial crisis had exposed a ‘mistake’ in the free market ideology which had guided his 18-year stewardship of US monetary policy: ‘I have found a flaw’, Greenspan announced, referring to his economic

philosophy, ‘I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.’3 Diversity of ownership and business models

A major contribution to creating the necessary systemic stability is to develop a more diverse financial services sector. Diversity of ownership and business models promotes systemic stability and is also good for customers because of the resulting increased choice, quality of service and fairness.

Andy Haldane, former Executive Director of Financial Stability and now Chief Economist at the Bank of England, has described well the way in which one of the factors that lay behind the 2007-08 global financial crisis was that individual institutions had been diversifying and that while this might be thought to reduce risk, it does not if all are diversifying in the same way, so instead the system becomes less diverse (Haldane, 2009, pp. 18-19). It is a classic fallacy of composition, that what is good for an individual institution acting alone does not necessarily apply when you consider all of them together. In addition to increasing risk through reduced diversity, this process also had the effect of shifting risk from the shareholderowned banks that moved into investment banking, to the public sector, on account of the Bank of England’s obligation to act as Lender of Last Resort.

The Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) produced two comprehensive studies of diversity in European banking (Ayadi et al., 2009, 2010). Both reports emphasise the advantages of having diversity in banking structures and models, and illustrate this with case studies of several countries. The purpose of these reports is not to argue that one model is superior to others, but precisely that advantages accrue through diversity. Their first report, Investigating Diversity in the Banking Sector in Europe found that ‘The most important conclusion is that the current crisis has made it even more evident than before how valuable it is to promote a pluralistic market concept in Europe and, to this end, to protect and support all types of ownership structures’ (Ayadi et al., 2009, p. 3).

Thus, in a situation of uncertainty and unpredictability, we cannot know which model will prove to be superior in all possible future circumstances, so we ought to be rather cautious before destroying any successful corporate forms. The global economy is a complex system. An important point about complexity is that many complex systems are intrinsically unpredictable, even if we know everything else about them. Thus, the problem is not just that the economic future is uncertain, but that it is fundamentally unpredictable.4 As The Economist notes: Just as an ecosystem benefits from diversity, so the world is better off with a multitude of corporate forms. (The Economist, 2010, p. 58)

Variety is the evolutionary fuel in economic development as well as in biology (as detailed, for example, by Hodgson, 1993). Diversity is desirable across the economy, and diversity within the financial sector itself – both a variety of corporate forms and geographical dispersion, with stronger local and regional presence – tends to support a broader variety of corporate forms in the rest of the economy which in turn enhances competition and consumer choice (Gagliardi, 2009). And promoting corporate diversity in the financial services sector itself contributes greater local presence, as the PLCs tend to be more London based. Thus, promoting mutuality within financial services not only creates a more robust financial services sector, it also brings the added benefit of fostering a more diverse economy more generally, in both corporate and geographic terms.

The financial crisis, which was largely caused by the activities of private sector banks, resulted in the UK Government giving them a bailout of perhaps £80bn. In addition, the Government borrowed in order to provide the fiscal boost that was co-ordinated internationally to prevent a slide into global depression.

These costs, along with the additional hit to Government finances that a recession causes, as tax receipts fall and unemployment benefits and other such payments rise, combined to create the fiscal deficit and accumulated debt that we are all having to pay for through increased taxes and cuts in services. Given the financial, economic and social costs of that global financial crisis and concomitant recession, a key priority for policy needs to be to put in place measures to prevent a reoccurrence in the future. Otherwise such problems may well recur, whether that be 10, 20 or 30 years from now. (And there is evidence that the incidence and frequency of bank crises around the world has increased over time – see for example Eichengreen and Bordo, 2002.)

What’s wrong with orthodox economic analysis?

Adam Smith is well known for pointing to the ‘extent of the market’ as being important in creating the conditions for economies to grow (Smith, 1776). He argued that this develops alongside the division of labour within the workplace – in Adam Smith’s case, the pin factory. As the workplace expands, it allows a greater division of labour which in turn enables workers to specialise and become more productive, increasing productivity which brings down prices which boosts sales thus extending the market which in turn enables firms and workplaces to grow, enabling a still greater division of labour.

Adam Smith also famously described the way market exchange can enable the butcher, brewer and baker to respond to the demand for their products through their own (economic) self-interest, but thereby making everyone better off. It was this argument in

theory&struggle 25

particular which today tends to have Adam Smith held up in support of ‘the market’, as opposed to relying on state intervention, although Smith himself did appreciate and discuss the need for government activity alongside the ‘market’.

The size of the economy is measured by the ‘value’ of all goods and services sold or provided. These may be provided free of charge (for example by government), but a monetary value can still be attached to all such goods or services, so that the size of the economy can be estimated. Economic growth is then the increase in the size of the economy from one year to the next. There has long been debate and discussion over how important economic growth is as compared to broader concepts such as the quality of life, and today this tends to involve questions of environmental sustainability. There are also more technical questions as to whether current measures of economic growth adequately capture changes in the nature of goods and services, the role of intellectual capital and ideas, and the contribution of natural resources. Thus, for example, the former IBM executive Irving WladawskyBerger argues that: GDP is essentially a measure of production. While suitable when economies were dominated by the production of physical goods, GDP does not adequately capture the growing share of services and the production of increasingly complex solutions that characterise advanced economies.

Nor does it reflect important economic activity beyond production, such as income, consumption and living standards. (Cited in Kaminska, 2013) It is certainly true that measures of economic growth could and should be improved: firstly, in the more narrowly technical sense, of for example taking care to use appropriate measures of services, which in many cases may be provided by the public sector at no charge or at least at a price less than the cost of providing them, and taking proper account of natural resources and whether they are being depleted or not. And secondly in the broader sense of ensuring that economic growth is sustainable in environmental and other ways, and also that other factors such as people’s well-being and happiness are included as policy objectives alongside the narrower focus on economic growth. On the need to reform the way we measure economic growth in order to include the contribution of natural resources, and whether they are being depleted over time, see the first report from the Natural Capital Committee (2013). The idea of attempting to measure happiness has been discussed in the UK by, most notably, Andrew Oswald (eg 1997) and Richard Layard (eg 2011). In 2008, French President Sarkozy commissioned Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and JeanPaul Fitoussi to consider the limitations of GDP as a measure of economic prosperity and progress. Their Report (Stiglitz et al., 2009) acknowledged all the points made above, and concluded that there does

26 theory&struggle

indeed need to be a shift away from just measuring economic outputs towards a greater consideration of people’s well-being; that more prominence needs to be given to the distribution of consumption, income and wealth; and that environmental sustainability needs to be paid particular attention, within the context of ensuring economic sustainability more generally.

The economy is a General Disequilibrium System

When John Maynard Keynes warned against Winston Churchill’s returning Sterling to the Gold Standard at an uncompetitive exchange rate in Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, he argued that real world economies simply don’t work like the economic textbook models, which was the incorrect assumption on which the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s approach was based (Keynes, 1925). Churchill was proved wrong, Keynes was proved right, and the Gold Standard collapsed – but only after having caused serious economic damage.

Keynes’s General Theory (Keynes, 1936) argued that the orthodox economics of his day – as advocated by the Treasury, then and now – was simply wrong in its assumptions as to how the economy worked. The Treasury view was that monetary policy could ensure the economy recovered, with wages adjusting as necessary to ensure a return to full employment.

Keynes pointed out, again, that wages don’t and won’t adjust in the real world as they do in textbooks. He pointed out that attempts to cut wages in money terms would be resisted for all sorts of reasons, including the uncertainty amongst those whose wages were to be cut as to what this would mean in terms of their comparative earnings. This was one of the warnings in his Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, when Churchill aimed to make Sterling competitive by cutting wages, which when applied to the mineworkers resulted in the 1926 General Strike. In the General Theory, Keynes also pointed out that relying on monetary policy alone may be like pushing on a piece of string – if no-one is pulling at the other end, the exercise may prove futile, and the same is true if companies don’t want to borrow money, for example because they have insufficient confidence that consumers would want to buy the extra goods that the loan would enable them to produce. One reason the industrialists may lack confidence that consumer demand would be sufficient might be if Government was at the same time planning to cut the wages of those potential consumers.

Instead, Keynes argued, recessions and unemployment are caused by lack of aggregate demand, and if there is not the required demand forthcoming from overseas, which could lead to exportled growth, nor from consumers nor, therefore, from companies wishing to invest to meet expected demand from either of those sources, then there is only one

other possible source of demand, and that is from Government. In such situations, active fiscal policy is required to boost demand, get the economy moving, create jobs and hence increased consumer demand which in turn will encourage businesses to invest in order to meet the anticipated rise in demand for goods and services. While the role of demand is what Keynes is best known for, he also warned about the behaviour of unregulated markets, with the danger of herd behaviour leading to stock market bubbles. He thus argued for economic regulation at national and international levels to enable markets to operate productively, avoiding unsustainable bubbles and the ensuing crashes and recessions.

Rethinking economics

To rise to the current challenges, it may be that economics itself needs a rethink. After all, Adam Smith completely changed the thinking of his day. Marx rethought economics fundamentally, presenting his analysis as a critique of political economy. And Keynes intended that his 1936 book should revolutionise the way people thought about the economy. Each was successful in their endeavours. One way in which economics today needs to rethink is to make far more explicit that the simplified textbook models are precisely that – simplified textbook models. All too often economic policies derived from those models are applied even though there is no rational basis for believing they will have the purportedly desired effects, given that they were derived on the basis on unrealistic assumptions. So, what is needed in particular is an appreciation that the simplified textbook models should not be used to derive policies, without the complexity of reality being reintroduced into the analysis before the policies are developed, finalised and applied.

And when economics is used to inform policies on broader issues such as the environment, then complexity becomes even more important and pervasive, and to capture fully these complexities, economics needs to engage in genuinely interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. By ‘genuinely’ is meant that economics need to listen to and learn from other disciplines in order to work constructively with them, rather than seek to impose current economic approaches onto other disciplinary areas.

The term ‘complexity economics’ was coined by Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute (Arthur, 1999), leading to the idea of economies as ‘complex adaptive systems’. Summarising the literature, Beinhocker (2006) argues that this approach differs from the standard view in at least five ways: i. Dynamics: economies are open, dynamic systems, far from equilibrium; ii. Agents: they are made up of heterogeneous agents, lacking perfect foresight, but able to learn

and adapt over time; iii. Networks: agents interact through various networks; iv. Emergence: macro patterns emerge from micro behaviours and interactions; and v. Evolution: evolutionary processes create novelty and growing order and complexity over time.

Drawing on ideas of Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Richard Nelson (2005) and others, Beinhocker (2006) argues that an ongoing process of co-evolution of physical technologies, social technologies (that is, institutions or ways of co-ordinating human activities) and business plans underlies the creation of wealth in industrialised countries, notably as property-rights based market economies encourage technological and social innovations for meeting (and creating) consumer demands. He argued that this approach can inform how to enhance and spread more widely this prosperity, whilst recognising the limits imposed by our impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.5 Complexity economics draws together insights from a range of approaches that challenge conventional economic thinking, including evolutionary economics and institutional economics. The roots of complex systems thinking and its application to environmental and evolutionary issues go back to Georgescu-Roegen (1971) and Kapp (1970), and significant progress has been made in recent years via the development of ecological economics that has done much to combine the analysis of ecosystems and economic systems. One of the challenges facing the further development of research integrating economic and ecosystems is its interdisciplinary nature, drawing as it does on analysis from the natural and social sciences. Working across such disciplinary boundaries is not easy; however, meeting this challenge would appear to be essential if we are to enhance our understanding of the social costs of economic activity, most especially environmental damage. Recent research grounded in a systems approach encompassing economic and ecological systems has brought insights that can enhance and enrich thinking and policy-making on these issues, and offers significant potential. Perhaps a major area of achievement has been to highlight the limitations of an over-reliance on market based instruments to the exclusion of other policy measures, such as reform of governance structures, changes in shared norms and innovation strategies.

Complexity economics seeks to draw on wider thinking on ‘complex systems’ by applying ideas of non-linear dynamics, heterogeneous agents, networks, emergence and evolution. Various authors have sought to apply some or all of these ideas to economic thinking. In a series of volumes from the Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems, Brian Arthur and colleagues developed ideas of the economy as a ‘complex adaptive system’ (Anderson et al., 1988; Arthur et al., 1997; Blume and Durlauf, 2006). This

theory&struggle 27

line of thinking led particularly to the application of agent-based modelling to economic problems. Potts (2000) developed an evolutionary microeconomic model, in which economic systems consist of elements interrelated by multiple connections in networks. Allen (2001) and Allen et al. (2007) developed models of firms interacting in economic markets, emphasising properties of self-organisation and adaptive learning.

These strands of thinking all highlight the fact that individuals and firms, though lacking in perfect foresight, are able to learn and adapt over time, and typically interact through networks. Emergent patterns arise out of these micro level behaviours and interactions, but these are only discernible at higher systems levels. Foster (2005) identifies the dissipative, evolutionary and structural irreversibility of complex economic systems as important properties, together with the possibility that systems exist as both holistic entities and components parts. It is the connections and interactions within and between systems that lead to the emergence of complexity (Foster 2005). This property of complex systems is highly relevant to the study of environmental sustainability that requires analysis of the connections and interactions between economic and ecological or natural systems.

The application of evolutionary thinking to economics was boosted by the seminal book by Nelson and Winter (1982), which argued that individuals and firms have ‘bounded rationality’ and so follow habits and routines, which evolve by a process of variation, selection and retention. Metcalfe (1997) developed this relation between evolutionary economic theory and the Schumpeterian idea of economic change occurring through periods of ‘creative destruction’. Dopfer and Potts (2008) sought to develop a general theory of economic evolution, based on interactions between agents and structures at micro, meso and macro levels.

Beinhocker (2006) argues that economic evolution is able to explain the explosive non-linear creation of wealth, increasing levels of variety and complexity, and spontaneous self-organization.

Economic evolution is thus argued to be strongly path-dependent – that is, ‘history matters’ – and technological and institutional systems may become ‘locked-in’, creating barriers to the adoption of more beneficial alternatives; van den Bergh (2007) argues that greater attention should be paid to the application of evolutionary theory to environmental questions, not least in the context of system resilience, resource use, ecosystem management and growth, but also in relation to individual behaviour and environmental policy. Many of the limitations of neoclassical economics spring from the underlying model of rational choice or business decision making, with no meaningful analysis of the institutional environment within which business and policy decisions are taken.

Ostrom (2006, 2007) provides significant insight into the use and evolution of governance systems to manage

28 theory&struggle

the commons and natural common pool resources; she found, empirically, that strategies for collective action evolve and adapt, aided by the design of appropriate institutions, thus enabling systems to escape the tragedy of the commons predicted by neoclassical economics. Similarly, Michie and Oughton (2011) show how alternative managerial, institutional and evolutionary theories provide important insights into environmental problems, as well as a broader spectrum of policy choices than results from orthodox economics.

The need for interdisciplinarity and new economic thinking

This need for new economic thinking, and for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work, including an economics that is open to new thinking and to contributing to genuinely joint endeavours, has gained some support over the past few years. The World Economics Association is a new international network of economists created in 2012 to debate and discuss issues with just such an open-minded agenda.

George Soros and others have funded the institute for new economic thinking, and one of the leaders of this new initiative is Professor Sir David Hendry, one of those who challenged monetarism in the 1980s, and who more recently researched an impressively interdisciplinary analysis of climate change (Hendry, 2011). It is to be hoped that economics as a discipline will take this opportunity to undertake a fundamental rethink – as it has done successfully in the past, by for example each of Adam Smith, Marx, and Keynes.

There is a need for an economic approach that draws on the richness of past analysis while appreciating the new complexities to be analysed, and that is able to combine with scholars from other disciplines to address the big issue of the day – now and in the future.

Policy reforms

The history of capitalism can be seen as having developed through distinct phases. The 30-year ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ (Marglin and Schor) from the post-World War Two reconstruction of the late 1940s through to the 1970s was one, broadly, of a Keynesian commitment to full employment and to public institutions, ownership and regulation, nationally and internationally, to ensure relatively stable economic growth and to prevent the disparities of income and wealth from expanding beyond certain limits. The subsequent thirty years of ‘capitalism unleashed’ did the opposite: the buffers and other institutional arrangements that had been put in place to prevent extreme inequalities and instability were systematically rolled back and repealed. Not surprisingly, extreme inequalities and instability returned to the economic system and society. Although this era witnessed

periods of rapid economic growth, generally driven by unsustainable financial bubbles fuelled by consumer credit or sub-prime mortgages, overall economic growth was nonetheless lower than in the previous Keynesian era.

The policy reforms required today need to be seen in this broad historical context. We need a new era of global economic development. There probably is a fair degree of consensus globally about what such a new progressive era would look like, although implementing reforms in the face of vested interests is always difficult, and there is not the head of steam necessary as there was, say, following the global defeat of fascism in 1945. The challenge is thus political as well as ideological and economic.

What is needed now is a genuinely global ‘Green New Deal’, with a return to international economic cooperation, along the lines of the new international economic order that was being pressed for before the collapse of the Golden Age of Capitalism. Wealth and income inequality needs to be tackled through progressive taxation of both income and wealth, alongside a culture change that recognises the economic and social damage wreaked by inequality, to create the economic basis for sustainable growth.

Piketty (2014) has detailed the way in which capitalism inherently generates inequality; tackling this is not only vitally important, but cannot be done through a few minor reforms – it will require an epochal shift in values, policies and practices.

Shifting to environmental sustainability also demands a historic change in direction for the economy and society. Ecological outcomes need to be placed and embedded at the forefront of public policy and corporate decision-making.

Privately- and shareholder-owned companies should be encouraged to take long-term investment decisions and to behave responsibly, via new requirements on corporate governance, a new ethos and ideology across society, and via competition from the public sector – with public ownership at national, regional and local levels offering a ready alternative to private ownership where this is seen to be failing – and likewise competition from co-operative, employee-owned and mutual businesses.

Ownership is therefore key. A new era of global economic development needs to be underpinned by public ownership of major economic sectors. Alongside this, a dynamic and entrepreneurial co-operative and mutual sector could deliver social as well as economic benefits. Private ownership should increasingly be seen as the exception, where there is an obvious justification for it – otherwise co-operative, mutual, and public ownership should become natural options.

The British economy needs to be rebalanced away from the ‘City of London’, towards the creation of goods and services across the breadth of the country, with companies operating on the basis of long-term and

sustainable decision making – socially, environmentally and economically sustainable.

A Green New Deal needs to be at the heart of this – over the next 30-year generational epoch. Such developments are needed globally just as they are in individual countries. Global financial speculation needs to be reined in with a ‘new Bretton Woods’ era of responsible economic and financial institutions on an international scale, which prioritise stability and sustainability.

Greater corporate diversity is needed domestically and internationally, with stronger pubic and mutual ownership, operating at local, regional, national and international levels. The commitment of the UK’s 2010 Coalition Government to increase the corporate diversity of the financial services sector was welcome in theory, but proved worthless in practice given their failure to take the necessary action – or even to measure the degree of corporate diversity over time.

This measurement was instead undertaken by the Oxford Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business, which found that far from delivering on their commitment, the situation had deteriorated (see Michie and Oughton, 2013, 2014).

This sort of economic alternative is viable and quite possible, domestically for the UK and globally. It would be the natural next era in global economic development. If pursued consciously, it could lead to further eras of progress subsequently, rather than lurching back to ‘capitalism unleashed’. As the golden age of capitalism was running out of steam in the early 1970s, alternatives were being promoted domestically and globally to take forward the social democratic project to a new era, in more far-reaching ways, from the ‘wage-earner funds’ in Sweden – which could have increasingly moved the bulk of the economy beyond a narrow capitalist outlook, with corporate ownership being increasingly collective, held on behalf of employees collectively – to the demands for a new international economic order that would have delivered fair prices to producers, in the same sort of way as the Fair Trade Movement is now attempting.

The challenge is thus twofold: firstly, we need a new political economy in place of the failed orthodoxy of neoclassical economics. And secondly we need public policy based upon an understanding of how markets actually work – namely, left to themselves, they create inequalities of income and wealth, inherent instability, and social and environmental degradation. Instead, for economic growth and development that is sustainable economically, socially and environmentally, policy activism is required that includes in its armoury the innovative use of public ownership at local, regional, national and international levels; progressive taxation of income, wealth and expenditure; and reformed corporate governance to promote long-termism, including through the use of ownership stakes for employees and other stakeholders. n

theory&struggle 29

Footnotes 1 Jonathan.michie@kellogg.ox.ac.uk 2 Francesco Guerrera, ‘Welch rues short-term profit ‘obsession’’, Financial Times, 12th March 2009.

3 Andrew Clark and Jill Treanor, ‘Greenspan – I was wrong about the economy. Sort of.’, The Guardian, 24th October 2008.

4 I’m grateful to Geoff Hodgson for making this point about uncertainty, unpredictability and complexity (private correspondence).

5 See Foxon et al. (2013) where these points are analysed and discussed in detail, and on which this section draws.

References

Allen, P.M. (2001), Knowledge, ignorance and the evolution of complex systems, in J. Foster and J.S. Metcalfe (eds), Frontiers of Evolutionary Economics: Competition, Self-Organization and Innovation Policy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham Allen, P.M., M. Strathern and J.S. Baldwin (2007), Complexity and the limits to learning, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Volume 17, pp. 401-431 Anderson, P.W., K. Arrow and D. Pines (1988), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Science of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Arthur, W. Brian (1999), Complexity and the Economy, Science, Volume 284, pp. 107-109 Arthur, W. Brian, S.N. Durlauf and D.A. Lane (1997), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Science of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Ayadi, R., E. Arbak, S. Carbo Valverde, F. Rodriguez Fernandez, and R.H. Schmidt (2009), Investigating Diversity in the Banking Sector in Europe: The Performance and Role of Savings Banks, Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels Ayadi, R., D.T. Llewellyn, R.H. Schmidt, E. Arbak,i and W.P. De Groen (2010), Investigating Diversity in the Banking Sector in Europe: Key Developments, Performance and Role of Cooperative Banks, Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels Bank of England (2010), Financial Stability Report, Issue Number 27, June, Bank of England, London Beinhocker, Eric (2006), The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Random House, London Blume, L.E. and S.N. Durlauf (2006), The Economy as an Evolving Complex System III: Current perspectives and future directions, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Science of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Butzbach, Olivier and Kurt von Mettenheim (2014), Introduction, in Butzbach and von Mettenheim

30 theory&struggle

(eds), Alternative Banking and Financial Crisis, Pickering & Chatto, London Dopfer, K. and J. Potts (2008), The General Theory of Economic Evolution, Routledge, London Eichengreen. B. and M. Bordo (2002), Crisis now and then: what lessons from the last era of globalisation?, NBER Working Paper 8716, January, Cambridge MA: National Bureau of Economic Research Fine, Ben and Laurence Harris (1985), Peculiarities of the British Economy, Lawrence & Wishart, London Foster, John (2005), From simplistic to complex systems in economics, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 29, pp. 873-92 Foxon, Timothy J., Jonathan K hler, Jonathan Michie and Christine Oughton (2013), Towards a new complexity economics for sustainability’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 37, Number 1, pp. 187-208 Hendry, David (2011), Climate change: lessons for our future from the distant past, in S. Dietz, J. Michie and C. Oughton (eds), The Political Economy of the Environment: an interdisciplinary approach, Routledge, London Hodgson, Geoffrey (1993), Economics and Evolution: bringing life back into economics, Policy Press, Cambridge and University of Michigan Press Keynes, John Maynard (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, London Kitson, Michael and Jonathan Michie (1996), Britain's Industrial Performance Since 1960: Underinvestment and Relative Decline’, The Economic Journal, Volume 106, Number 434, January, pp. 196-212 Gagliardi, F. (2009), Financial development and the role of co-operative firms, Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, Volume 32, Number 4, pp. 439-464 Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971), The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Glyn, Andrew (2007), Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalisation and Welfare, Oxford University Press Haldane, Andrew (2009), Rethinking the financial network, Speech to Financial Student Association in Amsterdam, April Kaminska, Izabella (2013), Beyond GDP and the rise of the non-monetised economy, FT Alphaville, http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/04/09/1453772/be yond-gdp-and-the-rise-of -the-non-monetisedeconomy/, accessed April 14th 2013 Kapp, K.W. (1970), Environmental Disruption and Social Costs: A Challenge to Economics, Kyklos, Volume XXIII, Number 4, pp. 833-48, reprinted in Kapp (1974), Environmental Policies and

Development Planning in Contemporary China and Other Essays, Mouten, Paris and The Hague, pp. 77-88 Keynes, John Maynard (1925), The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, reprinted in Collected Writings, Macmillan for the Royal Economic Society, London Keynes, John Maynard (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan for the Royal Economic Society, London Layard, Richard (2011), Happiness: Lessons from a new science, 2nd Edition, Penguin, London Llewellyn, David T. (2010), The global banking crisis and the post-crisis banking and regulatory scenario, Amsterdam Centre for Corporate Finance, University of Amsterdam Marglin, Stephen A. and Juliet B. Schor (eds)(1992), The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, Clarendon Press, Oxford Metcalfe, J.S. (1997), Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction, Routledge, London Michie, Jonathan and Christine Oughton (2011), Managerial, Institutional and Evolutionary Approaches to Environmental Economics: Theoretical and Policy Implications, Chapter 3 of S. Dietz, J. Michie and C. Oughton (eds), The Political Economy of the Environment: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Routledge, Abingdon Michie, Jonathan and Christine Oughton (2013), Measuring Diversity in Financial Services Markets: A Diversity Index, Centre for Financial & Management Economics Discussion Paper No. 113, SOAS, London Michie, Jonathan and Christine Oughton (2014), Measuring Diversity in Financial Services Markets: An update to the Diversity Index, Oxford Centre for Mutual & Employee-owned Business, Kellogg College, University of Oxford Miliband, Ed (2011), Speech to the Social Market Foundation, November 17th, London Milne, Seumas (2012), The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century, Verso, London Natural Capital Committee (2013), The State of Natural Capital: Towards a framework for measurement and valuation, Defra, London Nelson, Richard (2005), Technology, Institutions and Economic Growth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Nelson, Richard and S. Winter (1982), An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Ostrom, E. (2006), The value-added of laboratory experiments for the study of institutions and common-pool resources, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Volume 62, pp.

149-163 Ostrom, E. (2007), The Challenge of Crafting Rules to Change Open Access Resources into Managed Resources, Available at

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1304827 Oswald, Andrew (1997), Happiness and Economic Performance, Economic Journal, Volume 107, pp.

1815-1831 Ownership Commission (2012), Plurality, Stewardship and Governance: Report from the Ownership Commission, Mutuo, London Piketty, Thomas (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard, Cambridge, MA Potts, J., J. Foster and A. Straton (2000), An entrepreneurial model economic and environmental co-evolution, Ecological Economics, Volume 70, pp. 375-383 Smith, Adam (1776), An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Methuen and Co., Ltd., London, ed. Edwin Cannan, 1904, 5th edition Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi (2009), Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, CMEPSP, Paris van den Bergh, C.J.M. (2007), Relax about GDP Growth: Implications for climate and crisis policies, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 18, pp. 540-543

theory&struggle 31

Malcolm Chase A Parliament made up of men of property, intent upon passing legislation in the interests of property, had no intention of responding positively to the contents of the Chartist petitions...’

Chartism, democracy and Marx and Engels Malcolm Chase’s books include Chartism: A New History (2007), 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (2013) and Chartism: Perspectives and Legacies (2015).

He teaches at the University of Leeds and is Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Labour History.

I

N FEBRUARY 1849, readers of the newspaper Northern Star would have read a statement from the paper’s editor George Julian Harney:

‘I know Dr MARX personally, and know him to be a man of the most transcendent talent and sterling patriotism. He is one of the great men of the future. His day is fast coming. When it comes, woe to the enemies of labour’. 1

This is one of the earliest pen-portraits of Marx to appear in English. It’s remarkably prescient, even allowing for a little comradely exaggeration. It is significant that it appeared in Northern Star, for this was the newspaper of the Chartist movement. It was a shadow of its former self by 1849 (a decade earlier it had outsold even The Times); but until it closed in 1852, the Star was above all others the paper of record of British labour and radical politics and a powerful force in melding together into one national movement more than 500 distinct localities ranging from Penzance in west Cornwall to Kirkwall in the Orkney Isles.

Chartism was the first truly national mass workers movement in history, sustained not only by a national paper but also, from February 1839 by a series of delegate conferences elected by its regions and from 1840 by a centrally organised National Charter Association which coordinated a team of professional lecturers. Its focal points were three petitioning campaigns, in 1839, 1842 and 1848. The biggest of these, in 1842, marshalled 3.3 million signatures (around a third of Britain’s adult population and four times larger than the combined British and Irish electorate created by the Reform Act of 1832). This was the single largest petition ever laid before Parliament.

It occupied an estimated six miles of paper and weighed a third of a ton. The mountain of paper, heaped onto the floor of the chamber, dwarfed the clerks’ table upon which, technically, it was supposed to be placed.

Procedure required the Clerk to the House to read out all 3,000 words of a plea not only for parliamentary reform but also for other key Chartist demands. These included a clean-up of government corruption, disestablishment of the Church of England and home

32 theory&struggle

rule for Ireland. It was a deeply satisfying piece of political theatre.

But theatre is all that it was. However the 1842 Petition was at least received with courtesy. In June 1839, the 1.3 million signatures accompanying the first mass petition had been greeted by laughter in the Commons. In April 1848 the inclusion of multiple names written by the same hands, along with pseudonyms, was used to discredit a two-million strong third petition. Neither of these features was exactly surprising in a society where literacy was low and many lived in fear of losing their jobs if their political views became known. But the background to the 1848 petition was one of revolution across Europe; of troops moved up from all over southern England into London and of the royal family evacuated to the Isle of Wight.

The political establishment was in no mood to receive Chartism with anything approaching courtesy in the spring of 1848. Draconian changes in the law of freedom of political assembly and speech (pushed through Parliament with a first reading on the very day the 1848 petition was presented) were one of the factors that led to the consequent decline of Chartism.

A Parliament made up of men of property, intent upon passing legislation in the interests of property, had no intention of responding positively to the contents of the Chartist petitions, especially the proposition that the right to the vote should be enjoyed by every adult male. ‘Universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists’, argued one Cabinet minister in 1842: it is utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilisation … civilisation rests on the security of property … while property is insecure, it is not in the power … of the moral or intellectual constitution of any country, to prevent the country sinking into barbarism … I ask, whether the Government, being placed at the head of the majority of the people of this country, without any pecuniary qualification, would continue to maintain the principle of the security of property? I think not.2 So what was this movement that so unnerved Cabinet members they predicted the entire fabric of

society would be torn apart by giving working people the vote?

In May 1838 the London Working Men’s Association produced the People’s Charter, one of the landmark texts in British political history, launching it at a rally in Glasgow organised by the city’s trade unionists. The People’s Charter is short and noticeably lacking in passion (Marx described it as ‘a very laconic document).2 There was nothing in or about it that was at all novel except, except crucially the punchy title.

The allusion to Magna Carta of 1215 was one which all politically aware contemporaries would have understood. Indeed, radical interest in ‘the Great Charter of Liberties’ had grown over the previous quarter of a century, fuelled by an explosion of reform publishing in the Regency years. Magna Carta constituted the foundation stone of English liberties and the People’s Charter would complete the edifice by establishing universal male suffrage and the secret ballot; paying MPs and abolishing the property qualification to become an MP; equal sized constituencies and annual parliaments.

These six points had been proposed as a package as far back as 1777. All of course are staple features of British parliamentary democracy except for annual parliaments. This is significant: at issue for Chartism was a fundamentally contrasting concept of democratic procedure and the extent to which electors could trust the members that they sent to Westminster. The belief that Parliament was venal and incapable of passing any measure that was not in its members’ own direct interests was at the heart of early Chartism. The 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act had changed nothing in their view: annual parliaments were about creating a democratically elected assembly that could be trusted to govern in accordance with the popular will. The internal governance of Chartism itself underlines the strength of this conviction. The norm was for localities to elect an executive and officers for only three months at a time. County or regional bodies were elected for a similar period, the culture of accountable delegacy requiring clear procedures by which members were mandated by, and required to report back to, their electorates.

We must not shrink our understanding of what the Chartists meant by democracy just to the Six Points. It is important also that we do not fall into the trap of thinking that because none of the six points were obtained before Chartism came to an end, that the movement was a failure. Chartism made a profound and enduring difference. The Chartism that history textbooks portray is too-often simplistically a movement that failed. By contrast I want to argue that this was a movement that achieved a multiplicity of small victories. Taking this approach in no way belittles the tragedy of the Newport Rising of 1839 or marginalises the heroism of Chartists who were transported to Australia. Indeed, by thinking about why Chartism really matters for democracy, we may understand better those whom the movement projected as its martyrs.

However, before I go on to consider what these small victories comprised, it is necessary to address ‘the elephant in the room’ that appears whenever Chartism as a blue print for democracy is discussed. Why did it seek the vote for men alone? As I have already said, it is important that we do not shrink our understanding of what the Chartists meant by democracy to the Six Points. Chartism was not antagonistic to female suffrage, but the prevailing view was pragmatic, as the preface to The People’s Charter candidly conceded: ‘against this reasonable proposition [votes for women] we have no just argument to adduce but only to express our fears of entertaining it, lest the false estimate man entertains for this half of the human family may cause his ignorance and prejudice to be enlisted to retard the progress of his own freedom’.4 Once universal male suffrage was won it was widely assumed that female suffrage would eventually follow.

We should not therefore be surprised by female participation in the Chartist movement. It is true that most Chartist women concentrated upon immediate practical issues concerning the quality of family life, doing so both through the National Charter Association, which accepted men and women equally as members, and women-only Chartist groups: ‘It is our duty, both as wives and mothers, to form a Female Association’, the women of Elland, West Yorkshire resolved in 1838, ‘in order to give and receive instruction in political

theory&struggle 33

knowledge, and to co-operate with our husbands and sons in their great work of regeneration’.5 The Ashtonunder-Lyne Female Political Union was even more militant: We are determined that no man shall ever enjoy our hearts, or share our beds that will not stand forward … we do not despair of yet seeing intelligence, the necessary qualification for voting.

And then Sisters, we shall be placed in our proper position in society, and enjoy the elective franchise as well as our kinsmen.vi Thus women signed Chartism’s national petitions in large numbers. Where separately recorded for individual communities, women’s signatures in 1839 ranged from around thirteen to twenty percent. In 1848, by contrast, the House of Commons Committee on Petitions (with no incentive to underestimate the figure since it saw women’s signatures as discrediting Chartism) calculated the proportion to be only eight percent.

The contrast between the 1839 and 1848 National Petitions tells the story of a gradual transition from a movement that emphatically mobilised whole communities, to one that increasingly espoused the politics of male-defined ‘respectability’ and the ideal that man alone should be the family breadwinner. This leads me to suggest that Chartism was at its most politically potent in its early years, its moral authority rooted in the astonishing extent to which the movement mobilised whole communities. This is critical in understanding why Chartism mattered so much to Marx and Engels. It was the first mass workers’ movement anywhere in the world and, as such, it was a powerful and timely exemplar that did much to contribute to the two men’s confidence that the workers of the world could be united.

There was so much more to this movement than the six points. So great was its motivational force and so imaginative the popular response to it, that Chartism was the structure within which for a time the majority of industrial workers pursued their political and even cultural activities. Let me introduce you to a hypothetical family of committed Chartists. Their newborn child might be received into the movement at a special ceremony presided over by one of its leaders, and possibly given his or her name. Subsequently she or he might attend a Chartist Sunday School or have a subscription to the Chartist Land Plan taken out on their behalf. Meanwhile both parents would be immersed in the political and social life of the local branch of the National Charter Association, the mother also in a Female Charter Association and the father in a trades union affiliated to Chartism. She might shop at a Chartist Co-op store. If a ratepayer, he might be able to support Chartist candidates in local elections; if teetotal, they could join a Chartist Temperance Association. Prints of Chartist leaders would adorn their home; spare pence donated to support Chartist

34 theory&struggle

prisoners and their dependents. Their main source of national news would be a Chartist weekly paper, usually the Northern Star.

Few Britons at this time were not touched by this remarkable movement and it is almost inconceivable that there were any who had never heard of it. The result was that the Chartists constituted a massive cross-section of society: eighty distinct occupational groups are identified in an 1841 list of candidates for election to the Executive of the movement’s national executive, ranging from bakers and basket-makers to vets and wire-workers, as well as the mechanics and textile workers at the heart of Britain’s industrial revolution. Almost all Britain’s ethnic communities were represented in some way. William Cuffay, a leading Chartist (and London trades unionist) transported to Australia, was of Caribbean slave heritage; two other Londoners, David Duffy and Ben Prophett, arrested after a Chartist disturbance in 1848, were described as ‘men of colour’. Arrested with them – and transported for his part in breaking into a pawnbrokers to cries of ‘Hurrah for Liberty’ – was Charles Lee, a Romany who had been born in a tent in the New Forest. The Scottish Chartist John Taylor was Anglo-Indian (his mesmerising good looks ascribed to his Indian grandmother, Shanie Chanim from Sandila in Uttar Pradesh).

However, there appear to have been no Jewish Chartists – and we must frankly acknowledge that Chartism occasionally displayed that strand of economic anti-Semitism sadly so evident in much nineteenth century politics. Even so, Northern Star was highly critical of anti-Jewish policies pursued in the Ottoman Empire, which it thought redolent of the middle ages’, and in the 1850s the leading parliamentary supporter of Chartism, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, campaigned for Jewish civil rights.

The decline of Chartism and its complex causation have often been allowed to obscure the movement’s true significance. The movement had a multitude of small endings and a multiplicity of small victories. It is the dissemination of Chartist thinking in depth and breadth that concerns me here. Of course not all signatories to the petitions were immersed as deeply in Chartism as the hypothetical family described just now: but support for the Charter was close to the norm among working men and women in the industrial regions of the English midlands and north, south Wales and west central Scotland; and there were many other centres of intense Chartist activity outside those regions.

Long after the 1848 petition, long even after the very last Chartist national convention in 1858, the People’s Charter remained a tool to think with for those who sought to promote democracy in Britain. Its emotional charge was considerable: reforming personalities as widely contrasting as Charles Bradlaugh, the freethinker and atheist, and General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, cited it among

their inspirations. Booth actually claimed that his own religious conversion was the culmination of a process of reflection that began when he heard Feargus O'Connor speak for the first time. O’Connor was Chartism’s greatest leader: the political establishment ‘fundamentally detest the democratic energy of Mr. O’Connor’, observed Engels.7 For the leader of the Durham miners’ trade union and an early Labour MP, John Wilson, writing in 1910, Chartism was ‘everpresent to the progressive mind’. And as late as 1935, Sylvia Pankhurst was criticising the Labour Party for lacking ‘the sturdy democratic fibre of the Chartists’.

So why was Chartism important and what did it actually achieve? I suggest there were six main reasons.

1] It increased awareness among working people of what they had in common – despite widely contrasting experiences of gender, geographical regions and different occupational groups. It also established the tradition of a national press supportive of working-class issues – principally the Northern Star, but there were some 120 other Chartist and near-Chartist periodicals, a handful of which survived into the later decades of the nineteenth century. They were no longer Chartist papers, of course, but they still advocated reform politics. Notable among them was Reynolds’s News, a Sunday paper closely associated with the cooperative movement, which did not close down until 1962.

2] Chartism made authority, at both local and national levels, more cautious about applying any outright policy of repression. For example after Chartism, legal reversals suffered by trades unionism came from judicial interpretation of existing law, not from new legislation. Parliament was at worst disinclined to grant trade union rights and from 1859 it was increasingly well-disposed towards them. The landmark legislation was the Molestation of Workmen Act, which reformed the law of strikes and explicitly established a right to picket peacefully. It was passed

by Parliament as a result of lobbying by National Association of United Trades, founded in 1845. Two decades before the TUC was formed, there was a nationwide co-ordinating body, established by trade unions affiliated to Chartism, supported by the Chartist press, and with Tom Duncombe (effectively a Chartist MP) as its president.

3] Chartism was one of the key forces in persuading Westminster to legislate against the prevailing interests of those who made up parliament, and to bring forward instead social and economic measures to improve life for the people as a whole: Robert Peel’s reforming ministry of 1841-46 would not have achieved all that it did so fast, if at all, without the hot breath of Chartism at its shoulder.

4] Chartism began the process by which local government was opened up to working men, both as voters and as elected representatives. It was the crucible for active citizenship. The first Chartist councillors were elected in Leeds in 1841, a success

then widely imitated elsewhere. To return working-class candidates, it was necessary to organise closely and canvass thoroughly – so Chartism encouraged political awareness and habits of civic participation. The participation in municipal politics of those who’d called themselves Chartists was commonplace even into the 1880s. Commenting on the third reform act of 1884, John Howe (a borough councillor and founding chair of Colchester Trades Council) declared: ‘I am an old Chartist; manhood suffrage was one of the points when I was a boy, and we have been fighting for it up to the present time. Every man should have the right to vote’.

An even longer-serving political activist than Howe was another Colchester Chartist — Henry Clubb, a former branch secretary who, having emigrated to America, became a Michigan state senator and remarkably lived until 1921.

No survey has ever been undertaken of the extent to which the post-Second Reform Act intakes of MPs included men with earlier experience of Chartism.

Logically there must have been a number. There were certainly two, coincidentally both called Carter alone.

Samuel Carter, a Chartist elected for Tavistock in 1852 but unseated on petition, became Liberal MP for Coventry in 1868. And Robert Meek Carter, the Liberal MP elected for Leeds, had first entered politics as a Chartist local councillor in 1852. At work from the age of six, Meek Carter received no education beyond that of an autodidact, much of it with the help of the Chartist movement.

5] Carter’s career brings us to the fifth point.

Chartism increased ordinary people’s ‘social capital’.

Chartism was an important provider of educational opportunities; a lively newspaper press – not just news but fiction, poetry, extensive readers’ letters features, pages for women and, even, children. The movement also provided a place to develop organisational and public speaking skills.

6] Finally in this checklist of Chartist ‘victories’ is the contribution it made to internationalising the outlook of working people. Chartism was partly forged from popular horror at British government handling of political opposition in Canada in the mid-1830s. In the autumn of 1837 a rebellion in present-day Quebec was brutally suppressed. Between 250 and 300 rebels died in a series of bloody confrontations with the British army. A second rising the following year led to few fatalities, but overall 1300 were imprisoned, 12 hanged and over 60 transported. In contemporary Ontario radical reformers, partly inspired by the first Quebecois rebellion, attempted to capture Toronto and established an armed camp on an island in the Niagara River which was only dispersed in January 1838. There were only a handful of fatalities in Ontario but 95 rebels were transported, two executed and hundreds imprisoned.

This extraordinary episode has been forgotten (even by radical British historians). Why had the two Canadian provinces rebelled? Briefly, the British

theory&struggle 35

government suspended the Canadians’ legislative assemblies, levied taxes directly and arrested the leadership of the largest party in the Quebecois parliament. British workers’ sympathy for Canada emerged from a common perception that colonial rule exhibited exactly the characteristics of undisguised venality and self-interest that British radicals dubbed ‘old corruption’ at home. ‘Every blow struck in Canada is a blow at your liberties’, Northern Star proclaimed.

8 For London Dispatch, another Chartist paper: The Canadians and ourselves, especially the working classes of this country are engaged in a common cause, that of democracy and liberty against aristocracy and despotism, and in aiding them, we but serve ourselves, and show the misery creating few that the many are at last beginning to unite for their common interests.9 Chartists also linked government tyranny in Canada to the sentences of transportation passed on the Tolpuddle Martyrs and leading Glasgow cotton trade unionists. The Canadian rebellions go a long way towards explaining the militancy of early Chartism and the preparedness of its leaders not only to countenance the use of force against authority but to do so in a language that was uncompromising and explicit. This was a potent example for Marx and Engels as they developed a theory for political action that centrally hinged upon working people, rather than upon the liberal bourgeoisie whose militancy drove the revolutions of 1848 elsewhere in Europe.

Chartist internationalism was not confined to sympathy for Canada. London Chartism especially maintained close contact with radicals on the continent.

When the People’s Charter was formally launched in London in 1838, fraternal greetings were even brought by a French delegate, ‘in the great struggle for democracy and independence’.10 In 1843 the Lancashire Chartist leader Peter McDouall explained in a letter to an important French socialist paper that he subscribed to French socialist ideals and supported ‘communists’ facing trial in Toulouse. I want universal suffrage, McDouall explained, But I see in it only a means and not an ultimate goal. This universal suffrage and the other principles of Chartism are to me the key of the garden, the tool to devise a better social organization, the wall to protect the organizers.11 McDouall had been gaoled in 1840 for his role in Chartism; then, following the mass strikes of 1842, he had fled to France. He also translated work by the leading French socialist Etienne Cabet. Followers of Cabet were among the political exiles whose ‘Société démocratique française’ had met since 1835 in the Red Lion in Great Windmill Street. The same pub also hosted meetings the German Communist Workers’ Educational Society (an adjunct of the German Communist League). From 1844 the Red Lion was also the local for staff on the Northern Star which had

36 theory&struggle

relocated to premises just two doors down the street.

These details, prosaic though some of them may seem, underline how appropriate it is to discuss Chartism as part of commemorating the First International. Chartist internationalism was deeprooted and that it predated both the arrival of Marx in England and the formation the Fraternal Democrats – the most-famous of Chartism’s internationalist initiatives (in which he and Engels were involved). In 1843 Engels had met Harney, editor of Northern Star and this was the beginning of a close association.

Harney’s internationalist leanings were greatly strengthened by the wider circle of acquaintances among German-speaking political exiles that Engel’s friendship brought him. The proximity of Harney’s office and the HQ of continental socialists in London naturally helped. In 1847 the Second Congress of the Communist League was held upstairs in the Red Lion, this being the meeting at which Marx and Engels undertook to write the programme for the League that became known as the Communist Manifesto. Der Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei was in turn translated into English by the Scottish communist and feminist Helen Macfarlane and published in 1850 by Harney in Red Republican, the journal to which he devoted his energies after leaving the Star.

I want to conclude by looking in a little detail at the Fraternal Democrats, founded by Harney in 1844. By 1848 the Democrats had branches in some 20 British towns. Its politics reflected the Chartist position on the Canadian rebellions a decade before January 1847, a position that also extended to domestic politics and which was commonly held by almost all Chartists in the movement’s early years: While denouncing international wars, we do not share the sentiments of those who consider all war unjustifiable. We, on the contrary, assert that as long as tyranny there can nor should be peace between the oppressed and the oppressors.12 The formal launch of the Fraternal Democrats had taken place in 1845 at a rally attended by more than 1,000 in the City Chartist Hall. Toasts were drunk to Thomas Paine, to the ‘fallen Democrats of all countries’, to the Chartists transported to Australia; democratic songs were sung in several languages. Even the Islamic world was involved for a ‘Turkish democrat’ from Silistra in the NE of present-day Bulgaria (on its Romanian border) was among those who contributed to the music. The sentiments of the meeting centred on a belief that international solidarity was achievable only through workers’ unity. A French police spy who was present at reported: The most impious and extravagant doctrines have been developed and celebrated. Robespierre and Marat have been praised in the most pompous manner, though they were blamed for being too soft in their fight against their enemies. People drank to the toppling and the death of the Kings, while

the opinion was uttered that the great European movement must begin with France, etc.13 The Fraternal Democrats were a cosmopolitan organisation, involving Britons, Czechs, Dutch, French, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians and Swiss – as well as that intriguing Muslim Bulgarian. The organisation also brought a significant section of active Chartists closer to socialism and was therefore an important influence on the evolution of the idea of the ‘the Charter and something more’. This was the slogan of Chartists who sought to broaden the movement’s objectives, successfully, so for the 1851 Chartist National Convention adopted a wide-ranging social democratic programme (including ‘universal, gratuitous, and, to a certain extent, compulsory’ education; state allowances for the elderly and sick; ‘the restoration of poor, common, church and crown lands to the people’, to be used to support the unemployed; a programme of gradual land nationalisation via government purchase; abolition of existing employment and financial assistance made available for producer cooperatives.)14 It was a compelling vision for a humane society, albeit stronger on aspiration than detail for its implementation.

Although it signified little in immediate practical terms, since Chartism was now a fraction of its former size and riven by internal dissension, the 1851 programme summarised the vision of mature Chartism.

It is all too-easy to be dazzled by the magnitude of Marx’s intellectual achievement and to overlook the extent to which he was indebted, not just intellectually to Feuerbach or Hegel, but politically to the example of popular political mobilisations. Of these Chartism was the chief, more influential even than the popular movement of the French Revolution because it was an energetic and contemporaneous mass movement of industrial workers. As a living example of the potency, and even greater potential of collective action, the Chartist movement was a profound influence – not just upon Marx and Engels of course, or upon the internationalist tradition in British politics, but as indicated earlier on the British State itself. However I refuse to leave the last words on this matter to the British government. Instead I wish to conclude with a handful of comments from Marx and Engels, which illustrate their perspective on Chartism.

‘We hesitate not a moment in declaring that the Star is the only English newspaper … which knows the real state of parties in England; which is really and essentially democratic; which is free from nationalist and religious prejudice; which sympathises with the democrats and working men (now-a-days the two are almost one and the same), all over the world’.15 ‘The six points of the Charter, which they contend for contain nothing but the demand of Universal Suffrage, and of the conditions without which

Universal Suffrage would be illusory for the working class …. But Universal Suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class of England … The carrying of Universal Suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent’.16 And finally, from Engels, writing in 1881: ‘the first working men’s party that the world ever produced – the Chartist party. Yes, but the Chartists were broken up and attained nothing. Did they, indeed? Of the six points of the People’s charter, two, vote by ballot and no property qualification are now the law of the land.

A third, universal suffrage, is at least approximately carried … a fourth, equal electoral districts, is distinctly in sight … so that the breakdown of the Chartist movement has resulted in the realisation of fully one-half of the Chartist programme. And if the mere recollection of a past political organisation of the working class could effect these political reforms, and a series of reforms besides, what will the presence of an actual working men’s party do?’17 We might quibble with the accuracy of Engels’ statement that universal suffrage was ‘approximately carried’ by 1881, but as a statement that Chartism was a movement of victories this is eloquent testimony. n Footnotes 1 Northern Star [NS] 17 Feb. 2 Hansard House of Commons 3 May 1842 vol 63 col.

3 Neue Oder-Zeitung 8 June 1855, reprinted in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain (1971), p. 236.

4 The People’s Charter (1838), p. 9.

5 NS 24 Mar. 1838.

6 NS 2 Feb. 1839.

7 Le Réforme 4 Jan. 1848, translation in Articles on Britain, p.

69.

8 NS 6 Jan. 1838.

9 London Dispatch 19 Mar. 1837 10 NS 22 September 1838.

11 Le Populaire, 19 Aug. 1843. I am grateful to Fabrice Bensimon for this reference and its translation 12 NS 5 Feb. 1848.

13 I am grateful to Fabrice Bensimon for this reference and its translation.

14 Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (2007), p. 339.

15 NS 5 Sep. 1846.

16 Marx, New York Daily Tribune 25 Aug. 1852, reprinted in Articles on Britain, pp.

17 Labour Standard 23 July 1881, reprinted in Articles on Britain, p. 383.

theory&struggle 37

Harsev Bains

The International Working Men’s Association 1864 to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour.”

So Marx summed up the need for an organisation cutting across national boundaries, united as the international working class. The struggle for emancipation, building international solidarity among the working class is as fundamental today as it was at the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association.

This article summarises the history of the founding of the International working Men’s Association, as recounted by Wilhelm Eichoff, writing with Marx’s assistance in 1869, before providing extracts from Karl Marx’ own Address.

Foundation of the Association, as recounted by Wilhelm Eichoff

Harsev Bains is General Secretary of the Indian Workers Association UK.

I

N REFLECTING upon a colossal event such as the founding of the International Working Men’s Association on 28 September 1864 a number of significant factors come to mind, highlighting the relevance of the path illuminated by Karl Marx to explain the past, to understand the present and to illuminate the future. The inaugural address written by Marx during October, to replace the original preamble prepared by Association’s subcommittees, provides living testimony to the relevance of Marxism in the present era. Before the terms ‘neo liberalism’ and ‘globalisation’ were in common parlance, Marx presented an analysis of the implications of political economy for the working class which still provides explanations of increasing inequalities today.

38 theory&struggle

Marx warned of the inadequacies of mere reforms, ‘The experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however excellent in principle, and however useful in practice, cooperative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries.’

‘To save the industrious masses’ he continued, ‘cooperative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet, the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue

‘The immediate motive for the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association was the latest Polish insurrection. The London workers sent a deputation to Lord Palmerston (then Prime Minister) with an appeal in which they called on him to intervene on behalf of Poland. At the same time, they issued an address to the workmen of Paris, calling on them to take joint action. The Parisians responded by sending delegates to London. To welcome them, a public meeting gathered at St. Martin’s Hall, Long Acre, on September 28, 1864, at which Britons, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles and Italians were represented in large numbers.

This meeting gave birth to the International Working Men’s Association. Apart from the political purpose for which the meeting was called, it also raised the subject of general social conditions. It revealed that workmen of all nations had the same grievances, that they were subjected to the same basic evils in all countries. It showed that the interests of all of them coincided. It elected a provisional Central Council, later renamed the General Council which made its seat in London and was composed of various nationalities. The Council was provisionally entrusted with the central administration of the future Association, the publication of the Inaugural Address (a kind of programme), and the

drafting of the Provisional Rules.

Unanimity and enthusiasm reigned at the meeting.

Each nation was represented by men who did it honour.

As a result, the English workers, who had fought the ruling classes independently of, and uninfluenced by, the political and social movements of the rest of Europe since 1824, when the legislature was compelled to grant them the right of association, now came out of their national isolation for the first time and agreed with the workmen of all nations on the necessity for joint action. Hence the enthusiasm: the gathering was aware that it was ringing in a new era in the workers’ movement.

Difficulties in the Initial Period of the Association

New movements are not created overnight even if they are called upon to fill a pressing need of the times.

To begin with, it is essential to steer clear of reefs on which new organisations have foundered so often before or which have, at the very least, diverted them from their original and true goal, for representatives of declining forms of the movement join the new one to make it a vehicle of the old. This was the case here, too. The Italian members of the provisional Central Council were followers of Mazzini. They laid before the Central Council a draft of the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Rules drawn up by Mazzini himself. In his address, Mazzini repeated his old political programme garnished with a bit of socialist phraseology. He thundered against the class struggle. His Rules were formulated in a strictly centralised manner fit for secret political societies.

From the start they would have destroyed the very basis of an international working men’s association which was not conceived to create a movement but only to unite and weld together the already existing and dispersed class movement of various countries.

Mazzini’s name was in high repute at the time among the English workers, notably since Garibaldi’s triumphant visit to London.

Mazzini was therefore fairly confident that he would be able to take charge of the International Working Men’s Association. But he had reckoned without his

theory&struggle 39

host. Karl Marx, who had been elected to the provisional Central Council at the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, submitted his drafts of the Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules in opposition to Mazzini’s. Both of his drafts were unanimously adopted and published, and the Provisional Rules later won final acceptance at the Geneva Congress in 1866.

It was therefore a German who gave the International Working Men’s Association its definite tendency and organisational principles. And we might also note that the Central Council in London has repeatedly been confirmed in its functions’.

‘The Inaugural Address of Karl Marx

40 theory&struggle

“Working Men, It is a great fact that the misery of the working classes has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivalled in the annals of history for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In 1850, a moderate organ of the British bourgeoisie, seemingly of more than average information, predicted that if the exports and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English pauperism would sink to zero. Alas! On April 7th, 1864, Mr. Gladstone,’ the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, delighted his audience’ by the statement that the total import and export trade of England had grown in 1863 to £443,955,000, which amounted to about three times the trade of the comparatively recent epoch of 1843. With all that, he was compelled to refer to the social misery. He had to speak of those who were on the border of starvation, of wages that had not increased by a single penny, of human life that was in nine cases out of ten but a daily struggle for existence. He did not speak of the people of Ireland, gradually replaced by machinery in the north, and by sheep-walks in the south, though even the sheep in that unhappy country are decreasing, it is true, not at so rapid a rate as the men. He did not repeat what then had been just betrayed by the highest representatives of the upper ten thousand in a sudden fit of terror. When the garrotte panic had reached a certain height, the House of Lords caused an inquiry to be made into, and a report to be published upon, transportation and penal servitude. Out came the murder in the bulky Blue Book of 1863, and proved it was, by official facts and figures, that the worst of the convicted criminals, the penal serfs of England and Scotland, toiled much less and fared far better than the agricultural labourers of England and Scotland. But this was not all. When, consequent upon the Civil War in America, the operatives of Lancashire and Cheshire were thrown upon the streets, the same House of Lords sent to the manufacturing districts a physician commissioned

to investigate into the smallest possible amount of carbon and nitrogen, to be administered in the cheapest and plainest form, which might just suffice to avert starvation diseases. Dr. Smith, the medical commissioner of Parliament, ascertained that 28,000 grains of carbon, and 1,330 grains of nitrogen were the weekly allowance that would just about be enough to keep an average adult over the level of starvation diseases, and he found furthermore that this quantity pretty nearly agreed with the scanty nourishment to which the pressure of extreme distress had actually reduced the poor cotton operatives’.

If this was not serious enough, Marx continued ‘The same learned Doctor was later on again deputed by the government to inquire into the nourishment of the poorer part of the working class. The results of his researches are contained in the “Sixth Report on Public Health”, published by order of Parliament in the course of the present year (1864). What did the Doctor discover? That the silk weavers, the needle women, the kid gloves, the stocking weavers, and other workers, received, on an average, not even the distress pittance of the cotton operatives, not even the amount of carbon and nitrogen “just sufficient to avert starvation diseases”.

“Moreover,” we quote from the report, “as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire) insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the average local diet.” “It must be remembered,” adds the official report, “that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that, as a rule, great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it.”... “Even cleanliness will have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness; in all cases it is the poverty of working populations’.

Marx went on to contrast this appalling poverty amongst the working poor with official account of their improving lot.

‘Such are the official statements published by order of Parliament in 1864, during the millennium of free trade, at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House of Commons that “The average condition of the British labourer has improved in a degree we know to be extraordinary

and unexampled in the history of any country or any age”.

Upon these official congratulations jars the dry remark of the official Public Health Report: “The public health of a country means the health of its masses, and the masses will scarcely be healthy unless, to their very base, they be at least moderately prosperous.

Dazzled by the “Progress of the Nation” statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: “From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing to be almost incredible! This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” adds Mr. Gladstone, “is entirely confined to classes of property!

If you want to know with how many victims of broken health, tainted morals, and mental ruin, that “Intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power entirely confined to classes of property” was, and is being, produced by the classes of labour, look to the picture hung up in the last “Public Health Report” of the workshops of tailors, printers, and dressmakers! Compare the “Report of the Children’s Employment Commission” of 1863, where it is stated, for instance, that the potters as a class, both men and women, represent a much degenerated population, both physically and mentally, that the unhealthy child is an unhealthy parent in his turn, that the future was fraught with the gradual extinction of the race, and that the degeneracy of the population of Staffordshire would be even greater were it not for the constant recruiting from the adjacent country, and the intermarriages with more healthy races.

Glance at Mr. Tremenheere’s Blue Book on the “Grievances Complained of by the journeymen Bakers"! And who has not shuddered at the seemingly paradoxical statement made by the inspectors of factories, and illustrated by the Registrar General, that the Lancashire operatives, while put upon the distress pittance of food, were actually improving in health during this time, because of their temporary exclusion by the cotton famine from the cotton factory, and that the mortality of the children was decreasing, because their mothers were now at last allowed to give them, instead of Godfrey’s cordial, their own breasts.

Again reverse the medal! The Income and Property Tax Returns laid before the House of Commons on July 20, 1864, teach us that the persons with yearly incomes, valued at £50,000 and upwards, had, from April 5th, 1862, to April 5th, 1863, been joined by a dozen and one, their number having increased in that

single year from 67 to 80. The same returns disclose the fact that about 3,000 persons divide amongst themselves a yearly income of about £25,000,000 sterling, rather more than the total revenue doled out annually to the whole mass of the agricultural labourers of England and Wales. Open the census of 1861, and you will find that the number of the landed proprietors of England and Wales had decreased from 16,934 in 1851, to 15,066 in 1861, so that the concentration of land had grown in 10 years 11 per cent. If the concentration of the soil of the country in a few hands proceeds at the same rate, the land question will become singularly simplified, as it had become in the

Roman Empire, when Nero grinned at the discovery that half the Province of Africa was owned by six gentlemen.

We have dwelt so long upon these facts, “so astonishing to be almost incredible”, because England heads the Europe of commerce and industry. It will be remembered that not long ago one of the refugee sons of Louis Philippe publicly congratulated the English agricultural labourer on the superiority of his lot over that of his less florid comrade on the other side of the Channel. Indeed, with local colours changed, and on a scale somewhat contracted, the English facts reproduce themselves in all the industrious and progressive countries of the Continent’ in all of them there has taken place, since 1848, an unheard-of development of industry, and an undreamed-of expansion of imports and exports. In all of them the augmentation of wealth and power entirely confined to classes of property was truly intoxicating. In all of them, as in England, a

theory&struggle 41

minority of the working classes got their real wages somewhat advanced; while in most cases, given the universally rising prices, the monetary rise of wages denoted no more a real access of comforts than the inmate of the metropolitan poor-house or orphan asylum, for instance, was in the least benefited by his first necessaries rising in price according to official estimates from £7 7s. 4d. in 1852 to £9 15s. 8d. in 1864. Everywhere the great mass of the working classes were sinking down to a lower depth, at the same rate, at least, that those above them were rising in the social scale. In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every, unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those, whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool’s paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to industrial and agricultural production, no aids and contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that, on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms. Death of starvation rose almost to the rank of a social institution, during this intoxicating epoch of economic progress, in the metropolis of the British Empire, that epoch is marked in the annals of the world by the quickened return, the widening compass, and the deadlier effects of the social pest called a commercial and industrial crisis’.

Marx went on to reflect upon the devastating ways in which working class movements had been affected in Britain and elsewhere.

‘After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, all party organisations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic, and the shortlived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasme, and political reaction. The defeat of the Continental working classes a soon spread its contagious effects on this side of the Channel. While the rout of their Continental brethren unmanned the English working classes, and broke their faith in their own cause, it restored to the landlord and the money-lord their somewhat shaken confidence.

They insolently withdrew concessions already advertised. The discoveries of new gold lands led to an immense exodus, leaving an irreparable void in the ranks of the British proletariat. Others of its formerly active members were caught by the temporary bribe of greater work and wages, and turned into loyal subjects.

All the efforts made at keeping up, or remodelling, the Chartist movement, failed signally; the press organs of the working class died one by one of the apathy of the masses, and, in point of fact, never before seemed the English working class so thoroughly reconciled to a state of political nullity. If, then, there had been no

42 theory&struggle

solidarity of action between the British and the Continental working classes, there was, at all events, a solidarity of defeat.

And yet this period has not been without its compensating features’ Marx continued, going on to point to what he described as ’two great facts’.

‘After a thirty years’ struggle, fought with most admirable perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momentous split between the landlords and money-lords, succeeded in carrying the Ten Hours’ Bill. The immense physical, moral, and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, halfyearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the Continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action. But besides its practical import, there was something else to exalt the marvellous success of this working men’s measure.

Through their most notorious men of science, such as Dr. Ure, Professor Senior, and other sages of that stamp, the British bourgeoisie had predicted, and to their heart’s content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labour must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampire like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too. In olden times, child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch, but it was practised on some very solemn occasions only, once a year perhaps, and then Moloch had no exclusive bias for the children of the poor. This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the laws of supply and demand which form the political economy of the bourgeoisie, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the bourgeoisie succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the cooperative movement, especially the cooperative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”.

The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form,

destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the cooperative system were sown by Robert Owen; the same working men’s experiments, tried on the Continent, were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848’.

Whilst recognising the significance of these developments, however, Marx was clear about what more needed to be done.

‘The experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however excellent in principle, and however useful in practice, cooperative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic bourgeois spouters, and even keen political economists, have all at once turned nauseously complimentary to the very cooperative labour system they had vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the Utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatising it as the sacrilege of the Socialist. To save the industrious masses, cooperative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means.

Yet, the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour.

Remember the sneer with which, last session, Lord Palmerston put down the advocates of the Irish Tenants’ Right Bill. The House of Commons, cried he, is a house of landed proprietors. To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political reorganisation of the working men’s party.

One element of success they possess-numbers; but numbers weigh only in the balance, if united in an alliance and led towards a known goal. Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts.

This thought prompted the working men of different countries assembled on September 28, 1864, in public meeting at St. Martin’s Hall, to found the International Working Men’s Association.

Another conviction swayed that meeting.

If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission if the foreign policy of governments

pursues criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance by the working classes of England that saved the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. The shameless approval, mock sympathy, or idiotic indifference, with which the upper classes of Europe have witnessed the mountain fortress of the Caucasus falling a prey to, and heroic Poland being assassinated by, Russia; the unresisted encroachments of that barbarous power, whose head is at St. Petersburg, and whose hands are in every Cabinet of Europe, have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective Governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.

The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes.

Proletarians of all countries, Unite!’

The relevance of Marx’ address speaks for itself, in the contemporary context.

theory&struggle 43

Pete Caldwell and Peter Templeton ‘The genius of English workmen for organisation has covered some of the districts of northern England (for example Lancashire) with a network of institutions, industrial, social, political and religious…’

Political education and the WEA

44 theory&struggle

There is a strong case for political education for adults. Participation in conventional politics particularly voting in elections and membership of, and activity in, the major political parties has steadily declined along with civil society organisations, such as trade unions, that sustain this politics. There is widespread polling evidence showing distaste and contempt for the political classes and processes leading to an Establishment concern that this detachment undermines the quality of future political leadership and can lead to an unstable political system.

However this decline in conventional politics is only part of the picture. There has been a revival in oppositional electoral politics – UKIP, Scottish Nationalists and the Greens – and an expectation that the country is moving to a multi-party system with shifting coalition governments. In different ways, disenchantment with the electoral process is taking an electoral expression.

Additionally, digital communications have enabled the growth of effective campaigning and engagement around a range of issues.

Finally, it’s possible to point to a number of highly impressive grass roots campaigns. Hillsborough 96 and Stephen Lawrence campaigns are powerful examples of where highly motivated local campaigns have mobilised widespread support and succeeded in rocking the Establishment.

This wider view of political action should inform our understanding of political education. Whilst there is some tradition of civic education and study of politics as an academic subject, there is a much richer one of localised adult education provision that connects with the immediate needs and interests of disadvantaged groups.

The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) is a voluntary organisation that has a radical mission embracing a commitment to equality and democracy. It is non-party political but campaigns vigorously for educational reforms and improvement (in schooling as well as adult learning) and desires its learning to inform and support civic and political activity and engagement. This paper outlines how this has been approached since its formation in 1903 especially

looking at relationships with government and with the changing structure and needs of the labour and other social movements from which it grew. The WEA strongly believes that adult education deserves public funding and has been in receipt of this, albeit on a modest scale, since 1909. The impact of this funding and the constraints, formal and informal, that this has implied have been the subject of continual discussion and debate. The WEA grew up with a particular understanding of social movements (particularly the labour movement). The changes in these movements, and in the WEA’s understanding of this, is another important focus of our paper.

Tutorial classes and the development of the labour movement

The WEA’s formation early in the last century was part of a process of substantial social and political change that included mass unionisation and industrial unrest, women’s suffrage and the first wave feminist movement, Irish Home Rule and the formation and rapid growth of the Labour Party. At this time secondary schooling opportunities were very limited for working class children and entrance to university impossible.

Not surprisingly there was considerable demand for wider adult educational opportunities both to inform and develop the cadre of the new social movements and for reasons of individual self-improvement.

This connected with a desire from some more radical members of the Establishment, particularly the in the universities and Church of England, to make liberal education (of the sort received by the Establishment) much more widely available and to challenge the exclusivity of the ancient universities.

The WEA, formed in 1903, brought these reformers together with predominately local working class organisations: trade union, cooperative, religious and political bodies (mainly Independent Labour Party).

WEA branches were part of thriving local organisational networks, particularly in industrial areas and their purpose was to represent the educational needs of their members. It is recorded for instance that in 1910-11, the Birmingham WEA branch had 76

Pete Caldwell spent a working life in WEA adult education; his main teaching and curriculum interests have been shop steward education, second chance, return to learn and Access to HE. His email is petecaldwell125 @gmail.com.

Peter Templeton came to the WEA in the 1980s via community development and trade union activity. He worked in the WEA on second chance, health education, quality improvement, membership and volunteering. His email is pt007h3016@ blueyonder.co.uk.

theory&struggle 45

affiliations as well as 420 individual members; the affiliations included trade union branches, adult schools, and religious bodies, educational and political organisations.

From its inception the WEA was concerned with campaigning for educational reform (particularly universal secondary education and wider access to Higher Education) and providing educational opportunities for their members and those of their affiliates. Early WEA branches were conceived of as federations of local organisations, representing and responding to their educational needs. For RH Tawney, an Oxford man and important WEA leader, this connection with the organisational networks of the working class represented a major step forward from earlier, more top down, educational outreach efforts, such as the Settlements movement in which he and other university members had been involved.

‘The genius of English workmen for organisation has covered some of the districts of northern England (for example Lancashire) with a network of institutions, industrial, social, political and religious…There are certain towns in which almost every adult appears to a stranger to be connected with half a dozen different associations. It is obvious that the common atmosphere thus created is favourable, like that of an Oxford college, to the dissemination of ideas.’ (Tawney, quoted in Goldman p 54) Three year tutorial classes, meeting once a week in the evening, were the signal contribution of the WEA to political education in the first half of the last century although WEA branches undertook a wide range of other shorter courses and other educational activities.

Within the tutorial class, the WEA branch brought together students securing from their university partner a tutor to teach the subject of their choice; the WEA favoured topics being social sciences and humanities.

The first two tutorial classes in 1909 are credited as being those taught by RH Tawney in Stoke on Trent and Rochdale. He was employed by Oxford University to teach these and undertake research and writing during the summer break. By the 1930’s six or seven hundred tutorial classes were being provided annually with an average of 15-20 students in each class.

How do we assess tutorial classes as political education? The intention was to provide learning at a university standard, at least in their third year of study, to adults mainly fully employed during the day time.

The students were predominately manual workers although there was a substantial minority of routine white collar workers and primary schoolteachers. The tutors were university staff expected to be specialists in their subject. Clearly the direct comparison of adult tutorial classes with undergraduate study was of limited value; adult students brought motivation, ‘maturity of mind’ and ‘more grip of reality’ whilst lacking the broader educational grounding and study skills. The

46 theory&struggle

material and physical barriers to effective study were massive. At the same time, accounts of classes pay tribute to the enormous commitment of the students, their intelligence and their capacity to mobilise experience and the desire for social and individual improvement to support their learning. In practice an approach to teaching and learning was often developed that grew out of these strengths.

Central to the methodology of tutorial classes were the notions of ‘balance’ and class discussion. The WEA and university sense of liberal education was exposing students to the different sides of academic arguments and debate; the student was being taught ‘how to think, not what to think’ and every economics class should introduce students to ‘both Marshall and Marx.’ Classes were structured around ‘one hour’s lecture followed by one hour’s discussion’. As well as encouraging participative learning this enabled students, particularly the more politically engaged ones, to challenge the tutor and put forward strongly their own, or their organisation’s, stance on a particular debate.

An outcome of this emphasis on discussion and participation was an appreciation of the immense contribution that students’ experience and tacit knowledge could make to the development of the subject. Perceptive tutors, like Tawney at the beginning of the century and EP Thompson, in the Leeds Extra Mural Department in the 1940’s, drew extensively on their tutorial class students’ experience in developing their own subject understanding. This theme of ‘experiential learning’ will become much more relevant in the next part of this paper.

Whilst there wasn’t a WEA curriculum as such, there was a common approach among many leading figures in the WEA and some of their university partners; this was summarised under the banner of ‘Social purpose education’. This contained a number of underlying assumptions about curriculum and students.

The key potential students were those active, or potentially active, in working class organisations; the subjects should either focus on a grounding in the knowledge required to understand the position of the working class in society and that needed to take an active or leadership role in trade unions, political parties, local or national government, cooperative and voluntary organisations. A liberal approach to education would help develop the skills required in these organisations particularly the capacity to weigh up and analyse different arguments and perspectives and arrive at grounded conclusions. Social purpose education helped to describe and differentiate the WEA’s approach and how it contributed to democratic citizenship. Two of the strongest proponents of this approach were in Yorkshire: Sidney Raybould who was Professor Adult Education at Leeds University and the WEA Yorkshire North District Secretary, George Thompson.

The WEA’s approach to political education was

strongly critiqued from the left by the Plebs League and National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC). Their approach was based on adherence to a particular form of Marxist curriculum and a rejection of ‘balance’; their classes should be firmly committed to advancing working class interests. A particular source of conflict was the WEA’s use of public funding and their alliance with universities; the NCLC argument was that the state funded WEA provision in order to incorporate working class dissent and head off more radical alternatives, such as them. Whilst fierce debates between WEA and NCLC captured the imagination and trade unions mainly affiliated to one or the other, the differences on the ground were probably exaggerated. The WEA’s provision was in the main locally driven and attracted tutors and students of an anti-Establishment bent. In the absence of public funding, the labour colleges depended on financial support from their affiliated trade unions and this created its own limitations with a shift, particularly post-1945, to trade union training rather than broader political education.

An additional critique has highlighted how this notion of social purpose was focused on men and the formal institutions of the labour movement. Whilst there were many women students, their contribution and experience were undervalued. A recent study of Tawney lends weight to this critique. More recent work around social purpose and political education has embraced diversity and this is addressed in the next section.

Arguably the 1945 post-war settlement marked the high watermark of the tutorial class movement and this notion of social purpose education. The WEA was rightly proud of its contribution to political education and educating a large cadre of political representatives; in 1938 they produced a list fifteen MPs, 1800 councillors and 250 magistrates who had been students in WEA classes. The reforming 1945 Labour Government had, it was estimated, fourteen members who had been WEA tutors or Executive members. All this, and of course the achievements of that government, was powerful evidence to support the impact of WEA political education.

However, the settlement that emerged and the social and political changes in post-war Britain did little to nurture and develop this tradition. The post-war welfare state was centralised and helped lead to a decline in local self-help and mutual organisations whilst trade union power and activity shifted from the locality to the workplace. Universal secondary education was introduced and there were greater further and higher educational opportunities as well as greater social mobility particularly with the expansion of public sector employment. To an extent the consumer society undermined the culture of self-improvement that had sustained the WEA. The tutorial class movement declined much to the frustration of its protagonists. WEA tutorial classes

became shorter, the academic demands were reduced and the subject focus shifted away from the Social Sciences towards the liberal arts. The student body changed too losing its particular appeal to a working class audience. The WEA was felt to be drifting and losing its political edge; critics argued that by saying ‘we are all workers now’ it was reneging on its commitment to a specifically working class constituency, particularly manual workers. However the tradition of social purpose education was maintained in their trade union scheme and by university day release courses with groups such as miners and steelworkers, although organisationally these were separate from mainstream provision.

Rebirth of political education from the 1970s

The post-war boom drew to a close in the 1970s and consequent social change, instability and unrest gave rise to new social movements and significant innovation in adult education. Of particular importance were trade union militancy and widening scope of bargaining, second wave feminism and changes in women’s employment, campaigning against unemployment and deindustrialisation, anti-racism, local struggles around housing, welfare rights and urban regeneration.

The continuing value of the WEA was confirmed in the 1973 Russell Report on Adult Education which gave the organisation a steer in the direction of community education. The WEA that responded to these changed circumstances was itself changing. The WEA’s links with the universities had weakened (universities were able to make their own direct ‘extra mural provision’) and the Association now employed its own educational staff, tutor organisers who were responsible for teaching classes and finding tutors and organising other courses. Increasingly the WEA looked to their professional staff to arrange ‘community’ provision as well as continuing to support the predominately liberal adult educational programmes of WEA branches.

Changes in the WEA were part of a wider shift in the political landscape. A range of government initiatives particularly to address rising unemployment and inner city discontent provided funding and other opportunities. The Home Office sponsored Community Development Projects working in selected deprived inner city areas brought a mix of action research and community development that led to new understandings and the spawning of community based organisations such as neighbourhood law centres. The Manpower Services Commission, founded in 1973, provided funding for job creation and training schemes in areas of high unemployment. These state initiatives supported the growth of ‘projects’ — local short term initiatives designed to ameliorate particular social problems. In turn this led to the appointment of staff, the development of local self-help and campaigning

theory&struggle 47

organisations — fertile ground for adult educators seeking to connect their work with new audiences of disadvantaged adults. There were growing networks of professional staff (many graduates of the 1960’s student movement) – development workers, rights specialists, researchers as well as adult educators – bringing their expertise, and most importantly energy and enthusiasm.

The rapid expansion of community education took a quite different form to the previous tutorial classes.

The starting point remained the local: provision was developed as part of partnerships with other on the ground organisations such as schools, particularly Community Schools and those in Educational Priority Areas, neighbourhood law centres, Claimants Unions, Trades Councils, Community Centres. Curriculum was developed with the partner organisation and their users and courses tended to be short, flexible and ‘issue based’ rather than following an academic curriculum structure. The issues were those arising from the new social movements particularly welfare rights, unemployment, anti-racism, women’s rights and health and safety at work and in the community.

The WEA was a player in a growing field and it remained highly decentralised. Each of its Districts was a ‘Responsible Body’ receiving direct grant from the Department of Education along with support from local authorities with whom tacit spheres of influence agreements existed. Whilst some WEA Districts built volunteer branches out of community work, its development was mainly professionally led and varied greatly from place to place.

The WEA played a particularly important role in the development of women’s education and women only courses frequently experientially based and exploring subjects such as women’s health and women in history (‘Herstory’). For a time the Association had a national Women’s Officer and there were women’s branches in several WEA districts. Additionally the WEA played a part in the New Opportunities for Women programme; this was the beginning of the transformative adult educational work around women returners and access to higher education. Women returners and access students played a central role in the transformation of further education in the 1980s and many went on to fulfil important professional roles in adult education and elsewhere in community and voluntary sector organisations.

The WEA’s trade union work became part of the TUC’s regional educational programme and a substantial provider for shop stewards and, after the introduction of statutory safety representatives in 1976, for safety reps too. WEA staff played an active part in TUC curriculum development which, drawing particularly on Swedish experience with study circles, adopted a student centred and problem solving approach. Additionally though in some Districts the Association developed work alongside of a more campaigning and political character. For example

48 theory&struggle

Coventry Health and Safety Movement (CHASM) lobbied Parliament successfully for the speedy introduction of the Safety Representatives Regulations as well as organising public meetings on common industrial, and community, hazards such as Asbestos.

CHASM was part of a growing wider network of Hazards’ organisations (some still extant today) that brought together campaigning experts with trade union and community activists. The building of shop-steward education around what was described as a ‘training model’ was fiercely contested by proponents, mainly university based, of the social purpose ‘industrial studies model’ exemplified by the miners’ day release courses. The critics saw training, facilitated by public funds and statutory time off, as part of a strategy to incorporate and proceduralise trade union militancy.

How can the WEA’s work in this period be assessed as ‘political education’? Some of the WEA’s earlier social purpose work was continued in WEA branches but the political edge to the community education had a different character. Whilst the earlier generation had a sense of a curriculum as a body of knowledge to be shared with emerging working class leaders, here the curriculum mainly grew out of the needs, aims and ambitions of local organisations and students. This chimed with the philosophy of those like Paulo Freire (popularised in this country by influential community educators such as Tom Lovett) who argued against the idea of a ‘bank’ of knowledge. In the WEA key watchwords were that adult education should be responsive and flexible, relating immediately to the interests of potential students. The WEA’s role was to build on these and connect to wider social and political understandings.

A further strength was a greater accommodation of diversity; the methodology assumed that different groups had different needs and aims and that adult educators should draw and build upon these. The provision of women’s only courses was an example of this as well as the WEA’s nationally developed Women’s Learning Programme. None of this was straightforward or uncontested but was part of the creation of a different model of political education from the first half of the twentieth century.

Additionally the work contributed to the transformation of the education system particularly Further Education bringing in massive numbers of new students — many less well qualified than previously and much greater numbers of women and members of minority ethnic groups. It also contributed to important changes in curriculum and assessment particularly through the early pioneering work of the Open College Networks and laid the ground for the later development of ‘mass higher education’.

During the 70’s and 80’s an institutionalisation of community adult education is discernible and central government policy steers became stronger, with a clear labour market orientation, around

unemployment/employability and qualifications, particularly those leading to public sector white collar employment. An important part of this was the transformation of further education into making large scale provision for adults and the development of Access to HE courses.

The challenge of political education in the modern era

Looking at post-16 education in the last 25 years, we have seen a continuation and intensification of the trends set in train in the 1970s. A Prime Minister today could say exactly the same words as James Callaghan did in his ‘Great Debate’ speech at Ruskin in 1976.

“In today's world, higher standards are demanded than were required yesterday and there are simply fewer jobs for those without skill.”

In the UK, governments of all complexions have honed this ‘Skills’ agenda insistently for many years and arguably been following a direction set four decades ago.

The 1992 Further & Higher Education Act marked a key moment, finally detaching much of post 16 provision from local democratic control (polytechnics became independent of Local Authorities in 1989) and in introducing, in FE, the more individualised funding methodologies, detailed audit and common Ofsted inspection framework. This was tied to a strongly centralised target culture designed to energise the development of skills, usually through qualifications.

Perhaps its high point was the 2006 Leitch report into Skills which dominated policy discussions in the last New Labour term of office.

As part of this process, Adult Education was effectively incorporated into Further Education – making a clearer separation from Higher Education and weakening the traditions of both Access study and extra-mural provision. For many adult education providers, the drive was to show how they contributed to the Skills agenda. Although some local authorities maintained Adult Education departments these have been almost entirely centrally funded through either FE skills funding or a safeguarded fund for adult learning.

The changes in Further Education have been cultural as well as structural arguably evolving into self-limiting organisations, driven by performance management and new managerialism where people imagine what is and isn’t allowed within constantly changing funding, audit, regulatory and inspection regimes. This can feel bureaucratically crushing to staff – although, of course, this is a picture familiar to school teachers. The internalisation of surveillance by colleges and even teachers within the Ofsted framework was noted by Mark Fisher from his experience teaching adults (‘Capitalist Realism’, 2009, Zero Books).

Equally, John Field in (2000, Trentham) ‘Lifelong

Learning and new educational order’ argued that ‘lifelong learning is now a mechanism for exclusion and control. As well as empowering people, it also creates new and powerful inequalities.’ In this sense lifelong learning becomes a continuing requirement on workers in a globalised economy — Prime Minister Cameron’s ‘Global Race’. "We are in a global race today … How will we come through it? It's not complicated. Hard work.” (The Guardian, 22nd September 2013) However, within the incorporation of adult education, there is an awareness – especially amongst some individual ministers and politicians – of its historic value and subtlety particularly in relation to inequality. Policy adjustments have been made for many years in widening participation, postcode uplifts, equality and diversity, etc. acknowledging that adult education can have some influence on community cohesion, health and well-being, parenting, and citizenship.

So, whilst the implementation of the skills agenda in post-16 education has led to more centralisation, managerialism and less tolerance of innovation, it would be unfair to say that this was a blanket situation for all adult education. Even in the 1980s during Thatcherism there were initiatives and pots of significant funding that allowed scope for innovation (albeit intended to offset other consequences). The 90s saw the ‘Non-schedule 2 pilots’. These are often about supporting local initiatives around the margins (of society and policy). Today, the Adult Safeguarded Learning fund has been maintained throughout this Parliament from its start under New Labour. Moreover, the current Coalition government is unhappy with the centralist agenda and looks to greater localism (see ‘No Stone Unturned’ the Heseltine Report) albeit in a further effort to get traction on the skills agenda.

There is genuine awareness of the value of informal and non-vocational adult education particularly with individual ministers in this and the last Parliament.

This has been constant in ministers from New Labour through into the Coalition.

Most recently it included genuine recognition of the power of adult education in mental health and wellbeing. It also applies to elements of political education. The current changes to electoral registration hold huge potential for the disenfranchisement of younger, mobile voters, particularly in multiple occupancy dwellings, lodgings, etc. The WEA was invited to work with the Cabinet office on an awareness and registration campaign. In practice, the funding couldn’t meet the task but the intention was there and reinforced the WEA’s own voter registration campaign to its students and tutors http://www.wea.org.uk/campaign/whyvote Despite the prevailing trends in the dominant Skills agenda, there have been continuing opportunities and partnership work that the WEA has taken up and which are live debates in the Association today.

theory&struggle 49

2015 is a very different time to the period when the WEA was established in 1903. The working class is not as organised as it was and workplaces have changed in ways that make organising and connecting to neighbourhoods, towns and cities more difficult. The organisations and associations that linked and provided networks for people to widen their horizons have almost disappeared or new ones are disconnected from the adult education world.

Working class lives are becoming less certain, more precarious, atomised, individualised and indebted. The routes of social mobility that were available in the sixties and seventies (cheap education, jobs with pensions, reasonable house prices) have gone, sometimes destroyed by the policies of people who benefited from them as they became decision makers.

Political education has never been a primary driver of WEA provision, and its work in this area could be dismissed as pockets of provision – often in the places that Tawney would have been drawn to, Lancashire, Sheffield, Nottingham, parts of the North East.

However, it is worth considering how this links to the places the WEA has always worked and recent developments to share ideas.

A few years ago the WEA celebrated the centenary of Tawney’s Tutorial Classes in the Potteries. The Association is still working there in the same communities (still as poor as ever) but the work is now predominantly with women and with a strong focus on health and disability rather than International Relations with potters, steelworkers and primary school teachers.

In recent years, particularly in cities, there has been developing joint working between public bodies and the voluntary sector which has seen innovation and more connected approaches to issues ‘of place’. Local area partnerships have developed with sufficient effect for central government to take note and begin to respond. In many cases these were supported by MPs of various parties, looking to represent effectively their constituencies and to increase the ‘voice’ of people not always heard. In the latter parliament of the last government, a number of initiatives were valuable in looking to address this. Three in particular, Learning for Community Involvement (LFCI), Take Part and Tackling Race Inequality (TRIF), were adopted by the WEA across England to build a more coherent approach to political education in a new millennium.

The Department of Communities & Local Government was often a genuine patron of this work.

These initiatives allowed the development of frameworks, often with partners, and the resources to develop pilot provision and share ideas. They were especially important in helping embed political education within provision. This was an intentional approach in the knowledge that funding was short term and that public finances were becoming ever tighter.

The WEA used both of these initiatives to develop

50 theory&struggle

momentum both within local communities and across the Association. The kinds of work focused on a) engaging with authority/getting authorities to hear the voices of those not heard b) voter registration and the value of voting c) community ‘voice’ in services such as health and social housing For example, in Slough, local councillors come to meet students. In Southampton women students had a meeting with councillors and Muslim elders. In Bristol, Asian women went swimming on their terms – accessing a community facility that they pay for in their Council Tax but had felt excluded from using. Across the Highlands the Women@work networks link women together to speak out about things that matter to them at home, at work and in the community — http://www.weawomenatwork.org.uk/.

More traditionally, there are now more visits to Parliament by WEA student groups than there have been for many years. Across the Eastern region day schools on ‘Politics: what is it good for?’ are running this spring with the ‘Question the Powerful’ project.

The WEA emails all its students to encourage voter registration and links that to its campaigns to build its volunteers. Short courses, such as one in Bristol at a rehab centre, ‘Taking Part in the election’ cover ‘What’s the point of government?’ ‘Why should I bother to vote?’ ‘How do I register to vote?’ ‘How do I decide who to vote for?’

Once again, it is often the contexts or places that the WEA works in that determines the work, whether that’s with Housing Association tenants in Oxford or Chippenham, community representation in public health issues in the Potteries or the voice of the Somali community in Sheffield.

Perhaps the biggest success in embedding this work has been within the WEA’s English for Speakers of Other Languages provision across England. This work often connects students with councillors, doctors and the police – insisting their voice be heard.

With the financial crisis and the incoming Coalition Government in 2010 it appeared that the days of project funding for this work were passed and that the work would either fade away or need to be embedded more widely in the day to day work and provision of the WEA. A commitment to ‘Education with a Social Purpose’ embedded into all provision was proposed in response to this and it struck a chord with across the WEA with staff, tutors and volunteers. What it was, became, and continues to be a matter of debate but In the last three years the WEA has begun to focus its work in England and Scotland on four themes: Health & Wellbeing, Community Engagement, Employability and Culture and has committed itself to an embedding social purpose and critical action learning into all its provision.

So what could be the ingredients in modern political education? The challenge is to connect this innovative and well-crafted local activity with the wider

frameworks provided by Take Part, the NIACE citizenship curriculum, and the WEA’s own themes.

These would include: l Initial engagement with disadvantaged groups is the foundation of the project l Build on point of connection with initial interests (individual or group) l Experiential learning and co-production of the curriculum, reflection to social action Valuing diversity l Locally developed and crafted (albeit within a framework) l Reflection to social action

differs from other providers. In that sense, the dogged continuation of working at the margins, in areas many in education, policy and politics have forgotten, is political education. The key elements will remain: commitment to the impact of adult education; persistent working in local communities; partnerships locally, regionally and nationally. n

Conclusion

We know that, despite all the challenges, there is still local activity and people continue to turn to education to make sense of things. The reality remains that, at least at first, most adults prefer short periods of study, with other adults of like mind, face to face with a good tutor. These continue to happen in adult education. The WEA has over 70,000 different adults a year studying in England and Scotland, not in big central locations but in almost every local authority area. They study many subjects in groups of around 12.

Moreover, almost half of these people each year are coming back to education after many years away.

There’s a split in the type of student who participates, 37% of them come from England’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods (as determined by the ONS postcode analysis); 45% of them are on income related benefits; 35% are over 65 years of age.

Is this continued and persistent effort in localities (many of which are marginalised and in poverty) political education in any sense? In reality, much of what is studied is as it always has been in the WEA – a decision made between the participants (often through local partnerships or branches), the tutor and the WEA as a broker in the process. This approach characterised the WEA’s first 50 years with local associations, university joint committees, WETUC and local authorities. Since then much curriculum innovation has come through partnerships such as the Unison Return to Learn Programme, TUC UnionLearn, Tandrusti health work, Take Part, Tackling Race Inequality, etc.

The success of the approach is often its immediate and local impact and the context, partnerships and individual actors within it rather than the spread of common themes Even within some of the most prescribed areas of government post-16 policy – literacy, numeracy and English — from Bristol to Basildon, Glasgow to Slough and many places in between, people who need to improve their English, help their kids, get to grips with life, manage to find the WEA, often through word of mouth networks. They know what it does and how it

Marx Memorial Library Tours The Marx Memorial Library offers guided tours on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1pm.

This allows people to visit the room and desk where Lenin worked in exile in London in 1902/3, to see the banners of the British Battalion of volunteers in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 and view artefacts from major industrial disputes, such as the minerworkers’ and Wapping strikes of the 1980s.

In addition, the Grade II listed building’s historic vaults, which date back to the ifteenth century, can be visited, as well as a memorial courtyard dedicated to media workers killed in the 20th century war against fascism, from Spain in 1936 to victory in Europe in 1945.

Booking recommended.

For further information email admin@mml.xyz or call 02072531485. £5/£3 unwage

theory&struggle 51

John Foster ‘The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’

On Marx’ method and the study of history By way of introduction: concepts and dialectics in history

T

52 theory&struggle

theory&struggle 52

HIS ARTICLE is about how Marx studied history. More specifically it is about the way in which Marx used concepts, the general terms we use in everyday life to contrast, compare and make wider sense of our society and, in the case of history, the different phases of human development. These abstract terms, ‘abstract’ because they do not refer to specific detail but seek to compare generally, have been approached in very different ways by those who study social change.

Marx argued that they must be used dialectically. In doing so Marx followed, but transformed, the approach of the German philosopher Hegel who wrote in the period of the French revolution.

Hegel was revolutionary in so far as he argued that ideas, abstract concepts, never stand still but are always in a process of constant challenge and transformation driven forward collectively by the human mind, through internal debate and dialogue – dialectically. In a period of absolute monarchs and papal dogma this was indeed revolutionary. No idea was absolute or final. At the same time it was, for Hegel, the dialectic of the collective human mind that was itself supreme and determined social development. Ideas ruled.

Marx’s contribution was to reverse this order. He argued that such abstract concepts were simply tools, somewhat like any other tool, developed socially by human beings as they sought collectively to produce the means of their subsistence and, after a certain stage, also struggled over its ownership and distribution.

Material life, in its constant, ‘dialectical’ transformation by human beings, therefore also determined these conceptual tools by which people made sense of their activity. Abstracted from this material and social dialectic, the concepts of any given time lost their meaning – and, added Marx, the dominant ideas in any particular society would always reflect, though never without contest, the dominant material interests, those of the ruling class.

For this reason also any concept used by historians themselves to understand and generalise human development could not be treated as timeless or universal. It was itself a product of a class society. To

be useful, Marx argued, it had to be made ‘concrete’, broken from its conventional meanings and understood, for any particular society, in terms of the overall process of social change. The purpose of historical research was to subject any generalised ‘abstract’ concept to an understanding of what made it specific within this wider material process. We will look later at how Marx himself illustrated this in his ‘Method of Political Economy’.

Immediately, however, it is important to note that a quite different tradition dominates social sciences today.

It is one that goes back to a predecessor of Hegel, Immanuel Kant. Kant argued for the legitimacy and importance of empirical research but gave primacy to ideal concepts. It was, he insisted, the ability of the human mind to generate ideal concepts, comprehending and organising this empirical reality, that validated the presence of a divine being. Concepts therefore had primacy. They were the tools given to humanity to analyse nature. In a more modern form such Kantian, or neo-Kantian, assumptions dominate social science today.

Probably the most influential figure in this neoKantian tradition has been Max Weber. He described his own conceptual procedures thus: ‘to provide .. terms with the necessary precision, sociology must design “pure” (“ideal”) types of corresponding forms of human behaviour which in each case involve the highest possible degree of logical integration because of their complete adequacy on the level of meaning’.2 Their scientific utility depended, for Weber, ‘on their logical integration, their rational coherence as methodological instruments’. They were to be used to categorise reality – not to be redefined by it. To seek to do otherwise would be ‘historicist’. It would contaminate intellectual instruments with the reality that they were meant to analyse. This therefore represents a quite contrary procedure to that of Marx. It cannot admit a dialectic between the abstract and the concrete – one positioned materially within the process of social change.

John Foster is secretary of the Marx Memorial Library. He has taught at the universities of Strathclyde and the West of Scotland.

The Civil War in France The myth of the women Communard pétroleuses served to legitimise the repression of the Parisian working class following the defeat of the Paris Commune

Two Historians on Marx’s Method

This essay on Marx and the study of history begins by exploring this issue of the abstract and the concrete

theory&struggle 53

through the work of two practical historians. One is the Marxist historical geographer David Harvey in an article written very recently; the other a monograph by Eric Hobsbawm produced a generation ago. In different ways both illuminate Marx’s material dialectic of the abstract and the concrete.

David Harvey’s essay on Marx’s method was published in 2012.3 Harvey makes two initial points.

First, that Marx wrote very little history: probably only the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France would qualify in formal terms.

Second, that neither study appears to conform to guidelines laid out by Marx in his major theoretical outline, the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Here Marx defines, briefly but cogently, the material dialectic that drives humanity forward: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

By contrast, says Harvey, Marx’s two historical essays do not position the events of 1848-52 or 1871 within such an overarching politico-economic analysis.

Their style is fluid: events almost accidental. Both Brumaire and The Civil War tend to focus almost obsessively on the manoeuvres and personalities of political leaders. Comments are made about the economic orientation of particular factions and or social groups but these are relatively off-hand and not founded in any wider analysis of economic trends. Little or no attempt is made to position them within a historical reconstruction of an unfolding interaction between the forces and relations of production.

Harvey then turns to Marx’s great economic works, the three volumes of Capital. Here, paradoxically, he finds the missing history – at least in Capital Volume 1.

He notes that Marx’s methodological approach was based on a critique of the categories of classical political economy and hence to an extent, in terms of structure, constrained by them. But the force of Marx’s critique was derived historically – by using his understanding of the historical unfolding of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production to expose the real content, context and meaning of ‘abstract’ terms such as capital, labour and rent. Here Harvey demonstrates precisely the difference between Marx’s materialist dialectics and the neo-Kantian ‘analytical’ use of concepts.

He instances Volume I’s focus on the way ‘labour power’ was historically created as a commodity through

54 theory&struggle

primitive accumulation, the divorce of labour from the means of subsistence, and, technologically, through the accompanying the division of labour. The concept of ‘abstract labour’ developed by Adam Smith and Ricardo is transformed through its concrete reconnection with social processes. The subordination of labour is understood not as a universal condition but as a historical creation through capitalist class struggle that transformed the character of social organisation and state power.

Equally, Harvey shows how Marx deploys a detailed historical analysis of the struggle over the length of the working day to expose the way surplus value is extracted in the workplace after the sale of labour power. As we have just noted, the sale of labour power was itself not a normal market transaction. But thereafter, in the workplace, another battle took place. This was over the extraction of surplus value, how many hours constituted a working day, for how long the employer could extract value, and the legal constraints which the trade unions were able to place on it through collective struggle.

Concrete historical analysis again transforms the abstract category of ‘profit’ into an understanding of the contingent process by surplus value is extracted from workers.

Harvey finds Volumes 2 and 3, respectively on exchange and distribution, less ‘historical’ in their character – although sections of Volume 3 do contain remarkably perceptive comments on the tendency to monopolisation and its consequences for banking and financial manipulation.

More questionably, Harvey argues that these gaps in Marx’s application of his ‘method’ are at least partly explained by his comments in Grundrisse, the first outline of the work that was to become Capital. Here Marx distinguished between different levels of explanation: ‘between the universality of the metabolic relationship with Nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange and the singularities of consumption’.4 In Capital I Marx focuses historically on the generality of the laws of capital – even though he was constrained by his self-imposed framework of a critique of classical political economy. Harvey argues that what Marx never managed to do was to embark on an explanation of the singularities of consumption – the interactions of everyday life and the detailed material of history.

Harvey’s conclusion is that, apart from Capital 1, a magnificent exception, Marx’s history was not written.

Marx never completed the planned fourth volume of Capital that would have included discussion of the State and which might have enabled him to do so.

Nonetheless, argues Harvey, Marx’s own preferences in terms of method are clear. Again quoting Grundrisse, Harvey highlights the importance which Marx attached to understanding history as ‘an organic whole’ – the ‘mutual interaction’ which takes place between different moments, the members of a totality, distinct within a

unity’ with labour at its centre: the ‘natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between human beings and nature and therefore human life itself’.5 If there is one major anomaly in Harvey’s treatment of Marx – particularly in an article entitled ‘Marx’s Method’ – it is that he makes no use of Marx’s own exposition of what he described as The Method of Political Economy in Grundrisse.6 This deficiency is remedied by Eric Hobsbawn. In his 1964 introduction to Marx’s Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, he describes this section as being ‘as brilliant, profound and exciting as everything that Marx wrote in this crucial period of his thought’.7 In it Marx argues for the need to interrogate all given concepts and to do so not abstractly in terms of logic but historically and materially in terms of specific societies in their movement and development. It is worth quoting the opening section in full: It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.

Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. . even the most abstract categories, despite their validity –

precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations..

Here Marx acknowledges Hegel’s dialectics but, as noted earlier, goes on to argue that concepts must be refined, transformed and made concrete in relation to specific societies in their movement and change. ‘The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations.’ Concepts must be ‘evaporated’ in face of these unfolding processes in order, ‘ultimately, to yield a new abstract determination’. It was precisely in this way that Marx redefined abstract ‘labour’ as conceived by Adam Smith as ‘labour power’, a commodity to be ‘bought’ within the very particular power structures of capitalist society and used to create surplus value. Without such specific social determination it would be meaningless. As Harvey observed, Marx’s critique of the categories of political economy in Capital 1was not achieved through abstract reasoning but by actually writing history and laying bare material processes.

It is in this sense that Marx would have described as ‘idealist’ the various attempts made in the 1970s to give his work an academically respectable status. All, though in very different ways, sought to give Marxism a conceptual ‘rigour’ that would harmonise it with one or other of the established academic disciplines. The French philosopher Althusser drew, among other sources, on the structuralism of Gaston Bachelard. G.A Cohen utilised the assumptions of English analytical philosophy. E. O. Wright and Charles Tilly adopted the frameworks of Weberian sociology and Jon Elster rational choice game theory. While Althusser’s structuralism and Wright’s Weberianism are very different, they similarly privilege a priori conceptual definitions as tools for classification and analysis. So also, from a different direction, does Cohen when he seeks to introduce ‘those standards of clarity and rigour which distinguished twentieth century analytical philosophy’.8 For all of these approaches the assertion of logical precision comes first, history second and there is no scope for any dialectical encounter on the way.9 This does not mean, as we have already argued, that Marx rejected the scientific utility of abstract concepts. On the contrary, as David McLellan stresses, what was essential, and what Marx described as ‘the secret of scientific dialectics’, was to treat economic categories as the ‘theoretical expression of the historical relations of production corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production’. ‘In Marx’, comments McLellan, ‘[the dialectic] was material – designed to satisfy the material needs of men. For Marx the dialectical interchange between man and nature was conducted through a specific mode of production which itself generated new needs and the means to satisfy them

theory&struggle 55

– even human nature itself being subject to the dialectics of social change’.10 Hobsbawm argues that the importance of Grundrisse is that it demonstrates how Marx did this. It shows Marx ‘actually thinking’ and doing so in this concrete historical manner. ‘Marx’s vision is thus a marvellously unifying force. His model of economic and social development is one which (unlike Hegel’s) can be applied to history to produce fruitful and original results rather than tautology.. a dialectical working out of the contradictions between labour/property, and the division of labour’.11 Grundrisse was experimental in the scientific sense of constantly seeking to integrate new information on human development, testing generalities about means and relations of production and the place and feasibility of different modes of production: Asiatic, Germanic, Slavonic, Ancient, Feudal. Indeed, Marx’s correspondence through the 1870s and early 1880s, above all with Engels, shows him constantly renewing this experimental engagement as new information emerges from archaeology and anthropology. Engels described his 1884 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, as ‘the fulfilment of a behest’

by Marx and notes that the manuscript had, except in its very final phase, been discussed in detail with him and directly drew on Marx’s own comments on the recently published anthropology of Lewis Morgan.12 So what, in summary, do our two practical historians have to tell us ?

Both challenge the academic systematisers who dominated debate in the 1970s and 80s and take us back to Marx’s own writings. Both stress the way Marx used history to interrogate the concepts of political economy and expose the underlying dynamics of capitalist society. Compared to Hobsbawm, Harvey does not stress so explicitly Marx’s Hegelian heritage or his materialist transformation of it. On the other hand, Harvey provides two brilliant illustrations of how Marx actually used it. Harvey is also somewhat more emphatic than Hobsbawm in saying that Marx wrote little actual history and in particular that he was unable to complete any work that examined the capitalist state. Hobsbawm focuses to a greater extent on the exploratory and experimental character of Marx’s attempts to categorise the phases of human history, gives greater weight to the credentials of Marx’s own historywriting and, most importantly of all, clarifies Marx’s Method on his own terms.

Marx as a historian: The Eighteenth Brumaire

We will look next, very briefly, at one example of Marx’s history writing, The Eighteenth Brumaire.

It is easy to categorise this – apart from a couple of brilliant asides – as David Harvey to some extent did: an occasion piece written to rally the shattered forces of the Parisian working class and to ridicule the victorious defenders of the existing order. Its flashes of

56 theory&struggle

brilliance remain with us. Who can forget ‘as in private life one differentiates between what a person thinks of themselves and what they really are and do, so in historical struggles one must distinguish between the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interest’ ? But what can one make of the endless pages of extended references to figures of classical antiquity or previous historical epochs? Maybe this is to show that the workers have on their side intellects that can outshine the vapid poseurs who exercised power after 1848. But is it more than this? David Harvey looked in vain for any underlying economic analysis that could help him explain, for example, the physical reconfiguration of Paris during the Second Empire.

Brumaire does indeed provide only limited economic analysis. Its focus is much more specific: on short-term fluctuation not long term trends: monthly, weekly changes in employment and profitability. But Marx’s concern here is different from that in Capital.

Its focus is on state power, how it is exercised and how it can be challenged and in doing so illumines another badly misunderstood aspect of Marx’s work, one critical for the writing of history, the relationship between base and superstructure and the role of language and ideology.

In Brumaire Marx seeks to interrogate ‘the state’ and ‘political power’ not abstractly but, as with ‘labour’ in Capital, through historical exposure, understanding contexts materially, concretely and, in this case, also momentarily as politics ‘happen’. It is for this reason that so much of Brumaire is taken up with apparently arcane references to past figures and symbols. Military force played its part in Louis Napoleon’s eventual coup.

But so did symbolism and language. The coup came only after four years in which the victors of the February revolution, the workers of Paris, had progressively lost the political initiative and become politically and ideologically isolated. Marx seeks to explain this power of language, of the symbols of antique republicanism or Napoleonic glory, used to galvanise a population into eventual support for a regime of a quite contrary character that enforced capitalist order. He peels back the rhetoric to reveal class interests. But he also stresses the power of the rhetoric itself.

One of the most perceptive examples is Marx’s description of Social Democracy as it emerged as a dominant political trend within working class politics in 1849 – when alliances ostensibly designed to broaden the base of working class representation, using terms originally coined fifty years before, actually served to confuse and demobilise: “The [radical petty bourgeois] Montagne, thrust aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its popularity through its struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the

socialist leaders…A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken from the social demands of the proletariat and a democratic turn given to them; the purely political form was stripped from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point turned outwards. Thus arose Social Democracy. The new Montagne, the result of this combination, … contained the same elements as the old Montagne only numerically stronger. However, in the course of development, it changed the class it represented.

The peculiar character of Social Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic republican institutions are demanded as a means not of superseding two extremes, of capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony.13 Marx goes on to remark that the objective is to reform society within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie but then stresses: Only one must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within which modern society can be saved and class struggle avoided.

It is in this context – of revealing the power of language to mobilise, of showing the specific rhetoric used by different class fractions and of the political significance of the almost daily changes of tactic and material incentive – that Marx comments: Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While each faction, Orleanists and Legitimists, sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to the two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses.14 State power and its ideological exercise can only be understood concretely, materially and in a historically positioned context that is both immediate, in its understanding of the daily flux of argument that determine outcomes, and one that is also historic in terms of its points of reference.

In the series of lectures edited by Chris Wickham, Marxist History Writing for the Twenty First Century, the Left Weberian W G Runciman, comments more in sadness than anger that Marx, whether through illness or mental exhaustion, never got round to defining such basic concepts as class or the state and hence his work as a social scientist remains critically incomplete.15 Others

have commented in like fashion that though Marx wrote plenty on nationality he never provided a conceptually satisfactory definition of a nation – or as Harvey himself noted Marx failed to write that fourth book of Capital, which would have been the ‘synthesis of bourgeois society in terms of the State’.16 Yet in Brumaire Marx treats the concepts of class and the state to the same ruthless exposure to history as he does to ‘abstract labour’ in Capital. Extracted from its context, Marx’s comment about a ‘superstructure arising’ gives the impression of some mechanical relationship in which ideology can, almost tautologically, be read off the material base of property relations. Marx’s practice is quite different. He demonstrates that such an understanding only comes as a result of the detailed reconstruction of the balance of class forces, of the day to day unfolding of capital’s crisis cycle, of the way in which very specific, historically derived factions within capitalist property seek to use rhetoric, the images of the past, together with immediate material incentives of the present to secure their own ends. Equally with the capitalist state.

Its form and content constantly evolve. Brumaire provides one such analysis. The Civil War in France offers a quite different one a generation later in which the nature of capitalist state power is further illumined by the first attempts by working people themselves to exercise their own state power that challenged that of capital. The following decade The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, even though written in its final form by Engels, reflects a common preoccupation with understanding the historic origins of state power. In doing so The Origin returns to the themes of the 1840s (and Grundrisse) and argues that any analysis of the State has to be related to the ‘irreconcilable contradiction’ introduced by private property and the alienation of labour – a contradiction which, in its unfolding forms, can only be understood historically.

Marx’s Method and the Study of History

In his statement on Method Marx ends by stressing that abstract concepts are ‘themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations’. In the twentieth century the scholar who did most to recover the material character of Marx’s dialectics was the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov who was in turn strongly influenced by the Soviet school of social psychology initiated by Vygotsky and Volosinov and carried forward in the 1960s by Luria and Leontiev.17 We will end by re-emphasising the materiality of Marx’s study of history, as set out in the Critique, and do so by relating it methodologically to the perceptions of this school on the role of language – beginning by completing the quotation used earlier: At a certain stage of development, the material

theory&struggle 57

productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.

As with the very similar passage in Brumaire, this section in the Critique has been used by some commentators such G. A. Cohen to justify a technologically determinist reading – or alternatively by others to condemn Marx for endorsing such a reading. In stressing the materiality of Marx’s approach it is therefore important to be clear what Marx meant by these terms. ‘The material productive forces’ include labour in its broadest sense of the inherited and transmuted knowledge that enables people to labour and, socially and in combination, to progressively transform the effectiveness of that labour. These productive forces are, as David McLellan stresses, people as well as the tools they use. Equally the relations of production are about how at different stages very specific legal and political structures are used by some people to extract surplus labour out of others. It is within the immediate, momentary working out of this on-going contradiction, between productive knowledge and the political structures used to exploit, that ideological forms are to be understood.18 At the same time Marx also distinguishes between the economic conditions of production which can be determined ‘with the precision of natural science’, and the ideological forms in which people become conscious of the inherent contradictions. This, as we saw in Brumaire, is the particular material of history – whose analysis may appear to be focussing on the accidental, a fluid and inchoate succession of events, but one which, in its analysis of language and symbols, has the potential to lead us back to a concrete understanding of the underlying material contractions.

This is the significance of the work of the Vygotsky Volosinov schools.

58 theory&struggle

In his pioneering work in the 1920s Volosinov wrote: ‘Countless ideological threads running through all areas of social intercourse register effects in the word .. the word is the most sensitive index of social changes and, what is more, of changes still in the process of growth, still without definitive shape and not as yet accommodated into already regularised and fully defined ideological systems. The word has the capacity to register all the transitory, delicate, momentary phases of social change’,19 And again: The ruling class strives to impart a supra-class, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish the struggle between social value judgements which occurs within it, to make it uni-accentual. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes.

In the ordinary conditions of life, the contradiction embedded in every ideological sign cannot emerge fully because the ideological sign in an established, dominant ideology is always somewhat reactionary and tries as it were to stabilise the preceding factor in the dialectical flux of the social generation process’.20 As Volosinov stresses, ‘words’ do not determine any more than ideas in general. They are indicators. They register ‘all the transitory, delicate, momentary phases of social change’. Analysing their use as they are deployed socially in argument and debate, and, even more, their changing effect and effectiveness, has the potential to lead us back to underlying material contradictions: why a particular formulation can win the floor one day but be powerless the next; why proponents of a particular class position will feel it necessary to suddenly shift ground and give their words a new material context and significance.21 Marx himself gave a particularly clear illustration of this in Capital I when discussing the factory acts during the years between 1843 and 1848, ‘epoch making in the economic history of England’. In 1843, when the Chartist movement and the 10 hours agitation ‘had reached their highest point’, the ‘spokesmen and political leaders of the manufacturing class ordered a change of front and of speech towards the workpeople’.22 The employers sought common cause and promised ‘not only the double-size loaf but the enactment of the Ten Hours Bill’. Marx then describes how the manufacturing lobby subsequently sought to limit the earlier concessions once the Chartist movement had been broken and the imprisonment of its leaders and dismembering of its organisation had ‘shaken the confidence of the English working class in its own strength’.

To conclude.

This paper has sought to do three things. First, to demonstrate the materialist and dialectical way Marx used concepts. Second, to stress that this Method

demands that concepts be defined within and through active historical analysis, within particular modes of production and within a constantly changing totality.

Third, to propose that Marx’s own history-writing represents an active, experimental process from which we ourselves can learn.

However, this third conclusion is not intended as an easy closing platitude. Adopting Marx’s Method is difficult. It involves directly challenging the existing canons of academic discourse. More specifically, what it rejects is the process by which wider historical relevance is secured by the external application of predefined concepts to discrete fragments of experience.

Instead it demands that every fragment be related to social processes as a whole, in their movement and change. n Footnotes 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar in the series ‘The Philosophy of Economic History’ organised by Richard Saville at the Institute of Historical Research, February 2015. I am grateful for the comments received.

2 Weber, Max 1962, Basic Concepts of Sociology, translated H P Secker (London, 1962) p. 52.

3 David Harvey, ‘History versus Theory: A Commentary on Marx’s Method in Capital’, Historical Materialism 2012, 20, 2.

4 Marx, Grundrisse, (London 1979) p.

5 Harvey, ‘History versus Theory’, pp. 14-15.

6 Marx Engels, Collected Works (Moscow 1986) Vol. 28, pp. 37-45 7 Hobsbawm, Introduction to Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic formations, London 1964) p.16 8 G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford 1979) 9 Pierre Vilar makes these points about Althusser in his ‘Marxist History: History in the Making’, New Left Review, 80, July 1973 10 David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction (London 1980) pp. 152-54.

11 Hobsbawm, Introduction, p. 16 12 Engels, Preface to the first edition of The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Collected Works, XXVI, 1990, p. 131.

13 Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, Collected Works (Moscow 1979) p. 130.

14 Marx, Brumaire, p. 128.

15 W.G. Runciman, Introduction to Chris Wickham, ed., Marxist History Writing for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2007).

16 Harvey, History, p. ?15. M. Lowy in Haupt, G. Lowy M and Weill, C, ed., Les marxistes et la question nationale 1848-1914:etudes et textes (Paris ). This is explored further in J. Foster, ‘Marxists, Weberians and Nationality’, Historical Materialism, 12, 1, 2004 17 E.V. Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, Progress (Moscow, 1982);

David Bakhurst explores the relationship between Ilyenkov and the Vygotsky school in Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy, (Cambridge 1991).

18 McLellan, Thought, p. 137; Sean Sayer makes very similar points in ‘Labour in Modern Industrial Society’ in A Chitty and McIvor, Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy (London 2009) 143-158.

19 Volosinov, Marxism and Language, p. 19.

20 Volosinov, Marxism and Language, p. 21.

21 C. Collins considers issues of application in his Language, Ideology and Social Consciousness: Developing a Socio-historical Approach (Farnborough, 1999). The pioneering English applications were provided by C. Woolfson in “'The Semiotics of Working Class Speech”, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, vol.9, Spring 1976, pp. 163-197 and “Culture, Language and Human Personality”, Marxism Today, August 1977. See also C. Woolfson, “How Workers on the Clyde Gained the Capacity for Class Struggle: the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-in 1971-1972”, in A. Campbell et al., eds, The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-1979, (Ashgate, 1999) and Woolfson, The Politics of the UCS Work-In (London 1986) 22 Marx, Capital, I, CW, 37, p.

theory&struggle 59

John Ellison ‘It is in the very notion of Marxism as ‘Science’ that we find the authentic trade-mark of obscurantism, and of an obscurantism borrowed, like so much else, from a bourgeois ideology of great longevity.

Marxism affirmed and renewed A dip into the polemical essays of E.P. Thompson

John Ellison is a mostly retired solicitor, a specialist in child care law.

He has longstanding socialist convictions and has taken an active interest in labour movement and anti-war history for many years. He is the author of the recent pamphlet ‘World War 1: Causes, Consequences and the Struggle Against it’ in the Communist Party’s ‘Our History’ series.

He is contactable at ellisonjs@gmail.com.

C

AN IT BE doubted that Edward Thompson (1924-93) made an enormous contribution as an investigator and advocate of the Marxism – as humanist now as ever it was — which he helped to re-define? A fairly recent collection of essays that were published in his honour testify to the continuing relevance of his work for adult education and for the peace movement, as well as for Marxist approaches to the study of history, socialist humanism and the early New Left (E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism, edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor in 2013).

To dispel any doubts, in this article I visit aspects of the eloquent, and in some cases extremely elaborate, polemical essays by the author of The Making of the English Working Class 1 and other works. A number of books gather up these essays, which first appeared in periodicals. The latest of these collections is E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left (2014) 2.

This includes Socialist Humanism, first published in 1957, and linking socialist humanism to a critique of Stalinist ideology and practice. Thompson referred, two decades later, to this article as ‘long, immature, but not, I think, radically mistaken’ in his lengthy The Poverty of Theory, which was published in book form in 1978 together with his Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski (1973) 3 and The Peculiarities of the English (1965) 4.

The Poverty of Theory and the Open Letter are concerned at root with defining, and defending against unjustified attack, the essence of Marxism and what Thompson called the Marxist tradition. They also placed a distance between this tradition (as characterized by Thompson) and what he considered untenable stances taken by Kolakowski and Althusser.

All four essays contain elements of a constructive critique of Marxism as originally articulated. I do not propose to address dust-gathering arguments of Thompson’s opponents here, but suggest that his closely reasoned polemical journeys continue to be of serious relevance to those who wish to be guided by, and share the ownership of, the Marxist tradition.

As is well-known, Thompson was, in his later years, a scholar-activist in relation to the arms race and the

60 theory&struggle

menace of nuclear war, evidenced in the title of his agitational book – Protest and Survive. 5 While the risk of nuclear war has been down-graded since the collapse of the Soviet Union, other sources of darkness have advanced in recent years – aggressive imperial regional wars and the stark failures of capitalism (bank bailouts, mass unemployment, massive economic inequalities and so on). These developments would have certainly attracted incisive and compelling analytical input from Thompson had he been living now.

I reach the starting-point for introducing Thompson’s contributions — his definition of ‘the Marxist tradition’ in his Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski. Thompson preferred the term ‘tradition’ to ‘school’. The term ‘tradition’, he considered, gave Marxism a central position as interpreter of the world, past and present. Those who wished to treat Marxism as a collection of quasi-religious texts which could not be improved, or who regarded it as essentially a provider of a ‘method’, or as if it were just one of a number of innovative approaches to understanding the world, therefore at best fall into the margins of this tradition. 6 Without ambiguity Thompson set out his own revolutionary socialist stall. He declared: ‘libertarian Communism, or a Socialism which is both democratic and revolutionary in its means, its strategy and objectives, must stand firmly, on an independent base, on its own feet, developing its own theoretical critique and, increasingly, its own political forms and practices…To return, in every motion of analysis, to propositions of Marx is like going on a cross-country run in leaden boots…The point is, that Marx is on our side; we are not on the side of Marx. His is a voice whose power will never be silenced, but it has never been the only voice, and his discourse does not have limitless range.’ 7 In his Open Letter, Thompson attempted to establish precisely the role of historical materialism.

‘Historical materialism offers to study social process in its totality…It offers to show in what determinate ways each activity was related to the other, the logic of this process and the rationality of causation… .historical materialism must, in this sense, be the

discipline in which all other human disciplines meet…

We should also observe that ‘History’, insofar as it is the most unitary and general of all human disciplines, must always be the least precise….But…her knowledge remains knowledge, and it is to be attained through its own rigorous procedures of historical logic, its own discourse of the proof.’ 8 Yet this same historical materialism, Thompson pointed out, was in fact not developed much by Marx and Engels.9 In applying his characteristically rigorous approach, Thompson was not impressed by Althusser’s attribution to Marx of the view that the class struggle was ‘the motor of history’. While acknowledging that at times both Marx and Engels did come close to a ‘motor’ function for class struggle, Thompson was clear that the term ‘motor’ was at best an ‘analogy’.10 He amplified this view, limiting class struggle to a part of the process of historical change, as follows. ‘..we remember why we never did much like the analogy of class struggle as the motor of history. For it supposes two distinct entities: ‘history’, which is inert, an intricate composite of parts; and a ‘motor’ (class struggle) which is brought to it, and which drives these parts, or sets them in motion. Medieval scholastics would have used a different analogy; class struggle would have been the vital breath or soul that animated history’s inert body. But class struggle is the process (or some part of it) and struggling classes are the body (or some part of it). Seen from this aspect, history is its own motor.’ 11 Marxism, in Thompson’s view, is not a ‘science’.

He wrote: ‘It is in the very notion of Marxism as ‘Science’ that we find the authentic trade-mark of obscurantism, and of an obscurantism borrowed, like so much else, from a bourgeois ideology of great longevity. Utilitarians, Malthusians, Positivists, Fabians, and structural-functionalists, all suppose(d) themselves to be practicing a ‘science’, and the most unabashed academic centre of brutalized capitalist ideology in contemporary England acclaims itself as a School of Economics and Political Science. When Marx and Engels claimed that they were applying scientific methods to the study of society, the claim

may, on occasion, be upheld; when they supposed that they were founding a Science (Marxism) they were locking prison-gates upon their own knowledge.’12 Thus Thompson’s approach to the fundamental proposition that the existence of classes was bound up (as Marx wrote to Weydemeyer in 1852 13) with particular, historic phases in the development of production was ‘a hypothesis’ (Thompson called it Marx’s ‘most fertile hypothesis’) which seemed to Thompson ‘to have been demonstrated beyond doubt’.14 Taking care to distance himself from dogmatism, Thompson rejected too what he called ‘the determinist notion of law’. ‘There is a difference,’ he wrote, ‘between saying that a process works itself out in a known and expected way…and saying that it arises as a consequence of law…’. More apt was the descriptive phrase – ‘this is the way it works.’ 15 Elsewhere he offered in place of the term ‘law’, the phrase ‘the logic of process’.16 In Capital (1867), almost all of Marx’s attention was given to a rigorous (according to Thompson, even ‘obsessive’) exploration 17 of how and why capitalism had come about, how it had functioned, was functioning and how, to a degree, it was being challenged. The future prognosis for capitalism attracted not much more than a page in this work, in which, promising a socialist future, Marx famously wrote: ‘That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers…

Centralisation of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.’18 Nineteen years earlier, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, had said the same thing, in still simpler terms: ‘The development of Modern Industry… cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products.

What the bourgeoisie therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’19

theory&struggle 61

Such bald pioneer conclusions, after much bloody water had passed under many bloody bridges during the century that followed, naturally required adjustment, though we should remember that Marx provided a variation of his own prediction. Thus in the Manifesto capitalism could end not only in ‘a revolutionary transformation of society’ but in the alternative in ‘the common ruin of the contending classes’. 20 Again, while in some places indicating that socialism was an inevitable outcome, he was also insistent, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that men ‘make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; …but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.’ 21 Regarding the existence or not of ‘laws’ of social and economic development, Thompson wrote: “That these ‘laws’ or ‘tendencies’ did not [as he (i.e.

Marx) once truculently asserted] work ‘with iron necessity towards inevitable results’ may be explained, in part, by the fact that he understated the countervailing tendencies at work. Contrary to the view of some theoretical practitioners, no worker known to historians ever had surplus-value taken out of his hide without finding some way of fighting back (there are plenty of ways of going slow); and, paradoxically, by his fighting back the tendencies were diverted and the ‘forms of development’ were themselves developed in unexpected ways. In another part, this was due to the fact that other countervailing tendencies arrived unbidden out of ‘regions’ for which Political Economy had no terms.” 22 (He is referring here to such factors as the functions of political power and of culture.) 23 Substantial credit must go to Thompson, I suggest, for giving importance with emphasis to some features inherent in the work of Marx and Engels which, as he wrote, had not always been fully understood or, if understood, not been given sufficient value. One key feature is the ‘humanism’ of the Marx-Engels project.

By this Thompson meant not only that from the outset the intention was to benefit humanity, but that there was unambiguous commitment to human values which extended beyond ‘the interests of the working class’ or the interests of other classes earlier in historical development.

Thompson tells us that the humanism of Marx and Engels ‘glows through all their writings and sustained them in their heroic intellectual discipline. It springs from anguish at men’s self-divided, self-defeated history.’ 24 He quotes Engels: ‘Everything civilization brings forth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided against itself, contradictory.’ Thompson’s fundamental point is that over the centuries humanism has reached out more widely than class interest. I quote: ‘Past moralities have not been the same as class interests; they have justified or challenged those interests.’ He provided illustrations from the work of Shakespeare and William Blake: “’Timon of Athens’ did not sway

62 theory&struggle

capitalism from its course, but it helped to ignite the mind of Marx; Blake’s ‘Songs’ did not end human exploitation, but may have influenced the treatment of children in industry. Moreover…They were the tongues which – within the limits of their time – spoke for humanity.’ 25 Enlisting the insights of William Morris in support of the necessity of socialist humanism, Thompson asserted firmly that they ‘were not icing on the Marxist gingerbread, but were complementary to the discoveries of Marx.’ 26 He also noted that ‘..intellectuals of the Second International…several of the most interesting among them – including Bebel, Jaures, and William Morris – were deeply and continuously concerned with the question of moral and cultural values in socialist society. 27 To these could be added, even more formidably, the name of Rosa Luxemburg. Hindsight, of course, as Thompson acknowledges, has shown that Marx and Engels had undue optimism as to the revolutionary transformation of human nature under socialism. 28 An inter-connected cluster of features were identified by Thompson as inherent in the Marxist approach. In the first place, Thompson argued that the interaction of ‘social being’ with ‘social consciousness’ is not a mechanical process with ‘social being’ occupying the sole driving seat.

If this seems to over-simplify and therefore to bemuse, I rely on Thompson’s own words: ‘…Marx derived from the study of history the observation that ‘social being determines social consciousness.’ In class society men’s consciousness of social reality, when viewed from the standpoint of historical effectiveness, takes its form from the class structure of that society; that is to say, people grow up within a social and cultural environment which is not that of ‘all men’ but that of certain men with interests opposed to those of other men: they experience life as members of a class, a nation, a family. But that is not an automatic reflex in the individual’s mind; he both experiences and – within the limitations of the cultural pattern of his class (traditions, prejudices, etc.) — he thinks about his experience...it is of first importance that men do not only ‘reflect’ experience passively; they also think about that experience; and their thinking affects the way they act. The thinking is the creative part of man, which, even in class society, makes him partly an agent in history, just as he is partly a victim of his environment.’ 29 (It can be conceded in passing that Thompson, like Marx, employed more often than desirable, the term ‘men’ to include women.)

Thompson wrote explicitly that the dialogue between social being and social consciousness ‘goes in both directions.’ 30 Echoing Marx, he emphasized the fact that social consciousness reacts upon, and changes, social being. Human response to what is witnessed and experienced is not therefore passive and

mechanical, as was suggested by Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), and later in Stalinist ideology. 31 He stated: ‘Because a sense-impression may be described (metaphorically) as a ‘reflection’ of material reality, it by no means follows that human culture is a passive mirror-reflection of social reality.

Whenever Marx and Engels discussed the processes of social change they made it clear that this was not so.’

32

In Marx: The First 100 Years (1983) 33, however, Victor Kiernan seemed to take up a different position, stating: ‘Sometimes, too, Marx and Engels…were tempted to see all ideas…as no more than shadows of material life, instead of looking for reciprocal interactions.’ 34 But, if so, that was not, in Thompson’s view, the whole story. He quotes Marx’s own words, expressing himself unequivocally in compressed explanation which some, wishing to understand, have found understandably difficult: ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism …is that the object, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or contemplation but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively (First Thesis on Feuerbach). 35 The vital role of human thought and activity as a precipitant of change is therefore inescapably present, and inseparable from another feature of the central message of Marxism in Thompson’s view: that the concept of a particular stage of economic social development (basis) giving rise to a ‘superstructure’ (of institutions and culture) should be regarded as ‘a metaphor’, not as an explanation of an inflexible relationship.

After all, as Thompson writes, social classes make themselves as well as being made by the logic of history, as demonstrated throughout, The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was again insisting that socialism was not inevitable as a result of economic drivers, and that classes and individual human beings also determine outcomes.

William Morris had it right, he asserted, in regarding the capitalist system as having ‘innate moral baseness’, and founded upon forms of exploitation which were simultaneously moral and cultural as well as economic. 36 Thompson argued that the ‘Marxism’ adopted in the Soviet Union and later in the eastern European socialist countries neglected the broad-based, history-long humanism implicit in the work of Marx and Engels and was over-influenced by assumptions of economic determinism which were never inherent in their work.

He took to pieces the words which Stalin in 1950 used when referring to the economic structure at a given stage of its development as a ‘base’, which creates a ‘superstructure precisely in order that it may serve it, that it may actively help to take shape and consolidate itself, that it may actively strive for the elimination of

the old, moribund base and its old superstructure.’ 37 Here, Thompson points out, Stalin treated both ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ as concrete realities functioning mechanically in relation to each other, and the ‘superstructure’ as having ‘a narrow and restricted sphere of action’. He regarded, and treated, humanity as passive agents of the ‘base’, leaving no scope for complexity, for dissent, or, indeed, for socialist humanism.

Thompson also gave close consideration to the place of dialectics within Marxism. In this regard it is worth reproducing here well-known and tantalizing glimpses of what exactly Marx and Engels meant by the dialectical approach and the role it should and did have in their work. ‘In its rational form,’ wrote Marx, ‘it (i.e. dialectics) includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things at the same time also the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking-up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.’ 38 Much later, Engels, in a letter, described dialectics as ‘the science of interconnections’, admitting that he and Marx had not given enough thought to the obscure processes by which ideas come to birth. 39 Thompson quotes Engels as “thundering out in another letter in 1890 to Conrad Schmidt, ‘What these gentlemen all lack is dialectic’,” pointing out that Engels then went on “to adduce, not dialectical ‘laws’, but the mode of apprehension of a fluent and contradictory eventuation.” 40 Thompson’s own short comment about the role of dialectics is illuminating: ‘….in my own work as a historian I have…come to bring ‘dialectics’, not as this or that ‘law’ but as a habit of thinking (in co-existing opposites or ‘contraries’) and as an expectation as to the logic of process, into my own analysis.’ 41 As to how far dialectics can be reduced to a neat formula or set of formulae, he was doubtful. ‘..I am less sure’, he wrote, ‘that there is much to be gained from giving to ‘the dialectic’ elaborate logical and formal expression. We have often been told that Marx had a ‘method’, that this method lies somewhere in the region of dialectical reason, and that this constitutes the essence of Marxism. It is therefore strange that, despite many allusions, and several expressions of intent, Marx never wrote this essence down. Marx left many notebooks. He was nothing if not a self-conscious and responsible intellectual worker. If he had found the clue to the universe, he would have set a day or two aside to put it down. We may conclude from this that it was not written because it could not be written, any more than Shakespeare or Stendhal could have reduced their art to a clue. For it was not a method

theory&struggle 63

but a practice, and a practice learned through practising. So that, in this sense, dialectics can never be set down, not learned by rote. They may be learned only by critical apprenticeship within the same practice.’ 42 I turn now from these general points to some of Thompson’s remarks about relatively recent history.

In The Peculiarities of the English he gave attention to the history of the British Labour movement since 1880, emphasizing the internationalist and imperialist context with great cogency. ‘..if we are to begin to comprehend the British Left since 1880 we must take very much more seriously the internationalist and imperialist context. One of the ‘grand facts’ of the twentieth century which the orthodox Marxist model finds it difficult to accommodate is the resurgent nationalism of the imperialist climax. This foul politico-cultural climate, deeply contaminating the masses in the metropolitan countries, has presented quite exceptional problems to the Left… There have been fleeting moments – the early 1890s, 1911-14, 1945-47 – when, in real political terms, a vigorous socialist strategy was practicable. The movement of the 1890s crashed into the Boer War; the syndicalist surge of 1911-14 was smothered in the first great war; while the potentialities of 1945-47 were abolished by the Cold War.’ 43 Thompson made a general point, perhaps uncontroversial, about the scope for achieving progressive change within British conditions: ‘British democratic structures, with their innumerable defences against any ultimate confrontation of class forces, have nevertheless exceptional opportunities for registering partial, oppositional pressures.’ 44 Concerning actually occurred in 1945 and onwards, he registered in Open Letter the importance of the gains made. ‘It can be shown … that the years 1944-6 were a high-water mark in the morale and consciousness of British working people; miners and railwaymen wished to bring the mines and rails within ‘common ownership’; sixty years of socialist propaganda and organization, strengthened by the particular circumstances of wartime shortages and solidarities, had diffused very widely the criteria of need in social welfare and of ‘fairness’ in the distribution of both products and opportunities…’ 45 A conclusion was drawn which has been shared by many others: ‘…Those reforms, if sustained and enlarged by an aggressive socialist strategy, might well have effected such a cancellation in the logic of capitalism that the system would have been brought to the point of crisis – a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident and more possible.’ 46 As for explanations as to how the possibility of

64 theory&struggle

advance towards a socialist society had been thwarted, during the decades after 1945, Thompson had no doubts: ‘The reforms of 1945 were assimilated and reordered within the system of economic activities, and also within the characteristic concepts, of the capitalist process. This entailed a translation of socialist meanings into capitalist ones...The socialist meanings of each reform were surrendered (as they always must be if not sustained by a strong, conscious and aggressive socialist movement) because each took its place within an alien totality: capitalism. As each surrender took place, the socialist movement weakened in morale and direction, and the protagonists of capitalism gained in brashness and aggression.’ 47 But did these developments undermine the force of Marx’s predictions for the future of capitalism?

Thompson was trenchantly dismissive: ‘Whether these predictions were or were not falsified bothers me not one jot: Marx did not suppose that capitalism would endure so long, but, if he had, I doubt whether he would have supposed that it would endure as exactly the same kind of system…In any case one can show without difficulty that there were contemporaries of Marx, who shared his definition of capitalism-as-system, while not changing its innate ‘nature’ would show very considerable capacities to prolong its existence and to adapt to working-class pressure; and among these, William Morris…’ 48 For Thompson, capitalism remained the short-term and the long-term enemy. He wrote, still in Open Letter: No word of mine will wittingly be added to the comforts of that old bitch gone in the teeth, consumer capitalism. I know that bitch well in her very original nature; she has engendered world-wide wars, aggressive and racial imperialisms, and she is copartner in the unhappy history of socialist degeneration….the apologists of capitalism appear with newly soaped faces, and offer their beast as a beast of changed nature. But I know that beast is not changed’ 49

His point is well taken, though the gender-specific term ‘old bitch’ may have passed its use-by date.

I have taken just a few cuttings from the many flowers of Edward Thompson’s mature thinking. There are a lot more where those came from. n

Footnotes 1 Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1963 2 Ed. Winslow, Monthly Review Press 3 The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin Press, 1978 4 Ibid 5 1980 6 The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, P110-114 7 Ibid, p382-3 8 Ibid, p262 9 Ibid, p258 10 Ibid, p295 11 Ibid, p300 12 Ibid, p360 13 Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, Selected Correspondence, FLPH Moscow 1953 14 The Poverty of Theory, p351 15 Ibid, p121 16 Ibid, p278 17 Ibid, p251 18 Capital, 1887 facsimile ed., 1946, p789 19 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx Selected Writings, ed. McClellan, OUP, 200, p255 20 Ibid, p246 21 The Eighteenth Brumaire, Ibid p329 22 The Poverty of Theory, p345 23 Ibid, p254 24 Ibid, p68 25 E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, p68 26 Ibid, p69 27 The Poverty of Theory, p174 28 The Poverty of Theory, p157 29 E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, p56-7 30 The Poverty of Theory, p201 31 EP Thompson and the Making of the New Left, p77-9 32 Ibid, p77 33 Ed. McClellan, Fontana 34 Ibid, p65 35 E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, p77 36 The Poverty of Theory, p84 37 Ibid, p271 38 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. McLellan (2nd edn), OUP, 2000, P458 39 Marx The First Hundred Years, Ed. McLellan, p96 40 The Poverty of Theory, p304-5; Marx Engels Selected Correspondence, FLPH Moscow, 1953, p507 – ‘such metaphysical polar opposites exist in the real world only during crises, while the whole vast process goes on in the form of interaction…’

41 The Poverty of Theory, p306 42 Ibid, p306 43 Ibid, p66-7 44 Ibid, p69 45 Ibid, p144 46 Ibid, p144 47 Ibid, p145 48 Ibid, p145-6 49 Ibid, p182

Building an economy for the people An alternative economic and political strategy for 21st Century Britain Edited by Jonathan White with contributions from: Mark Baimbridge; Brian Burkitt; Mary Davis; John Foster; Marjorie Mayo; Jonathan Michie; Seumas Milne; Andrew Murray; Roger Seifert; Prem Sikka; Jonathan White and Philip Whyman £6.95 (+£1 p&p) ISBN 978-1-907464-08-9 Download the digital version free to readers of theory & struggle at www.manifestopress.org.uk

theory&struggle 65

John Hendy QC

The right to strike, a lawyer’s view

T

Strike action compelled the release from prison of the Pentonville Five London dockers leaders

HE ROLE of rights in Marxist discourse has been the subject of debate. For the purposes of the following article we can regard discussion of the role of rights or of the law in a communist society as a little premature. The issue I address is developments in relation to the right to strike in the present and immediate future.

There was a period after the Conservatives reduced trade union rights and freedoms in the 1980s during which it was argued that the exercise of industrial strength was what was required to regain the legal space in which trade unions and working people in which to operate effectively again. There was no need to pursue trade union rights as legal rights. It is now generally recognised that, conversely, in order to effectively exercise industrial strength unions and workers (in most cases) need the legal space to do so and that can only be achieved by rolling back the restrictive laws and securing the legal space for trade union action by underpinning it by reference to fundamental human rights.

The expression of the demand for the right to strike as a fundamental human right has another utility. The international recognition of such trade union rights as fundamental human rights, as a species of law rather than merely moral, industrial or political claims is important. It provides a particular authority, a legitimacy, a respectability, and, indeed, a degree of indisputability for at least some of the claims of labour.

That the right to strike for the advancement or protection of the economic and social interests of workers is a fundamental human right is not in doubt, particularly the right to strike as an essential element of the right to bargain collectively. This is not an expression of academic opinion; it is a statement of international law expressed in international treaties widely ratified. The right to strike is expressed in Article 8(1)(d) of the International Covenant on

66 theory&struggle

Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 and in regional Treaties such as Article 45(c), Charter of the Organization of American States, 1948; Article 6(4), European Social Charter 1961 (and 1996); Article 28, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union 2000.

Though not express, the right to strike is held to be implicit in the broader statement of trade union rights in Convention 87 of the International Labour Organisation as the relevant quasi-judicial committees have made clear for sixty years. In recent years the employers challenged that interpretation but by an agreement dated 25 February 2015 effectively conceded the point by recognizing that the right to strike flowed from the underlying ‘freedom of association’ and by accepting that the relevant committees had the authority to make the findings they made in relation to the existence of the right to strike.

By the same token the European Court of Human Rights has recently put beyond doubt that the right to strike is implicit in Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights 1951: RMT v UK; 1 Hrvatski Lije ni ki Sindikat v Croatia; 2 V Tymoschenko v Ukraine. 3 Virtually every country in the world recognises that workers have the right to take strike action. Unlike the UK, some 90 countries have the right to strike not merely guaranteed by legislation but, more fundamentally, enshrined in their national constitutions.

Given the dominance today of neoliberalism and its drive to an unregulated free market in labour it might be thought curious that these international legal standards are still standing. 4 After all, neoliberalism gives a central role to industrial relations and the labour market and how it is to be structured (or, rather, unstructured) and regards trade unions and collective bargaining as impediments to the free labour market. 5 With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent

John Hendy, QC is a practising barrister and Standing counsel to eight national trade unions. He is chair of the Institute of Employment Rights, President of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights and an honorary professor in the Law Faculty of University College, London.

He is a trustee of the Marx Memorial Library.

hegemony of capitalist economics, the appeasement of working class aspiration after the Second World War (a primary motor in the implementation of the international laws referred to) lost its principal rationale. It was only to be expected that those laws would in due course be attacked.

And employers and governments have indeed sought to attack fundamental trade union rights in recent years. In the UK we are all aware of the restrictions on the rights to strike imposed (even before the collapse of the Soviet Union) by Conservative governments and continued by Labour: complex requirements for service of notice before holding a postal only industrial action ballot followed by a similarly complex notice to be served before industrial action can be taken, all forms of solidarity industrial action prohibited and only the most limited protection for the individual official striker (and none for the unofficial striker) – and these are only the most notable restrictions. Industrial action is for the most part only permissible (subject to the foregoing restrictions) in support of collective bargaining and collective bargaining at sectoral level 6 has been all but destroyed by government policy 7 and the prohibition of solidarity action. In consequence the coverage of amongst British workers of collective agreements has fallen from 82% in 1979 to less than 23% today. 8 Today the Conservative Party threatens yet further restrictions on the right to strike if elected in May 2015 (and the Labour Party offers no amelioration of the current restrictions).

The UK and other governments have dealt with the requirements of international law, not, by and large, by seeking their repeal but by ignoring the obligations they impose – whilst proclaiming their significance for under-developed countries.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the EU where the Court of Justice of the EU in 2007 in the Viking case 9 held that, though the right to strike was a general principle of EU law, exercise of the right is subject to stringent conditions 10 wherever it comes into contact with the four business freedoms that underpin the EU Treaties (the freedoms of business to provide services, establish business, move capital and

move labour, from one member State to another). Thus, the right to strike is subservient to the business freedom to enjoy an undistorted labour market in which it can use workers from a low-wage EU State in a high-wage State, ignore collectively agreed terms there and pay instead wages at back-home levels.

This (and parallel CJEU cases) have been heavily criticised by academics, by the ILO and by the European Committee of Social Rights. Recent cases give no sign that the CJEU is prepared to relent, however. 11 However, the EU attack on trade union rights is more extensive than that since the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) insist on labour law reform (including alterations to strike law) as a condition of economic assistance, as seen, in particular, in Greece.

At the International Labour Organisation too the right to strike has been under attack, as noted above.

In 2012 the Employers’ Group walked out of a crucial committee critical to the ILO’s continued operation on the basis that ILO Convention 87 did not protect the right to strike (after 60 years of acceptance). As mentioned above, the Employers’ Group has now (25 February 2015) retreated and reached a compromise which, in effect, recognises the right to strike. In the preceding discussions many governments reiterated the existence of the right, including the government of the USA which stated (to the surprise of many): ‘We concur that the right to organize activities under Convention 87 protects the right to strike, even though that right is not explicitly mentioned in the Convention.’

It may be that the decision of the European court of Human Rights in RMT v UK 12 is not so much an exemplar of the dirty fingers of neo-liberalism reaching into the international judiciary but a symptom of a particular political incident. The court there held that though the right to strike was protected by Article 11 of the European Convention (as noted above), it was nonetheless open to a State to limit the right in appropriate circumstances (under its ‘margin of appreciation’) even to the extent in the UK of completely outlawing solidarity action in every

theory&struggle 67

situation (notwithstanding the jurisprudence of the ILO and European Committee on Social Rights to the contrary). It is clear that the court was fearful of the threat of the UK government to attempt, if the Conservatives won the next election, to re-negotiate the European Convention and the powers of the European Court and, if they failed, to opt-out of the Convention.

The case may be regarded as an attempt at appeasement. 13 Certainly the later cases concerning the Ukraine and Croatia (both above) contain no support for such blanket restriction of the right to strike as was permitted in the RMT case.

A judgment of the Canadian Supreme Court on 28 January 2015 shows that the predations of neoliberalism can, on occasion, be judicially resisted in relation to fundamental trade union rights. An extensive quotation from the majority judgment in Saskatchewan v Attorney-General of Canada 14 is warranted. The British Labour Party (and others) could profitably learn this text: [3] The conclusion that the right to strike is an essential part of a meaningful collective bargaining process in our system of labour relations is supported by history, by jurisprudence, and by Canada’s international obligations. As Otto KahnFreund and Bob Hepple [British academics] recognized: The power to withdraw their labour is for the workers what for management is its power to shut down production, to switch it to different purposes, to transfer it to different places. A legal system which suppresses that freedom to strike puts the workers at the mercy of their employers. This — in all its simplicity — is the essence of the matter. (Laws Against Strikes (1972), at p. 8) The right to strike is not merely derivative of collective bargaining, it is an indispensable component of that right. It seems to me to be the time to give this conclusion constitutional benediction.

the ability to pursue their goals and that, at its core, s. 2(d) aims to protect the individual from “state-enforced isolation in the pursuit of his or her ends”. . . . The guarantee functions to protect individuals against more powerful entities. By banding together in the pursuit of common goals, individuals are able to prevent more powerful entities from thwarting their legitimate goals and desires. In this way, the guarantee of freedom of association empowers vulnerable groups and helps them work to right imbalances in society. It protects marginalized groups and makes possible a more equal society. [para. 58] [54] The right to strike is essential to realizing these values and objectives through a collective bargaining process because it permits workers to withdraw their labour in concert when collective bargaining reaches an impasse. Through a strike, workers come together to participate directly in the process of determining their wages, working conditions and the rules that will govern their working lives (Fudge and Tucker, at p. 334). The ability to strike thereby allows workers, through collective action, to refuse to work under imposed terms and conditions. This collective action at the moment of impasse is an affirmation of the dignity and autonomy of employees in their working lives.

[55] Striking — the “powerhouse” of collective bargaining — also promotes equality in the bargaining process: England, at p. 188. This Court has long recognized the deep inequalities that structure the relationship between employers and employees, and the vulnerability of employees in this context. In the Alberta Reference [case], Dickson C.J. observed that [t]he role of association has always been vital as a means of protecting the essential needs and interests of working people. Throughout history, workers have associated to overcome their vulnerability as individuals to the strength of their employers. [p. 368] And this Court affirmed in Mounted Police that

68 theory&struggle

[53] In Health Services [a previous case], this Court recognized that the Charter [part of the Canadian Constitution] values of “[h]uman dignity, equality, liberty, respect for the autonomy of the person and the enhancement of democracy” supported protecting the right to a meaningful process of collective bargaining within the scope of s. 2(d) [of the Charter] (para. 81). And, most recently, drawing on these same values, in Mounted Police [another earlier case] it confirmed that protection for a meaningful process of collective bargaining requires that employees have

[Section] 2(d) functions to prevent individuals, who alone may be powerless, from being overwhelmed by more powerful entities, while also enhancing their strength through the exercise of collective power. Nowhere are these dual functions of s. 2(d) more pertinent than in labour relations. Individual employees typically lack the power to bargain and pursue workplace goals with their more powerful employers. Only by banding together in collective bargaining associations, thus strengthening their bargaining

power with their employer, can they meaningfully pursue their workplace goals.

The right to a meaningful process of collective bargaining is therefore a necessary element of the right to collectively pursue workplace goals in a meaningful way. . . [the] process of collective bargaining will not be meaningful if it denies employees the power to pursue their goals. (at paras. 70-71) Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker [Canadian academics] point out that it is “the possibility of the strike which enables workers to negotiate with their employers on terms of approximate equality” (p.

333). Without it, “bargaining risks being inconsequential — a dead letter” (Prof. Michael Lynk, “Expert Opinion on Essential Services”, at par. 20; A.R., vol. III, at p. 145).

Of course it would be a serious mistake to think that the very recent reaffirmations of the right to strike in the ILO, the European Court of Human Rights, the European Committee on Social Rights and the Canadian Supreme Court puts the right to strike beyond challenge. Without doubt there will be further attacks — and watch carefully how the membership of the Courts and committees will be manipulated by governments, like our own, sympathetic to business.

Meanwhile we have to fight the threat posed by the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA, between Canada and the EU), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, between the USA and the EU) and a myriad other international agreements. Though much focus has been on the damage these will do to the NHS and food and environmental standards, the undermining of the right to strike and to collectively bargain is clearly an aspect of these Trojan horses.

What the recent developments mean is that trade unions should use the Courts and Committees, in appropriate cases, to defend workers interests, not in the belief that lawyers and courts will win the emancipation of the working class – far from it. Instead the very pragmatic object should be to use these tools to gain a little more legal space in which the real struggle can take place. Needless to say the choice of cases to defend in these fora should be carefully and strategically selected.

The left and trade unions are also presented with an opportunity to employ the language of fundamental rights to present their demands for the restoration of the capacity of trade unions to fight on behalf of the working class. Such language has traction amongst the social democratic parties who so far have been the willing tools of neoliberalism. n

Footnotes 1 Application 31045/10, 08 April 2014.

2 Application 36701/09, 27 November 2014.

3 Application 48408/12, 2 January 2015.

4 Especially when one considers how effective neoliberalism has been in rolling back that relatively brief phase in the 400 years or so of capitalism when a state-dominated, vaguely egalitarian post-war economic settlement took hold across western and northern Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Even the great crash of 2008 has been harnessed to push further and faster the objectives of privatisation, deregulation and attacks on trade unionism under the banner of ‘austerity.’ In consequence, living standards have been intentionally driven down for the mass of the people, wealth has increased for the tiny minority, inequality has accelerated, and the achievements of a civilised society are being systematically destroyed.

5 This is not new, of course; a similar view dominated courts and legislatures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and much of the twentieth century too.

6 I.e. national collective bargaining across an industry.

7 As the then government put it in a White Paper (People, Jobs and Opportunities) in 1992, collective bargaining was an “outdated personnel practice” which had become “increasingly inappropriate” so that the government “will continue to encourage employers to move away from traditional, centralised collective bargaining.” The downward graph of collective bargaining was momentarily halted in 200 when the statutory recognition machinery took effect. Thereafter the decline continued relentlessly and at the same gradient. The recognition machinery therefore had no significant effect.

8 KD Ewing and J Hendy, A Manifesto for Collective Bargaining, IER, 2013. On average across the EU, 62% of workers continue to be covered by collective bargaining. There are 11 countries with collective bargaining coverage of 70% or more. The UK has the second worst coverage in the EU with only Lithuania on 15% with a worse record.

9 International Transport Workers' Federation v Viking Line ABP (C-438/05) ECJ (Grand Chamber), 11 December 2007, [2007] E.C.R. I-10779; [2008] 1 C.M.L.R. 51; [2008] All E.R. (EC) 127; [2008] C.E.C. 332; [2008] I.C.R. 741; [2008] I.R.L.R. 143.

10 Such as that the industrial action must be suitable for ensuring and did not go beyond what was necessary to attain the legitimate objective of protecting the rights of workers.

11 e.g. Alemo-Herron v Parkwood Leisure Ltd (C-426/11) ECJ, 18 July 2013, [2014] 1 C.M.L.R. 21; [2014] All E.R. (EC) 400; [2014] C.E.C. 575; [2013] I.C.R. 1116; [2013] I.R.L.R. 744 (right to run a business trumped right to collective bargain.

12 Fn 1 above.

13 Though it failed utterly since less than 6 months later, on 3 October 2014, the Conservative Minister of Justice published a paper reiterating precisely those threats if the Conservatives win the next election.

14 2015 SCC 4, 30 January 2015.

theory&struggle 69

John Foster

British Twentieth Century history TUC general secretary Len Murray lobbied by supporters of the imprisoned Shrewsbury pickets

T

HIS REVIEW examines books on modern British history published over the past three years in order, first, to highlight those that may be of particular interest to readers of this journal and, secondly, to examine more generally how history for this period is being written – in order to identify the main ideological trends. It necessarily considers only a small fraction of the material published and restricts itself to books, not journal articles.

Our initial observation has to be negative: very little has been written from a classical Marxist position.

There has been nothing to compare with A L Morton’s Peoples History of England or, more recently, E J Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire, works which, in different ways, sought to understand the interplay of class forces against the background of politico-economic change. Even for much shorter periods within the twentieth century no historian over the past three or four years has produced an incisive, evidenced narrative which shows how the ruling class ruled and how it did so in face of actual or potential working class challenge.

On the other hand, there has been a renewed willingness among academic historians to discuss the working class as a class — albeit in somewhat hushed and qualified terms. The most interesting intervention is probably that by Geoffrey Field in his Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking of the British Working Class 19391945.1 Field identifies these years as critical in transforming Labour allegiance for the first time into a majority position among working class voters and developing new levels of class cohesion in both

70 theory&struggle

workplaces and communities. His two final chapters look in detail at the changing mass politics using newly researched materials from government attitude surveys which reveal the scale of popular unrest in 1941-42 and in particular the level of support for the Soviet Union.

Field also examines Communist Party records for London and the North West – to argue that the party lost the initiative in 1944-45 and saw the political lead being taken by more centrist elements in the Labour Party.

What Field does not do is look at discussions at governmental level and within finance and big business on how to manage post-war politics and the conflicts over the endorsement of Beveridge and Keynes. We get the working class – but not the ruling class and hence no full understanding of how political interventions were initiated and their subsequent impact in moulding attitudes. No doubt this is partly because Field distances himself from a Marxist definition of class and after reviewing, somewhat favourably, Weberian positions, defines class as ‘structured inequality which is produced and reproduced in economic, social, cultural and political relations’ – without asking why there has to be inequality and how its ‘structure’ is maintained and ultimately enforced to sustain a capitalist mode production.

Another important intervention is that by Ben Jones in The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory. 2 The main subject matter is derived from a hundred and fifty autobiographical statements from people living in the poorer areas of Brighton. However, the book is in fact

about much more than Brighton. While Jones’ definitions are not precisely Marxist, his first chapter contains a spirited polemic against those who have sought to deny a class analysis and, in terms of empirical findings, argues forcefully against claims that the ‘working class’ has disappeared. He adduces evidence from Social Attitudes Surveys that selfascription to ‘being working class’ remained remarkably steady at well over 60 per cent from the 1960s to the 1990s and still today remains around 60 per cent. His concluding chapter contains an important account of how Conservative and later New Labour social engineering projects in the 1990s and 2000s sought to individualise workers and the importance of battles over housing in this process.

Jones’s definition of class draws on that of Raymond Williams: ‘class formation is understood as a historical and relational process which produces and reproduces economic, cultural and political inequalities through the unequal distribution of power and resources between different groups.’ The word ‘relational’ is important – even if Jones fights shy of talking about a ruling class.

In terms of documenting the major class battles which punctuated the twentieth century little new has emerged.

One partial exception is Jim Phillips’ very well researched Collieries, Communities and the Miners Strike in Scotland 1984-1985. 3 Philips reveals the importance of community support for the striking miners and explores the tactics and strategy of the Scottish miners’ leaders as against those deployed at British level. He also provides some important new materials on interventions through the governmental apparatus in Scotland. However, the book’s Scottish focus means that it does not examine the overall tactics of the British state.

For this one has to go back to Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within: The Secret War against the Miners, a book that can indeed be described as meeting the requirements of Marxist history and which was reissued in 2014 to incorporate material from newly released government papers. 4 This fully validates earlier suppositions on the use of state force, the intelligence services and the military, and the strategic importance attached to taking on and defeating the miners by both the government and its key allies in business and finance.

Three books have contributed to overcoming the long-standing deficit in our understanding of the role of women in both the workplace and politics. Valerie Hall’s Women at Work 1860-1939: how different industries shaped women’s experiences is an important comparative study of women’s lives in the mining, fishing and farming communities in Northumberland. 5 Hall demonstrates how the quite different material circumstances in each industry structured the lives of women – but also the active, creative response of women to these circumstances. Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye (ed.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 provides a dozen essays examining the afterlife of the suffrage movements and the role of women both in the constituencies and in the Commons (women weren’t allowed in the Lords till 1958). 6 The introduction states, rather tartly, that ‘class politics’ are not enough to explain the changing political role of women. But the essays themselves do little to examine the interface between class and gender in a period of unprecedented class mobilisation. The editors note, for instance, the irony that the 1918 Suffrage Act excluded women under 30 — precisely those who had ‘contributed to the war effort’. But they do not mention the reason: war work, which drew disproportionately on women under 30, had trebled the number of women trade unionists and brought significant radicalisation. For a fuller exploration of the relationship between class and gender we have to go to Mary Davis (ed), Class and Gender in British Labour History: Renewing the Debate (or starting it?) which does so over a broader canvas of two centuries – from an exploration of gender and class consciousness during industrialisation to the role of socialist women in the inter-war years.7 In terms of histories of the Left Jodi Burkett’s Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s promises far more than it delivers. It argues that the ‘End of Empire’ in the 1960s, itself a questionable assumption, caused the rise of mass movements of the Left seeking a new postimperial identity – specified as CND, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland and the Campaign against Racial

theory&struggle 71

Discrimination. Remarkably, however, the narrative is largely confined to the activities of Mervyn Jones, Eamon McCann and Tariq Ali – with no mention of Communists and scarcely more of the Labour Party Left.

Luckily, two books have been published, even if by small publishing houses, which bring us back to the historical reality. Ken Keable’s London Recruits: the Secret War against Apartheid, details the role of the dozens of young volunteers, principally recruited from the Young Communist League in London, who undertook difficult and dangerous missions to assist the ANC in South Africa at a time when the ANC’s main organised cadre had either been imprisoned or exiled. 8 John Green’s Britain’s Communists the Untold Story covers a wider canvas looking at the lives of individual Communists over the past two generations. 9 Its importance derives from the way in such individual life stories show the rounded character of these often remarkable people and the essential continuity of support they provided to the very organisations that Burkitt highlights. A concluding chapter by Graham Stevenson, using records released by the security services, shows that the British ruling class (and its allies in the US and South Africa) had no doubt about the central role of Communists in all these movements – particularly dangerous because of the way they worked in alliance with others on the Left.

Seifert and Sibley’s Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson is both a biography and an analysis of the Communist Party’s role within the trade union movement at the height of its effectiveness in the 1960s and 70s.10 It demolishes claims that the party’s focus was principally the manipulative control on positions and demonstrates the key importance attached to developing grass roots movements that were politically integrated within the structures of unions and able thereby to effect a much wider politicisation. Kevin Halpin’s autobiography Memoirs of a Militant: Sharply and To the Point continues this theme and sets his role as chair of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions within the wider work of the Communist Party to develop a shop stewards movement that was politically educated.11 Halpin vividly reconstructs the culture of comradeship that was developed across the workplaces of London and elsewhere in the 1950s and 60s and which ultimately, during the industrial relations crises of the early 1970s, led to a series of victorious confrontations with the government — and also the conviction within the Conservative Party that Britain was becoming ‘ungovernable’.

Effective analyses of how our ruling class responded to this particular challenge, or more generally across the twentieth century, are in extremely short supply. Stuart Ball has produced a major study of the Conservative Party between 1918 and 1945 that uses a wide range of new sources including the party’s own archives.12 He poses the question of, why, during the first decades of

72 theory&struggle

democracy in Britain, the Conservative Party governed almost continuously – and indeed continued to do so for much of the rest of the century. The answers are perhaps predictable for what is a semi-official party history. Conservative success derived from the party’s unity, its ‘gentlemanly values’, its espousal of class harmony and its depth of local support: in the constituencies the party possessed both an articulate mass membership and unrivalled access to resources.

However, Ball also acknowledges that the threat posed by a class-based Labour Party in the 1920s consolidated the Conservatives as the party of property, marginalising the Liberals, and also notes the electoral importance of the continuing element of property franchise up to 1948.

On the other hand, there is little on how the leaders of the Conservative Party saw themselves as guardians of the established order or on what Stanley Baldwin later claimed to have been his most important political achievement, that of ‘educating the Labour Party’ to be a purely parliamentary party.

Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders examine a later phase of Conservative politics in Making Thatcher’s Britain13. Robert Saunders provides an important analysis of how Thatcher and her supporters used, and indeed partly manufactured, Labour’s ‘crisis of government’ between 1975 and 1977 in order to argue for a radical break with corporate government – but does not go much beyond earlier work by Colin Hay.14 None of the essays in the volume probe particularly deeply into the conflicts within our ruling class over what, at the time, was seen by many to be a very risky departure from government based on corporate consensus. More revealing perhaps are the memoirs of Christopher Dow, chief economist at the Bank of England between 1976 and 1984.15 In contemporaneous diaries we see the transformation of Dow, a Keynesian trained by James Meade, from predictable support for statutory prices and incomes policies to support for monetarist cash limits and eventually and reluctantly for mass unemployment as a tool of labour market control.

In terms of the impact of neo-liberalism on the Labour Party an interesting comparative dimension is provided by Bryan Evans and Ingo Schmidt in Social Democracy after the Cold War.16 This examines the largely parallel transformations in a series of countries in which social democracy had been dominant: Australia, Sweden, Germany and Britain. In each Keynesian managed capitalism was abandoned in favour of neo-liberal management involving the supply side enforcement of market freedoms – directly against organised labour. Strangely, though, for a book entitled ‘After the Cold War’ the authors opening premise is that the collapse of the ‘Soviet Empire’ should have enabled a renewal of social democracy. The reason it did not they appear to attribute to the strength of neo-liberal ideology and globalisation – without considering the possibility that the dismantling of socialist states in Europe may have had at least some impact on the wider

political horizons of working class movements in the West. A continuation of this theme is provided by Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism who asks why neo-liberalism survived unscathed from the crash of 2008.17 His answer is that the biggest corporations and banks emerged from the crisis stronger than before, at the expense of everyone else, and as a result even more dominant over parties and the press.

Crouch’s political solution is, however, simply to accept corporate power and to urge the development a new ‘quadrilateral’ of the state, corporations, ‘the market’ and civil society which generates agendas of ‘corporate social responsibility’.

Positioned more centrally within Britain’s policy establishment are the authors of Britain in Global Politics. The two volumes span the twentieth century and provide an interesting inside narrative from foreign office advisers, academics in security studies and some former diplomats.

In the first volume, From Gladstone to Churchill, F.G.Otte seeks to demonstrate that Neville Chamberlain’s policy in 1939 was firmly founded on long-standing balance of power assumptions going back to the nineteenth century.18 The 1939 summer negotiations with the Soviet Union were designed to stop Russia ‘drifting into the German orbit’ but at the same time ‘not to cede to Moscow the ability to commit Britain to any Russo-German war’. John Fisher’s ‘Curzon’s War and Curzon’s Peace’ examines the role of Lord Curzon as foreign secretary in the final stages of the first world war in pushing to maximise Britain’s territorial gains – particularly in the Middle East and Africa – and his conviction that the ‘war must not end prematurely’ if Britain was to consolidate its grip over the former Ottoman empire. Martin Thomas in ‘Markers of Modernity’ examines the subsequent role of new military technology, the bomber, in territorial pacification.

Churchill as Colonial Secretary was a strong advocate of experimenting with the use of military aircraft for this purpose. In Iraq the British High Commissioner, in what was formally a League Nations mandated territory, described the situation in 1928: the royal government ‘rests almost entirely on British support and control and on the fear inspired by British aeroplanes and armoured cars’.

The second volume From Churchill to Blair provides no new revelations on Iraq.19 It does contain interesting essays on ‘British Elite Perceptions of the UK’s International Position 1950-1991’, based on witness seminars, and ‘The US Embassy and the British Withdrawal from East of Suez’. Nothing, however, is provided on Britain’s post-war policies of colonial control. So far no historian, it seems, has taken up the challenge of the documents discovered in 2011 on British activities in Kenya. Only the lawyers Leigh, Day and Co, have started to detail the scale of the repression: a network of concentration camps containing at their height 150,000 people who were systematically

brutalised and tortured.20 British practice in Malaya and UN-occupied Korea appears to have been very similar.

Providing an final overview of post-war policy is Glen O’Hara’s Governing Post-war Britain: Paradoxes of Progress 1951-1973.21 This has been hailed as a new landmark in the development of conceptual history. A decade ago the floor was taken by Andreas Gofas and Colin Hay in staking the claim of ‘ideational’ history – which called for the recognition of the autonomous role of ideas as against the previous dominance of very discrete and localised discourse-based analysis.22 Now O’Hara seeks to provide continuity and coherence of analysis around a particular abstract concept: in this case that developed in 1936 by the sociologist R.K. Merton, the ‘unintended consequence’. This is put forward as overarching explanatory principle and applied to the post-war welfare state. O’Hara notes that the intent of the Welfare State, in terms of the declarations of politicians, was to provide much greater levels of security and support for the general population.

Yet, despite the delivery of full employment and rising living standards, governments became increasingly unpopular. This, says O’Hara, was the result of unintended consequences. Policy makers in the ’big state’ had neither the information nor the analytical ability to match outcomes to interventions. He deploys this thesis through a series of discrete examples – from Alex Cairncross’s lack of professional economists in the Treasury, the ambiguities and confusions created in American minds by Britain’s withdrawal from east of Suez and the failure of German re-armament: based on the imagined fears on the Left of German militarism.

The Kenyan concentration camps are not mentioned – but would easily fit under the same rubric.

Sixty years ago Ranaji Palme Dutt wrote his Crisis of Britain and the British Empire. This examined the nature of economic power in Britain, the very special but fraught relationship with the US, the challenges posed internally by democratic politics and the demands of the labour movement and the determination of what he describes as Britain’s ruling class to hang on to as much of the empire as possible – in so far as it was consistent with their Cold War alliance with the US and the maintenance of political stability in Britain.

Today the archives for most of the twentieth century are open. Marxist history could be written with a documented precision that Palme Dutt could only approximate. But despite some valuable work in specialist areas, it is difficult to identify any overarching analyses that could match those of the past. As noted earlier, there may be some progress towards the use of ‘class’ to analyse rather than simply describe. It is, however, limited by an unwillingness to challenge dominant academic perspectives and to pose class ‘relationally’ in terms of an opposing class that actively rules. n

theory&struggle 73

Martin Rowson

Footnotes 1 Geoffrey Field, Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking of the British Working Class 1939-1945 (Oxford 2013) 2 Ben Jones, The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (Manchester 2012) 3 Jim Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners' Strike in Scotland, 1984–85 (Manchester, 2012) 4 Seumas Milne, The Enemy within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London 2014) 5 Valerie G. Hall, Women at work 1860–1939: how different industries shaped women's experiences (Woodbridge: 2013) 6 Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye (ed.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 (Basingstoke 2013) 7 Mary Davis (ed), Class and Gender in British Labour History: Renewing the Debate (or starting it?) (London 2011) 8 Ken Keable, London Recruits: the Secret War against Apartheid (London 2012) 9 John Green, Britain’s Communists the Untold Story (London 2014) 10 R.Seifert and T. Sibley, Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson (London 2012) 11 Kevin Halpin. Memoirs of a Militant: Sharply and To the Point (Glasgow 2012) 12 Stuart Ball, Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918-1945 (Oxford 2013) 13 Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge 2012) 14 Colin Hay, The Political Economy of New Labour (Manchester 1999) 15 G. Haache and C. Taylor (ed.), Inside the Bank of England: Memoirs of Christopher Dow, 1973-1984 (Basingstoke 2013) 16 Bryan Evans and Ingo Schmidt, Social Democracy after the Cold War (Athabasca, Canada 2013) 17 Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism (Cambridge 2011) 18 C. Baxter, M. Dockrill and K.Hamilton (ed), Britain in Global Politics, Volume I: From Gladstone to Churchill (Basingstoke 2013) 19 John W. Young, Effie Pedaliu and Michael Kandiah (ed), Britain in Global Politics, Volume 2: From Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke 2014) 20 Kenyan Human Rights Commission and Leigh Day and Co. 21 Glen O’Hara’s Governing Post-war Britain: Paradoxes of Progress 1951-1973 (Basingstoke 2012) 22 Andreas Gofas and Colin Hay (ed.),The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis: A Portrait of Contemporary Debates (London 2010)

74 theory&struggle

Charlie Hebdo We must not stop laughing at these murderous clowns Martin Rowson is a cartoonist whose cartoons are published in the Morning Star as well as in The Guardian and elsewhere. He is the author of a number of books including the Coalition book of cartoons, published during the Coalition government years

Mockery is hated by the powerful and despotic -which is why it must continue The death threats come with the territory. Since the advent of the internet, people around the world who are disgusted or enraged by my cartoons have been able to threaten to kill me via email. Over the years these have included Muslims, Zionists, Republican Americans, a few angry Chomskyians, Catholics, Russians, some Serbs and, I imagine, a large number of teenage boys locked in their bedrooms “having a laugh”.

Hitherto I’ve tended, in my turn, to laugh them off, joking that a death threat by email doesn’t count: it needs a letter sent to my home address containing one of my loved ones’ ears to be taken seriously.

However, after the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Cabu, Wolinski, Tignous and the paper’s editor—in-chief, Stéphane Charbonnier — who signed himself “Charb” — there’s a terrible temptation to stop laughing.

Although that, I believe, would be a fundamental error.

Laughter, it needs to be shouted, is one of the things humans do best, mostly because it makes us feel better. I’ve been convinced for years that laughter is a hardwired evolutionary survival mechanism that helps humans navigate our way through life without going mad with existentialist terror. That’s why we laugh at all those terrifying things like death, sex, other people and the disgusting stuff that pours out of our bodies on a daily basis.

Moreover, we’re very, very good at laughing at those who place themselves above us, either as our leaders or intending to impose their beliefs to make everyone else exactly like them. That’s the basis of the craft I shared with my murdered colleagues in Paris. This universal capacity to use mockery as a form of social control is one of the main things that make us human.

Crucially, it’s also in defiance of the primary need of the powerful to be taken seriously, often against all the external evidence of their innate absurdity.

In fact I suspect that throughout history that’s how political and religious power gained its original heft, by terrorising everyone else to suppress their giggles at the endless cavalcade of priests, kings, emperors, thrones, courts, burning bushes, virgin births, hidden imams, flying horses and all the rest of it.

But even then there appears to be something exquisitely intolerable to the serious mind about mockery when it is visual. Largely this is due to the way the visual is consumed: rather than nibbling your way through text, however incendiary, a cartoon floods the eyes and gets swallowed whole — and often makes the recipient choke. Worse, cartoons should be seen more as a kind of sympathetic magic than anything else: we steal our subjects’ souls by recreating them through caricature and then mock them in narratives of our own devising. Worst of all, we then pretend that it’s all just a goodnatured laugh: it is a laugh, but it’s also assassination without the blood.

“Without the blood” is the key phrase. In a weirdly indefinable but obvious way, satirists can only really function when it’s hideously clear that the objects of their mockery are much more powerful and have a far deadlier armoury than the satirists, as was demonstrated with such foul clarity in Paris on January 7th, 2015.

But is that entirely true? Almost nine years ago, when the Danish cartoons storm erupted, I argued publicly that I thought JyllandsPosten had been wrong to commission cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as I suspected they were just another salvo in the paper’s decades-long campaign against immigrants, many of them Muslims, most poor and powerless, and some of them cleaning JyllandsPosten’s toilets.

I was roundly condemned by many for betraying free speech.

Maybe I was, but claiming that the greatest freedom is to say whatever you want about anyone, whomsoever you choose, is ultimately as ludicrous as demanding that freedom from being offended — from being upset, in other words — trumps every other human right. On that occasion the blood flowed in gallons, though mostly unnoticed or unreported gallons as they gushed exclusively from more than l00 Muslims, shot dead by Muslim police or soldiers on the streets of Muslim countries in rioting fomented by Muslim clerics eager to flex their political muscles.

This time it is cartoonists’ blood that’s been shed. Yet however much

their murderers may identify themselves as victims of mockery, they have clearly also identified themselves as on the side of power, electing to act as agents avenging the hurt feelings of the most Powerful Being in the Universe.

Don’t forget that demanding either respect or silence from everyone else is one of the most common abuses of power going.

Charlie Hebdo is planning to continue printing its magazine. As chairman of the British Cartoonists’ Association, I am calling on my fellow cartoonists to join me in donating a free drawing. We should support them materially. We must also make a statement.

Don’t fool yourselves that this is about Islam. It was the Islamists’ secularist enemy Bashar al Assad who got his thugs to break the fingers of the Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat four years ago. The Palestinian cartoonist Naji al Ali was murdered in London in 1987 by a student who claims to have been a double agent for Mossad and the PLO. The British cartoonists’ names in the Gestapo death list were just another manifestation of how hateful laughter is to despots throughout history. Which is why, now more than ever, we mustn’t stop laughing this latest bunch of murderous clowns to scorn. n Reprinted from The Guardian, Thursday 8 January 2015, by kind permission of Martin Rowson and The Guardian,

theory&struggle 75

Pauline Bryan

The National Question in Britain: Federalism and Nationalism

T

HE WORLD, it is said, is getting smaller and that we are all part of a global village. Local cultures are being subsumed into a worldwide culture including food, fashion, communication and even speech patterns.

Peter Dicken describes those who adopt, what he believes is the majority opinion, as “hyper globalists”.

According to him they argue “That we live in a borderless world in which the ‘national’ is no longer relevant. In such a world, ‘globalization’ is the new economic (as well as political and cultural) order. It is a world where nation-states are no longer significant actors or meaningful economic units and in which consumer tastes and cultures are homogenized and satisfied through the provision of standardized global products created by global corporations with no allegiance to place or community. Thus, the ‘global’ is claimed to be the natural order, an inevitable state of affairs, in which time-space has been compressed, the ‘end of geography’ has arrived and everywhere is becoming the same”. 1 The world has, however, gained 34 new nation states in the past 22 years, most of them in Europe and there may be more to follow, someday even Scotland. Many of these recent states have claimed a specific national identity based on all or some of history, language, religion and ethnicity.

We appear to have simultaneously a reduction in differences and an increase in demands for self-determination based on differences.

The demands for autonomy in Scotland and Catalonia while receiving most attention are not alone.

In Spain there are the two other ‘historic nationalities’ Basque and Galician as well as the fourteen other autonomous communities. Belgium is perhaps the most divided population in Europe, where the Social Democrat Parties and some of the Trade Unions are divided by language. At various times in Italy there has been support for increased federalism from the centreleft and for outright separation from the Northern League (Lega Nord).

These demands for greater autonomy are usually linked with the desire to stay within the European Union. Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru stated “The

76 theory&struggle

argument for staying part of the EU – certainly with steps to make it more efficient and more responsive to the diverse needs of European regions – are more clearcut here in Wales than as seen in England. On balance we in Wales would probably prefer to stay put.” 2 Artur Mas, President of the Generalitat of Catalonia “says the wealthy and influential north-eastern region gets a raw funding deal from the central government.

His centre-right Catalan nationalist coalition (CiU) argues a Catalan state would fare better as a member of the EU than a province of Spain.” 3 This demonstrates that demands for selfdetermination can co-exist with membership of a wider federation and in the case of the EU, one which has less democracy than national governments. In some cases, as shown in the BBC report on Artur Mas, the argument for greater autonomy includes the claim that the region/country is wealthier than other parts of the nation and that independence would enable them to keep more of their own resources. Northern Italy and Scotland share this approach. Regions in southern Spain, southern Italy and Wales have been less keen on independence and argue instead for more powers to be accompanied by guarantees of fiscal equalisation. We do not, currently, hear arguments for independence accompanied by an appeal to the population to be prepared for a reduction in living standards, because it will be worth it to gain recognition of one’s national identity.

Scotland and Catalonia share something else. They are described by Keating as being involved in Second Round Reform. 4 Having achieved a degree of autonomy through devolved powers, other powers are identified as essential and meanwhile the claim for full independence continues. It does seem to be the case that achieving increased autonomy rarely makes demands for independence go away. Support for the SNP grew significantly after the Scottish Parliament was

introduced, and even the other political parties found themselves making the case for more powers although it is fair to say they had not used the powers they had available to them. Where the devolved Parliament or Assembly lacks fiscal autonomy in the original settlement it is likely that there would be demands for greater powers even without a nationalist movement to spur it on.

As a result of the 2014 referendum in Scotland, a new Scotland Bill has been drawn up which gives the Scottish Parliament full control over income tax and greater borrowing powers. These piecemeal changes though are unlikely to result in a settlement that will draw a line under constitutional change. It seems that once the process of devolution has started it gathers momentum.

Keating says of Second Round Reform: “This suggests that constitutional politics will not be a oncein-a-generation phenomenon leading to a period of stability but part of the political mainstream. The question of inter-territorial equity, which is not strictly a constitutional issue, is likely to become even more important but in the absence of agreed principles on how to do it, will also be dealt with by incremental adjustments and compromises.” 5 One of the penalties of the on-going preoccupation with the constitution is the formation of broad alliances on either side. “They usually bring together classes and interest groups which otherwise have little in common with each other or whose aims are mutually antagonistic.”6 In Scotland the SNP and particularly the Yes campaign was a broad alliance across the political spectrum. The Better Together campaign has the support of UKIP, the Tories, Lib-Dems and Scottish Labour. Both took real politics, the politics of class and class control, out of politics.

Is it possible, then, to have a resolution this side of

independence? Or is it the case that once you have started along the devolution route it is inevitable that you become stuck in a cycle of demands and concessions where independence is the only escape.

Finding a Settled Will

STUC and the Labour Party in Scotland have through most of their histories supported some form of Home Rule for Scotland. The STUC, founded in 1897, first formally adopted a policy of support for a Scottish Parliament in 1914. The Independent Labour Party, which went on to form the Labour Party, was from its inception in 1893 committed to Home Rule and played a prominent role within the Scottish Home Rule Association. The Labour Movement demands were for a federal arrangement rather than for independence.

The Scottish Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1924, which failed due to insufficient time being allowed for its progress, proposed that the Westminster Parliament had responsibility for the Post Office, the military, customs, foreign affairs and tax collection. There was to be no reduction in the number of Scottish MPs in the House of Commons, but Scottish Members would abstain from voting on English matters. A joint Exchequer Board would allocate finances.

In moving the Bill ILP member George Buchanan drew attention to the minutiae of Scottish issues that had to be dealt with in the House of Commons, and how he as a Scottish MP was able to vote on matters such as the London Traffic Bill. He stated “The English Members can rid themselves of Scottish representation as soon as they care to, for in our Bill we make this proposal, that whenever there is a scheme of devolution agreed on, to apply to England, Scotland and Wales, the Scottish Members will cease to take any part or interest in the affairs in which the English Parliament ought to take

theory&struggle 77

part.”

The Labour Movement’s position, unlike the nationalist one, acknowledged the bonds the British working class had forged in two centuries of political struggle and recognised shared class interests over and above the shared interest of living in Scotland. Far from wanting to separate from the English they wanted to join with working people across Britain and Ireland in creating a socialist alternative. While campaigning for the devolution of powers, the early pioneers adopted internationalism as their ideal. They wanted devolution of power so that they could tackle poverty, poor housing, inadequate public services and industrial closures and not for its own sake.

Now that we have the Scottish Parliament, Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies we have the basis for a federal arrangement with power devolved within the UK, but with the strength of a single Parliament dealing with macro-economic issues and international relations. This dual approach allows variations in policy within the constituent parts, but can provide the combined strength to operate within the global economy.

Can Federalism win support?

In the first few decades after the Second World War the German recovery was enhanced by its federal system “given the considerable diversity of the West German Länder in size, problem loads, economic prosperity and fiscal and administrative capacity, political demands and a constitutional mandate to create “equal living conditions" were accommodated not only by a fiscal regime of shared income and turnover taxes and ever more perfectionist vertical and horizontal ‘fiscal equalization’ transfers, but also by the institutionalization of an elaborate system of jointly financed and jointly planned programmes..." 7 Partit del Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) has adopted support for a federal solution to the demands for Catalonian Independence. This has put it at odds with the national Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). In February 2013 the Spanish Parliament debated petitions for the Spanish Government to enter into discussions over the future of Catalonia. The PSOE remained firmly opposed to Catalonia’s right to selfdetermination and voted against while the PCS accepted Catalonia’s right to self-determination even though they oppose Catalonia’s independence from Spain. After the massive 1.5 million strong demonstration in Barcelona in support of independence, the PSC General Secretary, Pere Navarro, asked the PSOE to embrace federalism and work for a reformulation of the Spanish State.

We do not have to look so far afield to find an advocate of Federalism. Carwyn Jones, the Leader of Scottish Labour's sister Party and First Minister of the Welsh Assembly, has been considerably more thoughtful on the future of the UK than we have seen from the Labour Party leadership in Scotland.

78 theory&struggle

In a speech given in Cardiff in March 2012 he stated “We are on the brink on huge constitutional change in the UK. There is a strong case for reforming our central institutions to reflect the emerging reality of a looser UK....The UK has changed beyond recognition over the past 15 years and it is time that our constitution recognised this.” 8 Reiterating his earlier call for a Constitutional Convention he said the future of the UK should be considered in the round and not, as it has been, nation by nation in a piecemeal fashion. He described the present constitutional set up as “an incremental asymmetric quasi-federation” that was far from satisfactory. “The UK has changed and the constitution needs to catch up”. 9 He has restated Tam Dalyell's West Lothian Question as “the Bridgend Question”, referring to the anomaly in which MPs from Wales and Scotland can vote on English domestic affairs, while English MPs cannot vote on those same matters in Wales and Scotland. But he also pointed out that the needs of Welsh Agriculture are represented in the EU by an English Minister for Agriculture.

However, the First Minister’s ‘line in the sand’ is that there could be no movement on taxation to make the National Assembly more fiscally accountable until the prior issue of funding via the block grant was settled satisfactorily. He also recognised the devolution of corporation tax would risk a “race to the bottom if all the devolved administrations decided to have a bidding war on lowering the rate”. 10 Carwyn Jones acknowledged that he was unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing from the Prime Minister, David Cameron, or the Secretary of State, Cheryl Gillan.

“But we should at least start the debate,” he said, noting that Wales had developed its constitution much faster over the past decade than many people had anticipated.

“In 1999 it would have been thought unlikely that the people of Wales would have supported primary legislative power so emphatically in the referendum last year. At the moment the UK government has its eyes turned to Scotland. But you cannot solve these problems by looking at just one part of the UK.” 11 There is, quite rightly, concern that the future of the UK is being decided largely in Scotland when the implications will be felt much wider. John Osmond, from the think tank the Institute of Welsh Affairs, says “In Wales there is concern that the country is being sidelined in a debate that inevitably tends to focus on an axis between Edinburgh and London."12 At least when we look to Wales we can see that the Welsh Labour Party is using its powers, even though they are more limited than in Scotland, to greater effect.

It was first to abolish prescription charges, it has used its powers to end PFI and to reject school league tables.

In March 2013 the First Minister of Wales announced that the Welsh Government has purchased Cardiff Airport. Edwina Hart, Minister for Economy,

Science and Transport said: “The airport is a major piece of economic infra-structure for Wales. I look forward to working in partnership with the workforce at the airport as we develop a high quality service for passengers and create a facility of which Wales can be proud”.13 We do not hear the Scottish Labour Party commending such bold policies from Wales. The First Minister and Leader of the Welsh Labour Party has, however, had to deal with fall out from Johann Lamont's comments. In the Welsh Assembly he was asked by a Conservative AM to respond to Ms Lamont's criticism of universal free prescriptions being available even to people who earn over £100,000 a year. His response was that means testing would cost more than it would save.

Carwyn Jones is seeking a UK wide approach to devolution and has called for a Constitutional Convention for the whole UK. He states, “…for me, devolution is not about how each of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are separately governed. Rather it is about how the UK is governed, not by one but by four administrations, and which are not in a hierarchical relationship one to another.” He also states “representatives of all the states should come together and agree amongst themselves what limited range of powers should be conferred ‘upwards’ on the federal authority”.14 What Democratic Federalism Could Deliver

What might a democratic federalist arrangement mean for Scotland? For a start it would resolve the West Lothian question. Scottish representatives would have the right to vote on issues that impacted on the UK as a whole and on Scotland in particular. They would not have the right to vote on issues that relate only to England or other parts of the UK. It would however safeguard the ability to redistribute wealth within the UK and allow the labour movements in the whole UK to collaborate in resisting attacks on working people. It would lessen the likelihood of a race to the bottom in making Scotland a low pay, low corporation tax economy that could result from independence. It would reduce the extent of the London-centric nature of the Westminster Parliament which is as damaging to Lancashire as it is to Lanarkshire.

Dave Watson, political officer for Unison Scotland, made the case for fiscal devolution which, unlike Devo Max and Devo Plus, allows for a progressive approach to taxation.15 This would give a Scottish Government powers to redistribute wealth within Scotland, but also allow for redistribution within the UK. The power held by the Scottish Parliament could be used more flexibly to create a fairer tax system both nationally and locally that could improve public services and the pay and conditions of public employees and make requirements on private sector employers to pay a living wage.

This requires an extension of the capacity to borrow

for capital and revenue purposes that go well beyond the limits set out in the Scotland Bill drafted in December 2014. This should be used to end the Scottish Parliament’s dependence on PPP, PFI or the Non-profit Distributing model.

A Scottish Parliament should, in appropriate situations, have the right to take land and enterprises into public control. These rights could be used to safeguard jobs and industries or where the best interests of those dependent on the land or the enterprise are in jeopardy.

A Scottish Government should be able to create publicly owned enterprises to rebuild Scotland’s industrial base on green technology, renewable and high value manufacturing; addressing unemployment black spots and creating a more prosperous future for the people, especially the young people, of Scotland.

The position of England in a federal arrangement would be up to those living in England to decide. The dominance of London is likely to be felt even more keenly as more powers are exercised in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Organisations such as the Hannah Mitchell Foundation which is seeking “devolution to local and regional government" would probably gain support with the growing expectation of representation on a regional basis.16 However, as its secretary, Professor Paul Salvesen, argues, there are also dangers in the new regionalism as being implemented by the Cameron government. The powers recently conferred on ‘city regions’ in the North do not represent an extension of democracy but its further dilution. The creation of new ‘combined authorities’ and the imposition of elected mayors on city regions “give greater powers to officers and effectively remove any semblance of popular participation. Further, almost by definition, ‘city regions’ have an excessive focus on the main city conurbations and less emphasis on the more peripheral urban centres and rural areas.

The imposition of directly-elected mayors who will work alongside indirectly-elected combined authorities …a recipe for confusion and conflict.”17 Salvesen argues that these developments make it now urgent that proposals be developed for democratic regional authorities. These must be directly elected, on the basis of proportional representation, and have powers to take up the issues of uneven economic development on terms not set externally by big business but as determined locally and with the opportunity to develop elements of public and cooperative ownership.

Whatever the ultimate solution, the answer to the real problems facing us all will not be found in constitutional change, but in political change. If we want more local powers, can we use them to create a more equal society and achieve greater democratic control of our economy? For without that we are, at best, rearranging the furniture, and at worst, leaving ourselves even more vulnerable to the grasping power of international capital. n

theory&struggle 79

Footnotes 1 Dicken, P. 2011. Global Shift. Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. The Guildford Press, New York 2 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/leanne-wood/eu-referendumwales_b_2551732.html 3 26 November 2012 BBC Europe 4 Second Round Reform. Devolution and Constitutional Reform in UK, Spain and Italy, Michael Keating LSE ‘Europe in Question’ Discussion Paper Series 2009.

5 ibid 6 Moreno, L, Ethno-territorial Concurrences and Imperfect Federalism in Spain, Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (CSIC) Working Paper 93-10 7 Scharpf, F W MPIfG Working Paper 05/8, September 2005 No Exit from the Joint Decision Trap? Can German Federalism Reform Itself?.

8 http://www.clickonwales.org/2012/04/wales-and-the-future-ofthe-united-kingdom/ 9 ibid 10 ibid 11 http://www.clickonwales.org/2012/03/carwyn-jones-calls-forwritten-constitution 12 Osmond, J. Federalism, devolution and the breech of British sovereignty Background paper for the Changing Union Forum Federal Future for the UK: 21-22 September 2012 13 http://wales.gov.uk/newsroom/firstminister/2013/7232836/?lang= en 14 http://unlockdemocracy.org.uk/blog/entry/a-constitutionalconvention-for-the-uk 15 Watson, D. Fiscal Implications of Constitutional Change in People Power the Labour Movement Alternative for Radical Constitutional Change 16 http://www.hannahmitchell.org.uk/blog/ 17 http://www.hannahmitchell.org.uk/2014/11/

80 theory&struggle

Mary Davis

Claudia Jones communist, anti-racist and feminist her work in the USA

I

T IS SURPRISING that not more has been written about Claudia Jones given her stunning achievements as an activist, freedom fighter, ideologist and theoretician. The fact that she is buried next to Marx is an appropriate, but not an adequate epitaph.

The bare bones of her all too short life – she died at the age of 49- are relatively well known. She was born in 1915 in Trinidad and emigrated with her parents, an aunt and three sisters to the US where they settled in Harlem; and where she and her family, like most of the black population, experienced appalling racism and great poverty. These experiences, together with the trumped up case against the Scottsboro’ ‘boys’ (1935-6), led Claudia, aged 18, to join the Young Communist League (YCL).

This is how she put it: ‘It was out of my Jim Crow experiences as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of working class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism-that philosophy not only rejects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them.’

This quote indicates that very early on in her life she understood the relationship between exploitation and oppression and in particular the connection between class, race and gender. This was something that informed her politics throughout her life both in the US and later when she was deported to England.

Although she rose swiftly through the ranks of the YCL and the Party this did not stop her retaining a critical view of what she perceived as a gender blind and colour blind approach to women’s and Negro oppression (She always used the term ‘Negro’ as it was in common parlance at the time.) She was supported on the issue of oppression, however, by William Z Foster, who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) from 1945-57, after the expulsion of the former General Secretary, Earl Browder. In the bitter struggle against Browderism, Claudia supported the Party’s rejection of the ‘revisionist position on the national character of the Negro question’. In a long discussion article entitled ‘On the Right to Self-Determination for the

Negro People in the Black Belt’, she argued that the CPUSA had always understood that the Negro question was a special question taking on the character of a national question. She made a distinction between the position of Negros in the North and in the Black Belt where they constituted a majority of the population.

She argued that self-determination was not the same as separation and argued that the former had to be seen as a ‘programmatic demand’ and a ‘guiding principle’.

She quoted Lenin who argued that the Negro people in the USA constituted an ‘oppressed nation’; she was informed by his teachings which is why she opposed Browder since, by 1944, the latter envisaged a rosy future for ‘peaceful capitalism’ which would end racism, imperialism and exploitation. She stridently opposed this revisionist view.

Claudia Jones was imprisoned for writing and delivering an International Women’s Day address in which she strongly supported the fight for peace against imperialist aggression. Furthermore she castigated the left and the Party for failing to uproot male supremacist ideas. Such ideas ensured that the stated aim of building a mass party was unlikely to be achieved given that women constitute half the population and that while working class women are doubly oppressed, black women are triply oppressed, as workers, as Negroes and as women. In articulating this formulation, Claudia Jones was ahead of her time

and was acknowledged as such by Angela Davis, decades later. In addition she examined the occupations in which Negro women predominated and found that domestic service (private and public) predominated. This, of course, accounted for Negro women’s pitifully low pay and hence she was able to assert that Negro women were super exploited even compared to white women. She castigated the trade union movement for failing to recruit and organise Negro women domestic workers. Further, echoing Clara Zetkin, she criticized bourgeois feminism, which instead of seeing women’s oppression as founded on class exploitation, viewed it as stemming solely from men, substituting ‘the battle of the sexes’ for the class struggle. Claudia quoted Engels, citing his work on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he said that within the family the man is the bourgeois, the woman the proletarian. Thus, she went on to say: ‘Marxist-Leninists fight to free women from household drudgery, they fight to win equality for women in all spheres, they recognise that one cannot adequately deal with the woman question or win women for progressive participation unless one takes up the special problems, needs and aspirations of women-as women.’ (from ‘We seek Full Equality for Women’ 1949) In the same article she wrote that the CPUSA was the first Party to demonstrate to white women and to the working class ‘that the triply-oppressed status of Negro women is a barometer of the status of all women’.

After several periods of imprisonment under the viciously anti-communist Smith and McCarran Acts, she was eventually deported. She suffered bouts of serious ill health as a result of her prison experiences; in particular a heart problem which was untreated in prison. Because she was not a US citizen, despite the fact that she had submitted her naturalisation papers years before, she was eventually deported to England because Trinidad was still a British colony.

In Britain she continued her activism: she founded the West Indian Gazette and the Notting Hill Carnival.

She remained a communist until her dying day. n

Mary Davis FRSA is Visiting Professor of Labour History at Royal Holloway University of London. She has written, broadcast and lectured widely on women’s history, labour history, imperialism and racism. She was an elected member of the TUC women's committee. She is one of the founder members of the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee and chairs the Charter for Women. She was awarded the TUC women’s Gold Badge in 2010 for services to trade unionism.

theory&struggle 81

Alan Mackinnon

Bypassing the choke points of world trade China reponds to the US military offensive Alan Mackinnon is secretary of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

R

EADERS OF this publication will be aware that the Asia-Pacific region is now the engine of the global economy and that within the next decade China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by some distance.

Less familiar, perhaps, will be the US strategy to halt or delay that process and China’s strategy for counterbalancing American power. The TransPacific Partnership (TPP) — like its transatlantic cousin the TTIP — is currently being negotiated with selected countries of the Pacific Rim and is intended to put the United States at the centre of a new TransPacific free trade bloc which excludes China. The United States recognises that the shift of the economic centre of gravity to Asia cannot be stopped, but by integrating markets across the Atlantic and the Pacific, ‘the US and the EU, through their combined magnetic power, would secure their ability to set market standards through the rest of the world’1 and delay the decline of north Atlantic economic power.

On the military front, the US is shifting the bulk of its naval and air force assets to the Asia-Pacific region.

New military bases will be established in Darwin (north Australia), Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, Guam and South Korea beefing up existing forces. The United States already has 40,000 military personnel in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea, 9,000 on the Pacific island of Guam and thousands more on over a hundred warships assigned to US Pacific Command. And it has recently been working hard to strengthen its military relationships with existing and new allies. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia have purchased US missile defence systems which, along with other military acquisitions, undermine the existing strategic balance and promote a culture of militarism. This is most notable in Japan where the right wing nationalist government of Shinzo Abe has adopted confrontational policies with China over disputed islands in the East China Sea, substantially increasing military expenditure and re-interpreting the pacifist clause in Japan’s constitution to allow its armed forces to engage in wars beyond its own territory.

82 theory&struggle

Who threatens whom?

To be sure, China has been more assertive in pursuing its territorial claims over island groups in the East and South China Seas in the past few years, but the accusation by US defence secretary Chuck Hagel of a ‘threatening’ Chinese military build-up is turning reality on its head. China lacks a blue water navy and has no ability to fight outside its own backyard. It has one aircraft carrier — a reconditioned former Soviet vessel, half the size of any US carrier and not yet in service. Its defence spending is one seventh that of the United States and it has no foreign bases. By comparison, the United States has 11 carrier groups which patrol every ocean, over 1000 overseas military bases scattered on every continent and almost 100,000 service personnel based in the region. US defence spending alone accounts for 40% of global military expenditure. And by 2020 sixty per cent of US naval and air force assets will be deployed in the Asia-Pacific as part of the ‘pivot’ to Asia. Just who is threatening whom?

Even more alarming is the new US strategic doctrine of AirSea Battle (ASB). This was conceived to confront China’s growing ability to defend its coastal waters with new anti-ship missiles. ASB would start with direct ‘blinding’ attacks on China’s reconnaissance and command and control centres before taking out air defence systems and striking at long range anti-ship missile launchers and antisatellite systems. This is a doctrine that would quickly escalate to all-out war.

A key component of the ASB concept is to blockade the choke points of world trade. The peculiar geography of South East Asia channelises merchant fleets through the Malacca Strait and the Strait of Taiwan. US domination of the high seas and its access to new strategic bases in Singapore and northern Australia would allow its powerful navy and air force to intercept merchant ships at these narrow points, choking off seaborne trade to China in vital oil and gas supplies and manufactured goods travelling in the opposite direction.

China’s dynamic economy is particularly dependent

on imported oil and gas — more than half its crude oil is imported and it has now overtaken the United States as the world’s largest net oil importer.

China’s response

How is China reacting to this threat to its strategic materials? Firstly it has begun to diversify its energy supplies away from reliance on coal and oil in favour of natural gas, hydroelectricric sources, nuclear energy and other renewables. Secondly it has diversified its sources of crude oil, now importing greater volumes of oil from a wider range of countries including Saudi Arabia, Angola, Oman, Russia, Iraq, Iran and Central Asia (insert China’s crude oil imports by source, 2011).

Third, it is building strategic stockpiles of oil and gas to enable it to withstand disruptions of supplies from any cause . And fourth, it is building the infrastructure for alternative land-based routes for these strategic energy supplies.

One part of the Chinese response has been to build a strategic reserve of oil and gas. This would allow it to survive a short term blockade of its ports or the choke points of world trade such as the Malacca Strait or the Straits of Hormuz. The 10th Five Year Plan (20002005) called for a strategic reserve to shield the nation from potential supply disruptions. China has been rapidly building new storage facilities to increase its reserve capacity from 160 million barrels to over 500 million barrels by 2020 or around 100 days of imports.

It tends to buy heavily while oil is cheap — described in industry-speak as ‘buying the dips’. This has wider benefits in helping to smooth out the market and puts a floor under the global price of oil. It also provides some protection to China from spikes in the oil price and disruptions in oil supply from any cause. But by the end of this decade China’s strategic reserve, although much greater than other developing countries like India, will still be less than half that of the United States. China is building similar strategic reserves of copper, rare earths and agricultural commodities.

Just as important, China is seeking to circumvent the long and vulnerable shipping route for energy imports around South East Asia. New routes and

transport corridors are being developed through Pakistan from the port of Gwadar, from gas bearing fields off the coast of Myanmar, from Central Asia and from Siberia through new oil and gas pipelines. This has happened alongside improvements to the domestic oil pipeline network in China connecting the more developed east coast regions with the north west, central and south west regions.

Pakistan-China economic corridor

Gwadar is a deep water port in the Western Pakistani province of Balochistan. It is close to the Straits of Hormuz and the vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and has the potential to become the gateway to Central Asia and China. The plan is to connect it with Kashgar in China’s Xingjian province creating a new economic corridor that will bring commercial benefits to both nations. In November 2014 it was announced that China will provide $45.6 billion to fund energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan over the next six years.2 The projects include an oil pipeline and a new oil refinery as well as road, rail and fibre-optic networks. The government of Pakistan plans to build industrial parks and enterprise zones along the route of the corridor — an investment that it hopes will kick-start its ailing economy. The benefits for China include faster and shorter routes for imports and exports which can particularly help the development of its poorer western provinces such as Xingjian.

The problems with such a project, however, are considerable. The 3,000 km route runs through the cities of Karachi and Islamabad. But much of the terrain is remote and mountainous traversing the sparsely populated Balochistan province at one end and the Karakoram mountains and the Pamir plateau at the other. It will involve building 200 km of tunnels and upgrading the Karakoram Highway. And it could become a target for insurgents in Balochistan province and along other parts of the route. Tight security will be required to protect the construction crews.

Other routes may offer more immediate promise.

One of these is the oil and gas pipelines from Kyaukphyu in Myanmar to Kunming in China. The gas

theory&struggle 83

pipeline which connects with the Shwe offshore field in the Bay of Bengal was completed in 2014 and will supply 12 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year — a quarter of China’s current usage. Its sister oil pipeline, although behind schedule, was completed in late 2014. It has a capacity of 22 millions tons a year, two million of which will be used by Myanmar. The oil will come via tankers from oil fields in the Middle East and Africa.

Also in 2014 Russia finalised a long-stalled 30 year deal to supply 38 bcm of East Siberian gas to China.

This new gas pipeline — the Power of Siberia — will connect new gas fields in eastern Siberia with north east China via Vladivostok. It will complement an existing oil pipeline — the East Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline — which opened in 2009 transporting 15 million tons of oil a year (around 300,000 barrels per day) between eastern Siberia and the north eastern Chinese city of Daqing. In June 2013 the countries agreed to double that amount and almost double the capacity of the ESPO pipeline. The pipeline also supplies oil to the Pacific coast terminal of Kozmino (east of Vladivostok) giving Russia the opportunity to send more crude oil to China via a short sea route.

Russia is also sending western Siberian oil to China through the expanded pipeline from Kazakhstan.

Central Asia pipelines

But within a few years it will be Central Asia which will supply the bulk of China’s natural gas imports. In particular, Turkmenistan has agreed to supply its eastern neighbour with 65 bcm of gas a year by 2020.

Two new gas pipelines (making 4 in total) passing through all five Central Asian states to the western Chinese city of Alashankou came onstream in 2014.

This means that within the next decade Central Asia will supply around 40% of China’s natural gas and China will be easily Central Asia’s largest trade partner.

Before these new oil routes were developed it was estimated that 80% of China’s oil imports (around 6.6 m bbl/d in 2014) passed through the choke point of the Malacca Strait. The ESPO pipeline alone is capable of expanding to 1.6 million barrels per day by 2018. If we add to that the expansion of the Central Asia oil pipeline to 400,000 barrels per day by 2014 and the potential for routing Saudi and Angolan oil to a pipeline through Myanmar it is possible to see Chinese oil traffic through the Malacca Strait shrink to 50% or less of net imports by the end of the decade.

The same is true for gas imports. The new gas pipelines from Russia, Turkmenistan and Myanmar will hugely reduce the proportion of China’s rapidly growing gas imports travelling as liquified natural gas (LNG) by the long and vulnerable sea route.

China’s strategy to bypass US naval power is part of its long-term policy of ‘peaceful development’. The role of its armed forces is focussed on territorial defence. In

84 theory&struggle

particular, it seeks to avoid any direct challenge to the world’s single military superpower.

By building a strategic reserve of oil and gas and developing alternative land based routes for its vital energy imports, China’s response has been to simply by-pass the threat from US naval power. During a time of heightened international tension a US naval blockade of China’s energy supplies, whatever the pretext, could still cause economic damage to China’s economy in the short term but it would no longer be critical or bring the economy to an immediate standstill. And a prolonged blockade or a wider assault on alternative land based routes could only be interpreted as a deliberate act of all-out war, massively raising the stakes. All this indicates that the current Chinese leadership recognises the growing threat posed by the ‘pivot’ to Asia but instead of attempting to confront US military power, China has continued to pursue a strategy of ‘peaceful development‘ and territorial defence.

China’s strategic response

This, of course, is just one component of China’s longer term strategy. As we have seen, the broader US economic strategy for the region centres on the Trans Pacific Partnership. China, on the other hand, is working with members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create an ASEAN free trade area and an ASEAN economic community by 2015 with a single market an an integrated production base and with looser rules on intellectual property rights and state subsidies.3 A report presented by Hu Jintao at the 18th Communist Party Congress in November 2012 described four pillars of China’s multilateral policy — the United Nations, the G20, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and BRICS. The last two of these are particularly important. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a regional political, economic and military grouping which brings together China, Russia and four countries of Central Asia and will soon admit four new members — India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia. Although security is the main concern of the organisation there is increasing economic integration and energy is at the heart of the new regional grouping.

SCO members will soon account for 20% of the world’s oil and over 50% of its natural gas reserves. The SCO is clearly emerging as a major counterbalance to the role of NATO in Eurasia.

On a global scale BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and and South Africa) are emerging as an alternative to the G7 western powers and is challenging the Washington-dominated Bretton Woods system and the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency. In 2014 BRICS set up the New Development Bank with an initial capitalisation of $100bn mainly to finance infrastructure projects in the developing world. In 2015

China launched a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which quickly attracted around 50 supporting countries including the UK despite the opposition of the Obama administration.

In conclusion, it is clear that China is not responding, like for like, to the US militarisation of the Asia-Pacific region. No arms race is taking place.

Instead, China is seeking to buttress its economic security by diversifying the sources and routes of its energy imports. At the same time it is putting itself at the centre of alternative economic, political and security networks — mainly around ASEAN, the SCO and BRICS. All of this is designed to facilitate China’s ‘peaceful development’ policy. n

Recent books from n manifesto press

Granite or honey the story of Communist MP Phil Piratin

by Kevin Marsh and Robert Griffiths £14.95 (+£1.50 p&p), 256pp illustrated ISBN 978-1-907464-09-6

Defence or Defiance Derbyshire and the fight for democracy

by Graham Stevenson £11.95 (+£1.50 p&p) 194pp illustrated ISBN 978-1-907464-11-9

Lone red poppy A biography of Dimiter Blagoev

by Mercia McDermott £14.95 (+£1.50 p&p) 250pp illustrated ISBN 978-1-907464-10-2

This pioneering new biography tells the story of Phil Piratin, elected Communist MP for Stepney Mile End in the post-war General Election that swept Labour to office on a radical manifesto.

Published in collaboration with Derby Area TUC this book provides a complete look at the history, people, economy and culture of England's heartland from the early 16th Century to the 1970s.

Mercia McDermott’s latest book is the first substantial and authoritative account in English of the life of Dimiter Blagoev, founder of the first marxist circle in Russia and of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

n manifestopress.org.uk

theory&struggle 85

Eric Rahim

The two souls of Thomas Piketty Eric Rahim is currently honorary lecturer in economics at Strathclyde University. He was formerly associate editor of the Journal of Economic Studies and for several years a member of the team producing the UN Economic and Social Survey for Asia and the Pacific.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer and published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pages, 2014.

P

IKETTY’S BOOK has been described as a publishing phenomenon. No academic work in economics has received the immediate public interest of the kind that it has for a long time, perhaps not since the publication of Keynes’ General Theory. A leading American economist referred to it as ‘awesome’, another commentator thought the data collected and analysed was ‘monumental and momentous’. Piketty has already become a household name.

What is the book about and what does it say?

It is about wealth and income inequality. Piketty has amassed an enormous amount of data on the subject going back to the eighteenth century; the study covers many countries, though the focus is on Western Europe and the United States. The data is neatly presented and analysed; the book avoids technical jargon and should be accessible to non-economists.

According to Piketty there is a natural tendency in capitalism that makes for accumulation and concentration of capital and it leads ultimately to what he calls ‘patrimonial capitalism’, a situation in which the economy and society come to be dominated by inherited wealth, family dynasties rather than by talented entrepreneurs. There are of course such entrepreneurs, but they tend to establish dynasties so that their offspring then live off inherited wealth. Patrimonial capitalism may be contrasted with ‘meritocratic and democratic’ capitalism characterised by upward and downward mobility that would limit the weight of inherited wealth in society.

It is important to note that Piketty defines capital to include not only capital employed in production (as treated by classical economists and Marx) but also farm land, real estate, financial assets, patents, etc., – that is, every asset that can be traded in the market. Capital is all types of assets (not including ‘human capital’) that can generate an income.

The reasoning behind Piketty’s claim that there is a natural tendency in capitalism for economic inequality to increase over time goes something like this.

The importance of capital or wealth in the economy is expressed by the ratio of capital (wealth) to annual national income. According to Piketty’s estimate this ratio in today’s developed countries is in the order of 5 or 6 to 1, that is, the value of capital is five to six times greater than the annual national income.

The second important concept is the rate of return on capital; this return is the ratio of incomes from all types

86 theory&struggle

of wealth to the value of all capital or wealth.

Now we have Piketty’s Big Idea, the ‘law of motion of capitalism’: when the return on capital is greater than the rate of growth of national income the weight of capital or wealth in the economy will increase. The idea is simple. When the rate of return is greater than the increase in average incomes of the population the share of income going to wealth owners will increase. (If wealth was uniformly distributed it would of course be a different story.)

The data presented by Piketty shows that during the period from 1970 to 2010 the rate of growth of per capita national income in the eight most developed countries in the world ranged between 1.6 and 2.0 percent. According to him in future this rate is not likely to exceed 1.5 percent, perhaps even less than that.

Against this, the return on wealth is currently around 4 to 5 percent. According to him this is in fact the rate that has prevailed historically.

This is the explanation for the tendency for wealth and income inequality to increase over time and the system to move towards patrimonial capitalism. ‘This is the central contradiction of capitalism ... Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future’ (p. 571). The system is in fact already moving towards the conditions that prevailed in Europe before the First World War. According to Piketty’s data, in the largely agrarian societies of Europe during the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth the rate of growth of the economy was less than 1 percent, but the yield on government bonds was something like 4 to 5 percent.

The wealth/income ratio was around 7 to 1. Tax rates were very low, and they were proportional. Ninety percent of the nation’s wealth was controlled by ten percent of the population. Fortunes passed from one generation to the next, thus perpetuating inequality (patrimonial society).

With the progress of modern industry in the nineteenth century the composition of wealth of course changed (the importance of farm land declined dramatically), but according to Piketty’s estimates, the weight of wealth in the economy changed little; wealth/output ratio fluctuated between 6 and 7. That remained the case until the beginning of the First World War in 1914.

During the inter-war period the ratio plummeted, it came down to 2.5 and remained at that level until 1950.

(During the years of the wars and depression capital declined by much more than output.) According to Piketty, the period between 1914 and 1945 was dark ‘especially for the wealthy’ (p.148). (It was even darker for the working people, but Piketty does not give much attention to changes in the standard of living of the working people, nor to their struggle for a better life – his focus being always on inequality.) The ‘collapse’ of capital between the two world wars Piketty attributes to the physical destruction of capital (Britain was less

affected than France and Germany), collapse of foreign investment portfolios (for instance, the Bolsheviks refused to honour Tsarist Russia’s foreign debt), low savings rates, and so on. ‘Ultimately, the decline in the capital/income ratio between 1913 and 1950 is the history of Europe’s suicide, and in particular of the euthanasia of European capitalists’ (p.149). According to Piketty, this period was an historical anomaly, when the long-term trend was disrupted because of the destruction of capital and the policies governments had to adopt in order to deal with the consequences of the wars.

From 1950, when it stood at around 2.5, the ratio of capital to output begins to rise steadily; in 2010 in Britain it reached more than 5; higher in France, lower in Germany (see table on p.147). Since the 1970s/early 1980s capital has staged a ‘comeback’ and we see the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism. In 2010, in most of the developed countries the richest 10 percent owned around 60 percent of national wealth while half the population owned less than ten percent, generally 2 percent. The reasons for this are: slow economic growth, high savings rates, and gradual privatisation and transfer of public wealth into private hands, deregulation and financialisation of the economy, and reductions in rates of taxes for the rich. We have a ‘political context on the whole more favourable to private wealth than that of the immediate post-war decades’ (p.173).

There has also been a surge in the salaries of top executives, and the difference between the remuneration of such executives and that of the typical worker of the firm has enormously widened. For instance, in 2012, the chief executive of Walmart in the US received more than 23 million dollars while the typical worker in the company earned around 25,000 dollars a year. In the US, real wages for ordinary workers have hardly increased since the 1970s, while the salaries of the top one percent earners have risen by 165 percent and those of the top 0.1 percent have risen by 362 percent. This trend is the strongest in the US, but it is also present in other developed countries, particularly in the UK, and it is evolving in other countries.

We see that the natural course of capitalist development is to lead towards increasing inequality of wealth and incomes. However, policy can make a difference and halt the drift towards patrimonial capitalism. When we are talking of the natural trend toward inequality we are thinking of pre-tax incomes; what matters in practice is after-tax incomes. Piketty therefore advocates a progressive wealth tax, ideally on a global scale, but if that is not feasible a start could be made on a regional basis. He also pleads for a very high marginal tax rate on very high incomes, and hopes that that might blunt the greed of the rich.

Let us now turn to the theoretical ideas that lie behind Piketty’s explanation of the observed changes in wealth and income distribution. As we have seen there are two crucial variables in his explanation: the rate of

growth of the economy and the rate of return on capital (or the rate of profit). We know that the rate of economic growth is determined by such factors as investment and technical change. But what determines the return on capital/rate of profit? It is on this issue that I find Piketty’s analysis at its weakest.

According to the prevailing orthodox (neoclassical) economic theory the return on capital is a price that is determined by market forces. Behind the demand for capital (physical goods such as machines) by producers lie the productivity of these capital goods, and behind its supply lie the psychological preferences of people (consumers) for present goods relative to goods in the future; by foregoing present consumption and lending their savings to producers they are postponing their present consumption to the future; they are making a sacrifice, experiencing disutility. They need to be rewarded for this sacrifice.

The wage rate is determined on exactly the same principle: the demand for labour by employers depends on the productivity of labour, the supply of labour is determined by workers making a choice between work (disutility) and leisure on the one hand and income on the other. In seeking employment they are making a sacrifice for which they need to be rewarded.

The important point here is that workers and capitalists stand on the same footing, and income distribution — wages and the return on capital — is determined by their individual choices. This is neoclassical economics’ conception of capitalism – a perfect market economy. We have here an implicit moral justification for the prevailing pattern of wealth and income distribution and of capitalism.

These ideas are translated into an aggregate model – production function – in which capital and labour are treated as two homogeneous factors of production and the distribution of income depends on the ease or difficulty of substituting one factor for another (in technical language, on the elasticity of substitution). I will return to this point presently.

Without going into any technical detail, we see that Piketty uses these ideas to explain (in part) the observed increase in income inequality in the period 1970-2010.

Now I do not wish to suggest that Piketty is a hard core neoclassical economist, nor even that he is a neoclassical economist. But in so far as he has a theoretical frame to work with this is the model he has in mind (see pp. 220-222).

This is clearly shown in his reference to what he calls ‘the Cambridge capital controversy’ in which he, curiously, assigns victory to the neoclassicals – the ‘neoclassical growth model definitively carried the day’ (p.231). This completely misses the point of the ‘controversy’ which was essentially about the problem (within the neoclassical frame) of the measurement of capital. This theoretical problem may be stated in the following terms.

In the neoclassical/marginal productivity theory we

theory&struggle 87

are considering quantities of two factors of production – capital and labour — that can be substituted for each other. If, for instance, wages get too high relatively to the rate of interest producers have to pay on their borrowings, they (the producers) tend to substitute more capital intensive methods of production thus replacing labour with machines. What they can achieve through this process of substitution depends on the ease or difficulty of adopting more capital intensive methods (on the elasticity of substitution). According to Piketty, this elasticity is quite high, that is, more capital intensive methods can be easily adopted, thus replacing labour.

That, according to him, is part of the explanation for the increasing income inequality observed since the 1970s.

Ease of substitution puts downward pressure on wages.

On the basis of this reasoning, neoclassical economists, adherents of the marginal productivity principle, argue that trade unions cannot succeed, in the long run, in raising wages because collective bargaining only results in unemployment, that is, higher wages only encourage producers to adopt capital intensive/labour saving methods of production. At least in part, this is the theoretical reasoning behind policies of ‘flexible labour market reforms’.

As one would expect there was a great deal of criticism of this theory, but the critics generally rejected it on empirical grounds, challenging the realism of its assumptions. For instance, it was argued that in the real world the scope for factor substitution was much more limited than the theory assumed; further, the theory assumed perfect competition, a situation that diverged far from reality. There was no coherent theoretical argument to challenge the marginal productivity principle – until, that is, the publication in 1960 of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. (This way of thinking first made its appearance in 1951 in Sraffa’s ‘Introduction’ to the Collected Works of David Ricardo. These ideas were in circulation in Cambridge, England, and were used by economists such as Joan Robinson in their debates with some of the leaders of the neoclassical school from Cambridge, USA, i.e., M.I.T. Piketty’s reference to the two ‘Cambridges debate’ is to these exchanges.)

Now to the point of the controversy and the debunking of the marginal productivity theory. It refers to the measurement of capital. In this theory we are dealing with quantities of factors of production, labour and capital. Labour is measured in working days; how is capital — which consists of a large variety of heterogeneous inputs such as different types of machines, buildings, and so on – actually measured to arrive at a ‘quantity of capital’? Obviously these heterogeneous inputs cannot be just added up. They have to be evaluated to give a quantity of capital in value or money terms. For this evaluation one needs to know the prices of all these inputs. But – and this is core of critique — prices have profits and wages, etc., as their components. In other words, to determine the

88 theory&struggle

quantity of capital we require prior knowledge of the rate of profit that the theory is supposed to determine.

What that means is that the neoclassical/marginal productivity theory explanation of returns to labour and capital (income distribution between the two classes) in terms of their scarcities and abundance and the substitution phenomenon is fatally flawed by the evident circularity of the argument: in order to determine the rate of return on capital, we first have to measure capital, but to measure capital we must already know the return on capital. It is this proposition that was demonstrated with the precision of a mathematical theorem in 1960.

Now, this is not merely a technical theoretical point.

Sraffa’s proof rehabilitates the old Classical-Marxian standpoint according to which the division of national product between capital and labour is fundamentally a social phenomenon (not one of pure economics as the neoclassicals maintain). One may think here of the significance of trade union activity that strengthens the collective bargaining power of the working people and a host of other historical and social factors that influence the balance of class power in society.

Piketty keeps reminding his readers that the ‘history of distribution of income has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanism’ (p.20). Of course it is deeply political; it is affected by government policies of regulation/deregulation, privatisation of public assets, of taxation and expenditure, legislation with respect to trade union activity, social welfare, and so on. Observed differences in patterns of wealth and income distribution in different countries can to an important extent be explained by differences in government policies. But what are the economic and social forces that make or unmake government policies? What makes these policies successful? What, for instance, were the domestic and international factors that made the Thatcher government’s assault on the gains that the working people had achieved such a success? These are the kind of questions that Piketty never addresses.

It is therefore not surprising that Piketty can go no further than making a plea to the existing political establishment for high marginal taxes on the incomes of the rich and a wealth tax. The appeal is to the same political powers that reduced taxes for the rich and adopted policies that led to increasing economic inequality. To reverse the existing trend toward greater inequality would require mobilisation of working people that could successfully challenge the prevailing ideology and policies.

To conclude: Piketty has done a great job in collecting, presenting and analysing an enormous amount of data on wealth and income inequality, but sadly his theoretical explanations and policy suggestions remain in the conventional frame. n

Chik Collins

Language and Discourse

T

HIS REVIEW explores some developments in the study of language in recent years, identifying salient and important trends and offering an assessment from a Marxist point of view. It cannot attempt to cover more than a sample of the material published, and seeks to offer something of an orientation towards the contemporary field for readers of Theory and Struggle. It begins by setting a context, firstly by reflecting on why language matters so much in the struggle for social change, and secondly by charting some longer-term trends in the study of language.

Language and Legitimacy

Ruling classes seldom present policies which serve their own, narrow interests as representing anything less than the interests of whole societies, indeed entire continents, or perhaps the population of the world. Even in regimes with very stark inequalities, legitimacy – or at least claiming legitimacy – matters. And in controlling not just the means of production, but also many of the most powerful means of communication, ruling classes have the capacity to project their chosen terms forcefully and persistently. At times, for instance in relation to Iraq post-9/11, or in relation to ‘the deficit’ post-2008, this can shape wide public perceptions flying in the face of previously established understandings.

It is for this this reason that people struggling for social change and social justice have always had to be acutely aware of the importance of language in their struggles. It is essential to contest the terms which will define what is actually happening in the world at any given time, and the associated identities of those who are involved in making it happen, preventing it from happening, or trying to make it happen differently. And while ruling classes may have access to powerful means of communication, their claims seldom sit easily with the real life experiences of the great social majorities to whom their terms are projected, or with real facts and objective truths. People don’t always – or even very often – ‘buy it’.

Were it the case that the contending forces simply spoke of their conflicting interests and aspirations in different languages, the whole process would be highly

transparent. But in fact they not only use the same language, they often invoke the very same terms – ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘rights’, ‘democracy’ – albeit with radically opposing ideological and political significances being only too obvious.

A stark example in recent years has been the neoconservative attempt to ‘occupy’ the language of ‘social justice’ – after it had been increasingly abandoned by New Labour. In this version, ‘social justice’ is no longer about the redistribution of income and wealth through a political process in which working class organisations are legitimate participants. It is, instead, about ‘freeing individuals’ from the ‘chains’ of ‘dependency’ so that they might adapt themselves to the ‘flexible’ labour market and achieve ‘autonomy’. This may require rendering people destitute – something by no means new in the history of capitalism. Writing of an the period of primitive accumulation, Marx used the German term volgfrei, ‘as free as a bird’, to describe how ‘free labour’ was created – by forcibly separating people from not only from their means of subsistence, but also from the preexisting bonds of communal human (inter)dependence.

Something similar is happening in the present – very much before our eyes. And neoconservative enforcement of it is evidence, they claim, of their deep ‘compassion’.

One could debate how far the preceding is an exploration of ideology, and how far it is an insight into an advanced form of mental illness associated with the historical cycle of capitalist development. The two are not at all mutually exclusive. But the analysis neatly exemplifies not only the salience of language in sociopolitical change, but also the continual struggle for ‘ownership’ – or at least ‘occupancy’ – of key linguistic terms.

Marxism, Language and Post-structuralism

Marxists, being inherently attuned to the way in which class pervades every aspect of social being, have generally grasped all of the above. Indeed some Marxists sought to theorise it all half a century and more before language and discourse became, from the 1970s, something of a new paradigm for the social sciences as a whole. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, two distinct groups of writers elaborated a Marxist perspective on the role of language in human development, and in processes of social and political change. This retains profound importance in the present and for the future.

Mikhail Bakhtin, 1 and in particular Valentin Voloshinov, 2 refuted both highly individualist and abstract structuralist approaches to language, and instead found the ‘actual reality’ of language in ‘concrete verbal communication’ between people amidst the contradictions, crises and struggles of their lives. In this perspective, language was not only intimately bound up with the energy and creativity of living struggles, and at times itself ‘a tremendous social force’, it was also a vital

Chik Collins is Professor of Applied Social Science in the School of Media, Culture and Society at the University of the West of Scotland.

He has researched and written on urban policy, community development and the role of language in social change. He is currently researching the impact of regional policy on the development of Glasgow in the second half of the twentieth century, and its likely relationship with Glasgow’s wellknown problems of health and mortality.

theory&struggle 89

way for social researchers to identify and to ‘index’ key moments of change and transition in those struggles.

Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues, on the other hand, developed a perspective on human development as emerging through people’s active transformation of their environments, and creation of new environments, through collaborative activity, always involving the use and intergenerational transmission/re-appropriation of tools, including language. 3 People, in this view, are seen to inhabit a profoundly humanised, cultural-historical reality in which language and consciousness are intimately bound together. Vygotsky and his group worked intensively in the 1920s and early 1930s to develop this perspective by putting it to work in a myriad of committed, humanistic interventions which sought to contribute to the building of a socialist society.

Given this heritage, it is somewhat ironic that fifty years later Marxists found themselves besieged by critics claiming to have found, in a new linguistic paradigm for the social sciences as a whole, compelling reasons to reject, not only Marxism, but just about any claims on which an ‘emancipatory’ social science might be based.

It was even more ironic that these critics often took inspiration from the very trends in the study of language and consciousness which had been quite effectively critiqued by Voloshinov in particular. And perhaps most ironic of all was that many who had thought of themselves as Marxists then engaged with these critics with so little reference to the work of their Soviet Marxist predecessors.

I am referring here to the rise of post-structuralism and postmodernism, a trend which Bryan Palmer referred to as a ‘descent into discourse’ – a ‘fashionable cult of absolute relativism’ which, he rightly pointed out, threatened to undermine the ‘kinds of coherent thought that can actually lead to the emancipation of humanity’. 4 For Michel Foucault, there was no such thing as truth or ideology – only a fusion of rhetoric and power which was to be conceptualised and analysed as ‘discourse’.

Multiple discourses competed to define the world in their own fashion, but none was ultimately truer than any of the others. Lyotard argued that the Enlightenment project sought to override the diversity of interpretations of the world, and to construct a single, totalising (and ultimately totalitarian) ‘metanarrative’ – a single interpretation of human destiny. The pursuit of ‘emancipation’ was really just one way of looking at things which had gotten badly out of control.

Which way to turn?

Had the emergent forces of neo-liberal globalisation sought to invent something which would confuse, disorientate and immobilise the intellectual left and western academia, then they might not have conjured anything quite so effective. 5 In this context those who wanted to defend and develop the intellectual basis of socialist politics would have done well to make recourse

90 theory&struggle

to the Soviet tradition of the 1920s and early 1930s.

There they would have found tools with which they could begin to meet the poststructuralists and postmodernists on their own ground, by analysing multiple discourses and shifting meanings in changing contexts of power and struggle, and theorising social change in terms of dialogue and ‘multi-accentuality’. They would have found the tools to do this without, with Foucault, abandoning notions of ideology or of truth, and while finding a sane pathway between the ‘incommensurability’ of the diverse interpretations of the world, on the one hand, and Lyotard’s dreaded ‘metanarrative’, on the other.

Some, in fact, did precisely this, and made the relevance and potential of the early Soviet tradition to the challenges facing Marxists and other socialists clear. 6 Some of this work even appeared in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s theoretical journal, Marxism Today in the mid-1970s. 7 But, by the later 1970s, that journal was increasingly becoming a means of disseminating the kinds of thinking which were palpably damaging the left.

And this set the stage for the emergence of a school of thought which has, in its own way, exercised a kind of ‘hegemony’ in the area of language and discourse studies in the subsequent decades – the school of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Much of the published output in language and discourse studies in recent years which might be expected to be of interest to readers of this journal is in one way or another connected to this school.

It is this which makes the long preamble to mentioning that output necessary. Indeed it demands that we extend the preamble a little further, in order that we will know what we are dealing with when we get to it.

Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis

CDA emerged as a highly derivative offshoot from a pre-existing school associated with Roger Fowler at the University of East Anglia in the late 1970s – the school of ‘Critical Linguistics’ (CL)8 . This was a very strange amalgam of some of the more problematic elements of both ‘critical theory’ and of linguistics. From critical theory it imbibed the notion of a ‘dominant ideology’ to which ordinary folk were subjected and which they were unable (unlike ‘critical theorists’) to ‘critique’. From linguistics it drew on both the linguistic idealism of Sapir-Whorf and the ‘systemic-functionalism’ of Michael Halliday. Drawing on the latter, it proceeded to ‘identify’ ideological intentions and effects associated with different kinds of grammar (e.g. with different kinds of verb constructions, or positioning of adjectives in relation to nouns).

This Critical Linguistics was, in retrospect, as bizarre as it was untenable, and, despite the best intentions of its creators, it was of little meaningful use to any kind of socialist politics. But it was at least original. Norman Fairclough then ‘reinvented’ it all as CDA in the mid1980s – substituting ‘discourse analysis’ for ‘linguistics’,

a received understanding of Gramsci for ‘the dominant ideology thesis’, and Foucauldian discourse theory for Sapir-Whorf. He retained his predecessors’ adaptation of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the basis for his ‘analytical’ (and in reality interpretive) approach – in which ideological intentions and effects, which would remain obscure to the critically uninitiated, were deduced largely from the grammar of various kinds of texts (most famously, a BBC Radio interview of Margaret Thatcher).

What was new in CDA as compared to CL was that received interpretation of Gramsci, together with the invocation – highly perplexing in any attempt to elaborate an emancipatory social science – of Foucault’s discourse theory. Fairclough was very clear as to where the inspiration for this came from; it came from Marxism Today in the 1980s, by then under the control of ‘revisionists’ who were in the process of eviscerating Marxism in the CPGB, and its influence in shaping both the trade unions and the Labour Party. This was to contribute much to the emergence of Neil Kinnock’s ‘new realism’ and ultimately lay the basis for New Labour as a vehicle for the neo-liberal project in the 1990s.

struggles in living memory – the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, the anti-poll tax campaign, struggles to prevent industrial closures, and to defend council housing and other aspects of the welfare state. But these living struggles are effectively absent from the CDA oeuvre – and not by coincidence. For their inclusion would very quickly have challenged the whole CDA enterprise. There would be no illusion of a populace bound into a ‘dominant ideology’ or of people who would dream of making sense of their being in the world according to the categories of systemic-functional linguistics. There would have been a need instead to analyse the actual processes by which people in the context of real political struggles make sense of their world and of its development. Gone would be the opportunity – and need – for the CDA exponent to ‘reveal ideological meanings encoded in language’, because it would have been apparent that other folk did that for themselves all the time (without any idea about either Foucault or systemic-functional grammar).

‘Revealed’ would have been the recurring tendency for ‘critical theory’, making much ado about ‘reflexivity’, to find the key to emancipation, not in the living struggles which Marxists are drawn to, but in the mirror.

Marxism Today — Nosferatu

CDA as ‘as established discipline’

The revisionists in the CPGB duly liquidated the Party and abandoned emancipatory politics – thus revealing the actual logic and purpose of their intellectual work. However, CDA carried on regardless, like Marxism Today, in nosferatu mode, reiterating the relevance of a contradictory and discredited amalgam of ‘theory’ to the development of the allegedly ‘emancipatory politics’ which the originators of that theory had themselves long abandoned.

Today this continues: Thirty years after Fairclough’s first interventions into the field, and more than twenty years after Marxism Today ceased to exist, CDA is a veritable industry churning out books – both new and reissued – and with its own journal. It has proved substantially impervious to criticism, largely because it has declined to engage directly with criticism as far as has been possible. It has traded very successfully – in terms of status and publishing revenues – on its claim to be the defender of a critical and emancipatory approach to language in opposition to the challenge of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Equally important however has been its ability to present itself to wellintentioned and busy social researchers as a way of not engaging with the difficult (and time-consuming) work of theorising language and its role in social life and social change – because someone has already done that for the researcher, and distilled from that a simplified and highly appealing ‘check-list’ approach to ‘critically analysing’ language and discourse as they find it in the world.

Readers may be thinking that this is all very harsh, so it is necessary to be clear. CDA emerged against the background of some of the most severe and protracted

Focusing just on Fairlough, here are some of the books in this tradition, which readers may have encountered at some stage: Language and Power (1989); Discourse and Social Change (1992); Critical Language Awareness (edited, 1992); Critical Discourse Analysis (1995); Media Discourse (1995); Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (coauthored with Lille Cuouliariki, 1999); New Labour, New Language? (2000); Language and Power (2nd Edition, 2001); Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (2003); Language and Globalisation (2006); Discourse in Contemporary Social Change (co-edited, 2007). There is an abundance of related texts by other authors who are more or less aligned with the CDA enterprise – including Paul Chilton, Ruth Wodak, Michael Meyer, David Machin, John E. Richardson, and Andrea Mayr. There is a strongly associated journal – Critical Discourse Studies – and dedicated methods texts – Wodak’s and Meyer’s edited collection, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2001 and 2009).

In this light, CDA had become something very far from a living engagement with working class struggles. It had become, as Wodak and Meyer put it, ‘an established discipline, institutionalized across the globe in many departments and curricula’. And in becoming this, it has not actually disassociated itself from such struggles, rather it failed to connect to them in the first place. Or as Wodak and Meyer themselves put it, after two and a half decades of the CDA enterprise, its exponents had continued to exhibit ‘exclusive attention … to the structures of text and talk’, and had, despite repeated exhortation, paid only ‘lip-service to the necessity of

theory&struggle 91

developing the relations between text and context’. 9 This provides the essential background against which much of the recent published output in the field of language and social change which might seem to be of relevance to the readers of this journal needs to be seen and read. Recent titles include Isabela Fairclough and Norman Fairclough, Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Students (Routledge, 2012); David Machin and Andrea Mayr, How to do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction (Sage, 2012), and Ruth Wodak, The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual (Palgrave, 2011) – as well as the 3rd (25th anniversary) edition of Norman Fairclough’s Language and Power (2014).

Rediscovering and reconstructing the Soviet tradition

The CDA enterprise has been challenged, directly and indirectly, over the years – both by those who have questioned the idea of emancipatory politics 10 as well as by those who reject the value of CDA for such a politics and have sought to elaborate an alternative.11 In the latter case, contributors have sought to return to the work of the Soviet tradition and to rediscover and reconstruct it in its relevance to the struggles of the present.

The Vygotskian tradition was ‘discovered’ in the west from the 1960s and thereafter the relevant works progressively translated into English. Today the tradition is carried forward by a wide range of contributing scholars across the globe – generally under the heading of ‘Cultural Historical Activity Theory’ (CHAT). A little later than the 1960s, the works of Bakhtin and Voloshinov were also translated and became influential in the west – often in relation to literary theory, but also at times in connection to wider social theory. As might be anticipated, this process of translation and rediscovery in the west has been problematic and has often seen the various authors’ thinking de-politicised, and represented in ways which have fitted with prevailing disciplinary concerns and with the swings of academic fashion.

Of interest to readers of this journal will be the more recent work of Anna Stetsenko. Born in the Soviet Union and educated at Moscow State University, Stetsenko has been based for some time now at the City University of New York where she has undertaken as an ‘expansive reconstruction’ of the Vygotskian project.12 Readers will also be interested to acquaint themselves with the important contribution of English linguist Peter E. Jones,13 whose keenly awaited book, Language, Communication and Human Potential in Vygotsky’s Tradition: Critical reflections and fresh perspectives (Cambridge University Press) should be published in 2016.

In Stetsenko one will not find any slavish restatement of Vygotsky – rather an attempt to extract and re-present the fundamental nature of the conception of, and engagement with, the world exhibited by Vygotsky’s

92 theory&struggle

group. But this, of course, has important implications in positioning the relevance of the group in relation to contemporary trends in social theory. What Stetsenko finds most fundamentally in the Vygotskian project is a particular form of science, one that is: ‘devoted not to the pursuit of knowledge per se, but to creating knowledge as part and parcel of larger projects that self-consciously commit to and participate in creating new forms of life and communal practices’. It is this which she seeks to extract, reconstruct and expand upon. And in so doing she is led to elaborate a view of the world and our knowledge of it ‘that put a premium on the broad goals and visions of what researchers want to achieve and contribute to’. 14 Knowing is always in some way orientated beyond the present, and into the future.

Jones, in a similar spirit, offers a critique of the limitations of CHAT’s engagement with language – finding within it too much evidence of adherence to fundamental precepts from mainstream linguistics (dating back to Vygotsky himself). These, he argues persuasively, are neither consistent nor coherent with the revolutionary potential of the basic CHAT approach. This is because they all embody what recently-deceased linguist Roy Harris called ‘the language myth’ — a conception of linguistic communication as a process which presupposes and expresses a pre-established linguistic ‘system’ which has to be appropriated and employed by individuals. This, Jones argues, is at odds with the distinctively human capacity for ‘free action’ which is at the heart of Marx’s (and Vygotsky’s) thinking: ‘Free action is impossible if our mental activity is governed by abstract structures outside our control which fix the content, possibilities and boundaries of what we can mean, what we can say, what we can think’. In seeking to address this problem, Jones finds interesting overlaps between Harris’s ‘integrational linguistics’ and the work of Voloshinov – both point towards a different view of verbal communication as an intelligent skill or craft, in which speakers create language to suit their communicative requirements. Ultimately, Jones argues that Harris’s work provides a further reaching attempt to capture the creative communicative powers presupposed by radical social transformation – powers which the Soviet tradition approached but did not reach.

The contributions of Stetsenko and Jones are evidence that some of the important achievements of the early Soviet tradition in thinking about language and human development, and about the role of language in social change and socio-political conflict, are being carried forward thoughtfully, creatively, and above all critically, today. It is to be hoped that, despite their current relative obscurity, their contributions will be disseminated much more widely, where they will inspire others to contribute, and lay the basis for a much more developed Marxist perspective on language – one against which the inadequacies of various kinds of CDA will be very apparent, and one which can both inform, as well as learn from, the struggles that lie ahead. n

Footnotes 1 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 1981); Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (University of Texas Press, 1986).

2 V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Harvard University Press, 1986) 3 L.S. Vygotsky, The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volumes 16 (Plenum, 1987-1999); A. N. Leontiev, Activity, Consciousness and Personality (Prentice Hall, 1978); Problems of the Development of the Mind (Progress, 1981); A. R. Luria, The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Harvard, 1979); Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Harvard, 1976).

4 B. D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Temple University Press, 1990), pp.xiii-xiv.

5 Daniel Zamora’s edited collection, Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale (Aden, 2014) will shortly be published in English by MCM (Chicago) as Foucault and the Neoliberal Temptation. The argument, which is that, notwithstanding Foucault’s appeal for much of the left, he endorsed rather than challenged many aspects of free market orthodoxy, is neither new nor surprising, but has caused something of a stir (see interview with Zamora here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/, and also Zamora’s “Foucault’s Responsibility” at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/michel-foucaultresponsibility-socialist/). Daniel Drezner of the Brookings Institution writing in the Washington Post (“Why Foucault is the libertarian’s best friend”, 11th Dec. 2014) responded to the ensuing controversy saying: “From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault’s writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics. … Zamora … reveals why freemarketeers might want to give Foucault another read and not just dismiss him with the ‘post-modern’ epithet.”

6 C. Woolfson, “The Semiotics of Working Class Speech”, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, pp. 163-197, 1976; J. Foster, “The De-classing of Language”, New Left Review, 150, 2945, 1985.

7 C. Woolfson, 'Culture, Language and the Human Personality', Marxism Today, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 229-240, 1977.

8 R. Fowler et al, Language and Control, G. Kress and R. Hodge, Language as Ideology (both Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

9 R. Wodak and M. Meyer, “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, agenda, theory and methodology”, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer, Eds., Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Sage, 2009, ps. 4 & 13-14).

10 See H.G. Widdowson, Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis (Blackwell, 2004).

11 P.E. Jones and C. Collins, “Political analysis versus ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ in the treatment of ideology: some implications for the study of communication”, Atlantic Journal of Communication, 14, (2) 2006, pp.28-50; C. Collins and P. E. Jones, “Analysis of Discourse as ‘A Form of History Writing’: A critique of Critical Discourse Analysis and an illustration of a

Cultural-Historical alternative”, Atlantic Journal of Communication, 14 (1&2), 2006, pp.51-69; C. Collins, “Discourse in Cultural-Historical Perspective: Critical discourse analysis, CHAT and the study of social change”, in B. Van Oers, et al, Eds., The Transformation of Learning: Advances in culturalhistorical activity theory (Cambridge University Press, 2008); P.E. Jones “Why there is no such thing as ‘critical discourse analysis’”, Language and Communication, 27, 337-368, 2007.

See also J. Foster and C. Woolfson, “How Workers On The Clyde Gained The Capacity For Class Struggle: The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-In, 1971-72”, in J. McIlroy et al, Eds., British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Volume 2: The High Tide Unionism, 1964-1979, (Ashgate, 1999).

12 E.g. A. Stetsenko and I. Arievitch, “ Vygotskian Collaborative Project of Social Transformation: History, Politics, and Practice in Knowledge Construction”, The International Journal of Critical Psychology, 12, 58-80 (2004); A. Stetsenko, “Activity as ObjectRelated: Resolving the dichotomy of individual and collective planes of activity. Mind, Culture and Activity”, 12(1), 70-88 (2005); “From relational ontology to transformative activist stance on development and learning: expanding Vygotsky's (CHAT) project”. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 3(2), 471-491 (2008); “Transformative Activist Stance for Education: The challenge of inventing the future in moving beyond the status quo”, in T. Corcoran (Ed.), Psychology in Education: Critical Theory-Practice (Sense Publishers, 2014); “Theory for and as Social Practice for Realizing the Future: Implications from a Transformative Activist Stance”. In J. Martin et al, Eds., The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology: Methods, Approaches, and New Directions for Social Sciences (John Wiley, 2015).

13 E.g. P.E. Jones, “Language as problem and problematic in the Vygotskian-Leontievan legacy”, in R. Alanen & S. Pöyhönen, Eds., Language in Action: Vygotsky and Leontievan Legacy Today ( Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); “From ‘external speech’ to ‘inner speech’ in Vygotsky: A critical appraisal and fresh perspectives”, Language and Communication, 29, 166-181 (2009) 14 Theory for and as Social Practice for Realizing the Future: Implications from a Transformative Activist Stance”, p.107.

theory&struggle 93

Review Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity Eds. Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Nira Yuval-Davis Lawrence and Wishart 2014

Women Against FundamentalismStories of Dissent and Solidarity Edited by Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Nira Yuval-Davis Lawrence and Wishart ISBN 978190983102 5 £17.99

Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) was a remarkable organisation. It was founded in 1989 at the height of the Salman Rushdie affair when the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie’s book, ‘The Satanic Verses’.

WAF was founded as a secular organisation consisting of women from a wide range of national, ethnic and religious backgrounds to oppose fundamentalism in all religions.

Fundamentalism is, however, in the book, distinguished from religious observance which is seen as a matter of personal choice. Such religious fundamentalism wherever it manifests itself is always profoundly anti-women and hence WAF was founded as a feminist, secular and anti-racist organisation.

The book is not a chronological account of the organisation, neither is it an analysis (more the pity) of WAF’s demise. Rather, nineteen women, erstwhile activists recount their stories, albeit in a somewhat formulaic fashion. Each chapter starts with a brief biographical sketch of the author, followed by an account of her transition to radicalism and ultimately to WAF. Much, although not all, of this is fascinating, depending on the author’s personal trajectory.

However, it is interesting to note that the majority of the contributors can trace their radicalisation to their time spent in Higher Education.

The opening chapter by the book’s editors outlines a three-fold rationale for the volume. Firstly it aims to explore how the secular and feminist ideology of WAF has confronted the growing identity politics among many minorities.

Secondly the book is motivated by a desire to understand how WAF activists have been drawn into this particular struggle. Thirdly there was a pressing need given that two of the

94 theory&struggle

central members of WAF (Helen Lowe and Cassandra Balchin) have recently died, to document the history of the members of the organisation before it’s too late.

WAF was opposed to ‘multiculturalism’ because in its view it was a means of ignoring racism.

WAF also attacked ‘multifaithism’ as advocated by Tariq Modood and New Labour. Pragna Patel (Southall Black Sisters and WAF) said: “The increasing use of religion (euphemistically referred to as ‘faith’) by the state as the basis for identifying minorities began in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Rushdie Affair but gathered momentum post 9/11 and the London bombings.”

Successive governments then have vigorously promoted a religious or faith-based agenda. So the ‘Cohesion and Integration’, ‘Big Society and Localism’ agenda have all given a further fillip to fundamentalist and religious right forces who are in the process of consolidating their power and control over communities and resources.

The State is happily promoting and funding multi-faith forums and projects at central and local levels to tackle all sorts of social problems even where those involved have no historical record or current interest in gender equality or social justice and human rights issues. Most are only concerned to ensure that the demand for equality is substituted for the demand for more ‘religious literacy’ in all public institutions.

That is, the demand for the State to recognise the supposedly ‘authentic’ theological values and traditions of minorities, but not the diverse, syncretic, liberal, cultural, political and secular traditions, including feminist traditions, within a community. It is a demand which elements of the progressive left are all too willing to accommodate.

The pursuit of the faith-based agenda is partly to do with a perceived need to appease conservative religious leaderships within minority communities so that they are de-linked from the extreme

radical elements, and partly in the belief that the right to manifest religion signifies equal treatment of minorities – a belief shared by many equality and human rights institutions across Europe and amongst considerable sections of the so called progressive left movements.

WAF was one of the first organisations in this country which was unafraid to tackle the violence meted out to Asian women-in this case Krishna Sharma- whose husband and in-laws had subjected her to horrifying abuse such that she committed suicide. Members of WAF highlighted this atrocity by entering a conference organised by white socialist feminists and argued for a race/class alliance as the most productive way to combat domestic violence. WAF marched through the streets of Southall with this message.

Probably the bravest and arguably the most controversial initiative was taken by a WAF founder member, Gita Saghal who, at the time, worked for Amnesty International, but was forced to leave because she did not support their campaign to free Moazzem Begg from Guantanamo Bay. Begg and his organisation Cage prisoners, had attracted much support among liberal minded Britons; but Gita Saghal and others exposed his sympathies for the Taliban. The WAF board did not support her so she campaigned alone. In addition both she and WAF were critical of the Stop the War coalition when it allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is clear to me that the original motivation for establishing WAF still exists, probably more so now than ever given the rise of ISIS and the situation in Kurdistan, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. This is not just a ‘middle eastern’ problem, but resonates throughout the globe, and of course, particularly affects women. It is to be hoped that the ideological and campaigning vision which inspired WAF will be re-ignited.

Mary Davis n

Marx Memorial Library lectures

Spring 2015 PUBLIC MEETING

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Victory over Fascism

Speakers David Ayrton, Mary Davis and Jonathan White 7pm Friday 8 May Classes

Capitalist Crisis and the collective power of labour Monopoly and imperialism

The State and monopoly capital: the challenge of democracy

Divide and rule and the collective power of labour Challenging capitalism: posing alternatives

Thursday 21 May Thursday 28 May Thursday 4 June Thursday 11 June

Allstart at 7pm. Register at the door. (£3 per session) or in advance at admin@mml.xyz Marx Memorial Library and Workers School 37a Clerkenwell Green London EC1R 0DU

theory&struggle 95

Marx Memorial Library & Workers' School An independent charity dedicated, since its establishment in 1933, to the advancement of education and learning in all aspects of marxism, labour and working class history.

We receive no subsidies of any kind and depend entirely on the generosity and dedication of our members.

If you would like to help preserve and carry on the important work of the Marx Memorial Library check out the affiliation and membership applications forms on the website, click on the relevant image, save on to your computer, print off and post to us with a cheque payable to MML. Membership rates and affiliation levels are kept purposely low in order to be as accessible as possible; therefore all rates listed are a minimum.

Join online marx-memorial-library.org.uk/ Donations and, especially, regular standing orders and direct debits are very welcome.

Annual membership fees are: Individuals: waged £20; concessions £10; overseas £25.

Affiliates: branches £50, regional bodies £250, national bodies £500.

96 theory&struggle