I wish I'd written this. I still think in those marxist phrases - I just don't use them anymore. People in particular don't like being reminded of class because where ever you stand socially it's somehow uncomfortable. Hence why 75% now call themselves 'middle class' - I suppose it makes us feel less divided. I always hated Brown's "hard working families" - what about bloody hard working single people? "Squeezed middle" is only marginally less annoying.
As the writer suggests, alienation and the feeling of "us and them" - Marx's class division - is being forced on us by capitalism and its drive toward concentration of wealth and impoverishment. On top of that we have a political class who have put all their eggs in the banker's basket. This really feels like a Titanic moment - but the Titanic sank quickly, while the sinking of the apparently doomed ship Financial Oligarchy may take a little longer and claim more lives. Common perceptions of Marxism, particularly the Bolshevik version of it, are coloured by the bloody history of the 20th century. Bolshevism turned the class struggle into a bloody reign of terror, though not before terror and subversion was visited upon them. The attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, by agents most likely employed on behalf of Britain, led to a counter-revolutionary terror against the Revolution's enemies. Lenin was keenly aware that in Marx's time the experience of the Paris Commune (1871) was the object lesson of what happens to a revolution when it can't defend itself. Some 30,000 Communards were executed when Paris fell to the French/Prussian forces. (A century later the same thing happened to Chile's Allende.) This was the fate awaiting Russia's revolution - hence Lenin's choice of 'hard men' to defend it, ultimately leading to his fateful choice of Stalin as general secretary. The great tragedy of the 20th century was that the survival of Bolshevism-Stalinism became, by example and myth, the object lesson on how to conduct a successful revolution across the colonial world. And the lesson was that, although workers (and, in the Maoist version, peasants) were the social agents for revolution, they needed a disciplined party of Marxist-Leninists to lead them. By surviving the civil war and then the crisis of the late 20s/early 30s, it appeared that Lenin and Stalin had laid down a blueprint of how to overthrow the semi-feudal classes and their imperialist overlords, and then how to modernise the country. Liquidation of the landowning and bourgeois classes and the destruction of all independent parties were the primary methods. Stalin set out to achieve industrialisation in 10 years where the Western nations had needed 50. Millions died. Mao, Mengistu, and the young officers who instigated the Afghan revolution all followed the blueprint with bloody results. Pol Pot pushed the nihilistic elements of Mao's idiosyncratic version of Marxism-Leninism to the ultimate extreme, turning the essential modernism of Marxism into its opposite - instead of industrialisation, he emptied the cities. Instead of mass education, he liquidated all those who were educated. Instead of internationalism, there was a racist nationalism, in which non-Khymers were eliminated. At this nadir in the development of the movement that began with Marx, communism had become its opposite. Western marxism, both European and Latin American, mostly did not take this course toward anti-modernist, national chauvinism. From Gramsci to Castro and Allende, the essential democratic and internationalist impulse was preserved. Stalinism/Maoism never achieved a monopolistic grip as it did in eastern Europe and Asia. To be sure, there was plenty of dogmatism at work in the communist and Trotskyist parties of western Europe and north America. In Africa, there was Mengistu's African Stalinism, Mugabe's opportunistic anti-imperialism, and other versions of socialism such as Nyerere's in Tanzania. In many cases the embrace of Marxism was purely geopolitical. Angola's Dos Santos declared the state Marxist-Leninist as long as Soviet aid was available, then promptly switched to crony capitalism when it dried up. Across Francophone Africa, experiments in state socialism lasted a decade or two before collapsing in economic failure. The legacy of dictatorship, terror and economic failure hangs over Marx and Marxism.
Social democracy and the welfare state achieved unparalleled social mobility and rising living standards in the years between 1945 and 1980. Since then both Keynsian economic intervention and redistribution have been in retreat worldwide. Capitalist triumph in 1990-91 with the collapse of communism, was followed by its carnival years. Only now, 20 years on, can we see the results of unleashing capital and putting labour on a leash, on a divided society and failing economy. Marx's own works have stood the test of time. In the greatest irony, it was only after the collapse of all the socialist regimes, or their transformation into state capitalism, when capitalism itself was able to once again throw off the shackles imposed on it in the 20th century, that Marxism was rediscovered in its essential form. Financial collapse followed the greatest asset bubble in history, then bailout and sovereign debt crisis. The stagnation of average living standards, with bosses reap obscene 'rewards' by seizing all the gains were the very phenonema Marx described in Capital - exploitation and the extraction of surplus value from labour, followed by crisis as capital destroys its own market. We are now in such a disfunctional phase of the system that fictitious capital has, until 2008, become the main source of profit taking by finance capital. Normal capitalism was replaced by a gigantic pyramid scheme.
Another strange turn of events is that, for the first time most people are urban dwellers and one form of 'proletarian' or other. Yet, crucially, they do not necessarily see themselves as such. The marxist understanding of the proletariat is a downtrodden class that becomes aware of its own position in relation to the owners of production and organises to wage class struggle against the boss class. This no longer describes the general situation in most countries. The globalisation of capital and de-industrialisation of much of the formerly industrialised world has stripped the old working class of its muscle and confidence. Until recently we were all heading toward bourgeois nirvana, as Blair and his ilk so firmly believed. In truth, from the 1970s in America, and since 2000 in Europe, wages have been stagnating, while independent small capital has been gradually destroyed by corporate capital. Bourgeoisification has gone into reverse.
Meanwhile the workers of the world's new workshops in Asia and elsewhere, even where they are resisting their own exploitation, are not part of a wider class struggle as was the case for most of the 20th century. The new way in which the global economy at the level of production is decentralised makes it much harder for the wage earners to engage in struggle. How can a cocoa worker in Cote D'Ivoire, working on a plantation for slave wages, locate the source of his oppression when the corporations who controls his industry are located thousands of miles away in Kensington?
The exception to this general trend has been the rise of the social movements of Latin America, where wide sections of the disorganised working class, and those like the coca workers of Bolivia and the informal classes of Caracas, have found novel ways to organise around new leaders and parties and strike blows against capital. Instead of the Leninist centralised party, there are social movements that remain by Leninist standards massively anarchic - and yet they are able to unite around basic demands for social justice and control of natural resources. This regional exception has led to leftist governments taking power - and retaining it - across the continent. However, only in Venezuela is there any suggestion that capital could be overthrown, and 12 years into the Bolivarian revolution, no collectivisation a la Stalin or Mao is imminent. And yet, history may yet surprise us. In the midst of the rightwing reaction in Europe and the apparent death of social democracy, a cataclysmic turn of events could yet give the lonely Marxists a chance to finally fulfil his prophecy, or watch us slip back into some dystopian zombie capitalism. We are teetering now. The mood and response of the masses to this onslaught on all the was won over the last century, as in Cairo, Tunis and Sana'a, will be the decisive force in this unknown outcome.
The "squeezed middle" has been chosen as "word of the year" by the Oxford English Dictionary. It is associated with Ed Miliband, and I can see why: because, although clever, he's a toneless sort of man, and it's a toneless sort of phrase.
But I first heard "squeezed middle" (and I would like to point out to the Oxford English Dictionary people that it is a phrase and not a word) in Gordon Brown's 2009 conference speech. I had the impression something had fallen off the end, that Brown had pulled up just before letting slip the taboo word "class". My other problem with squeezed middle is it reminds me of Fern Britton and her gastric band.
As a description of the constituency Labour is aiming for, I marginally prefer it to its equally anodyne companion: "hard-working families". Men, especially, don't really want to be reminded of their families, and I doubt it's much of a spur to political action. It also reminds me of John Major, that great promoter of "family values", which in turn calls up a mental picture of him having one of his extra-marital sex sessions with Edwina Currie.
Squeezed middle does neatly evoke that current sense of being caught in a pincer movement between the bitterness of the downtrodden and the triumphalism of the rich. For example, I know from experience that the driver who eventually kills me on my bike is either going to be the rich owner of a giant 4x4, or an apoplectic plasterer in a white van. But its use hasn't helped Miliband's poll ratings, and I wish Labour would revert to something trenchant: the language of, or associated with, Karl Marx. Now there was a phrase-maker. His philosophy may be workable in practice because it sure looks good on the page, especially in our present times.
Admittedly, Miliband can't claim to speak on behalf of both the proletariat and bourgeoisie because in Marxism they are locked in class struggle. And he can't speak for the proletariat alone, as Labour leaders once did, because it has been decreed by… well, by the ruling class that a society run in the interests of the workers would be inequitable. Ruling class demands a return, I feel – just observe Cameron and Osborne on the front bench. But who are those somewhat less confident-looking people sitting alongside them? They are the Lib Dems, the ones who assist the controllers of capital to remain in power. They are in fact capitalist lackeys.
We are all familiar with the gilded "1%" being protested against in the City, but how did they reach their eminence? Surely through the tendency, identified by Marx, for more and more money to be in fewer and fewer hands: the concentration of capital, which is associated with the tendency of financial capital to supersede industrial capital.
You know all those young people today working for nothing in the name of "work experience"? That's called exploitation. Turning to the young rioters of earlier this year, they appeared to be economically below the proletariat (in that many did not have jobs), and more interested in getting a pair of Nike trainers than political protest. Marx would have called this unprogressive and poorly educated sub-stratum the lumpenproletariat. It's not a pretty word, but it does the job. As for the extreme desirability of those Nike trainers, and the veneration of Apple man Steve Jobs, that's commodity fetishism.
But there's one Marxian concept that seems to encapsulate the life of the majority of Britons whatever they be collectively called. I refer to that feeling of working ever harder for ever less, at the mercy of giant, probably foreign corporations run by people who earn more in an hour than you do in a week, and then coming home and seeing Simon Cowell on TV. It's called alienation. I've looked up the symptoms in my Marxist dictionary, and I definitely have it. How about you?
As the writer suggests, alienation and the feeling of "us and them" - Marx's class division - is being forced on us by capitalism and its drive toward concentration of wealth and impoverishment. On top of that we have a political class who have put all their eggs in the banker's basket. This really feels like a Titanic moment - but the Titanic sank quickly, while the sinking of the apparently doomed ship Financial Oligarchy may take a little longer and claim more lives. Common perceptions of Marxism, particularly the Bolshevik version of it, are coloured by the bloody history of the 20th century. Bolshevism turned the class struggle into a bloody reign of terror, though not before terror and subversion was visited upon them. The attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, by agents most likely employed on behalf of Britain, led to a counter-revolutionary terror against the Revolution's enemies. Lenin was keenly aware that in Marx's time the experience of the Paris Commune (1871) was the object lesson of what happens to a revolution when it can't defend itself. Some 30,000 Communards were executed when Paris fell to the French/Prussian forces. (A century later the same thing happened to Chile's Allende.) This was the fate awaiting Russia's revolution - hence Lenin's choice of 'hard men' to defend it, ultimately leading to his fateful choice of Stalin as general secretary. The great tragedy of the 20th century was that the survival of Bolshevism-Stalinism became, by example and myth, the object lesson on how to conduct a successful revolution across the colonial world. And the lesson was that, although workers (and, in the Maoist version, peasants) were the social agents for revolution, they needed a disciplined party of Marxist-Leninists to lead them. By surviving the civil war and then the crisis of the late 20s/early 30s, it appeared that Lenin and Stalin had laid down a blueprint of how to overthrow the semi-feudal classes and their imperialist overlords, and then how to modernise the country. Liquidation of the landowning and bourgeois classes and the destruction of all independent parties were the primary methods. Stalin set out to achieve industrialisation in 10 years where the Western nations had needed 50. Millions died. Mao, Mengistu, and the young officers who instigated the Afghan revolution all followed the blueprint with bloody results. Pol Pot pushed the nihilistic elements of Mao's idiosyncratic version of Marxism-Leninism to the ultimate extreme, turning the essential modernism of Marxism into its opposite - instead of industrialisation, he emptied the cities. Instead of mass education, he liquidated all those who were educated. Instead of internationalism, there was a racist nationalism, in which non-Khymers were eliminated. At this nadir in the development of the movement that began with Marx, communism had become its opposite. Western marxism, both European and Latin American, mostly did not take this course toward anti-modernist, national chauvinism. From Gramsci to Castro and Allende, the essential democratic and internationalist impulse was preserved. Stalinism/Maoism never achieved a monopolistic grip as it did in eastern Europe and Asia. To be sure, there was plenty of dogmatism at work in the communist and Trotskyist parties of western Europe and north America. In Africa, there was Mengistu's African Stalinism, Mugabe's opportunistic anti-imperialism, and other versions of socialism such as Nyerere's in Tanzania. In many cases the embrace of Marxism was purely geopolitical. Angola's Dos Santos declared the state Marxist-Leninist as long as Soviet aid was available, then promptly switched to crony capitalism when it dried up. Across Francophone Africa, experiments in state socialism lasted a decade or two before collapsing in economic failure. The legacy of dictatorship, terror and economic failure hangs over Marx and Marxism.
Social democracy and the welfare state achieved unparalleled social mobility and rising living standards in the years between 1945 and 1980. Since then both Keynsian economic intervention and redistribution have been in retreat worldwide. Capitalist triumph in 1990-91 with the collapse of communism, was followed by its carnival years. Only now, 20 years on, can we see the results of unleashing capital and putting labour on a leash, on a divided society and failing economy. Marx's own works have stood the test of time. In the greatest irony, it was only after the collapse of all the socialist regimes, or their transformation into state capitalism, when capitalism itself was able to once again throw off the shackles imposed on it in the 20th century, that Marxism was rediscovered in its essential form. Financial collapse followed the greatest asset bubble in history, then bailout and sovereign debt crisis. The stagnation of average living standards, with bosses reap obscene 'rewards' by seizing all the gains were the very phenonema Marx described in Capital - exploitation and the extraction of surplus value from labour, followed by crisis as capital destroys its own market. We are now in such a disfunctional phase of the system that fictitious capital has, until 2008, become the main source of profit taking by finance capital. Normal capitalism was replaced by a gigantic pyramid scheme.
Another strange turn of events is that, for the first time most people are urban dwellers and one form of 'proletarian' or other. Yet, crucially, they do not necessarily see themselves as such. The marxist understanding of the proletariat is a downtrodden class that becomes aware of its own position in relation to the owners of production and organises to wage class struggle against the boss class. This no longer describes the general situation in most countries. The globalisation of capital and de-industrialisation of much of the formerly industrialised world has stripped the old working class of its muscle and confidence. Until recently we were all heading toward bourgeois nirvana, as Blair and his ilk so firmly believed. In truth, from the 1970s in America, and since 2000 in Europe, wages have been stagnating, while independent small capital has been gradually destroyed by corporate capital. Bourgeoisification has gone into reverse.
Meanwhile the workers of the world's new workshops in Asia and elsewhere, even where they are resisting their own exploitation, are not part of a wider class struggle as was the case for most of the 20th century. The new way in which the global economy at the level of production is decentralised makes it much harder for the wage earners to engage in struggle. How can a cocoa worker in Cote D'Ivoire, working on a plantation for slave wages, locate the source of his oppression when the corporations who controls his industry are located thousands of miles away in Kensington?
The exception to this general trend has been the rise of the social movements of Latin America, where wide sections of the disorganised working class, and those like the coca workers of Bolivia and the informal classes of Caracas, have found novel ways to organise around new leaders and parties and strike blows against capital. Instead of the Leninist centralised party, there are social movements that remain by Leninist standards massively anarchic - and yet they are able to unite around basic demands for social justice and control of natural resources. This regional exception has led to leftist governments taking power - and retaining it - across the continent. However, only in Venezuela is there any suggestion that capital could be overthrown, and 12 years into the Bolivarian revolution, no collectivisation a la Stalin or Mao is imminent. And yet, history may yet surprise us. In the midst of the rightwing reaction in Europe and the apparent death of social democracy, a cataclysmic turn of events could yet give the lonely Marxists a chance to finally fulfil his prophecy, or watch us slip back into some dystopian zombie capitalism. We are teetering now. The mood and response of the masses to this onslaught on all the was won over the last century, as in Cairo, Tunis and Sana'a, will be the decisive force in this unknown outcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment