This week's All the Hegemony You Can Eat

Here’s an interesting little story. The state of Louisiana currently legislates for the equal teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The state’s governor endorsed the act, asking the rhetorical question, “what are we scared of”?

Disinvestment in science and technology is one thing. Students who hold that the laws of nature can be suspended at any point are going to struggle with the sciences. If the state education system will not foster a scientific culture it will not turn out new scientists and will drive existing ones away.

It’s an interesting illustration of the practical limits of neoliberal economic theory. Businesses love state investment. Capital needs an appropriately educated workforce. Equally it needs a healthy workforce with good morale. It needs a strong transport infrastructure, reliable utilities and waste disposal, post, telecommunications. It needs a guaranteed currency. It needs enforced property rights and well defined borders. It needs all these things and more. Capital requires an actor, something at least the size of a national state, to pool the necessary resources. Of course individual businessmen and women don’t want to pay for these things out of their own pockets, but it’s these factors, more than income or capital gains taxes, that affect investment choices.

Why has there been a continual drive in the United States to restore creationism as a legitimate scientific credo? Why would a ruling class hurt itself so? There are ideologues out there, and the bourgeoisie relies on the state to preserve its coherent unity as a class. Creationism is contested as well as advocated by bourgeois representatives. But this is also clearly part of a management problem, of hegemony. It is about how to deal with mass participation in public life.

We have gone on a lot about Truthiness on this blog. There are ideologies, and there are ideological assumptions, but part of what makes truthiness recent and real (and not just a humorous quip) is there are areas of public life where rational debate has been fully subverted in favour of things like “family values” or “legitimate concerns”. If you attack every iteration of the scientific method, particularly if you stop it from ever forming in the first place by, say, insisting descent through natural selection is at least as plausible as intelligent design, you render people incapable. The gain that the masses make through achieving universal education is, in this instance, nullified.

If you have no concept of what is scientific and what isn’t then you will not be able to discern something as basic as your own material interests. Each attack on science is a pre-emptive strike against a counter-hegemony trying to form. Socialism is as much about the preservation of four centuries bourgeois achievement as it is anything else.

Age of conspiracies

This picture has been buzzing round the internet immediately after the Boston bombings. Who is this man?

The Boston bombings are compelling firstly because they are awful to contemplate but secondly because they are, as of yet, motiveless (if it was Al-Qaeda we would have been told straight away). The President initially did not even call the bombings and act of terrorism, then he did, but he still upset some people.

For the time being there is room for myth-making and pareidolia. What was that man doing on the roof? What would anyone do on a roof?

There are immediate psychological reasons for embracing conspiracy theories, the solidarity of the initiated, perverse reassurance about human agency and so on.  There are political reasons why one may promote a conspiracy theory, or conspiracism in general. Fear and projection are key stimulating factors for right wing populist movements, the tributaries of fascism.

The unacceptable attributes of the self, in this case a political body, for example a nation or a race, are projected on the enemy, who is always more powerful, cunning and prolific. Triumph over the enemy requires urgent action, great passion is mobilised, and it becomes a transforming force. It helps also when you find attributes of the enemy within the political body, these people become ‘traitors’ and can be dealt with peremptorily (btw – is anyone else spotting a similarity between this and the SWP CC’s epistemology of internal debate? – a leap I appreciate, but word has it Alex Callinicos turned up at a CC meeting with a copy of the infamous Facebook conversation and started ranting about conspiracies).

There is a short Marxist rider to this, we live in the age of public life, where all the formal decisions about society are taken in the open, yet society seems to career down strange, unwarranted paths beyond any apparent human control. Noam Chomsky contrasts conspiracy theories to institutional analysis. Conspiracies fill the gap left by the absence of the theory of class rule, the nature of the state. Perhaps this means they are part of the operation of bourgeois hegemony? In which case more consideration is necessary.

All the hegemony you can eat

The way things have been if I don’t see another buttressing quote from either Lenin, Luxemburg or Tony Cliff for a long while I will be happy. So, in that spirit, let’s talk about Lenin!

One thing I have been adamant about for some time is that the revolutionary party was not Lenin’s key innovation. Firstly, even if he intended to found “The Bolsheviks” he did not intend his party to be a new party. He was trying to found a Russian SPD. Many Communist Parties were not made brand news but founded out of Socialist Party majorities. Despite instants of political hardship (not least of which was Hitler’s invasion of Europe) from the mid-twenties onward the CP was a realistic means for a political career. Lenin intended for the Third International to be revolutionary parties, but being in this case is only the same as doing.

Lenin’s real innovation was his discussion of nationalities. The 20^th century was in many ways the story of revolutionary nationalism. Lenin was so perceptive he was couple of decades ahead of everybody else, including the actual movements. This is important though, what we are talking about here is Lenin the ‘autonomist’, the man who pointed to an expanded revolutionary subject. His particular concern was linking the workers movement in the Russian heartland with the national movements in the outlying countries of the Tsar’s empire. But there are broader applications.

Firstly we are discussing the matter of hegemony. How do movements against aspects of capitalism become movements against capitalism itself? We’re talking not just movements against occupation or imperialism but for civil rights, women’s liberation, LGBT liberation and so on.

But, more importantly, we’re talking about how we build a working class movement in the first place. Wage labour and subsequent exploitation is based on the separation of workers from the means of production. This is an excellent founding fact but too abstract as a basis for day to day politics. People’s living and working conditions are defined by much more than this, by gender, nationality, sexuality, race and so on. We look both for weaknesses in the current capitalist set up but also potential strengths on the part of the working class. An example, in Lenin’s time whole villages would send their sons off to work in particular factories. There was often a pre-existing sense of solidarity, imported from the countryside. This added to the concentrating effect of Russia’s huge factories, made the turn of the century Russian working class a force to be reckoned with.

It’s this kind of confluence that we should be looking for today.

This week's All the Hegemony You Can Eat...

Michael Gove has had to abandon his plansto scrap the GCSE, which is fine by me, though many of his other hare-brained schemes still remain; bibles, yachts, performance pay, the downgrading of arts education… it’s a long list. The proposed Baccalaureate was, of course, a return in all but name of the old O Level /CSE system of two-tier education. Gove’s aim, like all the Coalition ministers, is to destroy all egalitarian influence in public life. In this case he means to destroy all remnants of comprehensive education.

The weird thing is he claims inspiration from Jade Goody and Antonio Gramsci in doing it. To be honest I think we’ll skip Goody and talk about Gramsci if that’s all the same to you?

Firstly, regarding Gove on Gramsci we must remember that we dealing with possibly the first Generation X government. Funny though that idea may be at first look at various cabinet figures: Michael Gove, born 1967: David Cameron, born 1966: George Osborne, 1971: Nick Clegg, 1967: Danny Alexander, 1972: Jeremy Hunt, 1966. The one of the points about Generation X is it values cultural omnivorism. We have a somewhat deracinated ruling class (described in a recent George Monbiot article) that is semi-detached from its own tradition. Our rulers are as likely to be culturally influenced by Morrissey and Marr as Edward Gibbon and Winston Churchill. In this sense Gove, a relatively lower-class upstart compared to Cameron or Osborne, is simply one-upping his comrades.

But conservatives sometimes quote Gramsci approvingly, or at least as a worthy adversary. Here’s Melanie Phillips on so called Cultural Marxism. Gramsci is simultaneously the nice Marxist who admitted the working class would never take control of the means of production (a funny thing for the man who edited the paper of the Turin Workers Councils) and the man who said socialists should sneakily capture society’s cultural institutions and use them for subversion. It’s an astonishingly crude version of the Eurocommunist interpretation of the Prison Notebooks, but that’s Melanie Phillips for you.

In the most well-known version of the Prison Notebooks there is a short section on education. Gramsci based his ideas firstly on his own experience as an impoverished student but also on his time as editor of L’Ordine Nuovo, the leading socialist paper in Turin in the 1910s and 20s, education in a much broader sense. 

Gramsci’s attack on the 1923 education act, which promoted a supposedly active and humanistic education over the old style, which was more about rote learning, can be interpreted as a conservative eulogy. What Gramsci was attacking was a mode of education biased toward the ruling class children, those who start with every advantage in life. Humanistic education is ruling class education. It’s what young men and women get at private schools. It's where they learn how to rule. Antonio Gramsci was not against humanistic education, he was for workers power. But the foundation of humanistic education is instructive education, literacy, numeracy, scientific understanding, geography, citizenship and so on. At every stage working class children often get the worst deal from the  education system, they often have the disadvantage of a non-intellectual upbringing, they have to work harder to achieve the same results as their bourgeois classmates.

The question about education is not rote learning versus humanism, exams versus continuing assessment, etc, but to what end are these ideas put. From cutting Bookstart to jacking up university fees and shunting students away from ‘useless’ arts degrees, the current government is trying to deny poorer students the fruits of education. This is Austerity in action; the re-composition of class power in favour of the capitalist class.

Hegemony and truthiness

George Monbiot has a whimsical piece in the Guardian about the system of ruling class education, the effect it has both on the people processed through the system and the wider implications for society. It is also a useful piece of anecdotal evidence about the material basis of truthiness.

The telling part is what Monbiot describes as the typical output of public school education, colonial service, the civil service or the armed forces. You might want to add that the solidarity generated by said system (the process detaches young men from their families and attaches them to institutions) also renews the old school tie network in high finance as well, but that is a side effect, rather than an aim. 

While the transition from public school to ruling elite may not be so automatic any more what is true is the system generally turns out “young men fanatically devoted to their caste [read class] and culture”. To put it another way, young members are not taught to exercise hegemony but act as partisans for bourgeois corporate needs.

Truthiness, the willingness of lesser or greater numbers of people to believe something based on whether it feels right, is able to overcome public life when objective means of orientation, such as class, race, gender, nationality etc, are removed. The truth, or otherwise, of a statement, an idea or a collection of ideas (an ideology) is tested in practice.

We are living with a disconnected ruling class that no longer leads but simply represses and denies when it needs to. The subaltern classes however are not moving. The programme of Austerity is proving difficult to overcome in ideological struggle because it is not being challenged in practical struggle. Our society is at rest, like a stagnant pond, and the scum is floating to the top. 

Once more on bourgeois culture...

The role of any socialist approaching modern culture is as a critic. There is no such thing as socialist culture and trying to create such a thing is at best misguided.

Just because something is said in the bourgeois press does not make it untrue let alone something that can simply be written off. Modern mainstream culture is bourgeois. The prevailing ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class; this includes ideas about law, justice and so on. Most people we want to reach are, to this extent, 'bourgeois'. If mainstream press attacks a part of the socialist you deal with it head on, you don’t dismiss the attack and you don’t hide, because you can’t.

All the hegemony you can eat

Lenin’s key political innovation was never the vanguard party. Look at the Communist Manifesto, it’s there already. Gramsci is correct in attributing hegemony over and over in the notebooks to ‘Illich’. Hegemony is the capacity to lead. It bridges the gap between a party that fights its cause and by extension the cause of the class it represents and the party that leads the whole of society.

One should take care applying the concept too squarely onto our society. In Gramsci’s time hegemony at the level of statecraft meant a particular class leading a multitude of other classes, each with distinct political aims. There are not coinciding revolutions any more, like there were in 1917.

It reminds me, though I’m not sure this is a perfect analogy, of the observation that socialists should be the best fighters for reforms. They should, but I have also seen the times when this has been acknowledged in the sense of “thanks for being the best fighters, don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. Leading in struggle in itself is not enough.

Similarly, there is the idea that theory serves practice, in particular that a good book or pamphlet provides an overview for activists. It is very difficult for most people to be politically active, at least as as they need to be. Tailoring theory to current activists carries the danger of reducing party culture to a narrow section of society. Theory is liable to be degraded and the party becomes in danger of talking only to itself. This is perhaps how we got to the stage where words such as ‘feminism’ and ‘autonomism’ no longer refer to political credos but make do as refined abuse.

Wider society is also left unprepared should, for example, an unexpected section of the population take up struggle. This is less that the section lose because of lack of clarity – people are often very clear about what it is they’re fighting for and how they expect to get it – but more to do with other groups who might have a secondary interest not rallying to the cause. What was the meaning of Occupy? What is the meaning of modern feminism? Why do disability rights matter? Gramsci described revolutionary activity as the critical renovation of consciousness. Questions like these must be explained.

Western Marxism

Western Marxism (both the train of thought called Western Marxism and Marxism in the West) is cultural. The eponymous founder of Marxism concentrated most of his effort on a critique of political economy. He showed that capitalism not only leads to cyclical crisis but that these cyclical crises over time lead to an existential one. In the Communist Manifesto this existential crises is described as having one of two results, either revolutionary reconstitution or common ruin. He showed that there is a class capable of positively resolving this crisis.

Despite many valiant attempts the question is why hasn’t the working class mission been completed? The answer is not economic, but cultural. Capital was written as a prognostication. In 1867 Marx was describing not capitalism as it was but as it could be expected to become. There was no according capitalist superstructure in 1867. There were no mass parties, nor universal suffrage. There was no mass education or popular culture. There were not even many of the countries that we recognise today.

The works of Antonio Gramsci are crucial. They are the beginnings of a theory of capitalist superstructure, capitalist culture, which organises, replicates and defends capitalist practice. The Prison Notebooks are an elaboration on the experiences both of the Biennio Rosso in Italy and the experience of the early Soviet Republic (which, in part, inspired the two-year rebellion in Italy). They are about Lenin. He referred to so many times.

In Britain today you’d could canvass opinion on an average high street and find numerous, perfectly adequate explanations as to the cause of the current economic depression. You would find precious few useful ideas as to how to extricate our society from it. If people understand their economic interests why don’t they act on them? Why do Spaniards or Greeks fight for their interests but the British remain quiescent? The argument is not over economics but culture. Culture is conservative, in the precise meaning of the term. It preserves ideas long after they have any basis in reality.

Thoughts for the Brain: Miliband

The left-commentariat (for want of a better description) is quite pleased with Ed Miliband’s Labour conference address. One of the exciting things about the speech (apparently) was the audacious theft of Tory One-Nation rhetoric and the invocation of Benjamin Disraeli.

There is an article in the Grauniad explaining all this jazz:

Disraeli was devoted to social justice and social cohesion, at least in Britain, in a way that the current Tory crop has never attempted. He loathed the growing exploitation of the workers as the Industrial Revolution burned on and he attempted to "gain and retain for the Conservatives the lasting affection of the working classes".

He established his philosophy in his novel Sybil, where he wrote that England was "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws … the rich and the poor".

Disraeli was supportive of the Chartist movement also apparently. Actually not quite true, he was supportive of the moral force of Chartism, the side that sort to persuade enfranchised opinion to allow universal suffrage. This is consistent with who Disraeli was and what he represented after all. 
 
One Nation Toryism was also known in its time as the Young Englandmovement . Someone we know very well had something to say about this movement:

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.

 
The Labour Party conference poses the question, what is the Labour Party for? It is clearly seen as a party of reform. But that leads to the further question, what is reform for, and who is it for? In the case of Young England/One Nation Toryism there were two purposes. 
 
In the initial period of capitalist growth there was lots of plunder. One aspect of this was plunder of the rural population, which was driven out of the countryside, into the city, into the factories. If life expectancy was short and individuals were used up like coal in a furnace, well there was plenty more where that came from. As time passed there was not the same superabundance of labour. While capitalists might have wanted cheap labour from the shires the capitalist class needed hereditary proletarians born and raised in the cities. The capitalist class had to come to terms with the working class, and not just as pitiful victims, but a class with power and “affections” of its own. 
 
The trouble was the shared class interests of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie meant:

 In political practice, therefore, they join[ed] in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.

 
Something similar is true today. Some of the rhetoric of Miliband’s speech was excellent and to the point. The population of Britain is very much divided. Many of us live in Poundland, a world of austerity and ‘tough choices’. The select however live deliriously happy in the Land of Chocolate. 
 
Miliband’s rhetoric is to bind people like you and me to his political project. But what is his project? The Labour Party is a capitalist workers party, committed to the system. In practice this means a pay freeze for millions public sector workers (setting the benchmark for the private sector), a cap for those claiming benefits, thinly veiled union baiting and no return of public services carved up by the current government, services people rely on. 

As with One Nation Toryism, we are being bound to a hostile project.

This week's thoughts for the brain...

A small story, perhaps, and the big news is this is not big news, however: 46% of Americans are out and out creationists. Another 32% believe in something called theistic evolution. On the face of it this is incredible for the country that's supposed to be the advanced outpost of capitalist civilisation (more incredible because these figures really haven't changed in years).

A few observations:

1) Tread carefully. Atheism is not in itself radical or left-wing, especially in a country like Britain. If it is it is more so in a place like the United States.
2) The separation of church and state is meaningless in conditions like these.
3) Beware, there are people paving the way for this kind of politics here.
4) National politics is impossible on the basis of economic self-interest, otherwise it suffers from the "sack of potatoes" phenomenon identified by Karl Marx. Long-term politics fade and passivity reigns, punctuated by occasional mass movements with little lasting impact. Economic interest is transformed into hegemony and counter-hegemony by ideology (an ideology is a set of ideas consistent with a defined point of view).
5) The Regan Revolution was a movement to counter and dismantle the achievements of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement in America. Popular religion already existed, however, as much as all class-based ideology was destroyed (we're not and never can talk in terms of absolute results here) religion has helped fill an ideological void.
6) Religion is a way of the 1% (as it's now called) remaining in contact with the rest of the population (and in control).
7) If the Tories are busy dismantling the basis and results of class-based politics in Britain, there will be a move by conservatives to replace this with a form of popular reactionary politics with religion at its core.

Sideways stuff about DVDs, Victorians and Hegemony

I am the kind of person who watches DVD extras. Given digital technology allows you to load practically unlimited amounts of information onto a disc it's surprising more artists don't make creative use of this. The BBC DVD of the recent Sherlock series has an interesting 'making of...' section.

Sherlock, the series, is not as literary and refined as first it may seem. It is what the original books were, a very good genre production. It is at least a cut above other pretentious, prime-time pantomimes like Merlin and Robin Hood. It emphasises the Other London aspect of some of the original stories. Well-to-do Victorians had a turbulent attractive/repulsive relationship with the cities they'd built. It is, of course, the attractive/repulsive relationship between capital and labour; as classes, as ideas embodied they can't live with our without each other.

One of the series producers commented in the documentary that Sherlock showed a side of London she never knew existed; exotic locations you pass every single day, blazing signs you never notice, babble and slang you can never hope to understand.

The first point to emphasises is this is a normal aspect of urban life. The city is a medium for living. Each new medium is a powerful shock to our (individual and collective) system. If you walked down the street and paid attention to each and every bright, shiny thing thrust in front of you, you would be left paralysed. Numbness is essential day-to-day survival (though it is a threat to active citizenry).

An aside: our political/ideological struggle has to overcome this numbness, numbness of course suits the status quo. There are two ways to overcome numbness. First is sensationalism. In culture there is an arms race, akin to an addiction (with all the accompanying debilitation); sensationalism leads to numbness, which leads to greater sensationalism and greater numbness. Sensationalism is roughly parallel to movementism. There is no political change without a political impulse, a collective urge to right a wrong. But movementism has to lead to organisation, counter-hegemony.

The second way to overcome numbness is ambience. Ambient music is music built into an environment. Counter-hegemony is roughly equivalent to ambience, a network of organic intellectuals incorporated into the wider working class movement. Ambient music does not demand attention in the same way as, say, a pop song, but it insinuates itself so much more into the mind and mood of the listener. Revolutionary politics is not top down or one way, transmitter and receiver, but collective criticism, bringing practice up to the best levels of theory and theory up to the levels of best practice.

Back to the point: the other thing to say about the notion of Other London is, of course, why should there not be several Londons? Cities are peak communities. Human life proliferates in so many forms there. The fact that this can be new and novel shows how much the working class (as opposed to 'chavs', the 'white working class' or other ruling class inventions) has been excluded from public life for so long. No wonder the working class presence goes unnoticed, until, of course, it starts striking and demonstrating; then it gets less exotic, more fearsome.