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.

The deadly lure of esoterica...

“Since the revolutionary party cannot have interests apart from the class, all the party’s issues of policy are those of the class, and they should therefore be thrashed out in the open, in its presence. The freedom of discussion which exists in the factory meeting, which aims at unity of action after decisions are taken, should apply to the revolutionary party. This means that all discussions on basic issues of policy should be discussed in the light of day: in the open press. Let the mass of the workers take part in the discussion, put pressure on the party, its apparatus and leadership.”--Tony Cliff, Trotsky on Substitutionism.

This is not an absolute statement and we should always be wary of authority by quotation, nonetheless suggests there is a socialist epistemology, or theory of knowledge.

Socialism and fascism are opposite ends of the political spectrum (as generally understood). The BNP operates on levels of membership, the highest being gold membership. The SWP on the other hand has, or claims to have an understanding that “all members are gold dust”. Esoteric knowledge, secret understanding that can only be accessed through ritual, limited to a small group is what holds fascist organisations together (the core of the Nazi party was the Thule Society). It is a logical extension of the capitalist understanding, of a world and its people graded, ranked and talked to on a need to know basis, people presented with the inflexible judgment of ministers, executives and experts, none of whom you can ever meaningfully access. Esoteric practice is deadly to socialist organizations.

Though the SWP is home to thousands of great socialists, and has been home to thousands more in its time, it has become fatally top-heavy. Access to the little Vaticanon Thames is a mysterious practice that takes place via email or an occasional phone call or (if you’re really lucky) a personal audience; the point being you don’t ever go there and start poking round. Despite a formal ban on secret or permanent factions there are dozens of them, petitions are passed out, letters are passed around the great and good demanding X resign from Y position. The CC meets every week. No one except the CC is party to its discussions. The only secret factions uncovered are the ones that aren’t actually factions. The only crime is getting caught.

While we must admit the pressures of the capitalist world are very difficult to resist, to acknowledge them is halfway to successfully combating them. There is no sign that the current SWP leadership even understands what the SWP is meant to be doing and how it is supposed to relate to the wider world. It is merely self-perpetuating  and this is a large aspect of what’s killing the SWP.

Democracy and culture

I have just been given a copy of The Beatles Esher Demo. It was a very kind and thoughtful gift. The Esher Demo was made in spring of 1968 after The Beatles returned home from India. The songs were recorded in George Harrison’s home, many of which ended up on the White Album, recorded and released later that year. The recordings had been passed around as a bootleg for a long time and were so almost-official parts of the tape were eventually released on the final part of the Anthology.

The interesting thing was as soon as I mentioned I had a copy I was asked whether I downloaded it. This of course was the sensible thing to do, but then we live in an age where there’s really no such thing as a bootleg any more.

Pop culture produces two contradictory but complimentary modes of knowledge. One is popular; mass culture, mass enthusiasm and sometimes even mass participation. It has the all the appearance of democracy, i.e. the public gets what the public wants. More often than not a mysterious, ruinous law of averages seems to triumph. What the public gets seemingly no one wants. The response to this is esoteric knowledge, cult followings and very particular enthusiasms. Bootlegs are just one aspect of this. There is also an apparent democracy here too, the solidarity of the initiated; the negation of this is tribalism.

The point is each of these modes conditions the other. Sometimes the esoteric and alternative culture grows and for a brief period dominates mass culture. This is of course unsustainable. In the mid-nineties indie bands were having number one hits, which begged the question, in what sense was this ‘indie’ music any more?

An important side effect of the bourgeois revolution was democracy. The events of the revolution took millions upon millions of people of feudal bondage and thrust them into public life. This democracy however is relentlessly subverted by the commodity form. In the case of culture we see either a fake democracy, where the means of cultural production and dissemination remain in the hands of a minority, or a cultural cottage industry stamped by a sectarian mindset. 

A new blog...

And a mighty fine one it is too: the International Socialism blog.

Actually existing news

Here's something you can save for people who insist the Royal Family are a harmless institution.

Both the Queen and the Prince of Wales are entitled to veto bills in parliament that might affect the property of the Crown or the Duchies of Lancaster or Cornwall. In recent years the monarch and monarch-to-be have been offered 39 bills for personal approval, one was vetoed (a 1999 bill proposing the transfer of war powers from the executive to parliament was blocked by the Queen). Other bills offered for approval, include the 2004 Civil Partnership Act, the 2004 European Union bill, the 2005 Work and Families bill and the 1997 Merchant Shipping and Maritime Security Act, to name but a few - the last one was because Prince Charles owns the harbours on the Isles of Scilly.

Madness, isn't it? It's an incredible affront to what little democracy we do have. Two very wealthy landowners are given extraordinary executive powers because nearly 1,000 years ago some French bandits won a battle in a Sussex field.

Get on t'internet...

“Comrades need to stop complaining on the internet and bring their concerns to branch meetings”. I paraphrase, but variations on this canard are repeated quite often, sometimes with an addendum along the lines of, “we need to engage with the real world”.

We do need to engage with the real world but moral injunctions about branch meetings are just the opposite of such engagement. Revolutionary socialists advocate direct discussion and open voting against closed meetings and secret ballots, but this fine, hard won principle is not being applied intelligently.

Any medium is by definition is exclusive. You’re either online or not. You can either attend a meeting or you can’t. There are plenty of reasons why someone might not be able to make regular meetings on a Wednesday or Thursday night, too many to list. It certainly doesn’t make you lazy or devious or your opinions invalid. It can equally be said that electronic communication provides an invaluable resource for people not able to meet face to face. In fact it allows a far greater pooling of experience and information than a geographical branch.

But there’s more to it than this. There is an unacknowledged bias that has been hardened by the misapplication of the idea of direct democracy. Why does a branch meeting count as the real world (when quite often it’s a group of ardent left-wingers agreeing with each other then arranging a paper sale) when online discussion does not?

It is, in part, a residual prejudice of 20^thCentury thought. Using McLuhanite terms, under print media the written word is dissociated and cool, whereas the spoken word is involved and hot. The written word had elevated status because it was recorded, for all time.

Thanks to electronic media the written word can unfold as fast as spoken conversation. There is no going back to the old ways of thinking. The internet not only has an idiom of its own (idiom being a sure sign of intense involvement not cool dissociation) but is affecting language and communication in general.

The party must come to understand electronic media and incorporate them as part of a democratic mix, including print media and public meetings, or it will become irrelevant, and all for the sake of principles transformed into shibboleths. To put it another way, if you don’t like what people are saying online don’t hide away in your branch meetings, get out into the real world, get online.

An ounce of theory is worth a ton of action

The old 'orthodoxy' such as it was, was the three pillars of the IS, state capitalism, permanent arms economy and deflected permanent revolution. The last two are now void and the first isn't such a tremendous intellectual head start any more. The SWP has no programme. What makes the party different and how? Why is it a distinct organisation?

Often it’s described as democratic centralism, but such a term is polyvalent, it means different things to different people. Democratic centralism is often attributed to Lenin as a key innovation, sometimes its blurred with vanguardism, another ‘Leninist’ term. Independent initiative is sometimes described as federalism, the opposite of democratic centralism and something to be wary of. Even in Lenin’s controversial What is to be Done the reorganisation of the party as a collective of professional revolutionaries dedicated to distributing newspapers, posters, leaflets and on, was meant to encourage independent initiative: the ultimate aim being a simultaneous (or practically simultaneous) uprising among the diverse and dispersed people suffering under the Russian Empire.

But step into our time again, a party whose point of differentiation is it’s own internal organisation is a step away from a party that exists to perpetuate itself.

David Cameron in calculated insult to logic

And all those who practice such a quaint art. From a heavily armed bunker in Chicago he said:

It's not for me to say what Greek parties should and shouldn't stand on and how the Greek elections should work.

I bet you 420 billion Euros the next word is "but..."

But it's very important that everyone is clear that...

Ha! I win. Sorry, you go on Dave...

But it's very important that everyone is clear that the choice Greece faces is maintaining its commitments and maintaining itself in the eurozone, or deciding that is not the path it wants to take... So this decision point, the Greek election, has got to become the moment where all of the right plans are put in place to secure the future of the eurozone currency.

The Euro was not good enough for David Cameron, though it's clearly good enough now for him to secure its future. Look, Greeks, stop spoiling things! Either you're going to vote for the sado-monetarist destruction of your society, or Cameron and co are going to put 'the right plans' in place to ensure it. That's democracy for ya!

The end of democracy

There are technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, formed to enforce austerity. They may cry tears at what they have to do, the sacrifices you have to make, but you still have to make them.

The democratic impulse is an obstacle to austerity. People don't vote to be fleeced, not generally (hence, also, the general trend of declining election participation in supposedly advanced democracies). There is active vote rigging, suppression and violence going on in Russia right now. Russia has been ruled by a former KGB agent for rather too long. According to the NAACP the American political establishment is preparing something similar:

In its report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP explores the voter suppression measures taking place particularly in southern and western states.

Fourteen states have passed a total of 25 measures that will unfairly restrict the right to vote, among black and Hispanic voters in particular.

The new measures are focused – not coincidentally, the association insists – in states with the fastest growing black populations (Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina) and Latino populations (South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee). The NAACP sees this as a cynical backlash to a surge in ethnic minority voting evident in 2008.

Barack Obama is part of that establishment. His election in 2008 chipped a small crack in the American political monolith, also known as the Southern Strategy, in short the means by which whatever way the people vote they get a solidly conservative government. However flaky his programme might have been, Obama inspired the Black and Hispanic working class to become politically active, and that is dangerous.

What is Stalinism and why does it matter?

1. Stalinism is a form of statecraft practiced in Russia somewhere between 1924 and 1953. It is a series of policies, some of which ended with Stalin's death, some of which endured. If Stalinism is this and nothing more then it is an historical curiosity.

2. Stalinism is a system of government best described as bureaucratic state capitalism, where the state is fused with the economy but the imperative is capital accumulation. Its value and necessity depends on your perspective. From the point of view of the group effectively governing Russia during the late 1920s Stalinism, as it came to be, was essential and justified. Stalinism was, from the point of view of Russian history, progressive. It made Russia into a modern society. But that's not our perspective. Capitalism is a global system, and was a global system back when the USSR was founded, even back when the Russian Revolution began. Capitalism did not need developing, it was ripe to fall. This has bearing on the 3rd point.

3. Stalinism is a political strategy whereby Communist Parties around the world were effectively agents of Russian foreign policy. This meant different things in different countries. The consistent theme was Russia need to survive and compete within the capitalist world. Though the Communist Party contained many serious revolutionaries it's political strategy was never revolutionary. Without having an Actually Existing Socialism to serve surviving Communist Parties in the core capitalist countries adapted their strategy only slightly, by positioning themselves as left social democrats, to the point where in several countries they are almost the only true surviving social democratic parties, the official social democrats having become social liberal.

4. So, ok, Stalinism is not a strategy for transcending capitalism, why does it matter? Firstly it matters for the simple, ideological point regarding all revolutions leading to tyranny/co-option. Secondly, it matters because the violent intervention from the top of Russian society around 1927/8, which created Stalinism, did lead to significant change. Can change from below compete, full democracy, self-government compete? The fact that the Russian Revolution ended up founding a bureaucratic command economy when it started as an experiment in communal democracy would suggest to some that such democracy is utopian. We can only make extrapolations from the present into the future, but there're three things worth noting:

(i) For centuries now significant mass movements that have challenged the status quo have developed communal forms of democracy, even if only in embryo. Why would a utopia keep cropping up throughout history?
(ii) The development of capitalism prepares us in part for communal democracy. An example; the republican ideal of citizenship, of popular sovereignty (even if deferred to an elected representative) means that each is able, or should be able, to take their place as head of state. This also applies (in an obviously more round-a-about way) to constitutional monarchies.
(iii) It's a sore day for humanity if it's still not capable of liberating itself. Without change from below, at this point in time, human civilisation is almost certainly doomed.