The cynics and defenders of the status quo amongst us will point
to the alleged selfish nature of the ‘average’ human; to our ignorance
and indifference to the plight of the planet and our fellow humans. Yet
people are no more nor less selfish now than they were one hundred
years ago and in theory at least, we are better informed now than at
any point in our history and, it can be argued that people are more
concerned and more moved by events, especially disasters of one kind or
another.
But of course dipping into your pocket for a donation
to your favourite ‘charity’ is not the same as taking up the political
cudgel and joining the fray, this takes a conscious act of political
will and commitment and is not without risk either personal or
financial (or both).
Yet and still, people are undoubtedly
totally fed up with the ruling political class who they mostly see as a
gang of corrupt and self-serving liars and opportunists. Worse still,
when we look around for an alternative, it’s nowhere to be seen. For
the most part, the traditional parties of the left—those that still
exist—seem to live in some kind of time warp, still battling amongst
themselves over who is the ‘more revolutionary’, using arguments that
were, in my opinion anyway, out-of-date way back when, let alone today.
More
generally, we blame the ruling elites’ control of the media, education
(or lack of it) and the increasing concentration of political power
into the hands of a tiny elite for the current state of affairs but
although the propaganda war has entered a new phase of control and
sophistication, anyone who takes the trouble to check into the past
will see that broadly speaking it’s been like this for decades.
But
who is to blame for this state of affairs? Have we not allowed
political parties, especially those with formal connections to working
people, trade unions et al, to abandon their constituencies? During the
1970s and 1980s when the Reagan/Thatcher agenda was in full swing, did
we not fall in with their ideology of greed? Have we nobody but
ourselves to blame for the destruction of all the gains we had made?
But
undoubtedly things have changed, but how and why? Some will point to
the failure of the socialist states or more generally, the failure of
the Left to come up with convincing and viable alternatives to
capitalism and undoubtedly there is a great deal of truth in this, but
it’s not the whole story. At some point, we have to look to ourselves
for not taking responsibility for our own actions or rather lack of
them.
Yet for more than two centuries prior to the last couple
of decades, people consciously struggled to take charge of their own
destinies, whether in the workplace or within their communities.
Distilling Marx’s words it came down to a battle between Capital and
Labour in one form or another even if not directly anti-capitalist.
Political involvement was a feature of life whether through membership
of a political party, trade unions and finally, voting, when we had a
choice that is.
There would appear to be a paradox at work here,
for on the one hand, the ruling class lacks credibility on a scale
almost unheard of in past times. Simply put, people do not trust the
people who rule, even more so, the political class lacks any kind of
legitimacy to justify their rule and people generally know and
acknowledge this to be the case.
And almost unheard of,
opposition to yet another imperialist war of aggression found global
opposition to it even before it had been launched. Yet in spite of this
apparently fortuitous state of affairs, once the war had been launched,
we seem to have thrown up our hands in resignation and a despondency
descended upon us even as the actions and words of our ‘leaders’ would
have, in an earlier period produced howls of incredulity and anger and
the birth of a growing movement of resistance.
How do these
bastards get away with? What has changed? It’s as if some kind of awful
spell has been cast over us that has paralysed our ability to organise
and resist.
Some argue that for the most part, we have been ‘co
opted’, persuaded that our interests are the same as those who rule us.
Yet how true is this and most importantly, even if true, how long can
it continue given that in spite of all the ‘advantages’ we have, we’re
unhappier now than we’ve ever been. Dissatisfied and unfulfilled we
cast about for answers and find none.
Moreover, it’s becoming
increasingly clear that the actions of the ruling elites has made the
world incomparably more dangerous than it’s been since the darkest days
of the ‘Cold War’ period and they threaten to expand their wars of
aggression and acquisition even as the effects of uncontrolled
capitalism threaten our very existence.
Desperate, we seek all
manner of ‘solutions’ to that which ails us (except the ones that
count), and those who rule even exploit our realisation that things
simply cannot continue as they are, but instead of telling it like it
is, they continue to lie to us about the real state affairs and indeed
suggest that we can continue to enjoy the ‘good life’ and even maintain
‘business as usual’ and deal with what is a rapidly approaching point
of no return.
Now it’s true that the mainstream media are the
main culprits in perpetrating this mass illusion but even as they
continue to deceive, there is also a general movement to reject the
lies and deceptions and to look elsewhere for answers. So even if not
expressed in concrete actions, it shows that the state and its actors
are far from omnipotent.
We also have a deeper understanding of
the nature of capitalist economics, indeed it can be argued that
analysing capitalism is an industry all on its own replete with entire
departments in universities, research groups and foundations, all
beavering away producing analyses of capitalism.
We also now
have an untold number of independent media outlets, perhaps
collectively running into the thousands, that are analysing and
reporting on the world on a daily basis, yet we still remain for the
most part, on the outside looking in.
It is perhaps this paradox
that I find the most frustrating about the current situation for it
seems that in spite of our collective knowledge of the world, we are
unable to translate it into a meaningful programme for radical change.
In
part this is due I contend to the failure of ‘our’ theoreticians to
come to terms with the post-Soviet reality, for rather than
re-embracing Marx’s lifetime endeavour to unpack the nature of
capitalism, they seek to re-invent the wheel, forever leaning on the
failures of countries like the Soviet Union and China as somehow
‘proof’ that Marx got it wrong and blaming them for our failures.
Yet
if there is one thing that reinforces our understanding of capitalism
as a system which hasn’t fundamentally changed since Marx’s time, it’s
the events of the last two decades. Unencumbered by the presence of a
rival no matter how flawed, it has resorted to the time-honoured method
of the use of brute force of the most horrendous nature to enforce the
rule of capital.
However, in order to justify a return these
methods it has had to repress domestic dissent and resistance under the
guise of the ‘war on terror’. Clearly, even if we are not aware of our
potential power, the ruling elites are, why else go to such lengths to
pre-empt challenges to their power and authority?
An excellent
piece by by David MacGregor, entitled ‘7/7 as Machiavellian State
Terror?’ sums up the current situation by comparing the current
onslaught on the people of Iraq with the Allies terror bombing raids on
the cities of Germany and Japan during WWII
‘The RAF targeted
more than a thousand German towns and cities; hundreds of thousands of
civilians were massacred. Victory over Nazi Germany was clearly
inevitable by early 1943, but the remorseless Anglo-American bombing
campaign gathered momentum until the closing weeks of the war. By May
1945 “40 percent of the seventy largest cities had been demolished,
mainly by bombing.†A.C. Grayling remarks that Anglo-American
destruction of Germany and Japan amounts to culturecide, the “concerted
smashing†of a people, its cultural heritage and collective memory.[2]
‘Destroying
cities meant—in addition to killing and traumatizing many thousands of
people—destroying monuments, libraries, schools and universities, art
galleries, architectural heritage, the cultural precipitate and the
organs of corporate life that make an identifiable society.’[3]
Aside
from the direct comparison of the methods used, both situations share a
common use of racist demonology in order to win over domestic support
for such barbaric actions.
‘You either have to castrate [the
Germans] or you have got to treat them…so they can’t just go on
reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.’
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1942.[4]
Today, we see comparisons
made between German Fascism and what has been termed ‘islamo-fascism’,
the international conspiracy to ‘destroy Western civilisation’.
It
should be obvious therefore that in one sense we have returned to an
earlier period but this time armed with weapons of even greater
devastation than those used during WWII and also armed with a
propaganda machine of even greater power that has, in a relatively
short space of time (since September 11, 2001) succeeded in instilling
a fear of the ‘other’, the best comparison being the campaign used
before and during WWII as the quote from FDR above, demonstrates.
Today’s propaganda campaign may less crude and for a number of obvious
reasons, but no less effective.
I get fed up with repeating this
message, but nevertheless, the ideology of racism is so corrosive and
destructive that it is one of the most important weapons that the
ruling elites have in their arsenal. It divides and turns working
people against working people and masks essential truths about the way
the world is controlled. Just as it was used to unite working people
against Germans and Japanese in ‘patriotic wars’, so too it is used to
justify the creation of states of xenophobia and whip up hysterical
responses, for example after 9/11 and then 7/7.
It is within
this ‘return’ to an age of unbridled imperialist barbarism dressed up
as ‘democracy-building’, that we find ourselves as socialists, trapped.
Unable to call on a ‘higher power’ as it were, we have no alternative
to offer except slogans from earlier and now defunct period, yet again
recalling yet another of Marx’s razor-edged dictum’s
‘Hegel
remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in
world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first
time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ [5]
The problem we
confront is complex for in making comparisons to an earlier period of
imperialist expansion we are inevitably compared to the socialism of
that period and indeed that’s exactly what has happened. One
alternative being used is by Chavez in Venezuela, whose call for a
‘socialism of the 21st century’ tries to avoid the linkage (without
much success it has to be said, so deeply ingrained is the virus of
anti-communism).
Let’s face it, we have to stand up and be
counted as socialists and be proud of the fact but we need a coherent
alternative that meets the needs and demands of today’s working people
who live in a world that is very different from the one my folks grew
up in even if the imperialism of yesterday finds itself reinvented in
an age of the ‘war on terror’.
What I find depressing is that in
spite of the wealth of theoretical knowledge we have at our disposal as
well as the practical experience that has been accumulated, we still
lack a viable programme for change. What does it take I ask?
Part
of the problem resides in the fact that the political process itself
has been fragmented and reduced to the level of personal actions which
manifests itself as a multitude of ‘issues’ which have no connection.
When we do act, we do so in isolation (and we do act, which points to
the fact that people are not only concerned but willing to get
involved). For example, the climate crisis has been reduced to what ‘I’
can do to minimise ‘my’ impact on the environment. The responsibility
has been shifted from the social/economic to the personal (and all the
guilt along with it) which enables the state and business to avoid
addressing the fundamental economic realities of a system which in
order to survive must continue to ‘expand’ and by expand, they mean
continue to create new markets for products that we have to be
persuaded to buy.
The current ‘debate’ over over carbon
emissions is a perfect example of the paradox of an economic system
attempting to square the circle, for on the one hand it recognises that
it’s a global problem but ultimately it retreats behind the façade of
‘competition’ between producers when what we need is cooperation not
competition, something that capitalism is structurally incapable of
doing.
This reality is further revealed by the dominant ideology
of contemporary capitalism which is essentially a neo-Darwinian
‘survival of the fittest’ approach, best exemplified by the phrase ‘let
the market decide’. Thus all human actions are reduced to nothing more
than consumption; we make ‘choices’ about what to buy, which in turn,
decides who we are, which in turn ‘even things out’ as if what we buy
will somehow produce solutions to structurally fundamental
contradictions. Thus we act in isolation merely as ‘consumers’, at best
as the ‘family unit’ and even this is collapsing under the impact of
revolutions in production, and nothing more.
The question for
socialists (at least in so-called developed economies) therefore rests
less on the traditional wealth versus poverty divide than it does on
values but this is increasingly a question also confronting the
developing world, the last bastion of the collective.
But values
also has a new and broader meaning than it had in the past. If there is
one thing that has become clear, it is that a life based solely on
consumption for its own sake is ultimately pointless except in the
pursuit of profit. At the end of the day, filling one’s life with
products produces nothing of value, merely the desire to possess more
products in the vain hope that they will satisfy a craving that
consumption can never satisfy.
Marx put it succinctly when he wrote
‘The
less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go
drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you
save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor
maggots can consume … your capital. The less you are, the less you give
expression to your life, the more you have, the greater is your
alienated life … So all passions and all activity are submerged in
greed’[6]
Capitalism is the ultimate drug, more powerful than
heroin or cocaine, all consuming from cradle to grave and sanctioned by
the state no less. Thus any alternative has to offer a set of values
that are based not on passive consumption but on active participation
in all the things that make us human just as Marx wrote.
But in
order to to achieve this we have to abandon totally an economic and
hence political system that rests on nothing more than the accumulation
of capital and from which the entire rationale for the current insanity
flows.
Marx’s famous dictum that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’[1], is never more appropriate than now. Yet in spite of the absolutely desperate state of the world, we seem to be even more removed from the political process than our ancestors were more than a century-and-a-half ago when Marx wrote it!
