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The Financial Times Asks For Socialist Policies
On the same day the British Labour party announced the election of a center-rightt new party leader to replace the much denigrated socialist Jeremy Corbyn, the Financial Times(!) calls for the socialist policies Corbyn had planned to implement.
From today's FT editorial headlined:
Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract (also here)
If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone.
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Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need to put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.
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Amen to that.
There was a time when I regularly bought the FT weekend edition to the read the economic discussions in it. The weekend edition also has a section that is titled "How to spend it". The newest luxury cars are tested and the greatest estates are discussed in it. I never had a craving to buy any of the things that section promoted. I thought that the snobbish section title was probably meant to be ironic.
Now the FT has finally found the right content for that section.
This editorial is a sea change. We will quite soon experience more of it.
The Starmer accession is very easily explained. The Labour Party in the UK has two bases, the Trade Unions and the local government electoral machines.
The Unions are almost totally corrupted, the largest and wealthiest, rather like those in the US, are highly bureaucratised, work with government all the time, never strike, spend most of their energies preventing members from annoying their bosses. And are deeply invested in the neo-liberal status quo, despite/because of the fact that they have almost no power left except that to work for the state/employers.
These Unions, headed by people who-for the most part- are well educated careerists almost indistinguishable from corporate managers, hated Corbyn and all that he stood for: they feared being pushed by members into confrontations with the government that they had no stomach for. They feared losing, through fines and court assessed damages, the vast reserves, property, ‘strike funds’ that they controlled. They were Generals in an army that feared war above everything, the defeated leaders of an occupied territory, who, like the PLA, follow the Occupiers’ instructions to the letter and squash all signs of resistance and militancy among the rank and file.
And then there are local electoral machines. Their main strength lies in their control of local government, which involves not only much patronage but constant liaison and co-operation with the the Central government-the source of all money and power- and businesses. Labour local authorities are constantly involved in property development, re-development and gentrification programmes, in which millions of pounds are at stake. They sell and purchase public property, approve licenses and planning permissions. And they employ thousands of people, as well as choosing contractors and sub-contractors.
Such people have very little interest in substantial reform or transformation let alone revolutionary change. And then, there is the important fact that they are very well paid, collect self authorised expenses and have nothing to do to earn their wealth except follow the instructions of those to whom they defer. In theory this includes the electorate. In practice ‘forget it.’
It was the extraordinary corruption of the Labour machines which led to the Party’s collapse in Scotland and Wales. It was part of the reason that the “Red Wall” collapsed in the North last year too.
Corbyn was elected because after Blair and Brown had shown themselves to be completely bankrupt of ideas, the membership had been reduced to its lowest ever levels. The Corbyn campaign led to the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic supporters ready for change. They overwhelmed the right wingers not only in numbers but in ideas. Corbyn wasn’t very radical- he didn’t have to be to seem so against the background of ‘New’Labour’s combination of support for Imperialism and fervent belief in capitalism- but he was engaging and open to suggestions. And the masses, particularly young people, were eager for change. Corbyn had the appeal of old Cobbett in that the change he offered was packaged as a restoration of a stolen inheritance- the NHS, nationalised, public service, utilities and transit, the restoration of Union rights. The rights of the freeborn Englishman in the Welfare State era.
“We want great change” he might have said adding, in reassurance, “but we want nothing that is new. Nothing that my generation did not grow up with-, for example free education in comprehensive schools, free tuition and living allowances at University..”
To a population struggling against a half century of counter attacks by the capitalist class, cutting living standards, reducing economic and legal protections, smashing the manufacturing industries in order to sell of the pieces and to break the working class, a population reduced to begging for work, no longer assured of the basic necessities-housing, heat, income, security- and unprotected, Corbyn’s Labour Party offered a glimmer of hope. Thus it was that in 2017 it came within a few hundred well distributed votes of winning the election.
Not that that could have led to very much: the Labour caucus was overwhelmingly opposed to him and his policies. As the last two years showed there was never any chance that those policies could have passed Parliament- the Blairites would have seen to that.
But what happened to the “largest socialist party in Europe”? The answer is that its new members, mostly young and inclined to believe in ‘leadership’, were easily manipulated. The organisation with which most of them identified, Momentum was actually a privately owned corporation, impervious to democracy and dominated by a capitalist with Zionist affinities. Any chance that Corbynism might last was dashed when Momentum and some of Corbyn’s closest associates took two crucial decisions at the Liverpool policy conference- the first was to veto the idea of allowing local party members to kick out MPs that they didn’t like and select new candidates. The other was to approve a definition of anti-semitism so loose that virtually anyone could be suspended and expelled from membership on the grounds of anti-semitism. Of course most who were expelled were Jews and almost all were people with long records of anti-racist policies.
This didn’t matter because money- thousands of office holders’ salaries, tens of thousands of patronage jobs, hundreds of millions in contracts, enormous fees from lenders taking part in “Private Public Financing” scams and control over untold wealth in the form of public property,- money, was at stake. And the local politicians and their machines were perfectly placed to fill the membership lists of the party with the names of thousands of people, most likely religious congregations and ethnic organisations who, when the election came, could be instructed who to vote for.
I would not be surprised at all if some people actually got paid for their votes. I would be very surprised if a large number of religious leaders- local temple or church organisers- and the heads of clubs, as well as Union leaders do not see themselves as holders of IOUs signed by Sir Keith.
The good news is that a party of the sort that Starmer is bound for rapid self destruction. The PASOK model is far from unique. The French Socialist Party has descended from control of the Presidency to virtual disappearance within a few years. The SPD is, well, perhaps someone can tell us what the other half of the German coalition is. And what its long term prospects are.
The left in the UK doesn’t have a choice any more- it has no future in Starmer’s party, the expulsions will soon begin. It is going to have to organise anew the movement from which it sprung. This will include local socialist associations and opposition to elected politicians, but it will also include new syndicalist union organising and the defence of workers fighting for their lives, livelihoods and human dignity. It will involve real international solidarity, and for the best of reasons: without workers uniting internationally, they face only defeat. It will involve complete hostility towards imperialism and militarism. And it will begin with the formation of Palestine solidarity action.
This is the story of capitalist society, the class struggle: defeats shaken off, victories, betrayals, errors, victories again. Epochal defeats, such as the Miners’ Strike. The learning of lessons- the development of political consciousness, struggle. And, eventually a new world of freedom, brought into the world wet with the blood of martyrs
Posted by: bevin | Apr 5 2020 15:34 utc | 143
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