Post by david

One of the triggers for my post on Ed Miliband’s “quiet crisis” (published in revised form on the Guardian’s CIF site yesterday) was a Guardian Comment by Costas Lapavitsas. Lapavitsas suggests that the “return to agriculture” in Greece is “a sure sign of social retrogression”.

We begged to differ. No doubt, those erstwhile urban proletarians resorting to this are facing many difficulties in making this move. But we reckon it raises the urgent question (or problematic) of decoupling. That is, how can we disentangle our own lives and livelihoods from the circuits of capital?

Our suggestion that this “return” might be full of potential has turned out to be one of the most controversial points in our piece. One commentator on the CIF site mentioned the Khymer Rouge and Pol Pot comments spiralled from there. (Our take on gift economies: Pol Potlatch? Seriously, we do know about Pol Pot: this is part of our generation’s soundtrack.) But it wasn’t just those contributors. Another comrade of ours wrote and said he liked the piece, except for our “return to agriculture” remarks.

Why don’t we — “the Left”, Costas Lapavitsas, the comrade who wrote — take decoupling more seriously? (A great exception is Chris Carlsson, especially in his book Nowtopia.) We’re all in favour of strikes and “industrial struggle”. But a strike was a great tactic if you were a sailor (the term originates with tars who withdrew their labour by striking sails) or a car worker. Those sailing ships carried mostly luxury goods (or human “cargo”) and no one but capital gets hurt if there are fewer cars for sale on the forecourt. But with our lives (our social reproduction) so tightly bound to markets and capital, strikes raise all sorts of problems, as nurses, teachers, ambulance drivers/paramedics and others have learned. Lorry drivers and oil-refinery and depot workers have also discovered that they have a great deal of power to disrupt capital’s circulation. Remember when the supermarket shelves were empty of bread and milk — despite wheat growing and cows grazing just a few miles away? What would happen if farmers went on strike?

I’m not suggesting we need to consider decoupling so as to reduce the industrial power of teachers, nurses, etc. That way lies the terrain of Cameron’s Big Society. I am saying we need to take these questions far more seriously. The present extent of social reproduction-capital reproduction coupling makes us all (well, the 99%) weaker: both a teacher or farmer who might strike and an “ordinary person” who needs to put food on the table and socialise their kid.

So, returning to the “return to agriculture” question. Donald Rumsfield’s “known unknowns and unknown unknowns” remark is frequently repeated. I’m going to quote an earlier US conservative and neoliberal, Ronald Reagan, though in a different context. To those who think “returning” to agriculture is a stupid idea or socially “retrogressive” or whatever, my question is, in the words of the “great communicator”:

 If not us, who?

A Quiet Crisis sounds like the title of a John Le Carré novel. At least from Le Carré we might get some real insight into the murderous logic of capital and the complicity of the British establishment, along with a good dose of well-directed cynicism. But this is Labour leader Ed Miliband’s new ‘focus’. What’s he’s talking about is a crisis of social reproduction.

In many senses, Miliband is — alas — correct. After three centuries of capitalist development and three decades of neoliberalism, our own individual and collective ability to access social wealth is so entwined with the market that capitalist crisis spells, for many of us, an inability to reproduce ourselves as 21st century humans. (‘Must the molecules fear as the engine dies?‘, ask Siliva Federici and George Caffentzis.) He’s also correct that we mostly, at least in the UK, live and experience this crisis individually, and have been pretty quiet about it. Of course, for Miliband this is just fine. The most important way for us to express ourselves is through the ballot box, with a cross next to his party’s name. And when things have got a little noisier, as with June 30’s one-day public sector strike or August’s riots, Miliband isn’t quiet in his condemnation.

On the topic of the Labour party, it’s worth noting a few debates which seem to be getting an airing. One Miliband strategist apparently argues that

the financial crisis signals the obsolescence of the neoliberal economic model and that the government’s difficulties in responding to the crisis reflect Tory and Lib Dem inability to conceive of an alternative way of structuring capitalism. Ed’s plan is to define that new structure and sell it to the country. “Building an alternative to the neoliberal settlement should be the frame for the debate within our movement” is how Lord Wood puts it. “Ripping up the rule book” is Miliband’s distilled version.

And shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander is spot-on in his suggestion that:

There are moments in politics when the common sense of the time is up for grabs. The deteriorating economic situation here in Britain, in Europe and globally means now is such a moment.

This is what we talking about two years ago in ‘Life in limbo‘ when we argued that the ‘centre cannot hold, the middle ground is broken’ — that neoliberalism had lost its ideological justification, that it simply didn’t ‘make sense’ anymore.

But, of course, these Labour party thinkers are only looking for an alternative way to structure capitalism, they’re not looking for an alternative to capitalism, an alternative way to structure society. Alexander continues:

To seize that moment … we don’t need to shout louder, but explain more. Explain what we got right and wrong before the crash, explain how we would get the economy growing and so deal with the deficit, and explain how we will deal with social justice with less money around.

Economy growth economy growth economy growth… what happened to Alexander’s challenge for ‘the common sense of the time’? Even David Cameron has acknowledged there’s more to life than GDP, FFS!

But back to Miliband’s quiet crisis and social reproduction. In Greece, of course, the crisis had been a lot louder. The cacophony of dissent from Syntagma Square and other places has been heard across Europe and beyond. (Though, according to Paul Mason, many middle-class people have been as quiet as in Britain.) In many many countries across the planet the financial and economic crisis of 2007 onwards has engendered a crisis of social reproduction. But what’s happened in Greece and a few other places is that proletarians (or ‘the 99%’ , to borrow the term of the Occupiers of Wall Street) have made their own crisis of social reproduction matter for capital. By screaming ‘WE WON’T PAY FOR YOUR CRISIS!’ they have pushed crisis back onto capital. The Greek ‘indignants’ are still very much living through crisis at the moment, but so is ‘European capital’ (I know it’s a sloppy term and quite incorrect, but I can’t think of a better one): there is now a real possibility of a break-up of the eurozone and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Europe’s largest and ‘strongest’ economy is having almost as tough a time of the Greek crisis as George Papandreou.

The other interesting thing emerging from Greece is the way people are attempting to decouple their own social reproduction from that of capital. Probably as a result of necessity as much as anything else – an example of acting in a cramped space – but full of potential nonetheless. The prime example here is the migration from city to countryside, as urban folk take up farming. I don’t really know too much about this, but perhaps from this will emerge new collective struggles for food sovereignty. What I do know is that the following paragraph, by Marxist political economist Costa Lapavitsas, sums up not only Greek’s crisis of social reproduction, but also a widespread inability to even imagine a future for humanity disentangled from capital, markets and wage labour:

The social implications have been catastrophic. Entire communities have been devastated by unemployment, losing the means to live as well as the norms, customs and respect of regular work. Barter has appeared among the poor and the not so poor. Medical services in working-class areas are running low on basic provisions. Schools and transport are disintegrating. People are abandoning cities to return to agriculture, a sure sign of social retrogression.

 

As part of a debate elsewhere, somebody asks whether the “August days of 2011 [i.e. last weekend’s rioting and looting] can be considered in terms of moments of excess”. It’s a good question.

For us a moment of excess is an intense collective experience, a moment in which we feel — viscerally — our own collective power, a moment in which we glimpse other worlds outside and beyond capitalist social relations. So in this sense there’s no doubt the nights of rioting and looting were moments of excess for many of the participants. They experienced that collective power, they took over the streets, they cocked a snoop to the “Feds” (“Annoyed that the rioters call the police ‘feds’,” tweets Ben Liddell. “What happened to proper British nicknames like old bill, pigs and filth?”), and they took according to their needs (one half of Marx’s understanding of communism).

But moments of excess aren’t “pure”; they don’t stand “outside” of capitalism. The glimpse of other worlds we get in a moment of excess is from the standpoint of where we are now, i.e. within a fucked-up, capitalist world. And there’s no doubt a lot of fucked-up stuff took place over the four nights of rioting. From relatively minor incidents, such as the robbing of the young Malaysian by people pretending to help him or the pulling of cyclists from their bicycles, to really major instances of fucked-up, anti-social behaviour — the cases of arson and the killing of the three young men in Birmingham. (More pervasively, one outcome maybe more gentrification and more concentration of capital in the retail sector.)

We’re not interested in drawing up criteria which determine whether events qualify as moments of excess, or which can categorise their content as “progressive” or “revolutionary” or “anti-social” or “reactionary” excess. There’s a  danger here of simplifying the notion of moments of excess so that they become a glimpse of some pure liberated zone, a taste of milk and honey. The streets of Tottenham, Hackney, etc. were certainly not pure liberated zones.

In many ways, for us, the more interesting question is not: what are moments of excess and how can we get into them? Rather it is: how can we get out of moments of excess? I.e. what happens afterwards, and what is the relationship between a moment of excess and “everyday life”?

And these questions are certainly the ones we need to be addressing right now.

We’re in the midst of a furious, knee-jerk reaction on the part of the British state. Cameron and the Tories are fuming, and magistrates seem to have responded with gusto to the instruction to “disregard the guidelines” and are delivering their “disproportionate” sentences. We need to be able to counter that. In large part, this will depend on what happens from the bottom up, that is, in the neighbourhoods at the heart of the unrest. Will people hunker down and hope that theirs isn’t the next door to be kicked in? Or will they organise in some way, countering the state’s age-old strategy of individualisation? (Out of 1990’s poll tax riot, for example, emerged the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign, which became a model for political activists over the subsequent two decades.)

Also interesting and important are the discursive cracks which have opened up within the Establishment — in spite of, or maybe because of, the state’s totalising clampdown. I’m not thinking so much of the Liberal Democrats’ “bonkers, bonkers, bonkers” comments — they clearly need to put some clear blue water between themselves and the Conservatives and Clegg is probably a little nervous that his own arson conviction might be brought up again.

More I’m interested in the journalists who are starting to join the dots. In BBC Radio Nottingham’s interview with Clegg, for example, the presenter, having rattled the deputy PM, says that, yes, he does feel empathy for the rioters. And here is Daily Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell:

It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

She goes on to propose social democracy as the only solution:

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution.

Here’s another Telegraph columnist, suggesting that “the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”:

Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low?paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

From the Daily Telegraph this is incredible stuff!

Perhaps, slightly less unlikely, here is Channel 4 newsreader/journalist Jon Snow, pointing out that there is “one law for the rich and another for the poor”:

There is a sense in Britain too of a widening gap in both wealth and law – that there is a that there is one law for the elite and one for the poor. Take the MPs’ and Peers’ expenses scandal. A tiny handful of the expenses abusers have gone to jail. The vast majority have been allowed to pay stuff back or retreat to the political undergrowth. How many of the looters will be allowed to bring their plasma screens and running shoes back in return for their freedom? And yet it is the very unpunished abuse of the state by its elected and unelected elite which many argue is part of the landscape that the recent riots played out across.

We are told over two and a half thousand rioters and looters have been arrested. Hundreds have been charged, some have already been punished – many cases are still in train.

Many have pointed to the reality that an even smaller handful of bankers have faced the law even than those  politicians who have been prosecuted. No British banker is in jail for what happened in 2008. And as financial upheaval cascades before us all over again, almost no serious measures have been taken to stop the same people from doing it to the people all over again.

To keep replicating that meme, I think these cracks, these discursive spaces, have opened up because neoliberalism has become zombie-like, it no longer makes sense. So we need new stories to help us make sense of our lives: it’s only if we can get a (collective) grip on what’s going on in the world, that we’ll be able to (collectively) change the world. So, it’s important that we keep the cracks open.

 

 

We’re in the midst of two enormous news stories.

First the London burning story: three nights of rioting (and counting) in the capital, spreading from borough to borough and, now, to other cities (Birmingham). What a finance type might describe as a serious case of contagion.

Second, financial meltdown 2. Plummeting share prices, a deepening of the eurozone crisis and the downgrading by a notch of US government debt (for the first time ever) from the highest ‘triple A’ rating to AA+. (The credits ratings system is quite arcane – Wikipedia’s explanation is here.)

Most of the reporting on and analysis of the riots has been (predictably) poor. Comparisons have been made with the series of inner-city riots of the early 1980s. However most of the discussion is couched in terms of ‘criminality’; few commentators have bothered to mention the economic backdrop. But it’s no coincidence that that series of riots happened during the period when neoliberalism was being imposed on Britain’s population by Thatcher’s first government, when class antagonism was most naked and when Thatcherism/neoliberalism was arguably most fragile. Now, three decades later, neoliberalism is in crisis (as we’ve argued in Turbulence, a zombie — or here for our Comment in The Guardian) and we’re seeing more riots and more unrest. A great exception is Nina Power’s piece in The Guardian.

In fact, a year or so ago, parts of Britain’s Establishment were making the connections, e.g. an ACPO spokesperson in April 2009, Nick Clegg just before the election. Of course, now their predictions have come to pass they (the ruling class) have to pull together. Restoring order is the priority.

So that’s the riots then. Now let’s move on to consider the financial maelstrom…

In fact, the turmoil in the financial markets is all part of the same, much broader story.

What the commenters say is that there are doubts whether governments can repay their debts. Exactly. Those who trade in the financial markets, particularly those who buy and sell so-called sovereign debt — basically the IOUs, known as bonds or bills, that governments issue –think that there’s a risk that governments won’t actually be able to honour these IOUs. They fear default. And because they think there’s a risk of default they’re less willing to lend to governments. To persuade the people and institutions who lend to governments to overcome their reluctance, governments must offer a little extra compensation, a higher reward. In other words governments must pay a higher rate of interest, the lenders receive a higher yield. That’s why the yields on Greek and Spanish and Portuguese and Irish (the so-called PIGS) government debt, and now Italian and Cypriot government debt, have gone sky-high. Because financial investors think there’s a high chance these governments will default and they want additional reward for taking on that risk. Yields on US government debt haven’t reached Mediterranean levels, but nevertheless, they believe there’s a slightly higher risk — the reason why on Friday Standard and Poor’s (one of the three rating agencies) downgraded US government bonds from AAA to AA+.

So far so orthodox. But why the doubts? Why do ‘the markets’ fear that governments won’t be able to repay their debts? Because, to do so, governments must either increase their revenue (raise taxes) or reduce spending (make cuts). As we know, most governments are ruling out meaningful tax increases on the wealthy (individual rich people) and on capital (corporations), preferring instead to attempt to impose austerity. But this is where they’re running into trouble, particularly in southern Europe. Essentially governments aren’t able to impose as much austerity as ‘the markets would like’. And that’s because of class struggle — the occupations, the demonstrations, the social unrest, that we’ve been witnessing over the past couple of years.

And from here, we can travel north again, to this weekend’s rioting in London. Nick Clegg today claimed that ‘the international debt crisis vindicates the coalition government’s decision to prioritise cutting Britain’s budget deficit’:

Clegg insisted the crisis showed why the government was right to introduce sweeping spending cuts in a bid to eliminate the UK’s structural deficit by 2015.

“All governments around the world need to get to grips with their public finances and, at the same time, to put in place the long-term reforms that create growth and prosperity for millions of people around the world,” he said.

“If anyone had any doubt about the need for this coalition government first to come together in the national interest in times of great economic uncertainty and then to get on top of our public finances, I think that recent events should demonstrate the necessity of the steps that we took last year.”

Clegg is saying here that the British government has done — or is attempting to do — what the governments of the PIGS (and more) haven’t managed. The ‘recent events’ he’s referring to are the financial crises. But the recent — and ongoing — events on the streets of Britain’s capital may demonstrate that Clegg’s hubris may be premature.

At the moment, financial investors are betting that ‘the U.K. will remain insulated from the fiscal crises roiling the U.S. and the euro region‘ — yields on British government debt (known as ‘gilts’) have fallen over the past few days, indicating that ‘the markets’ do not currently fear British default. But over the next days, weeks and months, we should keep as close an eye on these indicators as on the ‘street’. The City is not apart from the city.

Documenting the revolution sounded like an easy thing, but what is the revolution? When did it start? When did it end? What constitutes participation in the revolution – is it only those who went down to Tahrir, or is it also the doctors who worked extra-long hours in their hospitals to treat the wounded? What about a police officer who fought the protesters – is he a part of the revolution or not?

It is people who make history, not generals or leaders.

The question of access to information and archives is political, because reading history is interpreting history, and interpreting history is one way of making it. Closing people off from the sources of their own history is an inherently political gesture, and equally opening that up is a political – even revolutionary – act.

This was a leaderless revolution, and one which came about through mass participation. The way we write history now has to be part of the same process, and so does the way we access that history. That for me is as much a part of the revolution as anything else.

Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy, quoted in ‘The struggle to document Egypt’s revolution‘, The Guardian, 15.07.2011.

A few days ago the following post appeared on the website of the Class War Federation.

The Class War Federation is no more.

Given our inability to continue to function at an organisational level and the huge amount of debt that the organisation finds it self in we have no choice but to formally dissolve the group.

Given that we only have 5 paid up members it is the decision of the five of us to end our association and in doing so end the project known as Class War.

Déjà vu? 14 years ago, we were members of the Class War Federation and were part of a faction that successfully argued for its dissolution. As it turned out, a rump continued… and following changes in membership which I’ve had no interest in following, it looks like the last remaining few have finally decided to call it a day.

In fact our reasons for dissolving Class War were neither organisational nor financial. (At least not organisational in the sense that we weren’t able to carry on the day-to-day tasks on maintaining the organisation’s structures, producing a paper, etc., though these tasks were frequently onerous.) Our reasons were political. In short, we decided that Class War was incapable of making sense of the changed social and political terrain of Britain in the 1990s. It was incapable of understanding new movements, such as Reclaim the Streets and the anti-roads struggles more generally, not to mention the problematics and possibilities opened up by the Zapatistas.

As part of this project we produced what we hoped would be a final issue of Class War the paper and organised a national conference — May Day ’98, held in Bradford — inviting various anarchists, anti-authoritarian communists, militant environmental activists and others for three days of discussion. With the decision to dissolve Class War and the production of the final issue of the paper, we’d done a lot of soul-searching and been very self-critical. But we reckoned that the problems we’d identified weren’t just ours — they applied to most if not all of the groups on ‘the left’ (including the anarchist ones) — and we hoped that others would question their own political practices too.

We probably had some success and the discussion at May Day ’98 was intense and, I think, productive. But others used Class War’s dissolution as an invitation simply to stick the boot in some more. We’d been self-critical, but this wasn’t enough for many on the left and there were several ‘and another thing’ type attacks which seemed to be written from pure positions of certainty. One example was ‘Death of a Paper Tiger‘, published in Aufheben, and linked to again in the libcom discussions on Class War’s second death.

In the last 14 years, arguments about Class War seem to keep cropping up on forums like LibCom. I’ve tended to steer clear and when I have dipped in I’ve been pretty unimpressed. (A recent post complained about the skull-and-crossbones logo, comparing it to the SS insignia.) In fact, rereading ‘Death of a Paper Tiger’, for example, I’m struck with how weak it is — its analysis, never mind its patronising and uncomradely introductory note: ‘But we do recognize that some people joined Class War out of a sincere desire to challenge this society and did some good things to further that goal while in Class War.’ I remember agreeing with much of the article at the time — and I still do agree with many of its criticisms of CW — but it fails to seriously address any of the what I’d today call problematics that Class War was wrestling with.

But this enduring fascination with Class War is itself fascinating. [A few years ago I did a talk at a meeting in Lund, Sweden and the organiser asked if I could put Class War in its title as this would attract a bigger audience — even though it was a decade since I’d been involved. And the first question was about Class War.] So, it might, after all these years, be worth putting down some of our thoughts on the subject… I’m making no attempt at any sort of nuanced, critical analysis of Class War — that can wait for another post. Instead I want to make some notes on what was good and important about Class War.

Working-class identity politics?

Quite a common criticism of Class War is that it glorified working-class identity, and a particular type of working-class identity. E.g. in the recent discussion somebody posted:

They’ve never been a class struggle group, it’s always been identity politics – worse, one based on a caricature.

Well… there’s identity and there’s identity politics, and there’s anti-identity. (Deleuze and Guattari, John Holloway and Sub-Commandante Marcos have all offered insights on this in various places.) Asserting I am black [or a Jew or a woman or queer]— and proud of it is not equivalent to saying I am white [or Aryan or a man or straight] and proud of it. And the ‘inequivalence’ of such pairs depends on the context — the time and place. The first statement can often be understood as anti-identitarian as it challenges the position of the dominant, majority identity. (‘Majority’ used here in way Deleuze and Guattari use it. I.e. male identity is majority desite woman making up slightly more than half of the population; white identity majority in apartheid South Africa.) In 1980s Britain, the majority identity was middle-class — it still is, of course, but in the 1980s this represented a break from the earlier, Keynesian, more collectivist era. Thatcher introduced the idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’ and policy of allowing council-house tenants to buy their homes. Having a mortgage meant being/becoming middle-class.

Of course, nobody wants to be working-class; we all want to escape the relation to capital, to work, to money, etc. that being working-class implies. As Holloway puts it somewhere in Change the World Without Taking Power the working class is better understood as an anti-working anti-class: this is Marx and Engels’ point about the working class abolishing itself. But this escape must be collective if the class (and classes) are to be abolished. With neoliberalism’s/Thatcherism’s attack on working-class organisation, the discourse that escape could only be individual became deafening. [As the author of ‘Death of a Paper Tiger’ writes, ‘Class War [was] the bastard child of Thatcherism’. Well, yes, of course. Anti-capitalist struggles and capitalism always develop in relation to one-another. It’s always possible to say this struggle is the product of that policy or that that policy was proposed in response to this struggle. Substituting ‘bastard child’ for ‘product’ makes it sound more of criticism, without much changing the meaning.] So, given this context, attempting to promote a strong working-class identity is not necessarily a bad thing to do. ‘Death of a Paper Tiger’ again: ‘Class War responded by publicising themselves as the defenders of the traditional working class values of these communities’. Values like solidarity and mutual aid?

Reversal of class perspective

It’s true that Class War frequently seemed to promote a particular type of working-class identity, maybe at times a ‘caricature’, as charged above. But really, what it was trying to do was represent the working class as ‘proud and menacing’. Here Class War was simply following the advice of the ‘father of Italian workerism‘ Mario Tronti in 1980: ‘As a matter of urgency we must get hold of, and start circulating, a photograph of the worker-proletarian that shows him as he really is — “proud and menacing”.’ In the context of the British political landscape this was an enormously important shift. In the mid-’80s (when Class War was formed), particularly during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, almost all of the left depicted the working class as victims and as passive, whilst anarchism tended to be dominated by pacifists. Class War challenged both: the working class is an active subject in the making of history, and sometimes that history involves violence. And what better expression of the reversal class perspective than the aphorism used on the masthead of Class War for several years: ‘The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise’. (Variously attributed to Max Stirner, Bakunin and James Connolly.)

Bash the rich

Capital is a social relation. It’s an abstract dynamic, what Marx called a ‘real abstraction’. Of course, Class War didn’t understand this, choosing instead to personify this social relation by attacking the police, bosses, the royal family and ‘the rich’. But the social relation is asymmetric, in a couple of ways. It’s asymmetric in the sense that capital needs and will always need labour — that is, the living human beings that become labour in the capital relation. But, we, as human beings, don’t need capital. This asymmetry is in our favour. But it’s also an asymmetric relation in that when a capitalist enterprise fails those who work for it may lose their whole livelihood: when workers lose their jobs, they may also lose their homes as well. But a capitalist’s risk — or liability — is nearly always limited. In fact, the legal concept of limited liability is one of capitalism’s most important ‘innovations’. A shareholder-capitalist may walk away from a bankrupt business and its debts, losing only the value of his or her shares, with profits securely banked — creditors, who nearly always include workers owed unpaid wages, may end up with nothing.

In this context, trying to personify the relation, however imperfectly or theoretically incorrectly, can be enormously powerful and liberating. Attacks on capitalists say: we won’t let you forget you’re a human being too; you cannot limit your liability; we will make you liable. As we wrote in ‘Six impossible things before breakfast‘:

For us, one of the most liberating moments in the 1980s was the way that anarchist politics gave names (and addresses) to the people who dominate our lives. It broke the rules of the game. It rejected the power imbalance between rich and poor, the asymmetry of a world where profits are privatised but loss is always socialised. (Look at the current credit crisis: whilst the ‘subprime’ poor are being turfed onto the streets, top bankers are selling third homes or luxury yachts.) In a bizarre way, naming the rich re-asserts a common humanity by denying them the ability to hide behind limited liability companies, off-shore tax havens, and multi-layered management. It is an echo of Lucy Parsons in 1885 when she said ‘Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.’

It’s funny because, in some ways, the more we stress that capital is a social relation, the more we reinforce the continual process of fetishisation essential to capital’s reproduction. The executive relocating a factory to somewhere where wages are lower, the manager sacking a worker, the politician cutting a service all claim their hands are tied, there’s no alternative, they’re just obeying the laws of the market… and we, when we discourse on capital’s logic, the ‘laws’ of capitalist development, etc. quite frequently agree: yes, your hands are tied, you have no alternative, you’re just obeying the laws of the market! But paraphrasing Wildcat, bosses do a difficult job in difficult circumstances… and that’s why we hate them. Part of our role as anti-capitalist militants is to attempt to defetishise the capital relation, i.e. locate the human content in it. Personifying/naming the enemy is one way of doing this.

Resonance

Finally, much of what Class War said and did seemed to resonate. As an organised group I don’t think Class War ever numbered more than a hundred or so members, probably far fewer active members. But the ideas expressed in Class War must have struck a chord, even inspired, many many more people, even if they didn’t actually mobilise them. Something would happen somewhere, some action, institigated by people with no formal connection to Class War as an organisation. But asked who they were, the response would come: “We’re Class War!”

As the Greek crisis develops and spreads, threatening to become a Europe-wide sovereign debt crisis, I thought the following line from The Economist‘s editorial on the matter (‘Acropolis now’, 1 May 2010) is worth noting:

When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion.

Another piece in the same issue is entitled ‘The cracks spread and widen’, which reminds me of John Holloway’s new book Crack Capitalism. One of the reasons financial investors are unwilling to purchase Greek debt — now rated below ‘investment grade’, i.e. ‘junk’ — is because they fear ‘Greece will not be able to stomach the programme of budgetary and economic reform which the IMF is due to set out in early May, and on which the euro-zone rescue funds will depend’. The Economist is talking about struggle.

I’ve been thinking about some of the issues around events in Greece and also ‘public concern’ over government debt in many other countries, including here in the UK where all three main parties are promising austerity in order to sort out the ‘public finances’. From the perspective of the financial markets, the number everybody’s talking about is the spread on bond yields between Greek government debt and that issued by the German central bank. The spread — or premium — is essentially the difference in interest rates. At the moment, financial investors are demanding a premium of almost four and a half percentage points for Greek 10-year bonds over 10-year bunds. Put the other way round, while at the moment the German government pays an interest rate of about 3% on its new borrowing, the Greek government must pay 7.4%. Investors are demanding this higher yield — this premium — because they fear sovereign default, i.e. there’s a risk the Greek government won’t be able to repay and investors want some reward for taking on this additional risk they won’t get their money back. (Of course, investors fear sovereign default because of the ‘structural’ problems in the Greek economy — low productivity, too generous social entitlements, etc. — and the fact that, so far, Greek workers are resisting attempts at ‘structural readjustment’.)

The problems don’t just affect Greece. Portugal, Ireland and Spain have all been mentioned. But also Britain. Britain’s public debt is almost at the level of its GDP and, if it continues on its present trajectory, debt will rise to more than five times the level of annual output by 2040. This is ‘unsustainable’. In the words of three Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ bank) economists: ‘the question is when markets will start putting pressure on governments, not if’. These economists are talking about investors demanding higher yields — increasing the interest rates that governments must pay to borrow money. The circle is a vicious one, because higher interest rates mean the burden of higher interest payments and an ever-worsening fiscal position — in the absence of what the BIS economists call a ‘fiscal consolidation programme’.

There’s a lot to said about ‘market discipline’ (what it means for ‘the markets’ to ‘put pressure’ on entities like governments or populations), as well as about struggles around structural adjustment and austerity. What I’ve started thinking about is capital’s flight. Capital flees Greece or threatens to flee Greece, unless it receives that premium. Capital is threatening to flee Britain — and the ratings agencies are warning the UK may lose its AAA credit rating, which would herald higher interest rates, again a premium reflecting a slightly higher chance of sovereign default. But this fleeing capital… Where’s it gonna run? It can’t all wind up in Germany (the ‘strongest’ EU economy)? What about China? Some of it’s taking refuge in gold, whose price (now at more than $1,100 per ounce) has risen three-fold over the past decade. The problem with gold, of course, is that it isn’t productive in any way: it’s a ‘store of value’, but the only ‘rate of return’ it produces is a result of its rising price (kind of like housing) and it certainly doesn’t contribute to the production of value and surplus value, through the exploitation of human labour — the lifeblood of capital.

So we have a story of flight. Following the crises of the 1970s, capital fled the factories of the First World. It headed South, to Latin America and Africa, so stoking the international debt crisis of the ’80s. Then it fled some more. To China, to India and other ’emerging markets’. It also sought refuge in finance, seeking a return from and a safer haven in government debt, in household debt and so on. But the present crisis has forced it to flee some more. What I’m wondering is: first, where can capital flee to next? second, if capital is fleeing, are we chasing; can we ‘chase it out of Earth, send it to outer space’? And third, how useful to our struggle is this story?

It’s funny how quickly and unexpectedly things can move. I’ve obviously thinking of the MPs’ expenses scandal, which seems to spiraling out of control. It’s also hard to know how to act in these situations. In one sense the obvious “thing to do” is to try to deepen this crisis of legitimacy (of MPs and of parliament) into a crisis of governance — linking this crisis with economic crisis, climate crisis, etc. But how? But perhaps these linkages are already obvious. Perhaps that’s exactly why this scandal has become a crisis. There’s also the risk that you say or suggest something only to discover that the Daily Telegraph or the Taxpayers’ Alliance has already said it. Strange bedfellows indeed. But that’s exactly why the crisis is interesting and, to some extent, why it’s out of control. Because it may carry the Telegraph and its readers (and us) to some very unexpected places, places they (and us?) are not at all comfortable being in.

I’ve been away for the past week and not keeping up. But I woke up yesterday to discover that, not only will Gordon Brown probably be ousted as Labour party leader and prime minister (wholly expected), but also that senior Labour party figures (including Brown’s likely replacement) are talking seriously about replacing the present “first-past-the-post” electoral system with some form of proportional representation. What?! Outfits such as Charter 88 have been going on about this for ages — since 1988 — and it’s never seemed remotely likely. Why would either Conservatives or Labour give up a system that so clearly works in their favour? But now, it seems, the political class reckons offering such a radical constitutional change is necessary in order to appease an angry population. I’m no big fan of PR, of course, and I’m certainly not suggesting The Free Association transforms itself into a political party and stands a candidate at the next election. But a lot of political groups will stand candidates. This and debates around constitutional change may well open up space — space that might quickly get closed down, just as the very offer of PR is itself an attempt to limit some unknown potential that may or may not exist at the moment, but space that might take us to other space and other places.

I’ve been reading Subcomandante Marcos’s Conversations with Durito and I came across this lovely insight, which suggests — amongst so many other things — the double-articulation of social movements:

Scratched on the other side, a mirror stops being a mirror and becomes a piece of glass. Mirrors are for seeing on this side, and glass is for seeing what’s on the other side.

Mirrors are for scratching.

Glass is for shattering… and crossing to the other side…

A few years ago we commented (in Moments of Excess) that tactics of militant protest and direct action seemed to have spread, been usurped or hijacked even, by other rather dubious campaigns, such as the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice. We then dismissed ‘militant lobbying’ and went on to talk about constitutive politics. Certainly both the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice were pretty marginal campaigns in the grand scheme of things. But we might now be witnessing the emergence of more worrying movements… of activists arguing for austerity.

There is certainly this tendency within climate change politics. The group Plane Stupid calling for more taxes on aviation and an end to short-haul flights, for example. Yeah, the growth in aviation’s an environmental problem. But occupying the offices of EasyJet, for heaven’s sake? Is aviation more of a problem when flights are ‘cheap’, i.e., when poorer people fly?

Or take George Monbiot who, at 2007’s climate camp by Heathrow, called for a stronger state to manage climate change and suggested ‘we’ might have to put down anti-austerity riots. Apparently we heard this wrong. In fact, Monbiot was calling for ‘us’ to ‘riot for austerity’! That’s even better. It’s what he said in 2004, according to a BBC report:

People don’t riot for austerity; they riot because they want more, not less. We have to riot for less.

Apparently inspired by Monbiot, there is now a group called Riot for Austerity, the ‘90% reduction project’.

(We’re already trying to engage with this stuff: our article on antagonism and a blog post or two; a presentation we’ve made at The Common Place and at climate camp, responses to Monbiot at climate camp. Hopefully one of us will get about to posting something about our climate camp experiences this year.)

But climate change isn’t the only looming crisis. Economists and policy-makers are increasingly worried about so-called global imbalances and the United States’ ‘twin deficits’: the fiscal deficit (the excess of government spending over government revenues) and the trade deficit (the difference between spending on imports of goods and services and export revenues). ‘America is consuming more than it produces’, ‘Americans are living beyond their means’ are the soundbites.

The twin deficit problem is real. Both deficits have been steadily getting bigger over the past three decades. The fiscal deficit is now about $9.5 trillion c $31,600 for every US resident or two-thirds of annual GDP. (If you include ‘unfunded entitlements’ such as Social Security and Medicare, the figure nudges $53 million or $175,000 per person.) For years, economists have been going on about heavily-indebted poor countries, an important enough concern for them to have their own acronym, HIPC. The United States is now a heavily-indebted rich country. The annual trade deficit is now about 9 percent of GDP. Economists and politicians are in a tizz about that too, blaming ‘China’ or ‘Mexico’.

Some pundits are talking about four deficits. A third is the savings deficit: since the 1980s, the household savings rate –-the difference between income and spending – has been declining and is now hovering around zero. Basically, the average American spends everything they earn and many spend way more than they earn, i.e. their savings rate is negative. The fourth deficit is a ‘leadership deficit’: because politicians and other ‘leaders’ have allowed these other three deficits to emerge and get out of hand.

There’s lots of reasons for all of this and lots of contradictions. The US Treasury has been able to borrow money easily (and thus finance the fiscal deficit) because the US dollar remains the global reserve currency: other nation-states’ monetary authorities – particularly those of ‘developing’ countries – still wish to hold US dollar-denominated assets, such as US Treasury bills. Given this demand for dollars, the US Treasury only has to pay low interest rates and there’s an ample supply of money flowing into the country to balance the net outflows on the trade account. Former World Bank chief economist turned critic Joseph Stiglitz writes of money ‘flowing uphill, from the poor to the rich’. This persistent demand for dollars also means the value of the dollar remains high so imports are cheap and Americans are able to buy more imported goods and services, which contributes to the trade deficit problem. And the relatively low interest rates means it’s cheaper and easier to borrow money and people are less likely to save.

But let’s leave some of this economics behind and look a little deeper. Since the 1970s – oil price ‘shocks’, global recession, etc. – real wages (including social wages) have been falling in the United States and throughout most of the planet. Austerity. But, to some extent, Americans have been able to defend their living standards by getting more into debt. Low interest rates and rising property prices – the property bubble – have both helped. (If your house rises in value, even if the mortgage company owns most of it, you can borrow more money against its value.) Result: rising deficits. But the fact that the US working class has been able to defend its standard of living to this extent also means there hasn’t been enough austerity. Economists continue to bemoan the ‘structural weaknesses’ of that economy and the ‘adjustments’ that are required.

But all of this is what you’d expect of economists and policy-wonks. What’s more interesting is some of the public discourse.

The Concord Coalition has been around since 1992. Apparently it’s ‘a nationwide, non-partisan, grassroots organization advocating fiscal responsibility’. The Coalition has recruited chief executives and economists from establishment think-tanks like the Brookings Institution to its cause and is currently running a ‘Fiscal Wake-Up Tour’, that involves ‘public figures and thinkers with diverse perspectives traveling the country to discuss our nation’s budgetary challenges and entitlement problems’. (Note: ‘entitlement problems’ basically means the social wage is too high.) All this might be similar Margaret Thatcher’s intellectual guru, Keith Joseph, who toured Britain in the late 1970s trying to popularise free-market (neoliberal) ideas, but on a much larger scale. The Coalition has just produced a film, I.O.U.S.A., which, according to both Reuters and The Economist, may ‘be to the US economy, what An Inconvenient Truth was to the environment’

A more recent group, set up last year by four students, is Concerned Youth of America. Like the Concord Coalition they are concerned about the rising deficits and ‘fiscal irresponsibility’:

Across this country, young adults are looking to the 2008 presidential candidates for a change of policy and for fiscal responsibility. We will no longer support the culture of deficit spending and pork barrel legislation. The youth of America will have to bear that burden, crippling our future and America’s economic might.

Over two-and-a-half centuries after colonists fought for their rights against an oppressive British Empire, American youth are facing the scourge of “taxation without representation” once more. Even though we did not enact the current spending polices, we will have to pay for them through our taxes. Through the burgeoning federal debt, a malignant tumor has grown as a result of irresponsible fiscal policy at the highest levels of our government. Debts accumulated to pay for bloated and inefficient entitlement programs and the War in Iraq will have to be paid for not by the current leadership, but by us, the youth of America.

The irresponsible spending policies of today will weaken the American economy if not stopped.

…

As today’s leaders, businessmen, parents, and grandparents age and retire, their children and grandchildren will have to bear the burden of a bloated debt. Those children will face high taxation to service exploding interest payments. By allowing this disastrous spending to continue, they condemn their children to live without American economic strength. They condemn their children to live under a government unable to care for its citizens. Paying the interest on the debt alone will leave our nation impotent, helpless to fund worthwhile programs, and captive to our lenders.

…

This is not an issue of large government or small government, conservatism or liberalism, Democrat or Republican. This is an issue of America’s future. Our position is simple: the generation with power, especially the next president, must maintain fiscal responsibility at all times. The next president must spend only what the government collects in revenues, while only deficit spending during recessions and emergencies. Not only is this a fair position. For America’s youth, it is a necessary one.

Of course, some of this makes sense. CYA want to save themselves from ‘crushing debt’ and there’s little doubt Latin American and African proletarians were crushed by debt following the international debt crisis of the 1980s (Latin America’s ‘lost decade’)… except in the wake of that debt crisis, many Latin American and African governments were encouraged to take on more debts. Their recalcitrant populations were crushed by ‘adjustment’ imposed – sometimes literally – at gunpoint. And we also have to understand that many of those governments only took on debt in the first place in order to meet or neutralise local demands. A similar story to current US indebtedness?

But essentially CYA are arguing for austerity. I think this might be a terrain we may need to start fighting on much more seriously.