The word 'tragedy' is over-used in politics. But if has application anywhere it is surely to the journey from the high-point of Syriza's election - here was the socialist left getting an electoral mandate in a European country - to this week's climb down. An austerity package, the price of liquidity exacted by the EU institutions, will mean misery for millions, rising unemployment, stagnant wages, and may well not succeed even in the ECB's own terms. It should be seen, at least in part, as the punishment of an electorate for daring to elect a left-wing government and for voting 'no' in the referendum. It is a warning shot across the bow of voters in other countries, Spain and Ireland for instance - don't even try it...
There is resistance in Greece. Workers struck and marched yesterday. Thirty two Syriza MPs, including four ministers, voted against the bailout terms. These deserve our solidarity. More than that, such is the ferocity of the austerity that will now be unleashed that material support is essential. Please support Medical Aid for Greece.
There are lessons to be learned from Greece. Power in capitalist societies does not rest solely, or even primarily, with parliaments. Any serious challenge to capital will be met by extra-parliamentary action on the part of the capitalist class. They will use their newspapers, their money, and the international institutions that defend their interest, such as the institutions of the EU. Any left-wing government serious about implementing even moderate reforms is likely to be forced to break with those institutions. But more importantly, it needs to able to rely on extra-parliamentary action of its own. It is only the power of workers to withdraw our labour, to take control, and to unify internationally that is ultimately able to stand up to capital.
And that means that even at a time when we in the UK are rightly upbeat about happenings in parliament - Jeremy Corbyn's success and Mhairi Black's rallying call - we cannot focus all our energies there. Without a mass workers movement, militant trade unions and protest groups, and without a widespread commitment to socialist ideas and values, we might have the best MPs imaginable, but we will fail. The Greek electorate put a Marxist in the finance ministry. In the months that follow they will watch their hospitals close and their pensioners go hungry. There's been a lot of talk of a British Syriza. That is the last thing we need.
Ten years ago today I was at home. A plumber was doing some work on the boiler. As the horrible events of the morning unfolded I, like other Londoners, became aware of them gradually. Partial, confused information, began coming in. The plumber couldn't contact his wife, who was in central London; the mobile networks were down. The radio started reporting that something had happened: perhaps it was an electrical fire. The subsequent blasts made it clear that this wasn't the case. News of casualties came, then images - we were by this time glued to the television, fixated on pictures that had an uncanny quality. Here was the city we knew, loved, and worked in; so familiar, yet so utterly different.
The feeling was one of utter confusion; nobody knew what would happen next. The media reflected this : armed police had drawn their weapons outside the Downing Street gates, what was going on? Rumours and misinformation spread - someone had been shot at Canary Wharf, my neighbours falsely claimed. Finally, as thousands of commuters struggled to get home across a city whose public transport was shut down, the grim realisation of the extent of what had happened began to settle in. The skies were eerily quiet, all planes had been diverted; millions of Londoners were similarly stunned into silence. This was an attack that was felt.
That was the thing about 7th July 2005. Its initial impact was to unify. Against those sections of the left who cannot see an outbreak of the collective with any popular purchase without sniffing reaction in the wings, this was something to celebrate, the human determination breaking through an otherwise relentless darkness. The shared grief, the shared efforts of emergency and tube workers (will we remember the latter when they are demonised for striking tomorrow?), the collective resolve of those struggling to walk home in their office shoes. It was a spirit captured by Ken Livingstone's response, surely his finest moment. Our response, he said, must be unified. This was an assault on working class people, of all faiths. We must not allow ourselves to be divided. In terms that stand as a marker of the extent to which attitudes to migration hardened in the subsequent decade, he ended:
In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports
and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack,
you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around
the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their
dreams and achieve their potential.
They choose to come to London,
as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to
live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They
flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want
that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that
flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in
harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you
will fail.
What followed, on the part of central government and security agencies, was the systematic negation of the attitude proposed by Livingstone. One person fitting Livingstone's description of someone coming to London to live their life was Jean Charles de Menezes, who should be counted the 53rd victim of 7/7 - murdered by police in a moment of paranoid frenzy. The New Labour government rolled out successive pieces of anti-terror legislation at a dizzying pace - only being prevented by a parliamentary vote from implementing 90 days detention without trial. MI5 recruited as never before; its staff has doubled since 2005. London's Muslim communities were criminalised and surveilled.
London became a city increasingly dominated, and policed, by fear. We have become used to armed police, as we before became used to the street homeless. The years since 2005 have seen the city change in other ways. Gentrification has accelerated: the multicultural diversity and the capacity of ordinary people to live and work in this city which were both integral to the city's initial resolution in 2005 have suffered at the hands of the housing market. We are, these days, a superficially hip city whose well-groomed exterior hides a fear all too willing to lash out if provoked. We have lost so much, and those who have lost most are given least opportunity to tell their stories.
Continuing my thoughts from earlier. First up, here's Costas Lapavitsas on the Varoufakis resignation and much else besides:
He clearly sees no prospect of a satisfactory outcome within the Euro. This seems right. It's worth reflecting on the extent to which what Greece is facing is the product of a crisis of the Eurozone as a monetary framework.
The Euro was always a tall order. Orthodox economic theory speaks of optimal currency areas (OCAs): these being regions within which a single currency would be a good idea. OCAs possess a number of features, none of which are obviously features of the Eurozone. A striking example is labour mobility. Here's how it's supposed to do. Suppose there is, as is the way with capitalist economies, a crisis. Suppose, moreover that this impacts disproportionately or exclusively on one member state economy (we have, as the terminology has it, an asymmetric shock). Unemployment increases within this economy. Unemployed workers from this country then, on the assumption of labour mobility, move to higher performing countries within the OCA, reducing the unemployment and preventing wages from soaring in their new homes. This, along with price and wage adjustments, smoothes out the shock and we all live happily ever after.
The assumption that prices and wages will 'adjust' is, as New Keynesians will not be slow to point out, far from unproblematic. But compared to the assumption that labour is mobile within an currency area like the Eurozone, that is nothing. Think about it: the Eurozone covers a large area and is divided by language and culture. I cannot easily look for work as a teacher in Germany if I only speak Portugese. Nor can I, if I am a lawyer trained in France, go and work in the distinct legal system of Italy. This is before we consider such barriers to labour mobility as attachment to loved ones, friends, communities, and the like, not to mention the human desire for stability of life.
So what happens when these adjusting mechanisms - labour mobility and price/ wage flexibility don't kick in after an asymmetric shock? The government of the state subject to the shock increases spending, as it has to fund unemployment benefits and the like to a greater extent, plus maintain its normal spending on the basis of diminished tax receipts. It borrows. The scene is set for a debt crisis - higher interest rates are needed to attract funding for increasingly risky debt (owed by a government in a currency over which it has no ultimate control), this reduces demand further in the beleagured economy. Meanwhile there's a liquidity flow from the down-at-heel economy to more prosperous countries within the zone, further magnifying the disparities within it.
Now, some of this is true of single currency zones with which we're more familiar, such as the UK economy. An economic event - say, one affecting a particular industry - might have a disproportionate impact in a certain region - say, the north-east of England. Workers in the north-east might, quite reasonably, not feel minded to set up their stall in Surrey in response to increased unemployment in Newcastle. Nor might prices and wages adjust. In this case, however, central government spending can act to cushion the shock - transferring, to some extent redistributing, funds within the UK. In particular, the north-east of England does not accumulate a public spending deficit (although, we should note in passing, the story as regards private debt in the region might be quite different) - the cost is born by the UK state as a unit. And there's the difference with the Eurozone: there is no fiscal union, no pan-Eurozone tax and spend mechanism remotely equivalent to that possessed by states like the UK. In this sense the Eurozone is an incomplete monetary union.
In other words, the Eurozone is structurally set up for something like the Greek debt crisis to occur. The bail out of banks in response to the 2008 crisis was the tipping point and the rest, as they say, is history.
The temptation here is to conclude that the Eurozone is bad for some national economies (like Greece) and good for others (like Germany). It is here that the Marxist tradition in economic thinking sounds a note of caution. Behind the front of the national economy, lurk a horde of competing interests. In particular, European capitalism and nation-state capitalisms are divided on the basis of class. Talk about what is good or bad for 'the economy' ignores that what is good for some classes, or groups within classes, may be bad for others. Hence, incidentally, the banality of the slogan 'austerity isn't working' - it's working fine for some people. This matters, in the present context because it goes some way towards explaining what might otherwise seem inexplicable: how so many interests in Greece were keen to secure a 'Yes' vote given that austerity policies by any reasonable indicator - employment, output, wages, even profits - are not helping 'the economy'. If the alternative is a threat to the rights of property, of the capitalist class' medium-term ability to pursue profit without interference, then it is in the interests of that class to see austerity pursued. Class power trumps even the bottom line.
Class interest also explains some of the persistence in Greece of Europeanism, attachment to the EU and, in particular, the Euro. It is straightforwardly in the interests of a significant section of the capitalist class, represented in the media and other opinion-forming institutions, to support structures that support policies favourable to it and minimise the costs of transactions within key markets.
But it is not simply the Greek capitalist class or its representatives in the political centre-right who buy into Europeanism. The left, including the Syriza leadership, share that commitment. Here, however, the commitment is to Europeanism as a political project. Europe as imagined on the left is a respository of the humane desire for peace on a continent ravaged by two world wars. It is an internationalist project, Greece's membership in which signifies its having put behind it the years of the colonels and having irreversibly made the transition to democracy. Those British leftists who grapple with the difference in attitudes towards the EU in states with thriving new lefts (Syriza, Podemos) - generally pro-EU - and the UK itself, where the left has traditionally been hostile to EU membership, forget the very different histories of the countries. The dictatorships that blighted southern Europe produced by way of reaction a favourable view of the European project.
There is Europe, the economic project. And Europe, the political idea. In Greece the tension between the two is nearing breaking point.
However necessary it is to adopt a sober realism towards the immediate prospects in Greece, yesterday's resounding 'No' vote was an example to the rest of Europe. Uncowed by relentless pressure from creditors and the mainstream media, Greece's electorate sent a clear message that they reject austerity. Whatever happens next, they deserve our admiration and solidarity.
Since the result was declared last night, events have moved at sometimes breathtaking pace (see the Guardian liveblog here for updates.) Yanis Varoufakis resigned, giving as his reason that some Eurogroup participants would prefer his absence from talks. This was not before making his feelings known about the No vote - he wrote of the Troika having been confined to its lair. He has been replaced by Euclid Tsakalotos, not obviously more well disposed towards an austerity-based 'rescue' for the Greek economy than was Varoufakis. Meanwhile, Greek banks remain closed and capital controls in force. There appear to be splits amongst the Eurozone leadership, with Merkel opposed to compromise with the Syriza government, and others better disposed. The ECB, as all this goes on, has increased the haircut required of Greek banks (that is, the difference between the amount loaned to Greek banks and the price of the assets required as collateral for these loans, expressed as a percentage of the collateral price: for example, if I lend you £90 but require a £100 IOU as collateral, then I have imposed a 10% haircut) - a sign that Greece is considered an increasingly risky prospect. One thing is certain: things cannot continue without resolution of some sort for much longer. If nothing else, these are interesting times.
Good commentary, from various left-wing perspectives, includes Michael Roberts here, Alex Douglas here, and the inimitable Paul Mason here.
I'll stop there for the time being. Later on I'll say something about how what is playing out in Greece is a crisis of the Eurozone as an experiment in monetary union, complicated by the political ideology of Europeanism.
If nothing else, a rather embarrassing display of Brand's new age proclivities. If it was that alone, it would be best to pass over in silence. I But, "love the police", what's that about?
I've made my feelings about our constabulary known before. I'm more interested in Brand's politics of love. The four-letter word only gets a mention at the end of his video, but was integral to the subsequent rough and tumble on Twitter under the #lovethepolice hashtag. And love has been a recurrent theme in Brand's political pronouncements and writings.
Love, for Brand, is a warm fuzzy feeling. It is antithetical to anger: witness his deplorable commentary on an enraged woman, rounded off with an amateur psychiatric diagnosis. He is not alone in this: love is - by common popular consensus - a feeling. It makes one happy, and therefore causes thoughts of conflict or dissatisfaction to recede. This is only good news in a certain sense: if the state we take to be characteristic of our most intimate relationships is an emotion, then it inherits all the uncertainties and fluctuations of emotions: alien creatures that they often are. Nor is there any prospect for a politics of love that is anything other than deeply reactionary, reconciling us to our lot, at best encouraging us to win round our oppressors with fine words and coy smiles. The problem here is that, at the end of the day, when you have put a flower in the policeman's gun, he still has a gun.
For good reason then, a lot of left-wingers regard any use of the 'l' word in politics with suspicion. It speaks of patronising demands for the cooling of anger and the seeing of reason. Thus, for instance, one of Christie Moore's better covers:
Interestingly, there's an older understanding of love (what it is about the modern age that causes it to be de-emphasised is an interesting question). For Aquinas, as for an entire classical tradition, love is the willing of another's good. This is not simply a matter of feeling; love might render certain feelings appropriate, but then again the warm fuzzies might stop me being sufficiently clear sighted to see how to promote your good. It is certainly less fickle than is love on a purely emotive understanding. Nor is it a matter of doing whatever will make you immediately happy, or of treading the path of least resistance. Indeed, Aquinas - who considers himself bound to love his neighbours - takes this love to be compatible in some cases (a just war, for instance) with fighting them. If you are damaging yourself by oppressing and exploiting then I should stop you. And that might not be a pretty affair. Such is love.
This older politics of love, I would argue, finds its modern continuation in Marxism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie are alienated - they fail to flourish as human beings (or to realise their species-being, in the slightly less poetic terminology of the 1844 Manuscripts) because of the very social relations which consist in their exploitation of the working class. It's just that, tragically, this alienation can only be overcome by the victorious struggle of the working class against that same bourgeoisie. Appeals for social peace simply prolong the mutual agony.
The hard work of love involves a disillusioned confrontation with dehumanising power - yes, even when it is wearing a police uniform. Only on the other side of that will we be able to indulge the Brands of this world, for whom presently there is seemingly no structural injustice so great that matters can't be improved by a hug.
Talking to people about the Labour leadership election, a recurrent theme can be summed up as follows: "I'd love to support Jeremy; he's a great guy and I agree with his ideas. But realistically Labour won't win with him in charge, and the most important thing is beating the Tories in 2020". The heart says Corbyn, the head says Kendall.
The thought here seems to be that 'the public' won't accept a Labour Party led from the left. Raymond Williams once observed that there are no such things as masses, only ways of viewing people as masses, and much the same could be said about publics. The public -- this seething undifferentiated mass of reaction -- only exists in the minds of commentators and second-rate sociologists. Utterly staid in its thinking it selects between election candidates like a cliched British tourist abroad choosing from a menu. Unmoved by the prospect of exotic dishes, it maintains a studied indifference between egg and chips and ham and chips. For this way of looking at things, Jeremy Corbyn is the tabbouleh of the leadership context. Activists are not part of the public, on this account, nor are the five million voters lost by Labour since 1997. For that matter, the entire Scottish nation is dubiously public. In fact, the public turns out to look very much like a Progress intern's stereotype of a swing voter in a southern English marginal. It's a rather deflating take on the British population.
Crucial to the head versus heart move is an image of the electorate as passive consumers of political programmes. They are not capable of being convinced, persuaded by argument, inspired by campaigns, or transformed by struggle. If 'the public' thinks x then the only response of a serious politician is to find ways of delivering x to the public. Electoral politics becomes a perpetual sales pitch, a transformation describable in two words: 'New Labour'. Of course, the customer is always right only within limits. To misquote a misquotation of Henry Ford, she can have any colour she likes as long as it's blue. Should she have the audacity to believe in the nationalisation of the railways, as a majority of the British electorate do, she should be kindly ignored and directed towards other political wares. The politics of appeal to 'the public' has always been in fact about the creation of the public, their desires and their perception of political posibilities, by a nexus of media and politicians. It is like a worked example in the theory of ideology.
In any case, it's not as though an alternative way of doing things weren't staring us all in the face; if only mainstream political geography didn't stop at Alnwick. The fact that the SNP won an election in Scotland on the basis of an anti-austerity ticket whilst refusing to join in the mainstream assault on migrants (supposedly a practically inevitable bowing to the 'legitimate concerns' of the public), cannot be explained by Scots being somehow magically more left-wing than the rest of the UK's population (even though some Scottish nationalists and the odd jaded English leftist seem to think this is the case). There is racism in Scotland just as there is England. It's just that a party decided to say something different, to challenge that racism. It didn't, it is fair to say, obviously suffer at the polls as a consequence. And - who knows - some of the public may have changed their minds as a result of exposure to an alternative narrative.
But what if the nay-sayers are right? What if a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be un-electable? I'm reminded here of some words of Tony Benn's,
In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a
civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit
and oppress people.
Those who think that the programme of a Cooper, a Burnham, or -- heaven forbid -- a Kendall could ever be a sufficient balm for humanity's wound could remedy this by watching the news, or even by leaving their house occasionally. The homeless on our streets, to whom we have disgustingly become accustomed as though they were part of the scenery, as natural as the trees; the lives eeked out in poverty; the migrants dying in the sea; the creativity and talent sucked dry in jobs with no social purpose beyond the production of profit; the accelerating destruction of the environment -- these are not ills that can be set right by a little tinkering with the system here and there. The only strategy that stands a chance of addressing them -- let alone the context of international injustice and inequality within which they sit -- is a socialist and internationalist one. Jeremy Corbyn at least begins to understand this.
For that reason alone -- for the hard-nosed pragmatic reason that only Corbyn sees the world as it is and recognises the immensity of transformation we need -- Jeremy deserves your vote. He is, contrary to the received wisdom, the only realist amongst the line-up. Because this is about so much more than 2020. This is about the future, about hope, and about socialism. It is the politics of the heart and of the head.
This blog has taken a bit of a gloomy turn of late. I make no apologies for that. Things are rubbish, and a first step towards changing that is to see things clearly as they are. There's too much facile optimism on the left.
That said, it's nice to have something political to feel enthusiastic about. Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party is just this. It deserves your wholehearted support.
As I've said before, what we need is a counter-hegemony, challenging the austerity mindset that pervades our society. Jeremy's campaign is a chance to get alternative ideas out there and to challenge the consensus across all the main parties in favour of neo-liberalism. This is about much more than the leadership of the Labour Party, it is about our capacity to imagine another world.
It would obviously be very good indeed if Jeremy's name ended up on the ballot paper. For this to happen he needs nominations from Labour MPs. With this in mind - please pick a few MPs to email. Even people who are not natural left-wingers are worth targeting; argue that it would be good for the Party to have a proper debate about its future direction, and that this requires that Jeremy be on the ballot. An MP nominating him doesn't commit that MP to voting for him. Numerous MPs, including David Miliband, nominated Diane Abbott for the leadership in 2010 but didn't go on to vote for her.
If you're stuck about what to write, here's a sample letter from the excellent Red Labour.
Dear ___________
I am writing to you
regarding Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to seek nomination for the
Labour Party leadership. Jeremy’s announcement has undoubtedly
electrified the leadership race. In the first 24 hours, he managed to
secure the nominations of ten MPs, 2,800 people signed an online
petition asking Labour MPs to nominate him and an incredible 10,000
people ‘liked’ the Facebook group ‘Jeremy Corbyn for Labour
Leader’, more than all the other candidates put together. This is a
clear indication that there is a thirst for a real debate amongst
grassroots Labour Party members. It is now in Labour MP’s hands
whether that debate takes place, or whether we have a leadership
election where large swathes of our membership feels unrepresented
and ignored.
As has been
witnessed already, an election where the candidates broadly agree on
the main issues only increases the public’s cynicism for the
political process. It casts the Labour Party in a bad light after the
shock of the general election not to be seriously discussing the
issues raised by that defeat. For that honest, serious debate to
happen, it is vital that Labour Party members, supporters and
affiliates are be able to pick from a broad range of candidates
representing the full range of opinion within our party. Jeremy will
stand on a platform against austerity and in favour of a democratic
economy which provides housing and services for all, while arguing
for a fair immigration system and in favour of nuclear disarmament
and humanitarian foreign policy. On those issues, Jeremy speaks for a
substantial section of the grassroots of the party. If Jeremy is
unable to overcome the substantial barrier to entry and make it on to
the ballot, then we will not get that choice and the quality of the
debate will suffer as a result.
It is in all of our
interests to have an open and extensive leadership debate, one which
is about the future of our party and how we move forward, stronger
together towards the next General Election in 2020. Whether Jeremy is
your preferred candidate or not, there is an overwhelming case for
including a voice like his in this leadership contest. At this stage,
it is not necessarily about who you are voting for - and we saw in
the 2010 race how many MPs ‘lent’ their nominations to candidates
in order to ensure a proper debate. That can be explained to both the
candidate you intended to nominate and the wider electorate. In doing
so, you will be putting the future of the party at the top of your
list of priorities.
If you agree with me
that a serious debate is needed and are able to offer your support to
Jeremy’s campaign, I would very much appreciate it if you could let
me know and cc in info@jeremyforlabour.com
Yours sincerely,
And if you want to be able to vote in the leadership election, become a Labour member or supporter. It only costs a few quid.
