Reforming the British State? posted by Richard Seymour

The bourgeoisie has charms, discreet and otherwise. Some of its allure can be accounted for in the unique dynamism that Marx imputed to it:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? (Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, chapter 1).

Such a heroic idealisation of that class was intended, of course, to allow Marx to bury it all the more comprehensively. In it, however, lies the seed of an error that underlies much present debate in my view. To summarise it, the error seems to me to consist of believing that Britain is unique among advanced capitalist states in the components of its polity, which are said to hold back political progress, guarantee conservative hegemony, and retard capitalist growth. This is a view of Britain that spans the whole terrain from academic Marxism to the Huttonite centre-left. It is as well not to forget the profound influence of Hutton on early 'new Labour' thinking. As David Coates points out in Prolonged Labour (2005), the 1990s had its 'Hutton moment', the time in the middle of the decade that saw Hutton's book The State We're In become a best-seller, and his ideas form a crucial intellectual back-drop to Blair's otherwise formless 'revolution' - that is, before Blair found a more malleable ally in Anthony Giddens, and a less demanding intellectual inspiration in Charles Leadbetter.

In his way, Hutton was answering to a crisis of capitalism that neoliberalism had not solved. During the 1980s, American economists like Robert Reich and William Lazonick had, respectively from social-democratic and Schumpeterian viewpoints, condemned what they described as an inflexible, short-termist, hierarchical Fordist model of production. One, they said, that did not invest nearly enough in research and development, tended to take skills of the shop-floor, and de-motivated the workforce. They ventilated most enthusiastically on the Japanese model of capitalism which had not yet experienced the kind of recessions and crises of profitability that the US and most Western European states. By creating 'vertical solidarity' in the workplace, privileging long-term market-share over short-term growth, and allowing a stable investment climate, Japan was said to have avoided the crises of the West. Much was ado about the 'yellow peril' when Nemesis arrived in the form of Japanese car and IT firms in the US. Such ideas were put cruelly to the test and found wanting when Japan's profit rates fell, financial crisis ensued, and the extraordinary 1980s splurge on capital began to yield negative returns.

A different fish of the same kettle, William Keegan wrote The Spectre of Capitalism as if the answer was to be found in social-democratic Europe and Rhineland capitalism. Some years later, as unemployment climbed and the Franco-German axis stagnated, this looked less convincing. Will Hutton wrote just as talk of a 'goldilocks economy' in the US hinted at the recrudescence and entrenchment of neoliberal orthodoxy. A 'new paradigm' was said to be emerging, one in which new technologies provided the means to improve productivity without allowing inflation to soar. Hutton, to his credit, was not bowled over, but still preferred the Rhineland and South Asian models of capitalism. His thesis triangulated three co-ordinates: constitutional reform, economic reconstruction and social renewal. In the first category, he proposed denuding the City of London of some of its powers, de-centralising the British state and reducing the powers of the Executive. These were intended, among other things, to free capitalism from the priorities of the City of London, whose origins were in mercantilism, feudalism and Empire. By reducing the obsession with short-term profits and keeping a high pound, one could produce a more balanced economy in which manufacturing could compete overseas and in which long-term investment was encouraged. The rest needn't detain us, although it bears remarking that his conception of the 40:30:30 society underpins much 'new Labour' talk about 'social exclusion' and 'insecurity' for the allegedly growing middle class.

The argument has its lineages in the more radical criticisms of Perry Anderson who, in The Origins of the Present Crisis (1964) argued that Britain was a backward state in which the ancien regime had yet to be completely disposed of. If, as he argued in Figures of Descent, the British pattern had universalised to some extent, he still maintained that Britain was unique. The theses were as follows: Britain had the first, but most mediated and least pure bourgeois revolution of any major European country; England had the first industrial revolution, and created a proletariat before the emergence of mature socialist theory, and the polarisation of industrial bourgeoisie and aristocracy was attenuated by the fear of this class, particularly in the wake of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars; Britain had, by the end of the 19th Century, siezed the largest Empire in history, qualitatively distinct from other European powers, "which saturated and 'set' British society in a mould that it has retained to this day, with the consequence that most major figures of the British Left were vocal imperialists; among European nations, England alone emerged from the two world wars, unoccupied and without major exogenous shock or discontinuity to its social structure.

The consequence of all this was that Britain's culture, hegemonic ideology and leadership was unusually 'upper class', or aristocratic. The 'supine bourgeoisie' had formed a historic alliance with the aristocracy, particularly when the City pressed for the Restoration in the face of political anarchy. That legacy had produced the most profound conservatism, as the ideological rationale of the aristocracy was never fundamentally interfered with by a revolution with genuine egalitarian potencies. Similarly, parliament is a site of dominance for the old elite in which Conservative governance is 'natural', producing a continuous landscape of political power, whereas a Labour parliament becomes a "spotlit enclave, surrounded on almost every side by hostile territory". To properly expropriate the aristocracy of this hegemony was to fatally wound the bourgeoisie at the same time.

Gregory Elliot, largely accepting what has come to be known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis, wrote in a similar but more dyspeptic vein that to create even the preconditions for socialism, it was necessary to transform Britain into a more egalitarian Continental capitalist state (Labourism and the English Genius, 1993). He proposed a progressive coalition aimed at fundamentally reforming the British state, integrating it into a new European supranational entity with some power to tame, as Marx might have said, the powers of the nether world whom the bourgeoisie has called up by its spells. He supported Maastricht, particularly the Social Chapter, and the campaign by Charter 88 for electoral and constitutional reform.

Charter 88, consciously modelled in 1988 after Charter 77, embraced a then fashionable notion that Britain was somehow an unusually retrogressive or tyrannical state. ( Wikipedia has more here ). Many dinners were hosted and attended by well-known left-wingers (Harold Pinter, Billy Bragg etc), and the stage was set for the revival of Whiggery on the British political landscape. Blair's contumelious takeover of the Labour Party would have been that bit more difficult without that enabling ideology, which represented both a misconceived notion of the bourgeoisie and the state, and also a political retreat in the face of a successful New Right.

As I said from the outset, I think this whole conception is fundamentally in error. It misdiagnoses the failures of both socialism and capitalism, misconstrues the role of the monarchy, the City of London and the Executive, and mistakes the history of the bourgoisie. In The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, (1991), EM Wood provides a compelling analysis and critique of the Nairn-Anderson thesis which also equips us with some sound reasons for rejecting the more intellectually light-weight versions which persist today.

The facts of Britain's origins as a capitalist state are not in doubt: the priority of the English bourgeois revolution has fundamentally defined its subsequent trajectory and left it ill-equipped to undertake the restructuring of capital that would have enabled it to weather international competition more successfully. "But these facts are susceptible to more than one interpretation", says the voice of understatement. In particular, Wood argues, Britain is not less capitalist for its feudal trappings. And the bourgeoisie is not the uniquely privileged agent of capitalist development - it is a by now banal fact of history that it was the aristocracy that created the conditions for capitalism through its land enclosures, which forced the peasantry to rent its labour, and which in itself was aimed at cultivating cattle to produce wool for sale overseas. Many of those aspects of British capitalist society which Anderson would see as enfeebling capitalism, and resulting from its relative immaturity compared to European states, Wood suggests actually result from its relative advancement. And while Nairn correctly notes that the monarchy sits at the apex of an ideological structure in which pre-capitalist principles are perpetuated, thereby obfuscating genuine class-relations and mystically embodying the will of all, Wood notes that this has not in itself retarded the militancy of the British working class which, it is often forgotten, has historically outbid its Continental rivals in terms of combativity. The ideal-type of a 'pure' bourgeois revolution, in which the bourgeoisie assumes power and activates a period of capitalist expansion has nowhere obtained without significant mediation. British exceptionalism is therefore a penurious confection, incapable of explaining or solving either the crisis of British capitalism or the failure to date of the classical conception of socialism.

Europe is littered with ex-colonial powers, monarchies, and strange feudal-style contraptions fastened to the parliamentary chambers, so Britain is not unique in any of these respects. Those that have proportional representation do not necessarily reflect the will of the people any better than does the British system. Republics like the US do not seem to be less hierarchical or more democratic. For instance, the President's war-making powers have been more or less unofficially sequestered from Congress with little protest. The enduring power of the City of London may be worth taming or abolishing in itself, but it is not the cause of Britain's economic problems - the decline in manufacturing has much more to do with the determined onslaught of Thatcherism and the subsequent 'post-Fordist' consensus than with the undue influence of the City of London. There is nothing particularly progressive, as Dan Atkinson & Larry Elliot point out in The Age of Insecurity (1999), in a European Union in which the prerogatives of a brutal neoliberalism form the current vulgate. In fact, while most of the demands of groups like Charter 88 are valid, none of them resonate beyond their own diminishing borders.

There are moves afoot to challenge, in parliament, the royal prerogative which Blair, the Queen regnant of all our hearts, used to go to war. There is a campaign, being pushed by the Independent newspaper, for some form of proportional-representation. The current political landscape seems defined for many by stagnation, and an apparent imperviousness to registering the demands of electors. It is a mistake, however, to imagine that any but incidental or incremental differences would result from the abolition of the royal prerogative or any form of PR. The nation would still have gone to war if Blair had been obliged to get a vote, and a red-yellow coalition that would undoubtedly result from PR would be unlikely to be substantially more progressive or reflective of popular will. It is to the substance of political power, and in particular class power, that our critique and actions must cut. Through mobilising popular and working class radicalism for efforts inside and outside parliament, on the streets and in the trade unions, we stand a better chance not only of achieving the kinds of reforms that the Left should welcome, but also of developing the political capacity to terminate the system whose awesome global dominion, not immaturity or backwardness, is the compelling problem of our time.