LENIN'S TOMB

Friday, March 02, 2012

Tories retreat, bemoan isolation posted by Richard Seymour

I really think now is the time to cash in on my previous prognosis that the government would prove to be remarkably weak and potentially fragile at the first sign of a serious fight. Of course, I wasn't the only one saying this, but the reasoning has held up quite well. Yesterday, David Cameron urged British businesses to stand up against the "Trotskyites" of the Right to Work campaign. He knew this would really upset us, as only complete ignoramuses ever use that locution. But he also invited people to notice that the Labour front bench hadn't joined in the red-baiting of the opposition to workfare.

The fact that this petulant lament was followed by a backdown, in which the government was compelled to withdraw the benefit sanctions from the workfare scheme (thus de facto killing the heart of the programme) underlined the fact that the speech was a down-in-flames whimper of defeat and isolation. No one had stood up for the policy, beyond the right-wing press and a few known Tory businessmen like Sir Stuart Rose, who has also castigated the failure of the capitalist class to unite behind their government.

But the reality is that the Tories don't seem to have given business much to unite behind. Few of the participating businesses really seemed to understand the finer points of the policy, just the general idea that they were getting, en masse, millions of free man hours of labour out of the deal. This resulted in hasty, confused statements and retractions being released by companies in quick succession, and eventually the exit of a melanoma of businesses (yes, that is the real collective noun) while others urged the government just to drop the compulsory element that made it such a mouth-watering scheme to begin with. Businesses hadn't signed up for a fight, nor for the embarrassing sorts of flash-mob protest pioneered by groups like UK Uncut to great effect.

In general, I would suggest that while they like the material benefits the government promises them very much, the capitalist class is likely to be very divided over whether the government is capable of delivering it without seeing the whole country burned down in the process, over whether it is part of a coherent growth strategy (a low-wage economy has its draw-backs for large capital), and over whether the Tories are the best party to deliver anything. For, the government are woefully inadequate to the scale of the task they have set themselves of structurally adjusting British capitalism. Their complacent mis-handling of the union negotiations shows this. Actually, so did their astonishingly inept handling of the riots, during which they signally failed to build any right-wing populist capital out of the fiasco. They haven't had a serious class fight in almost twenty years, and during most of the hiatus they have been out of office. Only the pathetic weakness of the opposition has spared them. But as the Trotskyists have shown, it doesn't necessarily take many people to put this bunch on the back foot.

Labels: austerity, capitalist class, capitalist crisis, coalition, neoliberalism, ruling class, tories, trotskyism

Monday, November 28, 2011

Strong public support for strikes posted by Richard Seymour

The government has lost the argument:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.
More than two million people are due to walk out on Wednesday.
The research also indicates differences between men and women in their outlook on the strikes and the economy.
The polling firm Comres interviewed 1,005 adults by telephone across England, Scotland and Wales one week ago.
The poll indicates greater sympathy for the industrial action among women - at 67% - compared with men, at 55%.
Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

Labels: class struggle, coalition, labour, liberals, militancy, public opinion, public sector workers, strike, tories, trade unions

Monday, June 06, 2011

The Sage of Twickenham Strikes posted by Richard Seymour

Vince Cable threatens the unions, then turns up to speak at one of their rallies:

Labels: class struggle, coalition, democracy, lib dems, liberals, militancy, strikes, trade unions, vince cable

The Great Moving On Up Show posted by Richard Seymour

This piece of privatised parasitism is a predictable outcome of policies designed to de-fund higher education and incentivise profit-making. The New College of Humanities, which will be a private educational faculty established in the University of London, charges £18,000 a year for what parents and students are assured is to be the highest quality critical education. The rationale for this institution is not a complete sham - it is hypocritical, and disingenuous, but there's a rational core in there. This is how it goes: we agree that governments should fund high quality humanities education out of general taxation, but no government will do so to an adequate degree, neither Tory, nor Labour, nor Coalition; nor will the current fee levels support such high quality teaching; we believe that such education is essential to a thriving society, so we have had to seek out the most realistic way of ensuring that this happens; changing policy through protest is so vanishingly unlikely that we have settled on the alternative of embracing the American funding model, based on fees, but mitigated by bursaries and scholarships; the alternative is that we fail to prepare the next generation of lawyers, journalists, judges, writers and historians, and society will be the poorer for it.

It is difficult to take such protestations of humanistic intent entirely at face value since we're talking about a profit-making enterprise which has attracted support from city investors. In all likelihood, it will be one with extremely well-paid professors and lecturers, since the logic of the market says you have to be willing to pay the best to attract the talent. And this institution, as we'll see in a moment, is all about bringing the stars. Further, the policies of marketisation in higher education that produced this scenario have been encouraged by, and greatly enriched, the sorts of high-flying academics, vice-chancellors and such that can be expected to do very nicely out of this. Still, the rationale adduced above is not entirely hollow. The privatization and concentration of educational assets among the rich and the middle classes has been pursued and incentivised by this and previous governments, whose deliberate underfunding of higher education and introduction of the fees system created the stimulus for this development. The Right, and their friends in industry, have been desperate to reproduce elites in education against a background of rising standards. Too many graduates with first class or 2.1 degrees, and too many good A Level results, constitutes a crisis for capital because there just aren't the positions in the jobs market to accomodate all these highly qualified individuals. Thus, access to elite status must be rationed, and they're going to ration it through pricing.

So, now we know what some were thinking when all those conferences entitled 'Whither the humanities?' were being held. The decidedly unglamorous, increasingly dilapidated and proletarianised world of higher education in the future, is not for the intellectual superstars to be trapped in. The luminaries of Channel 4 television, book charts, BBC radio and newspaper columns were never going to fester away in such unrewarding sticks for too long - they would either move to America, where they know how to reward celebrity dons properly, or Americanise the British academy. In this case, they have not only Americanised, not only gone Wall Street - they've gone Hollywood.

Look at the enticing line-up: AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Simon Blackburn, Peter Singer, Niall Ferguson, etc.... all of these are best-selling authors, some of them with television careers. They are unlikely to be directly involved in teaching for the most part, just as you generally won't find Bruce Willis chopping mushrooms in the kitchen of Planet Hollywood. Their names are there mainly for branding. Though couching its pitch in a sort of traditional bourgeois humanism, promising one-to-one attention and all-round education, the college is largely trading on a far less august form of cultural capital - viz. the reputation these celebs enjoy as purveyors of middlebrow 'learning'. Essentially, with this profit-making institution, which leeches from the resources of the public sector in more ways than one, rich parents are offered the option of sending their duller children to a sort of cross between Hogwarts and International Celebrity Mastermind. It's the Waterstones '3 for 2' book deal syndrome: if their money can't get them into Oxbridge for some reason, then in this 'Oxbridge of London' rich students will consort with the people whose books Ma and Pa have picked up in Waterstones from the '3 for the price of 2' (cheapest free) table. Indeed, AC Grayling, the founder of the college, is the author most recently of 'The Good Book', which is advertised as a secular bible. It may at least now be assumed that nothing in this bible rubs against the grain of bourgeois values, or of profiteering (which fact alone, by the way, makes it a pretty useless bible). Indeed, it surely isn't coincidental that the celebrity scholars involved largely tend to converge around a complacent celebration of the virtues of Anglo-American liberalism. And why wouldn't they celebrate, and why wouldn't their students? There has been much for them to cheer about.

AC Grayling's lecture at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, which is to take place at 6pm tomorrow, would be an ideal opportunity to register your disapprobation.

Labels: capitalism, coalition, education, education maintenance allowance, ruling class, tories, vanity

Monday, May 16, 2011

The Tories and the NHS posted by Richard Seymour

The NHS has always been a vulnerable point for the Tories. They neither like nor trust what it stands for, how it works, but cannot assemble a viable coalition in favour of its destruction. Today, David Cameron has attempted to justify the present government's privatizing measures by claiming that they are the only way to meet a funding crisis that will hit the service in the next few years. That is, they intend to underfund the system by at least £20bn by 2015, and claim that the dire effects of this can only be avoided through their 'reforms'. But note what they're not saying. This is David Cameron's explanation:

"If we stay as we are, the NHS will need £130bn a year by 2015 – meaning a potential funding gap of £20bn.
"The question is, what are we going to do about that? Ignore it? No – because we'd see a crisis of funding in the NHS, over-crowded wards and fewer treatments. Borrow more so we can chuck more money at it? No – because we can't afford to.
"Ask people to start paying at the point of delivery for it? No – because, as I said, the NHS must always be free to those who need it. There's only one option we've got, and that is to change and modernise the NHS to make it more efficient and more effective and, above all, more focused on prevention, on health not just sickness.
...when I think about what our NHS will look like in five years' time, I don't picture some space age institution, a million miles away from what we have now. Let me make clear: there will be no privatisation, there will be no cherry-picking from private providers, there will be no new up front costs people have to pay to get care."

This is obviously disingenuous. There will be privatization, and it will not make the service more efficient, either in terms of cost or patient outcomes. And the claim that this new system will look anything like the one we have now is a ham-fisted insult to reason. But the Tories are not seriously attacking the 'common sense' of the NHS. At the level of discourse, they are not making any inroads whatever into the principle of a taxpayer-funded, free national healthcare system. They dare not even try. Instead, they depend on a manouevre pioneered by Thatcher, that of exploiting a crisis of underfunding to argue for the reforms they want to see, which are then coded in apparently neutral, anaesthetizing phrases: not privatization - good heavens no! - efficiency. This is Stuart Hall writing back in 1988:

Mrs Thatcher has personally taken charge of the crisis - always an ominous sign. 'The impression which the prime minister was trying to create was that she was pleased that talk of crisis by the opposition and health professionals had opened up the NHS to her radicalism. Her spokesmen countered the impression of government panic by stressing that she was "seizing the tide of public perception"' (The Guardian Jan 27). The talk is now exclusively about 'alternative ways of funding' (which every post-Thatcherite child of nine knows is a code-phrase for the massive expansion of private medicine and privatisation within the NHS) and 'breaking the barriers to greater efficiency' (which we know is a codephrase for destroying COHSE and NUPE).
...
the balance of ideological advantage slowly turns Thatcherism's way, because the specific issue of the NHS is secured for the Right by a deeper set of articulations which the Left has not begun to shift. These include such propositions as: the public sector is bureaucratic and inefficient; the private sector is efficient and gives 'value-for-money'; efficiency is inextricably linked with 'competition' and 'market forces'; the 'dependency culture' makes growing demands on the state - unless ruthlessly disciplined - a 'bottomless pit' (the spectre of the endlessly desiring consumer); public sector institutions, protected by public sector unions, are always 'overmanned' (sic).; 'freedom' would be enhanced by giving the money back to the punters and letting them choose the form and level of health care they want; if there is money to spare, it is the direct result of Thatcherite 'prosperity'; and so on.
...
We may have to acknowledge that there is often a rational core to Thatcherism's critique, which reflects some real substantive issues, which Thatcherism did not create but addresses in its own way. And since, in this sense, we both inhabit the same world, the Left will have to address them too. However, squaring up to them means confronting some extremely awkward issues. One example is the fiscal crisis of the welfare state - the ever-rising relative costs in the NHS as the average age of the population rises, medical technology leaps ahead, health needs diversify, the awareness of environmental factors and preventive medicine deepens and the patterns of disease shift. The fiscal crisis of the welfare state is not simply a Thatcherite plot, though of course Thatcherism exaggerates it for its own political ends.
The Left's answer is that there is more to spend if we choose; and this is certainly correct, given Britain's pitiful comparative showing in terms of the proportion of GDP spent on health amongst the industrialised countries. But only up to a point. At the end of this road, there are limits, which are not those set by Thatcherism's artificial 'cap' on spending but those limits set by the productivity of the economy itself. What the Right argues is that, once this limit is reached (even at the USA's 10.7% rather than the UK's miserable 5.9%) there is then not much to choose between rationing by price (which they would prefer) and rationing by queue (which is what has been going on in the NHS for decades). Naturally, they prefer rationing by price, since it increases the incentive to the patient to save on costs and puts pressure on the 'health market' to become more efficient.
...
simply 'spending more on the NHS' comes up against the barrier of the failure of the Left so far to elaborate a strategy for an expanding economy. On the other hand, where it hits the road block of the unpopularity of higher taxation in the form of that entrenched figure (which, at the moment, belongs exclusively to the Right) - the 'sovereign taxpayer'. Thatcherism is also held in place by this ideological figure of 'economic man', the measure of all things, who only understands cash-in-hand, readies-in-the-pocket, and who apparently never gets ill, doesn't need his streets cleaned or his children educated or to breathe oxygen occasionally. Clearly, the NHS issue cannot be won in terms of the NHS alone. If Thatcherism wins the argument about 'wealth creation', 'prosperity' and 'taxpayer freedom', it will, sooner or later, win the argument about privatising the NHS.

Now, it so happens that Hall exaggerated the popular appeal of Thatcherism, and over-estimated their ability to erode public support for socialised health care - but discount for it and the same issue looms before us. Look at that last sentence from Hall again. If the Tories win the wider argument about austerity, they may not win the argument for privatising the NHS, but they will certainly make their case for this vandalism more plausible. The austerity narrative says that the state has over-extended itself and must contract to a more manageable scale; that the productive capacities of the economy are being over-burdened by the high taxation needed to support the welfare state; that prosperity can only be restored if business is allowed to get on with investing under relaxed conditions (albeit with some safety barriers built in to the financial sector in a vain attempt to protect the system from its instability). Naturally, therefore, "we can't afford" to pay for the NHS. The obvious lessons are that the Left, to counter this, has to have an alternative growth strategy, and; this has to be elaborated in an unabashedly ideological way, because what is at stake isn't just a bureaucratic-managerial matter of efficiency but rather of the priorities and direction of the whole society. I think there may be some in the Labour leadership who understand this, but they are no more able to act on this understanding than Gordon Brown was capable of being the 'secret socialist' of reactionary nightmare and centre-left masturbation fantasy.

I select the NHS to focus on because, apart from the fact that Cameron has made this intervention today, it's the Tories' weakest point, the issue on which we can assemble the broadest social forces. The middle class suburbs are up in arms about what's being done to healthcare every bit as much as working class boroughs. The Tories have already had to retreat on this, and the issue divides the coalition somewhat. We have them beating a tactical retreat before a serious shot has been fired. Yet, if what Hall referred to as the "political-ideological thematics of Thatcherism", which today are concentrated in the politics of austerity, remain in place, then they will be able to continue to come back for more. Even if the Tories do not succeed in getting all that they want, they will gradually get some more of what they want; and more importantly, they will find that their occupancy in power is not disturbed by their losing an election. New Labour, operating within a broadly Thatcherite mode, took the logic of privatization and marketization in the health service further, faster, than the Tories had been able to. Labour's leaders today cannot think or articulate a politics outside of austerity, which leave us with a desperate need for a counter-hegemonic campaign to do just that.

Labels: coalition, counter-hegemony, david cameron, hegemony, labour, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, socialism, thatcherism, the meaning of david cameron, tories

Friday, March 04, 2011

Liberals crash and burn in Barnsley posted by Richard Seymour

The results from the Barnsley Central bye-election:

Dan Jarvis (Lab) 14,724 (60.8%)
Jane Collins (UKIP) 2,953 (12.19%)
James Hockney (C) 1,999 (8.25%)
Enis Dalton (BNP) 1,463 (6.04%)
Tony Devoy (Ind) 1,266 (5.23%)
Dominic Carman (LD) 1,012 (4.18%)
Kevin Riddiough (Eng Dem) 544
Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 198
Michael Val Davies (Ind) 60

This is a huge vote against austerity. The Liberals crashed from second to sixth place and lost their deposit - this in a seat where the Labour MP had been forced to resign due to his imminent imprisonment for fraud. Both the Liberals and the Tories saw their vote share slashed, from roughly 17% each in the general election. That is, the coalition parties saw their vote share cut by almost two thirds. The BNP vote is also down by three percentage points, though this can partly be attributed to the fact that UKIP more than doubled its vote share.

This means that not only is the electoral base of the Liberal component of the coalition shattering as working class voters rally to Labour as the only available parliamentary obstacle to the cuts, but the Tories' hard right base isn't dependable either. UKIP represents the defection of a racist, nationalist, Europhobic and hyperglobalising segment of the Conservative Party, based disproportionately on small businessmen, lone traders and the insecure newly affluent, initially concentrated in the suburbs and rural areas of south-east England. Its voters include many 'strategic defectors' from the Tories outside of general elections, middle class right-wingers who want to register their hostility to immigration and European integration without risking a Labour government if possible. However, the party has also assembled support from skilled workers in collapsing industrial areas, and its core support is demographically similar to that of the BNP, excepting that BNP voters tend to be a bit younger.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition was based on the existence of a large centre vote, as millions of voters looked for an 'honest broker' amid the crisis and after the dreadful New Labour years - but that centre ground is predictably collapsing. The austerity agenda is producing a rapid polarisation, with Labour consolidating its hegemony over the left vote (excepting in Scotland, where the SNP is consistently out-performing Labour as a rival reformist bloc based on soft left nationalism), while the right-wing fragments in multiple directions. With racism on the rise and about half of the electorate theoretically willing to consider voting for some kind of anti-immigrant party, the danger is of the most reactionary elements on the right using the support redistributed to them in order to polarise the agenda further to the right. The temptation for Cameron will be to steer to the hard right as his coalition crumbles - he can't really do without the Liberals, but he can manage even less without the Tories' core vote and in his despair he may have to gamble on re-pivoting his whole agenda on the basis of some reactionary-populist cynosures.

This is the terrain on which the anti-cuts left is going to be operating in the short-to-medium term. It is one in which the struggle against racism and fascism will inevitably be a crucial aspect of the fight against the cuts. The fire-fighting against the EDL mobs, the doorstepping in BNP target constituencies, and the painstakingly constructed cultural interventions of Love Music Hate Racism are currently retarding but not stopping the growth of the racist right. They are preventing the racists from fulfilling their latent potential, and thus keeping a space open for the Left. But it is when the anti-cuts movement takes off as a force in its own right, as when the student demos rocked Britain, that the far right looks weakest and least relevant. The EDL's impotent, foot-stamping fury at the way in which radical youths stole the agenda and limelight for the Left illustrates this beautifully.

It also means that those who think you can exclude Labour from the anti-cuts movement are kidding themselves, and would do well to free themselves from the Procrustean bed of formally correct but useless slogans. Rather, we should be operating on conflicts at the core of social democracy: the central conflict being between the Labour Party's aim to represent and convoke the working class as an agency for reform, and its inevitable drive to gain 'credibility' with capital, whose cooperation will be required once Labour is in office. In practise, this means that anti-cuts activism will involve interventions within Labourism itself, uniting coalitions of Labour members and supporters with those to their left, the better to oppose any concessions to the Tory agenda by the leadership, resist the 'realist' pro-cuts politics of Labour-supporting intellectuals, and put pressure on Labour councillors not to simply capitulate and vote for 'humane' cuts.

There you go. That's my short hand analysis of the Barnsley Central bye-election. Don't say I never do anything for you. Or at you.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, coalition, cuts, david cameron, far right, fascism, islamophobia, labour, lib dems, liberals, neoliberalism, nick clegg, racism, socialism, tories

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The principled Mr Cable posted by Richard Seymour

On the VAT reversal: "We were trying to score a point against the Conservatives, if you like. Okay, well that was in the election. We have now moved past the election."

I don't find myself refreshed by the Sage of Twickenham's honesty about his dishonesty, any more than I'm charmed by any of his fatuous nicknames - aside from the 'Sage' tag, he is garlanded with 'Dr Doom' and 'the Prophet Elijah', the harbinger of judgment. For all his lamentations about the moral cesspit of the City, he consistently shows himself to have the mindset not of a prophet, but of a spiv, an opportunistic trader for whom any lie is good enough. Lacking talent or charisma, he makes a small electoral killing by misrepresenting his wares, banks the votes and splits.

Two of the last, pathetic, arguments mounted in the Liberals' defence is that they are if nothing else humanising Tory policy, and are, at any rate, honest brokers. Cable and Clegg are thankfully determined, in their exultant glee at finally being among the big boys, to trash those illusions. The only sense in which the Liberals have helped to humanise Tory policy is by lending their weak saffron brand of 'social justice' to the sales literature, and that is losing traction rapidly. And honest brokers? They've made their bona fides clear: they are at their most direct and brazen with us when admitting they've been lying to us.

Labels: coalition, condem, david cameron, lib dems, liberals, nick clegg, orange book, tories, vince cable

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Liberals: the weak link in the coalition posted by Richard Seymour

Good to see further proof that the Liberals are the achilles heel of the ConDem coalition:

Today's voting intentions and Government approval ratings are the worst for the Conservatives since the election. The net Government approval rating is zero - 40% of people approve of the Government's performance, but 40% of people disapprove. On voting intention, the Conservative lead is down to 2 points, the lowest since the election campaign. Topline figures are CON 41%, LAB 39%, LIB DEM 12%.

Government approval has been on a slow downwards trajectory since its peak straight after the emergency budget in June. This has been partially down to Labour voters' hardening disapproval of the Government, and partially due to falling Liberal Democrat support. The remaining Liberal Democrat voters still say they approve of the Government's performance, but there are far fewer of them...

As the Yougov comment piece points out, the Tories have held up their support rather well so far - it's Liberal voters abandoning the party for Labour that is bringing down the coalition's support overall. My etch-a-sketch analysis: this is the inevitable result of the collapse of the centre ground as the opening shots of the cuts battle are heard. Liberal voters in Labour's former working class heartlands are probably deserting en masse, back to Labour. At the same time, middle class voters who have supported the Liberals in the past now feel better about supporting the Tories (because Clegg has lent Cameron his 'progressive' aura). What is more, they now have a decided class motivation to do so, since their income is invested in house prices, shares and speculation. If the Tories can rescue the City, and the housing market, they will win back much of the long-term loyalty lost in 1992.

I would be surprised, though, if the Tory support didn't also start to collapse very shortly, and Labour didn't end up with a clear lead. I suppose it depends on whether the Bank of England's polyanna-ish stance on spending cuts holds true, or whether the economists' sceptical stance proves more accurate in the end. It may also depend on whether Ed Miliband is the unelectable weirdo that I suspect he is, because he's probably going to win the Labour leadership contest.

Labels: class struggle, coalition, condem, labour, lib dems, middle class, new labour, ruling class, spending cuts, tories, welfare, working class

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Iraqi Resistance has its own 'surge' posted by Richard Seymour

A website recording Iraq Coalition Casualties marks a rapid rise in deaths and 'wounded in action' over the last two months, and the trend looks like it's continuing this month. The Washington Post today reports:

"It is very clear that the number of attacks against U.S. forces is up" and that they have grown more effective in Baghdad, especially in recent weeks, said Maj. Gen. James E. Simmons, deputy commander for operations in Iraq. At the same time, he said, attacks on Iraqi security forces have declined slightly, citing figures that compare the period of mid-February to mid-May to the preceding three months. "The attacks are being directed at us and not against other people," he said.

May, with 127 American fatalities, was the third-deadliest month for U.S. troops since the 2003 invasion. As in the conflict's two deadliest months for U.S. troops -- 137 died in November 2004 and 135 in April of that year -- the overarching cause of May's toll is the ongoing, large-scale U.S. military operations.

The death rates are up not only because the number of attacks against troops has risen, but also because of more sophisticated weapons (improved IEDs, largely) and organisation. Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, who led US troops into Iraq, now says the US can forget about winning.

Labels: 'surge', 'war on terror', coalition, iraqi resistance, occupation