Re: Reactionary petty-bourgeois strikes?

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Introduction

Generally I have been extremely sympathetic to the fuel strikes in
Britain.  I have been so because they were an example of spontaneous mass
action in a climate of general passivity.  Also they were a sign of what
Marx once called 'decomposition' and made the times 'delightful'. However
the apologia by Jennie Bristow forwarded by Russell almost made me join the
anti-strike ranks. I should have known that good old LM would find a way to
fall in behind the most reactionary element in the whole strike.  Not the
growth of indirect taxation and tax breaks for the rich, not the
destruction of public transport, no, LM were concerned about restrictions
on the use of petrol.


There were though some other aspects of the Bristow post that I found more
interesting.

1.  Are today's politics inconsistent?

>But the main lesson of the past few days has been the degraded, and
>arbitrary, state of politics and protest. The empty, inconsistent character
>of politics today means that events can blow up apparently out of nowhere,
>throwing the government into crisis and society into confusion.

At one level I tend to agree with this characterization of the political in
the present conjuncture.  "Profoundly shallow" would indeed seem to be a
good way to describe the workings of the so-called Third Way and the
Blairites. Yet it is important to grasp that this is only superficially
correct.  We need to go beyond the Heraclitean flux or surface phenomena to
detect the enduring relationships that lie underneath.  If we do so we will
see that politics today is governed not by inconsistency but rather by a
marked consistency.  This is best captured in the old refrain 'The rich get
rich and the poor get poorer'.

The capitalist class has swept all before it since the economic crisis of
1975. The wealthy families of America in 1975 are ever so much wealthier
today.  With that wealth has come even greater power. Nevertheless despite
their power to disguise their historic role, the truth remains that the
capitalist class exist in an exploitative master-slave relationship with
other classes. Therefore there is a tendency for that relationship to
generate a range of oppositional reactions from the exploited, the
slaves.  Moreover because human systems are open (i.e. we cannot predict
what form the reaction to the underlying reality will take) then reactions
inevitably surprise us when they occur.  That does not mean they are
'empty', or 'degraded'.  What Marxists must seek to do is to link up with
the discontented and to get them to go beyond the narrow focus of their
discontent and instead broaden their concern to the existence of the
underlying class relations.

2. Should we be able to predict?

>Events like the fuel protests are the perfect illustration of this
>process: there was no
>strategy behind the protests, nor any idea of the momentum they might gain
>and the impact they would have. Yet because the government cannot anticipate
>these things, and because its insecurities prevent it from handling them
>effectively, what starts as a copycat protest by a few men in the North of
>England can spiral into a national crisis in a matter of days.

This section of Bristow's post seems to me to be overly fascinated by the
unpredictability of the events.  Blair was caught by surprise and so were
the Left.  But within open systems such surprises are inevitable.  They are
the rule rather than the exception. Marxists do not claim to be able to
predict what form the class struggle will take.  We leave that to the
Popperians.  But we do claim that we can understand and explain.


3. Who are the new elites?

>Yet despite the problems with these recent protests, they do highlight the
>limitations of the new ideology promoted by the government,
>environmentalists and the media. However strong the cultural and political
>hegemony of the new elite might be, there is still a world out there of
>ordinary people with everyday lives, who cope with different pressures and
>priorities than those running the country. To tax petrol to reduce car-use
>to help the environment might be common-sense to a metropolitan green elite,
>but it has far less resonance with those who just want to get to work, and
>get around. If political life is dominated by the new ideology, everyday
>life is not.


The enemy for LM is not the capitalist class.  Rather it is those very
people who have been created by Capitalist Modernity.  LM in its deeply
non-dialectical way reads today's environmentalists as a return to
pre-modernity.  They refuse to understand that the ecology movement is
created by the single most important contradiction within capitalism.  It
needs people with ideas.  As a result it creates as Bahro put it surplus
consciousness that is a consciousness which goes beyond the mere
functionalism of capitalism. So the people that LM attack are the creation
of capital.  They are the very people who have developed a consciousness
great enough to enable them to see especially the ecological limitations of
capitalism. What these people are groping towards is a non-capitalist
modernity. Of course most of them are not aware of this and the ecological
movement is rife with contradictions and absurdities. If Marxists had paid
attention to the environmental movement earlier then we could indeed have
facilitated the process of socializing modernity.

But these so-called new 'elites' are not the dominant political,
ideological or social force within capitalism.  This remains the capitalist
class.  Using the term elite only serves to weaken this insight and move us
away from a class based analysis.

Conclusion

Events like the lorry drivers blockade will continue to arise.  We will
continue to be surprised by them because we cannot predict the surface form
that underlying social relations will take.  Still, we are locked into an
antagonistic and unjust relationship with the capitalist class and the
tendency for this to be manifested will not go away. Our task as
revolutionaries is to identify the most progressive element in any struggle
and to use it to unite the oppressed.  We should not do as LM are prone
to.  Namely we should not abandon the class model and then use the most
reactionary element in any social movement to bolster one's argument.



>At times like this, such a reality gap can be experienced as a very real
>threat by the government and its supporters. One remarkable aspect of this
>week is that the left assumed the role of strikebreaker more quickly than
>you can say 'Fill her up'. 'This is a fight against the forces of
>conservatism,' ranted the Guardian's Polly Toynbee on 13 September. Trade
>union leaders, meanwhile, condemned the blockades and called on their
>members to get to work. For the left, these were not just protests: they
>represented a blow to the new elite's authority, and an attack on the values
>and behaviour it has been trying so hard to cultivate. Of course, the new
>elite didn't have to react so defensively. But that it felt the need to is
>heartening.
>
>Jennie Bristow, 14 September 2000
>
>
>