[PEN-L:36319] Re: What are Tony Blair's Class interests?

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hari wrote:

> Let us for the moment simply agree to watch what happens. I certainly have
> no crystal ball - & the Stalingard Thesis (I see it cited again in the
> Observer today by an Arab writer) can be left to the test of Old Man
> time......


Well we cannot know for sure but this is an urgent question for those
engaged in the war. At a strategic level it propels the defeat of the
unilateralists and delivers them into the hands of the military and the
CIA, who are closer in thinking to the British government. On a mere
tactical levell, CNN has just had a retired colonel involved in the Gulf
air war come on and advise that not only must the US army not go into
Baghdad as Saddam wishes - the US must intensify the air campaign by
bombing bridges and power stations so the population can see that the
regime can no longer supply the basic requirements of a modern
dictatorship, and will therefore finally have to overthrow it. Horrific
scenario of mass suffering that progressive forces should  try to pre-empt.



> 1) But what exactly is the Blair class interest? What force does he
> objectively represent?


Blair's class position interestingly comes from a mother who used to vote
Labour and a father who hoped to become a Conservative MP until he had a
stroke when Tony was an adolescent. He is therefore probably fulfilling
some sort of unconscious family destiny.

He got to Oxford as an undergraduate probably by ability rather than
privilege. He is a lawyer who joined, with Cherie Booth, a set of chambers
headed by the present Lord Chancellor.

As for the more important question of his class interests I think he exists
in the realms of ideology relatively detached from the economic base. This
therefore makes him a dedicated rational servant of the most enlighted long
term interests of finance capital - including the need for finance capital
to have a relative degree of social peace not only within an individual
country, but the world. He has achieved peace within the country by using
the market research methods of the most sophisticated sections of finance
and monopoly capital to use the government as the major player in a
pluralist capitalist civil society to steer all the other main agencies.
This is subtly different from directing them centrally. On a world stage he
analyses the enemy not as terrorism but as the forces of chaos. Because he
sees these as becoming more turbulent, and because it suits Britain's
historic claims to world leadership to act as the cunning servant of the
USA , and because he thought Bush had been thrown off balance immediately
after Sept 11, he stepped in to contest the leadership of the world.

I do not jest.

He represents the interests of global imperialism, using British
imperialism as a springboard.

It is because capitalism has reached a stage of such great abstraction as
an expression of exploitative economic relations that he can straddle the
claims to democratic relevance by a sort of process of total social
management, now to be applied on a world scale.

His vision has become so grandiose as to be reckless, and a number of
peopel think he might crack up, but because it is based on the actual
workings of 21st century capitalism, there is a material reality to it.

You did not really expect me to describe his class interest "exactly"?! or
do more than offer inevitably a rather intuitive formulation? but I do
think that the parameters I have used are relevant.

Chris Burford

London