Re: Oppositional possibilities in the UK

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

very nice.  astute.

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 08:40:06AM +0100, Chris Burford wrote:
> My understanding from the report was that Tariq Ali was calling for
> "genuine oppositional movements, dissident currents from below"
>
> My ear is not especially close to the ground on this, but I am not
> aware in England/Britain of anyone serious on the left "lining up
> support for the Labour Party on the grounds that it's the lesser of
> two evils". I am not sure that it is even considered in these terms
> which may now be ahistorical, and of course the circumstances are
> different in the USA compared to the UK.
>
> You must remember that even many of those who opposed the imperialist
> war of aggression are fully signed up liberal interventionists. Indeed
> virtually every day there are stories of intervention by the European
> Union, the USA or the "international community" in one country after
> another.
>
> Blair may be pushed out within the Labour Party in favour of Gordon
> Brown, but that battle will take place there. One of Blair's
> techniques is to make the battles within the Labour Party semi-public,
> and to take up his stance within the Labour Party always with an eye
> to what the focus groups say nationally.
>
> Although the Conservative Party attacks him on untrustworthiness he
> has an extra card in his defence if Bush falls. Geopolitically the UK
> has for the last 50 years always had to adapt to US dominance, even
> though it had its own (imperialist) reservations, and Blair did enough
> to show he preferred a multi-lateralist rather than a uni-lateralist
> solution. And prefers a Middle East peace settlement. It would be just
> if he were dumped and many are no doubt calculating with the Labour
> Party whether this will enhance of diminish their prospects of
> re-election.
>
> Some oppositional forces on the left in the UK pin in my opinion too
> much hope on changing things within the Labour party, which I think is
> a fallacious strategy because a) it puts faith in one political party
> in the bourgeois two party system, and b) Blair and those around him
> are much more skilful at playing off oppositional movements within
> Labour that they are. So they always get subsumed and co-opted into
> the
> contradictions inherent in the system. It makes the revolutionary
> constituency the Labour MP's who get told quietly that if they break
> ranks too much maybe their seat will not be in danger at the next
> election, but their friend and colleagues probably will. It is clever
> stuff, and part of pretty developed policies for managing the Labour
> Party.
>
> Oppositional forces outside the Labour Party like the Alliance and
> Respect are hoping for votes in the elections for the European
> Assembly this summer where the voting is by proportional
> representation. This can give them a showing but has the disadvantage
> of appearing to put the main revolutionary strategy on an electoral
> system that is still bourgeois.
>
> The problem is not faith in particular political parties. Electoral
> support for Labour is very soft, and the issue at the election will be
> what percentage of its vote it gets out. It may lose because the
> disillusion is just so great.
>
> On the other hand voting has become very tactical in the UK for a
> politically alert 10% of the electorate. They are likely to vote
> against the Conservatives. Labour voters are likely to vote
> substantially in favour of Liberal Democrats to defeat Conservative
> candidates (particularly because Liberal Democrats opposed the war,
> and are revolutionary enough to suggest a tiny increase in income tax
> on those earning more than 100,000 a year)
>
> There will be a web-site to facilitate this.  But this is so frankly
> tactical that I cannot see it runs risks of raising blind faith in a
> bourgeois imperialist party, even as the "lesser of two evils". It is
> just one of a few things people can do who know they are powerless.
> But two million may be prepared to spend a day on the streets in
> response to a global crisis.
>
> Although the Conservatives are scrambling back to the centre of the
> beach with their ice cream stall, (they have just symbolically been
> promoting their new gay-friendly image), the centre of the political
> agenda is therefore likely to lie more between the Labour Party and
> the Liberal Party.
>
> No serious revolutionary in the UK is going to promote the Liberal
> Party as the "least of 3 evils". Although some of its policies are
> more rational and progressive on paper, its activists are petty
> bourgeois discontents who tend to campaign effectively on local issues
> of a parochial nature, and may conceal a streak of fascism (sorry I
> cannot justify that in what is already too long an e-mail)
>
> What the revolutionary left, if it exists, and the non-revolutionary
> left as well as the Conservatives, have to adapt to, is the massive
> managerial competence of New Labour in the total management of the
> economy, and the total management of public opinion and the perceived
> parameters of debate.
>
> Yes Blair is a particularly brilliant and seductive tight-rope walker
> who is skilled at getting up on the line, balancing out the opposing
> factors and making you gasp as to when he is next going to fall off.
> So he converts some of the shock at his outrageousness into sympathy.
> But history is not made just by one human being. There is a whole
> stratum around him who learned, mainly I think in the hard school of
> managing local authorities during the grim times of the Thatcher era,
> how to handle budgets and expectations in an increasingly consumer
> orientated society. They use modern techniques which are impossible
> without computers. Their natural allies are the big liberal finance
> capitalist corporations. Indeed they are used to running budgets of
> millions admittedly in not-for profit positions, but it means they
> merge well with the high technical intelligentsia which finance
> capitalism now relies on for its real extraction of surplus value.
> This is a whole layer of modern late capitalist 21st century society
> some of whom could be interchangeable with members of this and similar
> lists in class terms and competence, whatever their political
> leanings.
>
> All this has transcended terms of debate about the lesser evil, which
> seem to me to go back at least half a century, and perhaps a century
> to an era when a substantial chunk of the working class would
> consciously and proudly say they are working class and would debate
> which parliamentary party they would vote for. Now they scramble for
> commodities that bring a little luxury and a little social status.
>
> My gut feeling is that virtually no one in the UK has a vision of a
> parliamentary road to socialism and there is a lot of disillusion, as
> Doug picks up. But that may be a good thing and it may help people
> decide what little they can do. The longer term effect of this is to
> pressurise the government even more to sort out concerns and pre-empt
> potential fury. So it reinforces the pressure on New Labour for total
> social management.
>
> But perhaps this is another way of saying that with the advance of
> capitalism to pretty integrated global finance capitalism an
> institution like the UK Parliament does not provide a chamber for
> class conflict, but for revising and adjusting the management of the
> country.
>
> The arena for class struggle is better seen outside the representative
> assembly, which can only partly respond to it. Which is what we should
> expect.
>
> Regards
>
> Chris Burford
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: <PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 8:41 PM
> Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Tariq Ali
>
>
> > Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > >On the other hand, we should take note of the fact that Ali says he
> > >would be delighted to see Tony Blair defeated in Britain.  I'm sure
> > >that the British equivalent of the US Anybody But Bush/Nader crowd
> > >are busy lining up support for the Labour Party on the grounds that
> > >it's the lesser of two evils.
> >
> > My New Press editor, Colin Robinson, just told me that the UK
> > political scene is even more depressing than the U.S. because there
> > is absolutely no alternative to Blair, drawing an explicit contrast
> > with Kerry v. Bush. Of course, Colin used to be an editor at Verso,
> > and, like Tariq, might be suspected of that creeping NLR
> "liberalism."
> >
> > Doug
> >

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu