That old May '68 playbook

Time to dust off those records of the '68-'75 years of unrest: first student then working class led struggles.

As the sixties ended, the long boom of the fifties was finally playing out. Profitability was falling and the economy looked tired. Those old patrician classes - those Tories who seemed to live in another land-owning age - were still in power with their strange articulations of English. Most students looked at them as if they were fossils: the ruling class had never looked so alien.

And students there were: so many of them. The education reforms of the sixties had introduced comprehensives into the secondary sector plus 'new universities' to provide the human resources for a more technological age. These new working class and lower middle class students, often the first of their families to go to university, were culturally nothing like the Eton-processed. They had been promised a dream the economy could not provide. No wonder they felt alienated.

I was such. In '69 I was on the streets protesting with the far left. If you had asked me why I was there, did I care about the Vietnamese Revolution, I would have given you some Marxist account of the combined and uneven struggle against Imperialism. The future might be hazy but it would be our people, the dispossessed, who would be in charge.

In my heart of hearts I hated and despised those who ruled us. They were people nothing like me or the folk from whence I had come. Patronising, superior, arrogant and entitled - the bubble people of their age.

Plus ça change...

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It took more than a decade for the insurgent tide to recede. The last gasp of the NUM was defeated and the economy (under Thatcher) retooled for a globalist, financially-led neoliberalism. The masses were back in their boxes for a generation while the Marxist-Leninist dream died.

So here we are again.

In 2020 the ailing economy, now drained by more than a decade of secular stagnation following the muted recovery from 2008-9, is again tottering on the brink of deep recession. The current cycle of growth is just about played out, hamstrung by zombie firms, too much debt and with COVID-19 providing the coup de grâce.

The current cohort of young people - just like in '68 - look at the establishment and don't see themselves or their concerns; they don't see prospects for themselves going forward. They feel alienated. All it needed was a spark and the George Floyd death was it, at least for this month.

Dusting off the playbook I would expect an endless sequence of demonstrations and événements going forward propelled by the 'new petit-bourgeoisie': students, left-professionals such as teachers, academics and government workers together with black activists and other groups who feel themselves unintegrated and aggrieved, those whom the dream has left behind (there are so many!).

The industrial working class may be less salient, organised and visible than in the 1970s but it's still there. They won't be easy sign-ups to the new woke, but when their jobs in manufacturing, logistics and technology start to evaporate over the next year or two don't expect them to sit on their hands.

I imagine there are mandarins in the Home Office as I write drafting memos to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister calling for a quiet reorganisation and upfunding of the police. The Government might have been woefully slow off the mark for the onset of COVID-19 but they will surely be sensitive to their forthcoming public order challenges.

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Nicos Poulantzas: Capitalism in the next decade

I wrote a series of generally admiring posts about the work of Nicos Poulantzas (here, in declining order of relevance).

I was reading this evening an outstanding recent summary of his work by David Sessions.

Nicos Poulantzas

Generally I'm a huge fan.

Poulantzas tried to break out of the simplistic stereotypes of both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists concerning the nature of the capitalist state and its role in mediating and enforcing capitalist class dynamics.

Poulantzas's great problem, the issue that destroyed his theoretical position, was that he wanted an accurate analysis of contemporary capitalism which also predicted transition to socialism (the supercession of capitalist relations of production) as a reachable goal.

All his analysis kept trying to tell him this wasn't on the cards. It simply wasn't possible.

What does the future hold if not a transition to socialism?

The central political problems 'we' face today: the breakdown of consensus politics, the rise of 'populism', leftist hysteria - these symptoms are all rooted in the obsolescence of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. Neoliberalism has created a gulf between the super-elite beneficiaries of a financialised, globalised capitalism and vast swathes of the proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie (old and new - Poulantzas emphasised the distinction) which has not shared in this largesse, which correctly feels abandoned, disrespected, atomised, alienated and futureless.

The problem has been accentuated by 'elite overproduction': the flow of c. 40% of the population through the universities, which has created a febrile petit-bourgeois mass which has internalised neoliberal ideologies and then naively tried to realise them in actuality.

This is the genesis of the SJW, equal-outcome, blank-slate-believing mass movements which self-define as 'left' but which are thoroughly bourgeois-liberal. They have captured the traditional labour parties of the left.

I expect a new capitalist synthesis to arise out of all this turmoil over the next decade. The shape is hard to discern but it will be whatever serves to restore class cohesion - that's the stability point.

Probably a little more socially conservative, a little more redistributive. Only time will tell. The process won't be pretty: I agree with Peter Turchin about that.

It's worth watching the project of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson in the new UK Government. That's exactly the project they're trying to define.

I expect the Brexit project now to go through, because there's a gathering consensus in the more strategic and hard-headed section of the British political elite that Britain's future is best assured by a strategic alliance with the US rather than being semi-locked-in to a disunited Europe, a power both politically and militarily weak.

In the past there has been the famous 'bridge' or 'straddling' policy, which saw the UK acting as a 'value-adding' middleman between the US and Europe. But in an increasingly multipolar political world resulting from the decay of the naive neoliberal globalisation project and catalysed by the rise of China and an incipent global recession, the UK finally, has to choose sides.

I think the Johnson government understands that, while the Remainers, locked into crumbling, sterile visions of the past, do not.

Such a shame that Nico Poulantzas is no longer with us. I wish I knew what he would have thought.

Post-capitalist and post-human?

Amazon link

I finally completed Poulantzas's turgid, repetitive, over-abstract and slightly-dated book. Far from a page-turner. Yet really important for the final few chapters.

Poulantzas turns his educated, sophisticated Marxist eye on the problem of transition and the nature of the socialist state. Let me crudely summarise.

Poulantzas understands completely the Leninist model of 'soviet democracy': that is, a hierarchy of workers' councils running everything as the proletarian state. He understands that this doesn't work. It requires a mobilisation of the masses which cannot last indefinitely. It isn't an efficient decision-making mechanism due to the need for expertise. It cannot replicate the enormously complex and specialised functions and services undertaken by the bourgeois state apparatus, which would only increase after the supercession of capitalism.

His solution is a transformed and transforming bourgeois-like state apparatus (i.e. a state bureaucracy) kept on the straight and narrow by parallel popular structures. The interplay between these two loci of power is under-defined, and, as he himself point out, inevitably leads to existential conflict. It's unstable.

Really, Poulantzas sees no way out.

I would add that with actually-existing humanity, both bureaucratic structures and a hierarchy of councils invariably ossify into self-serving elites which stagnate as they succumb to the principal-agent problem.

Altruism meets its limit in Dunbar's number.

How does capitalism avoid these problems? Poulantzas correctly observes that the state is not a dominant participant in the relations of production, which are those of privately ownership of the means and objects of production. A hegemonic bourgeoisie tolerates nationalisation only in the event of market failure.

We can additionally note that the only thing which keeps social agencies competent and innovatory is competition. The fear of losing everything saves a structure from complacent featherbedding and elite-capture. Remove competition and things slow to an ossified crawl and the tyranny of the elites is assured.

And so the destruction of the capitalist mode of production and its replacement by central planning leads to Stalinism. This is Poulantzas's compelling (and unwanted) conclusion.

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Amazon link

I'm debating getting this. I read the intro, where Žižek seems to share Poulantzas's general conclusions, but seems to have reverted to a strategy which Poulantzas correctly rejects: the encirclement of global imperialism by municipal, localised, counter-initiatives.

This has been a popular, albeit minority view in the Left: I wrote about Paul Mason's similar views. A counter to reformist social-democracy, a paradigm in worldwide collapse.

Utterly unconvincing of course.

Žižek gets brownie points for taking notice of the scientific advances in psychometrics, behavioural genetics and the like (cf. Plomin). Most writers in the Marxist tradition have taken the intellectually-suicidal route of turning their blind eyes to this and retaining a touching faith in blank-slatism verging on vitalism.

Žižek has little idea, however, as to how to integrate these new understandings of human nature into the traditional Marxist world-view. But in the longer term (which will still be co-extensive with the reign of capital) humanity will be as labile as any other innovating technological factor.

A society of clones could make communism - as anticipated by the founders - work, at least for a while. It is the only possible genetic underpinning of the perfect altruism required. Such a solution is, of course, genetically unstable. Utterly at the mercy of defection-mutations (if they are not ruthlessly suppressed). Oh, and evolution doesn't much like clone-species - too brittle with zero population variation.

It's imaginable that capitalist dynamism could be combined with a greater propensity to income-equality and tolerance of transfer payments. But I don't think we could take it too far, a kind of über-Denmark. The psychological attributes which make capitalism - red in tooth and claw - work seem incompatible with excessive hand-wringing liberalism. Ask Justin Trudeau.

TIG of the dump

This is a post about The Independent Group.

My reading about the (now ancient - 1998) dispute between Ellen Meiksins Wood and Nicos Poulantzas as to the status of white-collar ‘new professionals’ has been educational.

Poulantzas argued that these gentrified yuppies: hipsters, lawyers, journalists, media people, architects, lecturers - bubble people par excellence - were not part of the working class at all, they were the new petty-bourgeoisie. They had a distinctive class interest (they were unproductive workers in Marxist terms) and exhibited a contingent relationship with the proletarian class struggle.

Woods observed acidly that in every case we're talking about people who have been dispossessed of means of production, people who need to sell their labour power to survive. Look, they're workers!

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So how come they look so different to the traditional blue-collar manual working class? Our middle-class workers are educated, articulate, individualistic and, where active, fervent on identity issues. Class thoughts never enter their heads. They are post-class.

As always we have to look at the specific evolution of capitalism, particularly over the last decade or so, to understand the real situation here.

The traditional surplus-value-producing working class is, to our surprise, still with us: in car plants, mines, docks, transport, construction and a thousand subcontractors. They have no voice in the media and are rarely seen there, but they haven’t gone away. Instead, a decade of steady but anaemic growth has rendered them apathetically, resentfully quiescent.

The great four-decade expansion of automation, financialisation and globalisation has dramatically expanded the number of jobs in the circulation of capital (sales, marketing, advertising, PR, media), in financial services and for the state. Most of these workers are not directly involved in the production of surplus value per se; they skim the value produced by other workers as Woods reminds us. Yet workers they are, nonetheless. Their jobs are less obviously ‘working for the Man’ - in fact they can offer significant opportunities for autonomy and creativity -  and they are sometimes quite well paid (although by no means always - a source of anger).

It is easy to see why Poulantzas saw this working class fraction as petty-bourgeois. They tend to see themselves as floating free of the production processes of the economy, part of the general cultural superstructure. They internalise the dominant ideology of bourgeois liberalism (not an pejorative term at all here; descriptive) and push it to its pure extremes.

The result is the cult of social-justice, its contours carefully, albeit subconsciously, edited for consistency with the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Everyone talks about material inequality (those huge ratios) yet no-one seriously agitates to do anything about it - it's an abstraction; transgender equality, however, is a cause to die for

No-one talks about class. Even the existence of classes in the context of economic dominance is denied; class is conceded to be at most a cultural signifier, subordinate to intersectional identity.

This sociological fractioning is prevalent across the advanced capitalist countries. All that has changed in recent years is that continuing anaemic growth - which does not offer advancement prospects to either the blue- or white-collar fractions of the working class - has led to mounting (though inchoate) discontent and new mobilisations on the streets.

The traditional blue-collar working class is resentful and votes for Brexit or Trump - the conservative, anti-elite populists. The white-collar working class votes for Sanders or Corbyn - the progressive (in cultural terms) populists. The real political expression of the über-elites, the Osborne-Obama-Macron-Merkel axis, has hit the buffers and is failing to attract support outside those closest to the coat-tails of the international elites, Davos Man and assorted wannabes.

It's a problem.

In UK terms, we see the Tory’s Theresa May defiantly holding a course designed to appeal to the domestic, anti-globalist fraction of the UK national bourgeoisie plus a fraction of the English blue-collar working class abandoned by Labour; we see Labour’s Corbyn and Momentum hoovering up the embittered white-collar workers (together with some petty-bourgeois forces, for sure, students and the artisan self-employed) who want to complete the bourgeois revolution to the max and advance their own prospects.

And then there is The Independent Group, that remnant from the Blairite-Cameron glory days, wondering if there is a social base for its nostalgic brand of neoliberal 'revival'.

I suspect not.

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Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times this morning was talking-up a party representing his own preferences: Blue Labour (and Red Tory). That would be the current Social-Democratic Party.

In common with most people, I had thought the SDP had finally died back in 1990.

I can see why Rod kind of likes this ghost of times past, but the SDP (now) is destined to be even more ineffectual than TIG. It presents a brand of one-nation Labourism/Toryism which articulated the narrative of 1950s ascendant national capitalism, but which is completely inapplicable to the current period of neoliberal decay.

It's a dated answer to a question which has not yet been put.

Not sure about Quillette

I've featured Quillette on the website Blogs sidebar here for a while. It was established to offer a home to those afflicted by the excesses of the SJW 'left', primarily in American academia.

One might have hoped for some deeper, more analytic analysis there of the whole cultural revolution thing currently sweeping through the liberal establishment, the kind of thing Poulantzas was addressing.

But actually Quillette seems to have turned into an 'anti-SJW' version of what Steve Sailer has flagged as Grievance Studies.

In the dialectic, antithesis is a precursor of synthesis.

I do hope things improve.

LQG, LSD* and depth psychology

Amazon link

I'm just about glad I read this but the experience was like munching slices of supermarket white bread. The story of Loop Quantum Gravity is told chronologically through the biographies of Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli. It's the journey of those who started with General Relativity and tried to quantise spacetime. The nodes and links of LQG are not spacetime quanta, they're precursor objects out of which spacetime, along with its metric field, should emerge in the low-energy limit.

This is the fabrication of reality at the Planck scale, way down from observational data. The models are not without interest (especially the cosmological models) and the approach seems to have its compelling moments .. but .. but .. all the nasty things said about the theological or purely mathematical nature of String Theory also apply here, do they not?

If you're short of cash you could skip the book and read the Wikipedia article, though you are unlikely to understand it without a total familiarity with GR and QFT (not me!). The author had somehow to handwave his way over this cathedral of densely-connected abstractions: the "Quantum Space" reading experience is consequently pretty anaemic.

I'm guessing that Baggott wrote this book because, with the continuing decline in the prospects for String Theory, he's become convinced that there's something to Loop Quantum Gravity and wants to raise its profile for a generation of new physicists wondering what on earth they should be devoting their lives to.

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Amazon link

A few posts ago I said:

"I'm expecting this book to be a bunch of left-Keynesians arguing that an incoming Labour government should put more demand into the economy through deficit spending and increased transfer payments in order to stimulate investment and productivity."

I think I oversold it. This is a bunch of mediocre essays with no new ideas and many mistakes which reminded me of the kind of stuff sixth formers write. It insults the intelligence and bores the unfortunate reader. Give it a miss and read Steve Keen instead.

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Amazon link

Adrian pushed his copy in front of me. As I worked my way through I grew more impressed. It's an easy, folksy read but far from superficial. It puzzled me for a while - how should we think about this book? - and in the end I place it mostly in the Jungian tradition of optimal personal development.

Peterson has read deeply across the disciplines and has melded evolutionary theory, neuroscience and depth psychology into something coherent and new. That is a real achievement.

His blind spot is sociology - he doesn't see how the SJW orthodoxy he confronts is in reality the ideology of the new petty bourgeoisie, conjured into being with the neoliberal transition of the 1970s. He should read Poulantzas.

Still, this omission does not invalidate anything he says since even being conscious of the social dynamics does not suggest any different conclusions.The problem is here regardless.

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"Freud was a genius," Peterson remarks, “you can tell because people still hate him.”

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* Left Social-Democracy.

Reading Poulantzas and McDonnell

Classes in Contemporary Capitalism

Amazon link

From the preface:

"The book starts with a general theoretical essay that for the first time seriously explores the distinction between the “agents” and “positions” of capitalist relations of production, and seeks to avoid the typical errors of either functionalism or historicism. It also provides a polemical reconsideration of the problem of the “nation state” as a political unit today, and its relationship to the internationalization of capital.

Finally, and most originally, Poulantzas develops a long and powerful analysis of the much-abused concept of the “petty-bourgeoisie.” In this, he scrupulously distinguishes between the “traditional” categories of petty-bourgeoisie—shopkeepers, artisans, small peasants—and the “new” categories of clerical workers, supervisors, and salaried personnel in modern industry and commerce. At the same time he demonstrates the reasons why a unitary conceptualization of their class position is possible. The difficult question of the definition of “productive” and “unproductive” labor within Marx’s own account of the capitalist mode of production is subjected to a novel and radical reinterpretation. The political oscillations peculiar to each form of petty-bourgeoisie and especially their characteristic reactions to the industrial proletariat, are cogently assessed.

Poulantzas ends his work with a reminder that the actions and options of the petty-bourgeoisie are critical to any successful struggle by the working class, which must secure the alliance of important sections of the petty-bourgeoisie if the fateful experience of Chile is not to recur elsewhere tomorrow."

These are really critical issues when trying to understand the kind of class dynamics underlying the recent events in France, the left and right populist movements everywhere and specifically the SJW phenomenon. It's also relevant to any incoming Labour government here in the UK.

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State, Power, Socialism

Amazon link

This is Poulantzas's great exposition of the anatomy and dynamics of the various forms of the capitalist state, and the implications for the transition to socialism. I already read "The State and the Transition to Socialism" (Chapter 14 "The Poulantzas Reader" - PDF) where Nicos Poulantzas debates with the (at that time) Trotskyist Henri Weber (of the LCR) as to whether the Leninist model of a proletarian revolution/state based on federated soviets is really viable in modern Western Europe.

Poulantzas further questions whether the power of the bourgeois state can really only be overthrown by dual-power soviet structures as in the Bolshevik revolution (that was Trotskyist orthodoxy at the time of the interview, 1977). A kind of head-on assault.

My sympathies align with Poulantzas here, insofar as he at least thought about the nature of the state unlike the FI which had not moved beyond "The State and Revolution".

Weber is right against Poulantzas that the state is too strong and - in extremis - too focused to be subverted/reused from within. But they are both wrong to think that modern capitalism is vulnerable to the revolutionary imposition of a post-capitalist mode of production led by the massed ranks of the industrial proletariat.

That isn't the failure mode.

Update 23rd February 2019:

I've just read Ellen Meiksins Wood's book, "The Retreat From Class", where she devotes a chapter to Poulantzas. She takes him to task for assigning white-collar workers to the 'new petty-bourgeoisie'  (rather than the working class) and also for assuming this category is equivalent to the Marxist (technical) distinction between productive and unproductive workers (productive of surplus value, that is).

Poulantzas was undoubtedly wrong about this, and Wood has him nailed.

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Economics for the Many

Amazon link

I'm expecting this book to be a bunch of left-Keynesians arguing that an incoming Labour government should put more demand into the economy through deficit spending and increased transfer payments in order to stimulate investment and productivity.

I'm completely with Michael Roberts here: good luck with that.

Still, no sense in prejudging. Let's listen to what Mr McDonnell's favourite economists have to say.

The relative autonomy of the petty bourgeoisie

Nicos Poulantzas

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning came to people's attention in early 2018 with their book, "The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars". Seeking to account for an SJW phenomenon increasingly dominant in the western world, they distinguished between three kinds of culture: Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood.

Campbell and Manning over-abstracted these cultural categories, representing them almost as menu choices, or contingent way-points on the arc of history. This was mostly corrected in Tanner Greer's commentary at "The Scholar's Stage" (which features on the sidebar in the web version of this blog).

Rather than having me summarise his impressive analysis, please review it for yourself: "Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture"

Greer's analysis was not perfect.

"The transition from honor to dignity reflected a deeper shift in the basic building blocks of society. Had Western Europeans not shifted away from clan based to citizen based communities, there would not have been any Culture of Dignity. The shift from dignity to victimhood reflects a similar change in the societal distribution of power. ...

The federal government assumes powers traditionally reserved to local and state governments. Local businesses have been pushed out of existence by international conglomerates. The businesses, associations, congregations, and clubs that once made up American society are gone. America has been atomized; her citizens live alone, connected but weakly one to another. Arrayed against each is a set of vast, impersonal bureaucracies that cannot be controlled, only appealed to.

A "Culture of Victimhood" is a perfectly natural response to this shift in the distribution of power. Remember that the central purpose of moral cultures is to help resolve or deter disputes. Dignity cultures provide a moral code to regulate disputes among equals from the same community. They also help individuals in a community--citizens--organize to protect their joint interests.

21st century America has lost this ability to organize and solve problems at the local level. The most effective way to resolve disputes is appeal to the powerful third parties: corporations, the federal government, or the great mass of people weakly connected by social media. The easiest way to earn the sympathy of these powers is to be the unambiguous victim in the dispute.

Victim culture is here to stay."

In fact this 'atomisation' has to be interpreted more dynamically, in class terms. After all, not everyone identifies as a 'victim'.

Peter Turchin has correctly linked neoliberal atomisation with the 'overproduction of elites', the mass production of (social science and humanities) graduates with inflated expectations and entitlements, but for whom no place exists within the real elite, the top 1% or 0.1%. They are angry and febrile and in the mass a cause of political instability. It's not a new phenomenon: some of us remember the late sixties and early seventies.

This (now vastly enlarged) intermediate layer between the traditional working class and the high bourgeoisie is termed by Marxists the petty bourgeoisie. This brought to mind the seminal work of theorist Nicos Poulantzas and I reviewed with interest his chapter 13, "The New Petty Bourgeoisie" in "The Poulantzas Reader" (PDF) .

Poulantzas was an interesting guy and I also reviewed his bio, nodding along, until I came to this:

"He killed himself in 1979 by jumping from the window of a friend's flat in Paris."

He was 43.

There was something about the mental stability of continental Marxists in the late twentieth century. His more famous contemporary, Louis Althusser,  killed his wife Hélène Rytmann the following year and was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years.

Why are the new petty bourgeoisie so restless again? Because a decade of economic stagnation with the increasing gap between their circumstances and those of the top 1% has left them feeling abandoned. They experience a dislocating lack of prospects and purpose.

The old-time (pre-1980s) working class had a historic cultural identity forged through tenement communities, monolithic employers, trade unionism and social-democratic activism. The modern petty bourgeoisie by contrast is a collection of isolates, expressing their angst through faddish identity-issues.

None of these campaigns ever address the real causes of their dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, their heartfelt herd-activism is always destabilising .. and from the bourgeoisie's point of view, always with a risk of triggering wider unrest. Consequently, the elites attempt to manipulate and co-opt them (eg the moralising campaign against plastic pollution which carefully fails to discuss the true sources of said pollution).

The classic Marxist texts (Lenin, Trotsky) recognised the febrile and changeable nature of the radicalised petty bourgeoisie. Their works discuss methods of creating an alliance with the proletariat in the struggle for socialism.

How times have changed now that the tail wags the dog: the era of Momentum and the death of the dream .. .