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Reforming the Northern Ireland Economy – A job for the State

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No_Entry_to_Joy_Street_in_Belfast,_Northern_Ireland,_1974The following two articles originally appeared in the newspaper of the Irish Socialist Network.

CHANGING THE NORTH’S PUBLIC SECTOR

Northern Ireland got a new Finance Minister in August, Simon Hamilton from the DUP, and he made a bit of a splash in his first major speech.

He noted the well known facts that around one third of the workforce is in the public sector and two thirds of economic output is in the State’s hands.  However, instead of simply deploring these figures and blaming an inefficient and bloated public sector he said that the public sector can help the economy grow and not simply hold it back.  He said that what was needed was a reformed public sector that was more efficient.  And who could disagree with that?

Let’s skip for the moment what he means by reform and efficiency.  Surely socialists are in favour of reforms and efficiency? Aren’t we?

Well, the answer has to be yes.  Socialists are in favour of change.  In fact we want so much change that this requires not only reforms, not only radical change, but revolutionary change.  Of course we know the DUP aren’t advocating this but that doesn’t mean we don’t welcome change that involves genuine reform that, for example, improves efficiency.  And yes, we are in favour of increased efficiency.

In fact we are socialists because we believe a socialist society is a higher form of society than capitalism and is higher because, among many other things, it is more efficient.  Such efficiency could eliminate the need for unnecessary work, reduce the burden of work that does need to be done and create enough wealth so that poverty is eliminated and everyone has a standard of living that can satisfy our reasonable needs.

Simon Hamilton also said that he is in favour of alternative models of service delivery – like mutuals, cooperatives and social enterprises.  In other words public sector organisations or companies run or owned by the people who work in them.  What could be more socialist than firms or state bodies owned and controlled by workers?

Some might think this is a very naive approach to what Simon Hamilton is saying.  Surely he isn’t advocating the sort of reforms we would want?  Since when did the DUP become socialist and advocate workers’ ownership as a solution to economic underdevelopment?

Well there is a reason for the above approach and we can appreciate this reason when we compare it to the reaction of the trade unions to his speech.

I got a copy of the speech through a circular by my trade union NIPSA.  The letter from the General Secretary of NIPSA, Brian Campfield, noted the references to different models of public service delivery but said only that the view of NIPSA is that these would be detrimental to the interests of the union’s members and to the general community.

Of course Hamilton referred not only to cooperatives but also to ‘partnering with the private sector’, which is code for privatisation.  (You see! I’m not so naive!)  But this is only part of the story and not the most important part either.

Sticking only to the question of privatisation, which of course we should vigorously oppose, presents only a negative answer.  When our class enemies propose change our answer isn’t that things should stay as they are, but just be funded better.  We don’t defend the current state – or public sector as many call it – we want it changed just as much as we want the private sector changed.  We want the whole capitalist system changed, not just big private corporations but the bureaucratic state that supports and defends the corporations.

Socialists don’t look at the current state as a model for socialism. It’s bureaucratic and undemocratic.  I’ve worked in various bits of it for nearly 30 years and I haven’t had any meaningful say about how I do my work in all that time.  I have a boss, in fact I have loads of bosses, and I don’t have any say over who they are or what decisions they make.  How could this be any sort of socialism?

Socialists are socialists not only because are we against the present set-up but because we actually have an alternative – something positive to say.   So when the DUP says the present state is in need of change the first thing we should say is yes – and here is what it should look like.

It is much easier to be against things but much harder to say what you are for; even harder to explain what the alternative is and harder again to put it into practice.  That’s why when we see an opportunity to say we have an alternative and explain what it is we should grab it.

Part of the current weakness of socialism is that we, like the majority of people, are against how things currently are – with unemployment, inequality, crap jobs and the stress of everyday life – but we haven’t fought for the socialist answer that demonstrates the alternative.

Instead socialists have often been seen as defenders of the status quo – opposing privatisation but not offering any alternative to how the state delivers services, except to demand that it gets more money to do it.  Instead we are often seen as demanding solutions that don’t offer any radical change to the present system.  A better funded and bigger state is often how our alternative is presented, not just by our enemies but by ourselves!

The economy in the North of Ireland is well know as a bit of a basket case and the big size of the state sector is not the cause of it but is an expression of it.  This is also pretty well known by many.  It should be a big clue that a big state is not the answer.

Simon Hamilton thinks the public sector can be a vehicle for changing this situation and ironically the trade unions agree with him.  They just have slightly different ideas about how this can be done.

Socialist don’t agree with this and so don’t agree with Simon Hamilton or the standard trade union view.  In my next article I’ll explain this a bit more by looking at what else Hamilton said in his speech and what the standard left response has been.

STATE LED DEVELOPMENT?

When the new Finance Minister in the North said that the public sector could be a vehicle for developing the North’s economy, instead of being simply a drag, this was welcomed.  But with suspicion that this might mean privatisation.  There was also concern that he was continuing to boast of his party’s record of supporting low taxation.  In response the NEVIN economic think tank, sponsored by the trade unions, called for adequate levels of taxation; that is it was calling for increases in taxes.

What attitude should socialists take to this argument?

First of all we should recognise that states all over the world have involved themselves in promoting economic development, some more successfully than others.  Nationalists of all types are in favour of the nation state promoting its own economy in competition with other states.  For much of the last century this type of political programme was held up as ‘national liberation’. More and more state ownership was and still is presented as socialism.

It is very hard to see how the Northern state could ever be one of the successes.  State led economic development elsewhere has been successful to a point but the Northern State is dysfunctional.  Behind the rhetoric what is being proposed is not state led development but state enablement and facilitation of growth, but it is doubtful if the Northern State could even make progress with this.  Instead it will at best be reduced to attempting to lower taxes and entice a few footloose multinational companies to invest, based on a bucket of state hand-outs.

How desperate this has become was illustrated at the beginning of October when £3.3 million was given to a call centre company to promote nearly 1,000 jobs.  Half already existed, no capital investment was being made by the company and it had previously closed in Derry two years ago with the loss of 1,000 jobs.

The Northern Ireland Assembly hardly meets, it discusses things it can do nothing about and hasn’t a clue about what to do about things it can influence.  The Executive meets but has nothing to talk about since the DUP and Sinn Fein can agree nothing except to give hand-outs to multinationals.  But state led economic development requires much more than this.

It is doubtful if this is understood.  The DUP is a party of small businessmen who see the state and taxation purely as red tape and expense.  The need for the state to provide high class infrastructure and a well-educated and healthy workforce is all far removed from their immediate concerns with ‘how much tax do I have to pay?’

However a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development records that in Northern Ireland (and England), 16 to 24-year-olds scored  266 on average in a literacy test, which put them third from bottom in a 24-nation league table.  In numeracy, 16 to 24-year-olds scored 257 – putting them fourth from the bottom.

Sinn Fein thinks the economy would be great if there were only one Irish economy rather than two but there is not even an inkling that a united economic state might result in benefits for the larger Southern bit to the detriment of the smaller Northern bit.  It’s called uneven development.

A policy of relying on the state in the north for economic development looks hopelessly improbable not least because the state hasn’t been able to modernise itself never mind anything else.  The new minister, Simon Hamilton, announced the creation of a new Public Sector Reform Division but there is no strategy.

It is recognised that innovation comes from people but in his speech all he can do is ask the question – “and how do we motivate our public servants and unlock their ability to innovate?”

Don’t expect an answer.  Workers won’t get paid any more and they won’t be trusted with ownership or control over their own workplace or job.  And if you’re not trusted to control your own job how could you be trusted to make truly transformative changes to society?

One ideological supporter of capitalism once wrote a book with the interesting title ‘Why most things Fail’.  It noted that most companies fail sooner or later.  While the capitalist state will accept that this or that capitalist enterprises can fail there is one capitalist undertaking that cannot be allowed to fail, ever, because it protects the rest.  That is the state itself. Only the most trustworthy can be entrusted with state power which is why the DUP and Sinn Fein don’t really have it.  What they have are the powers of a glorified council and they don’t even exercise the powers they have.

If workers were really to be given the power to develop a new economy there would still be many failures but the powers unleashed would ultimately lead to a new society.

This however isn’t the model of state economic development on offer or championed by any nationalist party.

The Northern state has failed but unfortunately for Sinn Fein so has the Southern State.  The nature of the capitalist state everywhere is that it cannot give workers the autonomy or freedom to take risks, innovate and try to change society, for example by promoting workers’ cooperatives.  Such economic power might sooner or later form the basis of a rival political power.

In other words state led economic development is nothing to do with socialism, which is the power of the working class.  And ‘national liberation’ tells us that the key problem is liberating a state in the oppressed nation instead of liberating the working class of the oppressed nation from the state – foreign and domestic.

This means workers have no interest in supporting many of the measures usually associated with such a programme, including tax increases, which will inevitably hit them hardest, or supporting local industry against foreign as if it was somehow ‘ours’.  Socialism is not the growth of the existing state or its accretion of more and more powers.

Simon Hamilton’s proposals on privatisation are widely recognised as bad news but the bureaucratic state is not the alternative.  If the Northern economy shows one thing it shows this.

Employee ownership and capitalism

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{3E6643C4-0E2F-4C4C-B00C-DB42B68D2316}Img100Beyond the Corporation: Humanity Working, David Erdal, The Bodley Head, London, 2011.

The author of this book has an unusual pedigree.  He was born into a family which owned its own business from the year Charles Darwin was born, in 1809.  As a child he did not lack for money and joined the firm in 1977, at which time 1,500 people were employed in the company.  In 1985 he became its effective Chief Executive Officer.  In between he had led a rather different life, getting a job as an unskilled labourer on a London building site after leaving university

Through this real life experience he leant what thousands of Professors of economics are not – that it is employee’s work that creates wealth – and that the key to a company’s performance is leadership and commitment; leadership and commitment from everyone in the organisation.  That leadership is important should be readily understood by socialists.

He is therefore a strong advocate of employee ownership and the book presents his own experience of turning his family business into a workers’ cooperative and his own views on the benefits of such ownership.  He notes that because workers are so used to being ignored and exploited even the most minimal change, such as being allowed to own shares in the company, have positive effects in boosting productivity and performance.  He also notes however that such schemes transfer no real influence.  He is therefore clear that what is necessary is ownership because without ownership there is no real control.

Employee owned businesses do better because their workers are better trained, contribute more to the business and are more adaptable to change.  They generally do not suffer from underinvestment, do not lack ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit and do not exhibit shirking as workers monitor each other’s work effort.  Academic studies show them to be more productive and, while business problems are not solved by employee ownership in itself, or prevent strategic mistakes that may threaten the company’s existence, employee ownership will help the company survive longer.  If you own something you will look after it better.

He contrasts this with the views of traditional economists who, with no evidence, in fact against the evidence, claim that employee ownership will witness workers extract cash at the expense of the long term health of the business, take too long to make decisions, will see them avoid difficult decisions and witness the performance of  their business decline

In contrast he claims that the participation of everyone in decision making, and everyone being equally affected by the decisions made, makes for better decisions.

In his quest to turn the family company into a workers’ cooperative he was repeatedly told by finance advisors and other professionals that this was not a good idea.  The Market is always right – by definition.

He quotes one supporter of employee ownership who complains that workers normally have none of the rights associated with ownership, such as information, participation and control, and that while capitalism is good at creating capital, it is lousy at creating capitalists.

The view that cooperatives make capitalists of workers is one also heard from trade unions and argued as a reason to oppose workers’ ownership.  The author provides many examples of real employee ownership where workers have struggled with issues of productivity and competitiveness and where jobs have had to be cut because of threats of wholesale closure.

However the view that the Market is inimical to workers’ cooperatives is interesting because  in strict logic this is obviously not the case while it is also not the view most widespread on the Left, which is that workers’ cooperatives are simply not an alternative to capitalism because the market does not disappear and therefore capitalism does not disappear.

But it is not at all that simple and the hostility of some defenders of the market to worker owned companies is perfectly rational.

Irrespective of this the author notes that every generation throws up experiments with workers’ ownership but that most often this is not the result of the initiative of the workers themselves but arises from existing owners, from unusual individuals who stand against prevailing orthodoxy.  Who, from ideals of fairness, from appreciation of the contribution made to the company by workers, or realisation that the company can do better under their ownership, seek to transform ownership of their business.

Among the many issues arising from the idea of employee ownership, access to finance is often held up as the insuperable barrier to a business owned by those who work in it.  However the author notes that millions of small businesses do get access to finance, that most companies finance themselves from their own resources or can get started on the basis of the business itself, with funding based on sound business plans or backed by existing assets.  Or, in the case of the Mondragon cooperative in the Basque country, the workers can set up their own bank to finance their other cooperative initiatives.

This he contrasts favourably with the massive funding of mergers and acquisitions by private companies, which have a consistent record of failure, and the funding of property and other asset bubbles.  Mainstream dismissals of the viability and efficiency of workers’ cooperatives ignore the actual history and experience of capitalism as opposed to the mythical equilibrium properties of mathematical models of the market that exist nowhere outside of the models.

The massive increase of executive pay is ridiculed as an example that explodes the glib justifications of the market – that high pay for those at the top is simply the outcome of the interplay of supply and demand.  The demand for executives has not increased exponentially in line with pay but demand, fuelled by the cult of the capitalist exhibited in the growth of business schools and the MBA, alongside TV programmes such as ‘Dragon’s Den’ and ‘The Apprentice’, has seen supply multiply.  So why has the price risen?

Even if it could be argued that the demand for executives lies behind massive increased remuneration (to use the prevailing argot) the market is then supposed to increase supply to drive down prices to an efficient level.  Why hasn’t it?  Is it not working or is it rather that this is not how it actually works?

In the race to justify the rampant growth of inequality we now read about the ‘winner-takes-all’ society, which states baldly that market competition rewards those who win not those who come second or third or the rest.  The problem with this of course is that it is contradicted by the reality in which executive failure is still handsomely rewarded.  More worryingly for its proponents it contradicts the claim that the market rewards efficiency and is fair even minimally.

The author rejects many of the fashionable corporate claims.  For him employee ownership makes companies work better and their workers lead happier lives.  The contract of employment, which a worker signs, removes his right to his own product and pretends that he or she is a thing that can be rented.  Through case studies he argues that ownership make workers feel different – just as capitalism says it is supposed to!  But, he asks, why should such an effect be restricted to a few?

He has had enough experience to acknowledge the difficulties, not just of creating cooperatives but of running them.  How do you ensure workers’ actual as opposed to nominal participation and how do you deal with sometimes unrealistic expectations?  How do you overcome apathy among the workers?  After all, it is necessary not just to limit and control power exercised at the top but also necessary to ensure that it is wielded to effect at the bottom.

He addresses these questions and gives some practical answers, such as ownership being held collectively and not individually by particular workers.  This, he claims, has been the mechanism that ensures longevity of cooperative enterprises and obstructs private capital inserting itself and gaining control.  He acknowledges however that there is no obvious answer to what he calls the corporate governance problem.

It is exactly this question that is addressed by this recent blog post.  It is also only a Marxist approach that can address some of the apparently incongruous workings of capitalism that the author points up, such as why does it limit ownership of capital and not spread it around?

For a Marxist the obvious reason that capitalism does not encourage workers’ ownership is that by restricting such ownership capital compels workers to sell their labour power to those that do own capital and impels them to work on their behalf.  If all production was owned by workers then clearly an individual capitalist would be unable to compel anyone to work for them.

If all production was owned by the workers then equally clearly such production would be geared to what the workers wanted to produce and not to what capitalists believe would make them the most profit.  On both accounts production for profit would end.  Capitalists could find no one to provide the unpaid labour on which profit is based and the enterprises owned by the workers would have no incentive to pursue wasteful or aggressive competition aimed at forcing other enterprises out of business.  In fact they would have every incentive to collaborate in order produce in a way that met their collective needs.

When ownership becomes collective workers will feel differently but this simply demonstrates the truth of Marx’s claim that capital is not a thing but a relationship between capitalists and workers in which the unpaid labour of the latter expands the capital belonging to the former.  When workers own all the so-called capital it ceases to be a relationship between an owner and a worker, between an exploiter and exploited, and ceases to be capital.  When ‘capital’ is owned by everyone it ceases to be owned by anyone in particular so ceases to be capital.  This is why, unrealised by the author, the extension of workers ownership would spell not the expansion of capitalism but its ending.

Again and again the author reflects on how difficult it can sometimes be to get workers to think and act as owners of the enterprises they work in.   For Marxists this is indeed a big problem and is what we mean by saying that we need a revolution to change things, including changing the workers themselves.  Because a revolution is about transforming the lives of the working majority, which they can only do themselves, this includes transforming the vast amount of their lives they spend at work.  Probably unlike the author, we believe there are all sorts of obstacles and impediments put in workers way to gaining control of production, impediments that require workers taking political action to remove.

Production is only one aspect of how society works and attempting to take control of it requires ultimately taking control of the rest of society as well.  Taking control of society as a whole also reinforces the activity of workers control within the workplace.  It is also the Marxist case that ultimately no permanent and stable workers ownership or control can succeed unless the workers also control the state to defend such ownership.

There is therefore a real contradiction between workers cooperatives and capitalism, pace the author of this book, and equally no contradiction between cooperative production and revolution, pace the left opponents of workers’ ownership.

To be continued

Why have the Irish not revolted? Part IV

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gustave_dore_fourth_circle_dante_infernoIn much of Europe the workers movement developed in the latter half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th through industrialisation, the growth of trade unions and socialist parties and the radicalisation caused by two world wars, in particular by the first.  The socialist movement often led the struggle for democratic rights and freedoms and gained support as a result.

The Irish experience has been different, leading to a working class with a lower level of class consciousness.  While Ireland started to industrialise early it was thrown back by the development of superior industrial development in Britain.  What industrialisation did occur was small and mainly concentrated in the north east of the country.  Defeat and brutal repression of Ireland’s bourgeois revolution in 1798 led to a bitterly divided working class with the most extreme reactionary ideology dominating the most advanced industrial area.

The land question was denuded of its radical potential by this counter revolution and by the effects of the catastrophic famine in the middle of the19th century when, in a population of over 8 million, around a million died and a million emigrated and the population began a decline that did not reverse until the 1970s.  The number of agricultural labourers fell by 700,000 from 1845 to the early twentieth century, the number of small farmers was halved and the cottier class almost wiped out.  All this could only but weaken the potential base for a radicalised land movement.

The result of all this was that when the national movement erupted in the first decades of the twentieth century in a battle for an independent state it was dominated by middle class revolutionaries who subordinated workers’ interests with the demand that ‘labour must wait’, which has been pretty much the policy of Irish republicanism since.

The new truncated statelet these most conservative of revolutionaries created was dominated by the same economic subordination as that which preceded nominal independence, resulting in economic growth after foundation of the new state at very much the same rate as before its creation; and a polity not much different than before except for the role of the new Irish bourgeoisie that often proclaimed its Catholicism more than its nationality.

The working class in its majority never broke from this political class and the socialist movement has been small and peripheral.  The Second World War passed the Irish State by and during the 1950s emigration was higher relatively than it had been almost 100 years earlier, sapping all social classes of vitality and energy.

The Irish State caught the tail end of the world-wide post war economic boom and the workforce in industry increased from 259,000 in 1961 to 363,000 in 1981.  Overall however there was little increase as the numbers employed as agriculture continued to decline.  This growth in the working class led to some limited revival in socialism reflected in the Labour Party claiming ‘the 70s will be socialist’ before that decade came and went  and republicanism being genuinely influenced by socialist ideas, although of a Stalinist-type that did not offer any real alternative.

This period saw a large growth in the number of strikes so that at one point the Irish State had the highest number in Europe (see below).

strikestats

It also witnessed huge demonstrations against the high taxes imposed by the State on the working class, which amounted to 87 per cent of all income taxes in 1978. In 1979 over 150,000 workers demonstrated in Dublin with many thousands in thirty other towns including 40,000 in Cork.

At this point the Irish State’s model of economic development began to collapse. World-wide economic crisis, a weakening of foreign investment and bankruptcy of indigenous industry led to massive unemployment, renewed emigration and a ballooning State debt.  That the Irish working class and small socialist movement were unable to offer an alternative to the resulting capitalist restructuring and political offensive should not surprise.  There was no successful resistance and alternative created anywhere else.

The defeat of the tax struggles in the late seventies and early eighties and the inability to take advantage of ruling class political disarray, evidenced by repeated general elections in the first few years of the decade, plus the mass unemployment and emigration during the decade, weakened the working class both materially and politically.  The graph of strike activity above clearly shows a steep decline from the 1970s from which there has been no recovery.  It was in these circumstances that social partnership was imposed in the late 1980s.

Partnership signalled the move away from bargaining with the employers and State through militant action and acceptance that when the solvency of the State was in question this took priority.  Beginning in 1987 a series of deals were negotiated that meant accepting major cuts in pay and state services in order to reduce the massive State debt.  The parallels with today are obvious.

There was resistance to social partnership but it came in its most militant form from outside the trade unions and the trade union leaders were decisive in its relatively smooth introduction.  This defeat of militant workers action and acceptance of the prerogatives of capitalism was, as we have said, not at all unique to Ireland.

Across the world the ability and willingness of the working class to fight back in defence of its interests was set back.  Strike statistics are only the most graphic measure of this development.  Taking 42 countries and looking at the period between 1981-85 and 1996-2000 the number of countries in which strikes increased was 8 while there were 34 countries in which they declined.  In the group of countries in which strikes had risen the increase was only 5,183 while the reduction in strike numbers was 63,657 in the group of countries in which there was a decline.

In the Irish State the annual number of days lost in strikes fell from over 580,000 in the 1970s to 26,650 in 2005.  In the latter year there were only 15 strikes and only 10 in 2006, in which only 7,352 working days were lost, the lowest since records began in 1923.  In 2007, the last year of the boom, there were only 6.

As a percentage of the employed workforce trade union membership fell from 56.2% in 1987 to 42% in 1998.  Separate figures record a reduction from 46% in 1994 to 35% in 2004 while the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has admitted that density continued to fall, being lowest among young workers.  Where unions did exist member participation dropped and some of the features of bureaucratisation long normal at higher levels of trade unions infected union representatives further down the ranks.

All this occurred during an unprecedented boom in the economy, the period of the Celtic Tiger, when GDP growth ranged between 7.8% and 11.5% from 1995 to 2000 and between 4.4% and 6.5% from 2001 to 2007.  From 1990 to 2007 total employment grew from 1.160m to 2.112m, an increase of over 80%.  While incomes fell during the 1980s they grew rapidly during the Celtic Tiger.  The historical working class was recreated in many ways as a result of rapid economic growth both quantitatively as a result of falling unemployment, immigration and increased labour force participation rates and qualitatively as a result of the increased employment of women (whose number grew by over 125% from 1990 to 2007) and an influx of foreign workers.

The Irish working class was recreated as a result of a boom fuelled primarily by foreign investment, which excluded unions from its workplaces, increasing corporatism and bureaucratisation of the unions that did exist.  This within a world in which the historic goals of the working class movement – from progressive reform of the capitalist system to the view that it could be replaced – was increasingly discredited through the fall of Stalinism and defeat and retreat of workers struggles and the claims of social democracy.

The boom saw no political strengthening of the workers’ movement even as unemployment fell and the class objectively, at least in numbers, grew enormously.  As we said at the end of Part 3 capitalism is a revolutionary mode of production that recreates the working class.  In the Irish State it did so in a way and in circumstances that did nothing to overcome the historic political weaknesses of the class.  Indeed the trade unions became weaker as they bought into social partnership and the view that the interests of workers, State and bosses were best aligned.  Even the historic nationalist politics that has been hegemonic became encapsulated in the need to have a low corporation tax for US multinationals.

Lack of a strategic alternative, among other things, brought about defeat of the large struggles of the 1970s.  Unemployment, emigration and prolonged economic crisis brought an assault by the State on working class living standards and did so in such a way that it survived, even prospered, when the economy recovered and entered into a boom.  Social partnership sold the working class into sacrifices to bail out the State from bankruptcy and made the workers subordinate even when the boom gave them the conditions in which they could have recovered their strength and learnt to advance their own interests.  Instead, in so far as social partnership was later abandoned it was abandoned by the State.

The nationalist politics of the working class, the partnership with the state and the agreement of workers to sacrifice themselves on its alter came together in the reluctant acceptance of workers that they must bail out the banks and accept austerity when the economic crisis finally broke.  This dependence on the State can be seen in two other ways.

In Part 2 we noted that the left wing economist Michael Taft has claimed that the ‘squeezed middle’, the 4th to 8th deciles of income earners, suffered declines in direct income in the five years leading up to the crash, gaining only as a result of social transfers.  Social partnership involved a deal between the trade union leaders and the State/bosses in which workers refrained from industrial action and accepted lower than potential pay rises in favour of tax cuts.  This was not just the case in the final years of the boom but was the line pushed almost from the start – a policy that became more and more explicit as the partnership deals were negotiated.

Thus not only did the workers movement become denuded of any militant initiative but it became more and more dependent on the state, and this was true not only of public sector workers but of workers in the private sector as well.  Gross average industrial earnings grew by 25% in real terms in the 15 years between 1987 and 2000 but take home pay rose by 60% for a single person and 58% for married because taxation was cut.

Mainstream economists, in 2000, also reckoned that these tax cuts were regressive because they were largely achieved through reductions in tax rates, which favoured those on higher incomes.   It is well known that the State became excessively reliant on revenues from a credit boom but what this shows is that social partnership, and the whole strategy of the trade union leaders, was just as reliant.  But really, how could it be otherwise?

The second way this dependence increased can be seen in the simple growth of the state itself, true in all countries and not just of Ireland.  ‘The Economist’ reported that the average size of the state had grown from 12.7% of GDP in 1913 to 47.7% in 2009.  Even in the UK after decades of Thatcher and New Labour the size of the state remained around 44% from 1980 to 2005.  This translates into widespread and increasing dependence of the population on the state, which has become the supposed solution to every and all sorts of problems.

Such massive growth could not fail to have deep impacts on society at the ideological level and the ruling ideas that infect the working class.  Neoliberalism hasn’t done away with the State and neither has it weakened illusions in it.  The Irish State now presides over the world’s biggest property company (NAMA) after private capital made a mess of it.  The State is now the means by which the debts created by this private capital are made good by the working and middle class.

One business journalist has quantified some of the ways in which this dependency is transmitted:

“Irish Budget 2014: Half of Ireland’s population is on welfare and when recipients of child benefit, farmers dependent on public subsidies which are effectively welfare, accounting for 81% of average farm income in 2012; legal services costing the state about a half billion euros annually; public payments to doctors; a raft of corporate welfare schemes and the public service itself, at least while Karl Marx is likely to be disappointed that a few remnants of the failed communism experiment only remain, in Ireland there is a shining example of the halfway house known as socialism or to put it in non-ideological terms, dependency on the State.”

As we can see, he paints the growth of the capitalist state as somehow a practical example the ideas of Marx, and who can blame him?  It’s the view of most of the Left as well, who constantly call not on the working class to solve its own oppression but for the state to do it for them.

The journalist gives a host of facts that demonstrate the growth of dependency on the state -from the growth of social welfare expenditure from €9.5m in 2002 to €15.5m in 2007 when the crash came and to €20.7m in 2012.  The number of social welfare beneficiaries rose from 1.5m in 2002 to 1.6m in 2007 and 2.3m in 2012.  Of these 486,000 were on the Live Register.

He notes the increased number holding medical cards; the direct subsidies to private industry and agriculture – mostly to the biggest operators; the tax breaks for business and the direct procurement of goods and services from private capital.

However the bottom line with the austerity offensive is that the Irish State became bankrupt and could not afford to continue this, so introducing harsh cuts and tax increases.  The question we have sought to address is why Irish workers have not resisted, or resisted so little and to so little effect.

We have seen numerous reasons for this – from the historic weakness of the class; the recreation of such weakness in the defeats of the last few decades; international developments that have demonstrated the hardly unique character of the experience of Irish workers in this respect, and the particular role of trade union and political leaders, which again is far from unique to Ireland.  Only a few weeks ago I listened on the radio while a professor of economics in Madrid noted that commentators in Spain were wondering why Spanish workers were not reacting more angrily to austerity compared to their Portuguese neighbours.

The experience of Irish workers reflects the weakness of indigenous capitalism which the growth of foreign direct investment has not significantly altered.  The latter has only reinforced the weakness of Irish workers – they have hardly even attempted to unionise in the multinational sector and appear to have bought into the view that they must live through nine circles of hell before the proud Irish race will ever succumb to a headline corporation tax rate higher than 12.5 per cent.

Finally we have seen the very direct dependency of so many on the State that has just bankrupted itself bailing out the banks.  Unable to stop them doing so, in fact not even being asked if they agreed, and fed crap about the ‘cheapest bailout in history’, the working class was left with a choice – bail out the state it depended on for jobs and welfare or default when the only people in place who could carry out this policy was the same State that was demanding they pay up.  Without a mechanism to enforce default, even if that is what they wanted, and without an economic and political power base outside of dependency on the State, the choice was pretty clear, even if there could have been struggles that could have made it messy.

Put simply – how could workers tell the State to get stuffed when it relied on it so much?  The Left has peddled nonsense that the State can be made a means to redistribute wealth such that only the rich pay for capitalist crises but the workers haven’t bought this and some of the Left that calls itself Marxist is not actually supposed to believe it either.

The defeat inflicted on workers in the last five years should cause a rethink.  Renewed declarations of faith will not do.

Lessons from the Grangemouth dispute

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GRANGEMOUTH_2700282bI received an email from Socialist Democracy inviting me to contribute to a discussion based on an article they have written on the lessons of the Grangemouth dispute in Scotland. This article sets out the devastating scale of the defeat – the freeze in pay, butchery of pension entitlement and castration of union organisation.  Many in the media called it an old fashioned battle of labour against capital, such was the unvarnished clarity of what was involved.

The questions to be answered are whether there could have been a different result and what lessons can be learnt?

The article does not say whether the result could have been different.  Given the circumstances I think not, but this means we must be clear what the circumstance were that lead to this conclusion.

As for the lessons the article posits two – that the entire strategy of the trade union leaders has been overthrown and that of union support for, and reliance on, the Labour Party is a mistake.  I believe that there is a third rather more basic one, which can be explained very much as the old fashioned relationship between labour and capital.  What is this relationship?

The relations of capitalist production are unequal as they involve capitalists as owners of the means of production, including oil refineries and petrochemical works, and workers separated from ownership of such means of production and dependent on employment by the capitalist for their livelihood.  In a struggle that does not threaten or weaken these foundations it is generally the case that the capitalists will be able to impose their wishes because these align with the power structures in society.

This does not mean each and every strike or struggle by workers is doomed to defeat but that in certain disputes this power of capital is fully deployed and the fundamental imbalance in power is cruelly demonstrated.  Were it otherwise capitalism might be able to find some stable compromise, some equilibrium between the two classes that would allow a ‘fairer’ distribution of resources.  No such stable equilibrium has been found.  Marxists have been confirmed in their view that the liberation of the majority of working people requires overturning the existing system and creation of one in which the monopoly of ownership of capital is destroyed. 

This is the basic case for socialism in opposition to all those who think a better world is possible while not overthrowing the fundamental structures of society.

It is not an all or nothing case.  It does not say that workers can do nothing to protect themselves short of socialism.  Struggles that do not threaten these fundamental relations can sometimes be victorious such as when the economy is booming, unemployment is low and workers can strike or otherwise bargain for higher wages without fear of being sacked and their place being taken by the unemployed.

Of course in an economic downturn the temporary leverage of workers and trade unions is undermined and the power of capitalists to do as they wish because of their ownership of capital is reasserted.

In the case of the Grangemouth dispute this means that no workers’ action no matter how brilliant, innovative or militant could prevent Jim Ratcliffe from using his ownership of capital to close the refinery and petrochemical works and throw thousands of workers onto the dole.

Of course if you were convinced he was lying about the profitability of the plant and convinced his threats to close were a bluff the solution is simple – call his bluff and tell him his demands will not be accepted.  Unfortunately his ownership means that only he and his management know the truth and his claims that the plant only had a future if he was able to put £300 million in investment into it were credible. The same system that decrees private ownership of a refinery also necessarily involves periodic overcapacity in production and this was held over the workers’ heads as the brute fact that required they surrender or face the sack.

Under such circumstances no one can be surprised the workers decided to accept the lesser evil.

The article is correct that simple strike action would not succeed.  It was the boss who went on strike – it’s called a lockout.  It is he who brought production to a halt and threatened to make this permanent.

Others called for widespread solidarity action perhaps secondary strikes.  Firstly these are illegal and related to this, workers have not yet the level of combativity to carry out such action, even those involved in the chemicals industry who would have lost their own jobs had Grangemouth closed.

If it is argued that this strategy is one we must argue for and attempt to build for the future then this is indeed an element of strategy.  In this situation however there is no reason to believe Ratcliffe gave a rat’s arse about the fate of the wider industry and of the other thousands of jobs that would have been lost.  If he was going to close Grangemouth then all these strikes would have made no difference to his plans.

A second possible answer was to call on the state to nationalise the refinery and works.  The problem with this is that neither the British State based in London nor that part that might go independent had no intention of doing so.  Both are ‘open for business’ only when it means private capitalism.  So who was going to nationalise the works?  If it is believed that strike action would compel such nationalisation then it would have had to be wider and deeper than that considered above and the first response of the State would have been to attempt to throttle it. Some people keep on forgetting the State is the protector of the enemy.

Some on the Scottish Left said the situation at Grangemouth showed the need for independence but this was not an immediate solution.  As we have just said, the Scottish National Party has no intention of nationalising private industry when private capitalists are prepared to invest if only the workers accept the necessary sacrifices.  Alex Salmond’s primary concern was with the exposure of his independence project, and the illustration of how weak the idea of a prosperous oil economy looks in light of this immediate threat to pull the plug.  Since the refinery provides fuel for northern England and Northern Ireland as well as Scotland the case for action to protect the service went beyond the border and thus implicitly provides the grounds for wide action to defend it.  It also undermines any case for a nationalist solution from the right or the left.

The article argues against the efficacy of such answers and proposes its own elements of a strategy.  Some of these are by no means very clear.

For example what does this mean? –

“The trade union and political fights have to be united around a movement that is willing to reject the claims of finance capital and to step in and expropriate capital where it is necessary to preserve the livelihood of workers.”

The only time a workers’ movement will be able on its own to expropriate capital is when there is a revolutionary situation. We’re not in one of those so it wasn’t and isn’t an answer.  (We’re also fighting industrial capital in this one.)

The article says –

“The Labour Party has promised a temporary freeze on prices, so a call could be made for a permanent cap . . .”

Just how are the laws of capitalism to be permanently abolished or even suspended when the system still exists?

They can’t.  The only way they can is if and when there is a revolution that creates the conditions for totally remodelling economic and social relations and even then prices will not be abolished for some considerable time.

The alternative proposed revolves around occupation and seeking an alternative to the Labour Party.

Once again however if the plant is really losing money and the threat of closure real then why would Ratcliffe not just let the workers occupy, sit in the refinery and – so far as he was concerned – rot away?  It would be just another way of closing the plant if he didn’t get the workers to accept his demands.

What the demand for occupation means is that workers take over ownership and run it themselves.  They cannot simply run it themselves without ownership.  No one would provide raw materials or other services without someone to contract with and you don’t form contracts with those in unlawful possession.  So the question is how would the workers take ownership?  How would they get the money to buy it and to invest perhaps the£300 million Ratcliffe says is needed?

Obviously this is much harder when pushed against a wall, with no preparation and no conception that this is the alternative.  Equally obviously if it is accepted that this is the road that workers in such situations should follow then it would be better to be prepared for such a challenge.  The challenge is precisely to the monopoly ownership of the means of production that we said at the start is the heart of the relationship between capital and labour and at the heart of capitalism.

The workers movement is big enough to fund research into the creation of worker owned businesses.  Workers might start to fight to gain control of their pension funds to invest in their own enterprises.  Money can be raised for investment from financial institutions or other funding means to be determined.    A network of employee owned cooperatives already exists.  What is involved is not utopian, in the sense it has never been done before, nor is it without rational calculation.

If workers could be ready for such an alternative the threats of closure would not be so conclusive.

In other words the alternative to capitalist ownership is workers’ ownership.  Not just in some indefinite future ‘after the revolution’ but now and not just for now but in order to build towards the future.

Finally the article criticises the unions’ support for the Labour Party.  It notes that organised workers continue to support their trade union and political leaders, although it only proposes that in order to fight both it is necessary to break from the Labour Party but not from the existing trade unions.  It calls for a ‘class struggle movement’ to be created across all the unions, which should call for a new working class party.

It obviously believes this fight can dismiss the Labour Party and need not go through it, although it does not explain how this can be achieved when it acknowledges workers continuing support for that Party.  Implicit is the view that a fight within that Party is not needed to convince workers to break from it.  This in my view is very doubtful.

It draws no lessons from its ridicule of the small socialist organisations which have attempted this road or what it correctly describes as the private character of their concerns; illustrated by their bizarre discussions and replication of policies that decades ago they excoriated the Labour Party for.  The articles’ own call for a revolutionary party is correct but of no help here since it is put forward, necessarily so, as an ideal future location.

Instead it states that – “there are many issues around which a fightback can be organised, but they cannot be organized by the current leadership of the working class . . . What it [Grangemouth] has shown up is the utter inability of the traditional leadership to defend workers and the demoralisation and lack of strategic vision on the part of the socialists.”

If what is being said is that a new leadership has to be created, and the existing one challenged, then this is correct.  If it is being said that this is a precondition for a fight-back then this is not correct. It is only in the course of struggle that existing leaderships can be defeated, as long as such objectives become part of the struggle by the mass of ordinary workers.

The workers at Grangemouth and, by extension, those beyond have suffered a cruel defeat.  One possible reaction is to be cowed by the power of capital to shatter livelihoods.  A second is to seek some magic bullet of a strategy that workers can employ to defeat such plans: a strike, secondary action or an occupation.

A third lesson is that very often workers are forcibly confronted with the reality that to secure a decent life they need to go beyond capitalism and that no amount of shifting it with militant action can change its fundamental nature.  This nature is one where capitalists own the means of production and they can open and close it when they want.  This is not a strong argument for capitalism but a powerful argument for changing society – for socialism.

As Marx said – “the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!“

Russell Brand and Revolution

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I was listening to BBC Radio 4 on the headphones on my way home from work last night when three Westminster politicians were asked about Russell Brand’s interview with Jeremy Paxman.  The link shows it has had nearly 9 million hits, just a few million more than this blog.  This is why Radio 4 was covering it and why it is important.

Is it another illustration of the celebrity culture that colonises everything?  This is the claim of some of the derisive dismissal of Brand’s rantings by the rest of the media who, at least the ones I’ve read, have slagged him off as a hypocrite.  An obvious example of ad hominem argument or shooting the messenger, not that it’s always wrong to shoot the messenger when the message is intolerable.  In this respect I’m reminded of the opening scene of Gladiator when the Germanic tribes respond to the demand to surrender by the Roman legions by throwing the severed head of the messenger on the ground in front of their massed ranks.

The problem of course is that shooting the messenger doesn’t deal with the message as the Germanic tribes discovered.  It might be claimed Brand doesn’t have an argument.  But read his New Statesman article and he does.

It might be dismissed as primitive or naïve but a better word is elemental and he does have more than a few good lines.  He makes a case.  It’s not the sort you will read on this blog but this blog doesn’t pretend to have the only or the best or the most effective voice for revolutionary change.  It aspires to encourage the recovery of Marxism and its application to the practical political programme of socialists.  It hopes that whoever thinks this is a reasonable objective to pursue will contribute to it and write their own posts.

So what if Brand’s surprising political commitment lights up the sky like a meteor and crashes and burns to earth?  What if he is a one-hit wonder?  When the rest of us are unable to get a gig a one-hit wonder is something to be.

Has his outburst reduced the credibility of our cause?  Or given it a little more light? Perhaps one more point of departure to argue for it and to advance it?

He is obviously very aware of the brickbats he would get for his ‘champagne socialist’ position and his trenchant, and in some ways reasonable, response to this is itself rather honest compared to the carefully constructed insincerity of politician’s continual hypocrisy.  It’s not as if he’s a champagne socialist in the way that that other celebrity in the new is – ‘Sir’ Alex Ferguson – with his Icumfigovan sign in his office, his hobnobbing with millionaires and his advice on man management to Tony Bliar. Nevertheless Brand has a brand problem – for example my partner thinks he’s a prat and she is very rarely wrong in such judgements.

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Brand can be criticised as anti-political, with his calls for people not to vote, but he is not stupid and he puts forward a case why we ‘should not encourage them’.  He also puts well the idea that apathy is more accessible than anger to all the shit that people have to put up with from politicians and the system they pimp.  Compared to many on the left, who claim there is a crisis of working class representation, that is we don’t have the right politicians in parliament to represent us, the radical critique of all politicians who do represent us is refreshing.

Not because we haven’t heard it before, in fact as Marxists we invented the revolutionary critique of bureaucratic ‘representation’ of the working class, but because we never see it on television.  We are extremists who never get heard but a little bit of a hearing for revolution makes us a little bit less extreme in the sense we are able to register in political debate a little bit more.

Listening to the feeble and self-serving helpings of cant from the Tory, Labour and Liberal politicians last night on the radio shows how even such a minor assault on their system from someone with a shred of credibility can so easily expose the defenders of the status quo.  Now Radio 4 reports the disillusionment of Paxman himself with the politics on offer in Britain. For Ireland multiply that lack of alternative by the number of Euros given to bailout the banks.

Above all, when pressed for what he wants as an alternative Brand calls for socialism and for revolution.  This is a darned sight more than some on the left do when faced with such a question.  The next question is that of the child – but how do we get a revolution?  You can ague all you like that Brand hasn’t much to say about this that seems practical but what is the message of the so-called revolutionary left?

As I have posted many times, the left that claims to be Marxist asks the state to extend its power through extra spending, taxation and through nationalisation while simultaneously believing, but not having the courage to say so in front of the workers, that this same state should be smashed in a revolution.

Let’s not pretend Brand is an advanced political thinker whose views we should instantly embrace.  He may be on a ‘messiah world tour’ but he’s still more a very naughty boy than a genuine Messiah.

Brandism is hardly going to succeed Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism.  It’s not a practical guide but an emotional and reasoned outburst.  It’s not even an inarticulate expression of youth rebellion.  He’s 38 and very articulate.  We’re not obliged to defend his every word or even every tenth one but his avalanche of words creates an impression – there is something radically wrong with the world we inhabit.  Very, very wrong.

It would be easy to criticise what he says for all sorts of reasons, from his apparent attitude to women to his lack of political strategy.  But it is precisely his political limits that creates a focus on the key message that he is held to be delivering – opposition to the venality of the present system, the need for a revolution.

I’ve just finished reading a book – ‘A Marxist History of the World’, written by a member of a British left organisation.  It also makes the argument that what is needed is a socialist revolution.  The French revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848; the 1917 revolution in Russia and revolutionary wave in Europe up to 1923, the Spanish revolution in 1936, the Hungarian revolution of 1956; the French general strike in 1968; the Iranian revolution of 1979; the overthrow of Stalinism after 1989 and the recent Arab revolutions, are all held up to show its possibility.  The last 100 years has been ‘pregnant with revolution’ readers are told.  We face Armageddon reminiscent of that foretold by the bible –with the appearance of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  The stakes have never been higher with a crisis of capitalism the deepest and most intractable ever.

This to me is no more coherent than Russell Brand’s interview but without a few of the redeeming features of the latter.

The list of revolutions includes only one successful socialist one – 1917 – and it was strangled into Stalinism relatively quickly.  We will, rather shortly, be commemorating the 100th anniversary of this revolution.

The point is not that the objective of revolution should be abandoned.  Revolution is not required to achieve a certain state of affairs – socialism – revolution is that state of affairs, which is the ruling of society by its majority.

Revolution on the other hand is seen by many on the left as one strategy to achieve something as opposed to alternative reformist ones – such as voting and elections to parliament – which are said not to be realistic.  Revolution is therefore seen as a cataclysmic single event rather than as a process, one that begins and grows and that moves towards a qualitative rupture that destroys the old state and creates a new one based on the working majority of society.

The road to socialism is not growing state control but increasing workers’ control of every aspect of their lives through incrementally reducing the power of the capitalist class and its state in preparation for the final battle.  I have tried to explain this a little bit on this blog.

When a public intervention leads to Radio 4 interviewers pursuing their politician guests with the question “but why not revolution?” this intervention deserves some support.

Why have the Irish not Revolted? Part III

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The weakness of Irish workers resistance to austerity cannot be explained as a supposed result of this austerity having less effect than in other countries.  We have just witnessed the eighth austerity budget, the previous seven having cumulatively accounted for 17 per cent of current Gross Domestic Product.

The budget deficit in 2013 is higher than that of Spain, Portugal or Greece; there is at least another austerity budget pencilled in and the State debt is continuing to rise.  Next to nothing of the debt taken on in order to bail out the banks has been paid back and these banks are still saddled with mortgage customers who can’t pay their loans back.  Were the much trumpeted rebound of the property market to be anything substantial the banks would be repossessing and selling the vacated properties.  They’re not.

In other words the crisis isn’t over and neither is austerity, although faint hope that it is coming to an end plays one part in explaining latterly the weakness of protest and resistance.

The answer to the problem lies in the weakness of the Irish working class itself.  For Marx capitalism, in creating the working class, created its grave digger.  The nature of a particular capitalism goes a long way to explaining the nature of a particular working class and the weakness of the Irish working class is a reflection of the weakness of Irish capitalism.

An objection might be made to this that the Russian working class was the most ideologically advanced working class a century ago while Russian capitalism was weak. On the other hand capitalism in the United States has been the most advanced for a century or more but its working class is a byword for exceptional weakness.

The uneven and combined development of both societies has gone a long way to explaining this apparent anomaly and it is beyond the scope of this post to compare and contrast the development of the US and Russian socialist movements.  Over 100 years ago Karl Kautsky wrote on this question in ‘The American Worker’, relatively recently republished as part of a symposium in the journal ‘Historical Materialism’.

What we can say here in respect of Ireland is that its uneven historical development both inside the country, and as a region within the wider British economy, mainly as a reserve of agricultural production and labour power, has accounted for its historical weakness.

I was reminded of this nearly a year ago when I received a United Left Alliance (ULA) email newsletter what presented a series of proposed meetings to be organised by the ULA against austerity.  These meetings were to deal with different aspects of the issue such as the economy, health services etc.  In Russia a noteworthy feature of political and intellectual life a hundred years ago was the strength, vibrancy and hegemony of Marxism such that it dominated even the thinking of Russian liberals.

How different a situation from Ireland!  The speakers proposed for the ULA list of meetings demonstrated the reverse – the domination of Irish socialism by liberalism.  We can see this in everything from the Left’s opportunist search for unity with organisations that are far from working class in political character, from the Greens to Sinn Fein and populist independents, to their Keynesian economic alternative that relies on the goodness of the liberal capitalist state –taxing the rich and nationalising industry.

This of course feeds into the mis-education of workers who, while they may not reject the ULA’s state-reformism from a revolutionary perspective, have a healthy distrust of the really existing bureaucratic state they know.  And they have a healthy scepticism that this state will create a new economy and tax the rich when the most widespread view of politics and government is that the politicians and the state mandarins are only in it for themselves.

Acquaintance with the occupational training by FÁS and the decades-long state attitude to tax dodging by the elite has convinced workers that the state is rotten; a source of corruption, incompetence and of patronage which moves according to who you know or who you can lobby or to whom you can provide supplication.  Meanwhile Irish liberals bemoan the population’s lack of civic virtue and the Left feeds it nonsense about the capitalist state as the solution to austerity and poverty.

Lack of a response to austerity is in small part a result of this but more significantly a long result of Irish economic development and the working class and its movement, which it has produced.  The weakness of the working class movement is therefore of long vintage in Ireland.  The outstanding figure of Connolly, who remains a giant of working class history, and the courage of the 1913 lock-out, are today appropriated by the bureaucrats of ICTU and the Labour Party wielders of the austerity knife.  Where is the movement that can legitimately claim this heritage?

Connolly and 1913 shine so brightly because the working class movement has for most of Irish history been subordinated to other forces.  While capitalist relations developed early in Ireland and industrialisation grew beside that in Britain it was much reduced by its greater development in the latter so that by and large it became limited to the north-east of the country.  There a relatively compact and developed working class developed but the fatal disease affecting it has long been known.  It could therefore play no wider progressive leadership role for the rest of the country

There the creation of a reserve of agricultural production for Britain created the conditions for the famine in the middle of the 19th century that devastated the country and led to reactionary social and political consequences everywhere.

First were the direct effects of death and emigration which robbed the country of a growing domestic market on which capitalist production could grow.

Then there was its effect on the land question that provided the social basis of Irish nationalism but which, because of the famine and its effects, including emigration, could be solved without a wider popular alliance of forces that included the working class.  The Irish nationalist movement was thus alternately dominated by reactionary bourgeois forces heavily influenced by the Catholic Church or a republican tradition that had its most democratic leadership in the United Irishmen ripped from it at the end of the 18th century through severe repression and sectarianism.  Republicanism became a petty bourgeois movement largely indifferent if not hostile to working class politics when at its strongest.

It did develop a wing which looked at the working class as ‘the men of no property’ but only so that they would help win national freedom.  This grew into a socialist republican tradition but this has also looked to the working class as the force for national freedom.  Where in other countries the socialist movement has grown through leading a fight for democracy, in Ireland this has never happened.  The left wing of the democratic movement has on the other hand appropriated radicalism that might in different circumstances have flowed into the working class movement.

Instead of a socialist movement that has taken on board the tasks highlighted by republicanism we have had a republican movement with left wing views tagged on but which has more often than not simply not understood what a socialist programme is, although sadly they are not alone in this.  Thus left wing opinions have abounded in this part of the republican movement but opinions have substituted for programme.  Marxism, genuine Marxism, and not its bastard imitation Stalinism, has been almost non-existent.  So many of the most radical spirits in Ireland have left the country or been absorbed in the dead end of republican politics.

The famine also resulted in the growth of the enormous power of the Catholic Church.  It is commonplace to at least partly account for the weakness of the working class movement in Ireland by pointing to the sectarian division of the class.  This division was hardened and strengthened tremendously by partition, creating an additional divide between workers in the North and those in the South, on top of the religious divide.

What is more and more apparent however is not simply the effects of the division itself, in preventing unity across state jurisdictions or in spite of sectarian identification, but the paralysing influence of the resulting political forces within the separate parts of the working class.

Sectarian division allowed the Catholic Church to engage in social repression involving sexual abuse, censorship and imposition of a reactionary ideological environment that was consciously and vehemently anti-socialist.  The more that is learned about this repression the more its class aspects become apparent.

The extreme reactionary monarchist ideology is perhaps less important in the North among some Protestant workers than the sheer ideology of division itself, i.e. sectarianism.

The strength of both Catholic and Orange movements have in no small part been due to the creation of the two states issuing from the division of the country.  Again and again even today we see the state protect the most reactionary elements in society both North and South – the Northern state facilitate loyalist paramilitaries and the Southern State finance the organisations found guilty of systematic child abuse.

National oppression has prevented the Irish working class from being an organic part of the growth of the British working class movement which means it has never availed of its strengths while it has on the other hand imported and copied all its weaknesses, including economism and trade union type politics.

Upon this weakness of the working class has been built its political subordination; its domination in the South until recently by the bourgeois Fianna Fail and its saturation by sectarian politics in the North.  Without a strong socialist tradition the periodic shifts away from the traditional parties can go in almost any direction.

In the last election the Left captured the vote of a small bit of this but the apolitical and clientelistic character of Irish politics affects the Left.  This and the state-centred nature of its politics is the basis for the chronic sectarianism that has shattered the alliance the Left had formed.

As Marx said the growth of sectarianism is in inverse proportion to the development of the class as a whole and the weakness of the class is the fertile ground on which the narrow and blinkered outlook of much of the Left has been established.

So what we have had is an historically weak working class.  During the key episode of political struggle around and after the First World War it was subordinated and subordinated itself to bourgeois nationalist or sectarian forces.  The victory of the most reactionary of these forces combined with retarded economic development prevented the growth of a strong working class movement thereafter. The Irish state did not participate in the Second World War so its working class missed out in the radicalisation that accompanied it in many countries.

Marx however called capitalism a revolutionary mode of production that continually creates and recreates the working class.  While this historic political weakness weighs on today’s generations the system throws up new industries, new work relations, new circumstances enabling economic growth and new forms of working class development.  The historical development of the Irish working class during the 19th and much of the twentieth centuries cannot explain the current lack of combativity of the Irish working class because this combativity is capable of being changed and transformed.

The Irish working class continued to develop after the Second World War but this subsequent development did not create a break from its historic political weakness and to the extent it has not done so the weight of history continues to oppress.

 

What way forward for the Dublin Bus workers?

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482013-dublin-bus-strike-members-of-siptu-and-3-630x484In August drivers at Dublin Bus went on strike in opposition to yet another proposed cost cutting exercise in the company totaling €11m.  Subsequently a group comprising the Government, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the employers’ body IBEC, joined together to carry out an investigation into why Labour Court recommendations about cost cutting proposals had been consistently rejected.

From a workers’ point of view it is difficult to know where to start in responding to such an initiative.  ICTU joined with those seeking to cut terms and conditions in order to investigate why workers hadn’t done as they were told by management.  It might have been thought that unions were there to see how workers could defend conditions but the combination involved of bureaucrats, bosses and government have been engaged in a conspiracy against the decisions of the workers.

This is dressed up as concern for the drivers themselves –  the Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar and the Minister of State Alan Kelly have said that the investigators had worked independently “in an honest attempt to address the concerns of drivers”.  But addressing the concerns of drivers for these independent experts means that “We ask the drivers to agree to the final proposals.”  In other words the drivers are to do as they are told.

And if they don’t the workers are threatened – “We are clear, however, that the outlook for Dublin Bus and its employees is very stark if this final effort does not succeed.”

To appreciate what ICTU has done it is best to consider what it didn’t do.

ICTU didn’t commit itself to an investigation to ascertain if the claims by management about the financial position of Dublin Bus were correct.

ICTU didn’t investigate why the major concessions made by drivers in at least two previous productivity/cost-cutting agreements have failed to resolve the company’s financial crises despite management assurances to the contrary. Why are they threatened by yet another cost-cutting exercise?  Has management lied about the promised effects of previous cuts or has it just been incompetent in developing a robust plan for the company?

ICTU didn’t investigate whether the support of bus services by the State was comparable to that in other states, whether the Government had any coherent transport plan for the capital or had taken adequate account of the role that transport plays in providing the infrastructure necessary for an efficient and prosperous society.  Whether instead it had taken a narrow view of the company’s profitability without regard to wider benefits to society.

ICTU didn’t seek to collaborate with all the unions involved to determine a strategy that could assert and defend the bus drivers’ rights.

ICTU didn’t seek to rally together the bus unions, wider union movement and the users and potential users of the buses to initiate a campaign for an efficient, sustainable and decent bus service.

ICTU could have done lots of things and had plenty of alternatives but it decided to conspire with the bosses’ organisation and State to threaten the drivers. And it did it in plain sight.

When you think of it this way the actions of ICTU are shocking.  But they don’t shock and they don’t surprise and they don’t do these things because workers have long got used to the fact that this is the way ICTU behaves.  So registering anger and pointing out that ICTU are engaging in an act of betrayal is hardly enough.

Do socialists have an alternative?

The first and most important thing to understand is that socialists have no alternative unless workers decide to take matters into their own hands.  The first step is therefore that workers fight to win ownership and control of their own struggles through ownership and control of their own trade unions.

In so far as the steps that ICTU should have taken are political ones, workers need to create their own political party.  This of course is a longer term requirement only in the sense that it can realistically be achieved only over a number of years.  And while the building of a genuinely democratic and militant trade union movement is also not an immediate prospect it is one that is immediately posed.  In other words the fight to create it is always present, which means we must fight for it now.

These should be central tasks of Irish socialists and outside of them the debate about unity of the Left is pretty well irrelevant.  If the Left wants to unite to build itself, unless this is a task to be achieved through the organisation of the working class itself, it will be sectarian.  Left wing unity and political sectarianism are not mutually exclusive.

On the other hand genuine unity around such a task, achieved through democratic organisation, which alone can achieve it, would act as a beacon, however small, for workers in struggle.

In order to create it however we need to ask why we need such a movement.  Why is the current movement inadequate, even treacherous, and what would a new one do?  We need these answers in order to persuade workers to undertake the task of creating one.

So how do the ideas of socialism relate to the predicament facing Dublin’s bus workers?

First we should recognise that their repeated willingness to oppose management’s plans is the indispensable basis for any alternative.

Secondly we should inform workers that militant strike action by them will not be enough.  As Marx and Engels repeatedly stated, strikes are often provoked by bosses in order to facilitate their own plans.  Often they serve to save money, implement lock-outs and close workplaces.  In Dublin Bus they will undoubtedly be used to blame workers for the financial difficulties the company is in. Strike action is insufficient and is not the only action that can be taken.

Do workers have an alternative solution of their own that could be put forward?

The first step in creating such an alternative would be to establish the real financial position of the company, which is what ICTU should have done.  This would include an assessment of the support given to Dublin Bus by the state.

The second is to establish what sort of service should be provided and how it should be delivered.

The third is to determine whether the workers themselves can offer their own model of ownership to deliver this sort of service.  Privatisation and continued state ownership both offer the same prospect of cuts in workers’ conditions.  Reliance on state subsidy should be recognised as a weakness in the workers’ position.  Dependence on the state, the ally and protector of the bosses, is reliance on precisely those that are insistent that the cuts be implemented.  That these cuts must be made prior to privatisation is demonstration that both the bosses and state recognise that it is the latter which is best placed to reduce workers’ conditions.

The fourth is to publicise and win support among other workers and the travelling public.  Other forms of action could be considered to achieve this such as providing ‘free travel’ days.  Only a campaign structure going outside the confines of trade unionism could make such a campaign a reality.

It is no great feat of criticism to describe these steps as schematic or abstract.  Only a really existing movement could make them anything else.  Schemes, or plans, are there to be proposed and debated, discarded or modified as real, active workers determine.  They sometimes abstract from the concrete realities of the situation, which give abstractions content, and become simply propaganda, usually when those with ideas lack the power to implement them.  Propaganda however is almost everything when you have little else, which is where socialism in Ireland is at.  Ideas are critical when an idea of how to fight back is the element that is missing from struggle.

The point of the commentary above is to inform workers and socialists that a certain understanding, class consciousness, is required to see any way out of the struggle that the bus workers find themselves engaged in.

One thing is for sure; the answer to the bus workers needs has been proved not to reside with management, the state or with ICTU.  The second has yet to be proved – that it resides with the workers themselves and in the strength and solidarity that they can muster.

Why have the Irish not revolted? Part II

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imagesausterityIn my first post I qualified the view that there was something particularly weak in the resistance of Irish workers to austerity but argued that nevertheless an explanation is needed.  To develop this further we need to ask what this austerity has involved.

Some commentators would have a ready explanation.  In terms of the share of taxation in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in terms of the share of Government spending in GDP and overall deficit as a percentage of annual value added there has not been ‘savage austerity’ so there has been nothing to rebel against.

Here unfortunately we have no choice but to enter the world of economic statistics where only the naive can expect clear objectivity and accuracy.

A post on the Irish Economy blog records that (adjusting the statistics for the well-known effect of foreign multinationals in the Irish State significantly overstating economic performance) living standards measured in GDP per person (in Purchasing Power Parity values) declined by 14 per cent from 2007 to 2011.  This is a bigger decline in living standards than in Portugal where the fall was only 1.6 per cent, in Spain where it was 4.9 per cent and Greece where it was 8 per cent.  In terms of national income (another measure) the drop was bigger – 20 per cent – and it will have fallen further since then.  It would appear that the relative quiescence of Irish workers needs additional explaining.

But does it?

Any Irish statistic that uses GDP is immediately suspect for the reason above but not only because of this.  GDP is a measure of value added which means the 2007 figure will include property produced at vastly over-inflated values.  Houses and offices built and priced at one value will have been shown subsequently to have been worth 50, 60 or 70 per cent less, or sometimes to be completely worthless.  A moment’s thought reveals that this is not a characteristic simply of Irish statistics but of measures of capitalist production everywhere.

When we think of the effects of the banking industry on measures of economic growth we again see that this measure is seriously distorting, not only because of the difficulties of capturing accurately what is happening, but because of the nature of capitalist production.  This takes place through the production of commodities whose real value is only realised after production. The value of these commodities is elaborated through the workings of the market which reveals the socially necessary value of output in a cyclical fashion.

For economists wedded to capitalism recessions are always the result of exogenous shocks outside the system or of purely irrational behaviour within it, which amount to the same thing.  For Marxists the cycle of boom and bust is how the values of commodities are established and then re-established in a constant process.  By nature therefore there can be no precise measure of value produced at any one point in time or over any one period.

In figures for GDP the distinction between use value and exchange value is absent never mind any accounting for how really ‘socially useful’ the use values produced are – ghost estates and weapons compared to commodities actually consumed by workers. This is to be considered on top of the well-known criticisms of measuring living standards by GDP.

There are alternative measures we can review but before we leave behind this discussion we should appreciate that what we have been looking at is not simple mismeasurement of economic activity but one form of the appearance of real contradictions within the system.

From the point of view of our particular investigation we can make two points.  That a critical review of some of the figures means the boom was not as boomier (to quote Bertie Ahern) as some statistics might appear to show and the recession not as sudden and complete a reversal as might first appear.  The expectation of more or less immediate revolt might therefore be less justified?  Other evidence however might suggest that such a view should be considered a relatively minor factor.

Secondly, the constant reporting of such economic statistics plays an ideological role such that workers must accept real changes to their lives on the basis of these statistics.  Workers are subject to such pressures not just in the recession but also in the boom – encouraged to get into unsustainable debt for example.  To the extent that they do the latter they are then under ideological assault to accept that they, along with everyone else, ‘partied’ and went on a ‘mad borrowing’ frenzy, as Taoiseach Enda Kenny has put it.

Some commentators might argue that a recognition of ‘guilt’ has played a role in short-circuiting resistance but the existence of such undoubted views is as much a result of demoralisation as a cause of the lack of resistance.

There are other statistics we can look at to see if there are material reasons for the lack of opposition apart from this particular ideological one.

What appears a more relevant statistic is called Actual Individual Consumption which encompasses goods and services consumed by households including government services such as education and health provision.  This would appear to show that between 2008 and 2011 living standards in the Irish State fell more than in Spain and in Portugal but less than in Greece or Iceland.

Actual Individual Consumption

State

2008 index

2011 index

Percentage fall
Ireland

109

100

8.3
Spain

99

94

5.1
Greece

104

94

9.6
Portugal

84

82

2.4
UK

123

118

4.1
Iceland

122

107

12.3

 

This measure is made up of a component of GDP so is subject to some of the criticism above.  We have already seen that three different measurements of living standards result in reductions in living standards of 20 per cent, 14 per cent and over 8 per cent, depending on dates and the measurement adopted.

What we can say with certainty is that living standards fell abruptly and significantly due to the crisis and it is not obvious that the severity of the fall in any country determined the relative extent of opposition to austerity.  It is necessary before drawing any conclusions to look at what might be at least some of the components of the fall in living standards, not by any means only a result of the effects of Government austerity policies.

By one measure unemployment in the Irish State increased from 3.4 per cent in 2007 to 10.4 per cent in 2012, a tripling of the rate in only five years.  The economically inactive, which must contain many who have given up hope of getting a job, increased from 27.5 per cent of the population aged 15 to 64 to 30.8 per cent.

Using a different measurement unemployment in the Irish state was 13.5 per cent in January 2013 compared to 17.8 per cent in Portugal, 26.8 per cent in Spain and 27 per cent in Greece.  Clearly the crisis has hit the latter countries much harder than Ireland.  It is by no means clear that higher unemployment breeds resistance since its function under capitalism is to facilitate increased exploitation of the working class.  The mobilisation of the unemployed is not always for progressive reasons, which is one reason we have noted before that economic crises often breed reactionary movements.

Once unemployed some workers face the prospect of hardship and one measure of this defined as deprivation, or being without two or more basic items, has increased from 11.8 per cent of the population to 24.5 per cent in 2012.  The possibility of this is affected by the level of welfare an unemployed personmight rely upon and this is measured by the net replacement rate, or the payments due to the unemployed as a percentage of previous net income.  This obviously depends on whether the person has children or is married etc.

Net Replacement rates 2011

 

No children

2 children
Country Single person One earner

Married couple

 Two-earner Married couple Lone Parent One-earner married couple Two-earner married couple
Republic of Ireland 50 81 75 64 75 81
Greece 49 54 75 58 63 80
Spain 79 76 90 77 75 89
Portugal 75 75 92 77 76 91

 

The table shows that Greece has significantly lower replacement rates than the other selected countries for most categories but that the Irish state’s is generally lower than Spain’s and Portugal’s.  It would not appear that the prospect of a more significant loss of income as a result of unemployment has spurred opposition in Ireland relative to that in Spain or Portugal.

The other obvious way workers cope with periods of unemployment is falling back on any savings that they have accumulated.  The following table shows the movement in net financial assets per person (€) in the various countries:

Country

2007

2011
Republic of Ireland

23,634

26,279
Spain

21,698

16,328
Portugal

19,950

19,750
Greece

19,681

10,105
Euro area (17 countries)

37,289

36,201

 

The table shows the Irish State to have the highest level of financial assets (though much below the Euro area average) and that this even increased between 2007 and 2011!  Since these figures say nothing about the unequal distribution of wealth and we know that many have suffered unemployment, cuts in wages or tax increases, it is clear that certain sections of Irish society are bearing up quite well.  In the other countries financial wealth fell and in Spain, but particularly in Greece, fell quite dramatically.

Such average figures hide as much as they reveal.  Average household disposable income in the Irish state fell from €49,043 in 2008 to €41,819 in 2011 but this was still significantly higher than in 2004 when it was €38,631.  Right wing commentators have often made the observation that incomes have often just gone back to such and such a date and we are all much better off than before the boom kicked off in the first half of the 1990s.  This is undoubtedly true for many but doesn’t provide an answer why as a class Irish workers have resisted austerity so weakly, unless the argument is that expectations have very quickly reduced.  Is this however another result of defeat or a contributing factor to it, or both?

Averages can obscure because it is precisely the unequal incidence of the effects of capitalist crisis that can have decisive political effects.

Unemployment has increased dramatically but its incidence is not uniform.  Employment in construction has collapsed, from 258,000 at the start of 2008 to 102,000 at the end of 2012, a fall of over 60 per cent.  Over the same period employment in the state sector fell from 417,000 to 381,000, a fall of 8.6 per cent.  The pitting of private sector workers against those in the public sector was a clear strategy of the Government, the employers and the media and it was quite successful.

But this has not been the only divisive effect of the crisis.  Rates of unemployment among young people in Ireland, just like other countries, have been much higher than the general rate.  In the Irish state the rate of unemployment among those less than 25 years old was 26.6 per cent in April this year while it was 42.5 per cent in Portugal, 56.4 per cent in Spain and 62.5 per cent in Greece.  These are truly staggering figures.  The rate of long term unemployment has increased from 29.2 per cent of total unemployment at the start of 2007 to 45.5 per cent at the end of 2012.  What this should remind us, is that unemployment is a divisive imposition of the effects of capitalist crisis that impacts not only on those without a job but also those in employment.  Emigration has returned and is continuing to increase, up from 87,100 in the year to April 2012 to 89,000 in the year to April 2013.

None of these figures illustrates the hardship caused by tax increases and public expenditure cuts that can affect the most vulnerable the most.  They do not include the effects on people’s experience of negative equity, the full effects of which have yet to hit home.  Here again it is younger people who are more likely to be in negative equity and to be in arrears in their mortgage payments.  And of course the figures do not tell us that the results of the crisis and austerity are to be here for a long time.

Over 32 people were unemployed for each job vacancy in 2012, while the figures for Spain and Portugal were 72.6 and 90.4 respectively.  The General Government Debt as a percentage of GDP was 117.6 per cent in 2012 while the 2012 EU Fiscal Compact stipulates that where this is above 60 per cent it must reduce by 1/20th per year.  In 2012 the in-year Government deficit was 7.5 per cent which means the debt was not getting smaller but getting bigger.  Normally optimistic forecasters are predicting that unemployment, as measured by the International Labour Organisation methodology, was only to reduce from 14.7 per cent in 2012 to 13.9 per cent in 2014.

So what are we to make of all these figures?

The fall in living standards has been significant even if not so sudden or large for some sectors of society as others and not on the same scale as some other countries such as Greece.  Certainly the disproportionate effects on young people and rise in emigration have blunted resistance but these factors exist on the same or greater scale in some other countries in Southern Europe where resistance has been greater.

It is not therefore the effects of the crisis themselves that explain the response even if these act to weaken certain social and political reactions.  The left wing economist Michael Taft has claimed that the ‘squeezed middle’, the 4th to 8th deciles of income earners, suffered declines in direct income in the five years leading up to the crash, gaining only as a result of social transfers.

During the boom the level of trade union organisation fell relatively as union density dropped from 46 per cent of the workforce in 1994 to less than a third in 2007, and only 16 per cent in the private sector.

Thus even during the most favourable circumstances, when workers are best placed to protect and advance their living standards, they were unable to do so with their own strength.  During recession such weakness is exposed.

Now they are subject to the vicious laws of the capitalist market and, as we said in the first post, short of overturning the system there is a limited amount workers can do about this without challenging the system itself.

During this post I have said that workers have not resisted austerity but in truth the great mass of unemployment, insecurity caused by mortgage arrears and negative equity, and the drop in personal consumption are not so much the result of the austerity policies of the Government, which of course have made things worse, but of the capitalist crisis.  This crisis can in certain circumstances be postponed or ameliorated by the State but it cannot be suppressed and certainly not by a State in bankruptcy.

When even during the boom large number of workers dependency on this state increased rather reduced and rather than their developing their own independent power, it can be little surprise that when the state turns round and kicks them in the teeth they are unprepared.

Some socialists argued again and again during the boom that social partnership, the vehicle by which the Irish trade unions hitched themselves to the State, was to be opposed not mainly because it prevented workers making gains in their living standards that they should but because it rotted away their independent organisation.  This has not just organisational consequences but political and ideological ones and it is to these that I need to look at next.

Why have the Irish not revolted?

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Public-service-workers-st-006The defeat of the opposition to the property tax and the ability of the Government to impose a second Croke Park austerity deal might lead many to conclude that resistance to austerity has been defeated.  Even before this many have commented that while Greece has witnessed violent protests and numerous general strikes the absence of such events from Ireland is notable and remarkable.  General strikes have also taken place in Spain and Portugal but not in the Irish State.

The relative electoral success of the United Left Alliance appeared to blind some to this but the collapse of the ULA has simply confirmed what is more generally understood to be the case.  More and more it is acknowledged on the Left that we have to face the reality as opposed to perennial false claims that an upsurge is taking place or is just around the corner.

Realistic assessments of the state of workers’ action have often been drowned out by childish claims that this shows one is insufficiently revolutionary, underestimates the workers , their ability to change their ideas quickly or that such views will not encourage workers to take action.  Not in front of the children appears to be the motto.  Workers are always ‘angry’ and all it needs is the right campaign, so long as it is active enough, to stir them into action.

Reality is imposing itself and no sound bites along the lines of ‘the darkest hour is just before dawn’ can hide the fact that the economic crisis has resulted in the imposition of austerity on workers without effective resistance.  Why is this?

First we must qualify the judgement that Irish workers are peculiarly useless.  Commentators have remarked in similar terms about the countries in southern Europe.  We have noted before that more or less spontaneous social explosions have not resulted in great advances by the working class.  Greek workers have been by far the most combative in terms of general strike action but in hardly anywhere has living standards plummeted so much.  I have also noted in one of my first posts that economic crises spurs growth in extreme reactionary forces and we have seen this is in Greece with the rise of the Golden Dawn movement.  So Greece is no model to seek to copy.

Secondly Irish workers have fought back albeit within very strict limits.  I can still remember the very large demonstration in November 2009 in Dublin, which had many working class people from outside the ranks of the trade unions taking part.  The following year public sector trade unions organised a successful strike.  At a local level in certain places and at certain times strong campaigns have developed against tax increases or hospital closures.  All this and more was reflected in the vote for ULA.

There is however an over-estimation about what workers can achieve within the limits of the capitalist system – a general misconception that workers’ struggles can overturn the laws of capitalism.    For example, if a company goes bust and attempts to close down, making all its workers redundant, it is pretty obvious that strike action will not achieve very much.

At this point many on the left propose that the capitalist state protect workers even though these same people have a part of their brain that tells them that the state is a weapon of the capitalist class that cannot be reformed and must be smashed.  They also believe that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by workers themselves but usually object to the idea that, instead of the state, the workers should take over and own and run these workplaces as workers cooperatives.

It is a similar situation at the level of society as a whole and at an international level.  The Irish state was and still is bankrupt.  It needed a massive injection of money to save the banks and put itself in a position to start reducing its mushrooming debt.  Austerity is a means of doing this.  Again the Left argues that the state can adopt policies of taxing the rich and spending money on investment that will restore the capitalist economy to economic growth, which will then deal with the problem of the debt.

This is not however the view of socialists.  The socialist view, confirmed once again by recent events, is that capitalism inescapably produces economic crises which are dealt with and resolved by the laws by which the system works, including through unemployment and destruction of unsuccessful capital whose markets and sometimes businesses are picked up on the cheap by those remaining.  It is not possible for the capitalist system to prevent such crises by adopting policies of more investment, as for example argued by left followers of Keynes.

It is not therefore possible for workers no matter how well organised to prevent the laws of capitalism from working.  This at least was the view of Marx and the evidence of history would again confirm this.  So workers resistance against austerity may be able to ameliorate austerity but, in so far as they are necessary to lay the foundations of a new upturn, it is not possible for workers to prevent unemployment or wage cuts or tax increases in their entirety or even to a significant degree.  In other words it is not possible within the system to prevent capitalism periodically disrupting workers’ lives.  That’s why we oppose the system and why we propose a different one called socialism.  If we thought capitalism could work better without its nasty effects we wouldn’t be socialists would we?

Yet the left presents austerity as simply one policy option of the Government which it could choose to reject and replace with their own proposals.  But even the Keynesian alternative requires ‘counter cyclical’ state action.  In other words the austerity measures are simply postponed.  All the left’s proposals involve actions by the capitalist state in one way or another – tax changes, public investment, nationalisation etc.

The point in terms of the current argument is not that the Left is misleading workers into accepting reformist solutions that won’t work and this is a reason why resistance to austerity has been such a failure in Ireland.  These ideas are more widespread in southern Europe than they are here.  No, the issue is that, absent a socialist alternative being created, as long as capitalism exists the laws of capitalism will continue to work and impose themselves.  Resistance to austerity will therefore fail and this failure is bound in turn to lead to weakening of the resistance.

We must be careful however not to qualify the problem out of existence when it contains more than a grain of truth.  When Greek workers chanted “we are not Irish” on their May Day demonstration in Athens in 2010 they weren’t imagining the relative weakness of resistance in Ireland.

Nor can the question be dismissed by saying Irish workers did fight back – they did, but nowhere near to the extent required for success.

Nor is it credible to blame the poor politics or organisation of the Irish Left.

It is also not adequate to simply say that capitalism wins unless we create socialism. This is obviously true, although its logical implications for reformist strategies and policies are often ignored.  But it doesn’t come near explaining why the reformist strategies for resistance have elicited such weak workers’ action.  It’s hardly that Irish workers can see through such strategies and are ready for something more radical.

Socialism is not an event or a situation but a movement. Workers will only become capable of building a socialist movement and carrying out revolutionary change if they are also capable of mounting strong resistance to the ravages of capitalism.  In Ireland this hasn’t happened and there has been a retrogression of the small socialist movement, although this in itself is not particularly new.

So in Ireland the state has been able to pursue austerity policies that increase unemployment and wage restraint in order to restore its solvency in very much the same way capitalist crises work to   restore profitability in the private sector.  It has been able to do so without much of the resistance shown in other countries in a very similar situation.  This remains to be explained.

To be continued.

One Year to the Scottish referendum on Independence

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_65598596_ballotToday marks one year until the Scottish people vote on whether Scotland is to be independent and this morning I listened to an interview with Scotland’s Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on radio 4.  It was an interesting interview both for what was said and what was not said.

Invited by the interviewer to agree that the Scottish people will decide based on what was economically good for them she agreed.  What made the difference she said was that decisions on what should happen in Scotland are best taken in Scotland.

There was no mention of the issue being in any sense one of national and democratic rights, nothing about national oppression.  This would of course be a hard argument to make given that Scotland can exit the UK without facing the sort of threats and war that Ireland suffered almost 100 years ago.

The argument that decisions under independence would be taken in Scotland took something of a battering when Sturgeon accepted that the Scottish National Party favoured retaining sterling as the currency.  That’s a bucket load of decisions still being taken in London then, either in Downing Street or Canary Wharf.  It was also somewhat embarrassing when the interviewer quoted a statement by the SNP leader Alex Salmond in 1999 that described sterling ‘as a millstone round Scotland’s neck’.  For many years he had supported joining the Euro until the crisis in the Eurozone made this a less easy and obvious sell.  The change she said had been prompted by advice from ‘experts.’

Since the SNP also favour Scotland’s membership of the EU and NATO plus keeping the British monarchy the elements of independence start to look less impressive. More decisions from Brussels and Washington here.

The interview elicited the real concern for independence mentioned by Sturgeon, which is increased control over the levers of the State and its ability to tax and distribute the proceeds, including operation of the welfare state.  On this score the SNP have simultaneously attempted to present a future independent Scotland as some sort of social-democratic nirvana while also promising lower corporation taxes for foreign companies.

In this respect it seeks to emulate the Irish State and previously held the latter up as a model of what an independent Scotland could achieve until the proverbial hit the fan and the Irish became a model for austerity instead of prosperity.  The Irish are no longer referred to as the future and nationalists have to defend themselves against the charge that a newly independent state could not afford to support the large Scottish financial sector should it go into the same sort of crisis as the 2008 credit crunch.  Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) featured prominently in that financial crisis.

The case for independence then revolves around the respective ownership shares by Scotland and rump UK of the oil reserves and the national debt.  Ownership is a question of geography not of class.  Once again ownership by the state or at least increased capacity to tax resources is held up as in the interests of Scottish workers.

The state, in this case an independent Scottish one, is presented as the vehicle to deliver on the needs of workers.  The concern of the SNP to capture control of the state machine, irrespective of its actual power to control the economy – absent an independent currency and insertion into the EU – betray the real class forces behind the pursuit of independence.

Those on the left in Scotland supporting independence in effect tail end the promises of these forces that the capitalist state, in this case an independent Scottish one, can be the vehicle for working class advance.  As I have been at pains to point out in numerous posts it is the independent movement of the working class itself that will deliver and represent such an advance.  It cannot be devolved to the capitalist state whether newly minted or not.

The attractions of nationalism boil down to the attractions of state power which have less and less substance the smaller the state but which seemingly have greater and greater attraction the smaller and therefore closer it comes to some people being beside it.

In a debate that assumes capitalist ownership, that assumes a capitalist state, that revolves around nationality but excludes any opposition to national oppression the tasks of Marxists is a difficult one.

The first is to base oneself on the commonality of class interests regardless of nationality as the bedrock of working class unity and need for internationalism.  This requires defence of the Scottish people’s right to self determination free from any sort of outside threat or force.  It involves opposition to nationalist arguments and those which present the state as the vehicle for progress.  It requires being alive to the prospect that such a debate will increase the divisions between Scottish and other British workers and also divide the Scottish working class itself between those more and more committed to nationalist solutions and those who see no reason for an independent state.

Opinion polls appear to show a comfortable majority against independence and it looks likely at this point that the referendum will result in a vote against it.  In the meantime the referendum is an important event that has important implications for the development of working class politics not only in Scotland but also in the rest of the UK.  The parallels drawn with Ireland by many in the debate demonstrate that it has important implications here as well.

Some Scottish commentators have noted the dominance of the issue in the media inside Scotland and comparative absence in the rest of Britain.  I hope the blog will be able to keep up with and contribute to understanding this important struggle.  The relationship between socialism and nationalism is one that has repeatedly proven a difficult one for socialists and the Scottish debate may allow us to learn more about how best to address the difficulties.