Labour Through the Looking Glass: 15 Early-Morning Speculations on the Corbyn Surge

Dougald Hine | Bella Caledonia

Having jettisoned its raison d’etre, even its timid form of social democracy, Labour is now an empty hulk only committed to its own survival.

[box] Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”[/box]

1. If only Labour had a reason to exist…

[dropcap]I [/dropcap]keep thinking of Landon Kettlewell, the dot com entrepreneur from Cory Doctorow’s novel, Makers. At the start of the book, he has just bought up the exhausted shells of Kodak and Duracell. To an audience of puzzled Silicon Valley journalists, he explains that these companies have history, infrastructure, administrators, facilities, supplier relationships, distribution and logistics. All they lack is a reason to exist.

To their own and everybody else’s surprise, the Labour establishment looks to be losing their party the same way they lost Scotland. That’s what set me thinking about Kettlewell. A month earlier, the Corbyn surge would have sounded impossible, a piece of wild political science fiction. Now, they were throwing every trick in the playbook at the Islingtonian candidate, to the opposite of the intended effect, and casting around for explanations as to what the hell is going on.

“To their own and everybody else’s surprise, the Labour establishment looks to be losing their party the same way they lost Scotland…”

So here’s one more explanation to try out: Labour is Kodak, Labour is Duracell, Labour is the shell of something that has lost its reason to exist. As it currently stands, it is useless, but it is also the heir to a whole stack of resources that could be very useful indeed, if only it had a purpose.

Kettlewell has a solution for ‘Kodacell’: he is going to turn it inside out and put the companies’ resources at the disposal of a network, a grassroots network of tens of thousands of hackers and makers. Between them, they will make it useful again.

[box type=”download”] AFTER READING THIS PIECE, BE SURE TO INSPECT OUR KEYSTONE ARTICLE ON THIS TOPIC, FILED BY OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT, MIKE FAULKNER: THE FUTURE OF THE LABOUR PARTY IN BRITAIN: The Leadership Contest and the Party’s Prospects [/box]

And so the absurd thought came to me: what if this is what Jeremy Corbyn’s election ends up doing to the Labour party?

2. What does this look like, if it works?

Bear with me, this will take some time, but there may be pieces here that start to fit together.

I’m thinking about what it looks like, if this works. No need to ask now whether Corbyn can win – that was last week’s question – but winning is the easy part and there are plenty of scenarios circulating for how things then go wrong. Could we construct a scenario for how things go right? Is there a plausible account of the next few years, in which a Corbyn victory turns out to be the best thing that had happened to the Labour party in a long while? And how would current events look, from that looking-glass future?

I’m not a member of the Labour party, I don’t have a vote in this leadership election – and I’ve hesitated to join the ranks of the registered supporters who will get one. But in the raw hours of May 8th, I wrote something that resonated with a lot of people who would have preferred some kind of Labour-led government to five more years of rule by the rich, for the rich.

Here’s a taste of that post:

What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west…Labour is about to endure a tug of war between those who believe it needs to go leftwards and those who believe it needs to go rightwards. The truth is, neither of these directions will be much help. Right now, the only way is down.

That came from a place of loss; I’m writing this now from the vanishing point where scepticism and hope converge. My first reaction to the Corbyn surge was that this is wishful thinking, a shortcut, an attempt to bypass the journey down the hole into which we had fallen. But it’s worth at least trying out the alternative, the possibility that this might be one route into the upside-down world we need to learn to navigate.

A caveat, before I try to trace that route. My post-election post was about larger social and political currents. This one is about the Labour party, an organisation I only know from the outside. So it’s probably best to take what follows as one more piece of wild political science fiction. (Especially the part where I start writing Corbyn’s victory speech.)

It is after three in the morning, the sky is getting paler, and this is a story a man is telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

3. On the appropriate response to losing an election

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]abour, as it currently existed, was useless. If the election campaign had left any doubts, these were buried by Harriet Harman’s attempt to explain why the party would not be opposing the welfare bill.

‘We can’t simply say to the public, you were wrong,’ explained the acting leader of the opposition. (Except, that was, the 75% of the public who hadn’t voted for the Conservatives, or hadn’t voted at all.)

This wasn’t an aberration, it was an unusually clear expression of a mind-set that suffused the Labour establishment. According to this mind-set, the appropriate response to losing an election is not to do a better job of making your party’s arguments, nor to do a better job of coming up with convincing alternatives that embody what your party stands for, but to do a better job of imitating the party that just beat you. (This is a formula also practiced across the Atlantic by the Democrats, both parties —Labour and Democrats—simply reflecting the utter corruption of the remnants of capitalist democracy where only money counts.—eds.)

Those who thought of this as ‘realism’ thought of themselves as the heirs to New Labour, but this did New Labour a disservice. Whatever you felt about it, once upon a time, New Labour had worked. Some combination of Blair’s talent for summoning up conviction on demand, Brown’s brute cunning and the times in which they found themselves made it a formidable operation, until the men at the heart of it spun off into various flavours of self-delusion. But if Blair and Brown had been the Gallagher brothers of Brit Pop politics, the current Labour frontbench was a dodgy Oasis tribute act. The tunes might be the same, only if you thought they were going to wow an audience, you hadn’t really grasped how this works.

Harsh? Sure, but this matters, because it was the backdrop against which Corbyn’s leadership campaign started to make sense to far more people than even he could have expected.

4. An unexpected legacy

Let’s just say the Corbyn thing worked out. We’ll come to how this happened, but one consequence was to recast the Miliband legacy.

He became the leader whose reform of the way that Labour chooses its leaders paved the way for one of the great transformations in the party’s history. And there was a certain poetic justice to this, because inside the conflicted soul of Ed Miliband, there was a politician who wanted to be in the place where Corbyn now found himself, riding a wave of networked radicalism.

But in truth, it was a piece of luck. A reform designed to solve one problem accidentally solved another: the great conundrum of British politics, south of the Tweed, as of 2015. Like most other western democracies [sic], a strange insurgent political energy was bubbling up from below the surface of politics as we had known it. But how could this energy ever break through in a parliamentary system locked up by first-past-the-post?

The solution was to take over one of the existing big parties – and Miliband’s legacy was to create the conditions under which this could happen.

5. The Return of (Groucho) Marxism

If it took Miliband’s reforms to make it possible, it took a candidate like Corbyn to realise that possibility. The day that nominations closed, he told an interviewer he was standing because ‘It was my turn.’ As Diane Abbott and John McDonnell had carried the standard of the Labour left in previous contests, he had been persuaded to do so this time around.

His lack of ambition was palpable – and this turned out to be his attraction. Here was the rarest thing, a politician with no hunger for power. The sincerity of this was unfakeable, backed up by the evidence of thirty years’ unfashionable dedication to his principles. (Another kind of left-winger – the roguish kind, a Livingstone or a Galloway – would not have had this effect.)

Well beyond the natural constituency of a politician with his views, there was an appetite for this, a kind of electoral version of the Marxist theory of clubs: ‘I don’t care to vote for any candidate who is after my vote.’

Meanwhile, as they tacked leftwards in response to Corbyn’s unexpected appeal, the other candidates seemed to embody that other Marxist dictum: ‘These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.’

6. Occupy the Party

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s the newspaper columnists woke up to what was happening, they reached for easy historical parallels. Among the most popular was the Militant tendency, the Trotskyite group whose entryist tactics saw them expelled from the Labour party in the 1980s.

The comparison reflects a failure to understand how the world had changed in the intervening decades. A takeover might be under way, but it was of an entirely different kind.

Militant was a party-within-a-party, a Marxist sect with an ideological leader, hierarchical, disciplined in its tactics, wedded to its own ‘correct analysis’. It belonged to another era, an era in which you met someone who told you a totally different story of how the world worked to anything you’d ever heard, gave you a newspaper and invited you to a meeting. An era in which almost the only way to develop and sustain a critique of the society in which you had grown up was to adhere to an alternative orthodoxy, a support group of people who schooled you in a different way of making sense of the world.

This mode of politicisation belonged to an era in which Google and Wikipedia were unimaginable. You had no way of checking or filtering the information and analysis on offer from your new friends, little chance of exploring and developing it. The experience resembled joining an evangelical sect.

The survivors of these sects may have got excited by the Corbyn surge, but the character of the surge was quite different: it resembled the waves of networked disruption that first broke into view in the events of 2011. This was not a stealthy entryist takeover, years in the planning, it was a spontaneous movement to Occupy the Labour party, a suggestion taken up with an energy that took everyone by surprise. Such networks are like a mood in action, a rolling conversation that gathers momentum and brings the boundaries of possibility into question.

One of the characteristics of such a network is that it learns, experiments, adapts. In Greece, Spain and Scotland, the energy of the network had already evolved from the horizontalist purity of 2011 into a series of experiments in interfacing with the top-down forms of institutional politics. On each occasion, this had happened rapidly and unexpectedly. Now, it seemed to be happening again. (If this leads to a Podemos or Syriza type of option, one more example of a bourgeois fake left “movement”, we can all go home already and stop dreaming.—eds.)

7. After all the wild words

So much for the events leading up to Corbyn’s election and how they came to look in hindsight. Now the hard part: what had to happen after September 12th, for this not to turn out to be the disaster so widely forecast?

The new leader had to reach out to three different groups: a parliamentary party that would never have chosen him in a million years, the movement of members and supporters that he had enthused, and the wider electorate.

After all the wild words that had been thrown at his campaign, he had to claim the ground of common sense and pragmatism. Opposition to austerity was not some revolutionary project: it was a position backed by some of the world’s best-known economists, Nobel laureates among them. A government’s finances don’t work like the finances of a household – and yes, this is harder to explain than the ‘maxed-out credit card’ story that the Conservatives had been offering for the past five years, but so far Labour had not even tried to counter this.

‘From now,’ he told them, ‘our job is to challenge austerity, to help people learn about how finances actually work and how the decisions that shape their lives are taken.’

To do this, we need to work with everyone who shares our desire for a fairer, more just and more liveable society. If Labour could join forces with the Tories and the Lib Dems to campaign for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom, then we should be willing to work with other parties, social movements and groups within society to campaign for an alternative to austerity. That doesn’t mean we stop being the Labour party, or that we form electoral pacts that take away people’s chance of voting for a Labour MP, but we need to take up our responsibility as the largest and one of the oldest forces within a wider movement for social justice.

8. The MPs

The talk of an instant coup came to nothing: even the hardest Blairites could see it was suicide, and no one was really enthused by the prospect of importing another Miliband. But the parliamentary party was biding its time. Corbyn wasn’t their second choice of leader, he was their last choice, the leader no one had expected.

Meanwhile, another unexpected effect of his victory was the split between the Blairite true believers and the bulk of the party. While it prospered, New Labour had justified itself on the grounds of pragmatism: your heart might lie to the left, but your head accepted the need to move rightwards. When Blair said he wouldn’t want the party to win with Corbyn in charge, he revealed the unspeakable truth: that he would prefer a Tory government to what most still thought of as a ‘real’ Labour government. This surprised no one, yet now that it was spoken, the internal coalition on which New Labour had been built began to unravel.

As it became clear that, against everyone’s predictions, Corbyn was holding his own at Prime Minister’s Questions and establishing himself in the leadership, a couple of the true Blairites left parliament to spend more time with their careers. In the resulting byelections, with candidates drawn from the grassroots movement, rather than the party machine, Labour saw its majorities increase, and this steadied the party a little. Perhaps the new direction was not electoral suicide, after all.

A surprising number of MPs began to rediscover the reasons they had come into politics in the first place. The renewal of the parliamentary party would not be complete, though, until the arrival of the 2020 cohort. For the first time in a generation, it felt like Labour was represented in parliament by people who were recognisable to their voters, who had worked in ordinary jobs, been self-employed, knew what it was like to live on the minimum wage or to queue at the job centre.

9. The movement

Over the past weeks, tens of thousands of people have found a faith in politics, a faith they never had, or thought they had lost long ago. It is not a blind faith nor an unquestioning one, it is not dogmatic. At its root, it is a faith in each other, as human beings, that we are something more than just self-serving consumers.

The future of the Labour party under Corbyn’s leadership would depend on what happened next with the movement which had grown up around his candidacy. ‘The job of this movement is not over,’ he told them. ‘There are four and a half years until the next election. We can’t wait that long to start rebuilding society, we need to start today, in the places where we live.’

There were three things that needed doing, now, he went on.

First, to start conversations that went deeper than doorstep canvassing, those five million checkbox encounters that had amounted to so little in the general election campaign. Labour needed to listen to people, not just when they fed back the soundbite opinions circulating in the daily papers, but in spaces where they had room to reflect on their own experiences, and to start making sense of the forces shaping their lives. The task of creating those spaces started in people’s kitchens, in rooms above pubs, in empty units in shopping centres, with house parties, meet-ups or pizza nights. Members of the leader’s team would show up to these events, sometimes the leader himself, and party organisers helped find guests and speakers, people to get the conversations started and to carry ideas from one town to the next.

The second task was for members of this movement to get active in the places where they lived, offering practical help and support to those hit hardest by austerity. ‘There’s a word for this,’ Corbyn told them, ‘an old fashioned word: it’s called solidarity.’ This was a movement for a society where no one would need a food bank, but while food banks existed, its members were going to be there, alongside the people running them and the people dependent on them, because these were the people with whom society would be rebuilt.

The final task would be a voter registration campaign on a scale that Britain had never seen.

10. The voters

The panic and despair of the Labour establishment at Corbyn’s victory was based, more than anything, on their certainty that he could never deliver electoral success. (That the same people had been certain, two months earlier, that he could never succeed in the leadership election did not cause them to question this.)

What were the factors that proved them wrong? The effectiveness of the voter registration campaign – not only in getting people onto the electoral roll, but in generating a wider sense that, this time, voting would matter – was clearly part of the story.

But another part of it was the gap between the way the political establishment thought about voters and the messier reality of the voters themselves. Most people don’t have a political opinion or identity in the way that people who dedicate their lives to politics tend to think of these things. The left-right spectrum is irrelevant to them, not because they subscribe to any of the analyses used to argue that this frame is obsolete, but because the words just don’t mean much. What they do have is a gut-level feeling about the direction in which society is travelling and a trust in their own intuitive judgement about whether someone trying to persuade them of something believes the words coming out of his or her own mouth.

Mainstream politicians had tried to respond to UKIP by borrowing as much of their rhetoric of xenophobia as they could get away with. Just like Gordon Brown with Gillian Duffy, the assumption was that UKIP voters were bigots, it’s just that bigots had now been identified as a target demographic. Yet this was too simple an interpretation of UKIP’s support, which was rooted in a deeper, vaguer sense that things were headed in the wrong direction, had been headed that way for a long time, and that nothing these voters heard from the mainstream politicians seemed to acknowledge this or reflect the experience of their lives.

11. The obstacles

Among the reasons people wrote off the chances of Corbyn’s Labour was the hostility of the press. Yet so much ink had been thrown at Red Ed and his Britain-hating dad, there was no stronger vocabulary left with which to damn his successor, so the message that Labour was lurching dangerously leftwards just sounded like more of the same. Except that what viewers identified when watching Miliband was his awkwardness, the constant sense that he was trying to work out who you wanted him to be, whereas you could see that Corbyn knew who he was and was happy with it.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the shadows of the defence and intelligence communities, contingency plans must have been drawn up for the possibility of a prime minister committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. But whatever its calculations, there were no outward signs of the deep state moving against the Labour leader.

The other predictable source of hostility, big business and the City, was preoccupied with the fall-out of the second wave of the global financial crisis, which broke in the autumn of 2016. It was that October that Labour first took a clear lead in the polls. The party also benefited from the damage done to the Conservatives by the deepening paedophile scandal.

12. Back to the allotment

Of course, in the end, the people who said Jeremy Corbyn would never become prime minister turned out to be right.

In September 2018, in his conference speech, he announced his intention to step down as leader. The leadership campaign that followed could hardly live up to the drama of 2015, but it was historic for another reason, as it led to the election of Labour’s first woman leader. Three years earlier, when she was among the backbenchers elected to Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet, few would have identified her as on the left of the party, but the platform on which she stood combined the anti-austerity commitments of her predecessor with a pledge to reform the electoral system.

As for Corbyn himself, he was only too happy to leave the despatch box and get back to his allotment.

13. Beyond a nostalgia for social democracy

It is August 2015, it’s getting close to six in the morning, and this is a story a man has been telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

Does it even come close? I’m not sure.

I can convince myself that there is a movement happening that could go far beyond the leadership contest, that the reach of the kind of politics Corbyn represents could go a lot wider than those who identify as on the left, and that a Labour party that confidently made alternative arguments would have a decent chance of reshaping political debate, despite the hostility of the media. (A hostility that hardly goes away if the party tries to play it safe, instead.) The hardest part is imagining the parliamentary party coming together around a Corbyn leadership, or at least giving it a chance.

At the level of political ideas, despite a lot of what’s being written, Corbyn’s platform hardly comes across as ‘hard left’. (For comparison, try watching this televised debate with Militant from 1982, where Peter Taaffe declares that Labour should nationalise 80-85% of the economy and ‘introduce a socialist plan of production’.)

What I do get from his campaign is a distinct flavour of ‘the Scooby-Doo theory of neoliberalism’: the idea that, if it hadn’t been for those meddling neoliberals (Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, Blair), we could have got away with a social democratic end of history. That way of thinking always feels like it gives its enemies too much credit, makes them masters of events, rather than the opportunists that they were. Neoliberalism today is hollower than it appears, but that doesn’t mean we know what an equivalent of social democracy looks like for a world of international capital and networked individuals – or what an equivalent of social democracy looks like that knows how to include the people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats and climbing fences at Calais.

These are hard questions, but the space in which we can articulate them and think carefully about them seems to be opening up. Whatever else comes of the Corbyn surge, it should help to enlarge that space.

The most encouraging thing I’ve noticed in his campaign is the crowdsourcing of policy ideas: 1,200 people contributed to the Northern Future document. This has to be better than a policy-making process concentrated among the London-based thinktanks and inner circles populated by PPE graduates who have never worked anywhere beyond Westminster. It seems like the best chance for developing the principles of those supporting Corbyn into a policy platform that is not simply nostalgic for the golden age of social democracy. And it’s how Landon Kettlewell would make policy, if he took over Labour.

14. The reality-based community

There’s one other line that’s been ringing in my head as I read the churn of comment pieces, the phrase that Karl Rove used to Ron Suskind. ‘Guys like you,’ he said, ‘are in what we call the reality-based community.’ For many, it summed up the delusions of the Bush regime, and belonging to the reality-based community became a badge of pride. But I always thought that Rove had half a point, when he made that distinction between those who study reality and those who create it.

The alarmed voices of the Labour establishment surely think of themselves as the reality-based community. The panic grows as they find those enthused by Corbyn are seemingly immune to reasoned arguments. But reality is complex, it isn’t just composed of facts, those facts are always entangled with perceptions, and with stories that shape those perceptions. A lot of the reality to which Labour’s realists are currently appealing is made up almost entirely of perception, since its facts consist of the results of opinion surveys and focus groups. It’s worth asking whether these methods borrowed from the market research industry really plumb the depths of the electorate, or even its shallows. Not to mention, at what point perceptions that have become dislocated from the facts get to overrule them, whether in relation to the effectiveness of austerity or the impact of immigration.

Another chunk of the reality to which the realists are appealing consists of stories. For a story to work, it needs to show a certain respect to the facts involved, but there will often be more than one story that fits the facts. When Polly Toynbee writes that her heart lies to the left of Corbyn, but the 1983 election result tells her this would be futile, she is invoking what has been the definitive story of Labour’s wilderness years and its return to power under Blair, the story of ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Other stories are available, though, including one which might mention that, when the Tories took the seat of Lewisham East from Labour at the 1983 election by a margin of 1,909, they were helped by the 9,351 votes polled by the breakaway SDP, whose candidate was Polly Toynbee.

15. You get one chance

It’s nearly time for breakfast. I’ve been practicing like this, the last few mornings, because I want to believe that there is a constructive insurgency going on, a wave of networked disruption that will renew the Labour party, remind it why it exists and open up the politics of the country where I did my growing up. I want to believe that the party can take this and not just tear itself apart.

Give me a few more days, maybe I’ll have got enough practice.

Meanwhile, here’s one thing I am sure of: if Corbyn doesn’t win, there will never be another chance for a grassroots surge of this kind within the Labour party. The system for electing a leader will be reformed all over again, the gap that Miliband opened will be sealed and the control of the parliamentary party reasserted. And perhaps the result will be that the pendulum of politics continues to swing jerkily from blue to red and back again, as if by some ahistorical force of nature, but my hunch is that the gap between the reality talked about by politicians and the realities of people’s lives will continue to grow, the pressure will continue to build, and sooner or later it will find a way to break through the cracks of the existing system. Since I’m writing this from Sweden, which many of you still think of as the spiritual home of social democracy, let me remind you how ugly that can look.

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD, HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO. EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS.

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What is the pseudo-left?

OP-EDS | EDITORIAL BOARD, WSWS.ORG

Tsipras: Not exactly an orphan in terms of international support.

Tsipras: Not even his critics expected such a quick capitulation.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he events in Greece over the past several months constitute a major strategic experience of the Greek working class and youth that is having a significant impact on political consciousness around the world.

The so-called “Coalition of the Radical Left” (Syriza)—despite its use of radical-sounding phraseology and its nominal opposition to austerity—has capitulated entirely to the European banks and institutions. The Syriza government is now implementing policies that will dramatically increase social inequality and turn Greece into a virtual colony of German and European imperialism.

These developments are a striking confirmation of the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site over several years, going back well before Syriza was elected in January of this year. In a resolution adopted at the Socialist Equality Party (US) Congress in July of 2012, for example, it was noted that “as soon as Syriza was faced with the possibility of coming to power, its leader Alexis Tsipras rushed to Germany to assure the banks that his party had no intention of withdrawing from the euro zone. It has sought nothing more radical than the renegotiation of the European banks’ austerity program.”

Throughout the spring of this year, the WSWS organized a series of meetings in which the nature of Syriza was analyzed and warnings were made of its plans to fully accept the austerity demands of the European banks.

In the aftermath of Syriza’s final capitulation, many readers have asked how it is that the WSWS was able to predict so precisely the course of events. This experience is a vindication of the Marxist method, which analyzes political tendencies not on the basis of what they call themselves, but on the basis of their history and program and the social interests they represent.

Over the past several years, the WSWS has developed the conception of an international political tendency that we have described as “pseudo-left,” of which Syriza is only one example.

We would like to call our readers’ attention to the analysis made by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North in the Foreword of his newly-released book, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique. North includes a concise and more detailed “working definition” of the “pseudo-left” that will help provide an orientation in the struggle against the influence of these reactionary movements. He writes:

* The pseudo-left denotes political parties, organizations and theoretical/ideological tendencies which utilize populist slogans and democratic phrases to promote the socioeconomic interests of privileged and affluent strata of the middle class. Examples of such parties and tendencies include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, and numerous offshoots of ex-Trotskyist (i.e., Pabloite) and state capitalist organizations such as the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) in France, the NSSP in Sri Lanka and the International Socialist Organization in the United States. This list could include the remnants and descendants of the “Occupy” movements influenced by anarchist and post-anarchist tendencies. Given the wide variety of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations throughout the world, this is by no means a comprehensive list.

* The pseudo-left is anti-Marxist. It rejects historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism and philosophical irrationalism associated with existentialism, the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodernism.

* The pseudo-left is anti-socialist, opposes class struggle, and denies the central role of the working class and the necessity of revolution in the progressive transformation of society. It counterposes supra-class populism to the independent political organization and mass mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system. The economic program of the pseudo-left is, in its essentials, pro-capitalist and nationalistic.

* The pseudo-left promotes “identity politics,” fixating on issues related to nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality in order to acquire greater influence in corporations, the colleges and universities, the higher-paying professions, the trade unions and in government and state institutions, to effect a more favorable distribution of wealth among the richest 10 percent of the population. The pseudo-left seeks greater access to, rather than the destruction of, social privilege.

* In the imperialist centers of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, the pseudo-left is generally pro-imperialist, and utilizes the slogans of “human rights” to legitimize, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations.

North concludes the Foreword to his new book by noting, “The analysis and exposure of the class basis, retrograde theoretical conceptions and reactionary politics of the pseudo-left are especially critical tasks confronting the Trotskyist movement in its struggle to educate the working class, free it from the influence of the petty-bourgeois movements, and establish its political independence as the central progressive and revolutionary force within modern capitalist society.”

The publication of the Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique marks a significant step toward this goal, and the volume will serve as a valuable aid in the coming struggles of the working class.

The WSWS Editorial Board

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The Greek drama continues— Syriza surrenders: time for renewed popular resistance

OPEDS | Theodoros Karyotis | Roarmag.org

Now that Syriza has caved in to the creditors, the need for grassroots mobilization is more urgent than ever. A new cycle of struggles is ahead of us.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or two weeks now, political time has been condensed in Greece, and citizens live on the edge of their seats, struggling against forces that appear well beyond their control. On June 27, the Syriza-led government put the ultimatum of the creditors to a referendum and campaigned for a NO. The outcome of the referendum — a resounding rejection of perpetual austerity and continued debt bondage — will go down in history as an outstanding moment of dignity of a people under vicious attack by European creditors and the Greek elite.

Despite the patriotic overtones, this outcome was the culmination of five years of resistance to the steady downgrading of our lives. It signified breaking free of the choke-hold of the mass media, rising above fear to make the people’s voice heard. It ratified the absolute discrediting of the political elites that have been ruling since the democratic transition of 1974, which campaigned for a YES.

Furthermore, the outcome revealed a society divided along class lines: the middle and lower classes, which have so far born virtually all the cost of austerity and structural adjustment, overwhelmingly voted NO. Nevertheless, the outcome resists the attempts of all political parties to capitalize on it; it is the categorical negation of the present political and economic arrangement, the refusal which necessarily precedes all acts of social self-determination.

However, less than a week after the referendum, the Greek government submitted a new proposal of financing to its creditors, tied to a package of austerity measures even harsher than the ones rejected in the referendum. After a weekend of ‘negotiations’, which revealed a rift among Greece’s creditors, a humiliating agreement was reached early on Monday, which all but turns Greece into a European debt colony.

How was this NO metamorphosed into a YES in a matter of days?

Syriza’s dilemma

As many analysts expected, the government’s strategy of using the popular verdict as a means of pressure in the negotiations backfired. Upon returning to the negotiation table, the hardliners around German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble made clear that they are prepared to let Greece go bankrupt — with all the economic and political implications this would have for the Eurozone — rather than see the slightest crack in the neoliberal austerity discipline.

The Syriza-led government found itself in a harsh and pressing dilemma: it would either have to oversee the implementation of a new neoliberal adjustment program, or it would have to assume the political cost of a bankruptcy, with all its disastrous effects on the Greek population.

It opted for the first, thus officially putting an end to this five-month stand-off between the Greek government and its so-called European ‘partners’. The terms of the capitulation are painful, as they go against the totality of Syriza’s campaign promises: the new memorandum, even more so than the previous two, is an extreme experiment in social engineering and in redistribution of wealth in favor of the powerful. It maintains many of the unjust measures implemented by previous governments, such as ENFIA, a transversal tax on small property that has turned the lower class families into tenants within their own homes, or the abolition of the untaxable income limit for the self-employed, which makes it impossible for most skilled workers to get out of the unemployment trap.

The new deal also revamps and possibly renames TAIPED, an institution created to sell off all public assets, with all basic infrastructure, such as ports, airports and the power grid company, due to be privatized. Furthermore, the deal demands the lifting of the moratorium on home foreclosures, opening the road for a raw exercise of dispossession that threatens to create a humanitarian disaster, as we know from the Spanish experience. On top of that, it envisions an increase in indirect taxation, a hike in the prices of foodstuffs and transport as well as cuts in wages and pensions through a rise in social insurance contributions.

All in all, a package of measures designed to further compress the middle and lower classes, increase recession and unemployment, destroy the small and medium businesses, which form the backbone of Greek economy, and hand over all public assets and common goods to transnational capital. All the while perpetuating depression and increasing the debt burden, effectively crippling Greece’s economy and destroying the country’s capacity to get out of the crisis on its own feet.

The creditors went out of their way to ensure the measures are as punitive as possible. To further humiliate their opponents, they demanded the immediate voting in of reform laws and the return to Athens of the Troika supervisors, who were banished by the Syriza-led government in the early stages of negotiation.

The arguments of government officials and party cadres defending the ‘positive’ aspects of the deal are risible, as they echo the arguments of all previous governments that there is long-term prospect for the Greek economy and that the cost of the adjustment will not be transferred to the underprivileged. It is more honest to see the agreement for what it is: a large-scale operation of dispossession, a sacrifice of a whole country in order to maintain the delusions upon which the Eurozone was built.

It seems that this is the end of the road for Syriza’s ‘national salvation’ government. It will be called to vote in and implement an austerity package that not only disregards the struggle of the anti-austerity movements of the past five years, of which Syriza was once a part, but also betrays the verdict of the 61% of Greeks who voted against austerity only a week before.

Of course many would argue that this is a collective gamble gone wrong, and in front of the “partners’” blackmail the government took the least painful way out. There is no doubt that a disorderly Grexit, along with the punitive measures that would be employed by neoliberal hardliners to make an example out of the Greeks, would in the short-term be a disaster, primarily for the popular classes. In any case, political developments will be swift: the government will surely be reshuffled or replaced, and Syriza faces an internal rift that could mean the end of this party as we know it.

A contradictory relationship

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or about three years, grassroots social movements in Greece had deeply contradictory sentiments towards the electoral rise of Syriza. On one hand, the prospect of a left government was an opportunity to bring the conflict to an institutional level; after all, many of the demands of the struggles were reflected in Syriza’s program and the party always kept a movement-friendly profile.

On the other hand, Syriza has been an agent of demobilization, ending the legitimation crisis that gave a protagonistic role to the social creativity and self-determination of the movements, and by promoting the institutionalization of the struggles, the marginalization of demands that did not fit into its state management project, and the restitution of the logic of political representation and delegation, which promoted inaction and complacency.

At the same time, Syriza cultivated the illusion that real social transformation was possible without breaking with the mechanisms of capitalist domination, without calling into question the dominant economic paradigm, without building concrete bottom-up alternatives to capitalist institutions, without even calling into question the country’s permanence within a monetary union that by design favors the export-driven economies of the North in detriment of the Europe’s periphery.

Syriza’s leaders detached themselves from the party base and their former allies within the movements, and stubbornly resisted a public debate on the elaboration of a ‘Plan B’ outside the Eurozone, should the ‘Plan A’ of an ‘end to austerity within the Eurozone’ fail, for fear that this would be used against them by the pro-austerity opposition as proof that they had a hidden agenda from the very start.

Unfortunately, recent developments tend to confirm the views of those who claimed that, given the extreme delegitimation and fragility of the previous government, a new memorandum was only possible through a new and popular ‘progressive’ government. This is probably the role that Syriza unwillingly ended up playing, using its ample reserves of political capital.

Lifting the veil of illusion

Syriza’s failure to deliver on any of its campaign promises or to reverse the logic of austerity lifts the veil of illusion regarding institutional top-down solutions and leaves the grassroots movements exactly where they started from: being the main antagonistic force to the neoliberal assault on society; the only force capable of envisioning a different world that goes beyond the failed institutions of the predatory capitalist market and representative democracy.

Undoubtedly many honest and committed activists are linked to the Syriza party base. It is their task now to acknowledge the failure of Syriza’s plan, and to resist the government’s efforts to market the new memorandum as a positive or inevitable development. If Syriza, or a majority part of it, decides to stay in power — in this governmental arrangement or in some other, more servile, put in place by the creditors — and oversee the implementation of this brutal memorandum, it is the task of the party base to rebel and unite with other social forces in search of a way out of barbarity, to break the ranks of a party that might quickly be turning from a force of change into a reluctant administrator of a brutal system they have no control over.

The role of the left, broadly defined, is not that of a more benevolent manager of capitalist barbarity: after all, that was social democracy’s original purpose, a project that exhausted itself already in the 1980s. There can be no ‘austerity with a human face’: neoliberal social engineering is an attack on human dignity and the common goods in all its guises, right-wing and left-wing.

I have argued elsewhere that the NO in last week’s referendum was ambivalent, and the struggle to give meaning to it has only just begun. Hours after the announcement of the result, Prime Minister Tsipras interpreted the verdict as a mandate to ‘stay within the Eurozone at any cost’. It is evident, however, that the new ‘bailout’ package obviously is outside his mandate: Plan A, Syriza’s only plan, envisioning an end of austerity without challenging the powers-that-be, has utterly failed.

Plan B, promoted in various forms by Antarsya, the Communist Party and Syriza’s own Left Platform advocates a productive reconstruction outside the Eurozone. Although increasingly popular after the inflexibility of the European project has been made evident, it is still a productivist, state-centric, top-down plan that doesn’t put into question the dominant meanings of capitalism: endless capitalist growth, an extractive economy, the expansion of production, credit and consumption. Furthermore, by promoting national entrenchment it entails the danger of authoritarian deviations.

A decisive turning point

As always, the Greek crisis is a turning point regarding the future of the European project. The Eurozone hardliners insist on blaming the people of the European periphery for the structural defects of the single currency and their own insistence on socializing private debt through the euphemistically called ‘bailout packages’. At the same time they have poisoned the minds of the people of the North of Europe with a neocolonial moralistic discourse propagated through the mass media.

The perceived loss of political power over their lives is turning many Europeans towards reactionary xenophobic parties that promise a return to the self-contained authoritarian nation-state. The European left looks on perplexed as its hopes of an EU based on solidarity and social justice vanish along with Syriza’s bid to negotiate a humane way out of the Greek debt crisis.

Now is the moment for a broad alliance of social forces to bring forward a ‘Plan C’, based on social collaboration, decentralized self-government and the stewardship of common goods. Without overlooking its significance, national electoral politics is not the privileged field of action when it comes to social transformation.

The withering away of democracy in Europe should be complemented and challenged by the fortification of self-organized communities at a local level and the forging of strong bonds between them, along with a turn to a solidarity- and needs-based economy, and the collective management and defense of common goods. The social counter-power of the oppressed should confront the social power of capital directly in its privileged space: everyday life.

Within Greece, after a full circle, the debate on our future beyond austerity has only now started. The resounding 61% rejection of austerity serves to remind us that this debate is now urgent, and the reactivation of the social movements that envision new social relationships built from below is imminent, after some years of relative demobilization. We have ahead of us a new cycle of creative resistance, of forging collective subjects and of tireless experimentation for the bottom-up transformation of our reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Theodoros Karyotis is a sociologist, translator and activist participating in social movements that promote self-management, solidarity economy and defense of the commons in Greece. He writes on autonomias.net and tweets at@TebeoTeo.[/box]

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The Problem of Greece is not Only a Tragedy: It is a Lie

JOHN PILGER

Yanis Varoufakis: Part of a deceitful cabal. All pose and no substance.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.

These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.

“Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory”, declared a Guardian headline on January 25. “Radical leftists” the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a “rock star of economics”. It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they “anti austerity”.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy – in accordance with European “neo-liberal” values — and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece’s scalp.

Greece’s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, “is illegal, illegitimate and odious”. Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose “bailout” in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished.

Tsipras: Pathetic, but oh so typical of liberalism’s many faces.

For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it “intolerable” and “the dung of the devil”. The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.

Greeks had not voted for “better terms”. They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.

In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor “leftists” nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their “secret austerity plans” in leaks to the media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to accept their basic, most vicious demands – which he has now accepted.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the Greek electorate voted “no” on 5 July to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, “Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people”. Greeks had not voted for “better terms”. They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.

The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the “illegal and odious” debt – as Argentina did successfully — and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be “at the table” seeking “better terms”.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than “leftist” or “far left” or “hardline” – the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza’s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these “radicals”? What do they believe in?

In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: “Should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism …

“I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated …. Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Thatcher’s victory].

“What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself …?”

Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain “scorned socialist change” – when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change – he echoes Blair.

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as “liberal” or even “left”, Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.

This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.

[box type=”download”] John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com[/box]

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Debate Rages in SYRIZA Over Austerity Plan

donation to TRNN, a pioneer in people’s television
AN INTERVIEW WITH Dimitri Lascaris

https://youtu.be/FHU2OS-E1g0

[box type=”download”] Dimitri Lascaris is a partner with the Canadian law firm of Siskinds, where he heads the firm’s securities class actions practice. Before joining Siskinds, he practiced securities law in the New York and Paris offices of a major Wall Street law firm. Last year, he was named by Canadian Business magazine as one of the 50 most influential business people in Canada, and was described by the magazine as “the fiercest advocate for shareholder rights” in Canada. He is currently prosecuting numerous securities class actions in Canada, including the Sino-Forest class action, in which his clients just negotiated the largest auditor settlement in Canadian history: a $117 million settlement with the accounting firm Ernst & Young.[/box]

Transcript

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: This is the Dimitri Lascaris report on the Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.The Greek MPs are debating the controversial reform plan tabled by Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras to its European creditors on Thursday. He’s trying to avert a forced exit out of the Eurozone despite the clear mandate given to him on Sunday to say no to its creditors. In the meantime the left platform of Syriza, which includes Costas Lapavitsas that we have interviewed here on the Real News Network, issued a statement demanding that Greece exit from the Euro and deal with the economic crisis by developing its own economy in the interest of its own citizens.With me to discuss all of this and more is Dimitri Lascaris. He’s joining me from London, Ontario. He’s a lawyer with the Canadian law firm Siskinds, where he heads the firm’s securities class actions practice. He’s also a board member of the Real News Network. Dimitri, thank you so much for joining us today.
…

DIMITRI LASCARIS, SECURITIES CLASS ACTIONS LAWYER IN CANADA: Always a pleasure.
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PERIES: So Dimitri, give us the latest development in the last 24 hours.
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LASCARIS: Well, I think we are witnessing what could fairly be described as one of the worst political debacles in modern European history. The government surprised and annoyed, infuriated, its negotiating partners at the Troika by announcing at the 11th hour of the negotiations a referendum. It vigorously urged the populace to vote against the ultimatum of the Troika, despite immense pressure being placed upon the Greek electorate through the capping of liquidity assistance to the Greek banks, which resulted in the imposition of fairly severe capital controls, very extensive damage to the economy as a result of the freezing up of the flow of money in the economy. And the threats that a no vote would be equivalent to a Grexit, and there was a–it’s debatable how many people in Greece want to avoid a Grexit, but certainly a substantial portion of the population does not want to go down that path.Despite all of that pressure, the Greek electorate showed immense courage and voted oxhi, no, with a quite substantial majority, 61 percent, as we all know. In excess of 61 percent, actually. And within approximately 48 hours, the Greek government proceeded to offer terms, austerity terms, that were at least as harsh–I mean, essentially as harsh, and perhaps even harsher than those it urged the Greek people to reject only days earlier, successfully urged them to reject. And in addition, its proposals sent to the Troika yesterday make no mention at all of debt relief. Simply nothing in them in relation to debt relief. Even though, you know, the IMF and the treasury secretary of the United States have been saying in the last 48 hours and started to say previously, and Donald Tusk, senior official of the EU, others have said debt relief should be accorded to Greece. The acceptance–this term is not actually conditional. Certainly not on its face.
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PERIES: Is that because Germany, the German finance minister, has come out so clearly saying that they would not accept a haircut?
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LASCARIS: German finance minister, Angela Merkel herself, the chancellor, said that very clearly in the last 24 hours. She said that a haircut is out of the question. Let’s recall that the IMF itself–and these were words repeated to the Greek electorate in the run up to the referendum by the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, has said that in order for Greek debt to be rendered sustainable–and this was before the economic collapse that has been occasioned by the capital controls, the Greek government or state required a debt writedown of 30 percent, and a 20-year grace period on payments on that debt.And you have the German government saying–and they have enormous power, obviously, in this entire discussion, saying unequivocally that a debt haircut of any kind is out of the question.

…
PERIES: And I might want to remind our audience, this is the proposal that the IMF thought, and issued a statement recently saying, that that was perhaps something that they should try to achieve.
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LASCARIS: Absolutely. And you know, to be fair to the Greek government, and I’ll try my best to do that although it’s very difficult under the current circumstances to say anything positive about what is currently going on in the Greek parliament and the Greek government, the German government has not ruled out other forms of debt relief.
..
For example, they could agree to extend the maturities. They could agree to reduce the interest rates. But I assure you, I would be astounded if any other forms of debt relief that the government of Germany would agree to–and not just the government of Germany, the government of Finland and the government of Slovakia and other hardline governments in the Eurozone, would not come anywhere close to rendering Greek debt sustainable. That simply isn’t going to happen. There’s no appetite for it. It’s not even clear that there’s any appetite to disperse any further moneys to Greece, and this deal would require approval by the parliaments of the Eurozone for the disbursement of over 50 billion Euros to the country over the next, I think, three years.
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So debt relief just ain’t happening. Certainly not to a degree that is going to render the debt sustainable. And so this is the big question. I mean, really there are two questions in this debate. The first question is, is Greece better off on a long-term basis in the Euro, outside of the Euro. And you’ve heard people like Costas Lapavitsas say quite clearly that Greece is better off outside the Euro.The other question is even if you believe that Greece is better off inside the Euro, you disagree with people like Syriza MP Costas Lapavitsas, one must ask the obvious question, will this deal actually prevent a Grexit? And anyone who thinks that this deal, which is going to cause further economic contraction in Greece, further social inequality, further increase, probably in the debt–certainly there will be an increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. Further unemployment. But somehow magically this is going to prevent a default. I think they need to have their heads examined. If anything, this is going to accelerate a default on the other debts that Greece has.
…
And when that default happens, there will be an end to liquidity assistance by the European Central Bank, assuming that it ever restores the liquidity assistance, and that’s going to result in a failure of the Greek banking system and the need to seize the banking system and issue a parallel currency.

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