08.01.2004
Big people and the small state
Tory leader Michael Howard declares: "I believe the people should be big. That the state should be small." This is a sentiment that authentic Marxists would wholeheartedly concur with, writes Jack Conrad
Michael Howard's 15-point "I believe" political credo - run as an advert in The Times on January 2 at a cost of £57,000 - is a Saatchi and Saatchi mix of Dr Martin Luther King and Margaret Thatcher. Half bland platitudes, half future threat. Alike Tory grandees and constituency loyalists are revelling in their party's new-found popularity. The sloth of despair lifts; once again high ambitions stir.
A recent Popplus survey showed that with the ignominious departure of Iain Duncan Smith and Howard's unopposed coronation the Tories have substantially boosted their ratings: support has risen by two points for the second month running and now stands at 35% - five points behind the Labour Party. Silly predictions - including by leftwing commentators and sages - of the imminent demise of the Conservative Party have proven somewhat premature.
It is the Liberal Democrats who have successively lost ground. Apart from vacuously announcing himself in favour of freedom; of health, wealth and happiness; of equality of opportunity and of good education; and of security for the old, Howard declares: "I believe the people should be big. That the state should be small." This is a sentiment that authentic Marxists would wholeheartedly concur with.
In Howard's credo, of course, big people/small state is nothing but a codeword for a full-blooded continuation of the Thatcherite counterreformation. What Howard champions is not the empowerment of the people: rather it is the freedom of capital - freedom from taxation, freedom from responsibility and freedom to exploit and plunder untrammelled.
Yet the fact of the matter is that there exists a systemic mismatch between capital and its state. Capital - as historically the most alienated of human relationships - relies on constant self-expansion, accumulation of profit without limit and production for its own sake. That is why unparalleled wealth exists side by side with grinding poverty, chronic unemployment, endemic overwork and the danger of ecological catastrophe.
Unless individual capitalists - the personification of capital - subordinate themselves to this unique expansionist determination, they will be ruthlessly punished: by loss of market, shareholder revolt and ultimately by being squeezed out of business. Put another way, capitalists do not control capital; they are controlled by capital. For its part the state stands as the final guarantor against any rebellion - passive or active - by the producers.
The state also defends and promotes its capitals against the capitals of other countries. There are few, if any, multinational companies. Despite the claims of Tony Negri and Michael Hardt capital is not stateless. Nor is it just about to become so. Big capitalist firms operate internationally, but inescapably rely on a national base and a corresponding state - they are transnationals. Paradoxical though it may appear, the capitalist state must impose definite national restraints. The state acts on behalf of the collective interests of its national capitals. Without measures that curb or ameliorate exploitation and the tendency to monopoly by the particular parts the state itself would succumb to rivals, dwindle into impotency and in all probability fall to political revolution.
But capital has definite, innate limits: eg, decline in the rate of profit, overproduction, underconsumption and disproportionality. These limits are again and again overcome "¦ but only by successively compounding internal contradictions. Capitalism moves to complex forms of decline. The law of value continues, but increasingly relies on organisation. Under these transitionary conditions of an increasingly impossible capitalism and an as yet still unobtainable communism, the state machine grows to hypertrophic proportions. Hence the peaceful struggle for markets inexorably becomes a struggle between states.
Since 1914 capitalism has survived only through massive state intervention. Supervision of production, quotas, subsidies and caps on profits, government loans and spending on armies and armaments allowed capital to hang on and temporarily put off communism - though at enormous human cost. Following the horrors of World War II capitalism faced a deeply disenchanted and often militant working class. Neither fascism nor mass unemployment could be used to impose discipline over labour. Indeed - especially in western Europe - capital conceded a kind of social tribute: full employment, council housing, universal secondary education, national health service, pensions and other social security measures. That was the price capital paid to prevent the working class making revolution. Naturally these negative antici-pations of communism were administered in a thoroughly bureaucratic and off-putting fashion.
Being compelled to have the same coloured front door as everyone else; cramped, box-like housing; waiting long, agonising months or years for basic medical treatment; the factory-like comprehensive schools; and the humiliations involved in making benefit claims were the direct opposite to socialism and could easily be exploited by the hypocritical Tories.
Nevertheless the social tribute extracted from capital represented a substantial gain made by the working class ... and this is what Thatcher and now Howard really mean by the big state. Howard's Tory Party has no intention whatsoever of attacking or even paring down what we consider to be the big state: the armed forces, the police, MI5, MI6, the civil service, the courts, prisons, state export guarantees, subsidies for capital opening up in so-called development areas, etc. Nor can they reintroduce Adam Smith's blind hand of the market: gas, electricity, telephones, water, trains, etc all operate in pseudo-market conditions and are necessarily overseen by state quangos which fix profits, prices and minimum service requirements. What of us Marxists? There are those on the left who fondly look back upon the social democratic state.
The Socialist Alliance majority often talk as if there was some kind of 1950s and 60s golden age. Others, such as the left Labourites and the Morning Star's 'official communists', actually wish to further strengthen the capitalist state as the means to bring about socialism. Capital is either nationalised or negatively abolished. Even when that involves an armed uprising - such as in China, Vietnam or Cuba - the result is not proletarian socialism, but the dead end of bureaucratic socialism. Bureaucratic socialism - based on the model of Stalin's Soviet Union - proves to be an ectopic social formation, not the blunt instrument which ushers in the communist dawn. There must necessarily be a dialectical link between means and ends.
Communism is stateless and marks the real beginning of generalised human freedom. Such an end cannot possibly be arrived at by way of the strong state. Those who attempt to do so with their patriotic defence of the pound and British sovereignty, alternative economic strategies, immigration and import controls, nationalisations, etc unin-tentionally work towards not the liberation of the working class - rather a new form of slavery.
Both under capitalism and during the short socialist transitionary period Marxists genuinely stand for the big people/small state principle. Via mass political struggle we aim to progressively disempower the capitalist state to the point where it can easily - if possible peacefully - be overthrown and replaced by the empowered people. Organs of working class struggle thereby become organs of the working class semi-state. In short, extreme democracy is the state form of the rule of the working class - the overwhelming majority of the population.
Therefore our immediate, minimum, programme - the programme we advocate under the socio-economic conditions of capitalism - envisages replacing the standing armed forces, the police included, with a people's militia. Revealingly the Socialist Workers Party employed its full voting weight to ensure that this elementary democratic demand was kept out of the SA's People before profit. Evidently John Rees and co are fiery revolut-ionaries in the pages of Socialist Worker, but timid reformists when they stand in elections.
Indeed in all spheres of life we communists outline a programme of democratisation and active involvement, whereby the people - specifically the working class - exert an ever increasing degree of control. That is the social content we give to our demand for the present-day United Kingdom monarchy system to be abolished and replaced by a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. Everywhere - workplaces, local communities, schools, universities, trade unions, national administration, foreign affairs - communists fight for the maximisation of democracy. Hence, while we are committed to removing the commanding heights of the economy away from the clutches of capital, our main emphasis - before and after the overthrow of the existing state - lies in realising workers' control. The aim of our programme in this respect being the full socialisation of production. That necessarily demands internationalism. National socialism is the road to certain ruin. Because capital operates globally, it can only be superseded through a global revolution. So, while the fight begins on the national terrain, it must be completed through the ever closer cooperation and coordination of the workers of all countries.
Jack Conrad