09.12.1999
From Seattle to London
What kind of ‘anti-capitalism’?
The protests around last week’s World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle and the linked demonstrations around the globe underlined the profound weakness of working class politics as the millennium draws to a close.
There were anti-WTO protests in India, France, the US, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Holland, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Bangladesh and elsewhere. While most appeared to be relatively small and low-key, the dramatic events in Seattle itself, along with violent clashes outside London’s Euston station, attracted considerable media attention and the enthusiastic and practically uncritical support of most sections of the left.
Of course, there is no question that we must defend all those arrested by the rampaging police thugs. These filth were so brutal in Seattle that even the likes of Glenys Kinnock were moved to protest. In addition, we must raise the broader point about self-defence for our protests. We have consistently argued that the attacks of the police - or provocations which provide aid to them emanating from within our own ranks - must be countered by organised defence corps drawn from and accountable to our movement. The police should be made to think twice before deciding to launch violent forays into such gatherings.
However, it is vital that we sharply differentiate ourselves from the politics that informed these demonstrations. The bulk of the left have simply rejoiced at the fact that many of the protesters identified themselves with ideas that are in opposition to the way the world is currently organised: “The main trend in Seattle … was firmly anti-capitalist,” Socialist Worker assured us, and cited the comment of one marcher that “this feels like the 1960s” (December 4).
In fact, this is nothing like the 1960s, socially or politically. In that decade, world capitalism was confronted by a seemly viable alternative - ‘official communism’ - organised as it was in mass parties and holding state power in huge areas of the world. So strong was the apparent challenge from this ostensibly implacable enemy and from strong indigenous workers’ movements that it actually prompted a remoulding of ruling class ideology post-World War II. Impressionistic theories of the ‘convergence’ of capitalism and ‘socialism’ abounded. Shallow nonsense was peddled that western societies were ‘post-capitalist’, that state capitalist ‘planning’ agencies such as Britain’s National Economic Development Council (1962) and the dominance of interventionist Keynesian demand management economics somehow meant that capitalism had been superseded as a system.
The contrast with today could not be more stark. With the defeat and disintegration of working class politics since the 1970s - even in the distorted forms of ‘official communism’ and Labourite social democracy - the ideologues of capitalism feel no particular need for subterfuge or reticence. The class war general Thatcher rode into the field - and won - emboldened with the battle cry ‘For capitalism!’ The bourgeois commentator Anthony Sampson noted that by the time of the 1992 election, “Free market capitalism was again enthroned, with no idea powerful enough to challenge it” (A Sampson The essential anatomy of Britain, London 1993, p5).
Capitalism today is unabashed. The absence of a world alternative to its rule allows it to present itself unashamedly under its own brazen flag. Thus, it is more understandable that spontaneously generated protests against the effects of its rule should more easily adopt the mantle of anti-capitalism. Marxists should not simply take these pronouncements at face value, however.
The people on the streets of Seattle - well over 100,000 according to some estimates - are understandably recoiling from the ravages of the unbridled market, the growing inequities of the world economy. But what is their answer? It is simply inadequate - and miserably tailist - to just say that the “trade unionists, campaigners against third world debt and greens … recognise that the real enemy of the environment, both human and natural, is multinational capital …” (Workers Power December-January). Nor can it simply be blandly stated that “the growth of links between groupings such as Reclaim the Streets and trade unionists working on the tube … is a welcome development”. The question is, whose politics are going to be hegemonic? Whose vision of the future will win?
Since the ascent of Marxism and its huge influence in the workers’ movement, ‘anti-capitalism’ has been associated with an advanced form of thought, a progressive critique of the existing state of affairs. It has not always been so. Marx writes in the Communist Manifesto of reactionary socialisms - feudal, even bourgeois - that issued protests against the development of modern society. In much the same way, the ‘anti-capitalism’ on display on the streets last week was a protest against the advanced features of contemporary capitalism - primarily the developing global economy.
This took a variety of forms amongst the mix of protestors outside the Seattle summit. Legitimate protests against child labour and lack of workers’ rights in countries such as China were easily marshalled by trade union bureaucrats as ammunition to support chauvinist calls for protectionism. The president of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, postured that he would oppose normal trade relations with China “until there are some rules that the Chinese are going to play by” (Reuters, December 5). Inside the WTO meeting, the attempt to link labour standards to trade negotiations was the repeated theme of US representatives. Understandably, this was vehemently opposed by underdeveloped countries, whose one advantage in relation to wealthier western competitors is cheap labour.
The other characteristic theme of the protest - even more pronounced in the much smaller demonstration on November 30 in London - was a strand of liberal/anarchistic green ‘third worldism’. In truth, it is stretching the meaning of the term almost to breaking point to define this element as “anti-capitalist”. Certainly, such groups oppose the barbarism associated with the rapid development of the global economy and the human misery and havoc is it wreaking in poorer countries. But for many, the answer appears to lie in a return to ‘local economies’, self-sufficient communities trading limited ranges of commodities in a limited geographical area.
Such a perverse and inherently anti-human vision frankly has more in common with Proudhonism, a revolt against big capitalist property in defence of small capitalist property. In the proposals of many of today’s anti-debt, pro-‘third world’ campaigners it is easy to hear echoes of his reactionary and utopian notion of the organisation under capitalism of a “just exchange” between individual commodity producers.
It is symptomatic of the degeneration of contemporary working class politics that the left has sought to tail such petty bourgeois ‘socialism’, to make its own programme practically indistinguishable from these strands. A recent pre-conference document of the Socialist Workers Party urged its members to make recruits amongst liberal campaigners for the cancellation of third world debt, with whom the SWP was “90%” in agreement. This is precisely not the way for revolutionaries to intervene in such movements.
We do not argue for a sectarian boycott of these sorts of protests. Far from it. It is the glaring absence of a vigorous and effective communist intervention that allows the politics of the petty bourgeoisie to win hegemony unchallenged. If communists were able to engage effectively in the movement of Russian workers shaped by the politics of Father Gapon in the opening years of this century, why would we exclude ourselves from the tens of thousands of people repulsed by world capitalism on the march today? Our key point is that we need to cuts across their current ideas with a communist programme, not just a tame left version of the backward-looking politics that currently befuddle people’s heads.
The near universal, uncritical chorus of approval with which the left greeted the WTO protests underlines to Marxists the huge scale of the task facing us. The project of ‘anti-capitalism’ has to be rescued from the distorted, petty bourgeois form it assumes in the protests of green radicals and ‘third world’ campaigners. It has to be organically fused once again with the only body in society with the power and interest to win genuine socialism, the world’s working class.
Mark Fischer