24.02.2000

McCombes and his Liliputian dystopia

Jack Conrad critises the national socialist plans of the SSP

Judging by Alan McCombes' recent Scottish Socialist Voice article, 'The socialist century begins', and his draft conference paper, 'The Scottish economy', the Scottish Socialist Party is haunted by the ongoing globalisation of capital and in spite of everything seems determined to repeat the disastrous failures of the past. The SSP has a vision of the 21st century which is reformist, not revolutionary; nationalist, not internationalist.

The SSP starts with the principle of the Scottish nation and gaining its political independence from Westminster, not the necessity of uniting the historically constituted working class throughout Britain in order to overthrow our main, immediate enemy, the United Kingdom state, as an integral, but subordinate, part of the world communist revolution. What unites comrade McCombes, editor of Scottish Socialist Voice, Tommy Sheridan MSP, Richie Venton and their CWI International Socialism faction with the likes of Alan Green, Hugh Kerr, Allan Armstrong, Bill Bonnar, etc is the fight for a breakaway Scotland - presumably leaving the workers in England and Wales to overthrow the UK state. The SSP has a programme to weaken, not to smash, the UK. Instead of working class unity against the existing state, the SSP strives to end the historic unity of the working class in Britain. Hence, as capital becomes increasingly global, the SSP irresponsibly tries to divide the forces of the working class.

Without "full political and economic independence", without "full control of its own currency" there can be no "far-reaching change", according to comrade McCombes. However, once there is a sovereign Scotland and an SSP majority in Holyrood, legislation is to be tabled so as to bring into being a "democratic socialist Scotland". Such a Scotland will, we are assured, "stand up to the forces of globalisation, neo-liberalism and capitalism". In defiance of "vested interests" the commanding heights of the economy are to be taken into "public ownership", wealth redistributed from the rich to the working class and poor, and Scotland put on the road to "a fully socialised economy" ('The Scottish economy').

Comrade McCombes, the SSP's main theorist, is definitely trying to inculcate and justify nationalist pride, if not downright arrogance, under the guise of internationalism. He seriously argues that having 2,000 members and one MSP makes the SSP the vanguard of humanity, and Scotland virtually the world's revolutionary centre: "Today," he writes, "the forces of socialism in Scotland are potentially stronger than possibly anywhere else in Europe." His reformist Scotland will moreover become a "symbol of resistance and economic and social justice". Scotland's putative socialist breakthrough "would be the catalyst for change across Europe and across the world". Others will quickly follow Scotland's trail-blazing lead (Scottish Socialist Voice January 21).

We have seen the results that come from the sort of reformist socialism advocated by the SSP. They are hardly inspirational. Spain in the mid-1930s and Chile in the early 1970s ended in bloody tragedy. France in the mid-1930s and then again in the early 1980s saw a flight of capital and an almost instant programmatic reversal. Champions of national socialism - Alan McCombes among them - explain away history by insisting that the state's powers to impose restrictions over capital were not used forcefully enough and democracy and decentralisation not encouraged energetically enough. But failure is inevitable. No single country - not even the richest - has within it the means necessary to positively supersede capital. Individual capitalists can be expropriated en masse through a political revolution. But creating a sustainable and dynamic alternative mode of production is a universal task.

Comrade McCombes refers to "primitive socialist experiments". He does not name them but maintains nevertheless that they were "conducted under the most difficult and unfavourable conditions imaginable". Do his "primitive socialist experiments" include the post-1945 social democratic settlements in Britain, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia? Do they include the bureaucratic socialisms in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Kampuchea, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, etc? Conveniently we are left in the dark wondering.

He cites post-1917 Russia alone. The material foundations "for a thriving socialist democracy simply did not exist" in a country which still had "one foot in the dark ages", he explains. Leave aside the "thriving socialist democracy" of 1917 and 1918, the comrade is half right when he says that material backwardness is the reason why the dream of socialism was "usurped by the monstrosity of Stalinism" (ibid). That and, we must add, the isolation brought about by the failure of the world revolution to be a world revolution.

Here is the rub. Presumably in the mind of comrade McCombes his socialism will avoid such a fate because Scotland is a "relatively wealthy country" ('The Scottish economy'). Of course, he pays lip service to internationalism. The "battle for socialism" cannot be confined "within the borders of a single country" in this "age of global communications and multinational capital" (ibid). But, it has to be said, exactly the same sort of platitudes came from the whole range of 20th century national socialists - from the timid reformist to the bold revolutionary guerrilla. Ramsay MacDonald and Eduard Bernstein wrote about their undying commitment to international solidarity and international socialism. So did Joseph Pilsudski and Mikhail Gorbachev, Pol Pot and Enver Hoxha, Ernesto Che Guevara and Mao Zedong.

Precisely because Russia/USSR was backward but had continental proportions, a hundred million peasants awaiting transformation into industrial proletarians and huge untapped mineral, oil and other such resources, it could withstand imperialism's military and economic onslaught over many decades by adopting a policy of autarchy. Bureaucratic socialism survived in the Soviet Union from its inception in 1928-9 to the 1991 fall, albeit in a state of permanent crisis, because from the start it was isolated and because it turned the workers and peasant masses into state slaves. The USSR could in this way temporarily develop the productive forces and expand the wealth available to the state.

That is hardly the case with Scotland. It is not only an advanced country in terms of industry and economic activity. It is thoroughly integrated into and reliant on the world economy. General nationalisation would be woefully regressive. The very notion of a Scottish steel, car, computer or shipbuilding industry is a reactionary utopia. Such industries operate nowadays on a global scale and according to a global division of labour. Instead of breaking them apart - which would surely mean ruination - the historic task of the working class is to fully socialise them, necessarily on a world scale.

Comrade McCombes' Scottish socialism would either be a variety of state capitalism, and therefore no particular threat to international capital and the big capitalist powers, or, as a partial, local negation of capitalism, it would surely meet its nemesis within no more than a couple of years. Years in which working class incomes and living standards could only but plummet, not soar, as promised by comrade McCombes. By nationalising - ie, breaking apart - integrated transna-tionals, the SSP would inflict upon Scotland's economy severe dislocation. Diseconomies of scale would impose themselves and puncture productivity in the Liliputian dystopia. Furthermore, retaliatory sanctions, non-investment and military threats would compel an SSP government to turn on its working class base, there being no other source of surplus product. In the end the danger of counterrevolution comes as much from below as from the outside.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that capital is a universal system or metabolism and can only be superseded universally, not locally. The world is joined into a single whole. Capital's need for unlimited expansion has sent it hunting far and wide. No country, no person remains untouched. Raw materials come to the metropoles, Scotland included, in enormous quantities from the most distant places. Commodities are produced across frontiers and sold to a world consumer. The irresistible dynamic of this global system erodes and eventually prevails over even the immovable might of the most authoritarian 'socialist' state. Autonomy and self-sufficiency implodes before capital. The USSR is history. North Korea rots and its people starve. Comrade McCombes admits that because of their dependence on inward investment, "local economies, particularly in Lanarkshire, Fife and West Lothian, are extremely vulnerable to decisions taken by faceless directors on the other side of the world" ('The Scottish economy'). But in reality the same thing must be said of Scotland as a whole.

Today humanity is interdependent. Exploitation links workers everywhere. They still speak national languages, but mutual conditions, their radical chains, make them a world-class. In the stirring words of the Communist manifesto the emancipation of the workers requires a world revolution, the "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p519).

Though these developments are objectively progressive, they utterly confound and fatally undermine programmes for instituting socialism within, through or over a single national class state. Owing everything to Otto von Bismarck, Alfred Marshall and Joseph Stalin, nothing to Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Vladimir Lenin, national socialism was from its origins palpably anti-socialism. But nowadays - be it Chinese, Cuban, German, British, or Scottish - it is also the socialism of fools.

Capital never rests. It ceaselessly revolutionises the means and circumstances of production. What was useful in the 1970s must be swept aside in the 2000s. In the gale of competition nationalised industries become, or are absorbed by, giant transnationals - either that or they decay in hopeless obsolescence.

Much to the chagrin of our national socialists neither a Stalin-type command economy, nor the social democratic state, nor the SSP's "democratic socialist" third way, represents an intellectually coherent alternative to existing neo-liberal capitalism. The promised "detailed dialogue" between the SSP and a "range" of trade unionists, economists, environmentalists and "other experts" might result in comrade McCombes' "exact blueprint for a socialist Scotland" ('The Scottish economy'). Unfortunately we can predict with absolute certainty that the more "exact" it is, the more nonsensical it will.

Comrade McCombes is right to attack the neo-liberal message that the "globalised free market economy" represents the "pinnacle of human civilisation" (Scottish Socialist Voice January 21). Globalisation is more than the latest buzz word. It serves as an ideological drug to lull workers into acceptance of permanent wage-slavery. In a world where capital is meant to be stateless and comprehensively mobile demands on governments for improved conditions are patronisingly and poisonously dismissed as self-defeating. Higher subsistence levels, or so the story goes, will simply see capital packing its bags and moving off to where labour power is dirt cheap. Burma, Mexico, Indonesia. Hence, the apologists of capital insist, ideas of launching a socialist challenge to the system and its logic are a chimera.

Along with comrade McCombes we do not, for one moment, accept the new-old 'iron law of wages' theory peddled by the academic whores of capital - like the nonsense about complete automation and artificial intelligence it is a fiction invented in order to sustain the socially constructed image of a capitalism without history and without end. Through trade union struggle temporary gains can undoubtedly be won. Capital cannot locate just anywhere. That is why it is not spread evenly throughout the world. There is a strong regional bias. Most exports and investments are between capitalistically advanced countries. For instance, in the early 1990s three-quarters of British overseas direct investments were concentrated in North America, the EU and Japan. Moreover supplies of "skilled workers and efficient infrastructures" are vital (J Stopford and S Strange Rival states, rival firms Cambridge 1991, p1).

The neo-liberals maintain that the state is powerless. That transnational companies exist in mid-air detached from country. Needless to say, there are very few, if any, multinationals (an incorrect formulation comrade McCombes too is fond of bandying about). There is no supra-national capitalist class. Most boards of transnationals are mono-national. Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Silvio Berlusconi are respectively British, American and Italian. Moreover in terms of production and sales transnationals rely predominantly on what must be called their home country. Ford, AOL-Time Warner and Microsoft are rooted in the US; Vodaphone, BT and Barclays Bank in Britain; BMW and Bosch in Germany; and Toyota and Nippon Steel in Japan. And these mighty states have a long and very effective record of ruthlessly defending their transnationals at home and abroad. "At least 20 companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies if they had not been saved by their respective governments in the last decade and a half" (W Ruigrok and R van Tulder The logic of international restructuring London 1995, p218).

The self-serving economic determinism of the neo-liberals is contemptible - morally and intellectually. Behind the hype there is a world divided by an increasing and fundamental gulf, not only between poor and rich countries, but between the mega-rich, the billionaires, and the billions who inhabit our planet. As comrade McCombes tellingly points out, the 200-plus global billionaires "now own as much as half the world's population" (Scottish Socialist Voice January 21).

However there is a mismatch between capital's productive and reproductive structures and its state. National and transnational capital is tied up with and reliant on the national state. Global capital has no state formations proper. Nevertheless, as the noted Marxist thinker István Mészáros suggests, global capital exerts itself albeit "in an extremely contradictory form" (I Mészáros Beyond capital London 1995, p68). Capital exists as a single world metabolism but within a system of national states. Capital by its own logic demands the unlimited exploitation of labour. The national state cannot do this, observes Mészáros - neither economically nor politically. Therefore other solutions are sought out ... at enormous cost in terms of human suffering. The 20th century witnessed two world wars, the rise, decline and rise again of imperialist parasitism, the capitalist national socialism of Adolf Hitler, and the post-capitalist national socialism of JV Stalin.

By imposing draconian restrictions on capital - or even by abolishing capital negatively - the isolated revolutionary regime might well survive for some considerable time. Needless to say, in so doing it inevitably and very quickly becomes its unintended opposite - a freak society like Stalin's USSR, Mao's China or Pol Pot's Kampuchea. Year zero marks not the birth of new civilisation, but a horrendous barbarism.

The fundamental mistake made by apologists for national socialism like comrade McCombes is the notion that capital is a thing - money, factories, shares, jewels - in the grip of a class of very wealthy "fat cats". Hence an SSP Scotland will bring back into "social ownership" the rail network and other privatised industries and utilities. Other "key sectors of the economy" - eg, North Sea oil, the big banks and financial institutions, and the major construction, transport, food-processing and communications companies - will also be nationalised ('The Scottish economy'). Ownership is key. In this way the modern capitalist class is viewed as no different from the ancient slave-owner or the feudal lord. Remove them from the levers of the state, take away their property, and, hey presto, there is no capitalism.

Marx held all such 'socialist' magic in contempt. The idea that we "need capital but not capitalists is altogether wrong", he insisted. "It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labour - and these are its own product - take on a personality towards it" (K Marx Grundrisse Harmondsworth 1973, p512). This is a fundamental concept.

Capital is no mere thing - like land or chattels - but a "social relationship", whereby alienated dead labour dominates and feeds off living labour. Capital is in essence subjectless. It is its own cause. Its determination runs from capital to the capitalist, not the other way round. The individual owner is no more than the personification of an exploitative relationship; a relationship that can also be assumed by anonymous fund-managers or comrade McCombes' "democratically elected boards" of workers and consumers - or his SSP state.

Production under capitalism is separate from control. Production is not about satisfying wants. Production takes place for the sake of production. In this subjectless system capital's objective requirement for unlimited self-expansion must overcome the subjective wishes of any of its person-ifications. Thereby control is alienated from everyone. Decision-making simply becomes finding ways to allow capital to expand. Profits have to be realised. Accumulation must proceed. Either that or face certain extinction. The personification is in actual fact controlled by the system.

That is why capital has to be superseded in its totality and replaced by an open-ended communist totality. Without the positive supersession of capitalist society's division of labour and the domination of living labour by dead labour the power of capital will reassert itself. For Marxists therefore, though the workers' revolution starts politically on the terrain of the existing state, the content of our project is to bring the product of humanity back to humanity. What decides the matter is not ownership, but control. Does control over the worker continue to be the unlimited self-expansion of dead labour? Or do the associated producers control the products of work and thereby stop being workers?

We communists take capital at its most advanced and mature as our real point of departure. If capital is grasped as a relationship then questions such as whether or not North Sea oil is nationalised, or whether or not Scotland has its own currency stand revealed as mere tinkering with the system of extracting surplus value, not ways of superseding it.

There can be no socialism in one country because socialism must break out of capitalism positively, an outcome "which presupposed the universal development of the productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them". Put another way, it presupposes globalisation. Here we find the reason why Marx considered the capitalist system progressive and civilising - even if it is spread by conquest or statist emulation. Capitalism with its huge accumulation of wealth creates the possibility for the full development of every individual on the planet. Engels insisted for his part in Anti-Dühring that dreams of the "ideal" future "become possible" when "the actual conditions for its realisation were there". Socialism becomes "practicable" not because people realise the injustice of the class system, but by virtue of "new economic conditions" (F Engels CW Vol 25, Moscow 1987, p268).

In its insatiable drive for profit capitalism increases both the number of workers and their productivity. Production becomes more centralised and global, as one capital kills many and everywhere seeks out new markets. Along with the spread and integration of capital as a universal system of exploitation, the conditions for working class liberation are revealed as necessarily universal. Without beginning with these global material conditions the idea of freedom today will remain an empty slogan or a cruel trick.

That is why in the German ideology, written way back in 1845, Marx and Engels savaged all notions of national socialism. Universal development produces in all countries a mass of propertyless workers and makes "each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others". If by foolish design or unfortunate accident the workers' revolution remains national, all that would happen is that "want is merely made general, and with it the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business [crap - JC] would necessarily be restored". So "empirically", communism is only possible as the "act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' and simultaneously" (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p49).

The capital relationship cannot be positively superseded within the narrow framework of the national state, nor, for certain, in a little breakaway fragment. An independent 'socialist' Scotland would either be a social democratic flash in the pan or a revolutionary prison house for the working class ruled by SSP wardens.

A new Hadrian's Wall would be built to stop the liberated population fleeing south.

Socialism - as the stage of revolutionary transition between capitalism and communism - must and can only be the act of a world class. National or local socialism spells disaster. International socialism spells human liberation ... and that it what we should inscribe on our banner.