24.01.2013

ACI Hardy & Cooper: Beyond ‘anti-capitalism’

Harley Filben reviews: Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy, 'Beyond capitalism? The future of radical politics'. Zero Books, 2013, pp174, £11.99

One of George Orwell’s best essays - ‘Politics and the English language’ (1946) - makes an argument which is, even by the standards of its own context, both old-fashioned and provocative: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not,” he complains of the common prose of his day.

Orwell continues: “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no-one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”

The underlying premise - to put it starkly - is that this kind of slippery writing is slippery because it is hiding something, and whether it is hidden equally from the authors is a moot point. Orwell’s essay makes a cruel epigram for any book review, of course, but one of the most striking features - unfortunately - of Beyond capitalism? is its fractious literary quality. Some clangers may be put down to a hurried copy-editing process, and others to the legendary creative imagination of Microsoft Word’s spell-checker function. There are surely no such excuses, however, for a sentence such as this, on page 152:

“In the mêlée of cultural and political antagonisms distilled out of the economic crisis finding a path betwixt and between abstention from living struggle and accommodation to the still reformist consciousness of the masses, one that can result in the formation of ‘workers’ governments’, is perhaps the central question facing the radical left.”

On the face of it, it is simply incomprehensible, due to a stray comma. Putting the wayward punctuation back in place (after ‘crisis’, one imagines) takes a few passes in itself, however, thanks to the superfluity of jargon, the bet-hedging (the quote marks around ‘workers’ governments’ - well, are they or aren’t they?; that pregnant ‘perhaps’ in the final clause) and the jarring archaism (‘betwixt and between’).

Behind all that, there is a much simpler statement: ‘The radical left needs to participate in mass movements, without losing its political independence.’ Nothing more or less, in fact, is being said. But in that form, it is simply a truism; moreover, it is an old, old truism, that, more to the point, is the political self-conception of more or less every Trotskyist group going. It is this radical lack of novelty which is being imperfectly hidden by the jargon, by the scare-quotes (around the most obviously Trotty phrase, naturally) and so forth.

It may seem the whim of a pedant and a literature graduate to fuss over a single sentence to this degree. I do so because it is symptomatic of the central difficulty of this book. It attempts to express rather weather-beaten ideas through a grand rhetoric of novelty and, while some of the authors’ observations concerning the difficulties facing the revolutionary left are acute (and more measured than straightforward ‘libertarian’ critiques of Marxism), we are no further forward at the end of the book than we were on the first page.

Precarious analyses

The early part of the book - which may generously be called analytical - attempts to set out the predicament which we are supposed to find a way “beyond”. There will be little that surprises in these early chapters, really - the obvious context is the crisis, which shows no sign of ending, but also the concomitant failure of a positive leftwing alternative to emerge which truly points beyond capitalism as a system.

The result is Gramsci’s ‘organic crisis’, in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (quoted on p16); the authors cite the 2011 riots in Britain as a paradigmatic example of such symptoms. As far as the political discourse of our times go, it is best characterised by the idea that fundamentally not much has changed: the Thatcherite destruction of the very idea of socialism as a plausible alternative system persists, though its positive dimension (the appeal to the desire for freedom and democracy) has been badly shaken.

This analysis is more or less lifted from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist realism, with which the present book’s second chapter shares its title (along with Fisher’s own sources, such as Slavoj Žižek - pp20-38). Its basic contours, however, are straightforwardly empirically observable in the basically muted political response to austerity in the core capitalist countries.

The next major discussion (following a somewhat bland chapter on Blairism) is on ‘the working class - old and new’. It is here that the aforementioned contradiction at the heart of the book first arises. Changes in the labour market are analysed primarily through various ‘modish’ lenses - initially, theories of precarious labour as a cause and effect of the decline of the traditional labour movement; but there are also scattered references to the ‘Fordism’/‘post-Fordism’ paradigm, which so exercised Eurocommunists and ‘post-Marxists’ in the 1980s.

The political conclusion drawn from the latter - with almost creepy regularity - has been of a ‘goodbye to the working class’ variety (the ‘material base’ for mass labour struggles having dissolved), something which, in harder or softer variants, unites the Eurocommunists with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri with Moishe Postone ... and so on, ad infinitum.

Yet our authors do not go this route; the second part of the chapter is devoted to an empirical analysis of the decline of the trade unions (which gets rather bogged down in the ephemeral and superficial ideologies - ‘new realism’, ‘new unionism’, etc - intermittently cloaking the bureaucracy’s class-collaborationism), with straightforwardly Trot-leftist conclusions. We must “build grassroots coordinations of the members ... This process requires a united front with the leaders to take action, but constant and systematic moves to build coordinations and networks that can take action when the leaders sell out” (p80).

So why, then, all the guff about ‘precarity’ and ‘post-Fordism’? Put another way, if neoliberalism had never happened, work was not precarious and ‘Fordism’ was still in place, would the authors propose something other than extending union membership to the unorganised and organising at the grassroots independently of the bureaucracy? Would they then balk at united actions with the bureaucracy? Somehow, I doubt it - but if so, the ‘theoretical’ component of this discussion is reduced to a marketing gimmick, for the benefit of those more comfortable with the jargon of precarity: the ‘libertarian’ activist left.

‘Old’ is the new ‘new’

The next chapter, in which the authors discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ left, displays this contradiction most fully.

The ‘old left’, here, consists of the scattered remnants of Trotskyism, organised into so many competing, ideologically defined sects; the ‘new left’ is the ‘libertarian’, radical milieu that was at the core of Occupy and similar movements. The libertarians have certain advantages to their name: “The preference of the new left for ‘horizontal’ methods of organising ... has often made them the most dynamic, freshest, and youngest elements of the renewed anti-capitalist movements.”

Yet there are problems: while such movements are better at spreading a single, simple idea (a ‘meme’, in the authors’ terminology) to thousands (as in Occupy Wall Street), the resultant movements are often directionless in the long term. The ‘new left’ movements “famously ‘come and go’ with high and low points of social struggle ... It is also debatable whether the new left has what we might call a ‘strategic project’, defined organisations and a political agenda. The lack of these can be a positive in the early phases of a radicalisation, but they can also become negatives as politically [sic] challenges intensify” (pp94, 96).

The ‘old’ socialist left, meanwhile, inherits benefits from its mode of organisation - the ability to act as “memory of the class” (p94), persistence through time and so on. Yet it is isolated from the struggles, and unable to relate to them except propagandistically - “the form of the [left’s] intervention [in Occupy] was of socialists presenting their ideas to a non-socialist movement, rather than actually thinking about how the same politics could be put across in a way that it suddenly appeared a natural ideology for anyone that is serious about moving beyond capitalism” (p89).

The comrades, in seeking to combine all the ‘good’ and reject all the ‘bad’, deny that they wish to “eclectically muddle irreconcilable positions”, but merely wish to be “open-minded” on the basis that “practice is the main criterion for truth” (p97). But it is hard to see how anything other than an eclectic muddle can result. The libertarian preference for consensus decision-making, which they glorify, is irreconcilably opposed to democratic decision-making, for example.

But in truth the very terms of this discussion are obfuscatory. The ‘old left’, in their terms, is actually what in the 60s and 70s was called the ‘new left’; their ‘new left’, while it appears to be at most 20 years old, is in fact as old as anarchism itself (of which it is just a particularly disoriented and degraded form). The other ‘concealed’ oldness is attempts to ‘split the difference’ between traditional working class socialism and spontaneous new movements advocated here, which in many ways reached its apogee in ... the 1960s-70s ‘new left’.

Hardy’s and Cooper’s book is distinguished from the attempts of that time to merge with ‘new movements’ only by dramatically excelling it in vagueness. Whatever their weaknesses, the ‘new leftists’ of that time produced serious theoretical work on the women’s question, racial politics and so on. This is not necessarily an individual failing of Hardy and Cooper: practice, after all, is the main criterion of truth, and the old ‘new left’ - embedded as it was in the political ferment of the time - felt the guiding hand of practice very much more firmly on its shoulder than our two authors.

Beyond capitalism? instead is reliant ultimately on massively overstating the significance of ephemeral movements like Occupy. Several pages are dedicated to discussing the ‘Global Mayday manifesto’, a document promoted by some Occupy activists, which the authors wish to take as some kind of model - or at least a serious starting point (pp98-101). In reality it is an end-point - a verbose headstone on Occupy’s grave, the latter movement having already devolved in the US into the array of liberal campaigning organisations that gave it birth, doing no doubt useful activism around issues such as house foreclosures.

As such, its conclusions are highly indeterminate. “The crisis of the left is still a crisis of the sect,” write the authors - very true, comrades. But their overall political project is identical to that of 60s-70s new left, which produced the very sects currently in ‘crisis’. We should embrace “the drive to new political formations”, by which they seem to mean parties like Syriza and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste - but do they seriously expect a centrist lash-up of this type to survive the “test of practice”? It seems not - but the only get-out is to declare this an ‘objective’ feature of the current situation, and thereby a phenomenon on its upswing rather than its downswing (pp155-56).

More broadly, the comrades advocate a “pluralistic Marxism”. They write: “The idea of Marxism as a science that seeks to appropriate knowledge about the world that can be objectively proven, has often ... led to monopolistic conclusions about ‘right and wrong’ approaches” (p157). Here, in fact, we slide headlong into liberalism. Plurality of perspectives is not a good thing in itself, but simply an inevitable consequence of getting humans together in a single institution. It is not ‘diversity of ideas’, but the battle of ideas, which we need to have. Ideas are red in tooth and claw. They guide us by tearing each other to shreds. When ideas coexist in ‘pluralistic’ harmony, they cease to be ideas, and instead become ideology.

This is the tragic dimension of the book. Cooper and Hardy are correct that the division of the left into arid sects is the key subjective obstacle to success in this period. They are correct, furthermore, that the sect is in crisis - what other conclusions can we draw from the SWP’s recent convulsions (to which Hardy and Cooper’s own apostasy from Workers Power last year was, in retrospect, something of an appetiser)? That they seek to go beyond the sects without junking the whole history of Marxist politics - approving notices on the Bolsheviks’ pre-1917 organisational character abound, for instance - is another mark in their favour.

Yet the best these comrades have managed to bring into being is the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, a fragile pseudo-regroupment which gets smaller at each successive conference and is on any rational account stillborn. As for Beyond capitalism?, in its vagueness, in its prostration before shallow and ephemeral movements and theoretical fashions, and even in its violence to the English language, it shows that their rethinking has only gone so far.