In other circumstances John Smith’s unwavering class analysis of the linked themes of Brexit and Labour’s December defeat would have been in my January reads post. In the event, by the time it came to my attention I’d already decided on the murder of General Qasem Soleimani as organising principle for that month’s reads.
Here’s where I make good on the omission. I commend Smith’s piece for its analysis, grounded in a revolutionary’s understanding of the Labour Party, of Corbyn’s failure to deliver in the face of a wholly predictable response by Britain’s rulers to the threat he had posed.
I also recommend it for its analysis of Brexit itself. It serves as a vital corrective to starry eyed Remainers who consistently and absurdly confused the EU bankers’ club with what it pleased them to call ‘internationalism’. And to starry eyed Leavers who assumed, equally absurdly, that a Brexit led by BoJo and Farage, and driven by reaction, would somehow end well for Britain’s labour-sellers. It can’t and won’t, for reasons Smith sets out with commendable cogency.
But for my narrow purposes here, it’s this passage which interests me:
Since the 19th century, Britain’s plutocratic rulers have sought to bind workers into an imperialist alliance against the rest of the world … to pacify the working class and to secure the support of its trade union and political leaders for wars against insubordinate governments and insurgent peoples around the world. This imperialist social contract is the very essence of British social democracy, in both its left and right variants. Now, compelled by the depth of the capitalist crisis, Britain’s rulers are moving to dismantle this social contract, sending social democracy into a tailspin. (Emphasis added.)
Nils Melzer on the other hand invokes “the social contract” from the very different perspective of his role as UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. In his interview with Republik of January 31 – a murderous system is being created before our eyes – he does not bring Smith’s depth and breadth of analysis to bear on the subject. Indeed, strictly speaking he’s not even referring to the same thing. But his focus on the arrogance of power, and its contempt for hard won legal principles in the persecution of Julian Assange, picks up where Smith leaves off. Britain’s rulers are indeed moving to dismantle the social contract.
Says Melzer:
For an entire decade [Assange] has been inundated with accusations that cannot be proven and are breaking him. And nobody is being held accountable. Nobody is taking responsibility. It marks an erosion of the social contract. We give countries power and delegate it to governments – but in return, they must be held accountable for how they exercise that power. (Emphasis added.)
Melzer’s perspective could hardly be further removed from Smith’s marxist-leninist take on the severe limitations (I’m being kind here) of social democracy and an oxymoronic ‘parliamentary socialism’. For Smith the social contract is rooted materially and historically in a specific phase of British capitalism which, for our ruling class, has passed its sell by date. But its dismantling, a project begun half heartedly by Callaghan and in earnest by Thatcher, is far from complete.
Melzer by contrast is an old school liberal, an honest man of solidly establishment credentials whose idealist grasp of the social contract is not framed in class terms but as milestone in the faltering, two-steps-forward-one-step-back march of humanity to ever more civilised values.
This limited perspective, and Melzer’s initial reluctance to take on the Assange case as part of his wider UN brief, make his belated disquiet the more eloquent and credible. For the avowed liberals and socialists who should have leapt to brave Assange’s defence from the start, but ran for cover or stuck their heads in the sand the moment the authorities joined forces with ‘liberal’ media to cry “rape” and trash his reputation, Melzer’s interview may be seen as a first step on the road to truth.
What Melzer is groping his way towards, and Smith is in no doubt of, is that the velvet glove of parliamentary democracy – another oxymoron, though a more sophisticated one – is gradually being peeled away as capitalism’s crises deepen. Those who’ve troubled to look hard into the nature of power in the West have always known that when the needs of Profit clash, as sooner or later they must, with those of an ‘open society’, the latter will be swept aside by our rulers as rapidly as depth of crisis necessitates, and balance of class forces allows.
Which is to say very rapidly indeed. Witness the year on year erosion of civil liberties and union powers on the one hand, manufactured consent to war in the middle east and Orwellian hatred of Eastasia on the other. All within a context of surveillance by a state whose capacities would be the envy of Stalin or Hitler. We are spied on, photographed and filmed scores of times each day; our movements minutely traceable through our cell phones, and use of plastic for even the smallest and most casual of purchases. But, hey, that’s OK. “We” are the good guys!
Just like in Winston Smith’s Oceania.
I can’t guarantee life will get easier once you grasp that the world is run by criminals: some very smart, some less so, but all made morally insane by their self-serving belief that the best of all possible worlds, to be defended at all costs, just happens to be the one that brings staggering wealth to the few while millions starve … high-tech wars are a lucrative constant … our planet is plundered through a systemic addiction to ‘growth’ … and even the West’s workers are learning to live with levels of insecurity, at the workplace and in a shrinking welfare state, the leaders of a credulous Labour movement had thought banished for good.
In fact I can pretty much guarantee life will get harder once you grasp this truth, and have had time to digest in full its implications. You’ll have to live with greater levels of stress and anger. Fear too. The Slough of Despond will often beckon and you’ll lose friends (though new ones will appear). But look on the bright side. At least you’ll be seeing straight.
That’s got to be worth something, surely.
*
Brilliant writing, Philip. Thanks very much.
You’re too kind Steve, but thanks. Btw, I noted on FB your unavailability for yesterday’s rally in defence of Assange. Me too. I had to be in Sheffield but called a pal just as Roger Waters was speaking. Apparently he was magnificent!
Thank you very much for this. Your view of the last few decades has explained so much of my own growing sense of, to say the least, concern. That the social dismantling started not with Thatcher but with Callaghan is of vast importance since it underlines the basic fraud that the two party system meant a “balance” between capitalism and socialism. Also – the expendable nature of an “open society” is emphasised by the increasingly rapid demolition of the public services.
For reasons of her health, my wife has now left a “care” organisation that makes appallingly ruthless – and even senseless – demands on its workers. The carers travel around seeing to the needs of the elderly on the basis of a schedule in which travelling time is completely discounted. My wife wrote a letter in which she made it clear how appallingly she was treated and was astonished to find that the letter was simply accepted without comment. I myself am fortunate enough to still have a job with the local council in which my wife’s letter would have been treated with immense urgency and no effort would have been spared to right the situation. The fact that the care organisation my wife worked for (which was another in the endless parade of NGOs, third sector bullshitters etc.) didn’t even respond is enough to make me suspect that they are actually trying to decimate their own workforce.
Did she see Ken Loach’s latest, Sorry we missed you?
I have just read the John Smith article and it is superb. Also terrifying. These two parts really stood out. First this:
“….the broadcast media is firmly in the grip of middle class liberal meritocrats who exude contempt for working people.”
This contempt may be a hegemonic matter in that it has permeated (no doubt with encouragement) all the way down to the working class themselves through a kind of “pop” Nietzschean elitism.
Then this:
“….most workers showed by their votes that they are not itching to fight their rulers, they just yearn to be patronised by them.”
This is the deadly complacency that I have felt myself and it may indeed be chronic in generations who have been mollified – indeed neutered – by a sedentary TV watching culture.
The phenomenon of turkeys voting for Xmas only began to get critical attention by those who, pace Gramsci, investigated the nature of ideology. Alas too many of them – Althusser, Derrida, Lacan et al – really did lose the plot, massively overcomplicating things and laying the foundations for the superficially radical school of thought we now call postmodernism. The problem is, if it’s always and only about “narratives”, the Right wins every time. It has deeper pockets and has been playing that game far longer.
Turkeys voting for Xmas – combined with (a) an understanding of the political economy of “our” media (including the soft propaganda of the entertainment industries) and (b) the broader workings and agencies of ideology and opinion manufacture as understood from Gramsci through to Chomsky & Herman – is a lot snappier and works just fine.
Occams Razor, and the epistemological principle of parsimony, are useful guides here!
On Smith’s analysis: definitely worth a read, though it deepened my gloom and I don’t agree with all of it, e.g., the extent to which the UK was still a functioning imperialist power after WWII rather than the USA’s geopolitical bondservant (literally – the UK’s colossal WWII debt to the USA was only finally paid off in 2006).
He doesn’t say where he gets his figures on vote breakdowns, which is annoying because I want to know how reliable they are.
Depressed as I am by the historic defeat of British socialism – all the crueller for those of us foolish enough to nurture timid hopes – I’m nonetheless suspicious of conclusions that imply that democratic socialists will always lose because they are not ‘pure’. Wait: The Attlee government did manage the supposedly impossible feat of establishing a national health service, with effects worldwide. The old age pension, minimum wage, equal pay for women these are all achievements, however flawed. The UK had public ownership of much of its transport and utilities until quite recently; perhaps we may yet get them back? And so on.
Smith’s shout-out to internationalism though, abandoned in practice by much of the left and, crucially, by trade unions, both US and UK, that’s another huge issue.
And I’m still pondering the steel city scribe’s reflections on the social contract…
The two aren’t remotely contradictory, Caroline. US debt is colossal but no one in their right mind, and certainly not you, would argue that the USA is not an imperialism.
Me too, though I trust Smith. He is author of Imperialism in the 21st century, its use of big data a central feature of that invaluable book. But he does read and comment on this site so may well be able to reply in person. John?
I have differences with John Smith, crucially on Syria and the Kurdish question, but it is not at all accurate to say he attacks “democratic socialists” for lack of “purity”.
The partial and limited gains you refer to here are very much part of the social contract John Smith speaks of and which is now being dismantled. It is true of course that those gains had to be fought for by a working class organised under the banner of reformism. But it is even more true that they were conceded by the ruling class because (a) the ideological requirements of Cold War made the political case for such concessions and (b) super profits from the global south enabled them. The first condition is long gone while the second is being contested harder than ever by rival imperialisms.
To me that implies a mythical past over-egged. National parochialism, barely hidden by a pious rhetoric of internationalism, has always been a fatal flaw of reformism. (Here too we are speaking not of “lack of purity” but of a devastating inadequacy of world view given capital’s own internationalism and ability to divide and rule in a globalised version of the Hunger Games.) History is littered with examples but let me pick the speed with which leaders of the Second International did somersaults between the summer of 1914, when their much trumpeted refusal to endorse the warmongering of ‘their’ capitalisms gave way to the British, German and all other Sections waving ‘their’ national flags for the imperialist carnage of WWI.
Any thoughts on Assange?
The USA an imperialism??? Wash your keyboard out with soap! The USA only bombs people – with the greatest reluctance and the best humanitarian motives of course – when forced to in order to save them for freedom and democracy… Would you like to buy a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge?
Seriously, I only meant that I found Smith’s excellent analysis a bit too sweeping in places. And his last paragraph does still sound like an accusation of ‘impurity’ to me. But you know his work a lot better than I do.
Many thoughts on this, on social contracts (and on the abominable persecution of Assange), but they are whirling around disconnectedly while I am still reeling from your devastating rebuttal of my feeble attempts to retain a little sliver of optimism about democratic socialism.
Aw Caroline. I wouldn’t dream of making a “devastating rebuttal” of your views. I respect you too much. Actually I was going to write a PS to my reply to you. It would have made two points.
One, after writing said reply I spoke with another woman friend, who despite broadly sharing his views found John’s tone ‘contemptuous’ in places. Me being a typical bloke on the EI front, I hadn’t picked that up; only the substantive content, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Two, those who see the oxymoronic nature of ‘parliamentary socialism’ still have much to disagree about. I abhor sectarianism and am a Labour Party member for now (though the signing up of all leader candidates, including RHB, for IHRA and “pledges” may be the last straw) and even on the day of the election was urging a Labour vote.