"...whether the workers’ movement is ready for it or not."

....Socialist alternative

The European workers’ movement is presented with the austerity drive and ‘crisis of bourgeois leadership’ at a moment when it is weaker than it has been at any time in the last 130 years. Union membership density is low. The mass parties have been hollowed out at the base and their leaderships to a large extent turned into apostles of a ‘kinder, gentler’ financialised regime, together with nationalism and bureaucratic control. The idea of socialism remains in the shadow of Stalinism, not only in the memories of the older generations, but in the experience of the younger generations of the functioning of the organised left groups and their inability - thanks to their bureaucratic centralism - to unite.

To say this is to say that the euro zone crisis and the austerity drive does not prima facie pose the question of the working class in the near future taking political power and ushering in socialism. The workers’ movement is simply too weak, irrespective of whether theorists like comrade Bough or Bill Jeffries of Permanent Revolution, who claim that this is a pure financial crisis under global long-boom conditions, or those who see a deeper structural crisis are right.

If the ‘crisis of bourgeois leadership’ tips over into generalised meltdown matters will be different: the question of power will be posed, whether the workers’ movement is ready for it or not. The most likely outcome would then be the creation of authoritarian nationalist regimes, but the one chance of avoiding that outcome would be for the weak workers’ movement to pose a radical reconstruction of society as an alternative.

The immediate future is therefore one of a combination of defensive struggles, with efforts to rebuild the workers’ movement. Nonetheless, it remains necessary to pose the question of an alternative social order and how to get there in order to rebuild the movement. The weakness of the movement results at the end of the day precisely from the fact that its dominant ideas of alternatives (nationalist, class-collaborationist and bureaucratic) have so spectacularly failed - but the advocates of these ideas remain in leadership positions and the ideas themselves have spread to such an extent that they dominate the far left which once opposed them.

Posing the alternative of a socialist reconstruction of society is therefore not an alternative to the immediate tasks of defensive struggles around individual ‘austerity’ issues and against governmental ‘austerity’ programmes. Nor is it an alternative to the equally fundamental task of efforts to strengthen collective self-help against the effects of the austerity measures: to build up the trade unions at the base, to organise the unemployed, and to develop cooperatives and mutuals. In the period of welfarist ‘affluence’ these elementary tasks of workers’ organisation have been allowed to wither away or - like the unions and the Co-op - reduced to bureaucratically controlled institutions.

Arthur Bough makes this aspect of the rebuilding of the workers’ movement the be-all and end-all. He draws arguments from Marx’s writing at the time of the First International, when - until the 1871 London conference - Marx was attempting to hold together an alliance with the Proudhonists, who were arguing precisely this line: workers’ self-help through cooperatives, as opposed to political action.

The problem is not that socialists should ignore or oppose cooperatives. Firstly, it is that the initial wave of cooperatives came at a time when land values were tending to decline (which they did between, roughly, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847 and the introduction of planning laws, agricultural subsidy and mortgage interest relief during and after World War II). Since then access to land has been very much more tightly rationed by the ruling class; by the 1980s the cost of keeping even trades and labour clubs in existence was leading to their being sold off to property developers.

Secondly, the problem is that the capitalist class and its state do not consistently recognise property rights and the state certainly does not refrain from interference in the economy in the interests of major capitalist bribe-payers. Comrade Bough’s own 2010 review of Nicole Roberts’ history of the cooperative movement in Britain makes the point: the state intervened against the cooperative movement and - by regulatory legislation - continues to intervene in favour of bureaucratic managerialism in cooperatives.[8] However difficult to achieve anything by political action it may seem, political action is the necessary accompaniment of both defensive struggles and cooperative self-help.

Nor is posing a socialist reconstruction of society an alternative to posing defensive demands like the restoration of trade union freedom; or, in the sphere of the budget, an end to overseas imperialist adventurism and cuts in military expenditure.[9] Rather, it is a necessary accompaniment to defensive struggles, cooperative self-help and defensive demands.

Europe

Another society is possible: one in which, instead of being driven to competitive ‘growth’ ending in cyclical crises, we aim for the fullest possible development of every human being: communism. The transition to such a society involves the rule of the working class: that is, the subordination of the private producers to the wage-earners, tending towards a society in which nobody gets anything other than a living wage and open access to public resources like the internet, education, health, housing, etc.

We collectively have written more about this aim in our Draft programme. I have written about immediate steps in this direction as a response to the financial crisis in previous articles.[10] Europe and united working class action in Europe is central to this possibility.

The reason why that is so is the reverse side of the points I have made above against ‘tax the rich’ and a return to Keynesianism as strategies. Karl Kautsky argued in The class struggle (1892) that the nation-state was a sufficient scale on which the working class could reorganise society as a cooperative commonwealth. The idea descended into ‘socialism in a single country’. Kautsky was already wrong, and the experience of the 20th century has proved the idea wrong. All countries are integrated in the world trade and financial system to a point at which ‘sanctions’ can cripple their economies.

In reality, the capitalist class does not rule through independent nation-states, but through a global hierarchical system of states. Before 1914 this system of states was centred on the UK; after the prolonged death agony of the British empire since 1945, it has been centred on the US. National solutions run up against the institutions of this world hierarchy, as I have shown in relation to ‘tax the rich’ and ‘return to Keynes’.

If the working class can develop common action on the scale of Europe, that is a whole different ball-game. A European ‘cooperative commonwealth’ would not be immune from US-led attack or blockade; but, unlike the former tsarist empire which became the USSR, it would start from high levels of productive capacity and of proletarianisation. A socialist Europe could be a real beacon for the world.

The Europe Against Austerity conference could begin to set this as a goal. Not an immediate goal; but a goal which could begin to re-inspire the workers’ movement with the sense that an alternative is really possible, not just a dream. Maybe it will not. Maybe it will cling to the blind-alley lines of least resistance round nationalism and Keynesianism. But what an advance it would be if the movement really began to act on a European scale and to pose the question of a socialist Europe as an alternative to the Europe of austerity.