Though Cowards Flinch

Why does so much rubbish get posted at Comment is Free? If the rubbish was simply subjective then I’d condone it to a degree. It isn’t. Even basic logic is sometimes alien to CiF. Consider the following statement, which discusses the demand by atheists that they get a spot on Thought for the Day too.

Contributors to Thought for the Day mustn’t attack the beliefs of others. It’s a basic BBC rule. This is not a place where Christians can fire pot shots at Hindus or Muslims have a go at Judaism. Which is why it’s just not appropriate for atheists. Not that they haven’t important things to say. The problem is that atheism is defined by what it’s against, that it is not theism. And to introduce such a sense of “againstness” would fundamentally alter TftD’s character.

This was written by a chap called Giles Fraser who has evidently never heard of the concept of humanism. This collection of notions about the dignity and worth of the person stretches all the way back to the Greeks, includes famous religions and – guess what? – includes atheists as well. Since Thought for the Day is generally based around the ideas of humanism, why not permit atheist humanists to get on the bandwagon?

Atheist humanists aren’t defined by what they’re against, they just don’t draw the link between humanism and religion that religious humanists do.

Really, I’m just so bored with religious people in the media.

Reading over today’s recommended posts from Liberal Conspiracy, I noticed the following article from a site called Bartholomew’s Notes. It recounts how a Kent blogger, a Tony Flaig of BigNews Margate has been threatened with legal action by Jo Phillips, “director of communications” for Ten Alps production company and Geoff Wild, KCC director of law and governance,  for daring to voice his opinions about our local internet channel, Kent TV. Well piss on that.

Below is a snippet of Mr Flaig’s views, which I largely agree with on this subject.

There is a growing trend for councils of all descriptions to threaten legal action when someone says something they disagree with. In my opinion this legal threat falls under that category. Moreover, Mr Flaig has Kent TV bang to rights. Far from being about “old media versus new media” as Bob Geldof (who owns Ten Alps) has it, I object to Kent TV on the grounds that I don’t want our taxes being spent on something so frivolous.

Nor, with potentially £1.2 million being spent on it over two years by the council, is it “commercial.” Local papers are commercial; we individually choose to buy them or not. The free papers are commercial because advertisers choose to place ads or the whole thing goes bust. An internet TV channel which could effectively be bettered by YouTube is not commercial when it is subsidised by the state, effectively taking money from our pockets without providing a service that most of us will use.

Playgrounds, primary care trusts, public toilets, roads and associated paraphernalia, community centres, local fairs…an internet TV channel. Anyone else notice a disparity?

What I would like to know is this: are all the “Board of Governors” drawing an allowance or a salary for the work they do? After all, there are fifteen people sitting on it, from a “Director of Strategic Development” to an Assistant Chief Constable. How much do the “media consultants” involved in this get paid? What about the rest of the staff? Is there an independent monitor for how many individual hits the KentTV.com site gets? How much is Bob Geldof’s production company making from this boondoggle?

Kent TV is bollocks, and instead of spending over a million pounds on a ridiculous internet television channel, they should spent fifty thousand on a newly qualified computer nerd, give him an office and a desk and get him to “content manage” a Kent County YouTube channel. Or they could invest the money in the LEA, for example. Literally anything but such a ridiculous concept as an internet TV channel. Really, trust the Tories.

Looking at the political situation, I disagree with Martin Kettle about the possibility of another National Government. Politics is more than just simple analogy, despite Kettle’s best pretences to the contrary; economic crisis and a threat from the far right do not make for consensus government. The tone of Kettle’s article is tentatively welcoming, a drowning man grasping at straws, and it reflects the failure of the liberal-left, based around the Guardian, to enunciate potential alternatives to capitalist crisis.

There are a few things which speak against a National Government from the point of view of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, in the aftermath of the next election. Firstly, Labour is headed for an election of cataclysmic proportions. The polls are not reflecting the shift in marginal constituencies and the collapse of the vote in Labour-as-second-party seats. As in 1983, Labour will be reduced to the core constituencies – except now with a challenge from the Welsh and Scottish nationalists.

Such a collapse would most likely result in the Tories shunning any potential coalition. Up until the election, certain sections of the Tory party may still be apprehensive that Labour might pull a win or a hung parliament out of a hat, but afterwards all doubt will be removed. As for the Lib Dems, this election is going to see them squeezed, south of the Severn-Wash line, and potentially Labour could gets its act together in seats like Liverpool to deny them inroads there.

The first Lab-Con national government, formed in 1931, was created as the result of mass unemployment but also against a backdrop of working class organisation and world revolution and counter-revolution. Though it is tempting to see in the Lindsey strikers the first drums of Holst’s Mars, the bright flash of spontaneous strike action is only bright because more rigorous, organised industrial action is limited – and is often defeated or demoralised well before it can achieve a victory such as at Lindsey. I was reading recently that strike action is decreasing at the moment, year on year, though I can’t remember where.

On this basis, then, a Conservative move towards a National Government, with barely a year left in the life of this Parliament, makes little sense. There is no need for a J.R. MacDonald as a shield against the working class, and it’s unlikely that Labour would be much of a shield anyway. This is a curious situation, representing almost a complete reversal of the process which finally broke the back of the Liberal Party in the early 20th century. The only difference is that the unions are constitutionally bound to Labour, whereas they only supported the Liberals out of convenience.

In my view, no potential National Government has any answers. Those familiar with the history of the concept will know that Conservatives tend to dominate, since both mainstream Labour and Liberal thinking enshrine the capitalist genesis of Tory thought. In narrative terms this Labour government may be a failure, but there are plenty of small advances in redistribution which the Tories would see overturned, to claw back the massive expenditure on nationalisation.

Public services haven’t been cut or privatised so far that they can’t be cut and privatised still further. As unappealing as a desperate rearguard action sounds, it must include whatever rump is left of Labour, preferrably with the entire staff of New Labour dumped into the Thames by their constituents. In discussing alternatives to this de-funding of services, however, we can’t afford to mince words. On the basis of state-led action, the future is very, very bleak.

When Clement Attlee’s government arrived in Downing St after the 1945 election, the country was nearly bankrupt. The only thing that saved the Labour government was a loan, backed and guaranteed by the United States. Any potential government is going to face similar problems when taking control of “Britain plc” as some have taken to calling it. For this reason, we need to diverge from the road that a recent John McDonnell article points towards, in calling for full funding, re-nationalised public services.

This risks ignoring the witty retort of Harold Wilson, “Whatever government is in power, the Treasury is in power.”

Of course, we should put forth demands for those things, but we shouldn’t hide from the fact that to do so will bankrupt the country. Instead, now is the time to begin work on the transitional economy, from capitalism to socialism. Friends of ours might scoff that this is utopian, and that Labour needs a healthy capitalism to make any possible transition to socialism whilst still being democratic, but I think that actually the opposite is the case.

Far from being a “jam-tomorrow” socialist, who views bankruptcy and pauperisation with glee, both things concern me. However, capitalism expropriates a surplus value from workers, leaves them no control over that surplus and it requires – no matter how sophisticated systems of social mobility – a large pool of cheap labour. In organising that cheap labour, we’re striking body blows at the capitalist system, the result of which is (among other things) inflationary trends.

The creation of a united working class, organised and capable of retaining democratic control of its political and industrial arms, will destroy capitalism whatever the government of the day does. The question, therefore, is not what is the government to do, or what will a Labour Left government do, but what will workers do? The creation and sustenance of a socialist economy, where workers set and control the surplus value, will require sacrifice and, not unlikely, a return to rationing for a while.

Britain can supply about 60% of its food needs using 1.4% of the labour force, so we’re unlikely to face the same turmoil as the early Russian Soviet Republic, which practically starved to death. Nevertheless, there will be plenty of work to be done; house construction for the homeless, ensuring food is distributed to supermarkets, ensuring supplies reach NHS distribution centres, that transport infrastructure continues to function in high-density population areas and so forth.

The task of building a democratically controlled, planned economy will be vast – but it will not solely be the work of government. Far from being ecstatic about this potential for rationing after the final breakdown of capitalism, communists should recognise that they will be called on to give of themselves – not in monetary terms, but in being the first to give a few extra hours’ labour per day, or working on their rest days. But equally, it would be wrong to blame this on socialist activism.

Once workers take control of the surplus of production, and can democratically regulate it, the capitalist method of exchange is gone. If we think that system unjust, and if we think it directly underpins every undemocratic influence in our society, then we must abolish it. We must be free to take the consequences of that, and one of those will be economic readjustment; workers’ soviets will assess what production facilities are available and will decide what the best use of those will be.

Naturally this is not likely to be a solely national process and the economy will eventually return to normal as international trade resumes – the exchange of different commodities from their production centres, the gradual diffusion of those production centres to make transport more efficient and so forth. But in the short term there will be disruption. This is part of the choice which we must openly present to workers and socialist activists in a time of capitalist crisis.

The alternative is mass unemployment while capital reorganises itself, continuing hunger for many anyway (whether in the UK or not), the extraction of ever greater amounts of surplus from the working class and the use of that to bulwark the capitalist system and its undemocratic, parliamentary organs. Where one stands politically, regardless of party affiliation, ultimately comes down to a choice between these two alternatives.

Some might maintain that capitalism is more democratic than a democratic-planned economy because it allows a free choice of lifestyle and so forth, but that is a free choice within preset parameters. Socialism is the total democratisation of all aspects of society, the economy and use of capital included – and that is my choice: no National Government, no parliamentary Labour Left government, but revolutionary transitional government.

There is something about the anaemic, lawyerly way in which self-described liberals are attacking the strikers at Lindsey as racist or xenophobic which enrages me. This is one of the two lines of attack in evidence at Liberal Conspiracy in any of the numerous articles on the subject. The other is that this strike raises the potential of a nasty reciprocation by foreign companies, nations or workers should the strikers in the UK actually succeed. At the risk of repeating our good friend at Bickerstaffe Record, I want to take issue here.

Proponents of such lines of reasoning are offering no solutions to the problem. Instead they’re trying to explain away the problem by claiming that the jobs in question weren’t “British jobs” anyway as they had never before been offered to a UK company. Such sophistry is unlikely to cure the strikers of their anger that others are getting work on a basis which undercuts terms and conditions of the regular workforce in Britain.

As far as ‘prejudice’ and anger go in politics, I’m prepared to countenance this one. It may seem racist because Italians are being offered the work, and thus it is a foreign workforce which might suffer. To say this demonstrates a plain ignorance of the global nature of capitalism; workers aren’t just moved within countries in order to acquire cheap labour, they’re moved between continents – but that doesn’t change the purpose of moving those workers.

I am against ‘cheap’ labour. I do not buy into the liberal-economic arguments of Hayek and his successors that globalisation will lower prices for everyone and that the invisible hand of the market will be the great leveller. Workers should be entitled to struggle for the highest wages they can get, and when companies threaten to move overseas, workers should stage work-ins to prevent this terroristic deployment of capital flight.

Bearing in mind the degree of working class unity required to fight organised capital on this, it demonstrates political illiteracy of the highest order to ignore the damage done to unity and organisation when one group of workers is permitted to undercut another. Organising all workers, all around the world, in this common fight will change the situational logic that suggests the fight to be racist or xenophobic in any way.

It bears remembering that this is not a recent thing, nor is it a phenomenon limited to the crossing of national boundaries. Outsourcing happens every day in all sectors of UK industry, and it happens because one section of the working class is persuaded by the threat of unemployment to undercut another. It happens whether the undercut or the undercutters are of the same race, ethnicity, gender, religion or whatever.

Should we give up protesting outsourcing? I think not. Allowing one section of the working class to undercut another, when their interests ultimately lie together, is folly. That their interests do lie together are amply demonstrated by the victory of the Lindsey workers. Alongside the Italian workers, all of whom will keep their jobs, an additional 102 jobs have been created – and next time, if union organisers are smart, the Italian workers will be participants in the strike.

If it so happens that, from time to time, in this battle against outsourcing, different ethnicities clash, different religions or cultures or races or nationalities clash, then it should be the job of socialists to explain why these factors aren’t what we’re fighting against. Whether the influx of Eastern Europeans to Western Europe or Mexicans to America, the fight to stop outsourcing is not racist of itself, but it is necessary.

Equally it would be silly to think that there were not some prejudices on the picket lines. One doesn’t need to look far to find prejudice, and it can be found in all levels of society – from the highest qualified professionals to the lowliest trainee bricky. This prejudice was not in control of the struggle, again as evidenced by the actions of the workers and the unions, and even if it was, it doesn’t de-legitimate the grievances expressed, it just makes handling them that bit more complex.

One of the things I would like to know is this: of all the people on the picket lines, were they all Caucasian, British-born males? I can’t say for certain either way, but I would like to know how the caricatures of xenophobic strikers would have stood up against a black or Asian-descended British man or woman standing on the picket lines to fight for their jobs. Or how the caricatures would have reacted had the Italian workers themselves been on the picket lines, as the Polish workers were in Dublin last month.

Certainly it’s tempting to see in the caricaturists a flight to invert the nationalist narratives our own press endorsed, when they point to the La Repubblica article linked to above. The proper response to a lumpen reaction from Italian workers around the sites in Italy where British workers are employed is not to cast our hands up and say, “I told you it would all end in tears!” That is to surrender the right to be called ‘activist’.

The proper response is instead to resolve that their attitudes should be corrected by organising them to fight for jobs on the same basis as the British workers have done at Lindsey. By so fighting, they’ll realise in the course of struggle that the opposition are not the workers, it is the companies, the outsourcing and, in the final analysis, capitalism itself. This is a conclusion from which most liberals recoil of course.

We should also be awake to the possibility that any potentially lumpen reaction is created by the Italian and British media and governments. Listening to Pat McFadden, business minister, today in Parliament, I was struck by how deliberate his attempts to misconstrue the struggle. It’s nothing to do with freedom of movement, but I imagine one would find a lot less movement if workers in Italy could expect the same terms as British workers when they come to work in Britain.

So, contra the coverage of nearly every media outlet, this was not about discrimination against British workers, it was actually about creating a level playing field for all workers. Both sides, Italian and British, were the victims of discrimination: one set were given less jobs than they might otherwise have had, the others worse terms and conditions than workers ought to get in the UK. The grievances of one were settled without job loss and the next step should be to correct the grievances of the other.

I’ve seen a few rebuttal attempts on this point; claims that both sets of workers are earning the same amount – but on a lot of these sites, foreign workers will have deductions from their pay for board and keep, on which the company that originally employed them will make a profit. There is no union oversight of any of this and anyone familiar with Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier will know just how wily management can be in recouping their losses.

Addressing all of this will be the task of union organisers and worker-activists on the ground, on behalf of Italian, Portuguese and British workers. Only by working together can they hope to wring a better deal out of the company in the long term.

Last but not least, it’s important to note the positive environment for struggle created by this strike. As at Staythorpe powerstation, where workers have stayed out, the focus is less on the foreign workers than on the decimation of a community by a shameless attempt to ignore a local source of highly skilled labour. Arguably it is important to retain these skills and force the company to pay extra, though means of industrial dispute.

If the workers at Lindsey can fight for jobs and get them, whilst managing to hang on to the jobs for Portuguese and Italians being imported, then workers elsewhere can do it too. Meanwhile, we need to be increasing our efforts of organisation in this area, because next time the company in question will be wise and will attempt to back the unions into a corner by forcing them to choose either British workers or foreign workers.

In that, they’ll get every help from the media, many sections of which have been ‘selecting’ the banners and posters they want to cover, to meet a specific angle on the strike. We need to be ready to resist all this with a plan to widen industrial action next time, because, as one of the union organisers at Lindsey said, the fight isn’t finished, just round one.

A while ago I wrote an article on the subject of Roy Hattersley and social mobility. Tom Miller kindly wrote out his own thoughts in reference to mine (a flattering experience which I shamelessly pursue from other writers). In that article, I suggested that the split between Labour and the SDP was the result of a material and inevitable historical process and Tom asks; “What I want to know is why he thinks that the response of splitting is implied by the stimulus of economic crisis.”

Economic crisis (as we’re witnessing right now) is part of a process of retrenchment against workers. Wildcat strikes are currently breaking out all over the UK because firms are trying to use foreign nationals as a lever to break the organisation and concessions of workers in this country. On a macro scale, a lot of the summits have been about the intensification of exploitation in areas around the periphery of the developed capitalist world – e.g. the Pacific. Nationalisation of the banks is part of it too.

This assumption is based on the labour theory of value, wherein the worker receives less remuneration than the value of what he produces. An irreducible element of class struggle is the battle between capitalist and worker over the amount of surplus (i.e. the difference between the value of remuneration and the value of the product) – and a secondary battle is how this surplus is later used. Both battles are fought constantly, but more acutely at times of crisis, when the battle is one of life or death for the capitalist and thus for the worker.

An active awareness of this is not possessed by all members of society. In a society where actually naming the leaders of the three major political parties is an ability not possessed by everyone, how could it be? Despite this, and because it is part of a process intrinsic to every working day, millions have it to some degree or another. With this partial awareness, even those involved in the political process can appoint themselves subjective goals without fully appreciating the objective system in which they stand. This is called false consciousness. In this I am following Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness (the chapter on Class Consciousness, specifically page 50 and following). This false consciousness is at the root of any potential Labour split.

As crisis intensifies class struggle, the attempt by bosses to claw back overheads by sacking workers, reducing pay, below inflation payrises etc will drive workers towards the organisations which aim to win the struggle. This is the role of the communist party, as it would have been referred to by Marx, Engels and so forth. By making people understand their position within the class structures of society, and thereby pointing towards what actions they can take to win their struggles, the communist party will demolish this false consciousness, this misunderstanding of the objective situation which is a function of bourgeois hegemony.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the sites of this process was within the Labour Party – whether via Militant Labour or via Socialist Appeal and so forth. Even non-sectarian Labour activists had an appreciable grasp of these realities. However Labour was (and is) a party the leadership of which is opposed to class struggle; indeed Labour does not entirely consist of, nor does it aim entirely to represent, the working class. This is a contradiction; at once within the one political party there are those working to expose the ‘real’ class relations of society and there are those working to ‘mystify’ and obscure them.

Rhetoric by the Marxism Today strand began to mirror Foucault or Poulantzas or Laclau and Mouffe. Talk of power relations rather than class relations or of class in a vague and debasing manner; of an alliance between radical minorities; vague talk of freedom without qualifying the context in which freedom can be achieved. This was the language of struggle for those who believed in what they were doing but who lacked the theoretical apparatus to grasp the inadequacies of their strategy. This was the language of those with false consciousness, who perceived only piecemeal what had to be done.

Today things are a bit more obvious, which demonstrates the state of decay within the Labour Party. There is no spectrum of politics on which Geoffrey Robinson can sit side by side with the NUJ members he employs, who are struggling for a decent wage. Objectively speaking, their interests lie in opposite directions. That is not to say that the interests of one cannot be subordinated to the other. We exist in definite historical circumstances, where Robinson is a member of the Labour Party worth £30 million and he will probably prefer to take a hit financially than suffer the potential consequences of not paying out.

Robinson is an extreme example, because he actually owns a few businesses. Less extreme, apart from the already mentioned group of intellectuals around Marxism Today, would be the leaders of both the SDP and the Labour Party. They rejected wholesale the Marxist analysis of capitalism, but had nothing to put in its place except the amelioration of the effects of capitalism, which was honest enough in its conception. Yet at root it involved an acceptance of capitalism itself and the desire for a healthy capitalist economy to fund such social initiatives as are necessary – and indeed during the 1970s, this was reflected in the economic thinking of the Labour governments, which had already begun adapting to monetarism.

In this regard, Labour has hardly moved further than Ramsay McDonald. Moreover, this lack of revolutionary self-awareness (to borrow a phrase from Gramsci’s Socialist Culture) led to the abasement and paralysis of the Labour movement’s leadership before the oncoming beast of organised Capital. The announcements by the Callaghan government, for example, about wage retardation, almost caused a General Strike and the distrust of the workers at a time when Capital was on the offensive and the whole labour movement needed to stand together.

The Limehouse declaration actually directly enshrines the contradictions: “We seek to reverse Britain’s economic decline. We want to create an open, classless and more equal society, one which rejects ugly prejudices based upon sex, race or religion.” Every Parliamentarian and trade union bureaucrat had to choose either the section which speaks of a healthy private sector or the section which supports the abolition of class entirely, but they misunderstood that it was a choice at all.

Ultimately this logic is the same logic which underpins New Labour, it is simply that New Labour represents a new evolution in the Labour leadership that reflects a certain degree of decomposition in the strength of the organised working class, and a certain degree of reaction within the institutions which govern the Labour Party.

Shirley Williams, in the midst of the split between Labour and the SDP spoke of how she would return to Labour if Labour returned to its socialist roots. The false consciousness here is manifest, since the SDP represented a right-wing split from a Labour they openly attacked as too radical. To say this is not to attack Shirley Williams’ honesty or integrity; I’m sure she genuinely believed in what she was saying, but objectively she did not understand the role the SDP was playing.

It’s a bit like Tony Blair in his Marxism Today years, or in his speech to the Fabians about Christian Socialism. It’s the same man, and he represents not a decisive break but a continual evolution in the light of specific historical and material factors which no longer could restrict that evolution.

It is these objective conditions, and the false consciousness which is part of bourgeois hegemony and therefore part of capitalism which makes a split in Labour possible. Should socialists succeed in the reorganisation of the working class and the harnessing of the desperate and radical energies currently being generated by capitalism in crisis, either this reorganisation will bypass Labour or it will pick up the party and change it totally out of recognition from that which it is or has ever been.

That is not to impute teleological connotations to history, of course. Such tension will only be applied if we succeed; failure is always an option too.

(This post was originally written on January 31st, 2009 and was later edited to present a tighter, more cogent argument).

Mil posted a photograph (right) in one of his articles, and it rather tickled me. The photograph is of a London bus and reads, “There probably is no bus now stop complaining cheers Boris” – but unfortunately there is no punctuation. Either reading is quite humorous. One is a potential repudiation by the London Mayor of the atheist bus campaign along the lines of the metaphysical: “There’s probably no bus. Now stop complaining. Cheers, Boris.”

Alternatively, it might be an attack upon the London Mayor and his attitude to transport in the capital: “There’s probably no bus, now stop complaining. Cheers Boris!” Either way, it’s quite amusing. It made me wonder if advertising on the sides of buses in London should be an activity open to all citizens, not just those who have the media connections to launch a donations campaign that will gather over £150,000 like Ariane Sherine did.

There have been other mock-ups of the original atheist bus campaign, which read “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. One in particular, shown below, stands out as something of a breach in the original friendly tone of the humanist message. As I say, however, I’m not sure if these are real advertisements or if they are very clever photo-shopped versions of the photos taken by Jon Worth.

All of this reminded me about something that Leon Trotsky wrote once upon a time. I can’t remember the actual treatise but his idea went something like this. Freedom of speech shouldn’t be dependent upon possession of wealth because this would bias all speech in favour of Capital. Instead, a fledgling Soviet state should divide up the press amongst those groups which could demonstrate that they had social roots in the population at large.

I don’t recall if Trotsky went beyond the very basic outlining of this idea, which has plenty of problems. For example, the idea of giving X number of political groups part of the press tends towards the reinforcing of established values.

Lenin imagined that the administration of a communist society would still be a political matter – but politics would genuinely be post-ideological, with class having been abolished. In such circumstances, giving different parties space in the press would make the emergence of new groupings more challenging. Applied to a still-ideological world, the establishment would still have the advantage.

However, if taken in the contest of the London buses, say the state was to nationalise London bus advertisement space. The London Assembly could vote on what percentage of total advertising space was to be devoted to politics, religion or other issues which people would like addressed. Of the percentage of political space, each political party could get a share corresponding to their share of the vote in the London elections.

Again, this is somewhat problematic: it raises the possibility of fascists getting a platform, which I’m against. I imagine a no-platform policy by the transport unions would see to that. It also continues to benefit the establishment parties since they are supreme precisely because of their investiture by organised Capital – ideologically, as with Labour, or physically as with the basic purchase of the Conservative Party by Lord Ashcroft.

It would, however, give groups such as Respect, the Left List, the Socialist Party and so forth a way to promote themselves and their issues – which is important. Indeed, if the socialist groupings collaborated, they could easily get together a campaign which would amuse, delight and (most importantly) interest Londoners. Whatever its disadvantages, this would be fairer to the Left than the current system of purchasing advertising space.

Fantastic news, which I’ve only picked up this morning via the comments section of Phil’s A Very Public Sociologist site. The BNP, whose website is spouting a lot of crap about how their councillors are being called in, in preference to the union of the wildcat strikers, were actually turned away from the picket lines. The video below gives more information. Now that’s how to institute a no-platform policy: from below.

Meanwhile, Permanent Revolution have released a good statement, and the Socialist Party have apparently had a member elected to the informal Strike Committee. Take note Pub Philosopher. Four days into the unofficial strikes, the union leaderships have been forced to take up the call as thousands more workers are coming out on strike.

If you look closely at the above video, at several points the Bear Facts site is mentioned, which seems to be set up by the workers themselves – linking to the Blue Book (which the newly imported EU workers are not subject to), and to the various unions and professional bodies. “Bear” refers to the construction workers, and as the website says, the bears are growling again.

Also located on the video is a chap whose coat talks about the “British Jobs 4 British Workers” slogan, pointing out that it is a reference to Gordon Brown’s slogan, seemingly more of a dig at the Prime Minister than at the foreign workers – who, as I said yesterday, are currently confined to a boat, rather than living onshore as part of the regular staff of the refinery.

Over at LibCon there’s an article by a Belinda Brooks-Gordon (and I thought the double barrelled name completely appropriate, if probably irrelevant to the discussion) who is defending peerages and an unelected House of Lords. We must not forget, she says, that Tory and Lib-Dem peers have not been found wanting, and that plenty of bad laws have met their end in the House of Lords. Brooks-Gordon even defends the Lords Spiritual as showing more compassion and humanity.

There are so many things to say in reply to this that it is difficult to know where to begin.

First and foremost, with regard to killing bad laws, the Lords can at best postpone legislation. The Lords cannot stop the government of the day using the Parliament Act to force the legislation through. Though the Counter Terrorism Bill 2008 was defeated in the House of Lords, the reason the government didn’t push the bill through was a combination of odium surrounding extended detention powers and a revolt that ran to the very heart of the Labour Party.

Parliamentary oversight in the Commons needs strengthening. On that one will get no argument from me. Plenty of excellent work is done by Labour and Tory members on the Public Accounts Committee, or Lib-Dems on Science and Technology. But much of this work is essentially pointless; it serves to highlight a flaw here, a cashed-in consultant there. These committees have very little power – and the power of any opposition Party except the largest is seriously curtailed by the way time is allocated.

Changing these things, or indeed creating a constitution which enshrines certain civil liberties, doesn’t necessitate an unelected chamber – whether supposedly established on the basis of merit or on any other basis whatsoever. To proclaim that increased oversight of executive government or the curtailing of harmful legislation requires an unelected chamber mistakes the process and the end – and the process involved is just as important as the end.

These discussions often come down to a fear of the process – a fear that our democracy is already corrupt and that to extend powers of election would be to corrupt it still further. The worry is that editors and lobbyists and those who can fund elections would gain further influence in our system of government to the detriment of popular will. Brooks-Fordon mentions this herself: “No one wants peers guessing what the electorate or the editor of The Sun wants to hear”.

Such populist analysis of British democracy demonstrates intellectual smugness at its worst. Can’t be letting the proles have a say! They’ll just vote how Rebekah Wade tells them to! In fact the truth is much more complex than that. If the established media, the established churches, the demagogues and nationalists carry a lot of sway it is not because their message is easier to justify rationally, it is because of a failure on our part to organise a sufficient counter-hegemonic strategy.

We see this inadequacy with each election; solid Labour seats fall to nationalists in Scotland or BNP fascists in London. Danger is plainly inherent to democracy, and this is compounded by the fact that the ‘free market of ideas’ is distorted by the bases which organised capital have built up around the public sphere of debate. When some of us call for alternative networks to the mainstream media, the end of the established church or a more open national curriculum these bases are what we’re attacking.

The House of Lords, however, is just another base for Capital – and while not directly subject to the vagaries of democracy, they are composed of wealth of all descriptions: landed, merchant, finance. Where they are not wealthy or judges or Bishops, they are often former politicians. They all constitute a part of the Westminster bubble. Even the specialists have, as often as not, been part of one of the party-political favoured thinktanks such as IPPR.

There may be accountability should these individuals break the law or be seen to be unduly influended by lobbyists – but there is no accountability insofar as standing up for normal people, outside the bubble of government, is concerned. Constituency based politicians have to return to their constituencies to talk to constituents – and if it doesn’t mean they represent people any more accurately then at least they’re still in touch with the conditions of daily life for their people.

They may not read the Sun, but how much better is reading the Times or the Guardian? For nuanced political analysis not at all, not to mention that these newspapers carry their own forms of bias. Perhaps they read the Economist? Wonderful; we can have even less investment in public services. No intellectual snobbery of technocracy versus thalassocracy can cover all of these eventualities. Indeed it doesn’t even examine why the House of Lords voted down certain government laws.

There is no analysis presented to suggest that a libertarian stance is inherent to an unelected chamber. It may simply be an accident of this chamber, which could then change over time and become entrenched in the other direction.

What all of this amounts to is a fear of democracy. As the link between Labour and broad swathes of the working class, organised into CLPs, trades unions and small activist cells, has broken down, accountability in the Labour Party has been lost. No other party had those links, and our chief opponent, the Conservative Party, is treated as though it were the leader’s personal fiefdom. This collapse in links between activist base and PLP has allowed the Whips to increase their stranglehold.

Whereas once upon a time Labour MPs might have stood up to their own party while it was in government, now the MPs who are selected seem more like unctuous, over-perfumed apologists for the party leadership than fiery individuals with a stock of their own passionately-held political ideals. This is a problem which must be corrected – but it does not justify denying the right of a people to choose how and by whom they are governed, however imperfectly their will be represented.

The only things these problems can justify are a renewed activism, a search for better, more democratic party-political organisation, the resurgence of working class militancy in the face of government tyranny – whether economic or political – and the extension of our democratic rights through better oversight of government by Commons and the election of a fully democratic second chamber, in the style of the United States’ Senate.

An especially pernicious article at Pub Philosopher attempts to claim that the socialists are all silent on the issue of the wildcat strikes and that the BNP are the ones calling for a General Strike in defence of British jobs. Giving the lie to such rubbish, our good friend Phil has been attacking the coverage of the wildcat strikes (except for the Daily Star, which surprisingly shows the issue to be one of class, not race) and giving a sound socialist perspective.

It’s easy to see the racial element in the wildcat strikes, because they are protesting foreigners getting jobs which a lot of British workers were counting on. The BNP have of course come out to explicitly endorse this point of view (and to claim the strikes as their own success!) but in doing so it demonstrates the shocking weakness of BNP analysis, for it counterposes British workers to foreign workers, as though foreign workers weren’t simply pawns in a game of chess played by management.

In Ireland, when the same sort of thing happened recently, foreign workers marched alongside their Irish counterparts (a picture from the demo is in the previous article). Foreign workers are getting a raw deal out of it too; they are being hired to cut labour costs, so are getting less than a British worker employed by the same company to do the same job might get, as the result of decades of union struggle on pay and terms and conditions. This doesn’t seem to get mentioned.

Moreover, lest we forget, what constitutes a “British worker” has changed radically since seventy years ago. Red Clydeside, if it existed today, would hardly be 100% Caucasian. There would be black people and Asians and probably European immigrants working as “British workers” alongside the rest. The problem here is not the ethnic diversity of the crew, it’s that the company in charge is now explicitly outsourcing to a foreign company to geth things done for cheaper, by recouping wages from workers.

A rag like the Observer has to compound matters, of course, by talking in the most depoliticised terms possible about how people didn’t complain about globalisation when the economy was doing fine. Er, what? Millions protesting, riots on the streets of cities where the G8 met, trades unions marching to demonstrate their opposition. One wonders if the editorial writers of the Observer have been asleep for the last fifteen years. The truth is somewhat different, and the Observer only hints at it.

“The [losers from liberalisation] were also marginalised culturally and politically.” That’s the key. Far from being a small minority who were marginalised, the political struggles of the 1980s managed to marginalise the majority, and then the next generation grew up in ignorance as a result. Take the average Tesco worker; wages have been going up, but contractual terms and conditions have been going down. Unless you understand the value of the second, you won’t care.

Now workers are finding out just why those contractual terms and conditions matter. Socialists have been struggling to fight off outsourcing since it arrived with a vengeance under Thatcher, all while the National Front was busy fighting itself and blaming Conservative monopoly of the right-wing vote on Marxist thugs and their intimidation of voters. Oh, and don’t forget John Tyndall demanding, from his newly created BNP platform, that all homosexuals be removed from political office.

Pub Philosopher, who thinks that the wildcat strikes result from a clash between global capitalism and “persistent low level nationalism” (which seems for him to be an unhistorical part of the human condition), would probably do well to deconstruct what he regards as nationalism. The desire to categorise public services (and former public services) as “ours” is not a vestige of nationalism, it is a vestige of a people versus their national state – a people of any ethnic, racial or religious make-up.

If we take a look at France where there are protests underway about lower pensions and so forth, it’s fairly clear that this is far from being a national issue. Indeed all along the line there is an assault by “global capitalism” (to use Pub P’s phrase, though it is a tautology) upon workers. This is where socialist internationalism is born from – and far from merely “wringing our hands”, there are socialists out on the front lines, ensuring the solidarity of all workers.

Which is what we’ve been doing since before the fascists emerged from their caves and discovered public relations strategies.