Fraudulent democracy and the Lisbon Treaty
The second referendum on the 28th Amendment to the Irish constitution was approved by the Irish electorate, endorsing the Treaty of Lisbon. Cue singing from the rooftops and a gushing river of plaudits for Irish democracy from Brian Cowen and the chancelleries of most of the European nations, such as Sweden, currently holding the presidency of the EU. “An important victory for Ireland” said Carl Bildt, Swedish foreign minister. Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Gordon Brown and a bunch of others offered similar congratulations. Enda Kenny actually called it “a peoples’ victory”. Spot the effulgent wanker.
Except that the lie is given to their own comments by the fact that this is the second referendum. Last time, most of them voiced exactly the opposite sentiments. So one wonders why it is a great day for Europe and democracy when the leaders of the European nations get exactly what they want, and why it isn’t when they don’t get what they want. Mind you, it’s not that this is a new phenomenon: exactly the same sentiments were voiced in 2001 when Ireland’s first referendum on the Nice Treaty were similarly defeated, then endorsed in a second.
How are people fooled by such fraudulent democracy? When the 2005 referenda on the EU constitution began to go sour – with France and Holland rejecting it and most other countries postponing their referendum – the leaders of the EU learned an important lesson. Don’t ask the electorate a question unless a) you actually want to hear the answer or b) you think you can control the answer. Which is why virtually no country has held a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon – the only one that did hold such a referendum was Ireland.
And if the people of Ireland had rejected the Treaty? Well then there would have been another referendum, or the question would have been folded into a General Election where it would have been obscured by fifteen other concerns – not to mention that the two political parties which campaigned for a no vote have neither the manpower or resources to beat every major Irish political party, the Irish media, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (the Irish version of the CBI) and certain sections of the trades unions in an election.
Had that happened, of course, the election would have been played like a strong victory for the pro-EU parties. Thankfully, from the point of view of Brian Cowen – even Gordon Brown has an approval rating Cowen would envy – that will not have to happen.
Leaving aside the politics of whether or not the Treaty is a good thing or a bad thing, the fact that yet again, the government held a second referendum because it didn’t like the answer of the first one is scandalous. Not that they had much choice: Europe expects, after all. Which is my point; scamming is going on across Europe because political leaders either fear the answer of their electorates (when those electorates can’t be scaremongered into voting the ‘right’ way) and so don’t hold a referendum or hold two, because the first one didn’t turn out right.
People watching the situation absolutely better believe that pressure will be put on Vaclav Klaus to ratify the treaty, so that following a UK general election, the public don’t get the opportunity to snap the Tories in two and vote down the treaty, since David Cameron only proposes to hold a referendum if the Lisbon Treaty isn’t already in force. Such bureaucratic manoeuvring is a scam that further proves just how utterly corrupted the perceptions of the European bureaucracy is when it comes to treating ‘democracy’ – even the fraudulent kind – with some respect.
All of this, for what?
If you believe the “Yes” camp in Ireland, it’s because the Treaty of Lisbon will secure jobs. Which is incredible when you realise that it’s an Irish confederation of employers saying this. Tony O’Brien of C&C, Donal Byrne of Cadburies and Gary McCann of Kappa, three Directors of IBEC, have been responsible for hundreds of redundancies in the last eighteen months alone – all the while, some of these companies are posting huge profits or buying over still other companies with their spare capital.
None of it is less incredible coming from the Trades Unions, the same TU bureaucracies which have been involved in “Sustaining Progress” social partnership agreements with IBEC, CIF and an Irish government more intent on an agenda of aggressive privatisation. In the UK, the labour movement has nothing left to learn, I suspect, about the effect privatisation has on jobs and workers’ terms and conditions – though it may take the leadership of that movement a while to catch up with the average union member. In Ireland, it’s no different; politically conscious workers voting one way, their leaders voting another and funding a campaign to vote another, in league with business.
I have one word to sum that up: bullshit.
Meanwhile both media and political players are being distracted by the process story of who scared voters more: both sides dangled the future of the country in front of voters. If there’s one thing the Left should agree on, it’s that EU policies have not worked, have not been able to keep unemployment under control. It’s that EU policies condone in every respect the undermining of one group of workers by another from a different locality, spurred on by business which now wholesale imports them rather than employing the people on the ground.
None of which will be solved by further enmeshing ourselves with the European Union – and all of which validates the supposed scare-mongering of the Left “No” campaign (pictured above). Yet to get too caught up in the merits of the treaty itself is to ignore that, right or wrong, our politicians are swindling bastards – and even if the treaty is the right thing to do now, in the future there will be things that we shouldn’t do, that will be forced on us in similar ways. This Treaty does not change any of that.
Despite giving the European parliament more power and making voting in Council by majority rather than requiring unanimity, these measures are not about democracy – as the sniffy attitude of European politicians frequently demonstrates when ‘democracy’ doesn’t go their way. It is about resolving the tensions between competing national capitalisms, strengthening the ‘legitimacy’ of the EU by ensuring that one national capitalism, as represented by its State government, cannot hold the rest hostages to its own fortune, threatening the economic bloc.
Socialists should not be voting for this.
What do you suggest socialists should vote in favour of? As often happens, by holding fast against something which is not perfect, socialism is pushed into a reactive mode which simply does it no long-term good whatsoever. In that, Thatcher’s “the lady is not for turning” was the perfect mirror image of the kind of disengagement you describe.
Sorry to sound a wanker here – but I must see Europe from a completely different perspective.
What do you mean something that’s not perfect? The EU, no more than national parliaments, is not an instrument that socialism will one day use, when there is a mass conversion and everyone in Europe votes Left. To say so is to misunderstand the nature of bourgeois democracy.
Now national parliaments we must engage with, but a supra-national body specifically for the purpose of intensifying European capitalism? I’ll pass.
Edit: Incidentally Mil, actually engaging with any of the salient points made to this effect in the actual article would have been nice.
I’m afraid I see the ogre of 19th and 20th century European war as being by far the worse of the two evils. The European capitalism you talk about has helped to keep that ogre at bay. Sure, it deposits us all in a well of materialism which makes us forget the true things in life as we virtually drown, intellectually speaking, in the contradictions it represents. But, right now, the having vanquished our fear of all-out – as opposed to surrogate – conflict is one lasting achievement this highly capitalist organisation can be well proud of.
In relation to your edit, I can’t disagree – intellectually – with most of what you say. But back to the point I’ve already made: I’d far prefer an enslaving Eurocapitalism of the sort you describe to a war-like capitalism of the sort we suffered. You show me a socialist way forward which’ll work in my children’s lifetime (because their generation and their finite existences are what really preoccupy me now) and I’ll sign up to it any time you want. But before I help to tear down an existing structure, I need to see my offspring safe in the new.
You think the EU will solve the problems within capitalism that led to the wars of the 19th and 20th century? Of course it won’t; the EU might resolve those tensions within the EU – though it bears noting that European capitalism can pull the EU apart just as it put it together – but will not resolve the global tensions. Instead of a war being the British Empire and French Empire, or the Entente and the Central Powers, or the Allies and the Axis, it’ll be US-WEU versus China, or Russia or a combination of the above.
It’ll be fought by proxy, or with European workers dying and killing on foreign fields. Or with “police actions” of the WEU taking on EU member states and the subsequent body bags. The idea that the EU is a protection against any of this is even greater whimsy than your incipient contention that I think we should aim only for socialist revolution and that any compromise shy of that is to be opposed, even if it benefits workers.
Because that’s what you’re waiting for me to demand.
The EU has none of the benefits you’ve outlined, and all of the problems I’ve outlined.
Incidently, the concept of building gigantic blocs of power in the hope they wouldn’t annihilate each other – isn’t that something that went out with World War One and several million dead soldiers and civilians?
Dave – I’m not waiting for you to demand anything; certainly not trying to lay any traps for you to fall into. Don’t do that – would never want to; wouldn’t be able to achieve it anyhow because you critical apparatus is far better than mine. The anger you express hardly seems misplaced, but I’m trying to understand and inhabit a real world which I won’t inhabit in perhaps three decades’ time. And if socialism has any virtue over other creeds, it is that it values the here-and-now of the dispossessed more highly than that of the jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow arguments of the well-to-do. Incidentally, and going perhaps unhappily off-topic here, in all our debates of Members Net days your arguments never satisfactorily resolved – at least for me – the following issue: how do you prevent the battle with capitalism as you would wish it to take place from making even worse than it currently is the living circumstances of perhaps an entire generation? And how would you convince that generation to give up its lives on behalf of what might arguably be described as just one more in a long line of jam-tomorrow postures?
As should be evident from the on-going crisis of capitalism, no “battle with capitalism” or intervention by socialist activists is required to make the living standards of average people worse under capitalism. Capitalism does that on its own – and indeed if rudimentary class consciousness didn’t exist in the form of trades unions, living conditions would be worse still – as is painfully evident from those countries without them or with lesser developed ones than those of Western Europe.
So you are conceiving of the question wrongheadedly. The choice is not between jam today and jam tomorrow, it’s between no jam ever and jam tomorrow. It’s between most of us having no jam, and jam being available to all equally.
The value of socialism to the here-and-now dispossessed is that it doesn’t promise the quick fix that euphoria inducing politicians promise, then fail to deliver – as Barack Obama did and David Cameron is doing. It promises bitter struggle – but it acknowledges the reality that long and bitter struggle is the only way to better ourselves, and that taking personal responsibility for that struggle is the only valid point of view.
None of which responds to my answer for your initial queries.
Well humour me, if you can. I can hardly argue with the idea of taking personal responsibility for the struggle you describe. I do however find it more difficult to accept that we assume that responsibility on behalf of an entire voting public – and, indeed, second-guess them to the point that we give the impression of knowing better than they do what is in their true interests. If voting twice in order to get the result your looking for should quite understandably be denounced as fraudulent politics, how much more so is telling an entire class that they’re wrong in all their instincts and habits because they don’t want to man and woman the barricades in quite the way you need them to.
We can all raise our consciousness – I’m sure of that. I’m just not sure if it can’t – or shouldn’t – be more of an individual journey with discrete outcomes, rather than an all-or-nothing coming together of suddenly coinciding interests. And the latter is, in any case, about as conditional and materialistic as it gets: I think we going to need to move far beyond mere economic improvement and the self-interest even a revolutionary marketplace would engender, if we’re ever to make the 21st century world a fairer place.
If you define the improvement of a class in terms of material wealth only, you’ll be defining yourself in terms of the tools of your opposition until the very end of time. There has to be something more to it all than the battle of economic wits that underlies your writings – even as that battle is itself symptomatic of extreme injustice.
Don’t know what it is I’m looking for here – but it certainly isn’t because I’m whimsical.
I see nothing humorous about any of this.
“We” don’t assume anything on behalf of any public, voting or otherwise. What “we” do is render a critique of the organs via which it is accepted that “the public” offer their opinion, and indeed critique the very idea of “the public” by deconstructing it into its constituent parts and the institutions and ideologies which underwrite the idea (cf Habermas).
If you did so, you would realise that far from second guessing anyone – something I’ve made a point of avoiding in this article – I’m arguing that under no circumstances, whatever people actually think, does our current system of government permit of the full expression of those thoughts.
Setting that to one side, for a moment, if I were indeed suggesting that the habits, practices and ideas (etc) of all those millions of people were wrong, then you of all people should be ready to acknowledge that possibility. Is it not the case that your homeland was ripped apart by ideas and practices that you bitterly oppose? Are not those wrong, from the point of view of someone wanting a “better” world?
To take a less emotive example, we have at our disposal three thousand years of well-documented written history over which to see that people in all times and places can be wrong. The earth is not the centre of the universe; the gods do not reside at the top of Mount Olympus and so on through all the examples of human fallibility. If that fallibility, why not this? There is no prima facie case to make against fallibility in general – so if you wish to make a case that people are not fallible in this instance, then make it.
You haven’t yet.
The rest of your last comment hardly seems sensible to me. For example, why should our subjective experience of a collective “coming together” of our mutual and material interests not be felt as an “individual journey”? There is nothing mutually exclusive between the two. No individual journey is entirely unique in its components, even if for every individual there are a unique combination of the above. And no law states that, using different components, one cannot arrive at the same end.
Yet there are limits to this; again, that should be self-evident. Thus you cannot ignore “mere economic improvement” under the guise of superceding it, or at least adding to it, and expect to arrive at a more egalitarian world. The “mere economic” underpins everything we do, every relation between us and any other. Even the forms we regard as purely social, such as the family, are descended from economic imperatives.
None of which, however, is to claim that I or any Marxist wishes to see the improvement of our class in material wealth only. Yet material wealth is a prerequisite to higher cultural forms – which is why high culture has always and forever been the preserve of a minority, not a democratic and universal experience.
Moreover, economic organisation of our class is the basic prerequisite to the political organisation of our class – and the expanded social and cultural benefits that this entails: the reconstitution of a mass workers’ education organisation, the ideals of working hard and looking out for yourself and your neighbour (because he or she will look out for you) and so on. If you will not believe my own missive that this is so, you need merely look into the history of the workers movement in England.
Finally I have no objection to using the tools of my opposition. It is fantasy to deny that every age is built using all the materials gifted from the previous age. Historically speaking, I have no hesitation in asserting that capitalism is phenomenal improvement upon its forebears – but I equally have no hesitation in proclaiming that socialized, collective man can better the achievements of an anarchy of individuals.
Which brings me back to my conclusion; you are whimsical. You are looking at the world upside down, the idea and your sense-impression before the concrete and material reality which you should be able to see before you every day. All the elements of this reality bear towards various conclusions that I have enumerated over the course of my writings – and you rarely if ever challenge those conclusions or their predicates with anything other than what you feel should be so – a feeling more spiritual and emotional, from what I’ve ever gathered, than prepared to deal in the this-sidedness of our political thinking.
Edit: and again, none of your original contentions, my original replies or even the second or third lot of each are dealt with by you, in favour of this approach.
Nothing humorous about being asked to be humoured. But then you know that already.
I’d like to pick up on one idea you mention and ask you a question you’ll have been asked a million times. Again, you may humour me – though not because I am amused. (One of the three countries I feel close to was indeed pulled apart by decades of repression – a repression which, in fact, was justified in the name of the socialism you propound. I’m not saying it *was* the socialism you propound. I’m saying that’s what they called it for a while – and, for a while, there were people on the left here in Britain who talked generously of *its* notion of a Third Way, without experiencing first-hand the repressive aspects that exemplified it. But here I am definitely off-topic.)
Anyhow, you talk of fallibility. You even talk of three thousand years of fallibility. Can you not see that this fallibility may apply to your own critical tools? Of course you can, and – to your credit – have done so on more than one occasion.
They are, after all, the product of a different set of circumstances, a different century – a historical grouping of details, dates, people and peoples.
They are like all theories subject to improvement. But I’m reminding you of your scientific starting point here. It’s hardly necessary for us to be reminded.
Except that your discourse sometimes runs away with itself – and that’s when it refuses to reflect what I would argue is a different reality, refuses to contemplate any fissures with your basic understanding of life: that the non-altruistic relationships of economic exchange not only underpin but also *must* underpin even our most social and supposedly altruistic activities. Yet there is evidence that we do many things without thought of economic gain – and, to be honest, just because economics tries to measure everything in terms of that material wealth (which, as you rightly point out, is the prerequisite to certain kinds of higher things) doesn’t mean that such material wealth *needs* to be the prime driver of all that we do.
Just because you can put a number on it doesn’t make it a statistic. Just because New Labour wants a population of button-pressing robots to button-press doesn’t mean we have to act like that.
Or, indeed, will.
I think you show a lack of ambition when you assert the above. A tremendous lack of ambition, anchored to and circumscribed by the extreme injustices of previous centuries.
I’m not arguing that those injustices don’t exist any more. I’m arguing that the levels of education, health and general welfare are so much higher these days to make substantively and essentially different the approach we should take when we understand where parts of modern capitalism stand compared to two hundred years ago (something you in any case seem prepared to recognise) – and also, more importantly, how we should socialise and share those approaches; how we should conceptualise the individuals around us as discrete entities participating in socialising roles; how we should allow those individuals the freedom to conclude their journeys at separate destinations; and how we should most definitely not assume that the only true truth lies in in those individualised journeys which must curiously reach the same destination for our theory to have reached its final consummation.
To finish, far too late and far too frustrated by – essentially – the medium itself and my inability to go beyond my limiting intellect, the overarching problem I’ve always had with this issue is one of labels: I cannot conceptualise capitalism as a movement in the way I might be happy to understand socialism. Comparing my understanding of capitalism to my understanding of socialism is like comparing a tool-kit to an engine.
Or a lottery scratch-card to a baby’s future life.
But maybe that’s the whimsy in me again, after all.
And – at this late hour – you’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid. Time for bed.
Praxis.
http://www.socialist.net/britain-formation-lp201202.htm
I have nowhere said, Miljenko, that the human species has no capacity to be altruistic. What I’m simply saying is that altruism in any form that it takes, regular or sporadic, capable of regularisation or not, is not a basis on which to organise a new society to succeed capitalism. And this is not because of some idea of an unhistorical, timeless human nature independent of material conditions: quite the opposite. It is a judgment made on the basis of the relations in which we stand and the evidence provided by history about the means whereby we can affect and change those social relations.
Which is why I’m a communist and not an ethical consumerist. And within that dichotomy lies many debates held on this site that you might look up.
Where you go far wrong is this rather airy-fairy notion that any attempt to build a political movement on the basis of those materialist (in the philosophical sense) principles somehow moves people away from being discrete entities, or that it moves people away from concluding their journeys at different locations.
In the first instance you’re wrong because we cannot be anything but discrete entitites. Any communality of interests we have are created externally to our person, by the definite relationships we enter into in order to sustain that person. And I am suggesting changing those relationships, not changing anything about our person.
In the second instance you are wrong this time because you fail to see that the very point of any – all – political movement is to conclude a ‘journey’ at the same location. People should agree with me because I’m right. If I didn’t think I was right, I wouldn’t bother writing – because it’s not an intellectual exercise by a rather pompous and self-obsessed professor. It’s an attempt to lay out a cogent, consistent path to something better and to build towards that end, which involves people and the socialisation of the idea by people and the practical applications of the idea by people (none of whom are me, and all of whom are equally drivers in this particular engine room) rather than an attempt to propound some eternal truth and then waiting for the supposedly ignorant masses to show up spontaneously.
Or, as would be worse still, I would never write to attack that there can be an eternal truth at all (which is, it seems to me, what underpins this notion of allowing people to conclude their journey at different locations) and then sit around wittering about it in glorious impotence, because if nothing can be objectively true and no viewpoint is objectively right and worthy of being followed by our entire class, we remove the purpose of political struggle completely.
It is a variation of these two later concepts that I have found in your writings in the past, around the time my replies get very irritable and shrill.
Edit: Reading back, I once again note that rather than come back to any of the previous points both you and I have made, we go further off in a tangent. I’d have thought some of these points were of value to the question at hand, such as whether or not the EU will really prevent the “ogre” of European conflict from re-emerging, or whether or not I have second guessed the public of Ireland. I mean, if you’re going to make bald assertions, perhaps when I go to the trouble of providing replies, you should engage with all elements of the reply and not just the one that looks good to jump on.
Mil, am I right in understanding your argument is that an anti-capitalist appeal to the self-interest of workers in developed Western nations like the UK is difficult because while there is still much to be gained, the artificial lowering of prices through super-exploitation in less developed nations means the opportunity costs of action against an all-powerful capitalism appear to overpower seemingly abstract gains like liberty, more control over your own working conditions? And that deadening consumerism reduces the appeal of such goods anyway?
(Ugh, that was a horribly-worded paragraph. Hope it made sense. And apologies if it wasn’t what you meant; I was struggling to follow the argument in this thread.)
If so, I have some sympathy with that view. And I can see how that impacts on a view of Europe as the lesser of two evils re: superstate capitalism vs war. I accept Dave’s point that capitalism will always create wars, but there are important differences between wars between neighbouring countries and wars abroad – in wars abroad there is little threat to geographical territory and it is largely a section of working class kids in deprived areas who do the dying – allowing for a segmentation of the electorate that the fear of direct invasion does not. Of course, as socialists we care whosever kids are dying: we believe in equality.
Which brings me to the my view on the original article – I can see Dave’s point, but it does feel like a rearguard struggle. I’d prefer to concentrate on building a globalisation from below that can eventually compete with the globalisation from above imposed on us by market forces supported by all state organisations including the EU. Whether anti-Lisbon campaigns are a way of raising political consciousness to this end is debatable – they could just end up playing into the more dominant xenophobic anti-European politics.
This may be a load of pretentious nonsense, in which case, apologies.
Put simply, at this particular conjuncture, a breach in neoliberalism at the heart of the industrialised West is a breach everywhere.
I’m all for globalization from below – no socialist would argue to the contrary. We are after all internationalists. But this doesn’t mean that we can use the institutions of capitalism for socialist globalization, anymore than we can use the institutions of liberal-democratic capitalism to reach socialism on a national basis.
The State and its democratic facade – whether national or supra-national are not the same thing.
Moreover, as I’ve pointed out even wars between neighbours are not rendered impossible by the European Union, or even less likely. It’s simply that under the current conditions of their respective capitalist systems, the countries find some use for each other. That is just as easily changed.
After all, it is a section of the ruling class which funds a lot of the xenophobic anti-Europe rhetoric you’re talking about Tim. Capitalism itself is not resolved upon the point, and if at the moment it is in favour of unity, that this endows every opposing motion with the colour of a ‘rearguard’ action is an unacceptable teleology-affirming conclusion.
There are other reasons to write, Dave, apart from what we might term that self-obsessed one of believing we are so right in what we think that we have a veritable duty to communicate it. Such certainty almost frightens me. I write to discover. It’s another option, and perhaps less widely useful than yours – which is far more educational, erudite and knowing. But it’s an option nevertheless, and one many people choose – whether you like it or not.
Tim, your first paragraph says it really rather well – and the rest make thoughtful points. Far more succinctly than my groping around for meaning ever does. They clearly show up the contradictions and tensions in my position. Not as socialists but rather simply as human beings should the deaths of all young men and women in distant killing fields sadden us.
But that’s my point. Not just as socialists but also as human beings should we define ourselves. If socialism in its democratic form attracts me, it is not because it best fits a sequence of historical propositions but rather because it allows my idea of what it is to be a human being to be best and most accurately circumscribed in political terms. Dave uses the yardstick of science to justify his choice. I use the yardstick of my sense of what humanity means to justify mine.
And in many cases, socialism – for me – is not found wanting in its relationship with my ideal.
But its proponents – and especially the way they structure their discourses – are quite another matter: its proponents do disturb me quite frequently.
In order to reach a necessary explosion of class warfare, in order – if you like – to puncture the boils of injustice as violently as we can, some proponents of socialism deliberately exaggerate the essential goodness of a socialist state of affairs and underestimate the wisdom that other belief systems may generate. That some countries in the EU find some use for each other, as Dave points out, and that this then may lead to a kind of peace in our time, is a clear indication that good can unpredictably result from dynamics quite different from the ones we predicate.
I believe in altruism as a prime driver in human relations – which is why I am attracted to socialism. But another kind of socialist will fight for a world where economic relationships define us far more than our senses ever must. Curiously, that kind of socialist – through their belief in the power of the economic and the reducibility of human intercourse to a simple button-pressing of common, almost pecuniary, self-interested materialism – seems to have far more in common with Eurocapitalism than I ever would care to.
Finally, you say the purpose of all political action is to encourage people to arrive at the same destination. Very well. I concede that point. But what if that destination is one which not only allows for but positively supports and advocates a multiplicity of belief systems, all living together in (airy-fairy) peace and harmony? What if our future replacement for capitalism actually allows for plurality of thought – and in actually allowing for plurality of thought at the very same time demonstrates a monolithic sense of purpose and destination?
Probably, also, pretentious nonsense. But something, nevertheless, I am attracted to.
Well wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice, Mil. But the days of St. Simon, Fourier and Owen are gone. Instead of wallowing in indolent platitudes about how socialism endorses altruism (and the rest of the above diatribe) perhaps it’s time to actually analyze definite situations in light of definite relations or categories or basically anything of substance beyond “I think this is wrong because I feel it to be wrong”.
I wish the days of Fourier weren’t gone.
Then we could contemplate the Hieroglyph of the Giraffe in all its glory.
More on track: good fucking article.
Only just had a look at the lengthy comments from you and Mil – a bit too late for me to engage productively there, though there is a contribution to be made at some point in respect of Mil’s assertion that the ‘battle of economic wits’ leads to the exclusion of all other considerations, because in think in there lies an intuitive link to the post-Marxist argument that Marxism’s over reliance on economism (cf Laclau and Mouffe) leads to a simplistic conception of the world. I would, of course, disagree, but it’s important to recognise that sentiment from the non-Marxist left and its (negative, though well meaning) impact on any left movement.
On the Lisbon Treaty itself – it is being regarded either asa symbol of a generalised loss of democracy etc (by rightwing opponents) or as a relatively unimportant as tying up of loose ends by supporters, and the real dangers in it – the EU’s executive control of monetary policy, and the institutionalistion of neolliberal norms by that route (as well as by fuller control of trade policy and the rules governing the internal market) are the real dangers that are being overlooked. While I can’t obviously be certain, I’m pretty confident that a Europe under the Lisbon Treaty would have had greater trouble applying the fiscal stimulus that it did manage, and the pain inflicted on the working class of the bankers’ recession would have been even greater (it may still turn out to be).
This should of course be a concern to all Labour members who happily supported the UK fiscal stimulus, but it’s difficult to get that kind of anti-EU message over, when there’s so much shouting from the right about loss of liberty etc etc.. To that, and the more general problem of getting a leftwing anti-EU message heard above the reactionary shouts of the right, I have no immmediate answer.
Getting very frustrated here. Just to explain where I’m coming from in one short paragraph:
As Christianity begot atheism, and atheism in many senses is the mirror image of Christianity, unable altogether to escape its clutches of faith in its belief in something that cannot be proven, so capitalism has begot socialism and defined its reach, to the extent that we cannot understand a world where capital is not the key. Thus we argue about its ownership, the means of production – rather than trying to create a completely different way of thinking. In this sense, socialism just tinkers with capitalism – starting as it does from the same point of view, a belief in a much-promised but never delivered pecuniary paradise of behaviours and processes, it simply fails to describe any brave new world at all.
I’d like a brave new world, not a rehash of the existing. That is something I’d truly like to analyse.
(That was one longish paragraph and two short sentences. Oh well.)
This is childishness on about six different levels.
First the analogy is bogus. If the postulate that there is a god (theism, not Christianity) entails a conception of the opposite by virtue of the postulate in the first place, then every positive contention entails its opposite.
Anything you propose will be constrained by whatever it is opposed to, as though that is a bad thing. But all of this is just word-play. It doesn’t mean anything beyond the abstract.
In the real world, being born of the previous system is not a constraint. If the classical society grew out of the primitive, if the feudal society grew out of the classical and if the capitalist grew out of the feudal then history has demonstrated beyond doubt that successors outgrow their predecessors, that the “opposite” exceeds the original predicate. In the same way socialism will exceed capitalism.
This enumerates one of the organic laws of history, which Marx conceptualizes as the dialectic.
The truth is, what else can any system grow out of other than what comes before? For everything that is in the here and now was inherent to the past, to the previous organization of society. This is as much true of the material as of ideas. Plants don’t grow from soil without seeds; political ideas are merely the exposition of a systematized worldview of the present, potentially expanded to consider future developments.
To attempt to have political ideas without considering the current reality is to wish for plants without having sowed any seeds. Or, put another way, abstract conceptualization about society is well and good but is as much use as thinking about unicorns for all it bears a relation to what is and what can be.
This is what your brave new world amounts to.
By all means, you can argue to the contrary, that your “something new” really does base itself on understanding the forces and relations that underpin modern society, the motors which drive change whether positive or negative, and postulate a way to get from A to B, but you haven’t done that. Or you can argue that actually something other than forces or social relations drive change, but that’s a nonsense.
Finally, and most childishly, socialism does not start from the same point of view as capitalism. Socialism and capitalism may each promise a better world where behaviour and processes are more favourable to the individual, but that is peripheral to the actual operation of capitalism and to the theorized operation of socialism and is thus a meaningless concept whereby to analyze either.
So get frustrated all you want, but I think your frustration is because you are ignorant of the history of philosophy, of the deep cleave between the concepts of materialism and idealism and because at some level you must realize that by your idealist posturing, you’re standing on the wrong side of that history.
What is, is all there is. Ideas are not formed independently of what is; they are merely a part of it. If we wish to change what is, we must understand it, all of it, and particularly those things which are central to what is. By a Marxist reckoning those are the class system, the means of production, capital and so on.
You can argue that those aren’t central, that something else is, but that’s a different argument to the one we’ve been having, where your frustration is simply an expression of your inability to escape the reality that ideas do not exist outside of what is.
You’re right Dave. I think we *can* escape the debt that “what is” owes to “what was” and make “what is” *essentially* different from all that ever was.
But maybe what all this tangential and unproductive debate really reveals is that I’m not the socialist I thought I was after all – whereas you clearly are.
Methinks I’ll have to be looking sharpish for some other label.
Not some other party, mind. Just some other label.
Whatever. Whenever you grow up and actually tackle individual arguments rather than spewing tangential vagaries and unproductive generalities, we might get somewhere.
In the meantime, you’re obviously a socialist – you’re just not a materialist. Your brand of socialism is technically older than mine, it’s just a lot less useful and it died a death about 90 years ago in the mouths of Avenarius, Mach etc, having never served any useful purpose.
A bit harsh, Dave.
People have different ways of reasoning. People are motivated by different impulses, too. A scientific Marxist analysis is enormously useful in, well, analysing stuff. But I’m not sure it’s a lot of use in movement-building, for example.
I recognise the value of your style of reasoning, but personally speaking, my way of reasoning is a lot more emotional – it’s about a connection with particular people in particular circumstances and an almost-tribal affinity based on empathy. To be fair, that’s not particularly “useful” in analysing the role of the EU, but it does give me an intuitive understanding of class relations and help me prioritise struggles.
Perhaps it is harsh – but I don’t see reason here. Even in intuition there is reason. Mil’s argument is reason standing on its head. Moreover, this conversation was supposed to be about the EU: confronted with the flaws in his thinking Mil retreated about four different times to a different argument.
So if I am harsh, there are my reasons.
Tim
People come to Dave’s site on the understanding that if he things your argument is flawed, he will give no quarter. Or at least, people who decide to come for a second time come on that understanding. Mil knows that, not least from membernet days, and he respects the approach Dave takes. Tha’s clear from what he’s written at 21st Century Fix about this latest engagement. He leaves the arena battered and bruised, but with a whole knew set of things to think about, which is why he came. As Dave has said elsewhere, most comments threads end up simply dying off because the next OP piece is up and life has moved on, but the arguments and positions taken end up coming back round in other threads and in the end the overall argumentation is enhanced in quality and (slowly but pretty steadily) in reader/commenter numbers. Actually, not that slowly in terms of readers – site visit are up fourfold in four months.
This approach makes it pretty different from anything else out there in the blogosphere, and means that while comments might not come in huge numbers, what does come tends to be thought through and pertinent to debate. At least two bloggers have made reference recently to the fact the comments threads are as valuable a read as the OPs, because the OP is added to with new information and different angles of analysis.
I think Tim is right in one sense: my impatience impeded the clarity of my own responses, above, making them more insulting than they otherwise needed to be, and that is unforgivable.
The argument seems to have continued over at Mil’s: http://www.21stcenturyfix.org/2009/10/on-not-being-socialist.html