Though Cowards Flinch

I reviewed recently a fantastic book called The Courageous State by Richard Murphy for the Left Foot Forward blog. In it, I did raise one minor criticism:

He [Murphy] rightly notes that no functioning society has ever existed without a government but he tends not to tread too deeply into the legal territory of why government has such a claim on property as to be duty bound to raise taxes from it. I, myself, am not inclined to disagree with the conclusion that is raised, but I am curious as to whether this matter-of-fact method of argumentation will convince his critics.

His critics will not just be conservatives (in fact they are very unlikely to be; they may disagree on how much tax should be raised, but not on the principal of government raising taxes) or libertarians on the right – but left wingers, libertarians on the left and anarchists too.

And tonight I found such an example. David Graeber at the University of London, an anarchist and anthropologist, asks:

What gave early nation-states the right to levy taxes? Nowadays, we all think we know the answer to this question. We pay our taxes so that the government can provide us with services, starting with military protection. The arrangement is said to go back to an original social contract, though no one really knows when it was made or by whom, or why we should be bound by the decisions of distant ancestors on this one matter when we aren’t by their decisions otherwise.

He looks at the matter through the religious context that the question was once raised in, noting man as fallen, also born in debt, which over time is settled with the owner (government) through tax.

Angrily, Graeber contends:

Once we owed our lives to the gods who created us, paid them interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and, ultimately, paid back the principal with our lives. Now we owe our lives to the nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and, when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, pay back the principal with our lives.

I still do wonder where the answer to this is. Unlike with Graeber I would contest that a government has an obligation towards the people it serves, and also that there is good economics behind conceiving a society of people as in debt to each other which it levels through taxation – further, this is dealt with through government because tax is, as Richard Murphy pointed out in his book, a sum raised by a land owner, to occupants.

As I say, this makes perfect sense to me, and seems the most rational and ethical. But is it based on right? I can’t say I’m unconvinced any more than I can confirm I’m convinced, but I’m not yet satisfied.

Last week more than 100 historians signed an open letter expressing outrage at the sentiments of David Starkey, when during his appearance on Newsnight he opined: “What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs… have become black. The whites have become black.”

What Starkey was trying to say is that Enoch Powell had it at least partly right when he talked about the rivers of blood, and the destruction of the indigenous culture, in Britain.

In a way, through the use of patois, what Starkey believes to be black culture has transformed the identities of many white people, and so the UK has undergone some sort of black cultural hegemony.

He’s wrong, of course. For what can be defined as black culture in the form of music, language and fashion is subcultural – the message that Starkey began to read, on Newsnight, describing the words of a looter, using patois, was a single example, exploited by Starkey, to give the impression there was some racial notion at play during the riots and looting in London, Birmingham and elsewhere.

Fortunately, no one let Starkey get away with it. Waves of articles, blog posts, news items and letters filled the air as outrage turned to analysis.

Starkey got it wrong, everyone else got it right: race is not defined by a single set of ideas, therefore it is absurd to say whites have become black, just as it is say the black race is defined by patois.

So it seems only appropriate that an organisation like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) be given the cold shoulder for supposing that a black tea party member is “a paid “mouthpiece” traitor to [his] race” (see also).

Does this not suppose that the kind of dullard conservatism to which the tea party movement in the US embraces is limited only to whites?

It reminds me of Cornel West’s examination of black conservatism. According to him, in his 1994 book Race Matters – there were large swathes of black conservatives, particularly in universities, who were scornful of affirmative action measures, and were suspicious of black liberalism as inadequate and concerned, mostly, with in-fighting.

But to fellow black academics, there was an element of traitorousness to their conservatism – they weren’t wrong because of their ideas, but their ideas were wrong for them, supposedly because of the colour of their skin.

Conservatism was once the preserve of the racist, white, middle-class male (certainly in the West), but time has shown the two to be only tediously linked. Though I’m not a conservative, it doesn’t bother me to note that there are black conservatives and black members of the tea party because I know that my criticisms of conservatism do not rest on it being inherently racially exclusive.

Conservatism is not necessarily stupid, but it can attract stupid people.

Starkey was wrong on Newsnight because he thought race meant something beyond skin. But we must, here, be consistent. Anyone who suggests that blacks are traitors to their race for supporting the tea party are wrong because they, also, believe race means something beyond skin, and that conservatism as a black person is, necessarily, an expression of black skin, white mask.

Whereas, if we read Cornel West properly, we can see that through conservatism, the black subject isn’t necessarily appropriating and imitating the coloniser, but it could have more to do with a crisis in liberal or progressive politics – where we on the Left should draw our attention.

At a recent discussion of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, a few interesting points were brought up. When researching the issue beforehand, I stumbled across some figures for the “Yes” and “No” campaigns: the Yes side outspent the No side by just under 4:1. Well over half of that figure came directly from businesses like Ryanair or Intel, or consortia of businesses and celebrities. This was not counting the five million euros spent by the Irish state and the EU itself on “information” campaigns and actually holding the referendum.

Clearly the ruling class of Ireland had a vested interest in securing a Yes vote. The tactics of the Yes campaign were pretty devious – for example, IBEC’s campaign website promised jobs in massive lettering on the front page, as did plenty of posters. Yet Brian Lenihan, finance minister, didn’t disavow such claims until after the Yes vote had been secured. But capitalism does not produce a monolithic capitalist class – such a class can have divergent interests and it was this that led to a brief consideration of how parties of the ruling class react to such a division.

In Ireland, there are two coalitions broadly analogous to the two-party British system: Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats (a coalition recently including the Irish Green Party)  and Fine Gael-Labour. Broadly speaking these represent the conservative / liberal-conservative and centrist / social democratic wings of Leinster House. Occasionally it gets a bit confusing because Fine Gael, Labour’s traditional partners, are a party composed of people like UK Labour MP Denis MacShane, who is marginally to the Left of the Kaiser. There is significant overlap.

All of these parties – every single one – came out in favour of a Yes vote and spent money on securing a Yes vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The ruling class of the Irish republic seems fairly united on the point. It was left to the Socialist Party, SWP and maverick Declan Ganley, who reportedly spent over a million euros of his own money, including two hundred thousand of which on funding the Libertas anti-treaty campaign in the second referendum, to oppose the Lisbon Treaty in conjunction with UKIP. Ganley denies that his American company Rivada had anything to do with the campaign.

This unity of the Irish ruling class provoked some speculation: if there was to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the UK, would the British ruling class be similarly united? It is a standard media trope that European questions have tended to divide the Conservatives, the traditional party of the capitalist class. Recent unity has been possible because the Conservatives can have the best of both worlds, beating up a Labour government for kowtowing to European federalism run amok, whilst not actually having to give effect to their own utterances. The perfect example of this was the Lisbon Treaty referendum vote.

David Cameron voiced sentiments to the effect that the Lisbon Treaty was a dead duck, that nobody wanted it and that it should be jettisoned. Cameron has also promised a referendum if the treaty is not a fait accompli by the time a Tory government takes office. If it came down to a vote, could Cameron and his pro-EU allies campaign against the Lisbon Treaty without casting doubts over the future of the EU itself? Bearing in mind some recent polling for ConservativeHome, were I David Cameron, I would be praying that Poland and the Czechs ratify Lisbon very soon.

The Tory grassroots, according to ConHome, are overwhelmingly in favour of a referendum, overwhelmingly in favour of a No vote and quite a substantial proportion are in favour of EU withdrawal.

Wealthy support for eurosceptic parties has not exactly been hard to find. Whether from millionaires Paul Sykes, Stuart Wheeler, Alan Bown or David Sullivan, or businesses like Nightech, UKIP seem to have plenty of money to kick around – and indeed they upped their number of MEPs this year even when pitted against a seemingly resurgent Conservative Party. But little of this support comes from the first rank of British capitalism; the recent Conservative Party conference on the other hand demonstrates a totally different world of politico-business intercourse.

“…the real action is on the fringe. In meetings across Manchester this week, corporate money and time is supporting a debate which, it is hoped, will usher in a more enterprise-friendly government. General Electric, BT, Boots, Legal & General, John Lewis, Coca-Cola and BAA are there. So are Vodafone, DTZ, Serco, Standard Chartered, Aviva, Morrisons, T-Mobile, Clifford Chance, EADS, BAE and the tobacco manufacturers.”

All of which benefit from the European Union, particularly from the expanded EU into which companies like Vodafone have moved. Or BAA which has plans for eastern European airports, Serco which has contracts with the European Space Agency and in Poland to name two recent jobs. And so on. All of this investment in European markets is aided by the common framework of the EU, and when it comes to expanding further afield, the status of the EU as a primary trading partner to China and India, and as the world’s largest importer and exporter is useful muscle to keep onside.

The Lisbon Treaty is useful to European capitalism as a whole because it prevents the smaller nations, client states of the larger, from holding the economic and banking policies of EU hostage to its own individual fortunes. The new positions of President of the European Commission and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy are formulated so as to be able to wield the economic and military muscle of the EU as one bloc, which inevitably will be used to the benefit of European capitalism.

With business support largely assured, whatever the grassroots pull, the majority of Tory MPs will work out where their bread is buttered and vote accordingly. There will always be maverick exceptions, like the Labour councillors in Ireland who backed a No vote, but amongst the political establishment, these will be a minority. A referendum, however, might allow the grassroots to shine through – and this is why, I suspect, there will be no Lisbon referendum in the UK unless the Tory and Labour leaderships are fully confident of winning.

A similar referendum, however, has happened before, on membership in the EEC. The Labour and Tory leaderships campaigned in favour of the EEC and won the vote. Despite mavericks like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, no Tory split emerged. And this time, no doubt, the soothing balm of capitalist consensus will likewise ease the pain that any mavericks cause. UKIP is already losing steam, in that its membership numbers have been cut almost by half; I don’t think a resurgent Tory Party has anything to fear from its Right – unless the capitalist crisis deepens beyond what the Tories can easily retrench by attacking the unions, pensions, social welfare, public sector pay and public services.

Thus we simply cannot count on the Tories being broken and ousted by the issue of the EU, though Cameron himself might be damaged by seeming to speak out of both sides of his mouth. I say this at the risk of contradicting the commentariat, where there seems to be a theme developing that Europe brought down Margaret Thatcher and John Major (not the poll tax and control freakery, or habitual corruption and endless scandal then), so it could bring down David Cameron. It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t think it is likely – and I certainly don’t think it’s a notion we can base any sort of strategy around.

What we can do is ensure that if there is a referendum, we’re on the right side. As socialists, we seek the overthrow of the capitalist state; the issue of the EU-state should be just as clear cut. No free market of labour, no terroristic capitalism through EU diktat, IMF sanction or the easy ability to relocate capital investment abroad, no to the idea that we can ‘win’ the institutions of the EU to our own ends any more than we can win round the national state – but yes to a socialist internationalism linking the trades unions and socialists of all European countries.

By making these arguments, we’re changing the terms of the debate; it ceases to be about Little Englanders versus the capitalist consensus and could mobilize section of the working classs in their own class interests – as it did in Ireland. Such a campaign, if fought with skill and honesty, could provide a basis for mass re-engagement with politicis – socialist politics that is – and potentially help us along the road towards a reconstructed mass party of the working class. All of this, if there is a referendum. And that’s exactly why there won’t be.