[page 8]
Old fashioned
modernisers
ohn Bulaitis looks at Tony Blair's 'new thinking' about
URING NEIL KIN-
D NOCKS days as Labour
leader the word 'socialism' was to become the 'S word. Kinnock was so eager to prove his credentials to the Tory press that he had it removed from all policy documents and the speeches of party spokespersons.
Tony Blair, in contrast, while signalling his intent to remove Clause Four from Labour's constitution, is not afraid to speak of 'socialism' • He recently explained his 'new thinking' in a pamphlet - published by the Fabian society under the title Socialism - while his close collaborator and fellow leader of the modernisers' , Gordon Brown, has also written one subtitled A Socialist Agenda for Fairness.
Indeed, Labour's right wing have a new buzz-word - 'ethical socialism'. Brown even announces that "in the new global economy our socialist analysis is more relevant than ever". Yet, a cursory read of these pamphlets is enough to show that the two Labour leaders are
socialism and capitalism.
playing a grown-up version of the children's game 'Simon says. They say one thing but mean something entirely different. So, instead of 'socialist analysis' we get an insight into the ideology behind the attempt to eliminate Labour's socialist traditions and the party's links with the organised working class.
Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution speaks of a society based on the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. ". Yet now, Brown defines the "modern, popular view of socialism" as the recognition that "markets are in the public interest" . It's about the "community working together"
This 'broad, national' view of 'socialism' will indeed be 'popular with the millionaire bosses. But what possible 'community of interests' is there between someone like Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy, chairman of Woolworths on £1.3m a year, and his 30,000 workers struggling by on not much more than £100 a week?
Where is the public interest when the market condemns 300,000 building workers to the dole when their skills are needed to build and renovate millions of homes?
HE SOCIALISM OF Marx,
proclaims Blair "is dead...
Since the collapse of communism, (ethical socialism is) the only serious view... that can remain" • Like the capitalist class, Blair equates the former dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with socialism. But these regimes were opposed by genuine Marxists. Leon Trotsky waged an inexorable struggle against Stalin's bureaucratic rule while Blair's friends, the Fabians, were singing its praises. He explained that socialism means not only a planned economy but requires 'democracy in the same way a human body needs oxygen'.
Blair is not the first and certainly won't be the last to announce Marxism historically redundant. But few have the
Blair 7
[page 9]
temerity to announce in its
place (in eight pages!) a "clear
vision... both radical and mod-
ern" . The irony is that Blair's
'new thinking is nothing more
than a crude plagiarism of so-
cialists who predated the
'old-fashioned' Marx - after hav-
ing expurgated the early
socialists' indignation at the sys-
tem and their fighting spirit.
Blair speaks of "social justice,
cohesion, equality of opportunity
and community" to be achieved
by a "social partnership" where
bosses and workers act together
to "promote the public good". In
the early 19th century, Robert
Owen, William Thompson, John
Bray and others spoke a similar
language, with Robert Owen
trying to prove' his ideas by
running a cotton mill in New
Lanarkshire on these principles.
For them, the path to a new
society was through convincing
everyone, including the bosses,
of the superiority of socialism
over capitalism. Their 'utopian'
idea of a 'social partnership'
was a reflection of the fact that
large-scale industry was only just developing and the emerging working-class was only in its formative stages.
Soon, however, the mighty struggles of the Chartist movement were to show the irreconcilable contradiction between the interests of the capitalists and the workingclass. It was the recognition of this antagonism that gave rise to the ideas of Marxism or scientific socialism.
But Marx, Blair claims, had a "false view of class" that was "too narrow". Instead of class, these Labour leaders talk of 'citizenship' and the "collective power of all". . What real difference is there between this and John Major's strictures about a 'classless society?
Yet facts in Brown's pamphlet demolish the modernisers' own arguments and show that the gap between rich and poor has never been greater. "Unemployment has trebled, while wages are now more unequal than at any time since the 1880s... the homeless beg in the streets
• Blair
alongside news-stands proclaiming the latest six-figure salary increase of a corporate executive"
But was it not 'the time-limited Marx who explained the tendency of the capitalist market to create an "industrial reserve army, that weighs down on the active labour army and holds its pretensions in check"? Did he not also predict the inevitability of an increasing polarisation as "the greater social wealth... the greater is official pauperism"?
Marx, claims, "false
Blair
had a view of
class".
Marx's other sin, according to
Blair, was to "misunderstand
the nature and development of
a modern market economy". But
again it was Marx who foresaw
how "the centralisation of capi-
tal" leads to "the entanglement
of all peoples in the net of the
world-market". The largest com-
panies are now bigger in
financial terms than all but the largest nation states. In 1989 there were only 19 countries with a gross domestic product larger than the annual revenue of General Motors.
Even The Independent recently recognised that "it is fine to argue for revitalised communities but achieving the reality today is a far harder task than it was for Robert Owen. If Mr Blair reaches Downing Street, he will have to contend with a complex, international, capitalist economy whose every impulse is to reduce society to its atomical parts".
Incredibly, Gordon Brown argues that this 'new global economy' means that while "one hundred years ago the Marxist analysts said that the question for capital in Britain was how best to exploit labour to enhance the value of capital
to the benefit of the few today
the issue is "not how capital
can exploit labour but how la-
bour... can best use - even
exploit - modern capital". How
a worker is supposed to exploit
a capitalist is conveniently not
explained.
Marx's analysis of the 'mar-
ket' system is more relevant
than ever. He explained that it
is based on the bosses buying
the labour power of the workers
but only paying them a propor-
tion of the real value of their
labour. Profit, in the last analy-
sis, amounts to the unpaid
labour of the working class.
While Brown and Blair speak of
the 'dynamic' character of the
market, this exploitation of the
workers, making them unable to
buy back the goods they have produced, leads to inevitable crisis. As Marx put it "the ultimate reason for all real crisis always lies in the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses"
Despite the almost unimaginable human achievements in science and technology over the last 50 years, a period largely of economic upswing, millions of the world's population face hunger and the lack of rudimentary health care. In the world's richest countries 35 million are on the dole. In the words of Marx the capitalist mode of production, has "come to a standstill at a point determined by the production and realisation of profit, not by the satisfaction of human needs"
The experience of the chaos and anarchy of the market system will draw ever growing numbers of working-class people to reject the Labour leaders 'old-fashioned' apologies for capitalism and join the fight for real socialist change.
Socialism, by tony Blair.
Fabian Pamphlet No.565,
published by the Fabian Society, 1994, 8pp, C3-50.
A Socialist Agenda for Famess, by Gordon Brown Fabian Pamphlet No.583,
1994, 83-50
[page 10]