Can #occupy change the world?Sometimes we are so afraid of spreading

naive illusions that we forget that an idea can be a force for social change. This has

been the case with the youth-led, radical #occupy movement, which spread to 600 towns and cities in America and inspired similar actions across the world in recent weeks.

Even as the original Wall Street protest was evicted, the sense of victory was palpable. The #occupy movement genuinely shifted consciousness in America, showing a potential mass constituency for anti-capitalist politics and shaming the unions into action.

Impressive nationwide support for the movement – reflected in polls, in copycat actions, and in direct support from trade union organisations – shows how quickly ideas can shift with the right initiative. We had become accustomed to the dominant media narrative of American politics, with embattled Obama on the Left and the Tea Party on the Right. Anyone who suggested an upsurge of anti-capitalist protest a few months ago would have been laughed at.

The #occupy protests have thus shifted the vocabulary of the dominant ideology of austerity. Like the student movement in Britain and the protest movements on the European continent, it placed scrutiny on the question of class and highlighted the deficiencies of hollowed-out neoliberal democracy.

For a brief moment, it seemed that America was split down the middle, between supporters of more austerity and the continued dominance of the 1 percent, and the radical forces of renewal who demanded some change – any change! – to the corrupt system supported by the Republicans and Democrats.

Of course, ‘realism’ will set in again. There is an election to be fought, and there is nothing like an election to spoil any utopian hopes for mild reforms. After all, Democrats will ask, Obama might not be perfect…but do you really want Sarah Palin’s (or even Mitt Romney’s) finger on ‘the button’? Get real, as they say.

Reality aside, the American example is perhaps the most radical case of a wider predicament for the Left. There is an extremely widespread suspicion about what we rightly call ‘bourgeois democracy’. There is a smaller circle of people – perhaps 8 percent, according to some statistics – who are convinced of the case for changing society. Lastly, there is an even smaller, but still significant, group who will take action irrespective of the weakness of left-wing organisation.

In country after country, the organized Left has failed to respond to the challenge of the capitalist crisis – not due to an absence of grassroots resistance, but rather thanks to a toxic mixture of bungling incompetence, arcane hatreds, and inveterate pessimism.

Pessimism seems to be deeply rooted. This is odd, because in spite of the Left’s irrelevance, 2010-11 has arguably been one of the most intense years of global protest in decades.

Due to the Left’s weakness and disorganisation, it can only relate to ‘grassroots’ movements in two modes. The first mode is uncritical cheerleading from the sidelines. The second is to sneer at the ‘adventurism’ of young people who have never seen the inside of a union

branch meeting in their young lives.Twitter and Facebook have helped spread the

illusion that movements emerge as ‘swarms’ from nowhere, swaggering onto the stage of history by some deus ex machina.

Of course, this is hardly the case. The occupy movement, like most global protest movements, has emerged from politicised layers of youth subcultures. In particular, from the New York hipster scenes that played such an active grassroots role in Obama’s election, who have been the most burned by his subsequent sell-outs on corporations and war.

Likewise, the young leaders of the anti-austerity movement in Scotland have largely emerged from politicised subcultures connected to Palestine activism and anti-war politics in its various forms.

They only appear to emerge ‘miraculously’ from nowhere because the organised Left has become accustomed to isolation. Uncritical support for spontaneity quickly turns into hyper-suspicion if young people start to assert their own views on politics.

Many activists thus like to contrast the old, ‘closed’ Left with the new, ‘open’ Left. The dangerous thing about this contrast is that it assumes that the ‘new’ Left has a monopoly on wisdom - and this is not the case.

It is a sad fact that most of the old Trotskyist organisations in the world will wither and die with their members, or will be absorbed within new formations.

There are numerous Trotskyist ‘International tendencies’ in the world. Most of them are differentiated by debates about the Soviet Union, Maoism, and the post-War boom.

The substantial differences between these old sections on the Left cannot last. As it stands, they are like the old Warner Brothers characters who have walked over the side of a cliff and are miraculously suspended in midair.

Eventually, gravity will prevail, because these organisational expressions of old theories and old hatreds are not up to contemporary political challenges. Their ‘closed’ structure keeps them alive - but it will also stop them replenishing their forces with new activists.

But the new ‘openness’ is not without faults. Too many young leftists declare their undying opposition to anyone with an ‘agenda’ and to ‘politicians’ who make ‘compromises’.

This immaturity will be destructive in the long-run. Agendas are necessary for change. Compromises are necessary to give the movement victories. And here is the rub - without an agenda to transform the world, bad compromises will happen. We can only judge a good compromise by our broader goals.

Most controversially, the Left needs leaders. What it doesn’t need is unaccountable leaders. The latter follow inevitably from a weak movement and a poor grasp of strategy.

#occupy was not a leaderless movement. But it pretended to be. And this explains the frustrations of activists on the ground. The self-appointed ‘leaders’ would respond to every criticism by saying, ‘We have no leaders!’

Unlike the old Left, the open movement is learning on the job. It is a foolish man who predicts you won’t win anything with kids.

isEditorial 12.2011

EGYPT’S SECOND REVOLUTION

Contents

Editorial 2News Review 5Eden Springs, Tahrir report, N30, SNP...

FEATURES

#occupy the world 8We need to learn the lessons of Occupy Wall Street for the working class, Ben Wray argues.

Interview: The Precariat 13Are precarious workers the new ‘dangerous class’? We interview Professor Guy Standing.

Egypt’s Second Revolution 16After the latest uprising, John Rees argues that Egypt must unite against the ruling army.

N30 and the Trade Unions 18November 30 is a massive day for unions, but it must become a festival of opposition to the Con-Dems, says Phil Neal and Sarah Collins.

COLUMNS

Europe on the Brink 7Chris Bambery on the dangers of a European wide meltdown and the questions of democracy.

Year 1 of the Global Youth Revolt 12David Jamieson on how we can see the strands of a new generational politics.

Break up of Britain? 20Pete Ramand assesses contradictory polling data on Scottish Independence.

REVIEWS

Book Reviews 21Jenny Morrison looks at Dumenil and Levy’s The Crisis of Neoliberalism; plus Joe Glenton on Britain’s Empire by Richard Gott.

International Socialist Magazine is the monthly publication of the International Socialist Group (Scotland). We welcome submissions and encourage debate and new ideas. Please get in touch with new articles and responses.

Editor: James Foley & Aisling GallagherWebsite:internationalsocialist.org.ukEmail:publications@internationalsocialist.org.ukSubscription: 12 EditionsBritain £20; Elsewhere £35

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 4

8Ben Wray

#OCCUPY

John Rees

n30NOVEMBER 30: WHERE NEXT? Phil Neal & Sarah Collins18

16

Eyewitness from Tahrir Square

Since Sunday and right up to the current moment a street war is going on in all the streets leading to Tahrir Square.

The youth are now chanting against the military and the main political parties. They say that parties have betrayed the revolution for the sake of a seat in the parliament, for which elections are due to begin this week.

The cabinet has resigned less than 5 hours ago. But the government, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has so far refused to accept the resignation.

What is going on now is not only in Tahrir Square. Alexandria is burning and live ammunition is being used around the Alexandria Police Headquarters. There is a very serious situation in Suez and the youth of the revolution have again begun to organize public committees.

The few coming hours hold the real third wave of the Egyptian revolution. Egypt now has one demand – just as there was one demand during the first days of the revolution: People Demand Removal Of SCAF, People Demand Removal of the Field Marshal.

The movement began last Friday with the huge demonstration against a document issued by the deputy prime minister, which contained proposals to put the military beyond the control of the new constitution.

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists were the majority in this demonstration, but they were joined by many political movements because the political parties had asked only for a few amendments commenting on the document.

By the end of the day all the organizations had withdrawn from Tahrir, leaving only 200 people, most of them families of martyrs and injured victims of the revolution. They decided to start an open sit-in mainly demanding a time schedule by the military to step down from power in Egypt.

On Saturday many youth movements decided to join the sit-in. Security forces and Military Police attempted to evacuate the Square, which led to causalities

among the protesters – 24 martyrs and 1300 injured youth, including children and women, according to Ministry Of Health estimates. The reason of death for martyrs was reported as asphyxia due to inhaling the new variant of CS gas being used by the army.MOHAMED ATEF

Crisis in Belgium

Now it’s Belgium’s turn to see its credit rating downgraded, meaning it will have to pay much more to borrow.

Ratings agency, Standard and Poors, said that failure of the country’s political party to form a government which could then impose an austerity programme justified the decision. They demanded a government be formed and the outlines of a cuts budget agreed by Monday.

The response from Belgium’s caretaker prime minister, Yves Leterme, was pathetic but predictable: ‘We need a reply that is clear and credible if we are to avoid the worst,’ he told Belgian television after S&P’s announcement.

What should be said is these cowboys (the ratings agencies) failed to spot the US sub-prime mortgage crisis which ignited the financial collapse – and that’s their job.

Further we’ve had the European Union dictate the formation of ‘technocratic’ unelected governments in Greece and Italy, we’ve had IMF intervention galore and now a private company demands the formation of a government to implement the policies it desires!

There is little pretence of democracy here.

Belgium is in trouble because it holds too much Italian and Greek debt, bad news for France which is in the same boat. Even Germany is in trouble after the failure of its state bond sale this week. Meanwhile Italy looks set to sink.

Let’s remind ourselves the European debt crisis was caused in large part by the bank bail outs and certainly not by state largesse on welfare. Italy has seen such debt levels before and survived. The difference is this time there’s no economic growth in sight and mounting evidence of a fresh recession across Europe.

Greece points to the fate for the rest of Europe – years of

Glasgow Uni Water DisgraceETHNIC CLEANSING: Water company is at the centre of debates about boycott

Sarah Watson

It comes as no surprise to learn that yet again Glasgow University is wasting money. For once it is not on grossly inflated management salaries or a completely unnecessary new student website. This time it is on water. Glasgow University’s management is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on the stuff that comes gushing from the tap and more often the sky. Between 2007 and 2011 Glasgow University spend £212,203 on a contract with water company Eden Springs while at the same time forcing the closure of entire departments and cutting staff positions.

However Eden Springs is no ordinary water company, it is a company that profits from an illegal occupation of the Golan Heights by Israel. Mayanot Eden, the parent company of Eden Springs, illegally sources water from the Salukia Spring in Golan and also have a bottling plant in Katzin- an illegal Israeli settlement in Golan. This enterprise renders Israel in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and its occupation of the Golan Heights is in direct contravention of the United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 (1967), 452 (1972), 465 (1980), 471(1980) and 497 (1981).

Not only has Israel flouted international law by occupying the Golan Heights but through Eden Springs it is violating Article 55 of the Hague Regulations which limits the use of water resources of an occupying force

to that of military necessity only. By exceeding this limit Israel continues to completely ignore this legislation and by sourcing water to bottle and sell worldwide Eden Springs is showing complete disregard for international law, blatantly exploiting a murderous occupation to ruthlessly seek profit at the expense of people’s human rights to live freely with access to the essentials of life.

In a region where water is so scarce and unequally distributed, Eden Springs is profiting from illegally exploiting Syria’s water resources while ordinary Syrians live on only 40% of the minimum recommended water consumption advised by the World Health Organization. As long as Glasgow University maintains its contract with such a company we are complicit in supporting this company and in sustaining Israel’s illegal occupation.

The Hetherington Languages Building has already got rid of Eden Springs. They took the refurbishment of the building as a chance to change to using water coolers that feed off the main system which they have found to be a perfectly suitable alternative.

There have been successful boycotts of Eden Springs in Scotland with Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh, Strathclyde and St Andrews dropping their contracts. Glasgow University Palestine Society has launched a campaign to get Eden Spring off our campus and we hope we can soon add our names to this list of Universities who refuse to support this illegal occupation.

News Review:Eden Springs, Egypt

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 5

Edinburgh collegesThe SNP government is to ‘force the pace’ on college mergers in Edinburgh. Under pressure from Education Secretary Michael Russell, Telford College has announced discussions over mergers with Stevenson and Jewel & Esk Colleges. Recently, the SNP announced that college budgets would fall from £545m to £471m by 2014/5.

Coalition N30 PlansThe Coalition of Resistance is to organise support for striking public sector workers in Glasgow and Edinburgh on November 30th. The campaign brings together student protesters, community activists, and organised trade unionists who oppose cuts and privatization in Scotland.

Scottish LabourThere is more chaos in the Scottish Labour leadership elections. Henry McLeish has waded into the debate to encourage the unappealing candidates to engage with the public. ‘The candidates don’t have the courage to speak up loudly and boldly about the future of Scotland,’ he complained. MSPs Ken Macintosh and Johann Lamont will contest MP Tom Harris.

Website updatesWe live in a time of global crisis and the situation is always evolving. Don’t forget that you can always keep in touch with the latest coverage and analysis in Scotland and beyond atinternationalsocialist.org.uk

News Review: N30, SNP...

NEWS BRIEFS

continuing cuts combined with no economic growth or collapse.

Last week’s general strike in Portugal and Wednesday’s N30 strike here show we can resist. What, ultimately, is needed are national uprisings against our own elites, our own governments, to break free of the EU and IMF and to end austerity.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin said there is no final crisis of capitalism if the exploited are prepared to shoulder the cost. It’s about time we stopped shouldering the cost and gave this system the burial it deserves.CHRIS BAMBERY

Mixed News for SNP

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has recently had mixed news on its campaign for Independence.

Polls have varied, at one stage showing outright support for Independence, but later showing a large swing in the other direction (see page 20).

The SNP has been boosted by a large donation from the legendary late poet Edwin Morgan totally £900,000.

Furthermore, Lotto millionaires Colin and Christine Weir have donated £1 million to the SNP independence drive, making them the third richest party in the UK.

Labour still tops the fundraising table, taking in £3.5 million this year. 90 percent of this funding comes from the trade unions. However, Labour has debts of £10 million, while the SNP is debt-free.

This might allow the SNP to start putting more distance from its homophobic and pro-tax cut business backers, who have embarassed the party recently.

Unions defy Con-Dems with massive strike actionDespite a coordinated smear campaign, over two million workers from Britain’s public sector will strike against plans to reduce pensions provision.

Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, has given an ultimatum to the 29 unions threatening to take the current offer ‘off the table’ by New Year.

The media has focused on public inconveniences, and has paid little attention to the substantial issues behind the strike. Sadly, the real causes of the strike have too often been lost.

Due to Britain’s backward and draconian industrial laws, the unions are only able to strike to defend their very narrowly defined interests.

Thus, the strike has been presented to members as a pensions-related issue. For the media, this amounts to the defence of the ‘vested interests’ of the public sector against the private sector.

Under these circumstances, at a time of austerity, we would expect little sympathy. But votes for the strike have been high, despite intimidation, and public sympathy is strong.

The reason for this is quite simple. Whatever the unions are forced to say, this is not a strike about particular privileges. It is part of a broader campaign to defend the public sector in general against Tory attacks as we face the biggest cuts since 1919.

The Con-Dem agenda is anything but neutral. The goal of their economic policy, in the teeth of escalating unemployment and economic stagnation, is the re-engineering of British capitalism in favour of elite interests.

Under these circumstances,

N30 is far from a protest for the ‘privileges’ of the ‘gold plated’ public sector. Rather, it is a heroic action by nurses, teachers, and millions of ordinary people to defend the rights of workers.

In the week running up to the strike, media and government attacks on these workers have become increasingly shrill.

The Daily Mail has reported on the ‘scandal’ that a small number of public employees do union facility time.

The right-wing press is calling for renewed anti-union laws.

While the Con-Dem refuse to compromise on their austerity agenda, which even the IMF says is driving Britain into the depths of a double-dip recession, the unions are accused of being ‘hell-bent’ on confrontation and unwilling to compromise.

Democratic legitimacy is thus at the heart of the N30 strike. The Con-Dem coalition was formed, in dubiously democratic circumstances, to implement the ‘economic necessity’ of austerity.

A technocratic government has been formed in Italy on similar auspices.

The legitimacy of austerity governments depends on the suspension of democratic norms and hard-won economic rights for the sake of ‘saving the country’.

The case for N30 is quite the opposite: that the austerity measures are destroying our economic security, and that a rich country like Britain can afford to look after its workers in old age.

The spurious democracy of an austerity regime that nobody voted for, versus the will of nearly three million ordinary workers. That is the choice that will face Britain on N30 (see page 18).

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 6

Chris Bambery

EUROPE IS now gripped by a multi-layered crisis – a stagnating economy which is teetering on the edge of a further recession, a continuing banking crisis, a sovereign or state debt crisis caused by central bank and government attempts to solve the banking crisis, a fractured European Union unable to provide continental leadership and political uncertainty as sitting governments of whatever shade are turfed out and in Greece and Italy ‘technocratic’ governments are installed.

Every day the news on all these fronts gets worse. France, Belgium and even the Netherlands are poised on the edge of a crisis which has spread remorselessly from the periphery towards the centre.

Europe matters because the EU in total is the world’s biggest economy and exporters like China are aware of that – thus their attempts to push upward domestic demand. Falling demand in Europe and the USA must be part of the reason this week’s figures saw a fall in Chinese manufacturing.

Despite David Cameron’s claims that all is well for the UK because it is not in the Euro, the truth is that he could wake up one morning and find he is where Silvio Berlusconi suddenly found himself. Britain has a continuing banking crisis, a large sovereign debt (remember people were saying Italy had no fears on that front up until the market started racheting up interest rates on state bonds), an economy which is stagnant, austerity measures adding to lack of growth and to joblessness and falling tax revenues as a result.

EU Commission President Jose Manuel

Barroso is pushing the issue of Eurobonds. The idea being that the European Central Bank could borrow on behalf of all EU states, who would all be liable to repay them at the same interest rate and consequently the money raised could help states on Europe’s periphery which are in trouble.

Yet Barroso knows full well that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will veto

the idea because that would mean Germany paying higher interest rates than it does now and having to take responsibility for bailing out other EU states – and if Germany does not bank roll the scheme it will never fly.

The German ruling class is aware it calls the shots in the EU and it is prepared to take control of the EU rather than steer it along jointly with France as it has since the formation of the union. This has prompted the ‘Daily Mail’ to run lurid warnings of a Fourth Reich but the truth is the UK or France would do the same if the shoe was on the other foot. All Germany is doing is seeking to exploit a crisis to its own benefit, which is what all good capitalists are supposed to do.

Germany benefited from the Euro until recently because a common currency helped it to dump its exports in southern Europe, after it slashed it labour costs through cutting wages a decade ago. The resulting trade imbalance has helped deepen the economic woes of Greece, Italy et al.

Now Berlin is placing strict limits on EU bail outs and vetoing demands from Sarzoky and Cameron that the ECB be used to provide cash to banks in trouble – Cameron’s priority is obviously the well being of the City of London.

Meanwhile the common ‘cure’ in all EU states, whether Euro members or not, is austerity, liberalization, flexibility and privatization. In plain language this means: 1)

we pay for a crisis we did not cause and 2) we suffer the race to the bottom to see which state can offer the lowest wages, pensions, benefits and corporation tax and ensures employers can hire and fire at will.

It is obvious that the people of Greece are being kept on a form of life support which allows them to endure more and more pain with little sign of any recovery. This is not a rescue that is being enacted by the EU and the International Monetary Fund; it is a torturous waiting game for the Greek populace.

An excellent report by Research on Money and Finance called ‘Breaking Up: A Route Out of the Eurozone Crisis points out Greece and other countries of the EU ‘periphery’ (a flexible description encompassing more and more EU states) are ‘trapped within the Eurozone’ subject to ‘continued austerity, low competitiveness, high unemployment, gowing social tensions, and loss of national independence.’

Europe on the brink...Another month, another downgrade. Once again, the Eurozone is close to meltdown. Tensions between rival powers are beginning to intensify, while democracy looks increasingly marginal.

International: Europe on the Brink

The German ruling class is prepared to take control over the EU rather steer jointly with France

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 7

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 8

Ben Wray

The European sovereign debt crisis appears to be approaching breaking point. The ruling class have moved from

doing everything they can to avoid a Greek default on its debts to preparing to manage a default in their favour. Whatever they do the trajectory of the crisis is towards a second, deep recession. If anyone believed George Osborne’s lie that ‘Britain is a safe haven’ they don’t anymore. Mervyn King has broken that particular dose of fantasy by opting to print another 75billion of British pounds straight into failing banks coffers, whilst doing so he declared ‘This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen at least since the 1930s, if not ever.’

Of course recalling the 1930s makes sense given the economic similarities: the 1929 Wall Street crash was followed by a few years of stagnation before a second, deeper drop into

long-term depression. However if we accept the economic comparison, it is difficult to ignore the political outcome of the 30s: fascism and world war.

Crisis and ConsciousnessHistory never repeats itself but the comparison with the 1930s should at least make us aware of one thing about the present: nothing can stay the same. At times of turmoil and uncertainty everything has increased malleability. The relationship between structure and agency is rebalanced: the individual’s weight carries a greater potential influence with the rest of society than at times of relative stability. One way or another the crisis will be resolved; it is a question of which force, or more precisely which class, can resolve it in their favour and at the expense of others.

Tony Blair was aware of this moment, arguing immediately after 9/11 that ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are

in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.’

2011 has not been short of attempts to ‘reorder this world around us’. The Arab revolutions have been the most effective, tilting the pro-American network of neoliberal dictators off its axis in the name of freedom and democracy. The indignados in Spain have called for ‘real democracy- Now!’ in their hundreds of thousands and in Greece they have declared an end to the ‘debtocracy’. Now the #OccupyWallSteet movement has swept across America, in the name of the 99% who suffer at the hands of the elite 1%. On the 15th of October ‘Occupy’ went global with occupations in over 1500 city squares across the world.

All of these movements prove that at a time of economic and political crisis for the ruling class ambition and initiative can be rewarded, even if it’s driven at first by very small groups of people. This consciousness is

#occupy: The Revenge of the 99%International:#occupy movement

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 9

what Goerg Lukacs called looking at the world in its totality; it comes into particularly sharp focus at times of crisis:

‘In periods of economic crisis the position is quite different. The unity of the economic process now moves within reach. So much so that even capitalist theory cannot remain wholly untouched by it, though it can never fully adjust to it…Even if the particular symptoms of crisis appear separately (according to country, branch of industry, in the form of ‘economic’ or ‘political’ crisis, etc.), and even if in consequence the reflex of the crisis is fragmented in the immediate psychological consciousness of the workers, it is still possible and necessary to advance beyond this consciousness. And this is instinctively felt to be a necessity by larger and larger sections of the proletariat.’

What all the movements have in common is a connection of the specific to the global, mediated through the economic crisis: in Spain

resentment at years of neoliberalism from the Spanish Socialist Workers Party’s seven year rule as well as huge youth unemployment isolated a generation from the parliamentary process, leading to the demand for ‘real democracy’. In Greece the deep corruption of the ruling elite combined with imposition of huge austerity measures in face of opposition from the majority of society was the inspiration behind the idea of society being a ‘debtocracy’. In the US record-breaking levels of inequality, the cosiness of political elites to big business and rising unemployment and homelessness drove forward the ’99%’ message.

Lukacs argued that looking at the world in its totality is impossible for the bourgeoisie:

‘The tragic dialectics of the bourgeoisie can be seen in the fact that it is not only desirable but essential for it to clarify its own class interests on every particular issue while at the same time such a clear awareness becomes fatal when it is extended to the question of the

totality.’Commentators continually pick up on the

indecisiveness of the EU leaders as a key factor in the intensification of the crisis. This is true but it is impossible for the problem to be solved from above: the EU is institutionally uneven between surplus, exporting states and debt-ridden, importing states. The ruling classes cannot understand the system in its totality because they are divided and in competition with one another.

On the other hand the working class’s strength is that crisis and resistance leads its world view towards unity and universality:

‘As the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organisational and every other advantage, the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the centre, as a coherent whole.’

This is not to say that the masses reach a fully revolutionary consciousness when they ‘see society from the centre’: the lived

#occupy: The Revenge of the 99%

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 10

experience of living under capitalism means that whilst some ideas are cleared away, other ideas that limit workers to the confines of the system remain. Furthermore, the working class moves into action extremely unevenly: whilst many individuals will have been inspired by the ‘Occupy’ movement’s internationalist message against the banks and inequality, most have remain untouched or if they have been affected they haven’t been brought into the movement, and therefore the radicalisation is fleeting and immaterial.

So the problem of uneveness- both within the active participants and between those and the wider working class- remains. Hear Marx’s seperation between a class of itself and a class for itself is useful. Marx is trying to bridge the gap between objectivity and subjectivity: workers, whether they know it or not, are a revolutionary class because they have the material possibility of leading society as a whole to this end. But, they have to become consciously aware of this potential power and understand how to achieve it if they are going to become a subjectively revolutionary class. This gap is at the heart of the problem: how do we use the small minority who are moving towards revolutionary conclusions as a lever to raise the consciousness and organisation of ever wider sections of the working class?

The starting point is to promote and participate in the movements as they exist, as outside of this the question of anti-capitalist strategy is abstract. Even as a fragment of a class and a fragment of a class consciousness, the movements represent the potential embryo for a revolutionary consciousness as it captures the extent of the crisis, expresses the anger generally at those at the top of the system and wants to get rid of the system. But if the movement is to go beyond its considerable achievements it must attempt to undermine the uneveness of working class consciousness, raising the confidence and consciousness of large sections of the working class to an anti-capitalist one.

Obama and the movementHow do we do this? Whilst we need to learn the lessons from the best international examples, we also have to recognise that each country has its own particular dynamic that has to be taken into account. Looking at the political landscape in Britain and America can help us understand how anti-capitalists have to be aware of the particularities of their national situation and adjust our strategy accordingly.

The ‘occupy’ movement is now alive and kicking in Britain, largely taking on the politics and image of the US original. In many ways this makes sense as resentments are similar: dominance of finance capital and massive bank bailouts and bonuses; political parties and media that refuse to reflect anti-austerity feeling and have little connection with grassroots movements; rising inequality with an ever smaller layer of super-rich dominating the world’s wealth. However, if the movement is to gain the mass popular appeal that it has done in certain parts of the US it will have to acknowledge that the key contradictions which connect the specific to the global in the UK are not exactly the same as across the Atlantic. The primary difference between the two countries is government.

The American movement’s relationship to Obama’s administration is complex. Many of the activists leading in Occupy Wall Street would have been caught up in the euphoria of Obama’s election campaign which mobilised unprecedented numbers of volunteers for rallies, leafleting and fundraising of all kinds. ‘Obamanation’ was the common sense response to years of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ and the ’08 banking crisis: ‘change you can believe in’.

In many ways the Occupy movement today is the alter-ego for the campaigners who were inspired and let down by Obama’s message of hope, unity and faith in the system. Now condemnation, vilification and resentment at the system and its beholders, the 1%, are the key themes. Rather than the clear aims and ambitions of the Obama movement – Obama achieving presidency – the declaration of the Occupy Wall Street movement contains broad swipes at capitalism from just about every perspective, with the driving message being that the ‘system has to go’ without any clearly defined plan for achieving this – or as a cynic might say, ‘change you can’t believe in’.

Such a transformation in consciousness from pre- to post- election doesn’t amount to Obama being the target for the protesters’ rage, however. Rarely is he the one on the receiving end of the home-made placards, and Obama himself has attempted to carefully use the movement’s message as a stick with which to beat the American right. This reflects strategic nous on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement: in the consciousness of the mass of progressive forces in American society Obama is still in many ways untouchable, as the alternative for them is unthinkable. Therefore

the feeling that Obama is trapped in a political system that cannot work for the people, that he is held to ransom by the system rather than an active perpetrator of it, is common sense.

This is, whether consciously or not, an acknowledgement on the part of the protest movement of the balance of forces in American society. The right has been on the offensive since the start of the banking crisis with big ‘Tea Party’ mobilisations that have found a voice in the Republican Party and the media. Whilst Obama had first resisted the austerity message, choosing the fiscal stimulus option instead, he has been forced back by the right. The Tea Party showed its muscle recently when what should have been a routine extension of the American debt limit became a national crisis at the behest of Tea-party sponsored Republican representatives. Obama had to announce new attacks on social services and welfare to get the debt limit increased or else America was facing a humiliating default.

The Tea Party movement’s success is a reflection of a combination of factors specific to the US: its declining dominance of the global state system, the fact that the crash of 2008 was centred on the US, an absence of any coherent anti-neoliberal message from the Left or trade unions and Obama’s victory in the last election. The ‘Occupy’ movement is playing a more important role than it is aware of. It is starting the long overdue process of shifting the balance of forces away from the right, as unions are forced to come in behind a radical message and fresh recruits join up inspired by the protest, as well as pushing back the Tea Party movement. If the movement was directed at Obama it’s highly unlikely any of this would have happened.

Con-Dems and the movementIn Britain we are faced with a fundamentally different administration. The Conservative-Liberal coalition was an ugly, unpopular compromise. The Tories were unable to win a majority due to a permanent minority of perhaps up to one third of the population who refused to be won over to the party of the rich despite the unpopularity of Brown and Blair’s New Labour. Nick Clegg’s Liberals had vowed to be different from the other parties and won voters over by tacking to the left of Labour on issues like Trident and tuition fees. Therefore when the Oxbridge boys had a lash up in the name of austerity in tough times it was widely seen as lacking a mandate, as being a sell-out on the part of the Lib-Dems and fear that

International:#occupy movement

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 11

Thatcher’s party was back in power. Regular references were made to the amount of cabinet members who were millionaires and came from Eton.

The coalition’s first serious test came in the mass movement that erupted against the rise in tuition fees. The Lib-Dems were reeling as the secretary responsible for the decision, Vince Cable, toyed with voting against it in parliament in the face of a riot at the Tory headquarters, hundreds of thousands marching across Britain and general revulsion at Nick Clegg’s betrayal. In the end the coalition managed to squeeze the bill through parliament. Since then the mood of distrust and impermanence has been prevalent in the coalition, especially as Lib-Dem support continues to be at rock bottom in opinion polls and their embarrassing loss in the AV referendum.

A bigger crisis, however, is that the coalition’s key strategy – austerity to ensure economic recovery – is failing. The IMF, as well as a senior Tory member of the Treasury and Mervyn King have all been willing to criticise Osborne’s economic policy of harsh austerity as the facts show that job losses and wage cuts in the public sector is leading people to buy less and not stimulating a private-sector recovery. The intensification of the European debt crisis is leading to panic stations as the austerity model looks increasingly illegitimate.

Therefore the government has lost credibility over the exact issue on which it staked its whole reputation. This is beginning to create greater tensions between the Lib Dems and the Tories, as the Lib Dems know that failure of economic recovery means electoral oblivion in 2015. Several leading Liberals have now started to make noises about a ‘Green New Deal’ as an escape from the disaster, but Osborne is unlikely to buy it and this only goes to dent the coalition’s credibility further.

Such tensions could snap if the economy once again plunges into the abyss. The response could be for the Lib Dems to pull the plug on the shaky coalition and try to pin the blame on the nasty Tories before the next election. Alternatively, intensified crisis could breed unity, the message that ‘we have to stand together at this difficult time’ could prevail.

Which direction the coalition takes- fight or flight- is highly dependent on whether the movement is willing to make the coalition’s life unbearable. Pressure on the government to resign over the abject failure of its austerity agenda must be our primary message as it unifies and radicalises the movement at one and the same time. This isn’t to take the movement away from its current strengths- internationalism, against the banks and inequality, for real democracy- it is to sharpen its focus on the weak points of the ruling class in Britain.

First as Tragedy…This argument should not just be made inside the left of the movement; the right needs to hear it as well. It is indisputable that the ‘occupy’ movement in Britain received far greater media attention and intrigue from the mass of society than the combined efforts of the STUC demonstration in Glasgow and the TUC protest in Manchester just two weekends previously. The message of the protest in

Glasgow was ‘Put People First’, and despite up to 15,000 marching behind this banner in torrential rain, the media were more excited by a few hundred in St Andrews Square arguing that the 1% has to go.

There is a lesson here. The message must connect to the anger within society, exploit the weaknesses of the ruling class and inspire them with a vision and inspiration for something different. In Lukacsian terms, it needs to connect the immediate questions with the totality of the system. ‘Put People First’ achieves none of these things: it doesn’t reflect the visceral anti Con-Dem hatred within Britain, it doesn’t put pressure on the coalition over its weak points (David Cameron could ostensibly say he is putting people first) and it doesn’t connect the struggle in Britain with the international movement.

Alternatively, Occupy Wall Street’s radical message is helping to rebuild the ailing American labour movement. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, in an article titled ‘What if working class Americans actually like Occupy Wall Street?’, reports that ‘the affiliate of the AFL-CIO that organizes workers from non-union workplaces, has signed up approximately 25,000 new recruits in the last week alone, thanks largely to the high visibility of the protests.’ Another Union Official adds that ‘We thought it was big when we got 20,000 members in a month during the Wisconsin protests. This shows how much bigger this is.’

Rebuilding the Trade Unions from political action on the streets is not unprecedented. After the defeat of the Chartist movement in 1848 there was over 30 years of low-level of class struggle, characterised by the ‘Craft Unions’ that represented workers rather than building fighting unions. The rise of New Unionism at the end of the 1880′s emerged out of two riots: one over home rule in Ireland and the other against unemployment. The rise of previously unorganised workers like the dockers and gas workers was based on protests through the streets of London, in the confidence that their strength lied in the solidarity of other workers rather than on the picket lines.

We don’t have to look to the past to see this model of social-unionism in Britain. The construction workers protests against massive cuts to pay have been marked by militancy on the streets, shutting down roads and occupying

‘selfridges’. This is how the working class can rebuild its confidence and consciousness- challenging the government on the streets.

If the strike on November 30th is to draw the whole of the working class behind it we need to learn from the strengths of the movements of 2011 and relate them to the specific situation in Britain. To get it right we must be clear about four things: the capitalist crisis is intensifying, austerity is failing and only making the crisis deeper,the Con-Dem government is weak because it is divided and staked everything on the success of austerity and, finally, we need mass action on the streets whether it be occupations or marches to draw the wider working class into the struggle.

But November 30th is over a month away. Greece could default at any time and we have a movement on the streets now that is challenging the system. 2011 may have been a year of revolutions and mass movements, but its not over yet. If we are to ‘reorder this world around us’ we have to take our opportunities as they arise. We should be aware of this given our response when the Lehmann Brothers crashed in 2008: Trade Union leaders retreated- a co-ordinated strike over pay was cancelled to stand together at a time of crisis. Of course, most of the Left lamented this decision but no alternative political response was seriously attempted. Those vital days when the whole system was in question and the masses fury at the bankers was felt by everyone was missed. The ruling class regrouped, finance capital regained its influence despite serious embarrassment, and embarked upon a jobs massacre followed by austerity. Neoliberalism didn’t just survive, it was intensified.

There is not much to be gained from dwelling on the impact of the ’occupy’ movement if it had occurred in late 2008. What we must get our heads around is that this time the stakes are even higher. A Lehmann Brothers mark two is on the horizon but this time whole states could go under; the Trade Union movement is once again set for co-ordinated action but this time millions will be out instead of hundreds of thousands. Unless we learn from our mistakes and the successes of the movements across the world, we may be on the receiving end of our very own Karl Marx’s prophetic words: ‘First as tragedy, then as farce’.

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 12

David Jamieson

IT MIGHT be churlish to pretend that the international wave of youth revolt began a year ago, in Britain, when the Tory party HQ was stormed by students. Yet because events since then have thrown that dramatic incident, and many earlier ones, into the shade it hardly seems to matter. Besides – thinking parochially – it was certainly the open of a new phase for young people in the U.K – the shock of sudden relevance on the continent, the bizarre spectacle of Greek students marching behind a banner proclaiming solidarity with their British contemporaries.

It must be stated, however, that our movement has a formative pre-history which

still conditions the ideas of the movement today. The alternative-globalisation or anti-capitalist movement which began in the late 90’s, marked the beginning of a new political cycle and set the intellectual tone for the radicalism thereafter. It reached crescendo in the international ant-war movement, nowhere stronger than in the UK, where millions marched and the radicalism spread deep into the youth prompting school and college walkouts throughout the country. The years of the shallow economic ‘boom’ were punctuated by continual youth radicalism in Europe – especially in countries of the so-called periphery like Portugal and Greece – but also in its ‘core’, notably in France with waves of protest and rioting amongst youth. Even as the continued imperial aggression in the Arab world promoted fierce resistance from Iraq to Lebanon so it issued an explosion of anger from the Mahalla textile town in Egypt.

A thousand other examples might be

cited. From these major contours rose a new mood amongst young people, more sentiment than theory. War is bad, ditto poverty and inequality. Just as foul are oppressive behaviours and attitudes – misogyny, racism homophobia and more. The root of the problem is an ill-defined capitalism and the hierarchical apparatus that supports it. The practice is to collapse this critique into strategy and tactics, so that the strategy of those opposed to inequality and hierarchy is to conduct themselves in the movement in a fashion equal and ‘horizontal’.

In the 12 or 13 short years of this political cycle several generations more or less beholden to these guiding notions have come and gone. The rapid rise and fall of

the consensus and those who carry it speaks to its essential weakness. These ideas are sufficient to win real victories but cannot sustain the movement through its inevitable hardships and dry spells, let alone allow it to escalate to the point of achieving fundamental revolutionary change.

But the latest upsurge is different. The radicalism more intense - its determination greater. The British November quickly gave way to a Tunisian December. The Arab world is inhabited by a generation of youth labouring under the weight of economic conditions imposed by the imperial powers and mediated through ossified dictatorships which could never allow space for dissent. Decades of pent up anger supplied the momentum for the most spectacular wave of revolutions since the fall of the eastern block – and the most significant since the revolutionary wave that ended the first world war.

There is little reason to compare this

historic moment to 1968. The background to those events could scarcely be more different from today – much the same could be said of the forces involved and ideas in motion. But for what it’s worth today’s events put those of 68 deep in the shade; that might be true even if at this point we were only discussing the events in the Arab world . 1968 proved to be a mostly self contained political cycle, in retreat near the world over by the middle of the 70’s. The chaos spread the world over by the economic crisis and governments attempts to contain it through austerity is likely creating the condition for decades of instability.

The 68 radicals left behind them artefacts – a plethora of political organisations and ideas. Those organisations had to endure decades in

the wilderness after the downturn and over time became insular and doctrinaire.

‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ So wrote Karl Marx though he may have been commenting on events somewhat more profound than the leftover left of today. Attempts to impose a strategy today based upon a reading of developments in 68 largely came to nought.

But the real problem is that our generation isn’t yet defining itself. The generation of 68 produced an enormous output in terms of books, pamphlets and periodicals all competing to define the meaning and mission of the generation and its struggles. Our movement must become more conscious of itself, weigh up its strengths and weaknesses and argue with itself about what we are doing and how we are doing it. That much at least we should take from a previous generation in the struggle.

Year 1 of the global youth revoltThe remarkable rise of protest movements across the planet in 2010-11 has drawn attention to the plight of the so-called ‘lost generation’. We must begin to define the politics of this.

Opinion: A Global Youth Revolt

Attempts to define a strategy today based upon a reading of developments in 68 will come to nought.

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 13

Interview: Professor Guy Standing

Precariat: The New Dangerous Class?Guy Standing, professor of economic security at Bath University, claims that precarious workers - insecure, temporary, casual - are the ‘new dangerous class’. But how does his idea differ from earlier ideas about the working class? James Foley interviews the iconoclastic author of Precariat.JF: Kevin Doogan has argued that apparent changes in the labour market are not changes to the fundamentals, merely an ideological and psychological effect of neoliberalism. What do you think about this?

GS: Basically, anybody who says there haven’t been major changes in the labour market hasn’t been doing their research. In a series of books, I’ve documented how there’s been the growth of insecurity of different types, in labour markets not just in this country but across the world. Mainly this reflects a deliberate policy of labour market flexibility which has been adopted as policy since the advent of globalisation in the early 1980s. And basic this flexibility means to employers: ‘we want to reduce our labour costs because we’ve got to become more competitive with the emerging market economies.’ Nothing very profound of that, of course – this has been widely accepted for decades since the beginning of liberal labour markets.

If you treble the world’s labour supply, as was done in the 1980s, with all these people available to work for a fraction of the price of people in the rich countries, then obviously that puts downward pressure on wages and working conditions. So government’s opted for what they euphemistically call ‘labour market flexibility’, which meant rolling back employment security, giving management more control over job structures; it meant driving wages downwards, and most importantly chipping away at access to enterprise benefits for this growing precariat.

JF: One of the ideas that often comes up is that precariousness has always been the existential condition of the working class under capitalism. The post-War period is the exception, it is argued, and precariousness has been the rule for the working class throughout history. How do you respond to that?

GS: Don’t forget, the industrial capitalism that developed in the 19th century, basically transferred workers from a rural to an urban setting. We did not have a vast pool of urban workers before that. That was something that was forged in the late 19th and early 20th century. So it was a new phenomenon, anyhow. And in that period, many of the emerging people who went to the mills or the mines or the factories, still had one leg in the rural areas. In the working class, there was huge suffering that went with the development of a proletariat, but that was the consequence of a situation that was also unique. So to say that this is the traditional way of the working class, you’ve only got a hundred years you are comparing it with, whereas before that you’ve got perhaps two thousand years. So anything could be seen as unique.

Basically, at the beginning of the twentieth century, your emerging proletariat was coming into industrial capitalism. The managers of capitalism wanted a disciplined, proletarianised workforce that took the accepted regimentation of the clock adopted by supervisors, by direct managers, and they subordinated labour. Now, that period went on into the 1940s. And then you have the emergence of the welfare state, trusts, and labour regulations.

I worked for the International Labor Organisation (ILO), which was set up after the First World War essentially to give labourers decent working conditions. From 1919 onwards, you have all these conventions to give labour security to the proletariat. And your welfare state was geared to that proletariat.

The trouble was that it was always sexist, it was always labourist – in the sense that it was looking after only that core working class of labourists. And the deal was, essentially, and the unions accepted it, that in return for giving us labour security we are going to accept subordination in the workplace. And profits

‘Anyone who says there haven’t been major changes in the labour market hasn’t been doing their research’

‘It was always labourist, it was always sexist. The deal was, and the unions accepted it: in return for economic security we will accept subordination at work’

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 14

will continue flowing and so on.That was an aberration, in many ways,

because women were always treated as second class citizens – essentially, as a labour reserve – and it was not a model that was going to last if we had an open economic system. It could only work if there was closed economies for a certain period. Because labour costs were taken out of international trade. Once you liberalised, that model couldn’t possibly work. That model was doomed. In any case, it’s not a model I regard as progressive. It was always sexist, it always accepted subordination, and it accepted management’s right to manage. It was very limited and of its time.

But now we have a completely different ballpark. What makes it much more exciting, if you are an egalitarian, is that you say: now, you have this huge crisis, where the old labourist model has failed. It was very progressive for its time, we don’t want to dismiss that. But now, we’re looking to a new form of progressive politics. And that’s what I think is very exciting. Because we now know that the old social democratic model is not appropriate to the 21st century. We know that the neoliberal model will inevitably lead to extreme inequalities and extreme insecurities. So you’ve got two failures, and here we are discussing what’s the options now.

The story move forward if we consider this in terms of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. I’m very pleased, because his daughter has endorsed my books. Even though I’m very critical of his somewhat teleological conception of the great transformation, the tools that he produced I have found very useful for analysing today.

JF: Do you mean to say the we are moving, in cyclical fashion, towards new rounds of regulation?

GS: No, I don’t think that’s feasible. I think it’s a fool’s paradise, to try and return to closed economies. The cat is already out of the bag. The situation we have now is that we have created this precariat. The precariat consists of all these people who have insecure labour, insecure lives, lack of any access to all the state benefits and enterprise benefits that were built up in the 20th century, and there’s no chance that you can go back to full time jobs. Nor should we try to. That’s not what we as progressives should be about. We should be liberating ourselves from labour, rather than subordinating ourselves to return to a state of full-time jobs. It’s the wrong agenda. We should be thinking much more of giving workers – and everybody is a worker, remember – a sense of security in which they can develop their labour and their work.

JF: About ten years ago, it is arguable that the prospects look more promising for a precarious workers movement, in terms of things like the World Social Forum and the Euromayday marches. Some might argue that recently the question of precarious workers has gone off the political agenda rather than onto it. What would you say to that?

GS: I think the Euromayday movement is growing, not shrinking. And I think all the demonstrations this year in the squares – in Syntagma, in Madrid, in Milan, and now the occupy movement – I think these are still the

activities of what historians call primitive rebels, in the sense that a lot of people know what they are against, but not what we should be doing as an alternative. But I think that’s changing quite rapidly. I think a vision is emerging, of all these groups.

It helps, actually, that there’s a vacuum on both sides of the political spectrum in the mainstream, because social democrats know they have no clothes, they have no strategy, they are losing like mad in all the elections…The Right has only gone more right, and now they have austerity and this utilitarian ethos they are putting up, where all the conformist middle class crap is matched by harsh measures against those who are non-conformist down at the bottom. You can see the logic of that is leading to more and more punitive measures against those at the lower ends of the labour market, criminalising huge numbers of people, and so on. You’ve got all of that leading to an impasse, because they can’t go on forever in that direction, while social democrats are floundering in the back.

That actually helps, because now the debate is going to be much more progressive. People on the Left – the thinkers, the activists, the groups – are actually starting to say: ‘we can’t go back; we don’t want the Right to win; so we have to be proactive.’

JF: Do you think we can go round traditional trade union questions of collective bargaining and so on? Can we just argue for the abolition of labour through political movements, is that your point?

GS: No, not that. Labour will always continue. What we’ve got to realise is that we should treat labour instrumentally. We need to labour, society needs to labour…

JF: Does society need ‘wage’ labour though?

GS: Yes, I understand. The point is, we need to stop thinking we are going to find our happiness in ‘jobs’ – that’s a fool’s paradise, all of these people who talk about getting people into jobs, because jobs make you happy…90 percent of people who take jobs hate them, they don’t take them because they need them, because they need the income, and they get on with them the best they can. Now, of course, we need better working conditions, and we should continue collective bargaining and the rest of it. But I think it’s wrong to think, if you are an egalitarian – and I am – that you are going to get rapid diminution of inequality through collective bargaining. I believe in collective bargaining, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think we’ll achieve much if we rely on it, because the logic of global capitalism is that if we push up real wages, jobs will move, and profits will shift somewhere else. So let’s accept that

But, you’ve got to remember, coming back to Polanyi, that we are at a crisis point, and we’re going to see a global transformation. This means that we are now going to see a period of progressive politics where we can pull back the economic system into society, where we can ‘re-embed’, as Polanyi would put it. Every forward march in history, has a) been

different, and b) has been about the interests of the emerging mass class. It has never been the same mass class. The mass class that is approaching now is what I call the precariat.

JF: How do you define the ‘precariat’ against previous definitions of the working class?

GS: The precariat consists of people who are expected to be providers of flexible, adaptable labour, but also to do a lot of ‘work for labour’ outside of the labour relation. Your old proletariat was exploited ‘in’ the workplace. Your precariat today is increasingly exploited outside the workplace. That is a fundamental difference, a huge change. The proletariat was expected to be disciplined by the clock, by the management, to work eight hours a day or ten hours a day, whatever it was. But was expected only to be a stable, full-time labour supply. Whereas, the precariat is expected to be adaptable, insecure, to move around, and to concentrate on constantly updating their labour power. We are told by all these gurus and consultants that everybody should spend 15 percent of your time every year updating your skills – at your expense, of course. So, basically, we are meant to be flexible.

You are not expected to have a secure sense of occupation, whereas in the old days you were a mason, you were an engineer, whatever it was. You got your training in the early part of your adult life, and that would keep you for the rest of your life. Those who had craft skills kept them throughout their life and gradually accumulated more seniority. Today, the precariat doesn’t have that privilege. The problem with the precariat is that it has no trajectory of moving into a proletarian existence. It isn’t a proto-proletariat, in the Marxian sense. It’s meant to be flexible, it’s meant to be insecure, it’s mainstream. It’s not a lumpen category, it’s not an underclass. The precariat is not an underclass – it is wanted by global capitalism, it is central to its production system.

But also, an important thing when you are thinking about class analysis, is to think about consciousness. If you talk to, particularly young people, in the precariat, they don’t have the same set of objectives that the old working class would have. In fact, you find that in many meetings they reject many of the old labourist traditions.

JF: Is the paradigmatic precariat worker in the flexible end of the service sector – call centres, cleaners, bars, supermarkets – or is it, as in some definitions, a pool of underpaid but educated cultural and artistic workers who have been forced down into the lower ranks of labour?

GS: My take on this is that, at the moment, and we reached a similar stage in the emergence of the industrial proletariat, the precariat is internally divided into different varieties. There are people who are coming in from the old working class communities, and from old working class jobs, who are drifting into a precarious labour situation. Those people are ex-working class, if you like. Then there’s the middle group – and they listen to some very

Interview:Guy Standing’s Precariat

We’re going to see the emergence of new forms of agency to overcome capitalist competition

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 15

ugly voices, some of these people. They are very atavistic, they may listen to neo-populist and neo-fascist messages, because they are easily led to think that migrants are the cause of their problems or that some other group is the cause of their problems…

JF: A lot of these Occupy people are into odious figures like Ron Paul…GS: Exactly. And then you have another group that consists somewhat of migrants, who treat their labour essentially as instrumental and get their life outside of the labour market, and tends to be politically passive. And then you a third group of young educated people who have status frustration because they thought they were going to come out of education into a career that would meet their aspirations – and they are not finding it.

JF: So we have downward social mobility?

GS: Yes, downward social mobility – and people treated as para something, para-legal, para-medic…These jobs offer no social mobility. So you have all these different groups, but they all experience the same thing, this sense of social insecurity. And they are all treated as if they should be providing flexible labour supply. But they have differing consciousness.

JF: Traditionally, according to the Marxist category, one of the purposes of the capitalist factory system is to ‘socialise’ labour. The skills of collective working, teamwork, and so on, were seen as fundamental to the political organisational capacity of the proletariat. Is your thesis on the precariat more about the so-called ‘individualisation’ and ‘risk exposure’ of labour and lifestyles, as described by sociologists like Beck and Giddens?

GS: I know that argument, but I think it’s both, in the sense that we obviously have had individualisation in the labour market, in the sense of contractualising, decentralising, and so on. Individualised risk is obviously much greater. But the challenge before us is to say, going on with my Polanyian framework, is that every great forward march is about the emerging class. Not only that, but it always involves new forms of collective action and struggle. You’ll never get a forward march without collective struggle. So if you have an individualising process in the labour process, which we do have, you’ve got to have a collective re-action to that. What we have to realise as progressives, as egalitarians, is that this doesn’t mean that the same form of collective action takes place each time. The old labour unions were very progressive in the early twentieth century, fantastic, and we don’t want to be too critical of that. But they are not appropriate, in that form, in this stage of struggle. What we’re going to see, therefore, is the emergence of different forms of association, where we overcome the tendencies that the capitalist economy has, of making everyone compete against everybody else…

But that doesn’t mean that our enemy is always capital directly. That is something that’s very difficult for the Left to understand. We need, for example, to see the growth of what I call ‘collaborative bargaining’ alongside collective bargaining. What does that mean? It means that the precariat must have a

voice in all the agencies of the bargaining system. And much of the bargaining goes on between occupational groups. For example, the doctors in the medical professions often get a large part of the rental surplus from the labour process at the expense of the nurses

and auxiliaries. The nurses get benefit at the expense of the auxiliaries. So, to portray the struggle as merely between labour and capital oversimplifies dramatically, because what happens is that you get a pattern of exploitation and oppression very easily reproduced which serves the purpose of the salariat and capital…

JF: How is this different from the traditional problem of collective bargaining, breaking down the barriers between skilled and unskilled workers, as we saw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the passage from craft to industrial unionism?

GS: This is different because the precariat is not even integrated into the production process. They are different forms, there needs to be a different strategy. But it’s similar in conceptualising it, because it’s a double struggle. The trouble is that labour unions have been forced, understandably, to look after the interests of their members, who are a shrinking part of the workforce. So your precariat is coming out here, and it has not been incorporated into the process. And, at the moment, the collective voice of the precariat is still very weak.

So the point is that we need new forms of collective action, and this is going to involve new types of collective organisation. We need collective struggle. What we’re seeing, I think, is the gradual emergence of a new type of association, through the NGO developments. Now, we know that these can easily be turned into a vehicle for the middle class, we don’t want to idealise the NGOs. But we see a lot of these organisations, and the organisations that do the most to suppress any form of precariat organisation are the labour unions.

I think the struggle of the Left is to become the voice of the precariat. Only if you start to look at the world from the perspective of the precariat do you start asking the relevant questions. If you think in the old labourist, in the ‘old’ socialist model, then you think about

collective bargaining, you think about labour regulations, you think about profits versus wages…You think of the standard things. I really believe that we have to change the language and change the images of progressive politics. I don’t think the old language gets you too far, which doesn’t mean that the old values are wrong. The old values are what we have today. Anyone on the Left should have a Renaissance set of values coupled with an egalitarian set of values. In the sense that we should want people to have a sense of autonomy and freedom. We lost that debate in the twentieth century. For some reason, the Left gave the image that it wasn’t interested in freedom, and that was a failure. But now we have an opportunity to put our values in a different, radical way. Don’t forget that the Left has always been about reinventing radicalism. I think we are seeing a birth of it. We have to be imaginative as progressives. That means we have to look at our past and say, we can’t use the old language in the same way, but it doesn’t mean that we are abdicating our values. We’ve got to fight for egalitarianism now.

The last point I want to make is that on the Left is that we need respect for each other. Too often we are trying to find faults in ourselves rather than actually trying to build a new progressive politics. But I’m optimistic.

www.internationalsocialist.org.uk

Too often we try to see faults in the Left rather than getting on with building progressive politics

Guy Standing is professor of economic security at the University of Bath.The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class was published in April 2011 by Bloomsbury Academic

Issue 5 | International Socialist | December 2011 16

It was called ‘The Friday of One Demand’ and it turned into one of the biggest demonstrations in Tahrir since the fall

of Mubarak in February. It was also one of the most united demonstrations since the fall of Mubarak. It was made up of the youth coalitions, the Popular Committees, the left and, importantly, the Muslim Brotherhood – and hundreds of thousands of Egyptians not closely allied to any organisation. There was indeed ‘one demand’: that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the body that took over from Mubarak, leave power in favour of an elected government. In another parallel with the 18 days of the original insurrection the demonstration in Tahrir was matched by demonstrations in Alexandria, Suez and other Egyptian cities.

After the demonstration in Tahrir, emboldened by its size, a relatively small group of protestors, among them those injured in fighting during the 18 days, stayed on to occupy the square. On Saturday the hated Central Security Forces (CSF) and the police started attacking the demonstrators and attempted to clear the square. This began a battle which lasted all day, all night and into Sunday. Thousands of protestors returned to Tahrir to battle with the police, including

the Ultras, supporters of Cairo’s two football clubs. In yet another echo of the 18 days these normally fierce rivals joined forces to fight the police, as they did in the days of the ‘camel battle’. The independent unions joined the crowds. The crackdown was brutal and lethal. New forms of tear-gas, manufactured in the

US, were used. So were rubber bullets and, in a new departure, buckshot. At least eight protestors are dead and two more have lost an eye, one of them in fighting in Alexandria. Reports, likely to be an underestimate, say that 700 have been injured.

Revolutionary Dynamics To understand what is at stake in this latest phase of the revolution we need to be clear about what has gone before. Firstly we need to be accurate about what caused the fall of Mubarak in the first place.

There were three forces which broke Mubarak’s rule: the mass protests of millions of Egyptians, the escalation of strike action in the last days before Mubarak fell and the emerging

splits in the armed forces. These three elements were of course closely interrelated, but they were all necessary for the regime to crack. The demonstrations were the bedrock of the revolution: they destroyed the police and the CSF, the state’s most important line of defence, in days of open fighting, especially

on Friday 28th January. And, after two weeks of mass mobilisations, they gave workers the confidence to begin a wave of strike action. But even the demonstrations and the strikes would not have succeeded if the armed forces had not begun to fragment. We now know from Libya, Syria, Yemen and other places that if the armed forces agree to continue to fight for the regime the revolutionary process will be much longer and bloodier – even where there are general strikes, as there have been in Yemen and Syria. But in Egypt the fraying of the armed forces’ loyalty began early: air force officers refused to strafe Tahrir Square in the first week of the revolution, as Mubarak ordered them to do. Senior officers went on TV to guarantee that they would not attack demonstrators on the eve

Analysis:The Movement in Egypt

EGYPT: A SECOND REVOLUTION BEGINSEgypt is once again alive with revolutionary fervour, as protesters confront the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) over democracy. John Rees assesses the state of Egypt.

It is critical at this stage that armed forces of the state are defeated, split, or rendered inoperative

of the great day of mass mobilisation, Tuesday 1st February. And in the days immediately before Mubarak fell middle ranking officers, in and out of uniform, were joining the crowds in Tahrir. No regime can stand a simultaneous onslaught from mass mobilisations by millions, strikes and the threat of fragmentation among the armed forces.

The OppositionSome vulgar Marxist accounts of the revolution attempt to reduce the fall of Mubarak simply to industrial action by workers. This is wrong because it misunderstands what happens in the opening phase of a revolution and it prevents us from understanding the post-Mubarak political landscape in Egypt. Most revolutions do not open with a fully mobilised working class as the key force in the revolution. Even the February revolution in Russia in 1917 was not like this. On the contrary, most revolutions start because a regime, or its figurehead (the Tsar, Mubarak), has lost legitimacy among a wide section of society, including much of the middle class and even some of the ruling class. It is critical in this process, indeed almost definitional of a successful revolution, that the armed forces of the state are defeated, split or in some other way rendered at least partially inoperative. This process cannot be understood as merely epiphenomena of strike action. In Egypt it had two causes. One was pressure from below, both from the mass demonstrations and the strikes. But it also resulted from the ruling classes’ desire to save the regime, and critically the unity of the army, by throwing Mubarak to the ‘mob’.

Thus the outcome of the first phase of the Egyptian revolution produced a stand-off between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the ‘25th January Revolution’. The revolution could count the fall of the dictator and his subsequent trial and that of his family and other regime figures, the dismemberment of the police, and the subsequent sacking of the security forces’ headquarters in Cairo and Alexandria among its victories. Most importantly, after the fall of Mubarak, the level of strike action and the formation of independent unions rose almost exponentially. The initial victory of the revolution swept millions of workers into action and made their presence much more central to the continued fate of the revolution than they had been in its opening phase. Again, the same process happened in Russia in 1917.

But the regime has also regrouped. SCAF’s strategic aim is to move quickly to a weak electoral process which will construct a facade of civilian government behind which it will still exercise considerable power, as the army has long done in Egyptian society. The army has tried to enact a law that bans strikes and protests. It has arrested some 12,000 activists and tried them in military, not civilian, courts. Most recently, in a signal case, it jailed well known activist and blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah. And the army has repeatedly attacked demonstrators in Tahrir, including the Women’s Day demonstration on the 8th March, demonstrations by Coptic Christians and by protestors outside the Israeli embassy. Even the parliamentary elections which are set to begin this month will take 3 months to complete! All this has exhausted the considerable political capital that the army accumulated by refusing to open fire on the revolution during the 18

days. Then the popular slogan was ‘the people and the army are one hand’. Now the slogan is ‘the people demand the Field-Marshall must go’, a reference to Field-Marshall Tantawi, the head of the SCAF government.

This opposition to SCAF, and the calls for a Second Revolution to remove it, were becoming louder in the early summer with some important mobilisations in Tahrir. But it has reached a new peak now. Partly this is because the deputy Prime Minister, Ali El-Selmi, made proposals which reserved special powers for the army in any new constitutional arrangements. This helped push the Muslim Brotherhood back into the camp of the opposition. The Muslim Brotherhood has at crucial junctures since the fall of Mubarak sided with the regime against the protestors in Tahrir. They, like the regime, want a quick electoral process but for their own reasons: they are the longest standing and best organised opposition force and they think that they will gain most from the regime’s electoral timetable. But El-Selmi’s proposals, that initially included two controversial articles that would have granted the Egyptian army exclusive powers over its budget and internal affairs, shielding it from parliamentary oversight, were a last straw. The Brotherhood are vacillating between supporting SCAF and supporting new mobilisations according to their calculations about whether the regime is allowing them enough room to emerge successfully from the convoluted electoral process. These will not even allow a President to be elected before 2013. To attract Muslim Brotherhood supporters permanently to the side of the revolution (and the youth wing of the Brotherhood has already split away over the parent body’s opposition to the summer mobilisations in Tahrir) will need continuing momentum to be generated by the left and the workers movement.

‘Dual Power’So what are the conditions under which this new confrontation with the regime could be successful? One thing is certain: a simple combination of socialist propaganda and strikes, no matter how desirable these things are, will not do the trick on their own. There are plenty of both already and it is not visibly taking the movement forward. There is a vital third element that is missing: an alternative centre of power which institutionalises the forces of the revolution. There is, in a sense, already dual power in Egypt. The army is one source of power and the other source of power is the ‘Republic of Tahrir’ (i.e. the constant mobilisation of revolutionary forces including, but not limited to, the demonstrations in Tahrir). But the army has (and is rebuilding) state power as its weapon and the revolutionary forces are not creating their own institutional form of power, like the workers, soldiers and peasant councils of the Russian revolution or, even, the National Assembly of the French Revolution. One of the reasons that the Tunisian revolution has made a faster transition away from the old regime is because it did at least create some form of popular representation, whatever the weaknesses of the regime that has emerged so far. Such an institution would make the revolution stronger by allowing it to co-ordinate and concentrate its forces and political demands. It would allow the working class to emerge as the

leader of all the oppressed and exploited and not just act as (and be portrayed by SCAF as) a sectional economic interest. It would allow revolutionary socialist forces the platform to get their strategy and tactics heard by a far larger audience.

Revolutions disorganise the whole of society, including pre-existing revolutionary organisations. One might almost be tempted to say that revolutionaries can deal with anything except a revolution. This is to be expected. Those preparing for revolution in advance have only past revolutions to guide them. Yet each new revolution is inevitably a combination of old patterns with new patterns which are absolutely unique and which require fresh thought and new solutions. This tension between the old and the new tends to split revolutionary parties during revolutions. Famously the Bolsheviks were divided almost to the point of destruction over whether or not to oppose the Provisional government that emerged from the February revolution and to call for a second revolution, as well as over a host of other strategic and tactical issues. The main revolutionary organisation in Egypt split in the years approaching the revolution and has further fragmented during it. This need not be a fatal weakness as long as the revolutionaries who are clear about what needs to be done assemble their own forces and those of their sympathisers around a strategy to take the revolution forward at this critical juncture.

Critical to this development is the relationship between the most advanced fighters of the revolution and the mass of the oppressed and exploited in Egyptian society. Tamer Wageeh of the Socialist Renewal Current highlights a problem which also exists in the global anti-capitalist movement. He says that those who began the sit-in in the square on Friday are heroic fighters but they have little strategic sense of how to connect their fight with a wider mobilisation of workers and the oppressed. He says the revolutionary vanguard has to patiently explain its case against SCAF, and against liberal strategies of just pressurising SCAF into a better electoral process, to wider layers of the workers movement and Egyptian society. Tamer also reports that the debate about creating a national institution which can become an organising focus for the revolution’s forces is now in train in Egypt.

In short that strategy should be: no compromise with SCAF; for a Popular Assembly of all revolutionary forces; full support for the workers struggles; for workers to take a political lead in defending every oppressed and exploited section of society against the SCAF government. If these developments, or something like them, do not take place soon then the counter-revolution will gain an advantage, perhaps a decisive advantage.

John Rees is a member of Counterfire.

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n30British Politics:N30 Strike Action

At the time of writing, two million workers are set to strike according to the union ballots already in. So far

teachers lead the way with UCU, ATL, NUT, EIS and the NAHT all reporting overwhelming ‘yes’ votes along with PCS and Unison. Providing the current trend continues, twenty-two unions in total could be on strike, bringing out three million public sector workers on November 30th.

November 30th is not comparable to the eight day general strike of 1926, dubbed ‘Red Friday’, which saw a Labour government bought to its knees and a country at a standstill. And it is not like previous ‘winters of discontent’ in 1978-79 where 39 million working days were lost in both years. In order to rival these winters, the 14 major unions would have to be on strike for more than two weeks. What November 30th can be is a significant step in the fight against the government’s austerity programme which is attempting to make the public sector pay with its pensions and jobs for the economic crisis.

Hearts and Minds It is impossible to ‘sort things out’ through negotiation, as media commentators, politicians and even some trade unionists have claimed, with a government intent on class war. The recent suggestion by Francis Maude that there could be a token 15 minute strike is laughably derisory. But a lot of workers are still not convinced that the Unions should ‘give up’ on negotiations with the government. Not enough people are members of a union now, and the ones who are still feel alienated and disaffected by the Unions and even by the cuts. A lot of this is hidden behind an illusion which is being created by the media and politicians. It is even being created by the unions themselves – a sizeable number of trade union members claiming they did not even know there would be a ballot for strike action.

However the truth is it is not just the public sector that will be affected as the government scrambles to please the IMF and the ECB, with recent announcements that Osborne will fail to reach his deficit reduction targets by the next election. As this uncontrollable crisis - which has now claimed two European

governments - persists, prices will continue to rise, jobs in across the public and private sector will continue to be shed and more misery will be heaped on ordinary working people. Governments will continue with impunity to cut the welfare state needed to help people at their time of crisis in order to keep corrupt and self serving banks afloat and the numbers on the digital screens of stock exchanges rising.

As the government and its friends in the city will attempt to portray N30 as a day of the greedy public sector worker demanding their pensions from the poorer private sector taxpayer, the economic crisis is hitting the private and public sector worker equally and it is the bankers and the millionaires cabinet that are being greedy and demanding money from the ordinary worker of the economy as a whole to maintain their lifestyles. The fact is the top 10% of earners in which the government and the bosses lie has seen their incomes rise four times more than the average worker over the past 10 years, it should be them that pay.

November 30th must be portrayed as a carnival of resistance against austerity, the governments that implement that austerity and ultimately the economic system which causes these crises – capitalism. Whilst not immediately apparent to a lot of people, day by day we are seeing the systemic, all encompassing nature of this crisis. There are no solutions proposed by those who

claim to be the experts, and it is not just the economy which suffers, it is also democracy as technocrats replace elected representatives at the wishes of the ECB and IMF. Ed Miliband may talk about a new ethical breed of capitalism, but it is quite clear that allowing ownership within the economy has bred

nothing but feral monopolies intent on gaining at the expense of the majority of people.

The ResistanceAdditionally, November 30th is not happening in isolation to other forms of resistance. From a British trade union perspective this marks the fourth major action after March 26th, June 30th and October 1st against government plans. These significant actions must be placed in the wider movement against the crisis.

As well as the trade union movement’s protests and strikes we have seen major protests against tuition fees and riots after police murdered Mark Duggan, subsequently highlighting the dire state of urban Britain caused by years of neglect. International resistance is escalating; people have taken to town squares in Spain and there have been rolling general strikes and a collapse of state control in Greece. Cross the Atlantic and you will observe student militancy in Chile against privatisation and an eruption of anger in the USA which initially witnessed the occupations of town halls and more recently parks near financial centres, the influence of which is being felt in the occupation outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

The combined effect of all this is a growing movement against the principle of austerity worldwide – people are rapidly tiring of

On November 30th, nearly 3 million workers will strike to save public sector pensions, in a major protest against Con-Dem austerity measures. Phil Neal and Sarah Collins on the impact of N30.

November 30th must be a carnival of resistance against austerity

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working day in and day out for a basic wage that barely covers their own necessities while being forced to hand over what little they have to bail a small class of people who are their bosses, bank owners and elected representatives, out of their crisis.

This movement is taking on forms not familiar or expected compared to economic crises of before. Whilst millions are set to strike on N30, there are many in public and private sectors who do not automatically see their workplace as a place of resistance.

However, as the demonstrations on March 26th and elsewhere have shown, people do look to the street for resistance. Generations that are now being radicalised in the camps of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy LSX must unite with those on picket lines to fuse the political demands for democracy with the economic demands for better jobs, pay, pensions and conditions. This is what N30 must begin to do. This has already been seen in Occupy Wall Street to great effect with trade unionists joining marches and walking out of their workplaces in solidarity. Union membership grew as a direct result.

N30 and the ResistanceTaking the resistance seen outwith the workplace into the workplace can overcome the problems that mean N30 is not a general strike and is only a swipe at the government, all be it a significant first blow that can lead to further action and raise the idea that it is possible to fight back and fight to win.

The low ballot turnouts even in unions such as PCS, whose leader Mark Serwotka has been a prominent figure in posing an alternative to austerity show the necessity for this to happen, and through a broader movement not limited to a fight over pensions but a fight against the entire global austerity programme, people can begin to take the confidence exhibited on the street into their workplaces.

For those not in the public sector this

is particularly key. Whole layers of youth radicalised by the anti war movement and the protests over tuition fees now find themselves in precarious work in bars, call centres and agencies up and down the country. Whilst their instinct might be to return to the streets, occupy banks and set up tents, their energy must also be bought into the workplace to energise old union branches, create new branches but most importantly create a spirit of resistance in the new mass workplaces of the 21st century and against the most brutal of employers who for so long have wreaked more havoc on pay, conditions and jobs than a government could ever dream of.

It is these new workers, the so-called ‘precariat’, who must be encouraged to join trade unions in order to swell the picket lines and further the resistance. Until more people in these precarious industries join organised resistance in workplaces we have to recognise that the level of militancy is simply not high enough across every sector to have an ‘all out’ strike yet.

Nonetheless, it would be a grave mistake to view November 30th as simply an industrial dispute: public sector strike for public sector pensions. It is a political and tactical strike against the government, a strike in support of the welfare state and for the survival of our class. That is why we need to gear up for this day by providing a wave of solidarity, protest, occupations and actions. The length and breadth of the movement can, and must, be involved.

What Next?A strike on this scale requires a strong rank and file element to ask: what next? We need to come out of N30 with more organisation, better communication and with the possibility to raise the stakes further in the fight against the ConDems. We can only achieve this if we think strategically: if we want to bring down the government, we need to build up to N30 and

use it to create the organisation and confidence among our class to make Britain ungovernable for the ConDems.

One manner in which to bridge the gap between the trade unions, who are bound by bureaucracy and draconian anti-union laws, and the student and Occupy movements is through campaigns like Coalition of Resistance. Coalition of Resistance can focus on action and activism to prepare the battleground for the weeks and months after N30. Coalition of Resistance must be an anti-cuts campaign with an alternative to the austerity package being offered across the country. Instead of being on the defensive all the time, we need to start making the campaign offensive.

We know that N30 is not just about pensions, but the only way to ‘sort out’ the government is to wage class war on them. We need to fight every inch of the way to ensure that pressure mounts to make these strikes, and the action following them, the biggest and most militant it possibly can be, rather than simply a bargaining chip for negotiation. N30 is not just a call to public sector workers, but to every one of us who wants to stop the cuts and bring down the government.

Resistance to austerity in Greece and France started with governmental attacks on public sector pensions; we must learn from the strikes across Europe, linking with European organisations and trade unions involved with building the demonstrations and strikes in order to build international solidarity on the question of anti-austerity.

And so the battle lines have been drawn. We know our weapon: it is mass solidarity. A mass movement against the austerity agenda coupled with millions taking industrial action is our greatest asset. This will take a lot of hard work in all our capacities – not just as revolutionary socialists but as anti-cuts campaigners, as trade unionists, individually and collectively. There is a lot to fight for and a lot to win. We cannot be complacent.

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The landscape of Scottish politics has been transformed in only a few short months. At the beginning of 2011 the script was know by all – Labour would easily win the May elections and Scottish independence would be off the agenda for a generation – and not a pundit or poll cold be found to say otherwise. Fast-forward twelve months and it appears that along the way the participants lost the script. Polling data on the question of support for independence – previously seen as unchangeable - is fluctuating wildly. A short while ago ComRes found that 49% of Scots backed independence (up 11 points since May) while those against fell by 9 points to a new low of just 37%. It also suggested popular support for independence amongst Labour voters and also support by a majority of female voters. This was the news the nationalists had been waiting for. Everything was falling into place.

But if anyone understands the volatility of an opinion poll it is Alex Salmond. And the most recent poll conducted by Progressive Scottish Opinion found that 53% of those asked were against the break up of Britain, with only 28% in favour.

The most recent polls were conducted in the context of heated exchanges between Holyrood and Westminster. The Chancellor George Osborne launched a series of attacks on the SNP administration accusing it of blocking foreign investment due to instability caused by the prospect of independence. This was not just his opinion – but was supposedly backed up by a number of private conversations with investors. However the sabre-rattling backfired on Osborne. When asked to name a single company that would not invest, his lips remained sealed. While the SNP were all too eager to produce a document signed by all and sundry opposing the Chancellors economic policies and its affects on economic growth.

The biggest cause of anger is the date – or lack of one – for the referendum itself. The highest echelons of the SNP are still debating how the referendum should be framed and whether or not to include an extra question on devolution max. And most importantly when would be the strategically soundest date to ensure maximum support. As a result Cameron is coming under increasing pressure to pre-empt Salmond and call the referendum himself – a demand that is causing consternation in nationalist quarters. However Salmond has failed to respond with his usual gusto and vigour. Perhaps the first sign of

weakness since the collapse of the ‘arc of prosperity’ in 2008. The reality is that until the SNP finalise their independence stratagey in its entierety, they will be hamstrung in their responses to Cameron, Osborne and some of the more obsequious elements of New Labour.

But responding to ape like jibes from the Chancellor will not be what ultimately wins or loses the referendum. And Salmonds general stratagey is flawed. What became clear at this years SNP conference was that they wish to emphasise the lack of change that independence would bring. Gerry Hassan recently suggested that the SNP are attempting to position independence as ‘an expression of traditional Scotland, as being about continuity and preservation, rather than fundamental change…a kind of ‘devolution max plus’’.

He goes on to say: ‘One senior SNP politician once told me, ‘All independence entails is extending the Scotland Act until it covers all Scottish domestic life’. They then sat back satisfied with the straightforwardness of it, ‘It’s that simple’ they concluded. Such an approach explicitly positions independence as a politics of gradualism and incremental change, and as the child of devolution.’

There is a fundamental problem here. Support for the SNP has grown as a result of the feeling that Scotland must break from the status quo, a sentiment which the SNP have tapped into. It is this that allowed them to capture a number of seats in Labour heartlands in the May elections.

But while the SNP have developed a flawed stratagey, it is clear that the forces who will coalesce to form the No campaign are in complete disarray. The Scottish Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are barely worth mentioning. They command no authority in Scottish society and are either hated or the butt of numerous jokes – often both. The natural leaders of the campaign are Labour. But the dearth of talent within the organisation has been exposed by the current leadership elections. Having suffered their worst election result in Scotland since 1931, the party members enjoy the prospect of their organisation being led by either an unrepentant right-wing Blairite, a political unknown or one of the chief stratagest of the worst election campaign in decades.

The reality is that none of the organisations in the no campaign continue to maintain any meaningful form of social base within Scottish society. The Conservatives, the traditional voice of the Scottish landed elites, has seen its electoral base and influence

shrivel to a bitterly reactionary rump. The Liberals have been electorally wiped out, and any support they had amongst the vaguely progressive middle classes has been eradicated by a student movement who demanded a pound of flesh for Clegg’s lies about fees.

As for Labour, it is clear that their acquiescence to neoliberalism and privatisation has systematically eroded their support amongst the working class for more than a decade. But in the context of mass economic crisis their failure to articulate an alternative vision to that of Cameron’s austerity Britain translates into political suicide. The assumption amongst the leadership of Labour that working class voters had no where else to go and would remain loyal to the Party through thick and thin was at best wishful thinking – at worst it was gross incompetence.

Richard Leonard – former assistant secretary of the STUC and Labour candidate in Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley – recognizes this in the July/August edition of Scottish Left Review:

Days after the election Strathclyde University Professor John Curtice concluded that Labour’s vote fell more heavily in areas with more working class voters and in areas with relatively high levels of social deprivation. This has since been validated by research for the Carman, Jones and Mitchell ‘Scottish Election Study’ which found in its sample that Labour could only secure the support of 36 per cent of working class voters, whilst the SNP attracted 42 per cent.

Research also shows that if you are younger or poorer, you are far more likely to support independence. This is certainly no coincidence. The reality is that the SNP are the only party in Scotland that has recently built and developed a social base within Scottish society. However the SNP’s vision of a neoliberal Scotland does not gel with the aspirations of the people of Scotland. Young working class people support independence because they are sick of the status quo and of a deeply alienating neoliberal society, not because they are hardened nationalists who celebrate shortbread and tartan.

In this context the arguments of the left are vital. The question of independence must be – and intrinsically will be – linked to the question of crisis and austerity. Salmond wants to present independence as being no break with the past whatsoever, and unless the left forces the argument, he might just get his way.

Is Britain breaking up?Contradictory polling evidence in recent months has shone light on the dynamics of support for Scottish Independence. Pete Ramand looks at the possible ‘break up of Britain’.

Scotland: Breaking Up Britain?

Jenny Morrison

GERARD DUMENIL and Dominique Levy’s latest book ‘The Crisis of Neoliberalism’ is an excellent, though flawed contribution to the burgeoning body of Marxist literature on the current economic crisis. Their analysis starts from the position that capitalism has different phases where it takes different forms, the latest being neoliberalism which emerged out of the crisis of the 1970s and has been imposed from the core capitalist countries onto the developing world.

Dumenil and Levy argue that the current crisis is the fourth major crisis of modern capitalism, following the crisis of the 1890s, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crisis of the 1970s. Such crises go beyond ordinary recessions as they are structural so alter the social order and international relations. This leads on to one of the central arguments of the book, that they reject monocausal explanations for crises of capitalism instead maintaining they can be caused by a complex multiplicity of reasons. Whilst the crises of the 1890s and 1970s can be explained by declining rates of profit, Dumenil and Levy claim that the Great Depression and the current crisis came out of periods of rising profitability.

The Crisis of Neoliberalism understands the period from the structural crisis of the 1970s as one of financial hegemony. US capitalism was the starting point for neoliberalism in its expansion through financialisation and globalisation. This created high incomes for a small elite and excessive consumption. The financial structure was unstable, with slow accumulation and increasing financialisation to raise profit with growing domestic debt. The unstable trajectory of the US economy, from too much financialisation led to the current crisis.

Dumenil and Levy’s analysis is fascinating and well argued; however, it fails to provide a theory of crisis as they consider the cause of each crisis to be individual. The reliance on the idea of

financialisation as a separate entity within capitalism also fails to understand capitalism as a totality, instead artificially focusing on one section of it. If the problem was with excess financialisation then regulation of that industry to prevent this in the future could prevent crises of this kind. As financialisation develops out of and is interrelated with productive industry this is not possible. The struggle for profit in the productive sector led to financial speculation to maintain and increase profit, but this in itself depends ultimately back on production thus leads to crisis. Any theory of crisis must therefore account for the underlying factors in financialisation.

To do so, it is necessary to return to a monocausal theory in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Joseph Choonara, along with others, has criticised the data used to demonstrate that the rate of profit was rising in the period prior to the current crisis. The time period selected by Dumenil and Levy and others who counter the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall runs from 1982 through to 2006. However, this fails to account for the fact that there is a business cycle with 1982 representing a low point and 2006 a peak. In other words comparing two random points in an economic cycle cannot give any

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Reviews

Profits, Finance, and Crisis: Theorising NeoliberalismFrench theorists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy have been at the heart of debates about the impact of finance on capitalism. We look at their new book, The Crisis of Neoliberalism.

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indication of whether the profit rate is falling or rising. Comparing the trough to trough of the cycle in the period leading up to the current crisis and the profit rate has not risen at all. Additionally there has been a downward trend since the 1950s and the end of the great boom. The system has then indeed shown a tendency towards stagnation which accounts for the recurrence of crises within it

Dumenil and Levy also maintain that the new neoliberal form of capitalism has three classes. These are the popular class made up of wage earners and low level salaried employers, the capitalist class and an intermediary managerial class. This class sides with either of the other two, changing the social order as they do. In the post-war period the managerial class sided with the popular class, thus there was a period of rising living standards whilst from the 1970s they have sided with the capitalists leading to a reversal of this trend. The authors therefore propose that a change in the alliance of the social orders could come through the crisis of neoliberalism producing new social compromises.

Marxists have, of course, traditionally defined class by the relation to the means of production-whether a person lives from selling their labour power or whether they can appropriate surplus value created. Undoubtedly the 20th century saw an explosion of white-collar workers generally, who now are the most numerous section of workers, and in particular of positions of management. Crucially though, the Marxist definition of class depends on objective factors and not subjective consciousness. Thus in some groups, such as teachers, a proportion may see themselves and be perceived by others as middle class, but their relation to the means of production defines them as workers. The reality is that such jobs are often highly unionised and often take the lead in militant action because their interests are opposed to those of capitalism.

Dumenil and Levy are, nonetheless, partially correct to identify a third element in the managerial group. Increasingly capitalists rely on teams of varying levels of managers to control capital as businesses are too large for this to be done by the owner alone. Clearly such a group is not homogenous and exists on a sliding scale of levels of control over labour-power. Their interests also then exist on a sliding scale of alignment with workers or capitalists and are often contradictory. Except at the most elite levels they are distinct from the capitalist class in the sense that any level of power they have is delegated and limited to operational control.

The analysis presented in The Crisis of Neoliberalism is incorrect, however, in its political conclusions and tends towards a centrist position. They advocate an alliance between the popular class and managerial class to create a modern form of Roosevelt’s New Deal as an outcome of the current crisis. Whilst undoubtedly a return to a form of the welfare state of the 1950s and 60s would be beneficial to most people, such an alliance undermines the universal interests of the working class. In struggling for working class interests, who are still the vast majority, it is possible to push far beyond concessions from the state and demonstrate in practice how the interests of many in the lower and middle levels of management are ultimately aligned with the working class. Only in this way can we stop neoliberal attacks on our standard of living, push to claim real democracy and break a system which operates in the interests of a tiny minority.

Colonialism’s Ugly LegacyBritain’s EmpireRichard GottVerso 2011 £9.99

I recall an old aboriginal man painted in the tourist-friendly manner who used to squat in Darling Harbour, Sydney, and rotate with his fellows opposite; between playing the didgeridoo over some kind of progressive house music and sitting staring out at the ferries toing and froing. I had no idea where he

came from and now I do.Richard Gott’s book tells me that this man was a product of a

process so brutal that I am now surprised he existed to sit there on the pavement; surrounded by tourists off the cruise ships. If Britain’s Empire has a story to tell it is one of absolute savagery against the people who lived in the places ‘we’ went and where ‘we’ often remain, and how hard some of these people fought to hold on first to their lands, later to their existence. The book tells us that after tens of years of

Reviews: Dumenil and Levy, Richard Gott...

overt extermination, the white settlers, themselves often originally dissidents and rebels against imperialism, resorted to poisoned flour to kill the blacks, because it was harder to trace once some rudimentary laws were extended to the Aborgines.

Richard Gott was better known to me as The Guardian’s man in Latin America. Fittingly, this book combines the knowledge of a historian with a sharp, journalistic, readable style. He traces British imperialism by way of resistance to its advances and in doing so sweeps aside the Niall Ferguson-esque insistence that it wasn’t all bad. It was. The evidence of this is in the tales of those who fought imperialism from 1755 to 1857; often failing, occasionally winning, always desperate.

Gott covers four different categories of resister. Firstly, the indigenous people who revolted against colonisation, as in the Americas and Australia. Secondly, the resistance of people who were to be subjugated by means other than extermination and the mass influx of white colonialists, such as India. Thirdly, the rebellions by white settlers themselves against British rule and, finally, he revisits the Americas to chart some of the bloodiest incidents of repression in the various slave revolts which wracked Britain’s Caribbean acquisitions.

The book’s strength lies in its very detailed and short chapters, this perhaps a result of the author’s background as a newsman. These are an antidote to a great many historical and academic books, which can be impenetrably dull. In contrast, Britain’s Empire is highly rewarding whether read cover to cover or selectively. Even between readings for the review it tended to fall open on fascinating passages.

One of the key functions of the book is to peel away the damage done by centuries of historical airbrushing, and some of this resonates today. Of the 1842 loss of a British force as it was hounded from Kabul, Gott has dug up a quotation of eye-rolling relevance today, from Penderel Moon, ‘…so idiotic in conception and so inept in execution, that the reader may wonder how a nation capable of such blunders succeeded … in enlarging its empire …’ (p.338). There are lessons to be learned from history it seems, but first we have to scrape off the apologist’s veneer.

Gott allows us to see that the cannonading of mutinous sepoys, the vengeful sacking of Kabul, the massacres of rebellious slaves and the transportation of Irish dissidents to arid shores are not merely products of less civilised times. The tradition continues in the US ‘kill-teams’ mutilating Afghan corpses, the razing of Fallujah, the beating to death of Baha Mousa in Iraq and the whisking away of anyone a wee bit ‘terrorist-looking’ to Guantanamo or Bagram. These kinds of pursuits have a firm lineage; none of them is a case of benevolent intervention misapplied or of the transparent fiction of a ‘few bad apples’. Instead, they are a built-in, made-for-purpose feature of imperialism since its outset.

Britain’s Empire is, in one sense, another ‘people’s history’, but it surpasses many of these in accessibility and detail. It tells the reader that resistance to empire, as we see today in some of the same places mentioned in the book, is nothing to be surprised about. If you stir up the natives, they get punchy. Gott’s logic, if followed, demands stringently that we never accept the sly updating of ‘white man’s burden’ into ‘liberal interventionism’, or the ‘civilizing mission’ into ‘democracy plus diversification of oil industry’. Any more than we should accept the indiscriminate brand ‘Islamic extremist’ in place of the barbarous ‘Mussulmen’ of yesteryear.

The broad resistance movement in Afghanistan, the Naxalite movements in India, the insurgents in Iraq, the institutionalised racism in Australia and the Americas and the indigenous struggles against it, the anger in a still occupied Ireland and Palestine are not separate from, but a direct continuation of, imperial projects and peoples struggle against them. Gott’s book spells out the linkages.

Britain’s Empire brings together and archives the history of diverse people who share a sad tradition; that of those who were often outgunned, scared, tired, broken and oppressed and still fought. These were real people and while many of their names will never be known, they are lent back moments of their lives and trials over 500 excellent pages. I’d suggest we’re obliged to listen to them. For, as Gott points out in conclusion ‘…if Britain made such a success of its colonies, why are so many of them still major sources of violence and unrest…?’ (p.475).

This review by Joe Glenton first appeared on counterfire.org.

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