Part Two: The Malaise
It is obvious that within the developed countries the issue for most is not material but ‘spiritual’ poverty. This is a concept that many ‘traditional’ socialists find unacceptable, it’s too ‘woolly’ and ‘touchy-feelie’. Yet surely everything points toward the need to reappropriate the last sphere of human existence we could call our own, the insides of our heads, our Cultural Capital which the IT revolution threatens also to appropriate.
And no, I haven't got religion but who can argue against the reality that the subjective rules? I'm struck especially by the ethos of the socialists of the 19th century, whose concern was not simply with the material but just as importantly, with the subjective, or if you like, with the quality of life. Yes, much of it may well have been a romantic notion of the 'good old days' aka William Morris and the utopian socialists, but increasingly, as the unrestrained power of capitalism strips the planet bare, the notion of some kind of 'simpler' life, most definately has struck a chord with millions of people, including myself.
One must ask the question, if capitalism in its most rapacious form as expressed by the USUK alliance is to be curtailed, what is to replace it? Much is made of sustainable development, the transition from a carbon economy and so forth, but millions, if not billions depend on 'growth'. Surely this is why it's so difficult to break the grip of capital? We are caught up in its wheels. It would appear that total breakdown is the only 'solution' (or barbarism). Yes, it's conceivable that the global financial network could short circuit, a crash on the scale of 1929 etc. But is this how the contradiction is to be 'resolved'? I sincerely hope not!
But this comes back to my central issue of the 'split'. I have yet to see a coherent argument advanced as to why the EU does not represent an alternative path to socialism. If one looks at the role of state and the increasingly socialised nature of the economic relations that exist within the EU, all point toward a different path. And I think the dilemma of Blah and British imperialism epitomises this contradiction. Of course, Blah will do his best to drag the countries of the EU along the neo-imperialist path but will he succeed? So far he hasn't and the disastrous policy of invading Iraq, far from advancing the imperialist cause, has had the opposite effect. With every passing day, they dig themselves a deeper hole.
As a ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ socialist, even advancing such an argument is bound to lead to cries of derision from my fellow travellers. What about the class war? What about the imperialist project? What about the workers? What is all this talk of spiritual poverty when the behemoth strides across the planet? Yet how, I ask, are we to formulate a response to the crisis of capital, without a coherent understanding of ourselves in the grip of the fetish of accumulation? Without our passive complicity, capital is powerless. Are we to take the view that capitalism 'digs its own grave'? If so, then there's plenty of room in it for you and for me.
Yet there can be no doubt that many in the developed world are alienated and effectively cut adrift from the collective. Participation is confined to passive consumption via the mass media and the accumulation of possessions. Life has been privatised to a degree never seen before. People have retreated into their homes and have become effectively disenfranchised from the political process.
To argue that capitalism is the root of the malaise merely states the obvious without dealing with the issue of how we reconnect to each other. The ‘subjective’ state has become prime. And ironically, Marx’s observation that ‘religion is the opiate of the people’, quoted so often that it has become a cliché, hides the obvious. For although it may no longer be the belief in some supreme being that gives purpose or meaning to life, it is a fact that consumption has to all intents and purposes, become our religion. How else can one explain life as it is lived? How else can one explain the ennui of modern existence? Where are the socialist answers to these questions?
The solidarity of the days of the trade union, of working class organisations, of left culture is no longer. What is to replace it?
In part, the events of the past months if not years, contain some indications. I find it interesting that socialists who rabbit on about capitalism, have no trouble absorbing the notion that the biggest enemy the state has, is its population. And although opposition to imperialist policies may be unfocused and lacking in coherent leadership, the fact that millions marched against the invasion of Iraq surely points to something of importance. And even if the left downplayed the significance of the opposition, the state most surely didn’t. The most massive propaganda campaign mounted in modern times is an indication of just how important the state considered the issue.
I must have heard dozens of radio programmes and read dozens of articles about how unhappy people are in the developed world. A deep malaise pervades the land. I alluded to it in Part One: Out of the Horse’s Mouth. Of course there will be those who argue that it’s only the well off who can afford not to be happy (as the saying goes, ‘I’d rather be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy’).
However, I think this is a very cynical not to say inaccurate reflection of life under capitalism. There can be no doubt however about Marx’s observation on the fetish of accumulation and consumption and I can attest to its power to seduce. And the fetish is something that I want to return to and deal with at length because I think it’s the addiction to consumption more than anything else that is at the root of our inability to face up to the fact that we live lives of not-so quiet desperation. And importantly, why the transition to socialism is so hard to make.
The focus on socially unacceptable drug use conveniently masks the millions who have gone quietly bonkers in their privatised lives, where ‘downers’, ‘uppers’ and no doubt ‘sidewaysers’ are consumed in ever-increasing volumes. On almost every level of existence, social life (or lack of it) has been commodified to the point, whereby there are now drugs for almost every malaise of a consumerist society that afflicts us.
Indeed, dealing with the destructive and alienating effects of the capitalist way of life has become a business all in its own right, as with virtually everything else including the business of crime and punishment.
We need only look at how the one of the richest countries in the world treats its old people, abandoning them to lives of isolation. This is the breakdown of one of the most basic aspects of what we euphemistically call civilisation. Indeed the catalogue of horrors is almost endless, from the housing estates which have become repositories for all those who are ‘surplus to requirement’ in the age of Blahism. The endemic and institutional racism which sees young black kids enter school ahead of their peers and leave light-years behind.
It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in the UK (twenty-seven years) some seventeen of which were spent in the US where it’s safe to say the population have long lived with wealth (or trying to attain it) and where the ‘spirit’ of individualism has reached its zenith to the almost total exclusion of the collective. History becomes ‘heritage’, culture becomes a theme park and public space has long been corporatised.
The England I left twenty-seven years ago was of the pre-Thatcherite variety, still essentially ruled by the old aristocracy in an uneasy alliance with the social democracy of the post-war ‘social contract’ between Labour and the capitalist class. Interestingly, although I lived through Reaganism, its impact on life in America was nowhere as deep-felt as was Thatcher’s on England. But even Thatcher was unable to completely dislocate the ancien regime, it took New Labour to do it, which given the the record of past Labour governments, is not surprising.
The transformation of England under Thatcher is to my eyes anyway, a fundamental one connected to the failure of the socialist project to offer a viable alternative. And I must say that I find the England I have returned to an appalling place and most tellingly expressed by the behaviour of young people and by the ‘split’ between the poor (not necessarily based exclusviely on material wealth) and the middle and upper classes. There is also a pervasive nihilism and total lack of direction which the ruling political elite have encouraged (‘failure to vote is the sign of a satisfied citizen’) even as they go through the motions of bemoaning the fact.
The smug new rulers personified by ‘noveau intellectuals’ like Blah, with their roots in the post-war social contract of Labour and capital but without even the vestige of the industrial working class ethos that produced their parents and grandparents, are the direct descendents of Thatcher and the general assault on working people that has gone on since the late 1970s.
Desperate intoxication and aimless violence seem to be the lot of millions of young people, who with some money to spend drown their lack of purpose every weekend in bars and clubs up and down the land. Is this a shallow observation? I don’t think so. I think it’s in line with the idea of accumulation and consumption as being the be all and end all of life.
The idea of dissatisfaction with our current way of life is I think deeply rooted, perhaps in a past that was obliterated almost overnight during the dark days of the Enclosures Act of 1832 and the forced migration of the rural people in their millions to the ‘Dark, Satanic Mills’ of Victorian Industrial Capitalism. A process, which overnight, erased the past completely.
Romantic notions of the past expressed in an obsession with ‘our’ history and the idea that buried somewhere there is an ‘English culture’ waiting to be rediscovered. Yet such is the power of the fetish of accumulation, that history is commodified even as it is revealed to us.
What is clear, that aside from a minority of the population, we live in an age of abundance albeit one based on the supply of credit. What it does attest to, is the enormous productive power of the modern economy that it can run on what is essentially the electronic equivilent of the ‘emporer’s new clothes’.
The ‘classical’ struggle presented by the left revolves around the contradictions of capital and the struggle led by the organised working class and its political expressions as the ‘leading’ or most developed class. That this working class has all but disappeared of late (to re-emerge in distant lands but in an entirely different form not to mention gender) has in part led to the demise of the traditional left. Shorn of the industrial trade union and the expressions of solidarity of the urban, male industrial worker, we have floundered somewhat in trying to find a ‘replacement’. Who will lead the class struggle and what form will it take under these new conditions?
Feminism, ‘alternative’ communities, solidarity with the poor of the world, the environment and now the ‘anti-globalism movement’, have all sought to replace the traditional socialist movements of the past. All have failed insofar as they only partially address issues.
Shedding the ‘comfort’ of our lives is the major obstacle. By comfort I don’t mean adopting some hair-shirt socialism such as the cynical pundits accuse us of, but of re-establishing connections with out social selves that have been buried under shopping malls, freeways and prescription, non-prescription drugs and ‘madness’.
Re-establishing meaning in our lives is intimately connected to breaking the power of capital. It’s no accident that Tony Blah has appropriated the images and desires of the traditional socialist project eg, "Building the New Jerusalem" but recast it in the corporatist mould. That Blah returns to 19th century images speaks volumes and brings me back to where I came in, to the utopian socialist project of the late 19th century. One has to ask the question as to why Blah has appropriated this image, for surely, the experts who advise him are aware of the power of this image, appealing as it does to the evocation of something lost that needs to be rediscovered?
This is I believe what the socialist project should have as its raison d'etre, for without meaning, talk of class is empty. Are we to allow the Blahists to appropriate our past and distort it to fit the imperialist image?