THE QUAGMIRE

 

          Students of the relationship between the economic base and the political superstructure should be finding these interesting times – even if the rest of us are hiding under our beds. Whether or not we are witnessing the death of the Conservative Party we are certainly seeing a rift among sections of ruling class, at the very least over the details. While the dominant financial side may be optimistic over the latest ‘deal’ proposed by Mrs May which effectively leaves us where we were before if not somewhat disempowered here and there (plus the prospect of a four-year stalemate), there are other levels of business as represented roughly by Tory ‘rebels’ that reckon a cleaner break with the EU will mean wholesale elimination of regulations and the freedom to impose such conditions on a labour market as will render higher profits: to them ‘Brexit’ means a ‘business’ Britain of the more buccaneering kind not seen in this country for perhaps a hundred years and more, and perhaps not since Sir Francis Drake. At the same time, whatever the views on immigration made clear by the ‘Tommy Robinson’ end of the Tory Party, agricultural interests worry at the prospect of a drain on cheap imported labour to pick the fruit, etc. (gone are the days when the urban working class was transported en masse to the countryside for picking ‘holidays’), retail outlets facing for example a severe shortage of better-class chefs, while higher education is confronted by penury without a steady stream of EU (‘foreign’) and well-paying students. On the Labour side, the Right is fearful of the return of a ‘garrison state’ mentality if the Left continues to be determined to have the freedom to nationalise this and that through deficit spending, which cannot be done under increasingly neoliberalised EU law: the former clamours for a dubious ‘people’s vote’ while the latter holds to the referendum long since determining a decisive vote for Leaving: that showed us the ‘people’s will’ truly enough.  Not only would a second referendum conform to the EU practice to force countries to keep holding referenda until the ‘correct’ voting takes place (and there is a view that a second referendum will require a third in time, and so on), but polls indicate that a second referendum might well produce much the same result as the first. At the same time, how practical is the creation of ‘socialism in one country’: how long would it last, how deep would it penetrate our society of capitalism in the long run? A Labour government could – and is likely to - renationalise the Bank of England but it can’t nationalise Goldman Sachs, or (e.g.) Facebook. The Irish ‘problem’ is actually a British one, as it always was. The border question only shows further that a Northern Irish statelet was always a death-trap anomaly and that Ireland as a whole should be a different country. Apparently most British (non-Unionist) voters are almost entirely indifferent to the fate of Northern Ireland and would be glad to be rid of it if it meant a workable settlement overall. As for Northern Irish voters, they voted in the majority (not wanting a hard border) to Remain, as did the Scots, whose interest lies in an EU connection for a semi- or even (possibly in time) Scottish independence.

          Britain is facing the consequences of a nation that sort of ‘growed’ like Topsy whose unity was kept in being by absolutism, later by empire and by a large economy that embraced a country also sustained in spirit by foreign threats of conquest from Philip II, Napoleon, the Axis powers, and possibly the Soviet Union during the Cold War. National unity is cossetted along by a continuing strange obsession over 1940 and the image of Winston Churchill with cigar and tommy-gun, along with Royalty worship, while revivifying the Cold War with Russia today is plainly an attempt by British leadership to prop up national unity in the face of increasingly formidable odds. Faced with world recession and the fact that large parts of Britain are on the wrong side of what is happening globally, with a government either entirely indifferent to domestic massive poverty and hunger or else keen to see through a broken-backed working class, the country is actually crumbling before our eyes like a slow-motion landslide. And, by the way, Spain and Italy are also crumbling, in more spectacular fashion. Not all nation-states were meant to be, or not forever! Pot was calling the kettle black when this week Spain – with Catalonia on its hands – suggested there was no reason why Scotland should not become independent! And Germany has been a fractured country since 1989.

          One plausible scenario is that London should be in reality what it is de facto: in other words, instead of dragging an unwanted country behind it, London should form its own state in which it could be a more free-market version of wealthy Singapore, another breakaway entity. I think this is rather a good idea in some ways. London weighs on England like a stone. Apart from anything else, its ‘independence’ would give Birmingham and Manchester elbow-room to become again the dynamic cities they once were, this time assuming the leadership of at least much of the rest of Britain outside London. Indeed, we could make a packet in negotiated trade relations with London instead of being sucked in by her.  All that finance funnelled into a native British economy instead of being whisked off abroad (and even worse, into tax havens – though the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are that as well!) – at least, up to a point. Scotland would become a natural ally to the non-London English. I don’t think Scotland hates England. I think it hates London. Indeed the British map could come to resemble something like a map of this isle at the time of Alfred the Great (leaving aside the later impact of the Industrial Revolution). Am I joking? Perhaps. If only now were the time for jokes. But something along these lines is serious. We are already well familiar with the term ‘devolution’ and there could well be a build-up of steam behind the idea like nothing seen before, leading to something well beyond it. Major political configurations have been changed in response to recalcitrant circumstances in the past. Although perhaps in many ways an unfortunate example, it remains true that Versailles in 1919 altered the maps of Europe and the Middle East, with lasting effects.      

          Socialism in a country that no longer has any purpose or unity is likely to be a nonstarter. Imagine trying to bring socialism about in the similarly nostalgic and obsolete Austro-Hungarian Empire! But given more localised sovereign entities built on popular loyalty (and immigrant groups are as loyal to their communities as the rest), the possibility of socialism from the ground up and connecting with that of other such sovereign entities around the world is not unthinkable if one sees that socialism, like previous modes, works its way forward in dialectical stages of one kind or another. Marxists need to think out politics more – in relation to economics. This is just a mischievous stab if you like.

A RADICAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD

By Neil Faulkner

(Pluto Press – Left Book Club 2018)

          Latest, in the worthy successor series to the first Left Book Club (1936-48), this is outline history at its best, itself a worthy successor to that pioneer of the genre, HG Wells’ The Outline of History (1920) and various others since. Outline history is far from hack-work from secondary sources. It is the art of significant – and comprehensive – compression and interpretation. Neil Faulkner’s is the only modern one I know of that deals with this from an explicitly revolutionary Marxist viewpoint. It shows, for example, that it is perfectly possible to demonstrate an historical materialist analysis of (say) Sumerian civilisation, as of Roman, Medieval European, Japanese and contemporary Western history. Above all, to draw Marxist analysis from facts, and not facts from Marxist analysis. It is fact-driven Marxism that I hope non-Marxist historians will respect. Its attitude is that there is no validly ‘neutral’ history (whoever claims neutrality is putting up a front for one ideology or another) and no reason to be ‘neutral’ in this case especially as historical materialism provides an unparalleled basis of understanding of historical processes and developments.

          It takes its cue from Hegel’s saying: ‘The truth is the whole’. Whatever bourgeois historians have made of it, history is not a ragbag of disparate and unconnected happenings in a process described by Henry Ford as ‘one damned thing after another’. History has meaning only when all of history is taken into account, not some of it left out or ignored.

          Faulkner pauses, in his chapter on the first class societies, to outline just exactly how history works, and all of the subsequent book convincingly proves his (and Marx’s) thesis by encyclopaedic examples (33): ‘Three engines drive the historical process. First, there is the development of technique. Progress can be defined as the accumulation of knowledge that makes possible better control over nature, increases in labour productivity, and a bigger store of economic resources available for the satisfaction of human need….

          ‘The second engine is competition among rulers for wealth and power. This takes the form of conflict within ruling classes – among rival aristocratic factions, for example – and conflict between ruling classes, as in wars between rival states and empires…

          ‘The third engine of the historical process is the struggle between classes. In the ancient world, competitive military accumulation required the ruling class to increase the rate of exploitation and extract more surplus from the peasantry. But there were two limits to this process. First, the peasantry and the economic system had to be able to reproduce themselves: over-taxation would – and sometimes did – destroy the material foundations of the social order. The second was the peasants’ resistance to exploitation.’

          Faulkner shows how these three interrelate, combine, or dominate unevenly against one another at one conjunction of circumstances or another. On rare occasions all three have combined together to bring down particular socio-economic orders.

          One thing I had not realised was that mass environmental degradation at the hands of human beings is nothing new, though it has become progressively all-encompassing and planetary. The very reason for the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ of around 10,000 years ago and the widespread abandonment of hunter-gathering after countless centuries was that all the game were eventually hunted down to virtual extinction, which meant that human survival would have gone the way of the game had the domestication of animals and the planting of seeds not sprung up virtually everywhere – except in isolated areas where hunter-gathering continues today.  Farming was no picnic: compared to the relatively easy life of hunting and gathering it was – and as it remains especially for more than a billion or so poor peasants – ceaseless heavy toil and exposure to the dangers and disasters of drought, disease or blight, hailstorms and all sorts. And before the discovery of self-manuring by the use of draft animals in ploughing, whole tracts of land were abandoned when the soils gave out. Faulkner implies that humankind did not take up farming by choice but through crucial necessity. Farming especially as it expanded through the use of heavy ploughs drawn by oxen or  horses also signalled the growth of patriarchy after a previous aeon of matriarchy, since women had not the strength for the new ploughing and in any case were burdened with child-raising and other concerns, whereas in previous cultures (the Iroquois provided the most recent well-known example) women were either politically equal with men or in some areas dominant over them because they produced as much of the food wherewithal as men did – and sometimes more when the hunting was poor. With farming men became the dominant food producers. It is interesting that we see in our times a return to women’s empowerment (in part, anyhow) with the situation of society not being wholly dependent on one sex or the other and women in modern times being fully able to ‘bring in the bacon’ as effectively as men.

          A constant feature of the rises and falls of civilisations is that increases in productivity are invariably accompanied by claims on its fruits by one ruling class or another. And without effective resistance on the part of the producers the empowered rich come to grab more and more of the spoils, thus forcing extreme poverty on the have-nots while engaged both in conspicuous consumption of one kind or another or in the huge wastage of military expenditure due to conflicts and potential conflicts over potential spoils with rival ruling classes or nations. Only in polities where the lower-downs have managed to garner a significant portion of the goods have the systems stabilised, at least until the further demands from ruling classes become once again insatiable – the result of the politico-military failure of a working class or middle class (or alliance of the two) to corral and safeguard to themselves sufficient of the necessities of life. In our own time the extreme lop-sidedness of wealth versus poverty on a global scale simply repeats the pattern of old, and will continue to do so unless there comes to be a decisive superiority in the power and willpower of those in the majority determined to beat back the very rich. If there is not, the given society will tend to end in stalemate and in ossification, as happened with unerring frequency in the past. As for example to the Roman Empire (making the Roman Empire easy pickings for the northern barbarians in the end); but it has happened innumerable times in other civilisations and seems to be happening in our present global civilisation. It lies at the root of modern economic depressions and recessions. Only for us the crucially emerging reality out of the ceaseless plunder for profit is wholesale environmental destruction which may – and certainly will – lead to our extinction unless before then we can overpower those in the minority who expropriate too much of the social product. This would appear to have been the fate, for example, of the ancient Mayans of Mexico, and possibly of the Easter Islanders and others.

          These are my extrapolations from Faulkner, not Faulkner himself though I would hope he would not feel I had misrepresented him too much!

          I have been a lifelong student of history, and at one time or another a professional in the field myself, and I am no stranger to Marxist takes on the past, from Marx and Engels themselves onwards. But this highly accessible book by Neil Faulkner provides a genuine grasp on the whole mighty subject.