The arguments in favor of war are quickly disposed of. First, it is not clear at all whether Iran is in fact pursuing nuclear weapons. It has consistently denied doing so, and although recent reports are more ambiguous, so far the International Atomic Energy Agency has seen no definite proof to the contrary. Of course, any empire is all too happy to claim “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, as the American government did in claiming ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a casus belli against Iraq. But after having blown up the better part of that already ravaged country, no such weapons were ever found – a small oversight now quickly forgotten by the goldfish-like political memory of the ruling classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Where necessary, evidence can even be entirely fabricated and a casus belli manufactured, if one wants the war badly enough – there are many historical examples of this, from the German invasion of Poland in 1939 to the Tonkin incident leading to the Vietnam War, as well as the plans for fabricating a Cuban act of war (Operation Northwoods). All this notwithstanding, objective observers have no reason yet to assume that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, only that it is pursuing a full nuclear cycle, which under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it has a full right to do. In fact, Iran is heavily dependent on its oil exports, which are both its strength and its weakness, and being aware of this is trying to diversify its energy sources. Since the same is being done by essentially all Western governments, one can hardly fault the Iranian government for doing so. Whether nuclear energy is really a longer-term solution to our energy needs is a technical-empirical question, and the Iranians may well be wrong, but the principle behind diversification is fully legitimate and shows nothing but foresight.

Secondly, even if Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon, the political significance of this is not so clear. For all the brouhaha about it, one would easily forget that its greatest enemies, the United States and Israel, are both armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons (and chemical and biological ones, too, at that). No nation can reasonably be expected not to plan for its survival, and the more it is threatened, the more appealing a nuclear deterrent will be. One need not have any sympathy for the Iranian government as such to recognize that given it has been surrounded by two major American-led occupations, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and given the constant threatening language and behavior from the Western countries and Israel towards it, the prospect of a definitive counter-argument will be an appealing one. Nuclear weapons are an awful invention, and their proliferation the very height of human folly and a sign of the long-term destructive nature of nationalism and national rivalries. Nuclear weapons serve no human purpose, only the ability of larger powers to threaten each other and divide the world between them. They are the very arms of empire. Neither Iran nor any other country should be permitted to have any. But that said, what is good for the goose is good for the gander: a small number of nuclear arms in the hands of Iran, a country which has not attacked any other nation in living memory, does not outweigh the greater crime of a very large number of nuclear arms in the hands of nations with a history of constant warfare and even use of such weapons, like the United States and Israel. The Iranian people must not accept an Iranian nuclear bomb; but nobody in the world can accept the American or Israeli arsenals.

The casus belli itself is also exceedingly weak. In fact, the real casus belli, by any common understanding of the concept, is the other way round. It is a public secret that Israel, and possibly also the United States, has been sponsoring various Islamist and terrorist factions within and without Iran in an attempt to take down its government, including the MEK – an outfit wholly sponsored by Saddam Hussein when he was still America’s best friend and a visionary leader – and Jundullah, an organization of Sunni fanatics operating out of Baluchistan. These operations show a tremendous and breath-taking cynicism given the now familiar history of Western support for the reactionary and obscurantist forces of the Mujahideen in rural Afghanistan; a support intended ‘merely’ to destroy Communism and its prospects of modernity in Afghanistan, but one which promptly backfired on themselves and the entire region.

What’s more, Israel has also been undertaking a campaign of assassinations of nuclear scientists and military staff involved in Iran’s nuclear programme, presumably in an attempt to slow down its operations. Whether or not the Iranian nuclear programme is as peaceful as presented, surely one can hardly claim that if Iran were to undertake assassinations of Mossad officials in Tel Aviv and of members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the respective countries would not take this as an outright declaration of war. It is then all the more ironic that the United States has attempted to further add insult to injury by conniving with Saudi Arabia to fabricate a story of Iran attempting to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US, an action which would be as pointless as it is unrealistic! Of course, the Iranian government is not taking all this lying down – it has openly threatened to blockade the Persian Gulf in case of further steps towards war. The United States in turn has declared it is willing to use military means of guaranteeing the so-called ‘freedom of the seas’ – the same freedom that in the 19th century afforded Britain the free trade that benefited it on the high seas, but which equally enabled it to twice punitively invade China when it wanted to run international trade according to its own lights. Similarly, the United States is now apparently fully permitted to enforce with war its freedom to trade in the Persian Gulf (thousands of miles from the nearest American coast), but at the same time it is equally legitimate for the US and the European Union states to blockade Iran’s oil exports, which are one of its main sources of income. Only little Greece, bankrupt and dependent on Iranian oil for its mercantile fleet, has raised a little voice in opposition.

It is clear from all this maneouvering that Washington is trying to make the war inevitable. Israel’s own secret services have stated it is not at all clear whether Iran is actually going to produce nuclear weapons, and there is no reason to believe they would use them if they did – all the ranting and raving about the so-called ‘irrationality’ of the Iranian theocracy is a mere fig-leaf. Every war in history has been preceded by the participants depicting each other of being irrational, dangerous, and less than human. The North Korean government has been accused of dangerous insanity for decades now, and has yet not invaded a single country or fired more than a few warning shots at its neighbours; more than one can say of the United States itself, which invades another country roughly every 4-5 years. But this war is not inevitable, if it can be made clear to the public what is really going on. The Iranian government, mind, is no beacon of freedom and light. It has oppressed its national minorities, such as Kurds and Baluch, for many years now. It hangs homosexuals and its trade unionists languish in its jails. It brutally represses any rebellion, upholds theocratic and obscurantist laws and restrictions, and arrogates great power into the hands of a military-clerical establishment. It is no friend of progressive-minded people.

But this does not mean a foreign invasion by the United States and its vassals is a cure to this disease. Such an invasion will wreck untold havock on the region at large, as it will further inflame the sectarian divisions between the ethnicities and religions of the region. It will cause the entire greater Middle East, from Israel to Pakistan, to be one large war-zone: a frightening and destructive prospect, the impact of which will be felt for decades to come. The continuous wars and occupations in the region pre-empt the development of a healthy political process within Iran and other nations that allows the domestic opposition to play its revolutionary role, as we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, such wars only cause the population to band together against the foreign invader, create the prospect of civil war with minorities seen as inherently suspect in wartime, and further encourage the wasteful and oppressive militarism that characterizes virtually every government in the region, as well as the governments of our own Western countries.

The real beneficiaries of such a war are not the local people, who will die in their hundreds of thousands, whether through boycott – as the approximated 500.000 deaths caused by the boycott of Iraq in the 1990s – or by outright war. It will not ‘liberate’ them, as nobody supports the ideas of a foreign occupier, no matter how right they may be in their own eyes, and democratic revolution must be made by the people of the nations themselves. It is no way to help them in this process, it only makes it more difficult for the democratic and progressive forces to free themselves of the accusation of collaboration with foreign enemies. As the example of Iraq showed, it also gives no benefit to the working people of the Western countries, who do not here reap any benefit from their governments’ imperial enterprises. The war against Iraq, insofar as it was intended to secure a cheap oil supply for the United States, has singularly failed to do so. It has cost not only the locals, but also the American and British peoples (and many others) hundreds and thousands of lives and vast sums wasted, which could have been fruitfully invested in their own economies now buckling under capitalist crisis, for example by providing their people with better healthcare and affordable education.

The only people in the region who will benefit are the ruling cliques in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf emirates; among the most repressive, tyrannical, and militaristic regimes as one will find in the world, and purveyors of religious obscurantism, fascism, and lawlessness abroad as much as they support inequality and sectarianism in their own countries. A war which only benefits them can be no war to liberate any people, no matter the oppressiveness of the Iranian government itself. The Iranian people have already shown they can resist and rebel against their rulers when push comes to shove – they deserve our support, not our bombs. The minorities in Iran – Jews, Kurds, Baluchi, and so forth – too deserve their equal participation if they wish, and self-determination where possible, not the repression of the ayatollahs and the ‘Revolutionary Guards’. But their causes will not be helped by replacing their oppression with a new, American conquest, and it is highly unlikely that anyone in the West can solve these questions in a manner more satisfactory than their own peoples can.

In short, a war with Iran is unjust, costly, has unforseeable consequences, and serves no legitimate purpose but the strengthening of oppressive powers and imperial leaders. We must not accept it as inevitable, and let the millions who marched against war with Iraq be presented with a fait accompli again. Hands off the people of Iran!

For the future of the MENA region, the most important thing is the full development of its politics. Under the rule of the strongmen, all developments one would normally expect in their politics are frozen in place, held in stasis by the repression and the personal politics of the Assads, Mubaraks, and Saddam Husseins. The endless playing out of one religious or ethnic group against another strengthens sectarian identifications while preventing them from leading to any kind of result; at the same time, the other political options are never given a chance to play out, so that they always function as the imagined alternative. The various forms of clerical and religious politics, for example, only seem appealing because they are clear alternatives to the corrupt rule of the strongmen families and the military leaders. Because they are never given a chance to work out in practice, the people can’t find out what they do and don’t like about them, and they do not get to discover that when it comes to making public policy or combating unemployment, the ‘Islamists’ have no more knowledge of how to proceed than the military cliques do. For Egypt, therefore, the experience of the rule by the Ikhwan will be a valuable lesson, one that should be allowed to take its time and work itself out.

Soon enough the Egyptians will find out that the Ikhwan’s support base is the many poor in the countryside and the slums, but the leadership of their movement are bourgeois professionals who already have a considerable stake in the various quasi-monopolistic companies of the country and who are always ready to be bribed by either the military cliques or the Western governments who support them. As long as the political institutions remain open enough to allow room for political struggle, this will give an opportunity to the left for cricitizing their inevitable failure to actually economically satisfy the fellahin and the urban poor. Of course, the reactionaries will also attempt to benefit from this; it is of the utmost strategic importance for the left that it not accomodate their maneouvres to enlist the poor in favor of their ‘Islamic’ programme, and instead to attack them on the economic question, where they are weak. The working class in Egypt is however not large and not well-organized enough to stand on its own strength, so it is inevitable that on such economic questions alliances must be made; while at the same time the liberal currents in the very weak independent middle class of Egypt must be enlisted against the various schemes of religious repression that will no doubt be put forward.

The Egyptian situation has some interesting historical parallels, which to some extent also apply to other countries which are finding themselves in the position of having opened up their political sphere, only to find military strongmen and ‘responsible’ bourgeois ready to close it off again. Friedrich Engels’ analysis of the situation in Prussia after the part-success and part-failure of the 1848 revolution is surprisingly apt here. In Prussia a constitutional monarchy prevailed, but in fact this monarchy was largely military in orientation, and the ‘constitutional’ aspect severely curtailed by the weakness of the middle class and its fear of the great peasant and worker mass, which drove it to accomodation with repression. The result was a quasi-Bonapartist situation, just as prevailed in France after the failure of their revolution to make a full breakthrough. In his pamphlet “The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party”, Engels described this as follows:

But there is another form of reaction which has enjoyed much success in recent times and is becoming highly fashionable in certain circles; ‘this is the form nowadays called Bonapartism. Bonapartism is the necessary form of state in a country where the working class, at a high level of its development in the towns but numerically inferior to the small peasants in rural areas, has been defeated in a great revolutionary struggle by the capitalist class, the petty bourgeoisie and the army. When the Parisian workers were defeated in the titanic struggle of June 1848 in France, the bourgeoisie had at the same time totally exhausted itself in this victory. It was aware it could not afford a second such victory. It continued to rule in name, but it was too weak to govern. Control was assumed by the army, the real victor, basing itself on the class from which it preferred to draw its recruits, the small peasants, who wanted peace from the rioters in the towns. The form this rule took was of course military despotism, its natural leader the hereditary heir to the latter, Louis Bonaparte.

As far as both workers and capitalists are concerned, Bonapartism is characterised by the fact that it prevents them coming to blows with each other. In other words, it protects the bourgeoisie from any violent attacks by the workers, encourages a little gentle skirmishing between the two classes and furthermore deprives both alike of the faintest trace of political power. No freedom of association, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of the press; universal suffrage under such bureaucratic pressure that election of the opposition is almost impossible; police-control of a kind that had previously been unknown even in police-ridden France. Besides which, sections of the bourgeoisie and of the workers are simply bought; the former by colossal credit-swindles, by which the money of the small capitalists is attracted into the pockets of the big ones; the latter by colossal state construction-schemes which concentrate an artificial, imperial proletariat dependent on the government in the big towns alongside the natural, independent proletariat. Finally, national pride is flattered by apparently heroic wars, which are however always conducted with the approval of the high authorities of Europe against the general scapegoat of the day and only on such conditions as ensure victory from the outset.

The most that such a government can do either for the workers or for the bourgeoisie is to allow them to recuperate from the struggle, to allow industry to develop strongly — other circumstances being favourable — to allow the elements of a new and more violent struggle to evolve therefore, and to allow this struggle to erupt as soon as the need for such recuperation has passed. It would be the absolute height of folly to expect any more for the workers from a government which exists simply and solely for the purpose of holding the workers in check as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/02/12.htm

This is surprisingly close to the situation we should expect in Egypt today, following the street riots against the Mubarak government and afterwards the SCAF itself, and the electoral result in favor of the fellahin-supported parties of order. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is most loath to let go of its position as ‘mediator’ between the forces, representing the national interest and the future of Egypt, etc. etc., and more such rubbish which is intended to use the relative prestige of the army to hide their strongman position over and above the will of Egypt’s parliament. In this, they play the Bonapartist, monarchical role. The Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership and the liberals are two wings of the middle class, the former representing the accomodating wing, the latter the challenging wing; they and the left, including the trade unions in Egypt insofar as sufficiently organized, can easily be played out against each other. The same goes for the reactionaries, who together with the Ikhwan can easily be enlisted to support any convenient repression of political or social freedoms, or the rights of the Coptic minority, in the ‘national interest’. Over time, such repressions will inevitably also redound upon the organized workers’ movements in Egypt. In exchange, the Brotherhood and the army clique can be counted upon to support various ‘national’ building schemes and quasi-welfare programmes with which to buy off the natural resentment these repressions will cause. The progressive forces in Egypt must be aware of this, and not let up their struggle against this Bonapartist position the SCAF is preserving for itself, and fighting to let the actual politics play out in Parliament and in free political exchange. There over time the Brotherhood will reveal its hypocrisy and the reactionaries will discredit themselves, and then Egypt can move forward.

First, because it subjects the Labour Party to a hopeless enslavement to parliamentary politics as the only avenue for political action and strategy. For the Blairite type, it seems somehow self-evident that all politics is parliamentary politics and all parliamentary politics is winning elections at any cost. Traditionally, the left – whether in Communist or social-democratic form after 1918 – has been by far the strongest when it had a substantial, principled minority representation in national parliaments, working in tandem with an extra-parliamentary organisation in the form of unions (or party groups in unions), workers’ organisations, self-defence battalions, strike coordination committees, and so forth. The drive to cede all power to the parliamentary group, and to reduce all party activity to that of the elected members at local or national level, is on the contrary almost complete for the Labour Party in the UK. Only the union bloc vote within Labour nomination elections stands in the way still, and already the Blairites and their careerist hangers-on have launched a strong campaign to rid the party of this last anchor in actual society, so that it may soar to the giddy heights of Giddensian paradise. This is not to say the union bloc vote, on its own, has been such a strong moving force; dominated as it is by cautious union bureaucracies, operating under the strictest anti-union laws of the Western world, it is generally not much good politically. But this does not diminish the significance of the move.

The second and more important counterargument however is to point out that the Blairite approach does not even achieve its intended aim, and that it should not be the strategy in the first place. In 1997, the Labour Party, riding the wave of ‘modern leftism’ and so forth with the charismatic Blair at the head, won about 13.5 million votes. This as against the 9.6 million for the Conservatives and 5.25 million for the Liberal Democrats. Until the last election inaugurating the current liberal conservative coalition, the Blairites were in full control of Parliament and the Labour Party within it for 13 years. Plenty time, one should think, to put their strategic ideas to the test. But what happened? The Labour vote declined, and declined, and declined. In 2001, the Labour Party won 10.7 million votes against almost 8.4 million for the Tories, and 4.8 million for the LibDems. In 2005, the Labour Party had only 9.5 million votes, against 8.8 million for the Tories and almost 6 million for the LibDems. In 2010, the Labour reign was finally ended: Labour achieved 8.6 million votes, the Tories 10.7 million, and the LibDems 6.8. At first sight, this seems to be an almost total reversal of the core swing vote between 2001 and 2010 in favor of the Conservatives; a standard Blairite interpretation would here be to point this out and state that this shows Labour failed to properly cultivate the swing vote.

But when we look closer, we can see a different pattern emerging. The decisive point of comparison, between 1997 and 2010, is the disappearance of the Labour vote, without these votes being swing votes in favor of the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats, on the whole. Between those elections, Labour lost a stunning five million votes. But the Tories only gained 1.1 million in return, and the LibDems 1.75 million. One can safely assume that especially not all the new LibDem votes are likely to have been Labour swing voters, but, given the rightward shift of the Liberal Democrats (attempting the same strategy), more likely a certain number of Conservative voters also. But even aside from this, this demonstrates that even if every single new vote for the major opposition parties were a Labour defector, this would still account for only just over half of the total Labour loss. The real interest is in where the other at least 2.5 million votes or so went.

Of course, Labour rightists could claim that it does not matter, since the UK has a first-past-the-post voting system, so only the swing vote (a narrow band of a few million lower middle class white people in the Home Counties and Midlands suburbs) matters. But this argument fails on two grounds. First, because the Labour Party utterly failed to introduce a new voting system to replace the current one, even when it had an overwhelming majority to do so and it had been an explicit party programme point – allowing for the Westminster system presumption of popular mandate for such a change, as in the case of Asquith’s Parliament Act. In fact, when the current Coalition finally introduced a referendum to change the system to an only very moderately better one, as a demand of the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party leadership and MPs utterly failed to actively support it. Secondly, the United States has the most rigid and undemocratic first-past-the-post system in the world, and equally the most rigid two-party system. And yet, in America, where electioneering has been raised to the level of a science, everyone knows that the key to winning an election is not (just) capturing a small swing vote, but at least as much to increase one’s turnout, and where possible to decrease the turnout of the opponent. George W. Bush was twice elected President on his opponent’s failure to motivate the Democratic Party electorate; equally, Obama won overwhelmingly by his ability to greatly raise the favorable turnout in usually tepid states. Simple figures: Bush obtained 62 million votes in 2004 against Kerry’s 59 million, along a fairly ‘classic’ distribution of states. In 2008, the Republican candidate John McCain obtained about 60 million, again in the usual places, a slight worsening relative to Bush’s performance; but Obama clobbered him by obtaining almost 70 million votes. This also allowed him to win usually difficult states for Democratic candidates such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado. And this despite the fact Obama was generally perceived as relatively more leftist than the two previous nominees.

It is inconceivable that these facts could not be known and made clear to Miliband and his advisors, or even that Blair and Brown did not know them. To understand how this happened then, it is useful to look at similar patterns in other countries, where the rightward trend of social-democracy has also had this effect. For example one could take the recent elections in Spain. The PSOE of Zapatero was first elected in 2004 on an anti-war platform and one making overtures to the left-wing parties; it obtained 11 million votes to the rightist PP’s 9.75 million. In 2008, just before the crisis hit Spain, the results were much similar in terms of the political balance. However, the actual policies of the Zapatero government quickly turned to severe austerity as the crisis hit, and the left-wing parties went in opposition. This year, the PSOE was soundly defeated by the PP. The latter’s vote went up to 10.8 million, an increase of roughly a million, but the PSOE voted slumped to less than 7 million. Here, an alternative option on the left existed; and for the anti-Blairite thesis to hold, one should expect, under Spain’s roughly proportional representation, to see a corresponding increase in the left-wing vote. And indeed, one does: Izquierda Unida went from its lowest point at less than 1 million to 1.7 million. But bigger than that 700.000 vote shift to the left, and the possible 1 million vote swing from the social-democrats to the right, is again the remainder: some 2.3 million soc-dem votes that have simply disappeared. One can give comparable examples from Sweden, Italy, and so forth.

The rightist turn of the Blairites is part of a larger trend, and does not represent a real strategic consideration; or if it is one, it is suicidal. In reality, it is much more a part of the neoliberalization of the social-democratic movement generally. Social-democracy was originally conceived to achieve socialism through peaceful means and by the processes of liberal democracy. Before achieving this, it hoped to raise the standard of living of the working class by reformist means. It has failed on both counts. The first, because all social-democratic parties quickly got caught up in purely parliamentary politics, some sooner, some later, and abandoned their extra-parliamentary apparatus and their revolutionary ambitions. The second, because the reforms of the so-called welfare state have in many countries been introduced at least as much by conservative governments attempting to forestall and impede the revolutionary impulse of the subject of the reforms. But not only this: the final blow has been the late realization that any such reform, when not seen as instrumental to a larger end but instead being seen as the end in itself, is but a reed standing in the stream of capital’s motion. It may stand for a while, if the wind is favorable and the waters calm. But when the current moves more strongly, it is quickly broken, and swept away by the waters. This is precisely what has happened with and through the advent of neoliberalism, and this has shattered the social-democratic illusions. All the hapless leaders know to do now is what they have always done – swim with the tide of capital, no matter where it will take them. It is this that really underlies the Blairite strategy, and all it achieves is to kill the social-democratic parties quickly and efficiently. That death is just a question of votes.

The Tahrir protesters will certainly have the support of the liberal middle class, which seeks a ‘normal’ liberal-democratic order. It may also achieve the support of much of the urban working class, which knows the support of the army for the exploiting classes and their mutual back-scratching. But against this are arrayed the powerful forces of not just the army as symbol of the nation, but also the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood. This group still has strong appeal among the conservative religious elements of the nation, yet its leadership has allowed itself to be bought almost entirely into the military-bourgeois establishment. Because of the sheer numbers of the fellahin and the backwards elements of the poor population, the Ikhwan are almost certain to do very well in the elections, even more so if the ban on the former Mubarak party holds. For this reason, they have a strong incentive to make a deal with the SCAF and stab any attempt at a direct revolution against military rule in the back; the first signs of this have already been seen. But in a confrontation between army and Brotherhood on the one hand and the Tahrir protestors on the other hand, the great mass of the population will be deeply divided, allowing the stronger force to win. Finally, one must not forget the influence of the Western powers, who would much rather have the ‘stability’ of the military rule and corrupt clerics than the uncertainty of popular sovereignty. This is the challenge the Tahrir movement now has to face, socialist or liberal.

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When it comes to the so-called threat of Islamic forces in the Middle East, nothing can be more heartening than the development Turkey has undergone with the continued rule of the AK Party. Normally the sympathies of skeptical leftists would be on the side of a secular nationalist force over that of a conservative religious one. But in Turkey, the opposite should be the case in this confrontation. Obviously neither the nationalist CHP nor the conservative AKP represent in the long term the interests of the majority of the Turkish people. Nor will the European Union solve all its problems, as the current crisis has made all too clear. But the AKP’s third victory in a row has shown the widespread popular dissatisfaction with the conspiratorial, corrupt, fascistoid militarism presented by the CHP under the guise of Kemalism. While the war with the Kurdish separatists continues unabated, the very relationship of the Turkish people to their nation is being slowly transformed under the leadership of Erdogan and Gül. With the arrest of a large number of figures from the military and bureaucratic elite, the Erdogan government has made clear that the persistent attempts of the military-bureaucratic establishment and its supporters in the CHP to rule against popular will by Bonapartist coup de main will no longer be accepted as common practice. Erdogan has effectively declared war on the ‘deep state’ in Turkey, the establishment’s secretive extralegal networks for maintaining power. No longer will the will of the Turkish people be subverted by drug runners, arms dealers, ambitious generals, and revanchist lawyers conniving to establish a militarist, war-mongering, perfidious regime that appeals to the lowest instincts.

What’s more, the AKP’s religious background plays actually a positive role in Turkey. Its willingness to end the immediate struggle against the mere outward symbols of religion, such as the veil, shows in an ironic sense a greater appreciation of the nature of religious sentiment than the CHP’s laïcité does. As Marx so amply explained in his early works, one combats religion by combating the causes of religion, not by attacking its outward symbolism. It is the core, its expression as hope in a hopeless world, the sigh of the oppressed creature, and so forth, that must be addressed, not the mystical shell. The religious nature of the AK Party also plays a positive role in Turkey’s long-standing battle with its own history. While Atatürk had no problems whatever in admitting to the monarchist-military government’s responsibility in the genocide of the Armenians, the nationalist and revanchist cliques in Turkey have long made it impossible to discuss these matters in a scientifically and politically meaningful way by means of a campaign of terror and intimidation. Similar patterns apply to other historical difficulties for the nationalists.

The AK Party however does not feel itself bound to defend the dubious honor of making Turkey the most self-deluded country in the world, and its example here has now actually inspired even a CHP member of parliament to do the same. Huseyin Aygün mentioned the massacre of a large number of Alevi Kurds in the then-province of Dersim – an act of courage which promtly deeply split the CHP, with twelve CHP MPs gathering on their own initiative to denounce him. Erdogan promptly drove the point home by pointing out the CHP involvement in the murders, as the dictatorships of Atatürk and Inönü are their ideological ancestors. The CHP only deviated once from its stance representing the national interest as that of the military and the bureaucracy, and this was under Bülent Ecevit, when the military promptly stepped in to ‘correct’ it. At the same time, the popular pressure through the AKP as well as the increasing development of Turkey has caused the current CHP leader Kilicdaroglu to moderate his language with respect to the Kurds, making a new enemy out of the ‘Islamism’ of the AKP. In a time of widespread fear of Islamic terrorism, this is a card easy to play. It is disappointing therefore that so many in the West are falling for it, not realizing the AK Party’s domestic and foreign policies – Erdogan has recently taken a harsh stance against the former ally Assad, without supporting foreign interventions – are a great step forward from the CHP’s former rule.

This can easily lead some to despair; it is no joy to work to organize large numbers of people around common principles which will bring them in confrontation with the logic of capital, and to try and get them to recognize this as such, only to be interrupted by those who assure you it’s no use because all things are controlled by Bill Clinton via the Bilderberg Group. Equally, some are quite happy just to shrug this off and to ignore the loonies, as one ignores the religious fanatics intent on making converts that flock to any large public meeting or activism, especially longer term ones like the Occupy movement. But there is more to it than this. Precisely because these people often have quite good political instincts, and because they are capable of critical thought in a larger range, it will not do just to throw them away over the limited range on which they descend into the inane. After all, a UFO-hunter may well laugh at Jew conspiracies, and a believer in the New World Order is hardly bound to accept homeopathy, and so forth. Political or nonpolitical, these kind of fads and crazes are not necessarily mutually supportive. It would be more interesting if socialists could come to a better understanding of the mechanisms that cause people to be diverted in the first processes of developing a critical consciousness.

I have no readymade ideas or recipes for this myself, but I think it is something not often enough talked about, despite the frequency of such confrontations not only in left-wing meetings and working groups, but also on mailing lists, websites, and forum discussions. It can be very frustrating how one nutcase can disturb the productivity of a debate or meeting on a serious issue such as international relations or monetary policy (and I certainly count the gold standard fanatics under this); but equally, the left itself often is derided as crazy and dangerous for its critical notions. Ideally, we should develop good ideas on how to distinguish ourselves from conspiratorial lunacy while equally developing tools on how to re-divert such conspiracy craze of one sort or another into more meaningful political and social thought, even if we don’t necessarily agree with the specifics. There are certainly reasons to believe that the stronger such conspiratorial type thinking, the more this is a sign of an underdeveloped critical left, one in embryo but not (yet) able to be born fully. This is how Friedrich Engels briefly alluded to similar phenomena in his day, in the context of the rise of early Christianity compared to the rise of early socialism:

Everybody who has known by experience the European working-class movement in its beginnings will remember dozens of similar examples. Today such extreme cases, at least in the large centres, have become impossible; but in remote districts where the movement has won new ground a small Peregrinus of this kind can still count on a temporary limited success. And just as all those who have nothing to look forward to from the official world or have come to the end of their tether with it — opponents of inoculation, supporters of abstemiousness, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, free-community preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theories on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or unfortunate inventors, victims of real or imaginary injustice who are termed “good-for-nothing pettifoggers” by all bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers — all throng to the working-class parties in all countries — so it was with the first Christians. All the elements which had been set free, i.e., at a loose end, by the dissolution of the old world came one after the other into the orbit Christianity as the only element that resisted that process of dissolution — for the very reason that it was the necessary product of that process — and that therefore persisted and grew while the other elements were but ephemeral flies. There was no fanaticism, no foolishness, no scheming that did not flock to the young Christian communities and did not at least for a time and in isolated places find attentive ears and willing believers. And like our first communist workers’ associations the early Christians too took with such unprecedented gullibility to anything which suited their purpose that we are not even sure that some fragment or other of the “great number of works” that Peregrinus wrote for Christianity did not find its way into our New Testament.

(1) (By Peregrinus, Engels is referring to the story of a swindler who reportedly became a popular Christian bishop among the early Christians in Asia Minor.)

Similarly, it has been suggested that the “paranoid style” is popular particularly in the United States, and if true, this could well be a product of a sort of embryonic or quasi-stillborn socialist consciousness. It is hard to find any objective data on the persistence or frequency, let alone the origins, of conspiratorial and nonpolitical silliness; after all, it is too much in the eye of the beholder for most social scientists to deal with. But as people with a clear political view and a materialist philosophy, socialists should be able to politically engage with this, at least subjectively. This is not to suggest that political conspiracy is in any way unique to the left – see, for example, the astonishing popularity of the opportunistic conspiracy nonsense about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Nonetheless, we must especially develop tools to prevent ourselves from opportunistically jumping on a conspiracy bandwagon because it happens to fit our preconceived political scheme – an interesting example of this can be found in the case of Daniel Estulin’s visit to Cuba. An equal threat is the ability of cultist-type leaders to disorganize real political movements by creating conspiracy sects around themselves, as in the case of Lyndon Larouche. It behooves us as those often derided as crazy ourselves, as people who are outside the political mainstream, and equally as critical thinkers about society, to have a manner of dealing with the question.

1) Friedrich Engels, “On the History of Early Christianity” (1894-1895). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/index.htm

KKE banners on the Akropolis

KKE banners flutter on the Akropolis, calling on the peoples of Europe to rise up. A general strike has paralyzed the country; hundreds of thousands are on the march or stopped work; foreign leaders express their dismay; the government considers a national unity cabinet. Surely this must have been the scenario feared by the Royalists and reactionaries in the Greek Civil War, and by the colonels in their coup of 1967. But thanks to the greatest economic crisis capitalism has caused since the 1930s, it has become reality in the Hellenic Republic in these staid times of ‘liberal democracy’. With the financial and economic crisis hitting the debtor nations the hardest, the Greek government has been utterly unable to pay its outstanding debts and in order to save the European common currency it has to negotiate with its creditors in Europe and the IMF for a ‘bailout’ rescue plan if it is not to declare bankruptcy altogether. In first instance, it seemed a rescue package worth several billions spread over several tranches would be sufficient to save the Greek government’s financial position, but with economic conditions deteriorating by the day even these have not sufficed. The latest negotiations have seen creditors and ‘rescuers’ forced to accept an effective partial default of Greece on all its outstanding bonds of at least 50%, probably more.

However, such things are not done out of the goodness of the hearts of the friends of civilisation and freedom in Paris and Berlin. The penalty is to be paid by the people of Greece, as well as those of other southern European countries put at risk by the domino effect of ever diminishing bondholder confidence. The capitalist system knows no mercy, only the harsh demand that every debt is a credit, and this equation must equalize at whatever cost. With the threat of wholesale European monetary and credit collapse looming over them, the social-democratic government of Georgios Papandreou has seen no other choice but to implement the harshest programme of austerity Greece has known since the 19th century. This has led to a general strike against him and a chaotic confrontation outside the Greek parliament, in a sense the true ‘mother of all parliaments’, with KKE unionists and other demonstrators clashing with each other as well as riot police, while the assemblage of MPs passed the measures which would present the costs of the credibility of the eurozone in times of crisis to the Greek people. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage their democratic credibility, the PASOK leadership under Papandreou announced, without even informing their own cabinet, that a referendum was to be held on the question of continued Euro membership.

The very notion of a democratic decision on the economic future of the country was met with howls of outrage from the creditor’s governments abroad, as well as the liberal opposition party ND and even Papandreou’s own Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos jr. Papandreou was forced to withdraw the proposal. Even as I write, he has narrowly survived a confidence vote but is effectively forced to create a ‘national unity’ government with the opposition under Venizelos’ leadership, which will use its great majority of MPs (never elected under such a platform) to pass futher punitive measures on the Greeks. As always, when in a ‘liberal democracy’ liberalism and democracy come into conflict, it is the latter that loses. All the parliamentary formalities that normally hide the operation of the bourgeois state are thrown aside – the veil is lifted, and briefly all can see that the interests of small numbers of bondholders in Athens, Berlin, Paris and Washington supercede anything the Greek people may desire.

But such moments in which liberalism shows its true face are always moments of crisis in the double sense of the word. The Greeks themselves bequeathed this word to us, and it means a moment of confrontation, a moment where all can go wrong but also a moment of decision. All eyes are now on Greece as the first of the debtor nations which may buckle and collapse under the force of capitalism’s crisis. If it does so, others are expected to follow, such as the severely weakened economies of Italy and Spain. For the Greek people themselves, however, the cure is worse than the disease. To resolve the crisis of capitalism by capitalist means implies the restoration of the profitability of the banks, the credibility of the Euro bonds, and the victory of the creditor over the debtor: it means the great suffering of the majority in the interest of the wealthy minority whose property and interests are at stake. Now is the moment the Greek people and all of us decide whether we choose this path.

An alternative path exists. While most Greeks still have faith in the Euro as the guarantee of peace in Europe and the stability of their savings, a withdrawal from the currency would give Greece the opportunity for an independent policy. For this to be meaningfully on an international scale, it is not sufficient simply to devaluate under a Drachma and in so doing wipe out the creditors and the people’s savings alike. It must go further: the only opportunity is for Greece to declare a general default, to announce what David Graeber has biblically called a ‘Jubilee’ cancelling all outstanding non-commercial and state debts, and to prepare the way for an independent, socialist Greece which will never again risk its people’s living standards by hitching it to the destructive Juggernaut of international capitalism. This, too, means a better use of the state’s finances: instead of spending a proportionally massive percentage of its budget on sabre-rattling on the Turkish border, it would do better to restore Greek industry, improve the lamentable condition and inequality of Greek healthcare and education, and to disempower the monopolistic shipbuilders as well as the reigning political cliques. It also means the willingness of all Greeks to contribute their share to the reconstruction of the country, which in turn can only be done when a new government with a new approach regains the people’s trust. Only in this way can Greece have a lasting future.

One should not be so naive as to expect the powers in Washington, Berlin and Paris will allow this, nor will the ruling elites in Greece itself. It is no coincidence that the outgoing Papandreou government replaced, by surprise, its military commanders. The Greeks have all too fresh a memory of the Colonels’ Regime of 1967-1973, when right-wing militarists seized powers out of fear for the victory of the left; thousands were tortured, imprisoned, exiled and murdered in order to assure NATO her frontline base in the Cold War and the shipbuilders and landowners their property. Such a thing is not inconceivable even today. While it is not in the interests of Merkel or Sarkozy to drop liberal democracy just like that, big business interests may consider the option – Forbes already ‘jokingly’ suggested it. More likely is the ability of a ‘unity government’ to declare a state of emergency and in so doing attempt to destroy the unions’ and the demonstrators’ independent ability to resist the programme of austerity. Only the organised power of the Greeks can oppose them and prevent this, and in this they will need all the practical support from their friends in Germany, France, the United States and elsewhere they can get.

One should not imagine this crisis has seen its worst yet, and no Chinese deus ex machina will step in to save capitalism – it cannot be saved but at a cost so great that it is not worth paying. In the 19th century, the bankruptcy of many minor and middle-level powers, consciously engineered by their Western creditors, allowed the colonial or quasi-colonial takeover by Britain, Germany or France. In the 1930s, the Great Depression could only be overcome by the destruction of the Second World War, the greatest military cataclysm the world has ever seen. Only this wholesale destruction could destroy enough value to restore profit rates to the survivors so the system could continue. Shall our motto once again be: Vae Victis? Or shall we finally do away with this system, and say this time: Workers of the World, Unite?

NB: There is an interesting comparison to be made here with the article I wrote on the effects of the crisis in Greece in February 2010, when the effects were only just being fully felt. I was right to predict the necessity of a bailout for the EU major powers, but sadly the individual pressure on an isolated Greece I warned against has come to pass.

This is not to dismiss the significance of the struggles in southern Europe and elsewhere. They play not only a major role in showing how class struggle can and should be done, and that it can be done anywhere; but they also have a significant effect on the political-economic constellation of forces, since in many ways the very fate of the European Monetary Union depends on the willingness of the peoples of southern Europe to accept any imposition by the north. Their resistance is therefore more than a ‘merely domestic’ affair. A rebellion in Judea will never quite be the same as a rebellion on the streets of Rome, as Jesus was never as much a threat as Spartacus was; at the same time, the latter’s ideological power has greatly outlasted the former’s. So it may well be here. One of the conclusions that must be drawn from events today is the absolute importance of the international dimension of the movement, not just in terms of political strategy, but also in terms of the battle of ideas. So far, one of the weaknesses of the movement has been its character as the ‘awakening of the white people’, the emphasis on the rebellion being an event in the rich countries: but this is only a major event precisely because of its rarity. That it happens at all is to be applauded, but if this movement is to survive, it must become a movement at least as much of the truly oppressed of the globe as it is a movement of the indebted and dissatisfied workers of the West. This holds true at least for as long as the protestors in New York, London and Berlin do not move their demands beyond their own immediate, domestic interests, and as long as they have no intention of actually threatening the rule of international capital in any way. Merely camping outside St. Paul’s does not harm anyone, and therefore achieves nothing.

But here also lies an opportunity. As Marx wrote, “one step of real movement is better than a thousand programmes”, and this movement has taken several major steps in a very short time. Splits and contentions in such a movement are inevitable and a sign of health rather than weakness, insofar as they lead to the further and further confrontation of those involved with the true nature of the prevailing system and its defensive structures. Every further step will lead some to halt in fear of what lies ahead, but it will also lead some to identify and overcome barriers where they had never known them before, and in so doing to grasp more and more clearly the full outline of our capitalist maze. While the nature of the First World is such that it’s ‘aristocracy of labor’ is the least likely to rebel against the dominion of capital, it is also true that if and when they do, it has the greatest impact. The current crisis, as crises tend to do, has opened the eyes of millions to the reality of the system in a way that no socialist pamphlet or labor conference could possibly do. This alone is invaluable. The real nature of this movement is shown precisely by the fact that even in the United States, the tendency within it towards fascism, chauvinism, and petty-bourgeois white populism has been insignificant in the extreme. Neither the ‘Tea Party’ nor the fanboys of Ron Paul have had any success in diverting it from its fundamental political understanding, however undeveloped that may yet be. This, again, is encouraging in the extreme.

If these analyses may seem contradictory, it is because the movement itself is. In fact, it could not be otherwise. Its diversity of goals and aims, and of causes for protest, is potentially a weakness; it is also potentially a strength. As Vijay Prashad, hardly a First World petty reformist, put it about the American branch of the movement:

Our strength comes in our diversity, in our realization that no single issue discounts any other issue. The interconnected web of injuries draws us into our anti-systemic politics. Some see the sheer diversity of our movement as a failing, asking that we concentrate on one or two issues, on the main issue, which more often then not strips bare life into a cartoonish abstraction (is the “economy” really absent race and gender?). To such frivolous objections, here are at least two reactions. First, it is precisely that the American Left is constituted by this vastness that makes it imperative to recognize the right of the many to castigate all wrongs. More people should be welcome into the American Left,certainly into OWS, bringing with them their many complaints and dreams. Our movement must promise more to each of us than what is available in the present. Second, no one claim to human freedom is essentially more important than another. In time, there will be a serious debate in our movement over how to frame our core issues, and how to move one part of the agenda before another. That is inevitable. But that does not mean that at the start we should already be closing our doors to these or those issues.

(http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/06/zombie-capitalism-and-the-post-obama-left/)

All that said, anyone who thinks that at this point they know exactly what its historical significance will be, where it will go and whether it will succeed or fade out is deluding themselves. Nonetheless, I suggest a number of political points must be made and understood by all involved if success is to be more likely, at least.

1) We may safely assume that the current Depression will last for a considerable time still. In fact, there is no basic reason in political economy to expect living standards in the West to return to the levels they previously were, or even to expect anything other than slow but certain decline. As in all situations of crisis, this will lead to a radicalization of a considerable number of the population, both towards the left and the right. The natural instincts of the masses in the West may be fascist, but this is not a necessity, and can be opposed with right politics.

2) Such a politics has the absolute duties of both promoting any real movement that, whether it is aware of it or not, is aimed against the formal and real rule of capitalism. It does not in this context much matter under what banner or slogan such a movement operates, as long as its goals are in the fundament incompatible with the current capitalist order.

3) Where the demands of the movement are compatible with the current order, and are merely aimed at one or another form of domestic relief, they are insufficient. But as long as they are made in opposition to the capitalist class, and do not take on a chauvinistic or reactionary character, they can and should be moved to develop in the direction of anti-capitalism. Anything that finds its natural final outcome in opposition to capitalism has potential.

4) Insofar as the demands have chauvinist and labour aristocratic elements, these are to be opposed, but by demonstrating the incompatibility of such demands with true opposition to the rule of capital. This will, in the West, inevitably over time lead to splits in the movement. Such splits are healthy. For example, one must point out the significance of Western imperialism, and this will separate the wheat from the ‘patriotic’ chaff. To do this in such a manner that it promotes understanding of the interrelation between the death of millions in the Third World, the disempowerment of blacks and Native Americans, the endless warfare regardless of the will of the peoples of the West, and the independent power developed by the ‘military-industrial complex’ to the destruction of even any formal democracy: these are the tasks of the socialist in the West. They are not easy, but if even one-tenth of those on the march now and in future months will develop this political consciousness, it will be a very serious gain. It is imperative that we do not forget that for socialism to succeed politically, one does not need an absolute majority of any population being active Party members or the like. This has never happened and never will. All one needs is literally and figuratively a critical mass, and a constellation of political forces such that the great majority will prefer the victory of the socialists to that of their opponents.

5) For socialists outside the West, the task is a much more straightforward one, if not therefore any easier and considerably more dangerous. The popular democratic movements in the Arab world and the Maoists in Nepal and India have nonetheless shown these to be as potently pregnant with possibility as any other, and they have shown that they no more ‘necessarily’ lead to socialism than elsewhere. This is the real stuff of politics, which cannot be reduced to a static, mechanistic view of economic interests.

6) The final target must be to promote a politics which makes the connection between these movements clear: not by papering over the difference in economic and class position between a teacher in New York and a landless peasant in Chattisgarh, but by showing to the former that the target of their rightful anger is the same as which oppresses the latter. Even where their material position is widely divergent, the crisis and the popular response against it are great political and economic forces which push towards a convergence, even if it is nowhere yet near reaching that point. The future of such countries as China and India will determine the future of the United States; but they will no more succeed along the capitalist road than anyone else has, and in the zero-sum game of competition, there can only be so many winners. Any gain by them is a loss for the Americans and Brits and Germans and so forth, but one would be mistaken in seeing here only a problem for socialists in the West: as the current movement shows, this is equally a ripening of possibilities that have not been seen since the years between the great wars.

7) The main power that can divert this movement in the West is the strength of social-democracy, the ideology of the aristocracy of labor. But the more the crisis endures, the weaker social-democracy is. It has no answers that are not either co-opted by the left or co-opted by the right, and the great mass of people is ever more aware of this. Hitherto, disillusion with social-democracy has translated mainly into disaffection with politics altogether. This movement has the potential to change that. The great virtue of mass movements for economic change, however underdeveloped, is that they reveal the workings of many things to many people. Once taught, these are lessons people do not soon forget. This is why all the charlatans and figureheads of social-democracy from Obama to Jeffrey Sachs have rushed to co-opt the movement and to imbue them with their own ‘lessons’, which all amount to nothing else but further debasement before the golden calf of parliamentary liberalism. The fact they saw the need to do so – and no need at all to do so in the case of the ‘Tea Party’ – shows precisely that they are well aware of the ability of movements of this kind to teach real lessons in political economy, once that cannot be found in the books of Krugman or Mankiw.

In this chapter, Backhouse gives the most commonly heard responses to the charge of ideological narrowness and dogmatism levelled against the orthodoxy in economics. Because these are so much the standard answers, it is worth using the occasion to criticize them. This is not because Backhouse is particularly worse than other orthodox economists, but precisely because he formulated them so concisely in a book purportedly dedicated to this whole issue. Because of this, he is worth quoting at some length:

Heterodox economists frequently make two charges against their orthodox colleagues. The first is that ignoring their work means ignoring insights that are fundamental to understanding economic phenomena. The second is that the economics profession adopts an excessively narrow view of the methods that should be used in economics and that it needs to be more pluralist(…). The response to both these claims is that ‘insights’ about the economy are rarely useful unless economists also have tools with which to apply those insights. (…) Within the mainstream there is great suspicion of methodological claims that are not backed up by results. (…) It means that arguments about pluralism are more persuasive if they arise from examples of how new insights and methods can solve important problems.

(3)

Variations on these answers are what every heterodox thinker in economics is inevitably confronted with when challenging orthodox-minded colleagues. In fact, ‘answers’ of this kind are nothing as much as simply a restatement of the existence of an orthodoxy in a particular field of science; they are the hallmark of the existence of an established method among a large proportion of the practitioners in that field, something often – in fashionable imitation of Thomas Kuhn – called a paradigm. But they fail to convince, precisely because of this tautological nature, despite the frequency with which economists have recourse to them to defend the orthodoxy. The reasons can be explained briefly and in a straightforward manner as follows, as concerns economic theory:

1) The charge that the heterodox theories fail to provide insights which can be transformed into tools for application is easily rebutted. Not so much because they do in fact so provide, but because neoclassical orthodoxy, or any economic theory orthodoxy whatever, also fails to do so. Neoclassical economic theory does not exactly stand out by its immediate predictive value, nor by its ability to give practical tools which have an immediate, traceable, and easily controlled effect on the economy or society as a whole. Since economics is a social science, it is doomed (at least for the time being) like all other social sciences to operate in the realm of the inexact and the general. While there are countless models for economic purposes, from monetary policy analysis by central banks to stock predictors for financiers, none of these have any obvious or immediate relationship to any particular economic theory. Rather, they are generally derivative of applied mathematics, not economic theory proper. This is proven moreover by the fact that such models and systems can be used in virtually any economic and political context, from Gosplan to Lady Thatcher. When it comes to economic theory, one is always dealing with theories about the dynamics of a whole society, and those are inherently so complex, rapidly changing, and affective of the evolution of their subject-matter, that one should not expect to be able to easily pass from theory-building to practical application in any particular case. Neoclassical economics does not in any way obviously perform better at such transferral than do competing theories.

2) Secondly, the whole phrasing deeply begs the question. For the insights of competing theories to be able to convince the mainstream of their ‘results’ and ‘solving problems’, there needs be agreement to a very large degree as to what constitutes the problems of the field in the first place and what sort of theoretical outcome or scientific product would count as a result towards solving them. In many fields of science, this is indeed the case: not just in most of natural science, but this is also broadly true for history, anthropology, archeology, (historical) linguistics and so forth. Economics is particularly remarkable precisely for the absence of such an agreement, whether now or in the past; as Backhouse himself points out repeatedly elsewhere in the book, many mainstream economists in their day also disagreed strongly on major questions relating to these without being thereby out of the mainstream per se. The fact the discipline reinvents not just its methods, but its entire purpose every couple of decades is unusual in social science as much as in the natural sciences it has tried so hard to imitate.

That being the case, one cannot reasonably expect there to be any way that an Austrian economist or a Marxist economist could produce results for problems that a neoclassical economist would be inclined to recognize, even one as relatively interested in heterodoxy as (say) Brad De Long, simply because there is no agreement about what the problems are and the methods used differ too much to allow much agreement over results either. A neoclassical economist thinks he has achieved a result when he has used mathematical techniques to derive a particular equilibrium outcome in, say, a fictional and simplified labor market. A Marxist economist thinks he has achieved a result when he has demonstrated a particular crisis phenomenon to be reducable to a fall in the rate of profit in value terms. While there is sufficient overlap in methods for it to be perhaps hypothetically possible, it is in practice not at all easy to see how there could be any meaningful communication between the two as to which counts as a result to which problem, and why the other should care.

3) Nor is it immediately clear why the insights proffered by the heterodox economist should be new. While one always strives for progress in science, this can only be measured by prevailing notions about results and problems, and by concrete changes in real phenomena effected by application of theory. The latter we have dealt with already. The former changes much more often in economics than elsewhere, as mentioned, perhaps with the exception of ethical and aesthetical disciplines. What’s more, to the eye of many of the heterodox, the history of economics from at least WWII onwards, if not WWI, is actually a history of a science going backwards rather than forwards. If one perceives economics as dealing primarily with questions of value, production, distribution, and trade, as both functions of whole societies and a historically woven social fabric they are made of, it is not at all clear that the development of economics between roughly 1918 and 2000 has avoided sheer retrogression on issues previously considered long dealt with.

Orthodox neoclassical economics, being the use of applied mathematics to solve problems of interactions between stylized individuals in modelled equilibrium settings, will appear to an economist interested in the questions debated in the century before as utterly inadequate to making any progress in the tasks at hand, if not outright ridiculous. The presumption that the insights of the heterodox economist should follow newly upon the already established current foundation already tilts the scale in favor of the orthodoxy. This is exactly because economics has not only changed significantly in agreed-on methods and its notions of problem and result, but that this in turn is the product of a larger change: a change in the subject matter. This is even more unusual in other sciences, but one does not do the historical record much violence to state that in the 19th century, economics (political economy) was generally regarded as dealing with economic production and distribution processes as social phenomena, and in the 20th century, economics was generally regarded as dealing with the interaction of individuals’ preferences in monetary transactions between them. Even a very naive undergraduate in social sciences will immediately observe that this involves a very significant shift in the actual subject of the discipline, never mind all the attendant ideas about what the problems of the day are.

Perhaps this century will see yet another such shift – one could plausibly hypothesize an economics of this century revolving around the relationship between personal identity (psychology) and revealed preferences in experimental and observed social exchange more broadly, pushing the field away again from mathematics and in the direction of anthropology. But each of these three economics disciplines deal in their own way with interesting and relevant subjects, and none of them are likely to produce methods and questions that would be of much help for each of the others. This is very strongly an argument, therefore, in favor of supporting a pluralistic, interdisciplinary and open-minded approach, rather than an approach based on orthodoxy wedded to novelty.

1) Roger Backhouse, The Puzzle of Economics: Science or Ideology?. Cambridge 2010: Cambridge University Press.
2) Roger Backhouse, The Penguin History of Economics. London 2002: Penguin.
3) Backhouse 2010, p. 163.

Although only several thousand people have taken part so far, the persistent presence distinguishes it from the usual ‘show up, chant and leave’ approaches of American demonstrations, and consciously hearken to the kind of continuous ‘occupation’ that has characterized the recent uprisings in Europe and the Arab world. This is a phenomenon not as often seen in the United States, and this alone has garnered it much attention. Under the current circumstances of economic crisis, public sympathy is on its side in a way that it rarely is for demonstrators of any kind in the country. Although the New York Police Department has used the usual repressive measures against the demonstrators, they have already gained the support of several American unions and prominents, in particular the Transport Workers Union; this union has filed suit to prevent the NYPD from transporting arrested demonstrators on the city’s buses. Also unusual is the visible presence of military personnel in support of the demonstrators, something only Iraq Veterans Against the War consistently managed to achieve (and to little effect). With solidarity demonstrations arising in other American cities and with polling indicating general support for the demonstrators, and with the Obama administration at a historic weak point in the face of mass unemployment, loss of living standards, and general dissatisfaction, this is an encouraging sign for all on the left, and has been recognized immediately as such.

Yet the American people’s justified anger against the stock-jobbers and charlatans of Wall Street is not a sufficient basis for a meaningful popular movement that can affect the economic structure underlying the crisis. While it makes for a good political slogan, “bankers’ greed” is on reflection not the most relevant cause of the crisis, nor is it likely to be in any way impeded or prevented by demonstrations of this kind. We know the stock-jobbers did everything in their power to profit at public expense, to prevent regulation of their activities, and even now dole out millions to themselves despite having received unprecedented financial support from the public coffers. But this is what we should expect them to do: in a system which rewards only competitive possessiveness, it is what all humanity is drilled from the very youngest age to do. Putting the blame on intangibles of human nature like ‘greed’ is not a political recipe of any kind, and will allow real systemic causes to go underexamined. In fact, this naturalisation of the causes of the crisis is itself a product of the neoliberal order, which attempts – as capitalist ideology always and everywhere does – to naturalize capitalism itself as an inevitable, inescapable social reality which has always existed and will always exist no matter our intentions. Any meaningful political protest movement must resist this logic and go beyond such explanations to take aim at capitalism itself.

Of course this is easier said than done, especially in a country like the United States which by and large only sees the benefits of international capitalism and besides is so ideologically dominated by liberal thought that the very notion of socialism appears as an insult more often than as a political referent. But as it stands, the Occupy Wall Street movement is as liberal as the phenomenon it opposes – it’s an ad hoc response, a grab-bag of slogans and individual gripes, with no coordination and no leadership and which attacks only the most proximate and superficial causes of the crisis. In the final analysis, this crisis was not a failure of regulation (which is a right-Keynesian slogan), nor was it solely the collapse of a financial bubble in the housing and banking sectors, although it was all of these things. Most fundamentally, it is the outcome of the decades-long inability of capitalism to restore profitability to the worldwide production of value. The so-called globalization of worldwide manufacturing follows the classic Marxist law of the rate of profit to fall, as the cheaper prices enforced by the downward competition at once expands the ‘growth’ of the economy and undermines the worldwide rate of profit. This cannot be compensated for by the parasitical expansion of the so-called ‘services economy’ in the West, which exists only insofar and to the extent that the First World’s inflow of value is dominated by Third World production with a high rate of net exploitation. Some have made the underconsumptionist argument that the repression of organized labor and of the working class’ self-organization by the neoliberal offensive since the 1980s has made the working class’ consumption insufficient to valorize this expanded capitalist production. But although the Thatcherite-Reaganite political offensive against the working class was and is a real thing, in the end supra-political economic factors have determined the current outcome. The shift of capitalist value-producing activity to the Third World is the inevitable outcome not of too low, but of too high living standards for workers in the West, from the point of view of capitalism. The current crisis appears therefore as a classic Marxist case of capitalism’s inability to expand beyond its own given boundaries indefinitely, as it always creates new boundaries which it crashes headlong into, and always at a higher and greater level both spatially and quantitatively. Therefore, we should expect this crisis to be deeper and more prolongued than any since the Great Depression, and we should expect its global reach to persist, one which none subject to capitalist logic can escape (expressly including China).

All this is of course not easily encapsulated for a mass public in political notions that get people moving, and any movement is better than none at all. But the deliberate abstention from program and leadership on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement hampers it to a degree that it is more likely to invite a sympathetic pat in the head by the ruling class than to inculcate fear. This stands in sharp contrast not only to the direct political challenges, by locally determined and led popular fronts of political groups, in the Arab Spring. It also stands in sharp contrast to the heroic resolve of the Greek nation, which has fought to preserve the very economic existence of their country and their people, and who have shown a strength of organisation against all odds not seen since the days of Plataeae and Thermopylae. We should all encourage any sign of serious organisation against the effigies of capitalism in the United States, and “one step of real movement is worth a thousand programmes”. But the onus is now on the American left to make the case for anti-capitalism, rather than merely a rhetorical demonstration against the inequities of the stock market.

It is not the specifics of the case that make it interesting as a political question. After all, the law is clearly on the side of Basildon Council, while at the same time humanity seems on the side of the Travellers. After all, even a government inspector noted that there is a distinct lack of Traveller sites in the general area and significant overpopulation. There are no particular indications that the Traveller presence causes problems in other ways, the children attend local schools, and so forth. What makes the case interesting is the ramifications it has in terms of a conflict between political interests that have in the last decades been increasingly allied: left-wing political sentiments and environmentalist ones. After all, any socialist worth their salt is naturally inclined to defend a vulnerable, often exploited people on the margins of society against the authority of a borough council in Essex trying to prevent them from living in the homes they maintain on unused land. But on the other hand, many on the left would in general also be inclined to support the notion of the green belt, and the necessity for preserving open landscape to preserve the ecosystem, for walking and cycling and other forms of enjoyment of open space, and to restrain the limitless hunger of some city councils for covering all England in asphalt for the benefit of dreary ‘new town’ shopping malls. That makes this an unusually direct case of the interest of the human against the interest of the natural.

It will be no secret that the present author thinks the green-red coalition, to put it in contemporary terms, that has formed in the last 40 years or so is an important step forward for a more comprehensive and scientific political understanding of how to achieve a socialist society. But this test case, so to speak, demonstrates the limits to the potential this alliance has. A shortage of housing, especially when it redounds to the discomfort of the poorest and most marginalized groups in the country, is a very serious issue for any socialist. The United Kingdom has suffered from a dramatic underinvestment in public housing construction since the days of the Thatcher government, and the slow deflation of the housing price bubble will do nothing to allay these issues for those not ranked as middle class. One may like or dislike the semi-nomadic lifestyle of the Travellers; certainly, from the point of view of the full development of the individual there serious problems with the isolated and patriarchal nature of some of the culture of this group. But that is not germane to the current case, as there is no indication of any hostility towards the society of Basildon generally on the part of the Travellers, merely a desire to live as they have done for a considerable amount of time. The site itself is indeed in unmistakably green land, but is also a former scrapyard, which implies that even the pretense of unsullied nature would be hard to maintain for Basildon council or the town’s visitors – while of course every critical environmentalist is aware of the relative and invented nature of any ‘open nature’ in any case. This, in turn, raises the question of priorities, and more particularly, the question of for whose benefit a country is planned.

Local planning laws are, as any planning is, a formalization of the recognition of the need for all societies to control the interaction between its members and to create out of the chaos of social relations a particular structure of life as an emergent property, one with a definite political form and purpose. As soon as humans have historically entered into relations with others in a fixed place for an indefinite period of time, such planning is the prerequisite of all human control over our own lives. But at the same time, they are also always a restriction of individual freedom. In this sense, all planning is the victory of the abstract freedom of the social individual, the species-being, over the physical freedom of the individual creature. This can be justified if and only if its actual reality is to enhance, rather than diminish, the mutual recognition of humans in which their full development as individuals depends on the full development of each of the other individuals, the only authentic form of society. This is as true for environmental planning as for any other.

For reasons scientific and aesthetic, taking the human interaction with nature – our metabolism as Marx called it – into account is of prime importance in making political decisions. The days of pretending pollution would not kill the poor, that uneducated people do not care about having green spaces, or that adverse ecological impacts can be limited to any small region are clearly over. Whether we like it or not, we must face the consequences of the global system capitalism has created, and the interrelationship of all the natural elements with each other and with our own production – the crisis of nonrenewable resources being the clearest example of this. But general ecological principles can only be justified insofar as they serve human goals, insofar as they enable a better life in every respect: better production, greater aesthetic enjoyment, more freedom to roam, better health, and a better comprehension of the world we live in and its physical properties. But they cannot be a hindrance or a let, a hard limit to the needs of humans for their own sake. Getting the line right between these requires a very careful understanding of the intricate and contradictory nature of the web of our interactions with our environment, the way it shapes us and the way we shape it – perhaps truly a case where the use of the term ‘dialectics’ would be appropriate. In the case of Dale Farm, the preservation of the green belt on this particular site by means of public planning fails that test.