Occupy Has Nothing to Say? I Blame the Parents

 Socialism, or at least its 20^th Century version, collapsed for two main reasons: because it couldn’t find a political form which demonstrated at least much personal freedom and democracy as the Western liberal democracies it opposed, and because it failed to deliver economic progress at the same speed or to the same apparent degree of efficiency as capitalism. 

Like everyone else of a certain age I watched this collapse on prime time TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had a profound effect on me. I was, after all, a card carrying Communist at the time – a historical materialist stranded on what appeared to be the wrong side of history.  

It very quickly became clear that there was no ‘easy intellectual retreat’, as it were, to social democracy. Generations of refugees from Marxist parties had made that journey before The Fall, comforting themselves they were still pursuing the aims of socialism but by defensible, democratic means.

Actually, a very large slice of the Marxist tradition had, by the 1980s, made a serious attempt to make this shift within its own intellectual framework anyway. Classical Trotskyism had its own (to me, always unconvincing) version of this which ran broadly along the lines of laying stake to the heritage of a purified and re-claimed ‘democratic’ Leninism; the libertarian Marxists had a more root and branch version, and my own tradition, that of Eurocommunism, somehow accepted the theoretical inapplicability of much of Leninist political theory in the West ( I mean, what else was all that bigging up of Gramsci about?) whilst still maintaining an institutional allegiance to the broad hope encapsulated in the ‘moment’ of 1917. All three, were, in their different ways, quite keen on refusing the supposed gap between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ of course, and laying stress on the economic and workplace democratic element to a vision of socialism – something they held in common with ‘advanced’ social democracy, at least in Bennite/Livingstonian form. 

Yet none of these positions – not social democracy, not Trotskyism, not libertarian Marxism, not, most of all, Eurocommunism - survived the Fall in any meaningful sense. Sure, there are fragments of each of these traditions still knocking about the margins of the political scene - but the intellectual ‘oomph’ has gone from all of them. I don’t think this is because people looked at their political solutions to the evident lack of freedom in the Soviet bloc and rejected them.

I think this is down, in large part anyway, to none of them actually having a set of economic answers to the critique capitalism posed in 1989-1991: why aren’t you as rich as us ? It was the question that those glossy shop windows in West Berlin in 1989 shouted in the face of the newly arrived Ossi, still grasping the newly hewn piece of The Wall. It stubbornly remains as a question, even though most versions of leftism now have a critique of growth for its own sake and at least a Greenish tinge. The left lacks an economic policy, or even a vision of what a socialist economy might look like.

Given that the centrepiece of Marx’s own intellectual life was subtitled ‘a Critique of Political Economy’, there is a howling historical irony here. Capitalism is now in deep trouble – systemic trouble. So, to put it mildly, it is not immediately obvious to the average Greek that capitalism will make them richer - and fears of the same nature abound throughout the once triumphant West. But no one has any non capitalist economic language with which to discuss alternatives.

& that's down to my generation, not the predominantly young people who constitute the new foot soldiers of the Occupy movement. Good on 'em I say: they may not be practicing socialist politics as I understand it - in fact, it seems more like a usurping of the old religious tradition of 'bearing witness'. But they are practicing anti-capitalist politics, and perhaps such is the poverty of radical inheritance my generation of leftists have handed down to them that is all they can possibly do. But I'm very glad they're doing it.

Once More With Feeling?

I wrote last week about my dismay at finding my children didn't know the words to the Red Flag; Rab said he used the tune as a lullaby to his kids when they were small. & this set me thinking about the role of emotionally charged symbols - be they musical or flags or whatever - in the passing on of political and moral perspectives. 

Let me share another anecdote.

This summer I went to the funeral of a man I hadn't seen for the best part of 20 years. He had been General Secretary of the old Communist Party of Great Britain and, in the 1980s, I was a lowly rank and file member in the same branch as him. I simply wanted to pay my respects. 

There was a fair crowd at the funeral. A lot of faces I half recognised and one or two much missed friends. We were all much older than my mind's eye recalled us being, some very much older it seemed to me. A certain amount of shuffling around went on as, first, the forty somethings gave up their seats in the overcrowded hall for the sixty somethings, and then the sixty somethings gave up their seats for the eighty somethings. Most funerals are like that I suppose.

Anyway, we had the speech from the Son-who-is-a-Professor on his father's personal and political life; we had the (rather beautiful) acappella Burns ballad from the Grandson-who-is-the folk-singer ; and we had the warm appreciation from the (non Communist) woman who had worked with him on pensioners’ campaigns after he retired. I braced myself for the final moments, certain that I was going to find it unbearably sad to hear these gathered extinct volcanoes of British Marxism warble uncertainly through the Internationale for one last time. Somehow the sound of their ageing larynxes were going to confirm the passing away of my youthful hopes of socialism.

But Gordon, or his family, had thought of that. We didn’t end on the Internationale,nor on The Red Flag  or Bandiera Rossa . We ended on Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World'. An expression of hope and confidence in our fellow human beings’ capacity for wonder now and in the future, not a ritualistic reminder of a past world fought for and lost by the greyheads in the hall. It's taken me a few months to fully appreciate what a good decision this was.

Those old songs - like the Red Flag and the Internationale - are for teaching the children so they don't die and so the kids have an imaginative window into how the generations that came before them saw the world.  

The sentiments they were meant to contain need to be passed on in other ways as well though. & any tradition which is  something more than merely a tradition will find new ways of capturing the here and now and a contemporary sense of the  socialist possibilities pregnant in the future. Because, for all the fact that music or flags and banners can't represent a politics in its entirety, we do need to be moved and reassured and warmed at an emotional level - but by a vision of hope for the future, in words and images and melodies that speak to where we're going, not where we've been .   

Name That Tune

So I walk into the kitchen and there is young Ms. McMenamin, aged 12, doing some nonsense free-form rapping about squirrels or whatever. It was the tune that caught my attention: dum-dum-de-dum/dum-dum-de-dum/de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum.
I asked her if she knew what the tune was called, and she searched her memory and came up with a rather hesitant,"..  something about trees?".

"Well... sort of", I say:" ... but there are other words as well". A veil of blankness descends.  I called her 14 year old brother and asked him the same question only to get the same blank response. Now this depresses me, as he is by far and away the most politically aware kid of his age that I know. He wrote to Searchlight magazine asking to do his work experience next year FFS. But, no, he didn't know the words to that tune either.

Of course, my kids are not on their own: I see that whole conference halls full of people who might be expected to know the words need laminated cards to remind them. But when I was 12 or 14 everybody knew them. & I mean everybody, not just those who identified with the words in any way.

 I find it desperately sad to see something slipping away from popular cultural memory. It's not that I think either the words or the tune itself are that wonderful per se, but the idea that they're losing their status as widespread cultural reference points,  something almost like a nursery rhyme, obscurely upsets me. Even when one gets to the stage of doubting , even distrusting, any simplistic identification with 'flags and banners' of any kind, including musical ones, one has to be able to know which 'flags and banners' one is distrusting, or making ironic reference to, or whatever. 

So the kids are on a programme of 'repeat after me till you get it word perfect'. The rest of you can make do with this. 




 

That NHS Listening Exercise in Full

From the LRB blog,

"...there’s more to the listening exercise than a website. Paul Burstow, the care services minister, announced last month that 119 listening events had been planned. 119? Impressive. It would be nice to see a list. Apparently if you ask for the list you are told to contact NHS Future Forum. But it turns out that NHS Future Forum does not take incoming calls. Not, it would seem, that kind of listening exercise."

No need to even pretend to listen now, I'd say. It was always about keeping the junior partners in the coalition happy anyway. Those pesky Lib-Dems have been put back in their box via the AV vote and local elections, so Lansley is probably going to get a clear run at his intention of dancing on Nye Bevan's grave.

& hey- sometimes it really is true that you need to go ahead with a war because the railway timetables say so, as it were. At least that's what the NHS chief executive thinks.

Addendum: of course the really clever thing would be for Cameron to sack Lansley - and appoint Clegg to carry out Lansley's NHS plans which are now hurtling down the track towards reality.

AV: A Tactical Question for England ?

I'm in the 'Oh alright then, if that's the only thing on offer' camp on AV.

That's simply because, on balance, I think it is just a tinsey bit more sensible that FPTP. But proportional and fair it sure ain't. Not that any electoral system can necessarily guarantee those aims: you pick a electoral system to fit the underlying political sociology in my view, not to change it. Therefore a system which allows (it doesn't guarantee this of course) the two major parties to be cut down to something closer to their declining linkages to the political outlook(s) of the mass of us is probably preferable. That's as far I as tend to think about it before giving up with a yawn.

Up to now, I've been a bit dismissive of folk who think about this choice in purely tactical terms. I distrust those who tell me they'll be voting this way or that because of some predicted short term political effect. In general, I simply don't think people - even practiced spinners from the no-longer-smoke-filled backrooms - can predict that sort of thing. Life is just too messy. But this poll has concentrated my thoughts: it appears that pro independence parties - the SNP and Scottish Greens - may, for the first time, win a majority in Holyrood.

Now, this might not happen of course. & even if it does it's a long way from Salmond having a majority in his parliament to him actually wining a referendum on Scottish Independence. But it does focus the leftwing English mind on how FPTP elections might be expected to go in the future without the Caledonian contribution. We'd be looking at more or less permanent Tory government.

So I've changed my view. There is a tactical question involved here, but it's not about giving Cameron or Clegg a black eye, or encouraging the 'left' LibDems to jump ship or whatever. It's about an insurance policy against the possible day when the Scots leave us.

The Nakedness of Class and the Classroom

I thought I had given up blogging, but some things make you so angry you just have to write something down. Who is to blame for my return to my pointless habit of hurling typo strewn invective into the ether? Step forward Mr.Toby Young and his West London Free School idea.

Everyone needs to be clear what's happening here, so a little background. There is a 'zeitgeist-y' feeling across all welfare services that the old 'top down' professionally defined models of service delivery are falling short. Hence a lot of emphasis on the 'personalisation' of Health and Social Care and of general out rolling of models of greater user and consumer involvement across the piece. Education is not immune to these developments - and nor should it be. Parent controlled schools fit nicely into this zeitgeist, and shouldn't be opposed at all at the level of basic principle.

However, the question of what any school should control, never mind who should control the school, is a bit more complicated. Here we hit that Great British Wall of Silence About the Most Obvious Thing In the World: how class works in an mundane, everyday sense.

The question of school governance, in the abstract, is one that would send most people to sleep. No one chooses a school because it is a Community School, or a Foundation or a Voluntary Aided School or whatever: they choose on the grounds of the curriculum offer, the results and the ethos of the school.

Well, I say 'they choose', but often this isn't the case: the school effectively chooses them through its admissions criteria. Remember, we still have over 150 Grammar Schools in this country, never mind the Church schools, or the way almost any admissions policy can be adopted to manipulate the intake (e.g. there is a vast difference between having a 'distance from school gates' entry criteria depending on where a school is: in a leafy suburb, surrounded by expensive streets, it is selective; if the school is in the middle of a Council Estate you've got a Secondary Modern in the making).

It is for this sort of reason that some of us feel that no school should control its own entry criteria - there has to be an outside body which coordinates entry criteria to prevent unfairness creeping into the system. Traditionally, this has been the local authority. You don't necessarily have to think the LA should run schools, or not all schools anyway, to believe it should carry out this coordinating function. It is perfectly possible to imagine parent controlled schools which exist within such a regime.

But there is another way in which Tony Young and co appear to have found to flout the aim of achieving some sort of rough level playing field: rather than (just) fix the entry criteria - though they have done that as well- they've fixed the actual curriculum offer so it doesn't fit a huge segment of the children who might potentially attend. This is not choice: it is the active and knowing restriction of choice. & it's all about class.

I think more consumer power over welfare services is a good thing - but I don't think that can just be taken as meaning 'let the sharp elbows of the middle classes get their kids to the front of the queue and devil take the hindmost'. I'd be an enthusiastic supporter of any school run by parents - 'the consumer voice' - which had a genuinely comprehensive entry criteria and a genuinely comprehensive curriculum offer.

But what West London Free School is proposing is essentially a way of stealing resources from working class kids for selfish reasons. It's disgraceful.

Waiting For the Great Leap Backwards?

I had been wondering exactly what the Coalition now expects to happen. They've pushed through the budget, they've handed down the pain to the operational bits of the public sector in eye wateringly-tight financial settlements and they've (just about) got through the first really tricky Commons vote, the one on tuition fees.

Were they, I mused, now hoping a spirit of grim, 'post Dunkirk-like determination in adversity' to take over the country and we all pull together through these straightened times till the sunny uplands of a private sector led recovery are reached? That we collectively roll up our sleeves and build the Big Society out of whatever happens to be at hand?

Andrew Rawnsley says not: they want to unleash revolutionary cultural change on the country, and especially its public sector. He makes a rather far fetched analogue with Mao,

"I have heard one important figure in the government talk of unleashing a "cultural revolution" in the public services and another hailing devolution of power away from the centre using Mao's old slogan: "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

.... I have actually heard more than one member of the cabinet explicitly refer to the government as "Maoist".

Just about anywhere you look in Whitehall, there is a secretary of state unleashing upheaval. Ken Clarke challenges two decades of orthodoxy about the criminal justice system. Michael Gove battles the educational establishment to create his "free schools". Iain Duncan Smith has ambitions to be the man who definitively reformed welfare. Chris Huhne is dramatically recasting energy pricing. Nick Clegg wants to rewrite large parts of the constitution. Over at health, Andrew Lansley proposes the greatest upheaval in the NHS since its foundation. They are urged on from within Number 10 by the prime minister's principal strategist, Steve Hilton, who is probably the most Maoist person in the government. He has been heard to tell colleagues: "Everything must have changed by 2015. Everything."

Rawnsley manages to weave into his case the blurted out remarks of one Nick Boles MP , who claimed that chaos in local government is not only coming but is to be welcomed, as it is an alternative to intrinsically impossible planning. (In other news: Tim Worstell manages to work this up into a moment of Hayekian purity, somehow implying an obscure linkage between butterflies flapping their wings in the Amazon and the socialist calculation debate. Or something like that.)

Rawnsley's wrong. He's looking in the wrong bit of Marxist history for his analogies. I think I'm coming round to the view that what this lot are doing is much more akin to Stalin's scorched earth policy in WW2. They're not engaged in a 'regressive modernisation' as Stuart Hall so famously called Thatcherism. They're simply trying to lay waste to territory they don't expect to occupy for very long, to make it unusable by their opponents.

I suspect, deep down, they know their moment is passing, that the political and economic conditions which allowed neoliberal economics to become the default consensus of governments throughout the Anglo-American world have come to an end. The Great Moderation is over, it went down the pan in the Credit Crunch. The systemic default modes of managerial and political thought based on neoliberalism continue for want of a positive alternative, but the old certainty is gone. This may be their last chance to shrink the state for a long, long time. They're going to take it, come hell or high water.