New tactics against the beast

“The State is sometimes thought of as parliament. But Marx showed that the historical development of the State had little to do with representative institutions; on the contrary, the State was something through which the will of the ruling class was imposed on the rest of the people. In primitive society there was no State; but when human society became divided into classes, the conflict of interests between the classes made it impossible for the privileged class to maintain its privileges without an armed force directly controlled by it and protecting its interests. “This public force exists in every State; it consists not merely of armed men, but of material appendages, prisons and repressive institutions of all kinds” (Engels, Handbook of Marxism, p 726). This public force always has the function of maintaining the existing order, which means the existing class division and class privilege; it is always represented as something above society, something “impartial,” whose only purpose is to “maintain law and order,” but in maintaining law and order it is maintaining the existing system. It comes into operation against any attempt to change the system; in its normal, everyday working, the State machine arrests and imprisons “seditious” people, stops “seditious” literature, and so on, by apparently peaceful means; but when the movement is of a wider character, force is used openly by the police and, if necessary, the armed forces. It is this apparatus of force, acting in the interests of the ruling class, which is the State. […] It was obvious to Marx that the extension of the vote did not in any way alter this situation. Real power rests with the class which is dominant in the system of production; it maintains its control of the State machine, no matter what happens in the representative institution. A change of real power therefore involves the use of force against the old State machine, whose whole apparatus of force is turned against the new class which is trying to change the system.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/burns-emile/1939/what-is-marxism/ch05.htm

Published eighty years ago on the eve of global war, this analysis still applies today (1). But, then as now, confronting the might of state is problematic. In fact, success seems to depend on turning around the forces that defend the centres of wealth and power. If the military join the rebels, or just stay neutral, the revolt can become a revolution. But today’s professional armies are parked outside of society, so their neutrality is the best that can be hoped for. The military are the status quo’s protection against foreign aggression and a tool for operations abroad. To protect itself against homeland threats to its supremacy, it has the police. They also live apart from society, and consider it as globally criminal. And most of the police force stay on to retirement, whereas military personnel often leave after five or ten years, albeit with PTSD that can so easily lead to alcohol, drugs, homelessness, and too often to suicide. Both obey to a chain of command. In the case of the military, the chain goes up to the head of the executive, whereas some police obey orders on a more local level, and the multiple aspects of policing seem to compete as much as they collaborate.

The powers that govern the state dispose of force on such a massive scale that it cannot be opposed by violence. And that mercenary force will not turn against its paymaster. Thoreau’s option of not paying taxes is no longer materially possible, though refusing to fill the tax form would lead to jail, and could be envisaged as a mass action. And widespread civil disobedience could also swamp the judicial system. But, for such movements to succeed in profoundly changing the structures of power and production, they must have strong convictions and endurance. In an age of fake news, convictions can easily be fantasies. And, when most households are surviving pay-check to pay-check with a backlog of debt, stopping the rat race for even a day is impossible. There are, however, two groups who stand outside this agonising treadmill, those who have retired from work and those who have not yet started. The first have lived their lives and have nothing to lose, the second are just beginning their lives and find themselves without a future. Pensioners and teenagers do not seem much of an army, but they have the certainties of youth and old age, and the staying-power that comes from being outside the production process.

The state’s control of society relies ultimately on brute force. But, on an everyday basis, its hold is insured by the constant propagation of ideas in its favour. It will try to persuade before having to oblige. And it must have the willing support of at least some parts of society, notably its security services. They have been known to fire indiscriminately on student and dark skinned protestors, on miners and steel workers, and have on occasion clubbed and gassed most categories of working men and women. Would they show the same enthusiasm when faced by white-haired elders and pimpled adolescents, who might be their parents and children? If grandparents and grandchildren could join up to demand radical change, they would have a formidable ideological impact. The past and the future telling the present it is on a path to nowhere, a double focus on a doomed reality. The pacemaker generation and the post-millennial generation are physically inapt for violence, too old and too young, but they could exert a huge moral pressure on the security forces under orders to repress them. Even the most brutal mercenary might hesitate in front of frail old ladies and kids with braces. The wealth that uses the state to maintain its power is too strong to be overthrown by violence, but it is a moral weakling. The fault in its armour is simple decency, and that is where pressure needs to be exerted. Stopping thoroughfares by sitting on them is just a beginning.

1. For example this was posted by Chris Hedges in 2017: “Police forces, as Alex S. Vitale writes in his book, were not formed to ensure public safety or prevent crime. They were created by the property classes to maintain economic and political dominance and exert control over slaves, the poor, dissidents and labour unions that challenged the wealthy’s hold on power and ability to amass personal fortunes. Many of America’s policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in colonies of the U.S. and then brought back to police departments in the homeland. Blacks in the South had to be controlled, and labour unions and radical socialists in the industrial Northeast and Midwest had to be broken.”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/our-ever-deadlier-police-state/

Fragmentations

Societies have always been divided by class. Going back in time these were the priests, the soldiers, the merchants and the working people. In some societies this was rigidified into a hereditary cast system. Elsewhere promotions were occurring, though decreasingly so. These structures were possible as long as land, owned by the church and the military, was the major source of wealth. Trade encroached on this monopoly and occasionally gave power to the merchants. But the great upheaval came with industry. Mechanised production brought a new class into the circle of power: the entrepreneurs. The ensuing class struggles opposed land and industry, while the clerks sided mostly with the land owners, and the bankers with the industrialists. This resulted in a compromise when the rules of capital accumulation were accepted by all the contenders. By the late 19^th century they had joined together as a ruling class, over and above the labouring masses.

The majority’s living and working conditions have been described by several celebrated authors. For some it was the Gilded Age, la Belle Époque, but for vast numbers it was the most squalid poverty. The new 20^th century was rebellious. The upper-class felt threatened in life and limb by anarchist bombs and revolvers, and the working classes were labelled as dangerous. Labour was organising itself and flexing its muscles in the workplace. Capital was in trouble at home and on the question of conflicting foreign empires. This led to war, mass conscription, indescribable butchery of the bravest and best, and to a second helping twenty years later when civilians bore the brunt. During both World Wars, production and distribution came under centralised government control. And, in the intermediary period, world finance and trade had collapsed following the Wall Street crash of 1929. Capitalism, as the private property of the means of production, had failed dismally. However, in 1945 America was the only industrial nation left untouched by the destruction, and was producing about half the world’s wealth. And America remained the stalwart champion of private profit capitalism.

After the wartime (creative?) destruction, reconstruction in the war-scarred nations set off a new cycle of economic expansion. The technologies based on coal were replaced by internal combustion and electricity. This was largely financed and provided for by America, with a firm hand on the politics of the assisted nations. Free market capitalism was back in the saddle, and was proclaimed the only alternative to the state capitalism of the “Communist” Block. The war had bonded societies with a common purpose, behind a charismatic leader. The conscript armies had brought down class barriers through uniformity. Full employment had pushed up wages and strengthened the workforce’s bargaining power. And those who had done the fighting came home with expectations. These elements brought widespread middle-class conformity. But the post-war generation could not comply. Higher education, colour and electric sound opened perceptions that were different and gave a multitude of perspectives. The uniform world was broken into fragments. Minorities were coming out of the shadows and closets to proclaim their right to be different, and women – until recently a majority of citizens - were demanding equal opportunities and pay, and some respect. But ethnicity, gender and sexual preferences cut across class divisions. And, as these movements took centre-stage, the class struggle was pushed into the background.

The late 1980s and the 1990s witnessed the spread of market capitalism to China, Eastern Europe and Russia’s newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States. And this gave a boost to some countries in the southern hemisphere, while recalcitrants in the Middle-East and the Balkans were stamped on. Notwithstanding the dotcom blip, 9/11 and an expanding theatre of war, by 2008 the world’s production had doubled. The exploitation of labour had intensified – with working conditions resembling those practiced in Europe and North America a century earlier - and capital was accumulated by a few at a proportionate rate. But outsourcing the production of consumer goods meant the loss of industrial jobs, which could only be replaced by services. The old industrialised nations moved their production to less developed regions, to profit from cheap labour and slack rules on working conditions, pollution control and taxation. Corporations globalised, transporting goods around the planet, making at the lowest price and selling at the highest one. Meanwhile, in those traditional manufacturing countries, workers saw their factories close and were left to scramble for part-time employments.

Following the middle-class fantasy of the post-war years and the impact of a cultural mutation, the demand for equal rights and opportunities by minorities and women relegated class struggle, and the loss of factory jobs helped destroy the power of workers’ organisations. In some sectors union membership dropped to zero. Services tend to scatter the work-force and individualise the workers, whereas industry brings them together with a common objective. This unity of intent is a force that can oppose the power of abusive employers. When the workplace is at home, on a bicycle, or all over the place at unpredictable times, common purpose disappears, along with the capacity for mass actions. The labouring classes have been crushed and disseminated, and their past organisations have been made redundant. But, just as the new services economy has developed largely due to the internet, so labour is using that same tool to begin to reorganise in ways adapted to the present work environment. Their major handicaps are the persistence of antiquated ideas and the non-class divisions of society. When the concept of a proletarian dictatorship is brought up to date, and when women and men, gay and hetero, black, brown and white realise they have everything to gain by acting together, then a serious opposition can be made to the powers that rule the world, and to their hubris and Olympian disregard that are destroying the planet.

New ideals are in urgent need

For the past three to four decades ideology has been increasingly dominated by wealth and power. Money and military might seem to decide just about everything nowadays, and this situation has been propagandised so effectively that it is generally perceived as an inescapable fatality. But this has not always been the case. Going back another couple of decades, widespread ideas were very different. In the 1960s and 70s rebellion was in the air. Songs protested, youth dropped out and huge crowds gathered in opposition to a system of segregation and imperialist war. A lot of people were badly beaten, some were jailed and some were murdered, and the system survived, but it had its back to the wall and was compelled to grant concessions. Johnson and Nixon were elected, Nixon twice, but the first was obliged to outlaw segregation and install social programs, while the second was forced to end America’s military engagement in Vietnam. In those days people still believed they could influence events outside of elections, and they did.

The 1960s saw the rise of a counterculture, much of which would later become mainstream. A generation had lost trust in its elders, who seemed stranded in a wartime past of black and white, at a time when colour was spreading in print, movies and TV. A monochrome world suddenly lit up in a rainbow blaze. And, with the possible assistance of psychedelic substances, perceptions were irremediably modified. This new, different way of seeing things was extremely radical and indiscriminate. The Old World had to change or disappear. The destruction concerned the whole political spectrum. The Right was neo-colonialist and racist. The Left was Stalinist and xenophobic. Both were misogynous homophobes sold out to corporate power. And both sides were shattered by this cultural upheaval. However, the fundamentals of class struggle remained. The Left never recovered from the exposure of Soviet and Chinese forced-labour internment “archipelagos”. Those two experiments in proletarian government had turned into totalitarian bureaucracies. So the belief in another path evaporated, leaving a bleak emptiness. On the other hand, the Right was quick to rally behind a few ideologues, such as Hayek and Friedman, and the more obscure members of the Heritage Foundation. By the late 1970s their neo-liberal discourse was dominant on both sides of the Atlantic. There was no alternative to market forces.

The 1960s and 70s were like a huge wrecking-ball. Turn on, tune in, drop out, and then, no future. The Cold War and the permanent threat of total nuclear annihilation were partly to blame, but Western society was in need of a severe rejuvenation. This did occur, but the driving hands were the video media and their centralised control. The spread of ideas must have a medium. Offset printing can manage on a small budget, satellite TV cannot. The propaganda war was won by weapons of mass delusion. The Right’s offensive to reclaim ideological dominance had the support of all major media outlets, and opposition was muted. The egalitarian middle-class spirit of the 1960s was swept into the dustbins of history, leaving a vague sense of nostalgia, and cutthroat competition returned with a vengeance. The 1% would come out winners, and the 99% would be losers.

Technology and ideology rule the world. But ideology is an abstraction that can be modified at will. As Orwell famously put it, “He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past”. Thought control and limiting its capacity are ancient practices. Education has always been closely supervised, and contradicting elements have been excluded. Few escape the conditioning powers of schooling, with its repetitive timetables, its forced obedience and its consensual content. Those who, by some extraneous hazard, do evade the standard format are branded as deviant and dangerous or, at best, as eccentric and weird. And universities, which should be centres of open and lively debate on all and every subject, and were that half a century ago, have become commercial enterprises selling entry tickets to better paid employment. And they are followed by the workplace at a bullshit job, with a growing mountain of debt to pay off. From early childhood people are trained to run a race towards a glimmering future, but they get trapped in a treadmill going nowhere, one of those countless wheels that keep the system going.

Fifty years ago, people climbed out of their ruts and tried to think and act differently. Youth was in the forefront, electrified by rock-n-roll and dazzled by colour. But a mistrust of over-30s and a general contempt for the old world meant there was very little proselytising. In fact, there was not much to proselytise. The object was more to ridicule the system than to propose something different to replace it. Going back to the country and adopting the rural life appealed to some, but it was often in a sectarian context. And, anyway, flower power was doomed to fade away. The structures of wealth and power were shaken but not brought down. The middle-class rebellion did not link up with the working-class, and was left stranded high and dry. It would pass the next couple of decades trying to rescue the privileges it had thrown overboard. Ignoring the contradictions opposing labour and capital, the middle-class imagined its condition was universal. When the class struggle resumed, it was crushed between the two adversaries.

Today capital is triumphant. It has conquered the planet, even the most recalcitrant regions, and its possession has rarely been concentrated in so few hands. But, having encompassed the globe, it has nowhere left to expand. This means that one capital can only grow at the expense of another. The world market is becoming a national confrontation. The colonial empires had faced a similar dilemma at the beginning of the last century, when there was no more space to occupy. That led to fighting, all-out war and, ultimately, the end of colonialism. But colonial expansion is about territory, whereas capital expands by immaterial financial invasions. America may have some eight hundred military bases scattered around the world, its real power comes from the US dollar. This dollar denomination dominates trade, derivatives and monetary reserves. The last time empires went to war, the conflict was territorial. This time it will be financial.

The reign of capital and the rule of profit have brought humanity and its planet to the brink, and are about to push them into extinction. The ideology of infinite accumulation of wealth and power contradicts the reality of a finite system. There are no other living worlds, outside of fiction. There is just one planet, Mother Earth, whose particularities are so improbable that it could be unique in the galaxy, if not the universe. Though it goes back a long way and has brought down many an empire, the ideology of always more cannot succeed. More profits, more debt, more waste, more corruption, more pointless production for the sake of producing, more is killing the planet, that tiny blue paradise spinning round the Sun in boundless emptiness. But more can only be countered by less, which is not nearly as glamorous. Less cannot compete with more when so many have next to nothing and so few have everything. However, less can become very attractive as an alternative to the void of total collapse.

Renewable and sustainable are part of the new idea, though their meanings lack precision. Solar panels and wind turbines do not regenerate themselves. They need a lot of inputs that are not renewables. As for consuming less or none of certain things, it is still marginal and only concerns those who are over-consuming, those who need two, three or more planets to keep up their lifestyles. The new ideology cannot oppose environmental destruction and species extinction without opposing their causes. It will have to reconsider the production of wealth and its distribution. It will have to examine how the many who have little can be urged on to exhaustion by the few who have much. It will have to dig deep into the human psyche and find why differences lead to competition rather than collaboration. It will have to revisit the past to construct a different future.