2020s >> 2023 >> no-1430-october-2023

Capitalist Republic

Abolish the Monarchy. By Graham Smith. Penguin, 2023. £16.99

This book by the campaign group Republic’s CEO makes clear that its formal aspirations are for a liberal republic. They see the monarchy as something of left-over business (indeed, at one point in the book he actually argues that the rump of royal powers cannot be exercised because of the lack of legitimacy of the Crown, but that a president could deploy those powers: a cry for more executive power seems an odd stance for democrats).

In fact, the liberal fantasy gripping his work is on full display while he segues into discussing an elected House of Lords. Despite bemoaning the lack of imagination of those who can’t think past having a monarchy, he likewise cannot imagine a state without a bicameral legislature (albeit wanting all parts to be elected). Smith’s republicanism is simply wanting to continue the liberal project and sweep away the last vestiges of feudal power.

His book is worth reading for two features, though. The first is for his accounts of being a campaigning activist outside the political machines, and secondly for his attempts to describe a process of big reform to society, such as a wave of activism that sweeps away the monarchy. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a motor, beyond hope, for how this could come about, but nonetheless there is a certain, well, nobility in his continuing to plug away.

Smith, noting the predilection for the BBC to propagandise on behalf of the monarchy, says he is not suggesting a conspiracy, yet for the first half of the book he describes the very real secretive way the monarchy act and the determined way it protects itself. It is an organised conspiracy against the public, and by misunderstanding the nature of power beyond the formal and public roles, he is missing the real class nature of monarchy. Despite this, he is interesting on the actual real wealth the monarchy wields, and the way in which that buys considerable sway alone (especially as it has special access to the laws around which it can operate its businesses).

P. S.

Resistance to Empire

The Great Defiance: How the World took on the British Empire. By David Veevers. Penguin, 2023.

This is an account of the rise of the early British Empire that counters the ‘War of the Worlds’ style idea that Britain spread out to conquer the world based on some sort of natural or technical (or even providential) superiority. It puts centre stage the resistance to the rise of the empire, and shows how the British were often thwarted, or their victories curtailed.

For instance, the book begins with Ireland, making the point that the conquest took over a hundred years, and nearly ended up bankrupting the English state. Mostly, the English had to rely on a network of local lords who would ally with the Irish cause as much as support the crown, as their interests depended. The Tudor state thus adopted ‘an innovative strategy of colonial expansion. Withdrawing the crown’s claims to territories beyond the Pale, Elizabeth stepped aside and opened up the colonisation of Ireland to private enterprise.’ Backed up by the violence of the British state, using such weapons as induced famine and atrocious slaughter, rebellious Ireland was brought to heal.

This became the operating method of the expanding English colonialism, and indeed, the colonisation of the new world was linked by some of the people who colonised Ireland: the name Walter Raleigh keeps recurring through this book. Veevers deploys the indigenous people’s names for themselves, thus what is now Carolina in the United States was Ossomocomuck and the people were the Algonquian. Likewise, in the Antilles, the people were the Kalinago, and what is now called St Vincent was Hairoun.

In part, the expansion into the Americas was made possible by the conquest of Ireland, providing a substantial market for imported sugar and other goods, and also providing people to export to work in the colonies, in the form of indentured labour (which, as the author emphasises, and contrary to some claims today, is not comparable with the slavery that followed. Indeed, the book deals with the slave trade extensively, and notes how the Dahomey kings tried to take control of the trade in enslaved people from the Bight of Benin. Many Africans were not passive victims but agents, warts and all. And, again, it shows how the pieces of the jigsaw came together, and the tobacco and sugar trades drove the demand and thus the qualitative change in the slave trade to the new world.

The book also covers what happened when the English arrived as supplicants, such as in India or Japan, and found themselves confronted by powerful empires in their own right. The English were able to offer revenue to the emperors in the form of trade as well as military support (especially seaborne). Much of the history of the English presence was shaped by trying to escape taxes.

It’s not easy to come across accounts of how the English (later the British) came to dominate in India. My memory of schoolbooks is there was a blackhole in Calcutta and then Clive won the battle of Plassey (actually, he didn’t, but that’s a longer story). Veevers explains the interactions between the English merchants, the settled Portuguese community and the Mogul nawabs and princes. This book is worth reading for this account alone.

The book ends with the point that the history of the British Empire is as much an act of forgetting and airbrushing the subjectivity and substance of the wide variety of the world’s people. As he points out, in a very real sense, the British unmade the world.

P. S.

Employment as hell

Work Work Work. Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle. By Michael D. Yates. Monthly Review Press. 2022. 262pp.

This is a passionately written book by a lifelong critic of capitalism. Yates has an intimate knowledge of how that system works and this collection of essays, extraordinarily wide-ranging in its scope, covers key elements of social and economic development from the organisation of hunter-gatherer societies to the pressures exerted on human society and planetary ecology by 21^st century capital.

It reminds us that, for around 95 percent of the 200,000 years or more that human beings have walked the earth, social relationships were relatively egalitarian and non-hierarchical and the ‘earth was a commons, the property of all’, in which people ‘managed their existence in ways harmonious with nature and kept the earth’s metabolism in balance with their own’. It was only when hunter-gatherer societies came to be replaced by permanent settlements of farmers from round about 10,000 years ago that inequality and hierarchy began to set in, resulting in societies based on rulers and ruled, rich and poor, and above all divisions into classes. This led ultimately to the apotheosis of class society under capitalism, to a polarisation where one tiny minority class owns and controls the vast majority of the wealth and the vast majority of people have to work for that minority, selling their energies to them day-by-day in order to survive and often suffering significant tribulations and a pervasive sense of insecurity. His rhetoric in describing this polarisation is often powerful. For example: ‘Workers get a wage in return for converting their life force into a commodity owned by those who have bought it’; and ‘Only profit rules us and those with money will beat down those with none, without mercy or remorse’. And there is much visceral description of the conditions suffered by workers at the cruellest end of the market process, as, for instance, his reference to the more than 800 million farm workers in the world who ‘suffer short-life expectancies, pesticide poisoning, and state-sponsored violence whenever they attempt to organise, and whose working conditions are extraordinarily harsh, and their prospects for decent lives non-existent’.

It is work or, more precisely, employment in modern capitalist society which a large part of this book examines critically and informatively. Chapter titles such as ‘Labor Markets: The Neoclassical Dogma’, ‘Work is Hell’, and ‘The Injuries of Class’ give a flavour of the areas focused on and the author’s approach to them. The author explains how capital’s single-minded need to realise profits necessarily leads to the exertion of managerial control over work and, in the way it is implemented and enforced, often sets up competition between those who carry it out, making work in capitalism ‘a traumatic affair’ and leading to a profound sense of alienation. And he is overwhelmingly critical of this way of organising work – and society – and of the notion that this is the best or only possible way for human society to manage itself. He also points to the insidious role of education systems and their promotion of ideas like individualism and nationalism among people at an early age, causing them to internalise the idea that the existing organisation of society is inevitable. This, he says, makes it ‘easier for capital to control the labour process’ and less likely that workers will collectively challenge that control.

The alternative to all this is what Michael Yates focuses on in the later essays of his book, in particular the final chapter entitled ‘Waging Class Struggle: From Principles To Practice’. He has previously stated that ‘either explicit or implicit in the essays is the belief that both capital and the working class itself must be abolished if we are to achieve a society free of alienation, one marked with substantive equality in all spheres of life’. He has condemned those on the left who think that somehow a fairer and more just society can be established within capitalism, of those who ‘believe that markets are not inherently destructive to social well-being’ and think that something called ‘market socialism’ can ‘embrace markets but control them in the people’s interest’. He has also described the programme of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) led by Bernie Sanders as a ‘social democratic pipedream’. labelling it ‘pathetically utopian’ for the way it limits itself to organising campaigns, electioneering and trade union action in the vain hope that this will encourage ‘a deeper understanding of capitalism’ and lead to ‘full socialism’ via gradual and incremental reforms. What is needed, he commendably argues, is a clear understanding of the need for ‘a more radical perspective’, in which ‘the anarchy of the marketplace should be replaced by conscious planning of what is produced’.

Yet at this point his argument goes unfortunately awry, as, in apparent contradiction to his condemnation of the DSA’s politics, he sets about recommending, in somewhat breathless fashion, a whole slew of ‘radical’ reforms to be fought for and brought in under the existing system: eg, shorter working hours, free universal healthcare, bans on fracking, abolition of student debt, local low-price food production, vertical farming, reparations for slavery, unions and political parties funding ‘eco-socialist’ production, no government support for ‘oppressive regimes’ – to name but a few. And, to make things worse, there is also a significant positive reference to oppressive state capitalist regimes and organisations, past and present, whose policies bear no relation to the socialist objective the author claims to espouse. Here we are talking, for example, about China under Mao, Castro’s Cuba, the USSR under Lenin and Trotsky, the present regime in Vietnam and Maoist rebels in India.

These disjunctions seem difficult to explain. But part of it may stem from the author’s statement of the Leninist notion that workers must be led to socialism (‘new parties must be built (…) leading the working class’) rather than achieving it via democratic action based on majority working class consciousness and understanding. Despite these significant differences, however, there is a great deal we would share about the ultimate vision of the new society the writer articulates in his closing words:

‘What we are, as human beings, is a species than can thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment. There should be no workers, no wages, no bosses, no capitalists (…) – only cooperative and beneficial production, with substantive equality in all aspects of life. (…) We will take for granted that most profound maxim: From each according to ability, to each according to need. When this necessity is realised, only then will we be free.’

HKM

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