"Stand Up, Say It Loud; I'm Working Class And I'm Proud"

I found this very informative. In this article, 'Boffy' argues for a separate, socialist underlying strategy which questions the reliance on state intervention.

Most of the off-the-peg solutions put forward by Liberals, and by most sections of the Left rely on platitudes, and the repetition of past failed solutions. They hinge around calls for the Capitalist State to intervene, which in many ways are just the other side of the coin to those put forward by the Conservative and reactionary politicians. The latter see the answer lying with the Capitalist State in the form of a strong state response through more and tougher policing, harsher gaol sentences and so on, whilst the former show an equal amount of faith in that Capitalist State to provide a solution through redistributive tax policies, the provision of additional Welfare Benefits, or increased Public Expenditure in various forms.

Neither of these solutions offers anything in the way of an independent working-class solution. Both reinforce, the idea of working-class subordination to Capital. The Conservative/reactionary position does so by stressing repression, and the need for these sections of society to get a job, any job, at whatever pay or conditions, and for the need to reduce Benefits to encourage that. The Liberal/Left position implies that workers are by nature dependent on Capital – either private capital or State Capital – and that all they can do is to make impassioned pleas to it, rather like Oliver Twist asking the Beadle for more gruel, to ease their plight.It suggests that workers can only work, if Capital allows them to do so. That may be true if we take the Capitalist System as a whole, but, of course, the whole point about a Marxist response, is that we do not accept that state of affairs as being natural or eternal, and seek to challenge it, thereby challenging Capital, and the Capital-Labour relation in the process of doing so.

The whole point of a Marxist strategy here and now, is not to act in ways which reinforce and reproduce the dependence of Labour upon Capital, but to seek to subvert that relation and that dependency, including the crippling dependency of these groups in particular on the Capitalist State. In so doing, our task is to also enable the working-class to get up off its knees, to fill it with class pride, as a necessary step in the process of developing a revolutionary class consciousness.

It requires a sharp break with some of the Lassallean/Fabian ideas that have dominated the Labour Movement for more than a century.In previous posts I have demonstrated how, as Engels had pointed out, by the end of the 19th Century, Big Capital dominated, and had established as its method of domination an essentially social-democratic consensus. In the shape of Fordism, this came to be the dominant regime of Capital Accumulation, particularly after WWII. Its basis was the idea that workers would be bought off for enduring boring jobs, by being provided with steadily rising real wages made possible by the ever rising levels of productivity that Fordist production techniques brought with them. It was manifest in the idea of “mutuality” embodied in Trades Union Collective Bargaining agreements, particularly in the car industry. But, alongside this also went the development of the Welfare State, which acted in a similar way to buy off workers via a social wage, whilst ensuring that Capital got the reproduction of the kind of Labour Power it required.

In many ways that also fitted with the ideas of “scientific-management” put forward by the Taylorists, whose ideas were necessary for the implementation of Fordist production methods. Taylor had recognised the advantages of planning as he witnessed it in the USSR – in return Lenin (as well as Gramsci) also sought to employ Taylorist techniques in the USSR – though he was an opponent of Communism. Taylor sought to introduce these planning ideas into the factory, in place of the ad hoc methods of the existing management. But, it was not long before the Taylorists also recognised that what was good for the factory also applied to society as a whole. The Welfare State, and other forms of intervention by the capitalist state fitted well with their ideas, and before long the Trades Unions sought to use the Taylorists criticisms of bad managements to demand a greater say in management, and particularly to raise the idea of Trades Unions involvement in national planning. In this way the trades Unions were easily incorporated into this relation by which the subordination of Labour to capital was effected, with the workers being bought off.

In the 1920's followers of Taylor such as Tugwell, as well as other Liberals such as Hobson, had warned that the excess profitability caused by Fordism, and Taylorist methods would result in a crisis. Their ideas chimed perfectly with those of Keynes for the Capitalist State to intervene in this process, and for increased state planning of the economy.

In the US, Stuart Chase, in his book, “A New Deal”, which provided the name used by Roosevelt, argued “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?” Roosevelt's programme was emblematic of this social-democratic consensus around, which Big Capital was creating a new regime of accumulation. Werner Bonefield, argues,

“Thus, the specifically Fordist form of the state is the Keynesian corporatist, statist, welfare state (Esser/Hirsch/Roth) which, in the long run, was transformed into the Fordist social security state (Hirsch, 1980; 1983b)”

See: “Reformulation of State Theory” in Capital & Class 33, Winter 1987.

As he says, the means by which the Fordist, Capitalist State, achieves this is by infiltrating into every aspect of social life.

I wish to argue that a socialist strategy cannot be based around accepting that role of the capitalist State, but can only be based around developing a truly independent working-class, organising to stand on its own two feet, in militant opposition to that State, and cutting itself free from all dependence upon it. I intend to argue that a look at some of the lessons of the Black Power Movement in the US in the 1960's, and 1970's can provide some lessons for how that can be achieved, as well as pointing to some of the mistakes that need to be avoided.

We should proceed on the basis of the fundamental idea of Socialism that if there are unmet human needs, and there are unused resources, the two can be beneficially brought together. In the last week or so [during the London riots], we have seen large numbers of people in these communities come together to form Defence Squads to protect themselves against rioting and looting. We have also seen people organise themselves in large numbers – much larger than the numbers of looters – via social networking to carry out the clean-up of those communities for example. This is ample proof that local communities can self-organise, and can undertake work themselves without private capitalists and without the Capitalist State. It was a clear refutation to the argument sometimes raised that workers in these communities cannot take on such functions, because they have a job to go to, and so on. Whilst most of the rioters were without work, the majority of those that turned out to clean-up, did so in addition to having a job to go to. How much greater reason then is there to provide those without work, with a job doing those tasks within the community that need doing, tasks often whose main beneficiaries are those that do not have jobs, and who are dependent upon some form of assistance? I am not talking about Workfare here, which is simply a means by which the Capitalist Class uses the Welfare State to reinforce the Capital-Labour relation, but of subverting that relation.

I am talking about local communities establishing their own direct democracy, to decide on tasks within the Community that need doing, and providing the unemployed members of that community with work doing them.

It would involve establishing Co-operative enterprises within the Community to undertake that work. It could involve carrying out things such as Drug Counselling, for instance, where some professional knowledge would be required – possibly utilising workers from the Co-op Pharmacy – but, through which some of the unemployed could then also be trained appropriately.

It could involve reclaiming and developing, into inner city farms and gardens, derelict land. Indeed, it could involve building much needed social housing. The Communities themselves would need to raise Capital to begin to organise these types of activity, but there are a number of ways this could be done such as access to funds from the Co-operative Development Agency, The Co-op Bank, The Confederation of Co-operative Housing, and so on, as well as local workers raising their own funds, and by looking to their Trades Unions for support.

Moreover, the basic economic law is that where someone is paid to carry out work to meet the needs of some consumer, the income then received enables that worker to also expand their own needs, thereby creating demand for some other product or service, which in turn creates employment potential. Within the confines of Capitalist production, the scope for this is limited, because a Capitalist will only employ such workers if they can at the same time make a profit from doing so. But, a Co-operative Community enterprise would have no such limitation. Its only concern would be to ensure that needs are met.

Of course, this may mean that those employed to carry out the work might not be paid Trades Union rates of pay. But lots of work is carried out without it being done at Trades Union rates. Workers carry out domestic labour of that sort all the time. We should treat Labour done for the benefit of our own communities, and to develop an alternative sector of worker owned property in the same way. After all the work that activists do, which requires considerable amounts of time, going to Trade Union Branch Meetings, LP meetings of all kinds, attending various campaign meetings and activities, is all done without any payment at all. We do it, ebcause our concern is not primarily about payment, but about changing society, and as Marx demonstarted a fundamental aspect of that is changing those basic property relations. Our goal should not be limited by merely Trades Union politics, of the “Fair Day's Wage” variety, but be based on the socialist principle of abolishing the wages system, and of developing worker owned property as the means to do it. After all, a Workers State would have to abolish Welfarism, and seek to employ all available labour at whatever wages ensured competitiveness if it was to survive long in a hostile Capitalist environment. As Marx said in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, our principle, the principle upon which Socialism is based is “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

But, the more such worker owned property was developed in our communities, the more it was linked together, the more competitive it would become against Capitalist property. As the Mondragon Co-op in Spain has demonstrated, Co-operative production is innately more efficient than Capitalist production, and thereby provides the basis, in any case, of providing the workers within it with higher living standards.The graph here shows the rapid rate at which Mondragon has created new jobs, and I have referred previously to the fact that workers at Mondragon receive pensions way beyond anything that workers in the UK can expect.

Many of those involved in the riots were themselves entrepreneurial. The gang members, and those involved in selling drugs were already essentially businessmen. Our task is to take that entrepreneurial spirit, and direct it into socially useful and positive directions, for the benefit of those communities.

http://boffyblog.blogspot.be/2011/08...ing-class.html

Boffy's argument, as I have said before, is a slippery slope back to those same German liberal arguments for "self-help": there is limited scope for political action.

As I have also said:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/demands-st...523/index.html

From the long-lived cooperative movement to the premise of collective bargaining representation to the various residential anti-gentrification campaigns to the social movements for local currency alternatives to government money, the respective histories of all these and more have, individually and combined, demonstrated that economic independence for the working class under bourgeois-fied commodity production is wishful thinking, since related demands pressed forward have not and cannot be established on the level of society as a whole except through the overall body politic, let alone enforced by the modern state.

One last criticism of issuing demands must be addressed: the toxic notion of managing the bourgeois-capitalist state, or of managing bourgeois capital, state capital, and so on. In more technical terms, this means that reform struggles do not really benefit the working class, but instead facilitate capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power. What these particular critics simply do not understand is that there are times when these two outcomes intersect; there are measures strictly for facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power, measures strictly for labour empowerment (politically and economically), and measures that can achieve both in varying degrees. While it should be acknowledged that even the economically-inclined demands based on the game theory concept of maximin – by enabling the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” (Kautsky) and, in the cases of immediate and intermediate but not threshold demands, by “mak[ing] further progress more likely and facilitat[ing] other progressive changes” (Hahnel) – involve some degree of facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power, maximin yields little in the way of this other side and much more in the way of labour empowerment. Meanwhile, the economically inclined demands that result strictly in labour empowerment – and necessarily require the working class to expropriate, beforehand, ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas – are simply of a directional nature.

How limited would it be? The German self-help societies were, under their liberal leadership, against political action because of the political decission that the bourgeoisie, not the working class, was to rule and govern.

Speaking from the agitational point of view, yes, with such a strategy (as Boffy's) measures like the nationalisation of the key sectors of the capitalist economy would only be viable during a revolutionary period. But that is only problematic to those who have no or almost no political programme. From a more practical point of view all core political demands of the working class remain valid, just like many of the "economic" demands.

Buried somewhere in his blog, I pointed out a Canadian coop paper that stated outright with support that coops need government assistance (not least of which being $$$) at startup, which Boffy dismissed. The call for State Aid is political and acknowledges the illusory nature of economic independence in the immediate period. Here's a blog for more info on Canadian coops and politics: http://scansite3.wordpress.com/

Permanent capitalist nationalization is politically viable in revolutionary and non-revolutionary periods, though.

Boffy's arguement reminds of Rosa Luxemburg who said that the socialist programme is scientific because it is negative.

What we possess in our program is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist principles into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any socialist party program or textbook. That is not a shortcoming but rather the very thing that makes scientific socialism superior to the utopian varieties.

The Russian Revolution

What is the relation between state aid and the central programmatic demands that keep our final goals consciously in view?

That goes back to the sympathizers' problem with "anti-capitalism," doesn't it? It's all about being against something, but not being for something. We're against the Big Banks! We're against Corporate Media! Etc.

Comrade, re. your last question, the state aid depends on the specific policy in question. Unlike Boffy's caricature I am not calling for perennial state aid, which is the unfortunate case with Venezuela's coops. On coops I'm specific: http://www.revleft.com/vb/pre-cooper...629/index.html

On the broader whole, you should probably re-read Chapter 6 of my programmatic work-in-progress to refresh your memory.

I don't think Rosa Luxemburg was refering to such cheap sloganeering. I think she refered to the anti-feudal elements of the programme and the fight against state tutelage.
She might have inflated the meaning of passages like this one:

In striving to achieve its immediate aims, the RSDLP supports every oppositional and revolutionary movement directed against the social and political order prevailing in Russia, while at the same time resolutely rejecting all reform proposals which are connected with any sort of extension or strengthening of tutelage by the police and officialdom over the labouring classes.

Programme of the RSDLP

If that's the case, then perhaps she should have been clearer on that front.

Here's another example: If you recall my commentary and your own response on private-sector collective bargaining representation by a public "agency shop" monopoly (and the rant and "final" solution to "yellow" unions), that "state aid" (because it achieves the goals associated with "universal unionization") is based on pre-revisionist Bernstein's "free legal service" call in the Erfurt Program.