Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury -finding myself downloading article after article from New Left Review, in order to arm myself for the coming 'age of austerity' being imposed by the Coalition government. Lots of links below to NLR - happy for it to be a bit of a puff for them, they deserve it... All comments welcome.
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On the eve of the Coalition's Black Wednesday of deficit cuts, I was involved in what a psychologist would clearly call compensation activity. For about three hours on Tuesday night, I was downloading - perhaps hoarding is more precise - scores of digital documents from the archive of New Left Review over the 2000s. Am I worried I won't be able to afford the prescription next year? Possibly. Was I looking for signs that the calamities that bookended this decade - 9/11 and the Crash of 2008 - were part of deeper trends that the grandees of left thought had already identified? Certainly. Did I find those trends? Well, some of them.
In a piece on globalisation in 2000, Frederic Jameson noted that "the only ‘religion’ or ‘religious tradition’ which does seem to show the energy of a resistance to globalization and Westernization (‘Westoxification’, the Iranians call it) is—predictably enough—Islam". The old anti-imperialist nationalisms weren't enough, said Jameson, to defend Middle-Eastern countries against exploitation of their natural resources. Some other equipment of protest would be required to "match the tremendous invasive force of the new, globalized capital".
And looking at long-term economic trends in the US, Robert Brenner wrote (also in 2000) that "the unprecedented ratio of household debt to household income and the fall of the savings rate below zero" made it difficult to see how credit "can continue to rise sufficiently to sustain consumption growth—and, therefore, how consumption growth can continue to drive the economy".
Well, from the briefest of searches, not a bad score for the Marxists there. They seem to have anticipated Islamic terrorism's surprise attack on the icons of "globalized capital", and the underlying housing-debt-fuelled collapse of Western economies.
I turned to 2010's issues, to see if I could pick up any runes about the next ten years. Several articles on China are at pains to remind us of not just how epochal is its rise to economic superpower status, but its incompleteness. China's multinationals are weak by comparison with Western entities; the rural Chinese may well resist, for local and entrepreneurial reasons, their enlistment into the new industrial mega-cities; and how long can the Chinese Communist Party rely on "consumer nationalism" (as Perry Anderson puts it) to maintain their control and legitimacy?
Some pieces are counter-intuitive, usefully so. The veteran US leftist Mike Davis actually sees hope in the fact that a majority of people on this planet now live in urban environments. Cities that mark a clear line between town and country can encourage low-carbon living. On one side of the line, natural systems can be conserved and preserved; on the other, democratic forces can agitate for more efficient transport, housing and energy infrastructures. (Scottish supporters of Patrick Geddes and his garden city concepts might well be muttering: aye, we heard ye).
And the greatest of all left intellectual mandarins, Eric Hobsbaum, ends his contribution with this challenge. "The great question is this: historically, communities and social systems have aimed at stabilization and reproduction, creating mechanisms to keep at bay disturbing leaps into the unknown. Resistance to the imposition of change from outside is still a major factor in world politics today. How is it, then, that humans and societies structured to resist dynamic development come to terms with a mode of production whose essence is endless and unpredictable dynamic development?"
In short: everything solid is still being melted into air by capitalism. And if you're an SNP First Minister promising to protect your Celtic periphery from George Osborne's reckless measures, or the Maldives begging for carbon reduction before your land is submerged below the seas, you are still facing "the basic contradiction between the mechanisms bringing about change and those geared to resist it".
So fuelled and fortified by the very best of Soho socialism, I sat before my laptop yesterday and took in the flying axes of the Coalition's spending review. Certainly, many of the reductions in public departments, welfare and housing qualify for Hobsbawm's "disturbing leap into the unknown".
The huge cut in housing support, and the end of lifetime tenancy of council houses, introduces the cold steel of domestic turbulence into many poorer families who were hanging on in the best of times. A commitment that "wages are never exceeded by welfare" will mean a downward pressure on welfare, in an environment where wages are already depressed.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of forthcoming unemployed from the public sector have to hope in what Joseph Stiglitz (Alex Salmond's new economic advisor) calls the "confidence fairy" of private-sector revival to appear. According to Stiglitz, economic history shows that austerity measures in a slump rarely, if ever, create the "jobs boom" predicted by advocates.
Yet I have no doubt the Soho socialists are looking over the water at the French, fortified by their sense of civic republicanism and still organised by powerful trade unions, and are wondering whether the rather-more-battered masses of these islands would ever get involved in the same kind of action, to chasten their elites. After the convulsions of the Miners' Strike and the Poll Tax riots, and the huge non-event of the anti-Iraq War protests, has the public realm of British life has been mall-ified, community-policed and surveillance-camera'd into stunned quiescence? We'll see.
We seem to be the victims of the most extraordinary act of ideological hypnotism, though. We go through a banking crisis involving the worst kind of plutocratic excess and arrogance. The result? Not jail for some bankers, and a more bounded role for finance in general - but their debt rectified by the state, and the basic lifestyle and assumptions of the financial elite unchanged.
And instead, those who get punished are the pushed-around post-proletariat - those psychologically beached by the Thatcherite and Blair-Brownite consensus about the "weightless economy" and "the inevitability of global competition". And who now, at the behest of "the bond markets", have to submit to another increase in the micro-management of their deserving or undeserving behaviour, along with a real reduction in living standards.
If you live in NLR-land, you are compelled to be as interested in South-East Asia and the Latin American republics, as you are in what they called the "Blue Labour" of the Coalition government. Other than the SNP's exit strategy to a green, pleasant and independent land, there's little in the current British political continuum that taps into their great themes (the great Tom Nairn is Scotland's diplomat in their pages). And who knows what outlier from the wider regions of the world-system will land disruptively on our doorsteps?
But I guess they'd be looking at the current "contradictions" in this country, and really asking themselves: what does it take for resistance to happen? When do the people get angry? And what form will it take?