Janet Daley, state capitalism and fascism in Britain
Posted on Monday 2 March, 2009
Filed Under Theory
GORDON BROWN might accidentally introduce a state capitalist form of fascism to Britain, Janet Daley openly argues in the Daily Telegraph this morning. You think I’m kidding? Here, read it for yourself:
But Mr Brown may find that, out of political desperation, he has talked himself (and us) into demanding that the state must actually run the economy. Clearly, this is not what he would want …
The danger is that he will be trapped by his own rhetoric and be forced to embrace a form of state capitalism (which is the technical definition of “fascism”).
She makes Mad Mel read like an amateur, doesn’t she? This whackjob political sociology must rank as some of the most dangerously confused and politically illiterate garbage I have ever read in any national newspaper. Then again, I seem to recall that her colleague Simon Heffer last year advanced the proposition that bank nationalisation marked the beginnings of ‘Sovietisation’ in this country. The government just can’t win, can it?
Given that the prime minister has only got just over a year left in power to build his Thousand Year Reich, he had better get a move on. I mean, it would take at least 12 months to train up a serious paramilitary corps. Maybe he could call them the Brownshirts; the name has an undeniable historical resonance.
Fortunately, I think we can safely discount Ms Daley’s suggestion, at least until New Labour frames some Dutch bloke for setting fire to the House of Commons.
The irony is, I think I recall Ms Daley writing that she was once a member of the International Socialists. Even if I have got that detail wrong, she frequently makes play of her 1960s leftism, in a condescending ‘that’s how I know where the little bastards are coming from’ kind of way.
So when she uses grown-up words such as ‘state capitalism’, it can only be in full awareness of the body of political theory she is referencing. Yet even by the standards set by former Cliffites gone over to the hard right, her take on these matters is quixotic indeed.
The concept of state capitalism is ultimately rooted in the debates within Marxism in the first two decades of the last century, in which Bukharin built on the work of Hilferding to postulate that finance capital had in many countries fused with the state, forming what he dubbed ‘state capitalist trusts’.
According to this colleague of Lenin, all of the imperialist powers of the day could be described in this manner, especially given the extent of state direction in world war one. While Bukharin overestimated the concretisation of what was undeniably a tendency at the time, it is important to stress that fascism – which had not yet arisen anywhere in the world – did not come into the equation.
Later, Tony Cliff – the founder of what is today the Socialist Workers’ Party, and thus I suspect Ms Daley’s early political mentor – expropriated the term ‘state capitalist’ as a device to polemicise against the orthodox Trotskyist position that Russia was a degenerate workers’ state. Fascism does not come into that picture, either.
More empirically, can New Labour’s reaction to the global economic downturn sensibly be described as embracing state economic control anyway? The government has been careful not to buy voting shares in the banks it has propped up. In other words, it has consciously taken ownership but not control. It is bailing out the free market, because it is ideologically committed to the free market.
Accordingly, not only are the boundaries of state property not being extended; in other areas, they are being rolled back. Only last week, Labour confirmed plans to part privatise Royal Mail, something the Tories considered under Major before bottling out of what is clearly an unworkable scheme.
Back in the early 1980s, sections of the soft left debated whether or not Thatcherism constituted ‘creeping fascism’. Such speculation was misguided tosh of the highest order then. Nearly three decades later, the hard right is reduced to playing the same stupid game, and it is surely indicative of just as shaky a grip on reality.
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9 Responses to “Janet Daley, state capitalism and fascism in Britain”
Is this the Marxist equivalent of the argument about “angels dancing on the head of a pin”?
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more on Daley,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_up_from_liberalism.html
“I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose crudeness constituted a provocation to (not to say an insult to the intelligence of) any potentially rebellious 16-year-old. I can remember watching lurid graphics, in which red triangles pierced through defenseless red, white, and blue balloons, and then the slogan “Socialism and communism are the same thing” flashed onto the screen—all accompanied by a triumphal musical score whose climaxes underlined the most unsubtle messages of the narration.
…
In the 1970s, as I clung to my Marxist convictions, I heard an interview with Sir Keith Joseph, one of the great architects of the Thatcherite revolution. He described the dangers of what he called “the pocket-money society.” If the state provided all of the basic human needs—housing, health care, education, care for the elderly—it left nothing for people to provide for themselves, other than the more trivial recreational things. Their own earnings became like children’s pocket money, to be spent on toys or self-indulgence. The state took all of the significant economic choices of adult life out of their hands, diminishing them as responsible, moral beings. Joseph’s words did not convert me on the spot, but they shook my beliefs to the roots, because they chimed so convincingly with the evidence that I saw around me.”
‘Sigh’ Is it just me, or would ‘a pocket money state’ be a Good Thing?
Did I not hear last week that Labour is worried about mass riots, did I not hear that he is getting ready with Police and the army to march us all into camps, you know workers camps.
Or is this again more smoke, can I come in my wheelchair.
Good link, Mod. Thanks for that.
Where Daly “went wrong” in her thinking is obvious if one reads the article Mod linked to. She implies that things started to change for her when she witnessed the discouragement of personal ambition amongst the working class by leftists… and then she ends up deciding that what we need is a politics focused on the development of the individual rather than the collective. Obviously, only an idiot could fail to see how the embryonic germ of Thatcherism was already being nurtured within the young Daly, with all her ideas of social mobility. Proof, if ever there was some, that the aim of social mobility needs to be ditched by those few so-called “social democrats” who may yet still cling to it.
Oh, and I wonder what Daly thinks about all these working class kids coming out of ex-polytechnics with degrees in aspirational subjects such as film, fashion etc. Does she still uphold these lofty Thatcherite ideas about the aspirational development of the individual? Or does she completely undermine her position and say that what we need is to stop encouraging all kids to go to university? What a dope…
I think a broader point which Janet hinted at is asking whether Gordon Brown is actually worried about nationalisation at any level?
We keep talking about nationalisation as if it’s a last throw of the dice to save a bank, but the question of whether Brown is enjoying this little renaissance of nationalised industries is much harder to gauge.
Why would a government enjoy bailing out an industry if they fall over themselves NOT to take any control over it? What would be the point of that? Just because they like having huge deficits on the public books?
It’s not a “renaissance of nationalised industries”. Brown is willing to have a big row inside the Labour Party to hand part of Royal Mail over to the private sector. At the moment when nationalisation would be massively popular New Labour is doing everything it can to make it clear that it’s an emergency measure which it will undo at the earliest opportunity. Brown remains ideologically neo-liberal.
I agree with Liam (and Dave). Gordon is desperate not to nationalise the banks, even though they have failed to the extent that it’s only a 90% state holding which is saving RBS from insolvency.
But why can’t this be described as state capitalism ? It looks like it to me. As Jonathan Weil on Bloomberg was pointing out the other day, the way to make big money on the stock market now is to know what the government are going to do next.
“for the time being, the clearest path to making money in the public markets is to know in advance what the government plans to do next with which companies, and when – and then trade on it. Let there be no doubt: Plenty of people with access to such inside information are enriching themselves this way now”
We’re seeing the taxpayer bailing out the PFI schemes – we’re actually paying them to rob us now.
Fascism in Britain ? Well … I wonder how far away trouble is. The Civil Contingencies Bill went in a few years ago, Labour’s Enabling Act. Sources such as Richard North at the EU Referendum Blog have heard from “confidential sources” that the MoD is buying up large quantities of tear gas and riot shields.
NuLab signed a devil’s compact with capital some 15-20 years ago – around the time that the consultancies like Andersens started buying up senior Labour people.
“You can have political correctness, multiculturalism and gay rights if we can have deregulation, tax loopholes, offshoring and outsourcing.”
When the Tories stopped believing in God and Labour stopped believing in the British working class, they soon found other things to believe in. The Gods of the Market Place satisfied the spiritual needs of many Tories, while Labour returned to the Old Religion of the Pelagian Heresy – that man is essentially good and perfectible – but with a twist that Marx would have noted with a sardonic smile – perfectible only with enough teachers, social workers, Housing Officers, Funding Stream Co-ordinators, outreach workers and other Labour-activist beneficiaries of the Caring State.
Old Labour scorned the Gods of the Market, but New Labour realised that the taxes (and the party donations) would have to come from somewhere, so were quite happy to let the Market Place rip while taxing it to feed their core constituency clients – said social workers, Housing Officers etc. Indeed, for the architects of New Lab, it was but a short step from being intensely relaxed about others getting rich to being intensely interested in getting rich themselves. In this context I would recommend a read of lefty Yank Greg Palast’s expose of Mandy’s mate Derek Draper. It certainly dispels any illusions about the People’s Flag.
Blair and Gordy took the whole thing a little too far, though. Convinced that with enough social workers and Sure Start schemes, crime would fall, they didn’t bother to build any prisons – and now the ones they have are full. Convinced that ‘something would turn up’ – like wind power – and afeared of the Guardian, they closed all the nuclear power stations and didn’t commission any new ones. Now they’ve had to sell our energy future to the French, and the lights will soon be going out as the old stations shut faster than new ones can be built. The story of Anglesey Aluminium is a disgrace.
Above all, they spent and taxed in the boom years as though they would never end. What are they going to do now that they have ? The kitty’s empty.
IMHO there’s only one option open to them. They’ll keep spending and start printing. Consider their position. With unemployment projected to rise to three million, they’ll be worried about keeping order among the youth of our rainbow nation.
In case it all goes really pearshaped, they’re drawing up contingency plans for civil unrest. Libertarian Ian Parker-Joseph has heard from a military friend that ‘transfers to regiments and other units in the UK on home duties are being undertaken by the MOD based upon whether an individual was prepared to ‘open fire’ on UK citizens during civil disturbances’.
So no way can they let up on the outreach workers, but who will pay for them ?
The oldies will – especially those who were employed by the private sector. They don’t fight. They probably voted Tory anyway. Many of their company pensions have been destroyed, but there are still a fair few impacting the bottom line with their future pension liabilities. Just print money, let inflation rip, and zap ! those future pension liabilities are halved in real terms.
That solves the problem of paying the outreach workers, it ensures more donations and directorships from grateful capitalists – and it also makes a lot of pensioners, with their pensions eroded by inflation, once again dependent on the State. It’s a win for everyone – except the pensioners, but who cares about them ? They don’t riot !