Imperialism & the Working Class

 

 

Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I is an anthology put together by Richard Day and Daniel Gaido, in which they translate many articles not previously available in English.[1] They also give valuable introductions to the authors and the political times in which they lived. Their book raises many issues arising from contemporary imperialism, and shows the political consequences of the different ways in which imperialism was understood. Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, is not included in the book, but it is clear that this work, although the best, was just one of a large number of publications on the question.

Many articles and debates the book covers, from the 1890s up to around 1916, remain relevant today. This is especially true for those relating to nationalism and imperialism, even though the forms taken by imperialism have changed a lot in the past century. However, the book’s articles, and its editors, do not explore a critical feature.

How was it that the anti-imperialists often had the better arguments – and sometimes even won – but they were nevertheless beaten by social forces, both inside and outside the debating forums of social democracy? A devastating, murderous war was the result, in which the working classes of the major powers fought alongside their rulers. Only in Russia was there a practical, political and successful response to the outbreak of war – led by the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Here I want to focus on one issue that arises from a quotation the book provides from Friedrich Engels in 1885:[2]

“The truth is this: during the period of England’s industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but now and then even the great mass had at least a temporary share. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally – the privileged and leading minority not excepted – on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will again be socialism in England.”

Here, Engels notes the absence of any socialist movement in England, sensibly disregarding the largely irrelevant, small socialist groupings that were around at the time. Both Marx and Engels recognised that this absence needed to be explained, since England was the most capitalistically developed country in the world and had a large proletariat. Why was this proletariat not drawn to socialism by their experience of capitalism? Comments from Marx and Engels elsewhere did note the bourgeois politics of the English ‘labour movement’, but here Engels here pins down the cause.

The monopoly of England in the world economy went well beyond industry. It was also heavily backed up by domination in the areas of international commerce and finance – shipping, warehousing, trade finance, insurance, loans, etc. For example, from 1874-193, Britain actually had a deficit on its balance of trade amounting to around 5-6% of GDP per year: exports of goods were well below imports, though the latter were principally raw materials and foodstuffs. Massive revenues from services, particularly financial ones, and from foreign investments, offset this big deficit, and gave Britain a current account surplus of around 5% per annum.[3]

All these revenues, not industry alone, gave England its economic fortune and allowed relatively favourable conditions for the working class. While Engels notes that it was the more privileged sections of workers who benefited most from this, the benefits also extended to the mass of people. This is not to say that they were always having a great time. The point was that these – even potential – benefits acted as a dampener on anti-capitalism.

This is the critical issue. The usual argument from the left is that it is the trade union or labour movement/party leaders who corrupt the masses, compromise with the bosses and back capitalism. While the practice and political outlook of these leaders support such an assessment, it also ignores how the masses themselves can be open to being politically ‘corrupted’. Workers were not ignorant of wider developments in the country or where their immediate economic interests lay. In Britain, especially, the popular press was full of stories about the colonies, foreign markets and Britain’s status in the world.

The political problem is not this so-called labour aristocracy (though this mistaken argument was also used by Lenin); the problem instead is far more fundamental. It is one where the political and economic experience of the mass of people makes them see benefits in being loyal to the rich capitalist state to which they ‘belong’.

Popular loyalty to the state is expressed very directly whenever that state is under threat or challenged by others. That is because those threats or challenges are also threats and challenges to ‘our way of life’. People may not go on a march to call for war, but they will almost always agree with potential military action, overwhelmingly support military spending and extol ‘our boys’ when they go to fight.

Getting a popular endorsement for military aggression is fairly easy when there seems to be little risk involved. In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, that country was not in a position to fight back. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a little trickier for popular opinion, given stories that the evil dictator might have had ‘weapons of mass destruction’. If the opponent is a major country, then the build up of popular opinion in favour of action takes a bit longer. Still, as shown by the example of the British-German naval arms race in the early 1900s, there was enough support on both sides of the conflict-to-come to continue an escalation into war.

I would excuse Engels for his attempt in 1885 at revolutionary optimism, thinking that a future breakdown of England’s monopoly would once again lead to socialism in Britain. At least he took proper account of the current situation. If we did the same, we would be able to recognise what has happened to the mass of people in many richer countries – especially in the US, the UK and in the rest of north west Europe. It has not been a move towards socialism as their privileges in the world economy are challenged. Instead, a nationalist and pro-imperialist mentality has become more aggressive in defence of those privileges.

 

Tony Norfield, 13 September 2021

---

[1] Published by Brill in 2012. The book is over 950 pages; while the hardback is on sale for a ridiculously high price, the paperback edition is much cheaper.

[2] This text is taken from an article by Engels in the German Social Democratic Party’s Die Neue Zeit in June 1885, ‘England in 1845 and in 1885’. That article was originally published some months earlier in the English paper, Commonweal. The article is available in Marx & Engels’ Collected Works, Volume 26, p301.

[3] See P J Cain and A G Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688-2000, Pearson 2002, p165.

Corbyn’s National Welfarism

In the days, even weeks, leading up to Remembrance Sunday on 13 November, all public figures in the UK must wear a poppy. This is not actually obligatory; it is just the way things are done. Some 45 million poppies were attached to clothing this year, a total that far outweighs the number of celebrities. If you are not seen wearing one, then perhaps you forgot, perhaps it is on a different jacket, perhaps your mum or dad did not buy you one and your pocket money was insufficient, perhaps you are a household pet, or, heaven forbid, you might have some questions about this totem for honouring/remembering the war dead in their sacrifices for ‘Britain’, otherwise known as British imperialism. Just to make sure he was not numbered among the latter persona non grata, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made sure that he was wearing a poppy when he appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show that day.[1] To reinforce his patriotic credentials, Corbyn also made sure to note that he would be standing at the Cenotaph later on Remembrance Day with a 92-year old friend, a Labour party supporter and veteran of World War Two. Thus began his exposition of how Labour’s policies would meet the demands of the UK electorate.

The interview with Andrew Marr covered lots of questions. Corbyn came out clearly against racism, responding to recent political developments in the US and Europe. In the aftermath of the UK’s Brexit vote, he also stressed the importance of keeping its access to the EU single market and the provisions for workers’ rights existing in the EU. But my main focus here is on how Corbyn’s comments illustrated a common feature of leftwing views in many rich countries, national welfarism.

National welfarism

National welfarism is somewhat different from simple nationalism, which can be summed up as demanding that government policies should benefit the people of a particular country (usually meaning the corporations). Instead, national welfarism cloaks a nationalist policy in progressive phrases and proclaims the need to protect the common people from the depredations of the market. In all cases, national welfarism amounts to a call for the capitalist state to implement such policies, not for a struggle of people to protect themselves from such depredation. Furthermore, it avoids naming names. Rather than singling out capitalism as the problem, and the capitalist state as the enemy’s enforcer, it is a demand for different government policies. It is the stance taken by those who do not like capitalism’s impact on people’s lives, but who do not want to make a fuss about opposing capitalism. One might think this is just letting discretion be the better part of valour, but it is more than that. It is a facile belief that good bits of capitalism can be salvaged from the bad bits of capitalism.

Worse than this, national welfarism pays no attention to whether the state in question is one of the major powers in the world that spends its time oppressing others, either directly, or indirectly in making sure that the general system of oppression and privilege for the major powers remains in place. The reason is that this oppression by their own powerful state is something from which, implicitly at least, the national welfarists would like to benefit.

Answering the questions

Andrew Marr, a pillar of the BBC’s establishment opinion making elite, asked some pertinent questions. Corbyn answered clearly.

Why has there been a political shift to the right in many (rich) countries, and why has the left failed to channel popular anger? Corbyn thought that the previous New Labour agenda was mistaken and could not meet popular concerns, because it ignored the deindustrialisation of Britain and focused on globalisation. This was how he introduced his alternative Labour Party policy.

While Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France were in favour of trade protectionism, to stem the loss of domestic jobs, Corbyn countered with the view that there should be new investment in industry and ‘fair trade agreements’. He did not openly endorse tariffs and protectionism, but was very open to other forms of trade control – to make it ‘fair’, of course – which would go back to the Labour left and British Communist Party ‘alternative economic strategy’ programmes of the 1970s and 1980s. In this, he ends up posing foreign countries as the barrier to economic welfare for the Brits, not the market system, and still less capitalism. So the capitalist state should take measures against those who are not playing by the rules that the major powers, such as Britain, have introduced. Environmental concerns were also used to bolster his position. This is the common fashion among radicals these days – and is essentially a dig at China, in line with major power policy – despite the fact that the major powers have done by far the most to destroy the global environment.

Corbyn later criticised Donald Trump for demonising foreign workers, but, despite his anti-racism, he still managed to point to migrant labour as a problem for British workers. Even from his own perspective, he could have more simply said that migrant labour is not the problem, it is the capitalist labour market, and that he would demand the same conditions for all workers, whether migrant or not.

Immigration and UK politics

It was on the explosive popular issue of immigration that Corbyn was most evasive. He posed regional investment as a solution! The implicit logic was that if the state could encourage investment in those areas that were most anti-immigrant (basically, in England, and probably also in Wales), then such sentiment would fade away. This stepped aside from the post-Brexit issue of who is meant to benefit from the national investment policy, while his statement would, of course, be taken as meaning the ‘national’ working class. When asked about whether he agreed with the view of Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, who has argued that immigration should be lower, Corbyn said:

‘I think it [immigration] will be lower if we deal with the issues of wage undercutting, deal with exploitation, but we should also recognise that the migrants that have come to this country work and contribute, and pay taxes, and the NHS would simply not survive without the level of migrant labour, doctors, etc, because we have not invested enough in high skills in our own economy.’

So, migrants are justified on the basis of their economic contribution, but there is also the hope that training domestic workers, and enforcing higher wages, will cut immigrant job applications! This is the national welfarist’s solution to the anti-immigration outlook of his electorate. Just in case you thought that Corbyn was ignoring the demand from a sizeable chunk of that electorate for immigration to be checked, even reversed, he wants to stress that his policies will help do just that.

In a final, summary comment, Corbyn makes the broader points that his economic policy is for ‘left behind, broken Britain, poverty Britain’, one that will oppose the Conservative government’s policies on the National Health Service, etc, and appeal to the electorate that there really is an alternative that the Labour Party under Corbyn can implement. But there’s the rub. How to reconcile the predatory demands of capitalism and imperialism with the social welfare outlook of the reformer, while not giving too much ground to popular reactionary nationalism that the middle class, for now, still finds unacceptable?

Tony Norfield, 16 November 2016

---

[1] Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Marr starts around the 16-minute mark in this video.

Brexit Developments

Britain now has a tarnished reputation in the imperial family. It has long been the consigliere, advising on disputes and helping negotiate deals. While, of course, it often gets up to mischief for its own reasons, usually this is done in concert with one or more of the family – for example, it instigated the attack on Libya with France, drawing the US in too, and with the US it has promoted more liberal rules on financial dealing. But now the UK looks like a reckless troublemaker. Not only because the Brexit referendum led to shockwaves in world financial markets, but also because the aftermath of the vote further upsets an already crisis-ridden imperial landscape.

World leaders are bemused that the British government can have let things come to such a pass. For a major country to allow a pillar of foreign policy to be decided by the sentiment of a popular vote is just not done! Or, at least, never done unless the right outcome is assured. This outcome is unfavourable for the established powers, but that is no reason to look upon the result as progressive.

The Brits are in probably the biggest mess, not simply due to the drop in both sterling and the UK’s credit rating. It is also a question of status. They will look pretty stupid the next time they try to lecture other countries on the best way to run things. They will also be the wallflower next time they are in a party of ‘friends’, such as in NATO or the UN Security Council, aside from having fewer European-related parties to attend anyway. It is hard to see any way for the British state to restore the status quo ante. Even Britain’s new relationship with EU countries cannot be sorted out easily, quite apart from the main EU powers not wanting to make an exit seem like an easy option. The Brexit stance was based upon wanting (full) access to the single market, but rejecting the EU’s insistence on free movement of people within the single market, something that is anathema to the Leavers.

At the same time, the Conservative Party has to try to get a new leader, following Cameron’s resignation. It may only be then that the UK government will use the celebrated Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty formally to tell the EU of the intention to exit, which will then initiate a period of up to two years of divorce proceedings. The schedule is uncertain, but the main EU powers have made clear both that they want things over relatively quickly and that there will be no real negotiations until the Article 50 exit period has begun.

Some writers have noted that the Brexit referendum is not binding on the UK government, and could be taken as ‘advice’ from an opinion poll. That is true constitutionally, but it looks politically impossible to reverse it, nevertheless. The point behind Cameron calling the referendum was to stem the populist anti-EU threat to the Conservatives’ base of support. Instead, it revealed how many voters thought they had gained little or nothing from established policies, and how far popular sentiment had congealed on anti-immigration policies for their solution. While the 52%-48% split in favour of Leave was close, there had been no guidance that only a 55% or 60% Leave decision, for example, would endorse a change to the status quo.

To ignore the referendum result would bring an electoral disaster for the Conservatives as much as it would for the Labour Party. The core Leave vote came from England, where the majority was 1.9 million in favour (15.2 versus 13.3 million votes), more than accounting for the overall UK majority vote of 1.3 million in favour of leaving the EU. This was despite a number of the bigger English cities – London, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol – having large Remain majorities. According to the BBC, the Brexit vote was widespread, on top in 270 UK counting areas versus only 129 areas for Remain.

It will be interesting to see how much further the Labour Party adapts to anti-immigration sentiment, whether or not under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Not under Corbyn is most likely, given the scale of opposition from Labour MPs to his continued leadership (172 against, 40 for). The Labour Party fears a near-term general election that they will lose, and there is evident panic and plotting in its establishment ranks.

Last September, Corbyn won the Labour leadership election by a landslide, driven especially by younger people who had recently signed up as Labour supporters to back a more radical set of policies. They will now find their hopes shattered. One can only hope that they will learn some lessons from their earlier foray into the Labour Party.

History shows that the Labour Party exists to divert popular demands for change into a dead end, and that its policies are always determined by what is viable for British capitalism. Adapting the catchphrase of an old Heineken lager advert, Labour can reach into the parts of the electorate other parties cannot reach, in order to sustain popular support for the system. Even Labour’s welfare spending proposals are made explicitly on the basis of what capitalism can afford. Still worse, Labour’s policies are unashamedly patriotic and support British imperialism’s ventures. In March 2003, for example, the vote on the Iraq war was 254 Labour MPs in favour and just 84 against. Hilary Benn’s more recent ‘bomb Syria’ speech in the House of Commons was not an anomaly. But a few differences with the party line, eg with Corbyn’s timeserving of 30-plus years as a Labour MP, help give a different impression to the gullible.

Scotland is in a separate quandary, having voted 62% in favour of Remain. The Scottish National Party is now trying to deal with the EU on behalf of Scotland’s relationship, but is being told very clearly that Scotland is not an independent political entity so there can be no negotiations. That would require independence from the UK, and that – via another Scottish referendum – is something the EU is not going to encourage, since they are already worried about the threat from other potential regional breakaways in Italy and Spain. In any case, were Scotland to gain independence from the UK and apply for EU membership, it would have to sort out the tricky problems of replacing UK subsidies, avoiding an obligation to join the euro and running a budget on the basis of $50 per barrel of oil.

Meanwhile, other moves are afoot outside the UK. For example, the French government has raised again the role of the City of London in euro financial trading. Back in 2011, the European Central Bank, with Trichet then its French president, put forward a regulation that would have led securities trading in euros to be ‘cleared’ in a euro zone country. The UK challenged that in the European Court of Justice. The legal and financial details are very technical, but the gist of the matter is as follows. Being annoyed at the City’s dominance of euro financial trading, there had been a number of attempts on the part of France to shift financial trading into the euro area, meaning Paris. The 2011 ECB regulation looked innocuous, but the Brits smelt a rat and challenged it in the European Court, since it would have disadvantaged euro-clearing in London. In 2012-13, France and Spain backed the ECB position in Court (Italy did too, in March 2013, but pulled out in November), while the UK was backed by Sweden, also a non-euro EU member.

The ECB argued that the UK did not have the ‘standing to bring an action against it, on the ground that it does not participate in certain aspects of economic and monetary union’. No status, hence not able to make a case at the European Court. However, the Court ruled in March 2015 that ‘as a Member State [of the EU], the United Kingdom has standing to bring proceedings against acts of the ECB’. Furthermore, the Court accepted that the ECB’s new regulation was against the principles of a level playing field between euro and non-euro members of the EU. The UK won the case, and also got the ECB to pay its legal costs. It is unlikely that the same judgement would happen again, since the UK is not (rather, will not be) an EU member any longer, but very likely that a similar ECB regulation will reappear.

Admittedly, this looks like just a small-scale example of an opportunistic use of status to press an advantage. But the bigger picture it shows is how the UK’s changed status in the EU is going to have unexpected effects elsewhere. The Brexit vote has sent tremors through the imperial system’s tectonic plates and a number of structures are shaking. The great pity is that this has occurred in the context of a reactionary debate on Britain’s status in the world and delusions about how the new found ‘freedom’ of the British state will benefit the mass of people, while adding fuel to the fire of growing nationalism in many European countries.

Tony Norfield, 29 June 2016

Jerusalem. No, the One in England

In another example of the English sense of humour, while the world is on fire, news has come that the British Parliament might debate whether England should be given its own national anthem. If so, it might displace at sporting and other local, national occasions, the nauseating, genuflecting dirge 'God Save the Queen'. A favoured  option is William Blake's 'Jerusalem', a short poem published in 1808, and now used as a fake-nostalgic, patriotic, Methodism-not-socialism hymn of the beleaguered British Labour 'movement' (quotation marks indicating no real movement at all). As such, its chances of success are not negligible.

The words, although some of you may already know these by heart, are:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear: o clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariots of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

I will make no comment on whether, in the two centuries since the poem was published, England remains a 'green and pleasant land'. Opinions differ, and there are relative, not absolute issues to consider for a full evaluation, as labour movement management consultants will attest. However, a German comedian, Henning Wehn, has noted that this is a song with four opening questions, the answer to each of which is 'No'.

Tony Norfield, 14 January 2016