Budget Deficit Cleared – More Austerity on the Way

In 2010 when the Tory government was elected, in coalition with the treacherous Lib Dems, lest we forget, the UK economy had started a very fragile recovery from the 2008 financial crash. The Tory chancellor at the time, George Osborne, proceeded to drive the economy straight into a ditch. The public spending cuts introduced by Osborne, failed to bring the budget deficit down, and after two years he changed tack to basically introduce the austerity light that Labour had proposed in the 2010 general election.

Low and behold, the budget deficit started to reduce, slowly, and finally will be in balance by 2019-20, according to the Office of Budget Responsibility. The deficit refers to the amount of tax money coming into the exchequer, less the money the government spends, or to put it another way, we have been spending more than we are raising in taxes. This is often confused with the amount of money that the government is borrowing in total, but that figure has almost doubled over the last 8 years to around £1.8 trillion.

This is due to the government’s austerity policies, as you can’t cut your way out of a recession. The austerity policies have had the effect of depressing economic growth even more than the recession, hence the need to borrow more. At the same time the government cut taxes for the highest earners, further reducing the tax take, and we find ourselves where we are today, massively in debt.

News of finally balancing the budget, has been greeted with cheers from the government’s supporters, but in truth it is a woeful record. Along the way, public sector wages have fallen, with public service union the PCS calculating that public sector workers are now on average £5,000 a year worse off in real terms than in 2010.

Real wages overall, including the private sector have fallen by 10.7% since the Tories came to power. The cruel cuts to benefit payments, and accompanying regime of sanctions have caused much misery, and deaths in some cases. Public services have been cut to bone, which are often relied on by the most vulnerable in our society. There is a spike in the thousands of rough sleepers on our streets. Growth in the economy has only been modest. Hardly a record to be proud of.

What the Tories did manage to do, was frame their austerity policy as a result of Labour’s profligacy, but the depth of the recession in 2008 made Labour’s public spending necessary, and as I say, it was working to an extent. Why Labour let the Tories get away with their narrative, is still a mystery to me. Maybe they believed it themselves?

We should remember also that the Tories when in opposition advocated sticking to Labour’s spending plans (before the financial crash), so they shouldn’t have been allowed to revise history as they did. They in effect blamed the recession on Labour, although the Tories agreed with Labour’s deregulation agenda, and in fact wanted to go further.

The current chancellor, Philip Hammond, released his Spring economic statement today, in which he confirmed that higher than expected tax receipts mean that the current account budget is now nearly in balance. But he would go only as far as promising the possibility of ‘jam tomorrow,’ with the prospect of increasing public spending in this year’s Autumn budget. He wants to keep money available to cushion against any economic shocks caused by Brexit.

But more than this, austerity is an ideological fetish for the Tories. They are obsessed with cutting down the size of the public realm, believing in ‘small government’ just like their tea party compatriots in the US. They see it as an end in itself, whatever the cost.

Dr Faiza Shaheen, director of the think-tank CLASS (Centre for Labour and Social Studies), said: “Local Councils are almost bankrupt, workers are overworked and underpaid, and we are losing the race with our competitors in the G7.

Britain can’t afford more of the same failed dogma, especially given the uncertainty of Brexit. We need to see the public sector pay cap lifted, public services properly funded, and more borrowing for investment.”

Amen to that.

The convenient smokescreen of "overpopulation"

Review of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control by Betsy Hartman written by Leela Yellesetty. First published at International Socialist Review

At a charity gala for the Tusk Trust in November 2017, Prince William warned that while wildlife population is in decline, the human population in Africa “is predicted to more than double by 2050—a staggering increase of three and a half million people per month. There is no question that this increase puts wildlife and habitat under enormous pressure.”1

A day later on the other side of the Atlantic, Wisconsin state legislator Scott Allen defended banning abortion on the grounds that “labor force shortages are tied to population declines. Labor force shortages are a limiting factor in economic growth. And limited economic growth poses a problem when government tries to pay for public services and infrastructure.”2

At first glance, these appear to be to be two diametrically opposed views on the question of population—one says there are too many people, and the other too few. Yet they share more that meets the eye.

First, both are selective about which groups of humans there are too many and too few of. Prince William raises an alarm about the number of people in Africa, while himself expecting a third royal baby, who will consume hundreds of times more resources than the average African child. Likewise, Allen is concerned with labor shortages, yet sponsored a bill this past spring to penalize Wisconsin municipalities that refuse to assist in enforcing immigration laws. It would appear that there are too many of some kinds of laborers.

Even more fundamentally, both assume that their concerns about population ought to dictate the reproductive choices available to women. This is obviously the case with the anti-abortion right wing, but this attitude is also expressed by some people ostensibly on the left, especially in the environmental movement.

As we face the growing threat of climate change, the role of overpopulation is presented as common sense, even undisputed fact. “Science Proves Kids Are Bad for Earth. Morality Suggests We Stop Having Them,”3 asserted a recent headline at NBC News. The article referred to studies that found that the greatest impact individuals—at least wealthy individuals—could have in reducing their carbon footprint was to have fewer children. The important caveats of “individuals” and “wealthy” are noted in passing while not dampening their sweeping conclusions.

In this context, Betsy Hartmann’s classic 1994 book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control continues to resonate. Exhaustively researched, and devastatingly argued, it contends that population is neither the cause nor the solution to our problems, and a focus on it imperils both women’s reproductive health and economic and social justice. Recently reprinted by Haymarket Books with a new prologue by the author, it remains essential reading for those seeking to rebuild a fighting reproductive justice movement— and anyone concerned with the future of humanity.

Hartmann reflects on why population remains such a popular fixation, even as rates of population growth have been in decline since well before her book was originally published. In fact, we are soon nearing the point where the world’s population will begin to level off. A number of advanced countries now have birth rates below replacement level, prompting worries about population decline. Partly, this disconnect is due to the fact that the population worldwide is still growing, even as the rate has slowed, and “many people are demographically illiterate.” But, this illiteracy, she argues, serves a larger purpose for the elites:

Another important reason is that the myth of overpopulation is so politically useful to powerful interests. Elites deploy it to explain and legitimize inequality, essentially blaming the poor for causing their own poverty. Inequality is even worse now than when I wrote this book. The gap between rich and poor has become a yawning abyss, the bitter fruit of decades of neoliberal economic policies, financial corruption and speculation, and dispossession of peasants and small farmers. Overpopulation is a convenient smokescreen that obscures the voracious appetites and power grabs of the superrich.

Since the time of nineteenth-century economist Thomas Malthus, the idea that the problem of poverty is that there are too many poor people has been used to justify inequality and cuts to social welfare measures. In the twentieth century this ideology was weaponized in the form of population control measures, often with reckless disregard for the safety and welfare of their targets, and in many cases embracing racist, misogynist, and coercive means. In recent years, the population-control lobby has moved away from eugenicist appeals and embraced the language of ecology and even female empowerment.

Yet the focus on population as the root of the problems of poverty, environmental devastation, and gender inequality are fundamentally misplaced—and distorting. In the case of poverty, Hartmann makes clear that the problem is not a lack of resources, but their unequal distribution. In the case of climate change, the evidence is indisputable that industrial and military pollution and consumption by the wealthy bear the lion’s share of blame for carbon emissions—even as populations in those countries are stable and declining. Hartmann takes aim at the patronizing language of international aid programs that aim to promote good “environmental stewardship” among the poor, noting, “An illiterate peasant woman in Bangladesh, for example, is likely to be a far better manager of environmental resources than a college-educated professional in New York. The latter probably generates more non-recyclable waste in a week than the former does in her entire lifetime.”

Responsibility for climate change aside, it is true that population growth remains higher in the developing world—a fact exploited in population-control literature’s “lurid photographs of dark-skinned crowds, starving African children, and close-up pregnant bellies.” Surely, these images suggest, overpopulation is at least partly to blame for the entrenched poverty in these regions. But the population perspective fundamentally misunderstands the causes of high birth rates in the third world.

Conventional wisdom has it that Third World people continue to have so many children because they are ignorant and irrational—they exercise no control over their sexuality, “breeding like rabbits.” This “superiority complex” of many Westerners as well as some Third World elites is one of the main obstacles in the way of meaningful discussion of the population problem. It assumes that everyone lives in the same basic social environment and faces the same set of reproductive choices. Nothing is further from the truth. In many Third World societies, having a large family is an eminent strategy of survival.

Hartmann delineates a number of reasons why this is the case. In many impoverished countries, children are economic assets, contributing valuable labor beginning at a young age. In the absence of social safety nets, they also provide the only means of security in old age. High infant and child mortality rates—caused by poverty, disease, and child and maternal malnutrition—also drive higher birth rates, to ensure that at least some children survive to adulthood. Lastly, women’s subordinate status in many societies and lack of control over reproductive decisions also contribute to high birth rates. Without addressing these underlying factors, an exclusive focus on bringing down birth rates is not only ineffective but, in many cases, is counterproductive.

This is not to say that women and families in the Third World—like everywhere else—don’t desire access to contraceptives and the ability to plan their reproductive lives. “A family planning program designed to improve health and to expand women’s control over reproduction looks very different indeed from one whose main concern is to reduce birth rates as fast as possible,” Hartmann writes. “Women the world over want family planning. This is the story of what population agencies have done in its name.”

Beginning in force in the 1960s, a network of government and international agencies, private philanthropies, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, population think tanks, and others have pushed population control with a single-minded focus on much of the developing world, as well as on poor and minority communities in advanced countries. Hartmann details the impact of these initiatives with exhaustive research and in-depth case studies of a handful of countries.

At best, these programs have pursued a narrow focus on population control, often at the expense of basic health care and other needed services. At worst, they have involved mass endangerment if not outright violent coercion. In several countries at various points, women and men have been literally been rounded up en masse at gunpoint and subjected to forcible contraceptive insertions, injections, or sterilizations.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) gave the following assessment of such initiatives under the brutal Suharto regime in Indonesia: “The most ready explanation given for the success of the Indonesian family planning program is the strong hierarchical power structure, by which central commands produce compliant behavior all down the administrative line to the individual peasant.”

Even nominally “voluntary” programs are often accompanied by “incentive” or “disincentive” schemes involving giving or withholding food, clothing, or other services. Hartmann observes of such schemes, “For people who are desperately poor, there is no such thing as free choice. A starving person is much less likely to make an informed decision about sterilization if he or she is offered cash and food as a reward. Thus, in practice incentives often have more to do with coercion than choice.”

And rather than being a complement, funding for family planning services often comes at the expense of basic health care and other needed social programs. In Indonesia, for instance, the budget for family planning is twice that of basic health. As a 1983 USAID Emergency Plan for Population Control in Bangladesh explained, “A population control program does not depend on a functioning primary health care system.”

The combination of coercive methods and lack of basic health and education ironically can result in lower rates of birth control adoption, as women’s negative experiences with these programs and adverse side effects of the contraceptives themselves lead them to stop using them. This in turn only convinces family planning agencies to further constrict and remove women’s control from the equation.

Research into and promotion of contraceptive technology has often been dictated by the pursuit of population control and profits rather than women’s safety or desires. Rather than empower women, “increasingly, the implicit goal is to remove control from the woman entirely.” Long-lasting contraceptives such as IUDs, Depo-Provera, and Norplant as well as permanent methods such as sterilization are emphasized over safer, reversible methods in the all-encompassing goal of lowering birth rates.

Third World women have long been used as guinea pigs for testing contraceptive technologies, free of legal or ethical constraints. This same disregard for safety extends to oppressed groups in the United States and other affluent countries. To choose just one among many jaw-dropping examples, Hartmann relates: “One of the members of the FDA’s 1984 board of inquiry on Depo, Dr. Griff T. Ross, recommended that the drug be approved for limited use on intellectually disabled women and drug addicts, though he admitted its safety was not sufficiently proved for use on ‘human subjects.’”

At the time of the book’s first publication in the early 1990s, the Christian Right and anti-abortion movement was on the upswing on the heels of the Reagan and Bush administrations, which enforced a global gag rule on international agencies promoting abortion services. As Hartmann makes clear, access to safe, legal abortion is a necessary complement and backup to other contraceptive methods, and fundamental to women’s reproductive health. The right-wing offensive against abortion and indeed all forms of contraception has understandably made some feminists cautious to raise concerns about contraceptive safety and abuse.

Yet Hartmann cautions against the temptation for reproductive rights advocates to hold their tongue on these issues, or worse, seek common cause with the population-control lobby:

The population control and anti-abortion philosophies, although diametrically opposed share one thing in common: They are both anti-women. Population control advocates impose contraception and sterilization on women; the so-called Right to Life movement denies women the basic right of access to abortion and birth control. Neither takes the interests and rights of the individual woman as their starting point. Both approaches attempt to control women, instead of letting women control their bodies themselves.

What is needed is a genuinely pro-women alternative, which challenges both the population control and anti-abortion positions and which guides family planning, contraceptive research, and health policy. If instead prochoice supporters turn a blind eye to coercive population control practices, they allow the anti-abortion movement to capture the issue and posture as champions of individual reproductive freedom. Such an abdication of responsibility is not only ethically bankrupt, but politically disastrous.

The pro-woman alternative Hartmann advocates recognizes that true reproductive justice means connecting the fight for reproductive rights to a broader struggle for economic and social justice. This is, ironically, also the primary driver of declining population growth. As Hartmann notes, most economically advanced countries have already undergone a demographic transition of declining birth rates, “and this transition was achieved without any explicit government population control policies and often without modern contraception.”

Even relatively poor countries have undergone this transition through efforts to more equitably share resources and combatting gender equality. One example Hartmann gives is the Indian state of Kerala, which has bucked the trend in the rest of the country of both high impoverishment and birth rates. She credits this to policies of land reform, redistribution, education, and social welfare programs. A critical element of their success was the element of popular pressure to ensure that good-sounding policies were not just proclaimed but actually implemented. “Of the many lessons Kerala holds for the rest of India, perhaps the most important is that the foundation of equity rests on the political power of the poor.”

Political power—not population control—remains the critical element needed today to confront the threats of inequality, climate change, and gendered and racial oppression that face humanity today. Hartmann’s book remains an indispensible resource for those looking to rebuild that power today.

Notes 

“The Duke of Cambridge Gives a Speech at the Tusk Trust Ball,” Official Website of the British Royal Family, November 2, 2017, https://www.royal.uk/duke-cambridge-gives-speech-tusk-trust-ball.

Jenavieve Hatch, “Wisconsin Rep Says Abortion Access is Bad For Labor Force,” Huffington Post, November 6, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wisconsin-rep-says-abortion-access-is-bad-for-labor-force_us_5a006d6fe4b04cdbeb34d94c

Travis Reider, “Science Proves Kids Are Bad for Earth. Science Suggests We Stop Having Them,” NBC News, November 15, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-are-bad-earth-morality-suggests-we-stop-ncna820781.

21st Century Socialism and a New Left Project?

This is an extract from a piece written by Stephen Maher entitled ‘Crisis of the State, Crisis of the Left: Articulating Socialism After the Anarchist Moment’ and first published at The Bullet

I argue that key foundations from the Marxist tradition can still serve as an essential basis for this project, avoiding the pitfalls posed by the critiques summarized above. First is the idea that the commodity is not a ‘thing’, but rather the fundamental relation of capital – what Marx called “the economic cell form.” Capitalism, as the historical mode of existence of capital amidst other relations and logics, brings the penetration of this relation ever deeper and ever wider into our life-worlds. 

This therefore brackets questions of cultural difference. Capital, and the commodity form that is its social foundation, is not reducible to a property of any particular culture. Indeed this form has taken hold of and transformed the social relations of ‘Western’ countries just as it has in other places.

Moreover, the basic operation of capitalism lies in the interaction between value and use-value. Capital constantly reorganizes concrete, qualitative reality to serve the infinite production and circulation of abstract value. Qualitative use-values do not matter to capital, only the endless accumulation of quantitative exchange-value. Thus what Marx referred to as a “dialectical inversion”: exchange-value is the only use-value for capital.

In other words, for capital, the only useful things are those produced for the purpose of exchange in pursuit of the endless accumulation of abstract value. The abstract becomes concrete; quality becomes quantity; use becomes exchange; and freedom becomes slavery. Indeed, because the value-form is abstract, this appears to be the result of individual free choice: the threat or use of force is normatively prohibited in the sphere of commodity exchange, which Marx referred to as “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.” The exchange of commodities, including labour-power, appears to be a purely voluntary, individual act.

The coercion that constitutes the foundation of class in capitalism originates elsewhere, in that sphere liberalism explicitly deems “apolitical”: the “private” realm of production. As Marx wrote in characteristically colourful fashion (Capital Vol I):

“we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.”

Workers themselves produce the force – capital – that dominates them; it is none other than their own alienated life energies turned against them. As Marx shows in Capital, capitalism is uniquely a system in which the instruments and conditions of production dominate human beings, rather than serving as an extension of conscious human will and collective social planning. Since investment decisions are based on the need to accumulate abstract value, the ability to produce value for capitalists – rather than meet collective social needs – becomes the primary determinant of the social division of labour, and the ends to which our collective human energies are devoted. 

Moreover, capitalists themselves do not merely ‘plan’ the economy, but are themselves ruled by the value-form, which enforces its sovereignty via the “coercive laws of competition.” Capitalists must accumulate or perish: “Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets.” Thus the “law of value” appears over and above conscious human will in shaping social relations and directing society’s productive forces, an objective force that seizes upon human subjectivity and directs it to alien ends – the ends of capital. Capital therefore becomes the subject, while the true subjects (human beings) are instrumentalized as inorganic objects.

Capital must be understood not as a closed totality but rather as a totalising logic within the relentless totalisation in progress that is history. To base our analysis of history on a conceptual totality is to assume, in Althusserian or Hegelian fashion, that we can construct a logical model that fully captures, on the basis of its inner necessity, the actual movement of ‘really-existing’ capitalism. It conflates the logical with the ontological. Though he explicitly criticized Hegel, Althusser’s “structuralism” reproduced a very similar ontology, albeit substituting the abstract coordinates of a ‘structure’ for the Hegelian ‘totality’.

The provisional nature of knowledge, and the process of discovery via proposing hypotheses, is in both cases replaced with absolute certainty about the shape of the real derived from self-generating abstract theoretical constructs. In both cases, reality is reduced to the notion, and in both cases, the result in political terms is to potentially justify forms of despotism. This is fundamentally at odds with an approach that, understanding subjectivity as rooted in the basic properties of the human organism, sees that the historical ‘totality’ is never complete, but always in a state of becoming, of being made in the concrete life activity of really existing human beings. 

This leads us to interrogate the real for its causal interconnections, and to approach human beings as conscious subjects whose capacities for free creative labour are to be emancipated through the revolutionary project. In other words, it points toward a different conception of both epistemological and political representation.

Even though capital is not a closed totality, capitalist social relations exert basic pressures upon conscious human beings, including class struggle, competition (over consumer markets, investment, intellectual property, within firms themselves, and more), tendencies toward concentration and centralization, and systematically recurring crises. But these tell us nothing about the direction of history, or the particular manifestation of these tendencies in different places and times. 

As conscious subjects, human beings exist in a relation to their situation. This is not to deny that they are conditioned, merely to suggest that they cannot be reduced to their condition. If we are to understand capitalism, we must come to terms with the dynamism with which it has been created and re-created by conscious human beings as a historical process.

It is this moment of subjective human creativity, operative at every ‘level’ and in every ‘sphere’ of social relations, which, at base, is responsible for the dynamism of capitalism. And this is precisely what makes it impossible to study human societies as if they were governed by mechanistic laws. 

It is only by examining the nature of these projects, constructed within and against specific institutional assemblages that are constantly being remade amidst structural conflicts and synergies, that we can hope to decipher the movement of history. This also means that if capitalism will not simply collapse “on its own”: if it is to be overcome, we must overthrow it.

How, then, are we to connect this theoretical basis for a 21st century socialism to an organized political intervention that is all but absent today? Firstly, one should be clear that the rise of the right in the current conjuncture (sketched out above) is a direct consequence of the weakness of the left. In the absence of an organized radical left, the only force capable of articulating the anxieties stemming from the social dislocations wrought by neoliberal restructuring has been a nationalist and xenophobic right.

Meanwhile, the crisis of neoliberal hegemony has entailed the collapse of post-1990s “Third Way” Social Democratic forces, which moved away from articulating a class-based politics based in universalistic demands for the decommodification of social services and human labour power. Instead, they hitched their wagons to the neoliberal horse, limiting their political horizons to questions of identity and inclusion within a corporate-dominated liberal capitalist order. 

In fact, since the capacity for labour to oppose Social Democratic parties is limited in the absence of a credible alternative to their left, such parties have served as particularly effective vehicles for pushing neoliberal restructuring (albeit at a slower pace), reinforcing the idea that “There Is No Alternative.” 

As a result, the legitimacy crisis of neoliberalism has also eroded popular support for even the most well established and deeply rooted Social Democratic parties. Nevertheless, as the emergence of the new left parties in Europe indicates (to say nothing of the meteoric rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders within traditional parties), although the rise of the right poses significant challenges, the collapse of the neoliberal center also presents an opportunity for the left to present a bold, transformative political vision.

The best way for left forces to regroup – while recognizing the crucial difference between organizing the left and organizing the class – and seriously put a progressive break with neoliberalism on the agenda is to unite fragmented issue-based struggles within a broader socialist vision. Indeed one of the biggest shortcomings of the New Left social movements was their willingness to forsake the goal of broader social transformation in favour of individual issue-based struggles, such as war, the environment, women’s rights, and so on. 

The task for us now is to find ways to reintegrate these crucial struggles with a longer-term vision for fundamental social change. We must recognize that though important reforms can be won, capitalism is unable to fully accommodate demands for social and ecological justice. Therefore we must go beyond simply opposing neoliberalism.

Similarly lacking in strategic vision is the contemporary ‘anti-fascist’ discourse focused on fighting the hard right. Though many left groupings are now apparently relying primarily on this anti-fascism as a mechanism for building the left, simply opposing the far-right leaves us de facto defending neoliberalism unless we can come up with a positive program to collectively build toward something else. 

The best strategy for confronting the hard right is to destroy the conditions of despair and alienation upon which it feeds by formulating a bold yet credible program for breaking with neoliberalism and building toward a brighter future. This must not simply write off, but speak directly to the concerns and anxieties of those who have thus far found voice only in the chauvinist nationalism of the hard right. It must work to identify and pragmatically confront the forces responsible for the devastation of working class communities in recent decades. The intensifying ecological crisis makes this all the more urgent.

The basic principles that must animate a contemporary left program are clear enough. These include changes in the organization of our communities, including de-commodification of social services and developing ‘green’ ways of living, working and playing. It also involves reinvigorating workplace organizing, and building the democratic and activist capacities of the labour movement in conjunction with social movements and community activists, including through such campaigns as the Fight For $15 in the US and $15 and Fairness in Canada. 

But the neoliberal restructuring of the state and the economy, including the decline of state fiscal capacity and the global restructuring of accumulation, are such that neither unionization nor social movement activism alone are capable of bringing the broader political changes that are essential to rebuilding the power of the working class. 

Given the neoliberal restructuring of production, even implementing relatively mild reforms by historical standards today requires a radical confrontation with capital. The old question of “reform versus revolution” is ever less relevant. The more pertinent issue is whether we can implement reforms that are robust enough to withstand the pressures of capital’s totalizing logic, which have intensified over the neoliberal period.

An augmented left, from this perspective, could take the form of what Greg Albo has called “a political ecology of movements and forces” working toward another world, and supporting a struggle on the terrain of the state to transform it and move toward a genuinely democratic society. 

This requires building a political infrastructure that can reproduce and amplify popular power, animated by principles of class struggle and mutual solidarity and seeking to construct democratic systems of production and distribution for use rather than exchange. It means overcoming alienating commodity relations with organic human bonds founded upon mutual respect and solidarity. And it means facilitating the production of new, class subjectivities that can support these efforts, and serve as the gateway to a society in which collective human flourishing is truly possible.

Stephen Maher is a social critic and PhD candidate at York University in Toronto.

Social Media Abuse and the Framing of the Left

We hear a lot these days about people being threatened, abused and bullied on social media, and the mainstream media stories all tend to be about leftist activists being the wrongdoers. Particularly in association with the Labour party, and those members who support the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the latest is here, but it didn’t start with Corbyn.

During the Scottish referendum campaign and the lead up to it, ‘cybernats’ were demonised by the media for alleged bullying on-line in favour of independence. Any kind of threat to the established order must be smeared in some way, we know is the tactic employed by those who are happy with the status quo. Curiously there was a split in the right wing establishment over Brexit. The mainstream media are the attack dogs in both cases though.

Two of the main reasons that I started this blog, was to bring reds and greens together and to put out an alternative narrative to mainstream media and right wing social media. Ecosocialist yes, but also a green left take on things like news stories more generally.

Around about 75% of the traffic to this blog comes from Facebook links, the rest come from the email feed from the blog, left politics aggregator sites, twitter, email groups and forums and google searches. I have over 700 Facebook friends and posts are public, and I also link the blog posts in various Facebook groups. These groups are mainly of the green, left liberal, socialist and anarchist type politics. But I also post the links into some more general politics groups and some London based community type groups, it all depends on the nature of the post.

The reaction to my posts in the green and lefty groups is generally positive, with likes, shares and comments from posters. In the more general political groups, there will be some support in comments and likes, but a hell of a lot of negative, and in some cases, downright offensive comments from right wingers.

Of course, you have to have a bit of a thick skin if you blog about politics and share it about on Facebook discussion sites and I just ignore a lot of the condescension. I’m not claiming that I have been abused badly on social media, certainly not like some people are, especially women, but it does happen to an extent to me.

The worst thing I get is the racist stereotyping of me being Irish. I once said in a comment in a Facebook group that I was ashamed to be English (I think I was referring to the Brexit vote) and I was accused of not being English, but Irish. Stereotypes then flowed about the Irish doing anything for money, being thick etc. More recently, in a blog post that explained why I hated the Tories, I was called a ‘Paddy muppet.’

For the record, the only thing that is Irish about me is my name, so much so, that I am unable to get an Irish passport. The rule is that you need at least a grandparent that was born on the island of Ireland to qualify. The last one of my relatives to be born in Ireland was in about 1860!

Most of the time people just post distracting comments, probably because they can’t make a proper argument against what I am saying, which is annoying and reflects the commenters ignorance, although many people don’t seem to mind making themselves look foolish. Racist and sexist comments taunts are out order though, although they are tolerated in many of the groups I post into.

I am not saying that the left is squeaky clean when it comes to social media abuse but you would be forgiven for thinking that the left are the baddies if you are guided by the mainstream media with their smear campaign against the left. The right are just as bad, if not worse than the left when it comes to online bullying, so let’s get real about this.        

EU Puts the Ball in the UK’s Court with Irish Border Plan

The European Union (EU) has published its plan for resolving the problem of a return to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, once the UK leaves the union. In the worse-case scenario, of no other workable alternative being found, which looks to be the case now, Northern Ireland will be considered part of the EU’s customs territory after Brexit. In effect, Northern Ireland will remain in the customs union and single market, and checks will be needed on goods passing between the UK mainland and Northern Ireland.

“A common regulatory area comprising the Union and the United Kingdom in respect of Northern Ireland is hereby established,” the draft paper says. “The common regulatory area shall constitute an area without internal borders in which the free movement of goods is ensured and North-South cooperation protected.”

Northern Ireland would stay under the jurisdiction of the European court of justice and the EU’s VAT regime and state aid rules would apply.

Michel Barnier, who is leading the negotiations on Brexit for the EU said: “We are just saying that on the island there are two countries, we need to fund the capacity for certain issues relating to the internal market and customs union, that we need to ensure the Good Friday Agreement can function ... We need to ensure there is regulatory consistency, alignment.”

Yesterday, Boris Johnson the foreign secretary, being interviewed on the BBC radio Today programme, claimed that the Irish border was being used to ‘frustrate’ Brexit, and further claimed that the problem could be resolved by a similar system of CCTV cameras that is used to enforce London’s vehicle congestion area. Johnson was trivialising the situation disgracefully, because the analogy is completely different. He shames his high office with such blithe statements.

It was also revealed yesterday by Sky news, that a leaked letter from Johnson to the prime minister also trivialised the problems, and did not shy away from maintaining a hard border.

The prime minister, Theresa May, said at PM questions today that there would not be a hard border in Ireland, but she also ruled out the EU’s solution, which effectively would draw the EU/UK border in the Irish Sea. May refused to be drawn on the practicalities of this when pressed by the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn on the issue. No doubt this is because there is no workable plan, so yet again the government indulges in magical thinking, but this can’t last. Decisions need to be taken, and the EU has taken one. Over to the UK.

Since the problem of the Irish border has begun to receive attention in recent weeks, although it has been known about all along, the value of the Good Friday Agreement has been brought into question by the looniest Tory Brexiteers.

Tory MP Owen Paterson, a former Northern Ireland secretary, tweeted a link to a piece with a comment which claimed that the Good Friday Agreement ‘had outlived its usefulness.’ Paterson was sacked by former prime minister David Cameron as environment secretary, for making a complete shambles of the west of England badger cull, blaming the badgers ‘for moving the goalposts.’ A towering intellect he is not.

Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, who is close to Boris Johnson, has claimed that the Agreement is ‘flawed.’ But it brought to an end twenty years of military conflict, and shakily has maintained the peace for a further twenty years.

Journalist Fintan O’Toole writing in the Irish Times said that although the Agreement was imperfect, the Brexiteers are playing a dangerous game by trying to rubbish it and puts it down to Britain’s priority being a recklessly pure Brexit, not peace in Ireland. “If the Belfast agreement must die so that the glorious ideal of Brexit may live, so be it” he concludes.

One can hardly blame the EU for becoming exasperated with the UK’s contradictory and completely unrealistic positions on Brexit. They have now given Britain a clear choice on the Irish border, either accept the EU’s solution, or have a hard border. That’s it.

The Good Friday Agreement is an international agreement, and an open border in Ireland is part of it. If we reject the EU’s terms, which the UK accepted in December as a fall back option, then we will break international law. But more than this, if the conflict returns to Northern Ireland, the British government will have to justify to the families of British soldiers, the death of their loved ones. All to uphold the ideology of the most crazy wing of the Tory party.

Will the families be comforted by this? I very much doubt it.     

Labour’s Customs Union Shift Could see Corbyn Prime Minister by Summer

The Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, gave a speech in Coventry today, which had been trialled over recent days, confirming that Labour is in favour of the UK being in a custom’s union with the EU, once we leave the organisation. It had become clear weeks ago that Corbyn’s thinking was shifting in this direction.He said he wanted “a new, comprehensive UK-EU customs union” after Brexit.

The move has been welcomed by business representatives the CBI and the Institute of Directors, and even former Tory chancellor, George Osborne. All of the uncertainty caused by the government’s prevarication on what form Brexit should take, has been making businesses worry, and to put off investment decisions because the future export/import regime is so ambiguous.

Corbyn was careful to say that the customs union wouldn’t be the same as the existing one the UK is a member of, but a new ‘bespoke’ one. He said he wanted the UK to have some influence over new EU trade deals, so that if they were judged not to be the Britain’s interest, then they would not apply. 

This might be easier said than done, as it looks suspiciously like the ‘cherry picking’ that the EU has ruled out, but this might depend on what form the customs union exactly is in the end. Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, has said that the new customs union would look very similar to the existing one.

Turkey is in the customs union, but not in the EU. The deal means that EU goods are exported tariff free into Turkey, but there are tariffs on Turkish goods imported into the EU. Turkey is allowed to strike trade deals beyond the EU but must obey customs union rules. The deal doesn’t cover all sectors either, farming produce is exempt as are services. So, this kind of approach might not deliver the full benefits we enjoy now, and maybe wouldn’t solve the problem of re-instating a hard border in Ireland.

So, there is still some way to go before we can see this as a good solution to all of the barriers that Brexit throws up. But it is a promising start, in that it does give the EU something to work with, as opposed to the government’s wishful thinking on what the EU will agree to in whatever relationship we end up with once we leave. It does at least offer some hope of a reasonable break with our European partners of 45 years, and is perhaps the outline of a deal.

What is does do though, is that it puts the government, and the prime minister in particular in a difficult position. There are said to be around 20 Tory rebel MPs, who are prepared to vote for an amendment in the Brexit Bill, that would commit the government to staying in a customs union with the EU. This is enough to defeat the government, if all opposition parties vote for the amendment as well, which is what Corbyn appears to have signalled today.

The vote on the amendment should have been in March, but the government has put this back to April or possibly May this year. This is because they know the amendment is likely to be carried, and it gives the government’s whips extra time to work on the rebels.

My money is on the vote being pushed back to after the local authority elections in May, which are expected to be disastrous for the Tories, especially in London. Government thinking may be that the shock of big losses for the Tories will make some of the rebels wary of defeating the government. They will say that it could lead to a general election where Labour triumphs.

It could though be better to get the Brexit amendment vote over and done by the time of the local elections, and so go for April. Either way, these two events could well trigger the fall of the prime minister, and the government as a whole. There is no constitutional reason to hold a general election if the customs union amendment is passed, only if the government loses a vote of no confidence. The Tory rebels may not want to cause a general election, and could vote with the government.

Conversely, the government might make the amendment into a vote of confidence, to try and scare off the rebels. This would be risky indeed, as there is no reason why this should be the case. It would be a self-inflicted defeat by the government, so the rebels may leave them to it. High stakes indeed.

These things though can get a momentum behind them, and if there is huge pressure from the media and public to hold a general election, to ‘clear the air’ around the Brexit process, and it could come as early as June this year.

Bring it on I say, let’s elect a sensible government, that puts the needs of the country first, rather than holding the Tory party together, and keeping Theresa May in Downing Street at the same time. This is a more important matter than party politics and personal political careers.     

Reframing the Left Eco-Modernism vs. Orthodox Eco-Socialism Debate

This is an extract from a piece written by Emanuele Leonardi and first published at Entitle Blog

Jacobin‘s issue on climate change (especially its second part) and the Monthly Review‘s reaction to it (through an article by John Bellamy Foster) indicate a polarization within the eco-socialist debate, mostly due to different ways of accounting for the relationship between capitalism and nature. 

Simplifying a little: if virtually everybody involved in this discussion agree that the capitalist mode of production directly caused the ecological crisis, what remains controversial is the political answer to be given to the usual big question: what is to be done?

The eco-modernist Left endorsed by Jacobin – alt-growthers – argues that socialist (hence infinite), centrally-planned, innovation-led growth is desirable: once irrational capitalists are dealt with, nothing would stay in the way of placing sustainability at the very core of productive processes. 

The Monthly Review‘s Eco-Marxist hard-liners – no-growthers – praise instead a revolution in social relations aimed at overthrowing the profit-imperative so that production can finally be reconciled with biospheric realities and give rise to a steady-state economy. In a nutshell: you can’t have infinite economic growth on a finite planet.

Such disagreement is rooted in legitimate theoretical divergences concerning the role of technology in the transition towards eco-socialism, the so-called “civilizing mission” of capitalism vis-à-vis previous social formations, and the long-disputed issue of Progress. Yet my impression is that this polarization is both theoretically problematic and politically disempowering. 

Thus, what I propose in this post are a few embryonic elements aimed at reframing the debate so that an anti-capitalist strategy may be distilled in the following slogan: reduce entropic/industrial (wage) labor & liberate negentropic/reproductive labor (from its subjection to commodification).

As a starting point, the relationship between capitalism and nature is not a monolithic one. It changed historically and can be subdivided in at least two phases. To grasp the key rupture-event of this transformation – occurred between the social unrest symbolized by 1968 and the 1973 oil shock – it is important to critically assess the value-nature nexus, which is to say the categorial relation between economy and environment. 

Schematically: whereas in pre-capitalist societies nature is seen as a transcendent force, as an external normative entity – Marx’s wording is telling: “nature-idolatry” – in capitalism its function is from the very beginning mediated by surplus value as uncontested economic goal. 

Accordingly, classical political economists account for nature in a very particular way: it constitutes the border within which value-creation can occur, though it does not actively participate in the valorization process proper. If abstract social labor (i.e. the sphere of production) acts as the source of value, what Jason Moore defines as abstract social nature (i.e. the sphere of reproduction) acts as its necessary condition.

It is against this background – whose methodological assumption is an understanding of value theory not as a descriptive tool but as a historical agent, which, in its deployment, ceaselessly and violently imposes the conditions for its own reproduction – that wage labor in its industrial form can be considered an entropic factor. 

The hegemony of the deal-option, in fact, is represented in what Matthias Schmelzer calls the growth paradigm which lies at the core of Fordism (1930s-1970s; approximately 1945-1975 for Western Europe, hence the well-known French expression les trente glorieuses).

The growth paradigm is an institutional arrangement grounded on a social pact – working class obedience in exchange for protection guaranteed by the ruling class – which premised its solidity on perpetual (and environmentally destructive) growth. In this sense, at least until the mid-1970s, growth has represented the policy counterpart of wage as the institutional pillar of social mediation. Claus Offe named productivist nexus the twin societal goal of full employment and perpetual growth. 

It is only in this context that social antagonism could be displaced from the qualitative composition of production (what, where, when is to be produced, and how, by whom, for whom) to the depoliticized terrain of quantity. If each class’ proportional share of aggregate production is to be maintained, then a quantitative increase of economic output is the one best way to defuse social confrontation.

Furthermore, it is important to stress that the growth paradigm entailed the institutional inclusion of waged workers as predicated on a symmetrical exclusion of the sphere of reproduction. 

In particular, from an environmental perspective, the wage-growth dyad systematically downplayed the crucial role of what Ariel Salleh calls meta-industrial labour – which “denotes workers, nominally outside of capitalism, whose labor catalyzes [positive, negentropic] metabolic transformations, be they peasants, gatherers, or parents” – and metabolic value – which “denotes the value sustained and enhanced by this kind of worker in supporting ecological integrity and the social metabolism”.

We all know that the green economy – and, within it, carbon trading or Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes – does not work. But why? In my opinion the main issue concerns what kind of labor is mobilized by the green economy. For the internalization of nature within value to occur, in fact, a specific laboring practice needs to take place: the general intellect as the organizing principle of contemporary (re)production. 

If we look at the weird commodities exchanged in “green” markets – think of a Certified Emissions Reduction within the Clean Development Mechanism – we see that their value does not come from a tree or from the ocean, but rather from their sinking potential as politically calculated to fit financial markets’ accounting strategies; not from an actual seed but from the genetic sequence that, once modified, makes it resistant to biotech pesticides.

This is a manipulation of the general intellect, namely a form of labor which is potentially negentropic (precisely because it is rooted in reproduction) but completely loses its ecological potential once it is inscribed within commodity production, that is to say once it is subjected to the profit-imperative. 

This means that conflicts in defence of the community, its territory (and knowledge) and the environment against capitalist accumulation should be considered as instances of contemporary class struggle aimed at the liberation of the negentropic potential of cognitive/reproductive labor rather than oppositions that may or may not build alliances with the labour movement. 

In other words, “where we live, work, play and eat” is nowadays a fundamental stake of value production and exploitation. Thus, the working class should also be conceived of as a potential ecological agent, not only as an actor bound to support the wage-growth dyad.

If, as Stefania Barca suggests, the labor movement is to be a key element of a desirable degrowth scenario – where degrowth is not only about less, but also and more fundamentally about different – I believe it is important to assess the value-nature nexus and its contemporary transformation. This may help both in the search for an alternative politicization of limits and in the acknowledgement of social reproduction as the most solid basis for a the ecological revolution to come.

In particular, from the perspective of degrowth, the interplay between the classical and the new value-nature nexus allows for a strategic articulation of the “less” (smaller social metabolism) and the “different” (alternative social-ecology) that may be worth further exploring. In fact, there is no doubt all sectors belonging to the entropic model should shrink. In this context, accumulation by dispossession as proposed by Harvey and accumulation by contamination as elaborated by Demaria and D’Alisa constitute a proper horizon for indirect class struggle.

When it comes to structurally modifying (a reduced) social metabolism, however, an additional layer may be considered. It is composed by those sectors which could freely “flourish” once liberated form the seal of value and the growth paradigm. Reproductive work and the general intellect seem to me to be good examples of such potential, whose actualization requires in my opinion a form of direct class struggle in the hidden abode of contemporary production. 

In this sense, a few promising lines of further research-action emerge and mainly concern the need to articulate digital technologies (knowledge commons), sustainable re-localization of production (ecological commons) and democracy (civil commons).

Emanuele Leonardi is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES/UC). His research interests include carbon trading and climate justice movements, working-class environmentalism, and André Gorz’s political ecology.