Capitalist states (including China) reacted to the spread of the Covid virus by deliberately shutting down production and isolating their working populations. The authoritarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime under General Secretary Xi Jinping was able to use more draconian methods of isolation than in the West, to stem the spread of the virus, and so put itself in a position to restart production quickly. As a result, in the first quarter of 2021, China’s economy recorded its biggest year-on-year increase in quarterly GDP growth since the early 1990s.

However, this seeming success in dealing with the pandemic hides deep structural problems in the Chinese mixed economic model – problems which are being accentuated by the virus itself. Most dramatically, while Western stock market prices are now trading at record levels, the value of Chinese high technology stocks plunged by around $1 trillion between February and July 2021. This is a staggering loss in value which suggests serious worries in the new Chinese bourgeois class regarding the future of the system.

In the summer of 2021, Chinese share prices across all business sectors were highly volatile – a turmoil not seen since 2016. Despite share prices cheapening, there has also been a significant outflow of funds from China. The ostensible reason is a fear among local investors and big Chinese companies that the regime wants to impose stricter state regulation over company activities, especially by larger corporations such as Didi and Alibaba. But share price volatility has spread across the economy to educational, property-management and even food-delivery companies. Now, the major China Evergrande Group real estate firm has entered a serious crisis, spiking fears of yet more shocks. This all suggests deeper forces are at work.

At the same time, the geopolitical situation in Asia has been transformed by the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the pro-Western puppet regime in Kabul. This has left neighbouring China - which shares a short (91 kilometre) but strategic border with northwest Afghanistan – in a pivotal position to influence events in the region. Beijing has been pursuing closer contacts with the Taliban for some time. This is in marked contrast to China’s hostility to the previous Taliban regime in the late 1990s, which Beijing perceived (not without reason) as a base for spreading jihadist and separatist influence among the Muslim Uyghur population of China’s Xinjiang Province. However, Beijing is now desperate to use Afghanistan as a trade corridor linking mineral-rich Central Asia (previously part of the old Soviet Union) to Pakistan, where China has been investing heavily in modern port facilities, as part of its global Belt and Road project (B&R).

We will return below to the genesis of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road extravaganza, on which the regime’s political prestige and economic performance is now heavily mortgaged. The initial point to grasp is that the collapse of American and Nato influence in Kabul has drawn China directly into the Afghan quagmire. If China is to overcome this summer’s structural economic difficulties, it needs to secure fresh investment and trade outlets in order to out compete US capitalism. Which makes the stakes in Afghanistan all that higher.

DISSENT AND CRACKDOWN

As if this was not enough, these developments come side-by-side with Xi’s crackdown on party and business “corruption”.  For example, January saw the execution by firing squad of Lai Xiaomin (58), formerly one of the most senior bank regulators in China, and subsequently the boss of one of the country’s biggest, most aggressive asset management firms. Imagine Joe Biden executing the Chair of the US Federal Reserve and the CEO of BlackRock investments, and you’ll get the scale of the internal Chinese crisis. Lai was accused of taking bribes worth $280 million. Amazingly, in Chinese terms, that is actually small beer. Lai pocketed cash for himself, for his current (bigamous) wife and for various (some say over 100) mistresses. But this was pretty much par for the course. Few senior Chinese business executives or Party bigwigs enjoy a spartan lifestyle.

Lai got a bullet in the back of the head for political disobedience and for being too indiscrete, not for taking bribes per se. As a senior Communist Party member Lai’s real crime was to disobey Communist Party instructions. The regime is desperate to control China’s burgeoning debt crisis which threatens to explode the whole economy. That means restraining excessive bank lending and investment. But Lai’s Huarong Asset Management company had ignored orders and raised billions of dollars on the Hong Kong stock exchange. This he ploughed into new financial sectors, including brokering, insurance, leasing and property development. Naturally so as the quintessential essence of capitalist reproduction is the chain of investment, production, and valorisation. But such excess investment always threatens over-production, a commodity and property bubble, and ultimate economic collapse.

This situation has a backstory. In a bid to counter the global impact of the 2008 financial crisis in America and Europe, the Chinese regime launched a $600 billion stimulus package, which also triggered a surge in borrowing by local government and state-owned firms. The West cheered China on, believing this expansion would provide a market for US and EU produce. But since 2016, Xi has reversed course in a bid to reduce China’s debt mountain. Unfortunately, the economic downturn caused by the pandemic has forced China (and the West) into a further expansion of debt, much of it out of the direct control of the Communist Party leadership. A series of defaults late last year on bonds sold by firms linked to (wayward) local government cliques has raised fears in Beijing that a general financial crisis could engulf China’s state-dominated banking sector. Hence the CCP’s desperation to control the debt machine, to the point of shooting dissident cadres and bankers.

The problem is that this draconian method of fiscal control is not working. The root problem is not personal corruption but the fact that a capitalist economy is based on investment for profit, driven by competition. Having willed into existence a huge capitalist manufacturing and banking system inside China, the Communist Party finds itself unable to turn off the accumulation machine. The pandemic has only made things worse. China’s National Institution for Finance and Development, a think tank linked to the regime, warns that since the lockdowns, regional administrations have attempted to reboot their local economies by expanding off-budget borrowing at super high interest rates. Just how much extra hidden debt this involves is anyone’s guess, but defaults could bring down the banking system.

AN ECONOMIC MODEL IN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

The impact of the pandemic and the crisis in Afghanistan are bringing to the surface all the deep-seated contradictions in China’s economic and political model. Modern China has long since shifted back to a society dominated by capitalism – by Marx’s ‘law of value’ – where the economy is based on commodification, profit seeking and accumulation rather than production for need. In the process, China has moved from being one of the most equal societies on the planet to being one of the most unequal.

Today, the capitalist sector of the Chinese economy has long become a dominant social force. It generates 60% of GDP and 80% of urban employment. Private wealth is also responsible for 70% of investment and 90% of exports. The number of dollar billionaires in China exceeds those within the United States itself. True, the Communist Party still dominates political life. In the process, the cadres of the CCP have enriched themselves through massive graft. This primitive accumulation process includes acquiring personal property through outright theft, bribing party and state officials to acquire contracts, and cooperating with organised crime to steal land for property speculation. As a result, the offspring of senior party cadre – the so-called Red Princes – have become a new bourgeois class.

Where does this leave the ruling CCP? The Chinese regime is essentially what Marxists define as a Bonapartist state. In other words, Xi’s one-party state attempts to maintain a political equilibrium between contending and contradictory class forces. These include a new, aggressive finance capital, represented by the likes of Lai Xiaomin, that resents the constraints imposed by the Party; a sullen, super exploited urban working class that is incensed by the rampant corruption spawned by the Communist Party; an angry peasantry that resents the fact it cannot own and trade land; a growing professional middle class (now actually bigger than the peasantry) that provides much of the base of the Party and support for the regime, but whose rising living standards Xi has to guarantee; and a bloated, nationalist military establishment that has to be placated.

THE MOUNTING CONTRADICTIONS OF CHINESE CAPITALISM

Covid-19 has suddenly exposed the fragility of this Bonapartist, capitalist regime.

First, China’s economic model is in existential crisis. Before 2008, the Chinese economy was driven by exports to the West, financed by huge investments in manufacturing capacity. In classic Marxist terms, this produced an excess of fixed capital relative to surplus value created, leading to a fall in the rate of profit (see chuangcn.org for calculations by Chinese Marxists). At the same time, the virtual elimination of the historic labour reserve has begun to push up the real wage rate. This has resulted in significant industrial restructuring in the last decade. Textile manufacturing has shrunk as has producing low-end electronic goods.  The more agile parts of the new bourgeois class are attempting to shift investment into higher-end electronics which is leading to a clash with US high tech monopolies. The result is that a new era of inter-imperialist rivalry will dominate the post-Covid world economy.

Second, China’s wobbly banking system is leading the country in a dangerous direction internationally. Capitalist China lacks an outlet for the surplus profits it has generated in the past two decades. Chinese finance capital is desperately searching for alternative outlets for investment that earn an adequate rate of return. At first, this was achieved by simply buying up foreign assets, e.g. a chunk of Heathrow airport. But Western political resistance, plus the low returns achieved in a period of American and European austerity, has forced Chinese finance capital along a different direction.

This brings us to the ‘Belt and Road’ (B&R) plan promoted by President Xi – a vast investment in infrastructure and energy projects linking China by land and sea to new markets in Europe, Central Asia and Africa. The principal aim of the B&R project is not political but economic. It is a classical imperialist ploy to absorb surplus capital abroad (and, if possible, create “protected” markets). However, imperialist politics rears its ugly head in that Beijing is using its political muscle to smooth the path for this investment foray. Many of Beijing’s client states now find themselves stuck with debts owed to China that they can ill afford since the pandemic hit.

Third, the source of China’s economic miracle in the post-Mao period – exploiting lots of cheap labour – has dried up. The workforce is aging rapidly while the population is not growing fast enough to supply replacement workers. Births in 2020 totalled 12 million compared to 14.6 million in 2019. This explains the regime’s decision in June to raise the number of children allowed per urban family from two to three, though in effect this move means the end of all population limits. The usual source of fresh labour – shifting agricultural workers to the cities – is no longer an option. Over the past two decades, the peasantry has been reduced from just under 40% of the population to circa a quarter. Pushing it any lower would hit agricultural output. The option of farm mechanisation would entail privatising land. That would create a battle with the remaining peasantry that the regime is unwilling to contemplate as it would delegitimise the basis of the regime. It might also encourage the rise of a neo-Maoist opposition along the lines of the Naxalites in India.

All of these internal class conflicts impinge on Beijing’s capacity to respond to western imperial manoeuvres and provocations. The ‘Pacific Pivot’ which has grown in momentum since the Obama era, has issued the AUSUK pact, part of a new military alliance in China’s putative sphere of influence pulling together US allies including the UK, Australia and Japan.

THE REGIME RESPONDS

Where does this leave President Xi? Steely, ambitious Xi got the top job as party and state leader in 2012, having first secured himself against a challenge from the left in the shape of Bo Xilai, the flamboyant CCP chief in Chongqing. As regional boss in Chongqing, Bo had built a political base among China’s neo-Maoist critics of the country’s rehabilitation of capitalism. Bo and his wife are now serving life sentences for corruption and alleged murder of a Western business associate. Bo’s supporters retaliated by launching their own leftist movement, but this has been banned.

Next, in 2017, Xi had himself declared party and state leader for life. Under the guise of a crackdown on corruption, he launched a purge of potential rivals in the party and in the military. Xi has now accrued more personal power than any Chinese leader since Mao. Xi’s concentration of power is no mere personal quirk. It is the logic of trying to run a state capitalist system where the authority of the CCP is constantly challenged by the growth of a powerful bourgeoisie. Now that the internal economic contradictions of this model are shaking the whole edifice apart, Xi has been forced to act to reinforce his Bonapartist apparatus. That includes the suppression of autonomy in Hong Kong – also designed to get control of the local banking system – and attacks on the national rights of the Muslim Uyghurs. The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan opens the prospect of increased resistance to Beijing’s rule throughout the Muslim populations of Han-dominant China. 

Xi has also made desperate efforts to create a new political base by co-opting the new professional middle classes as a counterweight to both the bourgeoisie and the workers and peasants. The CCP welcomed 2.3 million new members in the first six months of 2021 – roughly as many as were recruited in the whole of 2020. Total membership now stands as circa 95 million, or roughly 7% of China's 1.4 billion population. Most of the new members are from the professional middle class. This is a gamble for Xi. The danger is that this 1) cuts the CCP off from its traditional working class and peasant supporters while 2) doing nothing to actually limit the rise of pro-bourgeois networks among the business class. The new recruits might give the CCP apparatus better intelligence regarding these networks but equally the new bourgeois elements are in a better position inside the party to destabilise Xi’s rule.

Xi has also attempted to defuse disgruntlement in the new professional classes and among unemployed graduates by stoking up nationalist sentiments against Taiwan and India. A West preoccupied with Covid has failed to notice serious border clashes with India in June last year and in July this year. After purging the Peoples’ Liberation Army high command in 2017, Xi has appointed his own proteges to run the military.  They are happily flexing their muscles (and new equipment) against the Indians. This brinkmanship could go horribly wrong.

CHINA, AFGHANISTAN AND THE ASIAN THEATRE

However, Xi’s central project to divert popular and bourgeois opposition to the regime, and to stave off the crisis of lack of investment opportunities, falling profits and likely debt implosion, is the Belt and Road fantasy. Some estimates put spending on the B&R project at up to US$8 trillion. If true, that would equal one half of one’s year’s GDP, or twice Germany’s GDP. That is a colossal bet on the future. Failure could bring down the regime.

There are already signs that the B&R project is running into multiple difficulties. Recipient countries for B&R investments now face huge debts to Chinese state and client agencies, which (post covid) they can’t pay back. Plus China’s intention to use new, foreign port facilities built with B&R cash as naval bases is provoking resistance not only from the West and its allies, but from local populations. Ultimately, Chinese imperialism is proving no more acceptable than its US counterpart. These tensions are likely to be exacerbated following the crisis in Afghanistan.

The political stability of Afghanistan is key to protecting more than US$62 billion worth of B&R projects in neighbouring Pakistan. These port and road facilities provide a strategic Indian Ocean terminal linking China’s sensitive Xinjiang province and the oil-rich, former Soviet states of Central Asia, to the outside world – particularly to the Gulf, Middle East and Suez Canal. Afghanistan provides the missing piece of the transport jigsaw, linking Pakistan to China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Even before the fall of the puppet regime of Ashraf Ghani, Beijing was building links to the Taliban to ensure the road corridor through to Pakistan remained safe. However, with the US withdrawal, Beijing believes it can fill the political vacuum, turning Afghanistan into a client state. The Chinese state media has gloated over the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The official Xinhua News Agency declared that the Taliban victory was the "death knell for declining US hegemony" in the region. It crowed: "The sound of roaring planes and the hastily retreating crowds mirrored the last twilight of the empire."

However, Beijing may yet discover that its own brand of Great Han imperialism is no more acceptable to the locals than the American brand. In Pakistan, Islamist and nationalist elements have already responded violently to Chinese exploitation. In the latest incident, in August 2021, a suicide bomber killed two children and injured an engineer, in an attack on Chinese nationals driving along the main expressway to the big B&R port at Gwadar. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which accuses China of exploiting Balochistan’s mineral resources. The BLA has carried out other attacks on Chinese nationals working on B&R construction projects, as well as against the Chinese consulate in Karachi.

The Balochi people have never accepted the forcible incorporation of their nation into Pakistan, after independence from the British in 1947. There have been repeated uprisings in Balochistan ever since. This separatist insurrection has now extended to opposing Chinese imperialism. The BLA has launched frequent attacks using suicide bombers on B&R projects, which are being built by tens of thousands of imported Chinese workers. In May 2017, the BLA killed 10 Chinese labourers in an attack on a pipeline. Last year, a BLS suicide bomber attacked a bus ferrying Chinese mining workers.

For Beijing, the nightmare scenario is for Pakistan-based, anti-Chinese Islamist movements to link up with China’s own Uyghur separatists, in wholesale sabotage of the B&R project. The key here is the co-operation of the Taliban. Even before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Wang Yi, the globe-hopping Chinese foreign minister, was pressing the Taliban to repudiate the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which uses bases in Afghanistan to mount terrorist raids in Xinjiang in support of Uyghur independence. Last year, the Trump administration provocatively removed ETIM from its list of proscribed terrorist organisations, to put pressure on Beijing. The Biden administration has shown no sign of reversing this move.

Meanwhile, Chinese interference in Pakistan is having serious repercussions at a state level. For one thing, Pakistan has surrendered territorial control over the port at Gwadar to a Chinese-backed multinational corporation, which involves ceding a 40-year lease. In addition, China is providing cash to renovate Pakistan’s entire transport road and rail networks, plus energy infrastructure (mostly coal) - the so-called China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The money is being provided by Beijing, channelled through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and by way of direct government-to-government soft loans. 

In other words, the Pakistani government of Imran Khan (a Pashtun like the main Taliban leaders) is in hock to Beijing. But Beijing wants a return on its investment in Pakistan. For instance, China investors will receive a 91% share of any revenues from the Gwadar port plus 85% of revenues generated by the associated free trade zone. This leaves China having its economic cake and eating it, and Pakistan in deep debt. Chinese loans represent around 6% of Pakistan’s GDP.

Beijing is anxious to protect its investments in Pakistan – militarily as well as financially. Pakistan has created a Special Security Division comprising some 15,000 troops, to provide security for CPEC construction operations. However, there are rumours of Peoples’ Liberation Army officers and Chinese security officials also being involved. In addition, there are indications that the PLA Navy wants to use Gwadar as an Indian Ocean naval base – China already has a military naval facility at Djibouti. The militarisation of China’s Near East sphere of influence, in the wake of American withdrawal from Afghanistan, is now a racing certainty. But that merely draws Beijing into the Great Game in a way that Xi’s capitalist regime may live to regret – as did Moscow after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

A later article will discuss in more detail the class nature of contemporary China

Thursday 23rd September, 6pm

Speakers:

Tariq Ali, activist, broadcaster, and author of numerous books, including Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (Verso, 2003), Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq (Verso, 2004), Conversations with Edward Said (Seagull, 2005), The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power (Simon and Schuster, 2015)

Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Verso, 2021)

Arun Kundanani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2015) and former editor of the journal Race and Class.

Anand Gopal, journalist and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes

State of the Unions: Strategies, Tactics and Rebuilding Workers Solidarity Globally

Saturday 16th October, 2:30pm UK time

Speakers:

Taslima Akhter, President of the Bangladeshi Garment Workers Union

Mikyung Ryu, International Director, Korean Trade Union Federation (KCTU)

Sarah Jaffe, Jacobin

Marxism, Ecology and the Climate Crisis

Tuesday 26th October, 6pm

Speaker:

John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and author of numerous books including Marx's Ecology (2000), Ecology Against Capitalism (2002), The Ecological Revolution (2009) Marx and the Earth (2016) and The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020).

After Neoliberalism? Covid, Crisis and the Future of Capitalism

Thursday 4th November, 6pm

Speaker:

David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010), and The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (2020).

Is the (Left) Populist Moment Over?

Thursday 18th November, 6pm

Speakers:

Yanis Stavrakakis, Professor of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and founder of the Populismus Observatory.

Catarina Principe, Associate Editor, Jacobin and editor of Europe in Revolt

Daniel Chavez, Transnational Institute and author of The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn (2008)

Nation, Class and Marxism: Understanding Neil Davidson’s Engagement with Nationalism

Thursday 9th December, 6pm

Speaker:

Jamie Allinson, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh, editor of Salvage, and long-time friend of Neil Davidson.

I am absolutely certain that the Scottish Government will fulfil at least one of its most audacious sounding commitments in this parliament – the so called ‘minimum income guarantee’.

Announcing the policy in tremulous tones (“I can announce today”) before the May Scottish Elections, Nicola Sturgeon explained that she wants to “identify the extent to which” she can improve wages and benefits so that everyone is on a “minimum” level.

This policy is otherwise known as ‘income’. The government will continue to pay wages to public employees, and benefits to those who are entitled (don’t get too excited, the money comes from our taxes). The private sector likewise will continue in the now centuries-old wage relation, paying money in exchange for labour.

In other words, this policy is what we already have. More impressive than the transmutation of lead into gold, Sturgeon will in fact transmute nothing into nothing. If some in party and government circles didn’t allow themselves a giggle at this, they ought to cheer up.

This is what happens 14 years into rule by a party of aggressively managerial technocrats. There can be few countries on earth where press conferences are held to announce nothing with words like ‘universal’ and ‘guarantee’ chucked-in for flavour, and no one even rolls an eye.

The creation of Scotland’s new Green/SNP administration felt similarly unreal. In an indifferent blur a coalition agreement was agreed, voted-through by party memberships and executives, and launched.

Had this taken place after the 2016 Scottish elections (which it easily could have given how similar the outcomes were) the celebrations would have been prolonged and hysterical. But in 2021 few took notice outside the thin social layer who surround official political life; many of them essentially outgrowths of the state in the media, higher education, the third sector and so on.

Both parties excel in ‘progressive’ elevator muzak. Scottish Government policy is a vast graveyard of schemes consulted on or piloted that went nowhere. Every one had a lofty sounding end.

How many times has the government pledged to eliminate poverty? We are nowhere closer that goal. Sturgeon herself once strutted the boards of a Ted Talk (what else) to pronounce on the need to move beyond GDP-type measures of economic growth to a ‘wellbeing economy’. That concept was expressly ruled-out in the coalition agreement.

Instead we have a ‘circular economy’; another buzz-idea which is endlessly elastic and can be approached forever in tiny increments (taking the necessary time to consult with all the stakeholders, many of them directly funded by the government itself in a circular economy of finger food and free plonk). I’ve heard about this circular economy on several distinct occasions – all of them party conferences. I’ve seen Green and Tory politicians alike nod agreeably at this weightless notion in the sure knowledge that it will never encroach on interests nor produce measurable results, lest they be judged by them.

As head of our newly circular economy, Green co-leader Lorna Slater will be rounding-off the hard edges and provisioning the free lunches. I doubt anyone will notice. Patrick Harvie will be minister for ‘zero-carbon buildings, active travel and tenants’ rights’. The first two could presumably be covered by tinkering with planning rules and paving some more cycle lanes. The tenants’ rights brief opens more opportunities, but the coalition agreement on introducing national rent controls already betrays a whiff of the Holyrood swamp.

Both SNP and the Greens agreed to introduce the controls by the end of 2025. This of course means little or nothing to renters right here in 2021, some of whom are facing evictions with the lifting of special pandemic measures. But just as importantly, both parties understand that this timing makes the policy precarious. The government often pushes potentially life-improving legislation towards the end of the parliamentary session in the hopes that time will run down and it can be dragged to next five years. At the very least, the threat of this scenario can add weight to the lobby for watering-down the regulation.

We shouldn’t be fooled by claims that rent controls (or anything else) must involve years of consultation. Where real intent exists, so can haste. The Greens understood what the 2025 date meant, and they accepted this as a ‘give’ during negotiations.

There's no denying that the putative basis for unity between the SNP and Greens is independence. To the extent that this coalition represents 'popular will' it is on that platform, and this is proven in the fact that independence tops the list of the coalition policies. One peculiarity of this coalition is that it is completely unnecessary. It wasn’t founded as a way to ward-off a threat from the right. The Greens have cosigned every SNP cuts budget for the last five years running (making a nonsense of discussions about how to resist Green assimilation into the swamp).

Yet the two parties were elected to this opportunity by an avowed commitment to independence, and have now formed a government. This speaks to a fundamental reality – the entire edifice of modern Scottish politics rests on the national question. Without it, there would be no obvious source for popular legitimacy.

Scotland is not at all unlike other European democracies: hollowed out of democratic content, prey to wonks and lobbyists who represent embedded interests, and generally repulsive to an alienated population. Indeed, if anything Scotland is the very archetype.

This is why independence still matters, even if, like me, you assume it isn’t on the agenda in the present parliament. Everything the government does (like calling for Nato troops to stay in Afghanistan even after they have been roundly defeated), doesn’t do (like create a National Care Service), or does do but pointlessly (like create a circular economy and a ‘minimum income guarantee’) is justified by the spectre of independence. Should they refuse to advance that cause in a meaningful way, none of the other nonsense will be taken into account.

A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths.

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.[1]

A military victory

This is a military and political victory for the Taliban. It is a military victory because the Taliban have won the war. For at least two years the Afghan government forces – the national army and the police – have been losing more people dead and wounded each month than they are recruiting. So those forces are shrinking.

Over the last ten years the Taliban have been taking control of more and more villages and some towns. In the last twelve days they have taken all the cities.

This was not a lightning advance through the cities and then on to Kabul. The people who took each city had long been in the vicinity, in the villages, waiting for the moment. Crucially, across the north the Taliban had been steadily recruiting Tajiks, Uzbeks and others.

This is also a political victory for the Taliban. No guerilla insurgency on earth can win such victories without popular support.

But perhaps support is not the right word. It is more that Afghans have had to choose sides. And more of the Afghan people have chosen to side with the Taliban than have chosen the American occupiers. Not all of them, just more of them.

More Afghans have also chosen to side with the Taliban than with the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani. Again, not all of them, but more than support Ghani. And more Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban than with the old warlords. The defeat of Dostum in Sheberghan and Ismail Khan in Herat is stunning evidence of that.

The Taliban of 2001 were overwhelmingly Pushtuns, and their politics was Pushtun chauvinist. In 2021 Taliban fighters of many ethnicities have taken power in Uzbek and Tajik dominated areas.

The important exception is the Hazara dominated areas in the central mountains. We come back to this exception.

Of course, not all Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban. This is a war against foreign invaders, but it is also a civil war. Many have fought for the Americans, the government or the warlords. Many more have made compromises with both sides to survive. And many others were not sure which side to take and are waiting with different mixtures of fear and hope to see what will happen.

Because this is a military defeat for American power, calls for Biden to do this or that are simply silly. If American troops had remained in Afghanistan, they would have had to surrender or die. This would be a even worse humiliation for American power than the current debacle. Biden, like Trump before him, was out of options.

Why so many Afghans chose the Taliban

The fact that more people have chosen the Taliban does not mean that most Afghans necessarily support the Taliban. It means that given the limited choices available, that is the choice they have made. Why?

The short answer is that the Taliban are the only important political organization fighting the American occupation, and most Afghans have come to hate that occupation.

It was not always thus. The US first sent bomber planes and a few troops to Afghanistan a month after 9/11. The US was supported by the forces of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of non-Pushtun warlords in the north of the country. But the soldiers and leaders of the Alliance were not actually prepared to fight alongside the Americans. Given the long history of Afghan resistance to foreign invasion, most recently to the Russian occupation from 1980 to 1987, that would just be too shameful.

On the other side, though, almost no one was prepared to fight to defend the Taliban government then in power. The troops of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban faced each other in a phony war. Then the US, the British and their foreign allies began to bomb.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services negotiated an end to the stalemate. The United States would be allowed to take power in Kabul and install a president of their choice. In return, the Taliban leaders and rank and file would be allowed to go home to their villages or into exile across the border in Pakistan.

This settlement was not widely publicized in the US and Europe at the time, for obvious reasons, but we reported on it, and it was widely understood in Afghanistan.

For best evidence for this negotiated settlement is what happened next. For two years there was no resistance to the American occupation. None, in any village. Many thousands of former Taliban remained in those villages.

This is an extraordinary fact. Think of the contrast with Iraq, where resistance was widespread from Day One of the occupation in 2003. Or think of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, met with the same wall of anger.

The reason was not simply that the Taliban were not fighting. It was that ordinary people, even in the Taliban heartland in the south, dared to hope that the American occupation would bring Afghanistan peace and develop the economy to end the terrible poverty.

Peace was crucial. By 2001 Afghans had been trapped in war for twenty-three years, first a civil war between communists and Islamists, then a war between Islamists and Soviet invaders, then a war between Islamist warlords, and then a war in the north of the country between Islamist warlords and the Taliban.

Twenty-three years of war meant death, maiming, exile and refugee camps, poverty, so many kinds of grief, and endless fear and anxiety. Perhaps the best book about what that felt like is Klaits and Gulmanadova Klaits, Love and War in Afghanistan (2005). People were desperate for peace. By 2001 even Taliban supporters felt a bad peace was better than a good war.

Also, the United States was fabulously rich. Afghans believed the occupation could lead to development that would rescue them from poverty.

Afghans waited. The US delivered war, not peace

The US and UK military occupied bases throughout the villages and small towns of the Taliban heartland, the mainly Pushtun areas of the south and east. These units were never told of the informal settlement negotiated between the Americans and the Taliban. They could not be told, because that would shame the government of President Bush. So the US units saw it as their mission to root out the remaining “bad guys”, who were obviously still there.

Night raids crashed through doors, humiliating and terrifying families, taking men away to be tortured for info about the other bad guys. It was here, and in black sites all over the world, that the American military and intelligence developed the new styles of torture that the world would briefly glimpse from Abu Ghraib, the American prison in Iraq.

Some of the men detained were Taliban who had not been fighting. Some were just people betrayed to the Americans by local enemies who coveted their land or held a grudge.

The American soldier Johnny Rico’s memoir Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green provides a useful account of what then happened next. Outraged relatives and villagers took a few potshots at the Americans in the dark. The American military kicked in more doors and tortured more men. The villagers took more potshots. The Americans called in airstrikes and their bombs killed family after family.

War returned across the south and east of the country.  

Inequality and corruption spiraled

Afghans had hoped for development that could lift both the rich and the poor. It seemed like such an obvious, and such an easy thing to do. But they did not understand American policy abroad. And they did not understand the deep dedication of the 1% in the United States to spiraling inequality in their own country.

So American money poured into Afghanistan. But it went the people in the new government headed by Hamid Karzai. It went to the people working with the Americans and the occupying troops of other nations. And it went to the warlords and their entourages who were deeply involved in the international opium and heroin trade facilitated by the CIA and the Pakistani military. It went to the people lucky enough to own luxury, well-defended homes in Kabul they could rent out to expatriate staff. It went to the men and women who worked in foreign-funded NGOs.

Of course people in these groups all overlapped.

Afghans had long been used to corruption. They both expected it and hated it. But this time the scale was unprecedented. And in the eyes of the poor and middle income people, all the obscene new wealth, no matter how garnered, seemed to be corruption.

Over the last decade the Taliban have offered two things across the country. The first is that they are not corrupt, as they were also not corrupt in office before 2001. They are the only political force in the country this has ever been true of.

Critically, the Taliban have run an honest judicial system in the rural areas they have controlled. Their reputation is so high that many people involved in civil lawsuits in the cities have agreed that both parties will go to Taliban judges in the countryside. This allows them swift, cheap and fair justice without massive bribes. Because the justice was fair, both parties can live with it.

For people in Taliban-controlled areas, fair justice was also a protection against inequality. When the rich can bribe the judges, they can do anything they want to the poor. Land was the crucial thing. Rich and powerful men, warlords and government officials could seize or steal or cheat their way into control of the land of small farmers, and oppress the even poorer sharecroppers. But Taliban judges, everyone understood, were willing to rule for the poor.

Hatred of corruption, of inequality, and of the occupation merged together.

20 Years On

2001, when the Taliban fell to the Americans after 9/11, is twenty years ago now. Enormous changes happen to political mass movements over twenty years of war and crisis. The Taliban have learned and changed. How could it be otherwise. Many Afghans, and many foreign experts, have commented on this. Giustozzi has used the useful phrase neo-Taliban.[2]

This change, as publicly presented, has several aspects. The Taliban have realized that Pushtun chauvinism was a great weakness. They now emphasize that they are Muslims, brothers to all other Muslims, and that they want and have the support of Muslims of many ethnic groups.

But there has been a bitter split in Taliban forces over the last few years. A minority of Taliban fighters and supporters have allied themselves with Islamic State. The difference is that Islamic State launch terror attacks on Shias, Sikhs and Christians. The Taliban in Pakistan do the same, and so do the small Haqqani network sponsored by Pakistani intelligence. But the Taliban majority have been reliable in condemning all such attacks.

We return to this division later, as it has implications for what will happen next.

The new Taliban have also emphasized their concerns for the rights of women. They say they welcome music, and videos, and have moderated the fiercest and most puritanical sides of their former rule. And they are now saying over and over again that they want to rule in peace, without revenge on the people of the old order.

How much of this is propaganda, and how much is truth, is hard to tell. Moreover, what happens next is deeply dependent on what happens to the economy, and on the actions of foreign powers. Of that, more later. Our point here is that Afghans have reasons for choosing the Taliban over the Americans, the warlords and Ashraf Ghani’s government.

What About Rescuing Afghan Women?

Many readers will now be feeling, insistently, but what about Afghan women? The answer is not simple.

We have to start by going back to the 1970s. Around the world, particular systems of gendered inequality are entangled with a particular system of class inequality. Afghanistan was no different.

Nancy did anthropological fieldwork with Pushtun women and men in the north of the country in the early 1970s. They lived by farming and herding animals. Nancy’s subsequent book, Bartered Brides: Politics and Marriage in a Tribal Society, explains the connections between class, gender and ethnic divisions at that time. And if you want to know what those women themselves thought about their lives, troubles and joys, Nancy and her former partner Richard Tapper have recently published Afghan Village Voices, a translation of many of the tapes that women and men made for them in the field.

That reality was complex, bitter, oppressive and full of love. In that deep sense, it was no different from the complexities of sexism and class in the United States. But the tragedy of the next half century would change much of that. That long suffering produced the particular sexism of the Taliban, which is not an automatic product of Afghan tradition.

The history of this new turn starts in 1978. Then civil war began between the communist government and the Islamist mujahedin resistance. The Islamists were winning, so the Soviet Union invaded late in 1979 to back up the Communist government. Seven years of brutal war between the Soviets and the mujahedin followed. In 1987 the Soviet troops left, defeated.

When we lived in Afghanistan, in the early 1970s, the communists were among the best people. They were driven by three passions. They wanted to develop the country. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and share out the land. And they wanted equality for women.

But in 1978 the communists had taken power in a military coup, led by progressive officers. They had not won the political support of the majority of villagers, in an overwhelming rural country. The result was that the only ways they could deal with the rural Islamist resistance were arrest, torture and bombing. The more the communist led army did such cruelties, the more the revolt grew.

Then the Soviet Union invaded to prop up the communists. Their main weapon was bombing from the air, and large parts of the country became free fire zones. Between half a million and a million Afghans were killed. At least another million were maimed for life. Between six and eight million were driven into exile in Iran and Pakistan, and millions more became internal refugees. All this in a country of only twenty-five million people.

When they came to power, the first thing the communists tried to do were land reform and legislation for the rights of women. When the Russians invaded, the majority of communists sided with them. Many of those communists were women. The result was to smear the name of feminism with support for torture and massacre.

Imagine that the United States was invaded by a foreign power who killed between twelve million and twenty-four million Americans, tortured people in every town, and drove 100 million Americans into exile. Imagine also that almost all feminists in the United States supported the invaders. After that experience, how do you think most Americans would feel about a second invasion by another foreign power, or about feminism?

How do you think most Afghan women feel about another invasion, this time by the Americans, justified by the need to rescue Afghan women? Remember, those statistics about the dead, the maimed and the refugees under Soviet occupation were not abstract numbers. They were living women, and their sons and daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

So when the Soviet Union left, defeated, most people breathed a sigh of relief. But then the local leaders of the mujahedin resistance to the communists and the invaders became local warlords and fought each other for the spoils of victory. The majority of Afghans had supported the mujahedin, but now they were disgusted by the greed, the corruption and the endless useless war.

The Class and Refugee Background of the Taliban

In the autumn of 1994, the Taliban had arrived in Kandahar, a mostly Pashtun city and the largest in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban were like nothing before in Afghan history. They were products of two quintessentially twentieth century innovations, aerial bombing and the refugee camps in Pakistan. They belonged to a different social class from the elites who had governed Afghanistan.

The Communists had been the sons and daughters of the urban middle classes and the middle level farmers in the countryside with enough land to call their own. They had been led by people who attended the country’s sole university in Kabul. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and modernize the country.

The Islamists who fought the Communists had been men of similar class backgrounds, and mostly former students at the same university. They too wanted to modernize the country, but in a different way. And they looked to the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Alzhar University in Cairo.

The word Taliban means students in an Islamic school, not a state school or a university. The fighters of the Taliban who entered Kandahar in 1994 were young men who had studied in the free Islamic schools in the refugee camps in Pakistan. They had been children with nothing.

The leaders of the Taliban were village mullahs from Afghanistan. They did not have the elite connections of many of the imams of city mosques. Village mullahs could read, and they were held in some respect by other villagers. But their social status was well below that of a landlord, or a high school graduate in a government office.

The Taliban were led by a committee of twelve men. All twelve had lost a hand, a foot or an eye to Soviet bombs in the war. The Taliban were, among other things, the party of poor and middling Pushtun village men. [3]

Twenty years of war had left Kandahar lawless and at the mercy of warring militias. The turning point came when the Taliban went after a local commander who had raped a boy and two (possibly three) women. The Taliban caught and hung him. What made their intervention striking was not just their determination to put an end to the murderous infighting and restore people’s dignity and safety, but their disgust at the hypocrisy of the other Islamists.

From the first the Taliban were funded by the Saudis, the Americans and the Pakistani military. Washington wanted a peaceful country that could house oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia. The Taliban stood out because they brooked no exceptions to the injunctions they sought to impose, and the severity with which they enforced the rules.

Many Afghans were grateful for the return of order and a modicum of security, but the Taliban were sectarian and unable to control the country, and, in 1996, the Americans withdrew their support. When they did so, they unleashed a new, and deadly, version of Islamophobia against the Taliban.

Almost overnight, Afghan women were deemed helpless and oppressed, while Afghan men – aka the Taliban – were execrated as fanatical savages, paedophiles and sadistic patriarchs, hardly people at all.

For four years before 9/11 the Taliban had been targeted by the Americans, while feminists and others clamored for the protection of Afghan women. By the time the American bombing started, everyone was meant to understand that the Afghan women needed help. What could possibly go wrong?

9/11 and the American War

The bombing began on October 7th. Within days, the Taliban had been forced into hiding – or were literally castrated – as a photograph on the front page of the Daily Mail crowed. The published images of the war were truly shocking in the violence and sadism they portrayed. Many people in Europe were appalled by the scale of the bombing and the utter carelessness of Afghan lives.[4]

Yet in the United States that autumn, the mixture of vengeance and patriotism meant dissenting voices were rare and mostly inaudible. Ask yourself, as Saba Mahmood did at the time, ‘Why were conditions of war, (migration, militarization) and starvation (under the mujahideen) considered to be less injurious to women than the lack of education, employment and most notably, in the media campaign, western dress styles (under the Taliban)?’ [5]

Then ask again even more fiercely – how could you possibly ‘save Afghan women’ by bombing a civilian population that included, along with the women themselves, their children, their husbands, fathers and brothers? It should have been the question that ended the argument, but it was not.

The most egregious expression of feminist Islamophobia came little over a month into the war. A vastly unequal war of revenge doesn’t look very good in the eyes of the world, so better to be doing something that looks virtuous. In anticipation of the American Thanksgiving holiday, on the 17th of November 2001, Laura Bush, the President’s wife, loudly lamented the plight of the veiled Afghan women. Cherie Blair, the British Prime Minister’s wife echoed her sentiments a few days later. These wealthy war-mongers’ wives were using the full weight of the Orientalist paradigm to blame the victims and justify a war against some of the poorest people on earth. And ‘Saving Afghan Women’ became the persistent cry of many liberal feminists to justify the American war.[6]

With the election of Obama in 2008, the chorus of Islamophobia became hegemonic among American liberals. That year the American anti-war alliance effectively dissolved itself to aid Obama’s campaign. Democrats and those feminists who supported Obama’s war hawk Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, could not accept the truth that Afghanistan and Iraq were both wars for oil.[7]

They had only one justification for the endless wars of oil – the sufferings of Afghan women. The feminist spin was a clever ploy. It precluded comparisons between the undoubted sexist rule of the Taliban and sexisms in the United States. Far more shocking, the feminist spin domesticated and effectively displaced the ugly truths about a grossly unequal war. And it separated those notional ‘women to be saved’ from the tens of thousands of actual Afghan women, and men and children killed, wounded, orphaned or made homeless and hungry by the American bombs.

Many of our friends and family members in America are feminists who believed with decent hearts much of this propaganda. But they were being asked to support was a web of lies, a perversion of feminism. It was the feminism of the invader and the corrupt governing elite. It was the feminism of the torturers and the drones.

We believe another feminism is possible.

But it remains true that the Taliban are deeply sexist. Sexism has won a victory in Afghanistan. But it did not have to be that way.

The communists who sided with the cruelties of the Soviet invaders had discredited feminism in Afghanistan for at least a generation. But then the United States invaded, and a new generation of Afghan women professionals sided with the new invaders to try to win rights for women. Their dream too has ended in collaboration, shame and blood. Some were careerists, of course, mouthing platitudes in exchange for funding. But many others were motivated by an honest and selfless dream. Their failure is tragic.

Stereotypes and Confusions

Outside Afghanistan, there is a great deal of confusion about stereotypes of the Taliban elaborated over the last twenty-five years. But think carefully when you hear the stereotypes that they are feudal, brutal and primitive. These are people with laptops, who have been negotiating with the Americans in Qatar for the last fourteen years.

The Taliban are not the product of medieval times. They are the product of some of the worst times of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. If they look backward in some ways to an imagined better time, that is not surprising. But they have been moulded by life under aerial bombardment, refugee camps, communism, the War of Terror, enhanced interrogation, climate change, internet politics and the spiralling inequality of neoliberalism. They live, like everyone else, now.

Their roots in a tribal society can also be confusing. But as Richard Tapper has argued, tribes are not atavistic institutions. They are the way that peasants in this part of the world organise their entanglement with the state. And the history of Afghanistan has never been simply a matter of competing ethnic groups, but rather of complex alliances across groups and divisions within groups.[8]

There is a set of prejudices on the left which incline some people to ask how the Taliban could be on the side of the poor and anti-imperialist if they are not “progressive”. Leave aside for the moment that the word progressive means little. Of course the Taliban are hostile to socialism and communism. They themselves, or their parents or grandparents, were killed and tortured by socialists and communists. Moreover, any movement that has fought a twenty-year guerrilla war and defeated a great empire is anti-imperialist, or words have no meaning.

Reality is what it is. The Taliban are a movement of poor peasants, against an imperial occupation, deeply misogynist, supported by many women, sometimes racist and sectarian, and sometimes not. That’s a bundle of contradictions produced by history.

Another source of confusion is the class politics of the Taliban. How can they be on the side of the poor, as they obviously are, and yet so bitterly opposed to socialism? The answer is that the experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class. But it did not change the reality of class. No one has ever built a mass movement among poor peasants that took power without being seen as on the side of the poor.

The Taliban talk not in the language of class, but in the language of justice and corruption. Those words describe the same side.

None of this means that the Taliban will necessarily rule in the interests of the poor. We have seen enough peasant revolts come to power in the last century and more, only to become governments by urban elites. And none of this should distract from the truth that the Taliban intend to be dictators, not democrats.

A Historic Change in America

The fall of Kabul marks a decisive defeat for American power around the world. But it also marks, or makes clear, a deep turning away from the American empire among Americans.

One piece of evidence is the opinion polls. In 2001, right after 9/11, between 85% and 90% of Americans approved of the invasion of Afghanistan. The numbers have been dropping steadily. Last month, 62% of Americans approved of Biden’s plan for total withdrawal, and 29% were opposed.

This rejection of the war is common on both the right and the left. The working class base of the Republican Party and Trump are against foreign wars. Many soldiers and military families come from the rural areas and the south where Trump is strong. They are against any more wars, for it is they and those they loved who served, died and were wounded.

Right wing patriotism in America now is pro-military, but that means pro-soldier, not pro-war. When they say ‘Make America Great Again’, they mean that America is not great now for Americans, not that the US should be more engaged in the world.

Among Democrats, too, the working class base is against the wars.

There are people who support further military intervention. They are the Obama democrats, the Romney republicans, the generals, many liberal and conservative professionals, and almost everyone in the Washington elite. But the American people as a whole, and especially the working class, black, brown and white, have turned against the American Empire.

After the fall of Saigon, the American government was unable to launch major military interventions for the next fifteen years. It may well be longer after the fall of Kabul.

The International Consequences

Since 1918, 103 years ago, the United States has been the most powerful nation in the world. There have been competing powers – first Germany and Japan, then the Soviet Union and now China. But the US has been dominant. That ‘American Century’ is now coming to an end.

The long-term reason is the economic rise of China and the relative economic decline of the United States. But the covid pandemic and the Afghan defeat make the last two years a turning point.

The covid pandemic has revealed the institutional incompetence of the ruling class, and the government, of the United States. The system has failed to protect the people. This chaotic and shameful failure is obvious to people around the world.

Then there’s Afghanistan. If you judge by expenditure and hardware the United States is overwhelmingly the dominant military power globally. That power has been defeated by poor people in sandals in a small country who have nothing but endurance and courage.

The Taliban victory will also give heart to Islamists of many different sorts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Mali. But it will be true more widely than that.

Both the covid failure and the Afghan defeat will reduce the soft power of the US. But Afghanistan is also a defeat for hard power. The strength of the informal empire of the United States has relied for a century on three different pillars. One is being the largest economy in the world, and domination of the global financial system. The second is a reputation in many quarters for democracy, competence and cultural leadership. The third was that if soft power failed, the United States would invade to support dictatorships and punish its enemies.

That military power is gone now. No government will believe that the US can rescue them from a foreign invader, or from their own people. Drone killings will continue and cause great suffering. But nowhere will drones on their own be militarily decisive.

This is the beginning of the end of the American century.

What Happens Now?

No one knows what will happen in Afghanistan in the next few years. But we can identify some of the pressures.

First, and most hopeful, is the deep longing for peace in the hearts of Afghans. They have now lived through forty-three years of war. Think how only five or ten years of civil war and invasion have scarred so many countries. Now think of forty-three years.

Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar, the three most important cities, have all fallen without any violence. This is because the Taliban, as they keep saying, want a country at peace, and they do not want revenge. But it is also because the people who do not support, indeed those who hate the Taliban, also chose not to fight.

The Taliban leaders are clearly aware they must deliver peace.

For that it is also essential that the Taliban continue to deliver fair justice. Their record is good. But the temptations and pressures of government have corrupted many social movements in many countries before them.

Economic collapse is also quite possible. Afghanistan is a poor and arid country, where less than 5% of the land can be farmed. In the last twenty years the cities have swelled immensely. That growth has been dependent on money flowing from the occupation, and to a lesser extent money from growing opium. Without very substantial foreign aid from somewhere, economic collapse will threaten.

Because the Taliban know this, they have been explicitly offering the United States a deal. The Americans will give aid, and in return the Taliban will not provide a home for terrorists who could launch attacks like 9/11. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have accepted this deal. But it is not at all clear that the US will keep that promise.

Indeed, something worse is entirely possible. Previous US administrations have punished Iraq, Iran, Cuba and Vietnam for their defiance with long running and destructive economic sanctions. There will be many voices raised in the US for such sanctions, to starve Afghan children in the name of human rights.

Then there is the threat of international meddling, of different powers supporting different political or ethnic forces inside Afghanistan. The United States, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia and Uzbekistan will all be tempted. It has happened before, and in a situation of economic collapse it could provoke proxy wars.

For the moment, though, the governments of Iran, Russia and Pakistan clearly want peace in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have also promised not to rule with cruelty. That is easier said than done. Confronted with families who have amassed great fortunes through corruption and crime, what do you think the poor soldiers from the villages will want to do?

And then there is climate. In 1971 a drought and famine across the north and center devastated flocks, crops and lives. It was the first sign of the effects of climate change on the region, which has brought further droughts over the last fifty years. Over the medium and long term, farming and herding will become more precarious.[9]

All these dangers are real. But the often insightful security expert Antonio Giustozzi is in touch with the thinking among both the Taliban and foreign governments and the Taliban. His article in The Guardian on August 16 was hopeful. He ended it:

“Since most of the neighbouring countries want stability in Afghanistan, at least for the time being any fissures in the new coalition government are unlikely to be exploited by external actors to create rifts. Similarly, the 2021 losers will struggle to find anybody willing or able to support them in starting some kind of resistance. As long as the new coalition government includes key allies of its neighbours, this is the beginning of a new phase in the history of Afghanistan.”[10]

What Can You Do? Welcome Refugees

Many people in the West now are asking, “What can we do to help Afghan women?” Sometimes this question assumes that most Afghan women oppose the Taliban, and most Afghan men support them. This is nonsense. It is almost impossible to imagine the kind of society in which that would be true.

But there is a narrower question here. Specifically, how can they help Afghan feminists?

This is a valid and decent question. The answer is to organize to buy them airplane tickets and give them refuge in Europe and North America.

But it is not just feminists who will need asylum. Tens of thousands of people who worked for the occupation are desperate for asylum, with their families. So are larger numbers of people who worked for the Afghan government.

Some of these people are admirable, some are corrupt monsters, many lie in between, and many are just children. But there is a moral imperative here. The United States and the NATO countries have created immense suffering for twenty years. The least, the very least, they should do it rescue the people whose lives they have wrecked.

There is another moral issue here too. What many Afghans have learned in the last forty years has also been clear in the last decade of the torment of Syria. It is all too easy to understand the accidents of background and personal history which lead people to do the things they do. Humility compels us to look at the young communist woman, the educated feminist working for an NGO, the suicide bomber, the American marine, the village mullah, the Taliban fighter, the bereaved mother of a child killed by American bombs, the Sikh money changer, the policeman, the poor farmer growing opium, and to say, there but for the grace of God go I.

The failure of the American and British governments to rescue the people who worked for them has been both shameful and revealing. It is not really a failure, but a choice. Racism against immigration has weighed more strongly with Johnson and Biden than the debts of humanity.

Campaigns to welcome Afghans are still possible. Of course such a strong moral argument will come up against racism and Islamophobia at every turn. But in the last week the governments of Germany and Netherlands have both suspended any deportations of Afghans.

Every politician, anywhere, who speaks in support of Afghan women must be asked, again and again, to open the borders to all Afghans.

And then there is what might happen to the Hazaras. As we have said, the Taliban have stopped being simply a Pushtun movement and have gone national, recruiting many Tajiks and Uzbeks. And also, they say, some Hazaras. But not many.

The Hazaras are the people who traditionally lived in the central mountains. Many also migrated to cities like Mazar and Kabul, where they worked as porters and in other low paid jobs. They are about 15% of the Afghan population. The roots of enmity between Pushtuns and Hazaras lie partly in long standing disputes over land and rights to grazing.

But more recently it also matters a good deal that Hazaras are Shias, and almost all other Afghans are Sunnis.

The bitter conflicts between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq have led to a split in the militant Islamist tradition. This split is complicated, but important, and needs a bit of explanation.

In both Iraq and in Syria the Islamic State have committed massacres against Shias, just as Shia militias have massacred Sunnis in both countries.

The more traditional Al Qaeda networks have remained staunchly opposed to attacking Shias and argued for solidarity between Muslims. People often point out that Osama Bin Laden’s mother was herself a Shia – actually an Alawite from Syria. But the necessity of unity has been more important. This was the main issue in the split between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In Afghanistan the Taliban have also argued strongly for Islamic unity. The sexual exploitation of women by Islamic State is also deeply repugnant to Taliban values, which are deeply sexist but puritanical and modest. For many years the Afghan Taliban have been consistent in their public condemnation of all terror attacks on Shias, Christians and Sikhs.

Yet those attacks happen. The ideas of Islamic State have had a particular influence on the Pakistani Taliban. The Afghan Taliban are an organization. The Pakistani Taliban are a looser network, not controlled by the Afghans. They have carried out repeated bombings against Shias and Christians in Pakistan.

It is Islamic State and the Haqqani network who have carried out the recent racist terror bombings of Hazaras and Sikhs in Kabul. The Taliban leadership have condemned all those attacks.

But the situation is in flux. Islamic State in Afghanistan is a minority breakaway from the Taliban, largely based in Ningrahar province in the east. They are bitterly anti-Shia. So are the Haqqani network, a long-standing mujahedin group largely controlled by Pakistani military intelligence. Yet in the present mix, the Haqqani network have been integrated into the Taliban organization, and their leader is one of the leaders of the Taliban.

But no one can be sure what the future holds. In 1995 an uprising of Hazara workers in Mazar prevented the Taliban gaining control of the north. But Hazara traditions of resistance go much deeper and further back than that.

Hazara refugees in neighboring countries may also be in danger now. The government of Iran are allying with the Taliban, and begging them to be peaceful. They are doing this because there are about three million Afghan refugees already in Iran. Most of them have been there for years, most are poor urban workers and their families, and the majority are Hazaras. Recently the Iranian government, in desperate economic straights themselves, have begun deporting Afghans back to Afghanistan.

There are about a million Hazara refugees in Pakistan too. In the region around Quetta more than 5,000 of them have been killed in sectarian assassinations and massacres in the last few years. The Pakistani police and army do nothing. Given the long support of the Pakistani army and intelligence for the Afghan Taliban, those people will be at greater risk right now.

What should you do, outside Afghanistan? Like most Afghans, pray for peace. And join protests for open borders.

We will leave the last word to Graham Knight. His son, Sergeant Ben Knight of the British Royal Air Force, was killed in Afghanistan in 2006. This week Graham Knight told the Press Association the UK government should have moved quickly to rescue civilians:

“We’re not surprised that the Taliban have taken over because as soon as the Americans and the British said they were going to leave, we knew this was going to happen. The Taliban made their intent very clear that, as soon as we went out, they would move in.

“As for whether people’s lives were lost through a war that wasn’t winnable, I think they were. I think the problem was we were fighting people that were native to the country. We weren’t fighting terrorists, we were fighting people who actually lived there and didn’t like us being there.” [11]

REFERENCES

Fluri, Jennifer L. and Rachel Lehr. 2017. The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements. Athens OH: University of Georgia Press.

Giustozzi, Antonio. 2007. Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. London: Hurst.

—, ed. 2009. Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field. London: Hurst.

—, 2021. ‘The Taliban have retaken Afghanistan – this time, how will they rule it?’ The Guardian, August 16.

Gregory, Thomas. 2011. ‘Rescuing the Women of Afghanistan: Gender, Agency and the Politics of Intelligibility.’University of Manchester PhD thesis.

Hirschkind, Charles and Saba Mahmood. 2002. ‘Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2): 339-354.  

Hughes, Dana. 2012. ‘The First Ladies Club: Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush for the Women of Afghanistan.’ ABC News, March 21.

Jalalzai, Zubeda and David Jefferess, eds. 2011. Globalizing Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Kolhatkar, Sonali and James Ingalls. 200. Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. New York: Seven Stories.

Lindisfarne, Nancy. 2002a. ‘Gendering the Afghan War.’ Eclipse: The Anti-War Review, 4: 2-3.

—. 2002b. ‘Starting from Below: Fieldwork. Gender and Imperialism Now.’ Critique of Anthropology, 22(4): 403-423, and in Armbruster and Laerke, 23-44.

—. 2012. ‘Exceptional Pashtuns?’ Class Politics, Imperialism and Historiography.’ In Marsden and Hopkins.

Lindisfarne, Nancy and Jonathan Neale, 2015. ‘Oil Empires and Resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.’ Anne Bonny Pirate.

—. 2019. ‘Oil, Heat and Climate Jobs in the MENA Region.’ In Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation, edited by Hamid Pouran and Hassan Hakimian, 72-94. London: Ginko.

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Marsden, Magnus and Benjamin Hopkins, eds. 2012. Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. London: Hurst.

Mihailovič, Konstantin. 1975. Memoirs of a Janissary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Mount, Ferdinand. 2008. Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes. London: Bloomsbury.

Mousavi, Sayed Askar, 1998. The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study. London: Curzon. 

Neale, Jonathan. 1981. ‘The Afghan Tragedy.’ International Socialism, 12: 1-32.

—. 1988. ‘Afghanistan: The Horse Changes Riders,’ Capital and Class, 35: 34-48.

—. 2002. ‘The Long Torment of Afghanistan.’ International Socialism 93: 31-59.

—. 2008. ‘Afghanistan: The Case Against “the Good War”.’ International Socialism, 120: 31-60. 

Nojumi, Neamatollah. 2002. The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave.

Rico, Johnny. 2007. Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America. New York: Presidio.

Tapper (Lindisfarne), Nancy. 1991. Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tapper, Richard, ed. 1983. The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm.

Tapper, Richard, with Nancy Lindisfarne. 2020. Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community. London: I.B. Tauris.

The Guardian, 2021. ‘Afghanistan Live News.’ August 16.

Ward, Lucy, 2001. ‘Leader’s Wives Join Propaganda War.’ The Guardian, Nov 17.

Zaeef, Abdul, 2010. My Life with the Taliban. London: Hirst.

Zilizer, Barbie. 2005. ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan.’ The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 10(3): 26-55.

[1] See especially Nancy Tapper (Lindisfarne), 1991; Lindisfarne, 2002a, 2002b and 2012; Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015; Neale, 1981, 1988, 2002 and 2008; Richard Tapper with Lindisfarne, 2020.

[2] Giustozzi, 2007 and 2009 are especially useful.

[3] On the class basis of the Taliban, see Lindisfarne, 2012, and many chapters by other authors in Marsden and Hopkins, 2012. And see Moussavi, 1998; Nojumi, 2002; Giustozzi, 2008 and 2009; Zareef, 2010.

[4] Zilizer, 2005.

[5] There is a vast literature on saving Afghan women. See Gregory, 2011; Lindisfarne, 2002a; Hirschkind and Mahmood, 2002; Kolhatkar and Ingalls, 2006; Jalalzai and Jefferess,2011; Fluri and Lehr, 2017; Manchanda, 2020.

[6] Ward, 2001.

[7] Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015

[8] Richard Tapper, 1983.

[9] For the drought in 1971, see Tapper and Lindisfarne, 2020. For more recent climate change, see Lindisfarne and Neale, 2019.

[10] Giustozzi, 2021.

[11] The Guardian, 2021.

The labour movement establishment has been rocked by Sharon Graham’s shock victory against the odds in the Unite general secretary election. Graham, who was vilified with disgusting sexist material being circulated against her and pressured to bow out to let the official left candidate defeat the right-wing threat, has confounded her critics by gaining 46,696 votes (37.7%). 

Her success was achieved by the efforts of hundreds of reps and activists working across the country, alongside her campaign team, to get the vote out. As the first woman to lead Unite, her success must be welcomed and disproves any idea that workers in predominantly male industries are unable to choose a woman to fight their corner. At the same time, Graham had to overcome sexist abuse, including being compared to Margaret Thatcher, which she says emerged after she refused to bow out of the race. Such attacks should have no place in the labour movement. 

Gerard Coyne, the right-wing, reactionary candidate, has finally conceded defeat – so at least the lawyers won’t be making a mint out of a raft of spurious but well-funded legal challenges against our union. This convincing defeat should send the right in our union, backed by Peter Mandelson, Tom Watson and John Spellar, packing? However, the ability of the right to regroup will depend on how the left responds to this major opportunity.

Why it was important Graham stood

Graham was put under immense pressure from supporters of Howard Beckett and Steve Turner to step back and prevent a split of the ‘left vote’. These demands played on the legitimate fears of left activists who were shocked at the near miss when Coyne came close to winning in the last General Secretary election. Then, some of the left tried to blame the rank-and-file candidate, Ian Allinson, for polling a respectable vote. 

However, for those who cared to look closely it was clear that far deeper problems lay behind the decline in support for Len McCluskey and the United Left (UL) in the 2017 election. The erosion in support for the UL had been underway for years with the organisation increasingly becoming a bureaucratic shell that focused more on manoeuvres within the Unite machine rather than looking outwards and organising members to retain control. 

This situation was reflected in declining votes for UL candidates at Executive elections and the vote for Len McCluskey himself, whose vote crashed from 145,000 in 2013 to 59,000 in 2017. Turner’s vote this time round was even lower at 41,833 (33.8%).

The internal manoeuvring reached its nadir during this election where Turner and the regional secretaries in Unite (who all supported his campaign) blocked the regional hustings which had been agreed by the Unite executive. Turner even refused to go on the LBC radio hustings – the only public debate of the whole campaign. The weakness of the UL strategy was plain for everyone to see and even Coyne was able to mock Turner for hiding from any challenge or scrutiny of his record.

Contrary to the ‘common sense’ view in union politics, there is no such thing as a ‘left vote’ once you step out of the activists’ bubble. Workers don’t fit neatly into left and right-wing buckets. Most union members have a complex range of views and problems they want to discuss and see addressed. They want to be convinced that they’re being listened to and will often support the candidate who provides the most credible solutions to their problems. 

The arguments about splitting the ‘left vote’ start from a spurious premise that workers aren’t really interested in these elections and that you have to focus on getting the activists to turn out their close supporters. If you’re convinced that the election will only involve a small group of enthusiasts, then why hold hustings? Why bother fighting for every vote right up until the end of the campaign?

Instead, the one-to-one conversations between reps, activists and members were key to building Graham’s campaign. The other campaigns did not have this network on the ground that operated largely out of sight. Instead, Coyne and Turner’s campaigns focussed on social media, phone banking and high-profile workplace visits. They were no match for Graham’s well-coordinated campaign with activists who spoke directly with workers.

As the anti-establishment candidate, Graham provided a vision of change and trade union militancy that proved attractive to members who were disillusioned with the existing leadership. 

Overall however, even Graham’s campaign was not as high-profile and radical as it could have been. Combined with Turner’s refusal to engage in hustings and Coyne’s cynical attack on the left, this did impact turnout, which was even lower than last time. 

But while Graham’s campaign was fairly low profile, it did pull votes from both Coyne and Turner, whilst also encouraging new layers of members to vote who would never have done so without the conversations with activists.

The aerospace site I now work on in Edinburgh has several hundred members with a two-decade history of nominating right wing candidates – from Sir Ken Jackson, to Les Bayliss and Gerard Coyne. It’s not that the membership on the site is ‘right wing’. The branch leadership was and they were the only people who communicated with the membership over that period. This time was different. The Coyne nomination was challenged by reps who saw through Coyne but couldn’t see the point of backing Turner. 

They saw the opportunity for change with Graham. After winning the nomination, reps met with the campaign team and then began to directly contact members working on site and those home-working to encourage them to vote for Graham. The rep’s operation ran right up until the last day of voting. This kind of intense, face-to-face contact was being coordinated by the campaign to help support several hundred activists up and down the country, and it explains how Graham won. 

It’s no guarantee that Turner, the status quo candidate, would have won if he was allowed to stand head-to-head against Coyne, who would have become a repository for all those looking for a way to express their frustration at the existing leadership.

Graham’s politics for change

In her manifesto, Graham argued that Unite’s political project in Labour has failed while the various extra parliamentary movements we support haven’t succeeded in building working class power. 

She wants to see Unite do politics differently and wants to engage activists and reps in developing a successful strategy. While Sir Keir and the Labour right may say they are comfortable with Graham’s victory, she has shown that she’s prepared to support reps who take on Labour councils and mayors if they attack our members and refuse to support them in disputes.

However, the biggest threat to the Labour Party could come from Graham’s commitment to give members more say over who we support with our political fund by ending ‘blank cheques’ to Labour. She has pledged to support candidates who oppose cuts to Unite members’ jobs and services, which could mean backing socialist political formations against Labour. 

Devolution and self-determination

Graham also says she wants to ensure that all political decisions will be fully devolved to members in Scotland and Wales. Graham says that it’s for Scottish members to decide on Scottish self-determination and that it should have nothing to do with London. She has also said that it would be up to members in Wales to decide what their relationship should be with Welsh Labour. 

It’s an open secret that a survey within Unite showed that most of our members in Scotland voted for independence in the referendum held in 2014. With greater support for independence today across Scotland, there’s no evidence that this situation has reversed within the union. 

If activists and members can hold Graham to these political principles, then Sir Keir Starmer won’t be so relaxed about the change in leadership in Unite. These challenges to Labour Party hegemony within Unite will only feed the discontent that is growing across the trade union movement, while support for self-determination will add further pressure on Scottish Labour with the Scottish TUC and several major unions already committed to supporting an independence referendum. And it’s not hard to see how this situation could be replicated when it comes to the question of Welsh independence. 

Challenges for the left

This victory should provide a lesson for the left. Many supporters of Turner have congratulated Graham on her surprise victory. However, despite the glaring failure of the UL strategy within Unite and the failure of the left to oppose the witch-hunt in Labour, some pundits still can’t face up to reality. In an analysis in the New Left Review, Tom Hazeldine sees the result as a defeat for the left in the Labour Party. All that this analysis confirms is a disconnect from the struggles within the labour movement. 

Instead, Graham’s victory provides us with an opportunity to build a new independent left, based upon building effective workplace organisation and resistance to bosses. As the count began last week, Graham addressed a large meeting of supporters where it was clear that many of the most militant activists involved in recent struggles were supporting the campaign. Alongside the familiar faces of seasoned left wing workplace activists, many young and new supporters were present. 

Graham described her campaign as an ‘insurgency’ within the union that was here to stay. The meeting was energised and completely different from the kind of left meetings we’ve attended over the decades. Graham indicated that over 900 activists had been involved in the campaign to get the vote out. It’s clear that an opportunity exists here to build up a rooted network of workplace activists that can become the basis of a new left in Unite that leads resistance to the employers offensive. 

There is a deep well of respect and goodwill for Graham amongst supporters who are now celebrating a victory we were all told was impossible. 

However, any new formation needs to be independent of the leadership in Unite and led by members to keep them accountable. 

As Unite General Secretary, Graham will face pressure of a different magnitude from the state, the government and the labour movement bureaucracy. No individual, regardless of how committed or principled they may be, can withstand this pressure on their own. 

Already the Telegraph is complaining about her ‘take no prisoners’ approach to ‘bad employers’ with the Tory party co-chair demanding that Labour condemn Graham’s ‘sinister campaigns of leverage’. This is only her first week in post and this kind of pressure will grow. 

But if Graham continues to avoid the big political questions facing the working class here and elsewhere, as she did in her campaign, then it will make it harder to resist these attacks. 

As rank-and-file activists, we need to seize this opportunity to build a powerful independent network, one that can defend the movement against a bosses offensive, keep Graham accountable and act independently if necessary. 

And if we want to transform the union, we will have to learn to take politics into the workplaces and sectoral combines that Graham has pledged to set up.

We must connect the big political issues with the problems reps and members face in the workplace. For example, no-one can ignore the fact that global warming has now reached levels that threaten our survival on the planet. Governments and employers across the world are belatedly recognising that they must act, with the Holyrood and Westminster governments desperately trying to portray themselves as supporters of a ‘zero-carbon’ agenda. 

The problem is that their solutions will always put the priorities of business first and throw workers under the bus. We are already seeing job losses threatened in aerospace and automotive due to the need to reorganise capital to accommodate new technology to deal with climate change.

Instead we have to fight for these workers to be employed in stopping the climate catastrophe. The ‘Just Transition’ has been Unite policy for many years, but it will only become relevant if our reps, members and communities become convinced that it is a realisable solution that we can fight for. This means taking the argument for a ‘Just Transition’ into the workplaces that are now directly affected, and where many of the senior reps have unjustifiably supported the employers agenda in disastrous ‘partnership’ agreements. If ever there was an example that partnership with bosses acts directly against our members interests. then surely this is it? 

At the same time, the impact of both the pandemic and the Tory’s handling of Brexit are combining to create labour shortages across the economy. This undoubtedly creates opportunities for the working class and our movement as a whole. 

At Anglian Water, branch reps for HGV drivers recently won massive £400 per month pay rises with improved leave, to retain and attract new drivers. If skills shortages are met with coordinated action then we could see an effective worker-led response to the crisis.

Graham says she recognises these challenges and her victory provides us with the space to explore new solutions and strategies to replace those that have failed us. However, we have been warned. If we are unable to seize this opportunity, then we will only have ourselves to blame.

At the precise moment when ‘humanitarian’ military intervention has been unmasked as bloody fraud, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon decides that it’s time for Nato to intervene in Afghanistan.

Speaking as UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace visited Scotland, she said: "I support calls to ensure that there isn't a cut-and-run operation in Afghanistan, that Nato countries are there and meeting their responsibilities for as long as is necessary.”

Wallace has accepted that the UK’s troops will leave by 31 August, the date negotiated by the US and the new Taliban government in Kabul. Sturgeon is part of a lobby of disaffected Nato hardliners, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are urging an open-ended Nato military presence in the country.

This represents not only an endorsement of the fiction that Nato performs a humanitarian function in the country, but also a policy that threatens to promote ongoing war. The Taliban have said they will not tolerate any extension of the deadline.

Nato’s presence has brought the Afghan people misery, with widespread corruption (with western contractors and corporations the worst culprits), theft, destruction and killing. The idea of Nato as a guarantor of Afghan rights or safety is a grotesque lie. It was only days ago that the US was still bombing Afghan cities, with massive casualties. Such a force has absolutely no legitimate role to play in Afghanistan.

Last week, Conter submitted questions to the SNP, asking if the party now regretted its support for the war and occupation in Afghanistan. Those questions went unanswered by a party and government used to a culture of secrecy and impunity. But it is clear that as far as Sturgeon is concerned, the disastrous policy of the last 20 years does not need to be altered, and Nato can still play a humanitarian role in Afghanistan, even in the hour of its defeat.

Meanwhile, Nato itself is in disarray. There are stories emerging suggesting tension between US and UK troops in Kabul. Baltic leaders are denouncing Biden in panic, as Nato provides them with their influence in the region. The British state has been revealed as impotent without US power, generating anguish in the British parliament and press. Blair’s appearance in the debate registers real fear in powerful parts of the establishment who can see that Nato has been damaged by its failure in Afghanistan, and that the policy tide is ebbing away from his infamous call to “reorder this world around us” with military force.

All of this is to say that Sturgeon is making her remarks in a context: she is siding with the war party in Nato. Naturally she is doing this by saying that her concern is for refugees. But the Nato occupation has produced over 5 million refugees since 2001, and this wasn’t up for consideration when she backed the occupation. If Sturgeon wants to help refugees, she could take her arguments to EU leaders who are once again building-up ‘Fortress Europe’ in anticipation of a new refugee crisis. But she won’t challenge established power, be it Nato or the EU.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Green leadership, having agreed the basis for a coalition government with the SNP, are absent from their responsibility to demand an end to the policy of war, and for Scotland to quit Nato. There’s little point in having a policy of opposition to Nato if it is not advanced against the organisation and governments that defend it.

The humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan was generated by Nato and its member states. There is no ‘good’ or ‘humanitarian’ use of this policy. It should be dropped immediately and a simple lesson, accepted by most of the population in this country, learned: the US, UK and Nato have no place in imposing their will on foreign countries.

Throughout its history the British left has always suffered from an attempt by some to separate domestic from foreign affairs. This attitude was moulded in times when Britain was the world’s most powerful empire, and acceptance of imperial policy was deemed necessary to win favour among broad masses, who in any case were only interested in what worried them ‘day-to-day’. 

Unfortunately this theme has returned in the period after Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. A common argument is that anti-imperialism was an anchor that dragged the project down to electoral defeat. The argument goes that Corbyn’s domestic agenda was popular and that ‘unnecessary fights’ were picked on foreign policy.

The most explicit version of the myth of the unnecessary foriegn policy aside was recently articulated by Jeremy Gilbert on a recent Politics Theory Other podcast. 

Gilbert argued that Corbyn’s anti-imperialism was off-putting to large swathes of the electorate because they have not reached the “highest levels of class consciousness”. He sets out a stagist theory of class consciousness, arguing that if the UK electorate is “not at the level of accepting [that] free broadband might be politically feasible, then you can’t get them to the level of accepting a full-scale critique of imperialism and their own country’s complicity in it”. This ignores the entire history of politics in the UK, which has seen many examples of anti-imperialist politics on a mass scale, even at times when other forms of class consciousness were uneven, declining or low. 

This politics was apparent at the height of post-war working class movement, when Scottish Rolls Royce workers downed tools and refused to repair jet engines for the Chilean air force in protest against the overthrown of Salvador Allende’s government in 1974. But the largest ever anti-imperialist mobilisations (and protests of any kind) were organised by Stop the War, a movement that was able to mobilise two million people against the most immoral and disastrous UK imperialist venture in recent decades - the Iraq war - along with numerous major protests over Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine and many other sites of western state violence. This movement appeared at a nadir for working class consciousness more broadly, but still managed to build anti-war feeling to the point where it was common sense, and help create a breach between the public, New Labour the media and foreign policy establishments.

Gilbert’s analysis also ignores that many sections of the working class in Britain are descendants of the former colonies, and some have an anti-imperialist disposition as part of that background. The recent Batley and Spen by-election illustrated just how important anti-imperialist and internationalist politics is to working-class voters in that constituency. Despite the recent protestations of the Labour right that voters in the ‘red wall’ are not interested in issues like Palestine, the leadership panicked and the victorious candidate started talking about the illusory ‘two-state solution’. 

In his interview, Gilbert stresses that a moral critique of imperialism should not be jettisoned as part of the left supporting the US Democrats and Labour. Yet in the Labour Party today, scores of members have been suspended for putting forward motions at branch meetings condemning Britain’s support for Israel. Material support for Israel is just the latest iteration of British imperialism in Palestine and there is no starker illustration of the barbaric nature of contemporary imperialism. These motions are typical of the sort of moral critique being advocated by Gilbert, yet even this most elementary form of moral critique is not tolerated in the Labour Party. 

But there is a more general, theoretical problem with Gilbert’s view; political consciousness is not a stagist process. Rather, it develops through complex determinations, beginning with one’s social being and relation to the mode of production of material life. These condition the social, political and intellectual life forming a dynamic social ‘totality’. A building block consciousness, where the abstract and international can only be grasped once the immediate and social is conquered is simply at odds with what we all know about how people think - you don’t need to be a socialist to oppose war or racism, and most people who oppose these things are not.

Gilbert argues that the way to break with UK/US imperialism is a communist revolution, which he then dismisses as impossible. The historical cards we have been dealt are such that we have to simply accept social democratic parties as the only plausible vehicle for advancing critiques of imperialism and a reforming program that strengthens the working-class and possibly leads to a break with imperialism on this basis. However, there is little to no chance of reformist programs that will permanently strengthen the working class in contemporary capitalism. The reformist programs implemented by the Democratic and Labour parties in the 1930s and 1940s (The New Deal and the Beveridge Report) were products of a period in history in which capital was rocked by economic crisis, war and revolution. Moreover, they were the culmination of a long struggle by a more powerful labour movement for positive reforms to improve the condition of the working class. Moreover, it is one of the key limiting factors of social democracy as a tradition that its domestic radicalism has always been limited by attachments to imperial foreign policy. 

The confusion about anti-imperialism on the anglophone left has gone further than debates about stages of consciousness and ‘priorities’. Owen Jones recently conducted an interview with the American YouTuber ‘Vaush’ (real name Ian Kochinski) on the Biden presidency, the US left and US imperialism. They criticised the amorphous ‘online left’ whose anti-imperialism is synonymous, they say, with the nationalism of geopolitical rivals to the US, namely Russia and China. This ignores that many socialists are perfectly capable of criticising various actors at once, whilst never losing sight of the fact that the US and its allies like the UK are overwhelmingly powerful. Vaush bemoans the left’s supposedly singular focus on US atrocities in Afghanistan whilst ignoring the Taliban’s own record of violence (naturally we are never told who is doing this). For Jones and Vaush, the key flaw in the left’s anti-imperialism is a singular focus on the US’ violent presence in various parts of the world. In fact, the left’s focus on the US is the strength of anti-imperialism, since it acknowledges that objectively the US is the biggest and most powerful imperial power and must be held to a higher standard of criticism. If both Jones and Vaush are serious in their claim to want a post-capitalist and socialist world, then it is necessary for US imperialism to be overcome. 

Britain’s domestic politics cannot be divorced from her foreign policy. Despite the formal dissolution of the British empire, the establishment still yearn for the ‘glory’ of the empire which signified Britain’s geopolitical dominance. One only need look at the way some British politicians have howled about withdrawal from Afghanistan to see how deluded they are about the country’s global influence. British foreign policy, like that of other developed capitalist nations, is intimately bound up with its internal economic development, its long-run chronic problems and periodic crises. Imperialism serves the dual purpose of maintaining British geopolitical power and also allowing developed capitalist countries to coerce developing countries (often former colonies) into an asymmetric economic relationship in which the benefits of the relationship accrue to the imperialist countries. 

Corbynism’s anti-imperialism was inconsistent when he led Labour. One of the high points of British politics in recent years was Corbyn’s insistence, amidst an election campaign and in the wake of the Manchester bombing atrocity, that British and western foreign policy contributed to global terrorism. An audacious argument, that nonetheless struck a nerve with a mass public opinion which knew this to be true, helped secure the Labour surge in 2017. As his leadership wore on, Corbyn increasingly put his internationalism into cold storage. This retreat of anti-imperialist foreign policy weakened the Corbyn project, rather than providing it any room for manoeuvre. 

In parallel, Corbyn’s long and continuing association with the anti-war movement is the central reason he was so reviled by the British ruling elite. It is the reason he is being avoided by the media today, despite his unique position as a leading British politician who consistently opposed the disaster in Afghanistan.

One of the consequences of successive defeats for the British left over the past forty years is a lowering of expectations. Some parts of it have internalised the mantras of the neoliberal right and sought to extract concessions from the Labour Party even as it returns to the establishment. Some have even embraced imperialism. The ‘radical social democracy’ that the Labour left promote is prepared to, in the words of Paul Mason “deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport and Kirkcaldy – if necessary at the price of delivering them to Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai”. That is not a price the British left should wish to pay in an age of more frequent crises of capitalism and a global ecological crisis. Anti-imperialism cannot be jettisoned as part of a strategy that simply tries to extract temporary concessions to the working class. The task of socialists is to move beyond a capitalist world, and anti-imperialism and internationalism are core components of that task.

Image: Defence Images/Cpl Lee Goddard

It took about a fortnight for the Taliban to overturn a Nato-built state, constructed over 20 years with over $2 trillion. In the end, that state had zero support. This should kill the doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' once and for all.

The Taliban have overrun Kabul, having conquered most of the major cities in the country in a matter of days, and the President and his puppet government have fled the country. Huge amounts of money have been looted at both ends of the aid exchange that kept the government afloat for so long.

Nato forces, including major contingents from Britain and the United States, did not invade with ‘good intentions’ which have gone unfulfilled, as in the media narrative. They invaded with bad intentions – to assert western strategic interests in a vital location, placing troops on the borders of regional players including Iran, Pakistan and China at a time when the US and its allies were about to launch a major attack against Iraq.

The ridiculous pretext that the war was fought for the rights of women and girls is an insult. Rights cannot be protected and sustained by a foreign force that exploits and steals from the population. Most Afghan girls never saw the inside of a classroom during the occupation. Most of the country remained under the control of authoritarian warlords.

The supposed mission to combat Al Qaeda also failed spectacularly. Osama Bin Laden hid in Pakistan for many years, presumably with the compliance of elements of the Pakistani state, a supposed ally of the US. The international Jihadi movement is far more powerful today than it was in 2001, as a direct consequence of the ‘War on Terror’.

Every British soldier killed in Afghanistan died for nothing except the tax money stolen by elites in Kabul, Washington and London. They were largely drawn from working class communities, and sent to fight on the behalf of the state and big business. None of the journalists or politicians so fond of 'civilising the natives' ever picked up a gun themselves.

We should never forget who is responsible for all this.

Of course, it was the Labour party that brought Britain into the Afghan war, supporting the US war drive without hesitation. With Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson back as advisors to Keir Starmer, it’s little wonder he has criticised the decision to withdraw troops.

The Tories maintained the occupation for over a decade, launching various failed bids to control the rebellious south of the country.

The SNP supported the drive to war in 2001, and since then they have drifted ever closer to the western foreign policy establishment, voting in 2012 for a policy to join Nato upon Scottish independence.

Now these same parties are bemoaning the collapse, and ignoring their own responsibility for a failed 20 year occupation and war. Sturgeon said the Afghan people, “women and girls especially”, were being “shamefully abandoned” by the withdrawal of troops. But she was prepared to kill these same people in the invasion and occupation. She said nothing as US planes continued the bombing of Afghan cities until just a few days ago. And she and the SNP’s spokespeople on defence are determined to maintain close ties with Nato.

It’s time to retire the whole concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’. There isn’t a single ‘humanitarian’ military force in the world. Powerful states don’t raise armies for the purpose of human solidarity, and they will only ever act in their own strategic and economic interests.

The collapse in Afghanistan is the worst defeat Nato has ever experienced and underlines the decline of western military prestige. It comes on the back of other disasters, like the collapse and civil war in Libya after Nato bombing.

There is simply no other function for Nato beyond these adventures, and exit from the organisation is essential. Those who organised and prosecuted the war should not be allowed to hide behind appeals to sympathy for the Afghan people, against whom they have committed so many crimes.

Finally, the Afghan people themselves deserve our solidarity, and aid in seeking refuge. True to form, the British state is likely to resist the prospect of really humanitarian action.

The election to succeed Len McCluskey as General Secretary of Unite the Union obviously comes at a hugely significant moment for the labour movement. It’s increasingly clear that the government plan to make working people pay the price of the pandemic, and that there is an urgent need for a just transition to a sustainable economy. Unfortunately a series of bruising political defeats have caused immense damage to the left’s prospects in Britain. This will be the forth GS election since the union was formed by the merger of Amicus and the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and this election has the highest stakes of any.

It’s important to remember that McCluskey’s election in 2010 came at a time when many in leading labour movement positions broadly went along with a “too far, too fast” response to the recently-formed Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government’s austerity programme. In a difficult moment, we should imagine how much worse the last decade would have been without  the leadership of one of the largest unions in Britain and Ireland being prepared to speak up in support of movements like the student protests against the trebling of tuition fees and abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance, wholeheartedly back initiatives such as The People’s Assembly Against Austerity, take a stand on issues such as opposing the war on Libya, and refuse to repudiate industrial action.

The United Left grouping in the union, which has managed to keep the position of General Secretary and a majority of Executive Council seats aligned to the left throughout the union’s existence, are supporting Steve Turner in this election. So too are the Progressive United Left grouping in Scotland, after a welcome and important agreement by former candidate Howard Beckett to prioritise the maximum unity of the left. As with any other organisation, it is entirely legitimate for activists to discuss necessary areas of improvement for the UL’s work and possible ways to maximise its potential. It should also be recognised that the grouping remains the broadest and largest current of left activists in the union, and its decision to endorse Turner should be of significance to all socialists when considering their options in this election (especially considering that the other candidate to seek UL endorsement has now also joined his campaign). Selection processes for choosing an agreed candidate are always likely to raise some points of contention, but what other organisation is better placed to have overseen one?

In contrast, it is clear to see who forces bitterly opposed to these progressive positions adopted by Unite are overwhelmingly backing. After coming within less than 5% of victory in 2017’s election against McCluskey and Ian Allinson of the ‘Unite Rank and File’ grouping, the Gerard Coyne camp sense a chance to go one better this time, especially with Executive Officer Sharon Graham making it three on the ballot again. The British left has experienced a highly demoralising couple of years, and the combination of an experienced right-wing labour movement machine, with enthusiastic support from many mainstream media outlets (The Sun have once again offered him a column to trash Unite), represents a significant intervention from those determined to ensure our unions assert themselves as little as possible.

Coyne’s ties to the likes of former Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson and John Spellar (MP and founding member of the right-wing Labour First organisation), are well documented. But a victory for him would have implications far beyond Unite’s relationship to the Labour Party. It is striking, for instance, that his manifesto makes no mention of the future of the Community Membership initiative, something which Turner played a significant role in the formation of. This has represented a crucial step towards bringing those who are, for whatever reason, not in paid employment into the union: running campaigns on issues such as Universal Credit payments and building solidarity with those involved in industrial disputes. Particularly in the current climate, strengthening our community branches to be a relevant and powerful force in all regions where Unite organises should be considered a key task for anyone serious about the future of the union. 

Naturally, it’s rare for any individual activist to wholeheartedly agree with a General Secretary all of the time: especially in a large general union like Unite, where workers from a wide range of sectors, supportive of various political traditions and none, will seek to have their voice heard. But this is a key factor to consider: a Turner victory will be crucial to securing the future of the union’s democratic structures. Something that has been lost at times in the debate surrounding this election, particularly in relation to discussions over issues such affiliation to the Labour Party (even putting to one side that none of the candidates standing have signalled support for breaking the link), is that the General Secretary is not an all-powerful ruler of Unite, and nor should they be (despite descriptions of McCluskey as ‘Unite boss’ from right-wing commentators and some on the left who should frankly know better). Indeed, as any regular at policy conference will be aware, it is far from unprecedented for strong interventions by members to shift the union’s position (see fracking for a recent example). Those at the heart of Coyne’s campaign have strong experience as ‘fixers’ in Unite’s predecessor unions, and it took decades of hard and painful work from left activists to loosen their grip. A victory for him is almost certain to see a ‘restructuring’ of the union which would make events in the Labour Party look like child’s play. The threat of Coyne is far deeper than him merely being a milquetoast, uninspiring figurehead: the consequences for the left would likely be immediate and brutal.

When Unite’s role in ‘Westminster politics’ over recent years is discussed, all socialists should be clear what this is code for: the fact that the union was supportive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and has opposed the rightward shift of the Starmer era. It is perfectly valid, and indeed hugely important, that a lively and honest debate on the future of workplace organisation takes place in the union, with all the barriers and opportunities we face raised. It is a huge mistake, however, for anyone on the left to boost arguments which present a false dichotomy between the union either seeking to make an impact politically or industrially. Admittedly ‘people I’ve spoken to’ is a limited sample, but I have yet to come across a single workplace activist who found that their efforts at organisation were frustrated by Unite’s support for Jeremy Corbyn or others sympathetic to his politics. Quite why anyone on the left would advocate that we should attempt to exercise less influence in a party we are affiliated to (with no serious moves to change this fact in sight) is beyond me. And irrespective of differing views on affiliation to the Labour Party, the union’s political voice has far wider repercussions. Stepping back from our current commitments would leave countless campaigning organisations working to oppose austerity, build international solidarity, defend the right to protest, take on racism and fascism, support movements for equality, defend workplace safety, protect our environment, and oppose British involvement in wars of aggression, in a far weaker place. As important as the future of Unite is in and of itself, this election has huge repercussions for anyone invested in bringing about serious change. 

The present state of affairs demands we have a union committed to fighting for working people on every front we can, however we can. A victory for Steve Turner would not only be a much-needed show of strength amidst a tide of setbacks for the left: but a positive endorsement for a union that is unafraid to embrace talking about the potential of a ‘Workers’ Greenprint’ and leading the campaign for vital investment in renewable energy, stand with workers and communities opposing an upcoming offensive against the living standards of millions, combat powerful projects seeking to sow false social divisions, and promote a politics which advances the interests of working people at home and abroad. If you haven’t already, please do vote for Steve, and encourage any members you know to do the same: information is available on the union’s website for anyone needing their ballot to be reissued.

The British magazine The Economist produced, in its latest issue, a rather long special feature on the last 10 “dismal” years in Brazil. Among the reasons for such a desolated social and economical outcome, the publication lists several factors, including the inability of recent governments to enact neoliberal reforms. However, as we go deeper into the data, the absolute opposite is what can be inferred: the economic tragedy of the last decade is directly connected to an adhesion to neoliberalism and its dogmas, strongly reinforced by the rise of the far-right in Brazil.

It is common knowledge that capitalism in Brazil faces a deep and prolonged crisis. Its effects are dramatic. The last 10 years may be unequivocally grasped as yet another “lost decade” for the country. More than that: the data expresses that it was the worst decade over the last 120 years. Brazil clocks-up two strong historical recessions over the aforementioned period, the first one from 2014 through 2016 and another beginning in 2020, the latter without any clear perspective for a short term recovery since, along with the economic crisis, one can add an out of control pandemic situation.

From 2011 through 2020, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by an average of 0.27% a year. In the previous lost decade, from 1981 through 1990, the average yearly growth was1.57% - almost 6 times greater. Maintaining the same grounds for comparison, in the previous lost decade – 1981-1990 – the GDP per capita fell by 0.4% while in the current lost decade, 2011-2020, the fall amounted to 0.56%. Currently, Brazil’s GDP (data from 2020) is 6.4% lower than it was in 2014 and its GDP per capita has decreased by 10.8% in the same period. One can say to sum up that Brazil is poorer.

As a commodities producer, Brazil is increasingly specializing in primary products with low added value, with low demand on technology and scientific knowledge, which impacts directly on other areas of national life, since we cannot separate economic, social and political changes, which are all permanently interconnected.

A de-industrializing country

In order to accurately portray the current reality in Brazil, let us draw from the data of the proportion of manufacturing industry in the economy, now representing only 11.3% of GDP (numbers from 2020), reaching its lowest point in a historic phase which began in 1947 (then, with 19.9%, almost double the current number). In 1985, this sector represented almost 36% of the Brazilian GDP. As such, it is noticeable how the share of the country’s GDP relative to industrial activities is at its lowest since the end of the 1940s. As a result of the past decade, industrial production in 2020 was 12.4% lower than in 2011.

The proportion of high and medium/high technology in Brazil’s industrial exports has regressed from 43% in 2020 to only 32% in 2019, the lowest percentage since 1995. In other words, whichever little amount is exported by the country’s industry is concentrated in low technological complexity and added value products.

Let us draw data from another sector, which seems to present the opposite outcome, in order to compare. Exports of all kinds have doubled between 2000 and 2020, with China as the main commercial partner – a market that buys, from Brazil, mostly primary products. According to Social Scientist Zander Navarro, that all sums up to a “new” kind of rural economy in Brazil. It is an “agribusiness” marked by technological advance, high productivity, economical concentration and, therefore, massive unemployment leading to migration from rural to urban areas. The Agricultural Census of 2017 shows that only 2% of rural establishments make up for 71% of the gross value of all that is produced. In the words of Navarro:

[t]he ancient dual segmentation between major land owners prone to exports and, in another subsector, the medium and small supplying the domestic market, as it prevailed up until the 1980s is ceasing to exist. It is an unconcluded yet no return passage. Medium and small producers are being cornered.

Hence the ultimate shift of the “social question” from the countryside to the cities. The previous situation with the creation of low-income formal jobs and decrease of extreme poverty in Brazil during the mandates of the Workers Party (PT – Partido dos Trabalhadores) has been strikingly reversed since 2014. The underutilization of the workforce has leaped from 14.9% in 2014 to 28.7% in 2020, plus the observation of an increase in misery all around the country. A high informality in employment has also been observed with 39 million Brazilians in such conditions as of December 2020.

This draws a picture where financial markets and institutions and their financial elite counterparts become increasingly powerful over economic policies, decisions and their effects, leading to unequal gains and losses among economic sectors and classes. From 2010 through 2019, the annual profits of the four major Brazilian banks put together went from 38.91 to 81.51 billions of reais, which corresponds to a nominal growth of 109.4%.

Low growth rates, deindustrialization, reprimarization (reversion to low value added products), financialization and economic concentration in multiple sectors with an increase in unemployment, precariousness, poverty and inequality: such is the Brazil that emerges from the latest “lost decade”.

The failure of programs, predictions and promises

Dominant economic policies – both from the right and “left” wings – mainly based on “austerity” dogmas are largely responsible for this outcome. These policies delivered, at a structural and systematic level as seen, the opposite of their triumphant promises: the highly desired economic growth.

Despite prior developments that should not be disregarded, the milestone of austerity policies took place in 1999 with the adoption of the macroeconomic ‘tripod’ that continues today: inflation targets, floating exchange rates and fiscal adjustment. Immediately after, in 2000, came the “Fiscal Responsibility Law”, that limited the space for social spending. The opening of the economy and privatizations, financial liberalization, fiscal adjustment and continuous labor and social security reforms are added to this supposedly economical “modernization” package.

The Workers Party's weak-developmentalism kept this arrangement in place, taking advantage of the margins opened by the supercycle of commodities and its positive effects on domestic economy – notwithstanding a package of income distribution measures, appreciation of minimum wage and popular credit offers, followed by a fragile resumption of public investment. The project for consolidation of the country as a mix of “high-tech-plantation” and “financial-valuation-platform”, granting short-term financial gains with a strong currency was maintained and in some aspects strengthened. Even those public policies implemented over the aforementioned period, whose social effects must not be ignored – although, by this point, they have proved to be frail and ephemeral – were conceived and implemented under this framework and its regulations, in short, within the scope of financial rationality. Fiscal surpluses were systematically triggered at least up until 2013, to mention another significant element of this foundation.

After weak and uncoordinated attempts to resist this arrangement, the aggressive fiscal adjustment in Brazil was made definitive as of 2015, established as the hegemonic program of the country’s political and economic elites. In addition to the ever-growing dismantling and continuous decline in investment power and action of the national public banks such as the National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES, in Portuguese) and other state-controlled companies such as Petrobrás, this development – already in a new and darker political ambiance – consolidates with the inclusion in the Federal Constitution of a “New Fiscal Regime”, whose guidelines include a draconian and suffocating “spending cap” for the next 20 years. Unparalleled in the world, such a fiscal regime routinely requires the weakening of the state’s capacity for economic and social action, threatening its day-to-day functioning. The scandalous and denounced statements made by the current Economy Minister of Bolsonaro, Paulo Guedes, a truthful and spiritual representative of a significant part of the aforementioned elite, on the excesses and lack of frugality of the poor, serve as an authentic illustration of this point.

Certainly, the 2020 pandemic crisis imposes a significant increase on public expenditure – especially with the limited, yet relatively important emergency benefit paid by the country despite the wishes of the Federal Government. It reopens in the country the discussion on many subjects such as economic policies, state expenses and economic induction, currency issuance; which reflectsthe recent controversies between orthodox and heterodox economists highlighting the debates over Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in Brazil and around the world. From the start, the wide political front of the upper class, clustered around an austere outlook, kept a firm position in defending the deepening of the very same hard-neoliberal economic program in the post pandemic era. They actually wish to double the stakes: giving the Central Bank full autonomy, a Calamity Constitutional Amendment Proposal (“PEC da Calamidade”), an Emergency Constitutional Amendment Proposal (“PEC Emergencial”), extensive tax and administrative reforms, new and more aggressive privatizations.

In any case it must be said: painted in red or blue, yellow or green, the implementation, maintenance and continuous intensification, throughout this period, of these harsh fiscal adjustment measures in Brazil created its the following reality, evidenced in data: scarce results, a stagnant country and, even more flagrantly contradicting the orthodox narrative, a growing gross debt – which, from 52.29% of GDP in January 2011, reaches almost 90% in March 2021.

The new moment of Capitalism in Brazil and its political challenges

Facing such catastrophic reality, harshly politically aggravated by a far-right government, the progressive political forces have been testing numerous proposals to overcome stagnation and its effects on social majorities and political minorities. The austere economic policy is to blame for the hole that Brazil  finds itself in, it is stated, and, based on this diagnosis (to a large extent correct, as we have just seen), several developmental proposals have been resumed; the case for the “return of the state”. 

Nevertheless, in order to properly frame the feasibility of these proposals, it is imperative to better qualify the cited diagnosis, which tends to underestimate or simply disregard altogether social and political causes and consequences of such an economic framework. Analytic errors lead to action errors. Therefore we must ponder the limits of this critique in favor of a post-pandemic “new economy”.

First of all, because our developmentalist colleagues (they be soft or hard developmentalists) are prone not to pay close attention to structural problems of Brazilian stagnation: a subordinated insertion in the international division of labor and production, dependence on commodities production and exports mostly relying on Chinese market demand (or lack thereof, for that matter), chronic shortage of public and private investments, stagnant productivity and low-skilled labor force which in large extent favors the proliferation of the aforementioned social and economic structures.

Secondly, and perhaps even more bluntly, because they also disregard the social and political character – class related – of the state and its structural role in Capitalism. This is particularly clear in Brazil under its current conjuncture, where the austerity dogmas are being applied as a powerful ideological tool on political offensives by certain sectors and class groupings that I have named before as a “wide front” – uniting bolsonaristas and anti-bolsonaristas – around a consensus regarding this economic status quo, in which they have a united interest and around which they are consolidating.

The paradox that brings us to yet another “lost decade” lies in the encounter of economy, politics and society: it seems that the country’s political and economic elites have definitely chosen the path of brutally enforced management, leaving little to no room for new attempts at social agreements, of a society living under a perennial crisis where the “profitable” management of a scenario of economic stagnation, recession and misery indicates the “new moment” of Capitalism in Brazil.

Finally, the question that remains to be answered is: which classes, actors and social sectors are willing to serve as political foundation for the desired “return of the state” in a post-pandemic Brazil? Our much needed and important plans for economic action. resistance and dismantling of the current situation may be in vain unless they are accompanied and supported by a new and concrete effort to (re)organize popular forces. Such an effort requires, given the evidence, an honest and creative reflection on the crisis of the left  as a whole and its forms of organization in contemporary Brazil and elsewhere. 

Edemilson Paraná is a Social Scientist and professor at Federal University of Ceará (UFC). Author of ‘Digitalized Finance: financial capitalism and informational revolution’ (Brill, 2019/Haymarket, 2020) and ‘Money and Social Power: a study on Bitcoin’ (Brill, forthcoming).

Friday 30 July was a significant date for two seemingly unconnected reasons. First, it was reported that Scotland retains its European title as the country with the highest per capita death rate due to drug overdose. These deaths occur almost exclusively in working-class communities characterised by both acute and chronic deprivation. Second, it was 50 years ago last week that a powerful, cohesive working-class community, characterised by mutual support and solidarity, declared its intention to take over shipyards on the upper Clyde which were condemned to closure despite several orders on the books.

In 1971, Jimmy Reid gave his speech to the UCS shipyard workers at Fairfield yard, Govan, to inform them that the shop stewards had reached the decision that they would take over the yards in a 'work-in'. It was a unique moment in organised working-class history, usually accompanied in its telling with the famous words: 'And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevying…'. Immediately following this imperative, issued with a flash in his eyes of humour and understanding, he continued: 'Because the world is watching and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves responsibly and with dignity and maturity. The shop stewards representing the workers are in control of these yards. Nobody and nothing will come in and nothing will go out, without our permission'. It was an audacious, courageous, and strategic statement of intent by these trade-unionists to save thousands of jobs and a major industry.

'But that was a long time ago', we're told; 'we need to live in the present and think to the future', we're told. 'Times have changed', or so we're told. Yet the world is now watching our wretched decline into one of the worst countries in the world for poverty-related drug addiction while at the same time claiming to be world leaders in progressive policies. Times have indeed changed.

Something of crucial significance has disappeared from our politics and culture. This was brought home to me at Jimmy's (my dad's) funeral 11 years ago: a funeral that didn't just mourn the man, the friend, the comrade, but was a lament for a lost era. Emotions ran high not in self-pitying nostalgia, but for a time, a place, a community. An era of solidarity that is gone. So what was it about this unique struggle – nothing before or since can match it – that captured the imagination and spirit of an era?

Looking at the photos of the time, one magnificent shot stands out (see below, photographer unknown). A sea of upturned faces with bunnets, the shop stewards pacing what looks like a boxing ring, Jimmy talking. All men. Today, that would be a complaint. But in truth, women were heavily involved in that struggle. They may not be present in a world of appearances, which these days matter, but they were there alright. My mum, Isobel Dickie, Ann Airlie, my grandma and countless others were working-class feminists yet would never call themselves such. They were strong women with agency, whose priority – same as the men – was economic and political equality. Their struggle was for the working class, of the working class, and by the working class. Fighting for social justice was a luxury, but a luxury that would eventually flow, they thought, from the eradication of socio-economic equality.

A strategic struggle, the UCS work-in was led by intelligent, thoughtful men and women. They realised early on that to win they had to build support from all walks of life, and they did. Across political parties, religions, families from all classes rich and poor, the solidarity was truly ecumenical. Even the local police were engaged and supportive. At that point in history, identity politics was but a glint in a French intellectual's eye. Nowadays, that kind of solidarity displayed 50 years ago would likely be condemned. Standing 'shoulder to shoulder' with a member of another tribe is largely frowned upon in the present era where the binary nature of current politics is stifling and ugly.

The community as we understood it back then is no longer. Living in the present is to live in a society that has fragmented into neo-liberal silos of identity politics. This is characterised as progress. And it is progress of a kind. Equality legislation passed by the Blair/Brown Government gave certain characteristics legal protection. Class was to be included in the next parliament, but the Tories won the election, so it was not to be. A working class whose solid, cohesive communities were already brutally decimated in the Thatcher years, were uprooted and now unrecognised by the political classes as an identity worthy of protection.

Not a mile from our close, a family suffering from the devastating impact of poverty will go unnoticed unless their circumstances become so severe that some government-funded charity is helicoptered in to stage an intervention. These families have no extended, recognised over-arching community with which to identify. This kind of fragmentation of so-called 'lived experience' with its temporary solutions thought up by well-intentioned third sector folk, would not be described as 'progress' 50 years ago. No government in power in the UK represents or prioritises working-class interests. There are enlightened individuals, sure, but progress – particularly in Scotland – is measured mainly in terms of identity politics that excludes class.

Our current political ethos is dominated by appearances. And the working class do not 'appear' unless, for example, during the COVID-19 crisis, the value of our Amazon workers, supermarket workers, public transport workers, cleaners and many more is made manifest. Funny how the free market is rubbish at valuing jobs and their worth to society. Usually consigned to society's dark undergrowth, the working-classes engine room emerged to remind us of their worth.

But they appear again in the perennial attainment gap; they appear in our shameful drug deaths; our problems with addiction; poverty-fuelled trauma filling our prisons; homelessness; the decline of our biggest city where precious services for the most deprived are cut and yet 'People Make Glasgow'. Not all of them, to be sure.

It should be noted that Jimmy and some of his fellow shop stewards were committed to what was then called 'home rule'. In later life, they joined the SNP and Jimmy himself would have argued passionately for a 'Yes' vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. He would be dismayed by the stalled progress of the working class over the last few decades, but, as an optimist, would hope that determining our own destiny would provide a remedy.

In the meantime, the poor will disappear again as we march progressively towards a promised Scottish panacea.

As the new progressives issue their imperative to live in the present and look to the future, it would be instructive to remind them that there is no expiry date on fundamental, universal principles of equality and fairness. Back and as recently as 2010, the Labour Party stated that the persistent inequality of socio-economic status overarches the discrimination or disadvantage that can come from your gender, race or disability. We have made excellent progress on these three categories and rightly so, but it remains the case that class inequality which is 'cumulative over an individual's lifetime' is still carried from one generation to the next.

Slogans issued such as 'we must end poverty now' underestimate the scale of the challenge. The men and women of 1971 understood that. They are worth listening to.

In May 1984, a mini revolution took place in the staid, conservative (and Conservative) capital of Scotland. The local elections that month swept from power the ruling Tories and installed the first ever majority Labour administration on Edinburgh District Council (EDC). Overnight Labour gained 9 seats on the 62-seat council, yielding an overall majority with 34 seats. I was one of the new Labour councillors. This result was a shock to the middle class residents of the New Town - not to mention the city’s business elite, which included the bosses of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland. For Edinburgh’s new governing Labour group were not at all typical of the party’s right wing Scottish establishment.

The able group leader, Alex Wood, was an ex-member of the Militant Tendency while key members of the administration (myself included) were set on following the lead of Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council (GLC) and using a toehold in the state apparatus to introduce radical, pro-working class reforms in the capital. There followed a decade of struggle initiated by the new Labour administration consciously aimed at shifting popular power in the capital to working class communities; at asserting a degree of popular, socialist planning over the city economy, at using the local state to defend women’s rights, and making an intervention in international working class politics by opposing nuclear weapons and offering solidarity to the struggle for black liberation in South Africa.

Under the slogan “Improving services, Creating Jobs” the radical councillors would do more than put an illuminated red star atop the City Chambers every Christmas - though they did that and caused much of Tory Edinburgh to have a collective heart attack. Rents were frozen, a Zero Tolerance campaign was launched against male violence towards women (one that would replicated across the UK), free needles were handed out to limit the new Aids pandemic (a revolutionary move at the time), interventionist popular planning bodies were set up including a Cooperative Development Agency and an Edinburgh version of the GLC’s public enterprise board to impose democratic control of the local economy, Edinburgh was declared a nuclear free zone, and a series of new training initiatives were directed at marginalised sectors of the city’s population, including an agency to train women in the housing schemes in computer skills while simultaneously providing free child care.

EDC also drew explicitly on the work of the Italian Communist Party in using cultural interventions to reinforce working class solidarity and seize back Edinburgh from petty-bourgeois conformity. A new People’s Story museum was set up to celebrate Edinburgh’s working class and radical history. I initiated a Science Festival (the world’s first) to parallel the existing International Festival.  An Edinburgh Hogmanay event was established which became one of the biggest such gatherings anywhere.  The City Art Centre was expanded, and its exhibition policy popularised.  As a result, Edinburgh hosted everything from the very first UK exhibition of artifacts from the Xian Warriors to singer Joni Mitchell showing her paintings (I bagsied taking her to lunch at a local pub).

FIGHTING THATCHERITE AUSTERITY

All this took place against a background of Thatcherite austerity and a rising tide of class struggle, as the first wave of neoliberalism began to dismantle the post-war welfare system. Thatcher came to power in 1979 committed to reducing public spending in general, and council spending in particular. Local authorities that refused to adhere to these spending limits were penalised via cuts to their central government grants, and by surcharging.

The most radical Labour councils responded by refusing to accept spending and rate controls. These included Ken Livingstone’s GLC and Militant-run Liverpool Council. In Scotland, the resistance was more muted due to the dominance of the Labour right, but both Stirling and Edinburgh took part. The rebellious councils on both sides of the border coordinated their activities with a view to forcing the Tory Government to back down. In Edinburgh we orchestrated a big public awareness campaign, including marches and rallies.  (Note this occurred simultaneously with the 1984-85 miners’ strike and was seen as a common struggle to defeat the Thatcher Government).

Ultimately the campaign was defeated. Firstly, the reformist Labour leadership under Neil Kinnock pressured councils to retreat. Second, the trades union bureaucracies argued that local government workers faced a loss of wages if the Tories cut the funding of the rebellious councils. EDC was one of the last holdouts. By 1987, with the miners also crushed, we were forced to retreat. Four councillors (led by Alex Wood) resigned their seats rather than capitulate. The rest of us decided to soldier on rather than hand over to a Tory administration – a difficult decision. Fortunately, the more progressive wing of the Labour group under Mark Lazarowicz was able to retain control. (For his pains, Lazarowicz was blocked from standing for the Scottish Parliament and later exiled to the Labour backbenches at Westminster.)

ZERO TOLERANCE CAMPAIGN

In retrospect, the most influential initiative of the 1984-96 EDC administration was the launch of the Zero Tolerance campaign against male violence to women, which had a lasting UK and international impact. The campaign was the work of the administration’s new Women’s Committee – the first of its kind in Scotland. The idea for the Zero Tolerance project came from the amazing Evelyn Gillan, a young working class and feminist activist who was fulltime campaigns officer in the Woman’s Unit we set up to support the Committee. Sadly, Evelyn died all too young in 2015, but not before spearheading the successful campaign for alcohol pricing in Scotland.

Evelyn conceived the Zero Tolerance campaign together with the documentary photographer and radical feminist Franki Raffles. What made their campaign effective was the use of huge, 48 sheet public billboards. These paired strong, positive images of women (shot by Franki) with shocking statistics about physical and sexual violence against women and children. Before long, other councils across the UK wanted to duplicate the campaign in their own local areas.  Eventually it spread to America and Australia.

POPULAR ECONOMIC PLANNING

There is a difference between a so-called progressive, reformist council administration and one willing to challenge the rule of the marketplace and the law of value. The radical EDC administration sought to use its modicum of control over the local economy to prioritise popular planning initiatives and use municipal land holdings to challenge free market investment flows. In this we copied work already underway at the GLC and later (in a more advanced fashion) by the Workers Party administration in Porto Alegre in Brazil in the 1990s.

The author spent eight years as convener of the EDC Economic Development Committee. During this period, we consciously subverted and circumvented Tory rules limiting capital investment. As a result, at one point, EDC’s capital programme was as great as all other district councils in Scotland put together. To evade spending restrictions, we set up a stand-alone company called by the anodyne title of Edinburgh Development and Investment (EDI).

We gave EDI a large, multi-million-pound loan which it used to purchase council land. This transaction (loan and purchase) was done simultaneously which meant the cash “lent” to EDI was purely fictitious.  The result was that EDI now owned a big land bank against which it could borrow outside the Tory financial controls. This capitalised EDI so it could go on to build factories, houses, training units and the like.

We also used the council’s cash flow as a covert spending fund. Rents received from council commercial properties were deliberately undervalued in budget projections and passed through escrow accounts before being declared formally in the council accounts. This “slush” fund was used to finance capital spending that otherwise would have fallen fowl of Tory controls. This method was used to build the massive Gyle Shopping Centre on the city’s western approaches. A later, reformist Edinburgh administration sold off the Gyle for a cool £122 million.

Our ultimate plan was to put all the revenue-earning public assets of the District and Regional councils (including Lothian Transport, the bus company) into a Common Good Fund, with the profits pooled for public enterprise. This would have safeguarded these assets from a future right-wing administration and created a political lever to direct the city economy in a socialist direction. Alas, as the class struggle diminished, the reformist elements in the local Labour Party came to dominate and these visionary plans were scrapped.

Yet we left behind a new generation of infrastructure including Edinburgh’s conference centre, some innovative housing projects designed by radical young Scottish architects, the new Traverse Theatre; and Edinburgh Park – an advanced business space that secured thousands of jobs for the city. The construction of these projects during the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s created significant construction employment. I still have a press photo of myself lecturing a certain Mrs E. Windsor on socialist economics, at the opening of the Bank of Scotland computer facility at Edinburgh Park. (Incidentally, we funded the creation of the Edinburgh Science Festival by telling Bank of Scotland we would not release the land for their computer HQ unless they forked up £100,000 for the festival.)

In 2007, I tried to interest the first SNP Holyrood administration in these methods of outflanking UK Treasury financial controls. I offered to join a transition team to help explain how to go about it.  Jim Mather (soon to be Enterprise Minister and a friend) was the go-between and seemed enthusiastic.  But weeks went by with no response.  The new SNP Government was now in the hands of the civil service.  I was shunted off to an official advisory body for Scottish business at which John Swinney made fluffy speeches. I gave up in despair. 

BALANCE SHEET

The politics behind the radical EDC of 1984-1996 was a variation of the “red base” theory of the 1970s.  We intended to use our control of a small part of the state to intervene in ways that shifted the balance for forces in favour of the working class. We had no illusions regarding our ability to build islands of socialism inside Thatcher’s Britain. But access to a part of the state apparatus was valuable if used in solidarity with other radical councils, the trades unions and the women’s movement during periods of sharp class struggle (we had all read our Gramsci).

The exemplar of this strategy was the Italian Communist Party and in particular the PCI’s administration in Bologna – I was sent there as an emissary. The capture of the local state as a red base was also practiced in the GLC and by some of the inner London boroughs, now colonised by elements of the 1970s revolutionary left who had grown exasperated by small group politics (myself included). There were mutual visits between EDC and the GLC. In particular, we formed close links with the late Tony Banks, then head of the GLC’s culture committee. Thatcher dissolved the GLC in 1986 which only added to our political isolation in Edinburgh.

Of course, there were tensions inside the EDC group between the old Labour traditionalists and the 1968 revolutionary generation. At a group meeting I once moved to transform the serially incompetent and mismanaged Works Department into an autonomous, self-managed workers cooperative but could only muster two votes in favour. The conservative housing department steadfastly rejected my attempts to import some of the ideas pioneered in Red Bologna, which included turning long-term empty tenement properties into workshops to employ local women.

On the other hand, we had political advantages that are less available now.  A whole generation of young revolutionaries grounded in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s had by this time decided to make the “long march through the institutions” – meaning the Labour party and municipal councils. I can think of half a dozen cadres from the tiny Scottish wing of the International Marxist Group (of which I had been a member) who became Labour councillors, including Charlie Gordon who ended up leader of Glasgow City Council.

Just as important, there was also a leaven of leftist cadre among the council staff. My economic development team on EDC included a Director (Bill Ross) who had been in the Labour Party Young Socialists during its domination by the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League; a head of property who was a leading cadre in the Socialist Workers Party (Ian Wall); and a head of training projects who was a spirited Eurocommunist (Matthew Crighton). As a result, ideology usually triumphed over bureaucratic routine.

I don’t mean to over-promote the success of the Red Edinburgh experiment between 1984 and the mid-1990s.  In retrospect, we were too “commandist” and our attempts at decentralised planning, budgeting and decision-making were inadequate. On the other hand, we played a concrete role in a period of mass resistance to Thatcher.  As the tide of class struggle ebbed it was inevitable the EDC administration would find itself politically marooned - much as the Porto Alegre comrades were to experience a decade later. Yet for a period, we were able to use the council’s land bank and planning powers to develop Edinburgh in ways that were responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens rather than big Capital, thus delaying the victory of neoliberalism in the Scottish capital.  Our interventions on health and on behalf of women had a positive impact on life in Edinburgh felt to this day. And we created a line of resistance to Thatcher that destroyed Tory political hegemony in the capital. It is interesting, in this context, that many of those in the leadership of this generation of Edinburgh Labour councillors moved over to the SNP with the rise of Blairism. That included Alex Wood and myself.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

The Tories abolished EDC in 1996, as part of a major local government reorganisation. Ostensibly this was to reduce bureaucracy, but it effectively eliminated political thorns in their flesh. The Scottish Labour bureaucracy cooperated, bought off by the introduction of bigger personal expenses. A new City of Edinburgh Council emerged, but effectively this was a take-over of the old District by careerist regional councillors.

After a further reorganisation in the early 2000s, the increasingly lacklustre Labour administration in Edinburgh lost power to the Lib Dems – symbolic of the transformation of the capital into a rich, middle class city dominated by academia, tourism, and banking. However, the Edinburgh Lib Dems – far to the right of their English comrades – were booted out following the great trams fiasco that went hundreds of millions over budget. Since then, Edinburgh has been in the hands of a variety of SNP-Labour coalitions, each more subservient to the property developers’ lobby than the last.

The days of a radical, People’s Edinburgh seem long forgotten except for our public art, including Eduardo Paolozz’s wonderful anti-war sculpture or the anti-apartheid piece in Festival Square depicting a mother and child in a South African ghetto. 

But the colonisation of municipal government as a focus for radical politics is being reborn across Europe, especially in France and the Spanish state. Why not in Scotland?

The next Scottish local elections are in 2022.  If there is a lesson to be learned from the EDC experiment of the 1980s it involves how to combine an assault on the local state structures with mass activity on the ground. There is already a wave of grassroots local campaigns in Scotland, aimed at opposing austerity and forcing improvements in working class living standards. For instance, there is the Living Rent movement in Scotland’s major cities, the Get Glasgow Moving campaign to municipalise local bus services, and the refugee support groups that stimulated the marvellous mass mobilisation at Kenmure Street, that forced Police Scotland to release two men detained by the Home Office for deportation. This suggests there is a popular base on which to launch an independent, class struggle united front to contest the 2022 local elections.

One major weakness of the anti-establishment left in Scotland is that it has surrendered contesting the terrain of the state to the SNP and its reformist electoralism.  As a result, Scottish left-wing politics is dominated by a “wait for the SNP to win independence” approach supplemented by the odd demonstration against this or that. But genuine leftist politics requires a permanent assault on state institutions, and the construction of a political pole independent of capital and an uncritical professional political element.

Imagine if, in each of the big Scottish cities, coalitions of existing local campaign groups came together to run candidates in the 2022 elections under the banner of, say, Glasgow Against Austerity, Edinburgh Against Evictions, etc. The aim would be to polarise the elections on genuine local working class issues, not the manifestos of the reformist parties.  Electing even a smattering of radical councillors would transform municipal politics and pave the way, perhaps, for class struggle forces winning a majority at some future election. Such redouts would be invaluable in preventing an indy Scotland under the SNP merely reproducing neoliberalism under another name. And they could provide the democratic launch pads for an entirely new society.

After touching down from his first space adventure, billionaire Jeff Bezos drew substantial backlash when he said the following at the post-flight press conference: “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for this.” Little wonder. Amazon is known for its union busting, low wages, inhumane conditions and exploitative practices. That Bezos rides his rocket into space on the back of an army of low paid workers seems to capture the essence of capitalism. Despite the rhetoric of “building back better” the likes of Bezos have seen their wealth grow throughout the pandemic. American billionaires saw their net worth increase by more than a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, the experience of working-class Americans has been of rising poverty and instability.

Yet Bezos is correct in what he says. It is an often-mystified truth that it is the working class who create wealth, make the products and deliver the services. It is the working class upon which the lives and indulgences of the super-rich are based. And as we have all seen during the last year, it is the working class who keep society going during a crisis. Workers run the food distribution systems, the hospitals and the delivery networks. Now there is a feeling that leverage is on their side – and demands are being made.

As of May of this year, trade union membership in the UK had risen by around 120,000. Between 2015 and today, trade unions have grown at their most sustained rate since the 1970s. New unions and workplace campaigns are appearing too. Deliveroo drivers are organising. Fast food workers in the US are rebelling. Fed Ex workers in France have taken strike action after a derisory pay offer. Spanish steel workers have taken strike action after losing substantial sums of money and cuts to hours during the pandemic while company profits soared. Refuse workers in the UK are fighting – and winning – strike campaigns for better wages. And lorry drivers are planning action too. It would be mistaken to exaggerate. But something is beginning to stir.

It is not just that there has been an up-tick in strikes and union membership. For many, the pandemic has led to a broader re-evaluation of the meaning of work in their lives and about what they expect in return for their labour. Given the high levels of unemployment, you might expect an acquiescence to low pay and conditions. But in lots of ways – and this is a developing process – we are seeing some disruption to this logic.

Rather than a clamour for jobs companies are reporting labour shortages. As the Financial Times reports on the situation in the US: “…companies are desperate to hire staff as continuing fears about the pandemic, a lack of childcare, and a temporary expansion of unemployment benefits have kept many workers on the side-lines. That means people looking for work hold more bargaining power with prospective employers than they have in decades.”

They continue: “Workers are using their newfound leverage to demand higher salaries and to prod employers into hiring and training them for jobs even when they lack experience.”

KFC – an American institution – has been unable to keep up with consumer demand in the country, because they are having to pay higher prices for chicken as suppliers struggle to attract workers. Supply lines are being affected by the pandemic. There are lots of factors involved. In the case of the UK the impact of Covid coincides with a reduction in workers from Brexit. But the overall outcome seems to reinforce the idea that workers have a chance to seize the initiative. As one lorry driver planning on taking action in the UK makes clear: “For far too many years we have been ignored, exploited and taken for granted. Now our time has come, now we have a window of opportunity to be listened to.”

It is a growing sentiment. Unite Hospitality in Scotland has a charter of demands including: a real living wage, an end to zero hours contracts, a proactive sexual harassment policy, 100% tips and notice of rota changes. All of these would help address the often dire experiences of hospitality workers, and their demands are being made at a time when the industry is desperate for staff. Once more, this enhances the power of workers as opposed to the employers.

Meanwhile, nurses in England are resisting the paltry and frankly offensive 3% pay rise announced by the Tories. They enjoy huge public support given their role during the pandemic and are seeking a 15% pay rise. They are starting the process of organising lunchtime protests and a serious fight over pay. Again, there are 100,000 vacancies in NHS England. The question will be posed: how seriously is the government taking this disastrous situation when it can’t commit to paying NHS workers properly?

To what extent, we don’t yet know, but the working-class are re-emerging as a force. The opponents of organised labour are also all too aware of this. They will contend that cuts to social security, a sharp retreat of the state-led pandemic support structures, and a slashing of public health measures will be required to get people back into the system and to ensure that workers don’t get ideas beyond their station.

Economist Larry Elliot rightly contextualises rising trade union membership by saying: “Unions are far less powerful than they were four decades ago; the balance of power in the workplace has shifted in favour of employers through a combination of mass unemployment, curbs on trade unions and welfare reforms designed to ensure that people take low paid jobs.” Yet green shoots are in evidence and – for the time being – structural pressures appear to be to the advantage of workers especially if more militant and sustained forms of action can emerge. A movement of hospitality workers, nurses, lorry drivers, refuse cleaners, unemployed youth and so on could create a powerful front – and not just for better pay. They could provide leadership and vision for society as a whole in the aftermath of the pandemic. It is not coming from anywhere else, least of all the billionaire "astronauts".

If the events of the past year and a half haven’t got you thinking about the importance of ecological catastrophe to the politics of the 21st century, nothing will. Following the pandemic, recent weeks have seen a spate of extreme weather events in North America, Europe and China which reinforce the mood of foreboding. The infrastructure of some of the most advanced economies in the world turned to rubble overnight - no internet, no electricity, no gas, no roads - by the sheer force of rain water alone.

In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century Andreas Malm’s starting point is that while Covid-19 and Climate Breakdown are different in quite fundamental ways, they both have the same root cause: the global circuits of capital that continue to find new lands to churn-up and extract from in the never-ending search for greater profits. The specific processes which release carbon into the atmosphere are well known. In the case of Covid-19, the key process is mass deforestation, destroying wild habitats and disorientating those animals (in this case, almost certainly bats) which can then move to human settlements and shed their viruses, often via another species first (pangolins are in the frame in the case of Covid-19), and from them on to us, in a zoonotic spillover that can lead to an event like the current global pandemic.

Malm argues: “Capital is fastened to ever more land and sucking its contents into circulation at an ever madder pace, and this must, as a general law, result in a high risk of zoonotic pandemics, as one consequence of the ecological havoc caused.”

But there’s more. As the climate breaks down, wild habitats will increasingly become destabilised not only by the direct human intervention of deforestation, but also simply by the floods, heatwaves, droughts and other extreme weather events (as well as general heating) which will accompany our new reality, creating further possibilities for pandemics, at least in the next 30-40 years (after that, so many wild animals could be wiped out as to reduce the possibility of zoonotic spillover). In the last three cases of major zoonotic spillovers - Mers, Sars and Covid-19 - the places they occurred were all suffering from drought conditions at the time.

“The hypothesis here is that the coronaviruses themselves prosper in low humidity,” Malm writes. 

“Like so many others, it has yet to be confirmed, but it should now be evident enough that corona and climate do not form separate, parallel lines. Corona can be an effect of climate; not the other way around. More importantly, the two are interlaced aspects, on different scales of time and space, of what is now one chronic emergency.”

One chronic emergency, but with an enormous divergence in political responses from states across the world. Why the disparity between the extraordinary state responses ot Covid-19 and climate change? Malm devotes the first section of this book to knocking back all suggestions which let the global system of highly uneven power relations off the hook. 

Malm argues that the “timeline of victimhood” is key. Covid only became an emergency when wealthy people in the global north began to suffer. There was no lockdown planned when the virus swept through Iran in February. But by mid-March, Europe was considered by the WHO to be the “epicentre” of the pandemic. And since the super-rich travel most, they were often the ones to be hit first. Boris Johnson and Prince Charles were among the first to be on ventilators. 

“The timeline of victimhood placed rich and poor at opposite ends for corona and climate: in the former case, inducing governments of the North to do the right thing; in the latter, to behave in a manner that can only be called evil,” Malm argues. “Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe.”

Malm was writing this in April 2020, and if you consider the responses from the global north (or perhaps one should say non-responses) to subsequent waves of Covid-19 in the global south, or the breathtaking inequalities in vaccine rollout between the global north and global south, it’s clear that he has a point. European states have all officially declared “climate emergencies”, but they will only act like it’s an emergency when rich westerners are the ones whose lives are in peril.

Given this political logic which steers the decision-making of the establishment, what hope that they will suddenly change course on climate breakdown and dismantle “fossil capital”? Malm draws on the marxist economist James O’Connor’s crisis theory of the second contradiction of capitalism - that the conditions of production (labour and non-human nature) tend to be undermined by capital itself - to argue that it is possible that climate breakdown could create a global crisis for the capitalist system, in the way the pandemic became a major global recession (which Malm calls “the first true O’Connor crisis”).

However, the timescales of such a crisis, and the unevenness with which it is likely to occur, rule it out as a viable means by which irreversible climate breakdown can be prevented. Furthermore, when capitalist states do respond to crisis in an emergency like fashion, that by no means includes tackling anything other than the most immediate and pressing symptoms. There’s nothing in how states around the world have responded to the pandemic which would make one believe that the root causes of zoonotic spillover - capital’s voracious appetite for extraction - is even on the agenda as an issue that must be tackled. Indeed, we have just learned that the Amazon has just become a net emitter of carbon as deforestation continues.

“Fossil fuel extraction in tropical forests combines the drivers of climate change and zoonotic spillover in one bulldozer,” Malm writes.

Given we cannot rely on capitalist states to deliver but we can expect capitalist crises linked to escalating ecological disasters, the ‘what is to be done?’ question is inevitable. The last part of the book is dedicated to developing an answer.

Social democracy and anarchism are quickly dismissed as incapable of rising to the challenge of overhauling the global economy at breakneck speed. Malm finds that social democracy has only ever thrived in periods of capitalist stability, where “time is on our side”. It is difficult to see how such periods are ever coming back, and thus gradualism looks increasingly redundant. 

Anarchism is anti not just the capitalist state, but any state, which is a problem when you need the power of compulsion to prevent people from hacking down rainforests for tree-logging, or any other individual endeavour which in aggregate can wreck a collective plan to prevent ecological catastrophe. Just as some behaviours have been limited during the pandemic, the same requirement for compulsion - levied by an authority which can only have legitimacy as a state - would clearly be essential in any serious effort to address ecological crisis. A state, of some kind, is clearly needed in an emergency.

Which brings Malm back to revolutionary marxism. Malm finds that “the category of catastrophe” was “central” to the development of revolutionary marxism. It can be found as far back as Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto: class conflict ends “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”. Malm quotes extensively from Lenin, Trotsky and Luxembourg, all three of whom never tired of emphasising urgency in the delivery of their programmes. And the more time narrowed, the greater necessity for avoiding the “half-measures”, hated by Lenin and which could fairly describe the climate action of basically all governments across the global north today.

Malm focuses on the Bolshevik policy of “war communism” which was introduced to defeat the ‘White’ counter-revolution ( supported by the imperialist powers) in the civil war of 1918-1921. This is a better metaphor for present day needs, Malm finds, than comparisons with the WWII mobilisation, when the allied side ultimately sought to defend the status quo and was reactive to the threat of fascism.

On the other hand, War Communism sought to radicalise Bolshevik policy on nationalisations and seizure of landed estates, as essential measures in a rapid marshalling of resources towards defeating the Whites. These measures largely eradicated what was left of the old Russian elites. War Communism was a success, but it was also brutal. It involved, among many other harsh measures the militarisation of labour, with workers sent into forests to cut trees as fuel for the state (coal and oil had been almost entirely seized by the Whites).

Of course, Malm is not suggesting militarising labour today, just as no one who uses the WWII mobilisation analogy is suggesting nuking Nagaski and Hiroshima. The War Communism metaphor carries two political purposes: 1) that “the basic make-up must harbour a predisposition for emergency action and an openness to some degree of hard power from the state”, and 2) that it will require political leadership from the centre to bring about the planned economy necessary to overcome climate catastrophe, or as Malm quotes Luxembourg: “Tendencies of capitalist development, at a certain point of their maturity, necessitate the transition to a planful mode of production, consciously organised by the entire working force of society – in order that all of society and human civilisation might not perish”. 

This last point is key for Malm: Leninism has the methodological approach of attacking the roots of a problem: “First, and above all, ecological Leninism means turning the crises of symptoms into crises of the causes.”

Here, Malm is also critical of the present-day radical left, which has largely responded to the pandemic crisis by pointing to the symptoms of the crisis - rising poverty, unemployment, growing inequality - rather than the causes: zoonotic spillover generated by capital’s destruction of wild habitats.

“A left staying in its habitually defined social corner will only be capable of raising demands similar to ‘sea walls for all’ – better palliative action, but palliative,” he writes.

What’s admirable about Malm is, as a long-term climate justice activist, he knows talk of an ecological Leninism and War Communism will be uncomfortable territory for many of the people he has been working with for years, but he’s willing to follow the scale of the challenge to its logical solutions. There is a bravery and intellectual honesty about Malm which is refreshing. That said, there are some important aspects of his ecological Leninism which are suspect.

First, Malm does not answer the all important question of who is the revolutionary agent of our times? The bedrock of the Russian revolution was not the Bolshevik party, it was the soviets, or workers’ councils, which emerged early in the revolutionary process and were spontaneous and not created by the Bolsheviks. The soviets were workplace based power centres, and acted as the foundations for the new state following the Bolshevik-led October revolution. There was a material basis for forging a new state; i.e. it was based on the power of a different class, the workers.

Suffice to say, there is nothing remotely comparable to the soviets anywhere today, and Malm appears to acknowledge this by saying that Lenin’s conception in State and Revolution - of smashing the existing state and creating a new one - is not currently tenable.

“No workers’ state based on soviets will be miraculously born in the night. No dual power of the democratic organs of the proletariat seems likely to materialise anytime soon, if ever. Waiting for it would be both delusional and criminal, and so all we have to work with is the dreary bourgeois state, tethered to the circuits of capital as always,” he says.

Malm’s sense of urgency is perfectly understandable, but how does one transform the “dreary bourgeois state” into a mechanism of War Communism? All Malm has to offer in this regard is the strategies the broad left has been pursuing (usually unsuccessfully) for decades.

“There would have to be popular pressure brought to bear on it, shifting the balance of forces condensed in it, forcing apparatuses to cut the tethers and begin to move…”.

The lack of a class base for War Communism points to a second problem: if an emergency programme reliant on important aspects of compulsion and hard power is to be introduced by a bourgeois state, what is the social force which could stop this becoming a straight-forwardly authoritarian capitalist project? It is not actually impossible to imagine the Chinese state delivering the sort of rapid and huge changes to the economy that are required to seriously reduce emissions at ultra-fast speed, but under the current regime this would be done via a ramping up of the state’s authoritarian control over the populous, intensified worker surveillance, and exploitation.

Malm is acutely aware of the risks in this respect, which he describes as “the dilemma of how to execute control measures in an emergency without trampling on democratic rights, but rather by securing, building on and drawing force from them.” That is a dilemma that is closely tied to class dynamics, most critically between the state and the population at large. 

These weaknesses do not mean Malm’s ecological Leninism should be dismissed. The whole point of War Communism was that it was an emergency plan to stave-off complete disaster, not a route-map to a blissful future. He is right to say that humanity is quickly reaching a point where there are no utopian pathways left; the dreaded tipping points are closing in, and as we cross them soon enough there will be no ‘mass abundance’, which Marx believed to be the material basis for a society free of class division. Ironically, ecological Leninism may be the pragmatic option.

Andreas Malm ‘Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century’, is available from Verso Books.

The Covid-19 pandemic is the worst global public health emergency since the ‘Spanish’ flu that enveloped the world after World War I: a catastrophe following a nightmare. In comparison with the flu’s 50 million victims in a world with a population under 2 billion, the number of deaths due to Covid-19 is small; yet, the pandemic has produced countless tragedies, traumatised the survivors, and triggered the sharpest economic contraction in the history of capitalism. 

The pandemic hit a world already suffering from growing economic imbalances and worsening finance-driven crises, and from the corrosive impact of the ‘Great Stagnation’ that followed the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), starting in 2007. In addition, for many years and with growing intensity since the GFC, global neoliberalism has become reliant on coercion and violence, leading to an escalating crisis of democracy and the rise of overtly authoritarian forms of government. In recent times, these governments have tended to be led by ‘spectacular’ leaders, often supported by mass movements combining modern forms of personality cult with more or less close relationships with traditional far-right currents and groups, with Brazil, India, Hungary, Turkey and the USA under Donald Trump as clear examples. 

These political and policy developments have been closely related to the erosion of the non-market protections that had been achieved by the working class in previous years and phases of capitalism (broadly under the umbrella of the ‘Welfare State’), and the increasingly common deployment of ‘fiscal austerity’ backed up by punishing measures against the poor, the underprivileged, the neglected and those who are hard to reach, serve, and provide for. They have been accompanied by attacks against any form of collective representation; repression against most expressions of dissent, ranging from lynching-by-media to various forms of victimisation, interception of communications and persecution by the police, the security services or the military, as well as the emergence of a myriad of groups aggressively attached to fascism or even nazism. At the same time, and to some extent paradoxically, post-GFC neoliberalism has led to new forms of state economic intervention, often centred around expensive infrastructure. Distinctly from its historical predecessors, these presumably ‘public’ forms of provision almost always take the form of (heavily financialised) support for private enterprise at public expense, and with socialised risk. While even to talk about ‘state provision’, however incorrectly, has helped to change the policy atmosphere even in the USA and the UK, this is far from a symbol of revitalisation of, and much less a return to pre-neoliberal Keynesianism. It is, rather, symptomatic of a desperate attempt by staunchly neoliberal governments to create demand and skilled jobs, fuel economic growth after many years of stagnation, and strengthen the Western economies to contain China. So far, none of this has been either significant enough or transformative enough to mark a shift away from neoliberalism, or even to herald new forms of global economic competition. It remains to be seen if it will change after Covid-19, but the failure of the so-called ‘Biden plan’ to gain traction in the USA does not bode well for the presumed capacity of neoliberalism for self-reinvention in challenging times.

These developments in global neoliberalism are rooted in multiple factors, including severe cracks in its ideological hegemony since the GFC. The notion of ‘free markets’ has been undermined by the growing realisation that neoliberalism has sharply negative distributional and other consequences and that it creates undesirable patterns of employment and social reproduction, with implications for social welfare and much more. The GFC highlighted these adverse implications, as it revealed the costs and consequences of perpetuating a parasitic system of accumulation that veers endlessly between stagnation and destabilising speculative bubbles while, in the meantime, producing a mode of life that is widely considered to be undesirable from the point of view of the majority of people, and unsustainable in view of the imperative of protecting the known forms of life on Earth.

The longer-term picture was similarly concerning. The economic restructuring taking place under neoliberalism was perceived to have created large cohorts of economic ‘losers’: new technologies, financialisation and the ‘globalisation’ of production led to the elimination of entire professions and large numbers of careers, many of them previously stable and well paid; they were often replaced by relatively unskilled, precarious and badly paid jobs, lacking stability, pensions, benefits, promotions prospects and much else. These profound transformations in economic life had adverse implications for tens of millions of people, most dramatically in the advanced capitalist economies. The legitimate concerns that emerged from them could not be articulated clearly and, by and large, demonstrations of dissatisfaction by the ‘losers’ were ignored if not ridiculed by the institutions of the state, established politicians and the mainstream media. Their attitude was facilitated by the destruction of the left in previous stages of neoliberalism: left-wing political parties, trade unions, social movements, community organisations and other forms of political mobilisation and social life were, invariably, the first victims of attack in the transitions to neoliberalism.

The throttling of traditional forms of expression of dissatisfaction fed political alienation and fostered a political vacuum in which opposition tended to be dissolved into anomie, absorbed into the far right, or enraptured by ‘spectacular’ authoritarian neoliberal leaders promising to resolve the problems that the ‘losers’ were unable to confront. The rise to prominence of authoritarian leaders, often peddling nonsensical interpretations of neoliberalism and its consequences, pushing absurd claims to competence, and advancing facile policy options depending upon their own strength of character, was facilitated by a bizarre process of individualisation of the truth under neoliberalism: the cult of ‘consumer choice’, self-improvement, and the erosion of the value of ‘expertise’ – which lost purchase as it denied the experiences of the losers despite the widespread perception of dysfunctionalities and perversities in the world of neoliberalism – fed a growing disregard for science, evidence and established truths. Previously marginal, extreme or frankly ridiculous views found fertile terrain in the echo chambers of social media, and drove shallow but increasingly radical accounts of neoliberalism and its consequences (with ‘flat Earth’, QAnon, anti-vax and related conspiracy theories becoming especially prominent in recent times). These cults merged into the idolatry of authoritarian neoliberal political leaders peddling comforting claims, and whose every trespass would be forgiven because they seemed ‘genuine’ and magically ‘in touch’ with the concerns of large masses of people.

It follows that the political crisis of democracy and the drift towards an increasingly authoritarian form of neoliberalism cannot be reduced to epiphenomenal events or electoral blunders that will be corrected when voters realise that self-centred, thieving and megalomaniac politicians separated from conventional neoliberal ‘expertise’ must always fail, and that their projects ought to be replaced by a (temporarily lost) ‘third wayist’ normality. This will not happen, despite the wishes of the punditry and the whimpers of middle-of-the-road politicians. Instead, the rise of authoritarian modes of governance stems from the economic and social damages inflicted by neoliberalism, followed by the fracture of its ideological legitimacy and the consolidation of a repressive politics of crisis management after the GFC. This form of politics centres on the manipulation of sectional (exclusionary) resentments in order to shore up the system of accumulation by means of permanent strife, escalating repression, high rates of exploitation within and between countries, and the plunder of the resources of the poor, poorer countries, and nature. The underlying social divisions have been contained, channelled and deflected by nationalism, racism and violence, often encased within right-wing, authoritarian and populist political forms. 

The degenerating economic, social and political dynamics outlined above were overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic. At first contact, the pandemic triggered the deepest and sharpest economic collapse in the history of capitalism, which tended to hit especially severely the advanced economies that had been most weakened by several decades of ‘policy reform’ under neoliberalism. This economic shock could be contained only by unprecedented levels of public sector intervention aiming to support production, demand and employment, compensate for the contractionary impact of the inevitable lockdowns, and settle the health and other costs of the pandemic. Those desperate interventions will have long term consequences for the functioning of capitalism. In particular, in addition to disarticulating the global processes of extraction and circulation of surplus value, the pandemic also had profound implications for social reproduction and daily life. They range from unprecedented forms of state intervention to secure the basic economic relations of capitalism, protect public health and maintain order, to changes in urban spaces because of the decline of the high streets, the rise of online shopping and the transformations of the service sector more generally, with much else in between. 

At the global level, countries, states and provinces confronted the pandemic in sharply distinct ways, with strikingly dissimilar outcomes. A heterogeneous group was highly successful largely eliminating the coronavirus, among them; China, Cuba, Ghana, Kerala State in India, New Zealand, Senegal, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Others witnessed extraordinary policy failures culminating in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths, for example, Brazil, Ecuador, Hungary, India, Italy, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the USA. 

In very general terms, the most uncompromisingly neoliberal economies were incapable of mounting coherent policy responses to the pandemic. Instead, several governments attached themselves to (more or less explicit) policies of ‘herd immunity’, an approach replete with social Darwinistic overtones. These states also tended to have been more heavily restructured by the neoliberal ‘reforms’ – that is, institutionally disarticulated, heavily privatised and colonised by piratical syndicates committed to plunder rather than management. It is unsurprising that these states found it difficult to gauge the threat, reach decisions in the interests of the majority, mobilise state capacities in the interests of public health, or implement co-ordinated policies to address the pandemic. In contrast, in places where neoliberal ideology was less influential and the ‘reforms’ of the state, industry and health provision were less advanced, notions of common citizenship tended to be more prominent, welfare states were stronger, and health systems were generally more comprehensive and resilient. Those states also tended to have more policy space to deploy better co-ordinated policies. They often could suppress the coronavirus and resume ‘normal’ life faster and with much lower casualties; however, the failures elsewhere would force the ‘successful’ states to keep themselves isolated from the world in order to avoid importing new cases of Covid-19.

The experiences of policy success and failure addressing the pandemic suggest six significant lessons.

First, neoliberal states can be highly efficient protecting profits and the interests of the privileged, and they have learned the art of rescuing finance from its self-inflicted disasters. However, these states have great difficulty performing other functions of governance, especially protecting the population from the ravages of misfortune, and securing jobs, incomes and basic services for the vast majority. The pandemic shows that this must be done not only for reasons of justice and distributive economic policy; this is also important for effective health policies, since security of employment and income will make the population healthier and, in the event of a pandemic, they will allow more people to stay at home, easing the load on the health system and accelerating the economic recovery. Costs should be no obstacle: since the authorities have been able to provide hundreds of billions to banks, hedge funds and large corporations time and again, they can certainly support the vulnerable and fund a resilient and universal health system, if there is political will to do so.

Second, the more that neoliberal ideologues and policymakers had reconstructed the state along neoliberal lines, and the more they had enforced the marketisation of social reproduction, the lower was the capacity of these states to mobilise resources and expertise to respond to emergencies. This limitation was strikingly obvious in what may be called the ‘Quartet of Calamity’ (USA, UK, Brazil and India). 

Third, there is no trade off between health and the economy. That is, the claim that countries must choose a position along a purported continuum between lockdown (ensuring minimal loss of life in the short term but carrying heavy economic costs) and ‘herd immunity’ (with the opposite balance of costs and benefits) is a misleading guide to public policy. What has been proven, instead, is that the economy cannot function if the population is either insecure or unhealthy. Experience also shows that the countries that resisted lockdowns and flirted with ‘herd immunity’ tended to suffer the largest human disasters as well as the deepest economic collapses. These outcomes reinforce the significance of integrated public policy, state capacity and a strong manufacturing base, in contrast with the systematic depredation of the economy and the public sector under neoliberalism.

Fourth, it was possible to eliminate the coronavirus in many different ways. In particular, the supposed trade-off between democracy and effective combat against the virus was false, because countries have performed more or less well depending on their state capacity and public policies, rather than their political regimes. Since it was possible to combat the pandemic successfully in a democratic framework (viz. Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand), the widespread escalation of authoritarianism in the wake of Covid-19 was a travesty: the primary goal of surveillance, tracking, repression and the politics of command was not the implementation of appropriate health policies. Instead, the goals were to disguise policy failures in the short term and validate social control in the longer term. In contrast, the experiences of success did not depend primarily on repression, but on distinct combinations of state capacity, purposeful, centralised and co-ordinated action, economic resources, technology, testing, tracing, capillarity of health systems and social control. These are the features of successful industrial policy, applied to the field of public health. In contrast, the ‘failed’ states tended to be disorganised, disarticulated and to have been more radically restructured by the neoliberal ‘reforms’, as well as having deindustrialised drastically, fragmented their own supply chains in the name of ‘globalisation’, embedded ‘competition’ into their health systems, acted late and unwillingly against Covid-19, failed to test or trace the virus, imposed lockdowns late and reluctantly, and lacked PPE, ICU beds and ventilators. This is, then, a pandemic with neoliberal characteristics, in which the impositions of neoliberalism were directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Fifth, the pandemic revealed starkly how the neoliberal cult of competition and maximisation had fed nationalism and racism, debased science, and interacted closely with the individualisation of the truth. This is especially corrosive, because if truth is open to ‘choice’ there will be no possibility of dialogue between people with different viewpoints – this is the collapse of the possibility of democracy, because of a surfeit of neoliberal individualism.

Sixth, the economic burden of Covid-19 will be much higher than that of the GFC. Most governments, especially in the advanced Western economies, spent huge sums during the pandemic, in addition to lowering interest rates whenever this was possible (given the exceptionally low rates already prevailing for a decade). Many governments expressed their intention to cover those costs by shifting to a ‘new fiscal austerity’ as soon as possible, but this would be untenable. Fiscal austerity is unjustifiable in economic terms, and it will be widely seen as illegitimate given the boost to wealth due to government support to the asset markets. It is also impossible for the poor and the remaining public services to bear the burden of another round of ‘adjustment’. Austerity policies could be imposed only by force, and these policies, their regressive implications, and the repression that must accompany them will undermine the legitimacy of the state and damage the mass base of any government. These limitations suggest the likelihood of a long period of crisis politics with unpredictable consequences.

From the point of view of the left, the strains of the pandemic have shown that the economy is a social system characterised by strong interdependencies (‘we are the economy’), that we are bound together as humans, and that the universal provision of basic services is far more efficient than privatised, for-profit and fragmented supply. It follows that it is incumbent upon the state to secure access to universal basic services, jobs and incomes, opening the way to the transformation of dysfunctional (but highly profitable) essential sectors into public utilities. This can give a decisive contribution to the democratisation and definancialisation of the economy and the transformation of the crises in neoliberalism into a crisis of neoliberalism. It has also been shown that responses to the current economic, political and health crises in neoliberalism (not to speak of the crises in the environment, water, food production and so on, that also have neoliberal features) must be based on internationalist values, since only global solutions can be effective in an integrated world: we truly are ‘in it together’. This approach can pave the way for a politics of humanity and hope, organised around the defining concerns of the left with equality, collectivity, and economic and political democracy, against (a, by now, clearly zombie form of) neoliberalism. Our future hangs in the balance, and only left activity can secure a life worth living.

Alfredo Saad-Filho is Professor of Political Economy and International Development in the Department of International Development.

Leading Marxist figures have always taken for granted that they must provide a clear analysis of the nation state in which they operate in order to chart the way forward. Marx and Engels charted that with their writings on both Germany and Britain. Lenin and Trotsky did the same in regards to Russia, and Gramsci Italy. 

One of the weaknesses of socialist theory in Britain can be said to be the lack of such analysis in recent years in regards to the British and English state and its elite. An exception to that has been Perry Anderson of the New Left Review. He has written on this subject repeatedly over six decades and whether you agree or disagree with him he not just deserves respect but praise for addressing a shortcoming of the left within the British state.

In the 1980’s there was something of a debate about Anderson’s analysis, unfortunately broken off and not resumed in any substantial way. Historical Materialism has just posted a challenge presented to Anderson by the  Northern Marxist Historians’ Group in 1987 which Conter is happy to share because we believe socialists in Scotland need to understand the way capitalism developed in England, how what became the UK state was established and how it differs from its rivals. In other words we need to know our enemy. Consequently its an issue to which we shall return.

Read the full exchange on the Historical Materialism site here

In response to a civic petition signed by thousands, last week Toronto city council passed a staff report recommending the changing of Dundas Street and other civic assets with the Dundas name by a 17 to 7 vote. 

Removing Henry Dundas’ name is unambiguously a positive step and long overdue. Dundas’ views and actions are rightfully coming under scrutiny, and not only with the benefit of hindsight. He was an arch reactionary who opposed democratic reforms and helped extend the slave trade. He was a man who was despised in his own time.

Reframing history

The wave of Black Lives Matter protests last year and the recent discovery (or confirmation) of mass graves of Indigenous youths found in residential “schools” has provoked a necessary reevaluation of historical figures and events that dot our present landscape. Many of the streets, parks, statues, squares and towns in this country are named after white supremacists, colonizers and villainous reactionaries.

When it comes to reassessing historical figures and events there is an argument that goes something like this: sure, their actions and views seem abhorrent now, but we have to put their actions and views in the context of the time. We can’t judge people and history using today’s standards and views–or so the argument goes–because judgement has to be put in historical context. 

But the reality is that many of these odious figures who our towns and streets are named after were just as much villains then as they are now. Historical context is the context in which history is written and that is, and always will be, contested terrain. The fact that for so long figures such as Dundas, Amherst, Simcoe and Macdonald had their ghastly views and crimes airbrushed speaks to the pervasiveness and ongoing nature of white supremacy and colonialism.     

Correcting the historical record to reflect experiences, views and collective struggles of workers, the oppressed and those fighting injustice is just as much about asserting the primacy of those struggles now as it is about providing a more realistic appraisal of events and figures of the past. When we scratch just beneath the sanitized history of these figures it is not too difficult to see that they were just as reviled and odious then as they are now.      

Dundas and slavery

Dundas’ views and actions are not just abhorrent by modern standards, they were challenged and opposed in his own time.

Henry Dundas was an influential Scottish politician who played a central role in opposing the end of the slave trade. As Home Secretary he used his considerable influence to repeatedly forestall efforts to abolish the slave trade. He outmanoeuvred the abolitionist William Wilberforce’s attempts to pass the immediate abolition of slavery. Dundas instead proposed a compromise solution of gradual abolition of the slave trade, over a number of years. 

Dundas was keen to extend the slave trade to advance the British’s state’s economic and military interest in the West Indies as well as help his powerful allies in the slave trade and shipping industries. Between 1792, when Dundas delayed the first abolition bill, to the eventual abolition of slavery in 1807, some 630,000 African people were transported into British (and Canadian) chattel slavery. In 1793 the colony of Upper Canada honoured Dundas by naming a street after him, and for two centuries it has commemorated this proponent of slavery. 

Dundas was not simply a delayer of abolition but also oversaw the purchasing of over 13,000 slaves, to serve in the West India Regiments. As Home Secretary and Secretary at War (following Yonge), Dundas was in charge of the British campaign to put down the slave uprising in Saint Domingue (now Haiti). The British state wanted to protect its financial interests in slavery in Jamaica, and feared the impact of Black liberation on its colonial empire. But the Haitian revolution defeated the British and they finally withdrew in 1798, though not before 40,000 British soldiers and countless thousands of Haitians were killed. 

In Scotland, where Dundas was from, the abolition movement had strong roots. Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass and other prominent activists toured Scotland as part of the abolition circuit. While the Scottish ruling class supported slavery there was wide sympathy for abolition among labouring Scots, who formed numerous abolition societies throughout the country.     

Dundas, a counterrevolutionary   

The height of Dundas’ power and influence in the British empire coincided with a period of revolutionary upheaval. Dundas, like many in the British ruling class, was horrified by the French and Haitian revolutions, seeing them as existential threats to the British empire and ruling class.

While Dundas and other elites were haunted by revolution, the masses were sympathetic. In Scotland, the French revolution’s democratic impulse struck a chord with the common people. Dundas, who essentially ruled Scotland by controlling 36 out of 45 parliamentary seats, was seen as an authoritarian and corrupt figure referred to as ‘King Henry IX’. 

In the wake of the meeting of the Estates General in May 1789, the first stirring of the French revolution, Henry Dundas urged the government to ban seditious pamphlets and meetings. But in early June the residents of Edinburgh marked the occasion of King George III’s birthday with three days of rioting that featured the burning of an effigy of ‘King Henry IX’. The authorities suppressed the protests, killing and wounding several people, but the protest spread throughout the towns and villages of Scotland. As did the burning of effigies of Henry Dundas.   

As the French revolution spread and radicalized in the early 1790s, its appeal grew in the highly undemocratic Scotland, where only a small minority (large property-owning men) had the vote. Another large pro-democracy demonstration greeted George III’s birthday in Edinburgh in 1792. This protest was suppressed violently and turned into two days of rioting, where mobs had again burned a large effigy of Henry Dundas and attacked his mother’s house. 

The pro-French revolutionary clubs that dotted Scotland were eventually organized into the Scottish Friends of the People that maintained regular contact with French revolutionaries as well as radicals from Ireland and England. Throughout 1792 the protests against the government and Henry Dundas escalated and spread. Dundas’ effigy was routinely burned and defiled in ever-increasingly creative ways: it was hanged on a gibbet in Scone, blown-up with gunpowder in Perth and put on trial and hanged in Crieff. Politicians who dared to defend Dundas and Pitt the Younger were threatened with the guillotine. 

When the Tory government of Pitt the Younger and Dundas decided to wage war on revolutionary France in the wake of the execution of King Louis XVI, they used this as an excuse to violently crackdown on radicals at home. Dundas crushed dissent at home and extend the slave trade abroad. This won him many allies and friends amongst the British ruling class, who in turn honoured him by naming towns, cities, roads, squares and parks after hime. But even these favours and friends could not save him from his own naked corruption of pocketing naval funds, which ultimately led to his resignation.

Ditching Dundas

Renaming our streets, towns and public spaces that bear his name are not about rewriting history, they are about coming to terms with it. Some like John Ralston Saul think that Dundas’s name should be changed because he doesn’t reflect Canada’s values. But the truth is, he does. And he is not the only one: as the city of Toronto report noted, “Staff are aware of approximately 60 other street names, primarily small local roads, which could require further examination, including at least 12 streets named after slave owners.” Dundas perfectly represents the white supremacy and colonial outlook upon which Canada was founded, and how the Canadian state acts to this day. 

But there is another side to Dundas’ legacy, and that is he was hated in his own time. He was widely seen by the people of Scotland as corrupt, pro-slavery and anti-democratic. Ditching Dundas is less about rewriting the historical record and more about rediscovering it. It is about centering Indigenous peoples resisting colonialism, enslaved Africans fighting for abolition, Haitian and French revolutionaries fighting for a better world, and Scottish weavers and farmers fighting for democracy.  

Perhaps, if we really want to honour the historical record we should place a statue of Dundas being burned in effigy by the Scottish masses at the former Yonge-Dundas square.

When WikiLeaks posted transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s private Wall Street speeches, she noted that both a public and private position must be taken in politics. This approach has been fully absorbed by the Labour Party: in the 1990s Tony Blair modeled himself after Bill Clinton’s presidency; Keir Starmer has adopted the public/private dichotomy in a bid to win over English voters; and in Scotland, Anas Sarwar has come to represent the unassuming tartan variant of the right-wing of the Democratic Party.

During the collapse of the Corbyn project, Richard Leonard’s leadership of Scottish Labour seemed to be the final hurdle standing in the way of another New Labour takeover. Jackie Baillie had already been elected deputy leader, and Starmer’s ascension to leader of the UK party put everything in place for a Scottish counterpart to be knighted. Monica Lennon’s soft left campaign, while rooted in practical concerns, was insufficient to beat Sarwar in a leadership race. Scottish Labour had learned its lesson: the game of policy was far less important than the game of image management, apparently. His successful leadership campaign saw Biden aide Mae Dobbs hired to head up digital strategy, not an inconsequential decision in an age of pandemic-restricted campaigning.

Searching for answers in the US is emblematic of the exhaustion of Labourism and the direction the British state is taking after Brexit. The push and pull between a fantastical image of social democratic Europe and a laissez-faire America now frames UK politics. But the American model still requires a veneer of public consent and necessitates a wider buy-in. Through this process, platitudes and a co-optation of language have become weaponised.

The Democrats branded themselves as the party of social and racial justice in the last election. This rhetoric tipped the hat to people’s anger towards injustice, while maintaining the neoliberal hegemony that generates injustices. In other words, hearing the pain became a tool to placate a desire for change.

In Scotland identity politics had already been co-opted by several Holyrood parties, and the labour movement has deeper roots, so this was not the best path for Sarwar’s New Labour 2.0. The co-optation of language had to come from traditional Labour values. Instead of policy announcements, the focus was on paying lip service to the solidarity that brought many to the Labour Party in the first place. Sarwar was a “proud socialist” in interviews, twisting the word to fit his worldview. “Socialism can mean we create the right framework for a thriving private sector”, he told an interviewer.

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up and see the only socialist who wants socialism for the benefit of the private sector.

From Washington to Holyrood

Sarwar, newly minted as leader, was immediately thrust into the 2021 election campaign. The strategy was clear: define Sarwar as a personality. His new position as head of the Scottish party became the focal point of Labour’s campaign. The strategy resulted in relatively strong leadership polls but unexciting results, with a lost seat and no demonstrable change in support from the previous election. But the final vote tally could easily be blamed on previous leaders, and were hastily swept under the rug.

But a calculating media-driven leader should thrive during elections. In the blitz of a campaign, its easy to hide behind soundbites, with occasional obligatory nods to past ideals when pressed. Perhaps the most transparent attempt at public relations management was the “gatecrashing” of a children’s dance class. The source video, filmed on a camera phone, gives the impression of an impromptu gag that just happened to be recorded. The song, “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars, is universally recognizable, and a “cool” cultural symbol to latch onto. This was all remarkably reminiscent of Biden playing “Despacito” from his phone in an “off the cuff” act designed to appeal to Latino voters. Both acts featured a calculated spontaneity, meticulously choreographed in campaign HQs to prove their candidates were in fact human.

The adoption of American political strategy by Labour has been a recent topic of debate, with ex-Lib Dem leader Vince Cable and various establishment journalists making the assertion that Labour’s electoral success will hinge on building a progressive coalition much like Biden’s. So far, however, the “progressive coalition” under Biden has been nothing but smoke and mirrors. Basic demands like the $15 minimum wage failed to be included in the Covid stimulus bill, due to the bargaining of right-wing democratic senators like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Meanwhile the Congressional Progressive Caucus were unassertive, allowing the right’s agenda to win out.

Any sort of coalition in the UK or Scotland will inevitably experience the same diversionary tactics from the right. If the left is to work with the right, it must be in areas where the left refuses to stray from its position. Biden’s strategy towards the left has resulted in progressives giving up on implementing their policy goals in favour of recognition. Biden has managed to placate elected progressives with meaningless task forces and pats on the head. This capitulation to liberalism has been disheartening, but is not unexpected, given the pull of the Washington machine. Scottish and UK Labour don’t have the advantage of government power, but the US nevertheless offers concrete lessons in the necessity of demanding accountability rather than recognition.

Mobilization or Surface Level Makeover?

Corbyn’s project aimed to bring disenfranchised people back into the political process. The Sarwar project, conversely, is predicated on appealing to registered voters whose interest in politics is superficial at best. This was evident in Sarwar’s media appearances as well as his reactions to contemporary issues, which were reminiscent of Biden’s courtship of wavering suburbanites in the US election.

Whenever independence is brought up, Sarwar aims his rhetoric at individuals who haven’t considered the nuances of the topic, but who are fed up with hearing about it. In each debate he refused to take a position, writing off independence as one of the “old arguments”. To a certain comfortable subsection of voters, this might seem appealing. To others, it comes across as patronising and gives the impression that he’s above issues people care about. This was Sarwar’s public stance during the election campaign.

Behind the scenes, however, Sarwar held talks with outgoing Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie, discussing how to curb the momentum for independence. This informal alliance may be an attempt to survive, one last attempt to carve out a future that results in neither independence nor the Tories becoming the default preference of anti-SNP voters. But this is centrism bereft of ideas; a cry of confusion at what lane could be occupied.

Is the Mask Slipping?

When running against Richard Leonard in 2017, Sarwar refuted criticisms by painting himself as an anti-establishment candidate. Followed up later by Starmer’s “I’m still a socialist” rhetoric, it illustrates an obfuscation of the reality we live in. When a façade becomes the object of meaning, it contributes to a post-modern elimination of material reality. When Labour, the supposed representatives of working people, wear the mask of platitudes the ultimate result is the undermining of the working class. It is an exercise that contributes to the erosion of the traditional worker, where a political identity is stripped and replaced with the precarious trust that Labour leaders will work in their best interests.

Unfortunately, outside of Scotland many members of the left commentariat have fallen for Sarwar’s surface charms. Novara Media founder Aaron Bastani was quick to accept a snapshot impression of Sarwar, vicariously using him as a weapon to beat up on his main target Keir Starmer. Bastani didn’t cite political reasons for his preference for Sarwar over Starmer, just that he was a better ‘frontperson’. This invokes the danger of legitimising Sarwar’s amorphous leadership style.

Sarwar can’t hide in the whirlwind of election fever as the day-to-day process of politics plays out. Like a presidential candidate, he can’t bow out until after the next election. He will have to take hard political positions if he is to have any chance of stopping his party from atrophying further. The spotlight of leader tends to leave no stone unturned, and without a policy anchor he may just see his party in permanent decay.

Going forward, this balance of public and private will be harder to maintain. As Starmer struggles to gain steam, so too will Sarwar. The myriad of issues within Labour are too mountainous for any leader to fix, and the problems are further cemented when the current leadership is so formless. In England Labour will continue to enjoy the privilege of being the default choice of anyone opposed to the Conservatives, but that ship has sailed with Scottish Labour. Scotland has left them behind, and plastering affirmative language like “Bold and Ambitious” on campaign materials won’t change that. They are now a non-entity, left to rot as an artifact and former friend of working people. All good will has run out.

Seeking to ride a wave of patriotic feeling around the English national team’s Euro 2020 run, whilst simultaneously denouncing that team from a culture war angle, displays remarkable hubris.

Overconfidence has clearly built-up in Tory circles in the last two years following the 2019 victory, the disarray of Labour and the mood of national solidarity that developed at the height of the pandemic. In recent days the government seem to have misjudged the public mood at a sensitive time in England. One doesn’t need to be very sensitive to notice a mood of euphoria at the end of lockdown measures, which have mixed with the frustrated joy of England’s near miss at a trophy. Apparently, the England team refused to meet Johnson for the traditional reception, feeling they were made a target of enmity by government ministers who criticised them for ‘taking the knee’.

It’s a reminder that so much of the Conservatives’ hegemony depends on the weakness of the official parliamentary opposition, headed by Keir Starmer, who has remained invisible throughout this episode, as so many.

The retreat of social democracy is structural to British politics today, as it is across large parts of Europe. In England, this has seen the Tories transfigure the electoral landscape, robbing Labour of its traditional stores of voting power in the North and Midlands.

The novelty of this situation means we don’t know how well it can be maintained, or the extent of the schisms it may open up in the Tory party. Tom Hazeldine has touched on these questions for the New Left Review blog Sidecar:

“Whether society is as pacified as the current Westminster scene would suggest, beyond party-political disagreements over the schedule for final lockdown easing, is another question. The Conservatives lost the safe Home Counties seat of Chesham and Amersham on 17 June on a huge swing to the Liberal Democrats, having earlier taken Hartlepool from Labour by a similar magnitude. But see-saw byelection results aren’t necessarily destabilising in the aggregate.

“‘Are provincial gains for the long-term? Probably. Can the party hold on to at least most of the affluent South? Definitely’, argues James Frayne, an associate of the Prime Minister’s former advisor Dominic Cummings, writing in the Telegraph. He urges Johnson to hold his nerve and persist with the Vote Leave-derived electoral pivot to working-class voters in the Midlands and the North, although they should dial down the rhetoric – ‘provincial voters doubt “levelling up” could ever happen; affluent Southern voters think they will be fleeced to pay for revolution’.”

In Scotland, the SNP’s hegemony is also predicated on the collapse of Labour and the rise of the national question, but they dynamics are different. Scotland’s national team didn’t ‘take the knee’ (except, tellingly, when playing against England), despite there being blanket political sanction. Little pressure formed around this matter and none of it against the government.

But in recent days the Scottish Government too has been caught overreaching its very considerable political dominance. Following revelations from the SNP party treasurer that ‘ring-fenced’ independence campaign funds (some of them raised from party members, others from the wider independence movement, all on false pretences) had been spent on routine party activities, Police Scotland launched a formal investigation.

Meanwhile the Scottish Government launched yet another advisory group, this time attached to a 10 year “National Strategy” to “unleash entrepreneurial potential and grow Scotland’s competitive business base”. It’s make up is as big business and establishment as that sounds, with the selection of Nick McPherson – a former senior British state official and one-time anti-independence doyen – attracting much attention.

The new advisory group was followed by revelations published by The Ferret that almost a third of Scotland’s largest windfarms are owned by tax avoiders, and that 39 of the largest 50 were owned abroad. This is no mistake, it confirms the model of development established by the Scottish Government itself with its green investment portfolio, which was the product of the last ultra-elite advisory group.

The strange thing about all this is that it is so unnecessary (perhaps not the disappearance of the independence campaign funds – which were apparently necessary to make ends meet). In the recent Scottish elections, the SNP leadership spun any amount of outright nonsense about “four day weeks” and a “National Care Service” which will be purely ethereal when it emerges years from now.

Talking left and walking right is a trick they have perfected. But here they are vaunting entrepreneurship and business competition as the UK economic consensus shifts in a state-interventionist direction.

Both sides of the border, it seems, political leaderships suspended in mid-air by their own successes are losing touch.

Introduction 

Ballot papers for the election of the next General Secretary of the Unite union, one of the two biggest unions in Britain, have arrived through people’s doors this week. 

With recent union elections returning right wing candidates in both the GMB and UNISON, the battle over who leads Unite is an important one for the whole left. If the right wing candidate, Gerard Coyne, wins, it will be a boost not only to the right of the union but the right of the Labour Party and wider movement. 

But this election is about more than the internal battles within the Labour Party. Trade unions such as Unite, with over a million members and huge potential industrial power, are significant in their own right.

The truth is that all major unions, including Unite, failed to fight the devastating attacks on jobs, wages, terms and conditions during the austerity years. Now we are struggling to cope with yet another assault on terms and conditions as employers take advantage of the pandemic. For example, more than 10% of workers were threatened by ‘fire and rehire’ at the start of lockdown. 

Following decades of defeat, the labour movement has retreated from many former ‘heartlands’ and struggles to be relevant in significant parts of the economy.  Many activists don’t start from the internal factions in the union or Labour Party, but from struggles in the workplace. 

We need to start by recognising how the movement is failing millions of working class people. Then we can begin to effectively deal with the problems we face in the workplace and work out how these issues relate to the wider movement.

Last time the right nearly won

Despite offering nothing positive in his campaign, the right wing candidate Gerard Coyne came close to causing an upset in the last General Secretary election in 2017. 

Incumbent Len McCluskey had 1,185 branch nominations versus 187 for Coyne, indicating that Coyne would get far fewer votes than McCluskey. But in the end, McCluskey only narrowly won with 45.5% of the final vote, with 41.3% for Coyne. A third candidate, the rank and file socialist Ian Allinson got 13.1% and was accused of splitting the left vote. 

But the shock result in 2017 shows how the number of nominations can have little bearing on the actual result, and that widespread malaise over the Unite leadership can be capitalised on by the right if the left are seen to be the gatekeepers of the status quo. 

Coyne’s campaign 

During the last election, Coyne breached data protection laws, launched a campaign of smears against Unite and Len McCluskey; failed to distance himself from support from the racist English Defence League and campaigned using the anti trade union Sun tabloid. 

To distract from his disgraceful campaign, Coyne brought a litany of charges against Unite following his defeat and dismissal from the union. Despite several costly attempts to present these charges against Unite, not a single one of his cases, at the employment tribunal, with the Certification Officer or the Information Commissioner was successful. 

They were all thrown out. The appeal judge also reported in his findings that Coyne had conducted an improper campaign with an abundance of personal attacks and had breached data laws and election rules. Having stood on a campaign of ‘cleaning up’ Unite, Coyne was sacked for the misuse of data during his election campaign.  While all of Coyne’s claims were widely trailed in the press, the judge’s findings were quietly ignored. 

Despite claims of wanting to remain distant from bitter internal Labour Party faction fights, Coyne was being backed by Tom Watson to help undermine Unite’s support for Jeremy Corbyn. Today, arch Blairite Peter Mandelson is suggesting that Coyne is the only candidate who can save Unite. 

However, whilst Coyne poses a serious right wing threat, he is honing in on legitimate concerns such as the cost of the Unite Birmingham Conference Centre. As if he possesses some sort of moral gravitas, he’s suggested that the centre was “an appalling waste of members’ money”. However, during his 17 year tenure as West Midlands Regional Secretary, Coyne raised no objections to the planned development. Coyne presided over all of the issues he is now complaining about – decline in membership numbers, opaque transactions, lack of democracy, lack of industrial strategy and so on. 

Coyne is thoroughly discredited and unfit to run Unite. So we have to ask ourselves, how is it that someone as disreputable as Coyne can stand for election and get on the ballot paper? To answer this means facing up to some uncomfortable truths.

Problems in Unite

Working class communities have been fractured by more than four decades of neoliberal restructuring. Workers collectivity and solidarity has been undermined and our lived experience is more atomised than at any point in living memory.  Now our lives are being upended again. The pandemic is being used to force through huge changes to how we live and work together. Government and employers are making changes to create an employers  ‘new normal’. To defend our jobs, communities and standard of living we need a radical change in direction in the labour movement. 

The approaches and structures that weren’t fit for purpose to fight austerity haven’t suddenly become appropriate today. 

Unite has been led by the left since its inception in 2007 and It has supported and helped finance many of the major social movements against war, austerity and racism. 

Once Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, Unite and Len McCluskey in particular backed him against the right. It’s fair to argue that without this support Corbyn wouldn’t have survived as long as he did. So for those of us on the left, Unite’s position on the left in the labour movement is important. And clearly, this makes Unite a target for the right.

But support for policy positions and campaigns has rarely moved beyond the executive or the conference hall in Unite. Many of our positive policies aren’t carried through the union to the grassroots and the support for the left is broad but shallow. Only a small layer of lay activists are aware of these positions and a smaller number actively support them. This makes these positions and policies vulnerable to attack, as many members have no knowledge of positions taken on their behalf, let alone support them.

Despite being one of the largest unions in Britain representing members across the private, public and third sectors of the economy, Unite has failed to lead any determined attempt to organise and lead concerted industrial action across any sector. Taking positive political positions and supporting important political campaigns doesn’t detract from these failings. 

Unite’s current structures belong to a bygone era that was appropriate for dealing with single site local employers. They are not fit for the modern world where members face multi-site and transnational employers. The majority of the power and resources in Unite lie within the regions, meaning we have a dysfunctional relationship between regions and national sectors. This structure hinders us when we want to organise or coordinate action against a single employer or across a sector that spans different regions. Where coordinated and effective action has been organised it’s largely been done independently by rank and file activists like those in construction who defeated the hated BESNA changes to terms and conditions in 2012 and in recent weeks the attempt to deskill electricians.

The mismatch between those structures and the industrial reality today also encourages a situation where key decisions are taken away from our democratic structures reinforcing a top-down culture that minimises membership participation which is the key to building workplace power. If we are to successfully rebuild we need to re-engage with existing members, rebuild in those areas we’ve lost and organise in the new sectors. To achieve this we need to develop a strategy with appropriate structures that encourage mass participation.

Deal on the Left

With the very real threat of Gerard Coyne, pressure has grown around the need for the left to unite behind a single candidate. 

Howard Beckett, one of the original left candidates, has fallen in behind Steve Turner, who is the candidate of the United Left (UL), the official left in Unite who also has the most branch nominations. Many are surprised at this move and a substantial number of his supporters are disgusted by it. Whatever, the personal and political disagreements between both Turner and Beckett, what many fail to grasp is what they substantially agree on. They both have very similar visions for the union – defending the ossified power structures and despite the claims to want change, they both have in their many years in office maintained the status quo. 

A joint statement reveals that Turner has pledged to implement a ‘blended manifesto’ if elected. This means he has agreed to support Beckett’s Unite TV initiative, giving each region and nation a studio from which to broadcast on YouTube. The ‘blended manifesto’ remains unpublished and it is difficult to imagine how they can reconcile significant differences over Unites relationship with Labour. We do know that this alliance will give more power to the regions which will further Balkanise the union, exacerbating existing difficulties for activists organising across their companies and sectors. 

Even if they win the election this agreement is a recipe for further decline which will only create yet more opportunities for the right to feed off the growing discontent with the left leadership of Unite. 

Steve Turner

So what about the two competing left candidates, Steve Turner and Sharon Graham? 

Steve Turner has been an Assistant General Secretary (AGS) of Unite for many years with responsibility for manufacturing. On his watch we’ve seen the continued decline in jobs and membership. Turner prides himself in his relationships at Westminster. In a recent interview he’s quoted as saying, “It’s looking someone in the eye, just sitting down and having a straight conversation. People talk about ‘beer and sandwiches’, but that’s where a lot of our business is done, in the evenings, in a coffee shop somewhere, just having that break and building a relationship. Because a lot of this is about trust – believing that people are being straight with you and being confident in the person that you’re negotiating with, for them and us.” This approach underpins partnership, the idea that all sides have shared interests in reaching agreement. Partnership has been disastrous for our movement. The idea that we all have shared interests undermines the independence of trade union organisation.

Turner’s belief that compromise is not a dirty word, and that engagement is better than confrontation, means that his focus is on reaching deals, not fighting for workers’ interests first and foremost. For example, Turner recently joined with a small group of union officials – the TUC’s Frances O’Grady and Kate Bell, and Prospect’s Mike Clancy to meet Rishi Sunak and Treasury officials to help draft the furlough policy.

On the deal, Turner said, “People need to know this wasn’t a gift from government.” The furlough scheme has protected millions of workers from the ravages of unemployment but it’s also protected the Tories from the unpredictable consequences of millions of workers and their families being turfed out onto the street.  The involvement of Turner and other leading trade unionists no doubt helped secure a better package for workers.  

Some of Turner’s supporters have claimed credit for Furlough, but the truth is that there was no public pressure from Unite on the Tories to implement it. 

In fact, trade union involvement in the negotiations must be one of the best kept secrets of the pandemic. Because these negotiations were conducted in secret – most people who’ve benefited from the package would have had no idea about trade union involvement. 

Moreover, it’s clear the Tories were under pressure to find a solution and in this situation it’s likely that more could have been won. Workers’ sick pay remains at pitiful levels leading to problems for those who need to isolate. Did our negotiators raise this? Who knows. 

Either way, a public campaign around furlough and related issues would have raised the profile of trade union involvement and made it possible to fight for a better deal. This was a missed opportunity, and despite Turner’s protestations, most people have concluded that it was ‘a gift from the government’.

It’s never in the interests of the labour movement to keep negotiations with the Tories or employers private over issues affecting millions of workers and their families. Our strength is built through informing and involving our members and publicly confronting bosses. Ultimately though, the lack of member involvement means that a benefit like the furlough scheme can be taken away whenever the Tories think they can get away with it.

Turner’s manifesto has a raft of policies, particularly relating to Green jobs. He says he wants to establish a new industrial strategy and Green Transition Team to move towards a greener, cleaner economy. As AGS responsible for manufacturing he already has the power to make these changes. Many of us who have argued for years for a ‘Just Transition’ towards green jobs, feel that these policies won’t be implemented. Since the end of the Cold War, we were promised a ‘peace dividend’. What we got was tens of thousands of P45’s and site closures. Setting up a ‘Cross sector Defence Diversification Combine’ in manufacturing became policy in 2018 and nothing has been done to organise it. After years of supporting policies for a ‘Just Transition’, nothing has been done. Now employers are waking up to the need to transition from dirty carbon intensive products and processes. Their transition won’t be a ‘just’ one. They’ll aim to protect the ‘bottom line’ not jobs, wages and conditions. So, we need more than fine policies and commitments. We need action to support our reps, members and communities. Otherwise these policies are just another example of ‘Greenwash’. 

Turner has been a supporter and co-chair of the anti-austerity coalition People’s Assembly (PA) since its launch in 2013 and this is one of the arguments made in support of his election campaign.  His support for the PA is welcome and should continue; PA has played an important role in mobilising large numbers against austerity. Mirroring failures across the whole left, however, it’s been unable to galvanise action on the scale needed to stop the cuts. 

But there’s an important point around action against austerity that often gets missed. 

The power to stop austerity ultimately lies with organising disruptive action in the community and workplace involving workers facing cuts in the public sector, with support from service users in the profitable private sector. 

Unite is uniquely placed to pull together a campaign that involves workers in the public and private sectors alongside the community branches to develop a campaign to mobilise effective action across our class. Sadly, there’s no evidence that Turner has attempted to use his leading positions in the PA and Unite to argue for the kind of strategy that could stop the grinding cuts. There have been countless opportunities to organise nationally against cuts and privatisation but they have been scuppered by bureaucratic inertia and a lack of vision.

Sharon Graham

The election of a new General Secretary can’t resolve all of the problems we face. But it can herald a change in direction and open up the space for activists to rebuild our strength. There is unfortunately no rank and file candidate in this election and all those running have had a part to play in a union leadership that has not properly defended members when faced with an employers and government offensive in recent years.

However, to have any hope of moving forward we have to first recognise that we can’t go on like this. This is one of the critical points that separates Graham out from all of the others. Turner, Beckett and Coyne, with their years of support and defence of the status quo, have all in their own ways been responsible for the problems we face in Unite today. 

While Graham has been part of the same machine, she has led initiatives across various sectors that have helped Unite activists build new organisation, defend reps and defend existing terms and conditions. 

So for example, Graham led the drive to organise in the meat industry with a large precarious and migrant workforce where only 30% of workers were protected by collective agreements. Three years later, with over 10,000 new members joining, 80% of workers in the sector were covered by collective bargaining. In Honda, following the victimisation of the senior rep and threatened derecognition, a campaign of leverage on Honda won his reinstatement with over 1,000 new members joining Unite in the plant. Graham also led the campaign against the ruthless exploitation of seasonal horticulture migrant workers helping them win union recognition and the removal of the most draconian measures being used against the 4,000 workers.

Unite members at Go North West were recently involved in the longest bus workers dispute in our history against ‘fire and rehire’. Pressure from strikers and supporters got Andy Burnham, the Labour Mayor, on the picket line where he condemned ‘fire and rehire’. Workers’ action combined with leverage on Go North West resulted in victory. However, Turner criticised the tactics. He said: “I want to see Labour councillors elected on May 6. I want to see Labour mayors. And it frustrates me, it angers me sometimes, that some of the union’s campaigning right now is pitched against our mayors, against Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham. What’s that all about? I find that incredible that we would do that.” Yet the leverage action organised by Graham’s department which supplemented the 85 days of strikes, was part of the action that delivered victory for Unite members on the buses. Although the leverage campaign should have been organised earlier in the dispute, we have to wonder whether it would have been possible at all if Turner had been general secretary? 

Those of us who have had to resist cuts or job losses administered by Labour councils or sanctioned by Labour Mayors, find it incredible that a prospective leadership candidate of Unite would undermine our campaigns that aim to defend our members’ services and livelihoods. Refusing to openly call out senior Labour figures when they are acting against the interests of Unite members weakens our ability to defend our members. It’s this uncritical support for Labour that reinforces our weaknesses and helps perpetuate decline, encouraging further apathy within the union. 

The official left in Unite are increasingly disengaged from members and they support structures in the union that are a barrier to building the movement. They continue to support a relationship with Labour that pledges continued funding with little obvious return, while undermining the struggles of members who face Labour-administered cuts. If the left wants to build a relationship with the best fighters in the union and build a movement for change then we need a different approach. 

Working class people are facing a crisis of representation in the workplace and in the political arena. 

The most effective way to take on Coyne is through developing a programme for struggle and positive change that can appeal to broader layers of Unite members, who don’t normally vote in the union’s elections. 

In her ‘Manifesto’, Graham points out that Unite’s political project in Labour has failed and the various movements outside of parliament have failed to build working class power. While she’s not in favour of breaking the link, she says, under her leadership, we will no longer write blank cheques to fund the Labour Party.

Graham also makes the critical point that under her leadership Unite will “Oppose any Local Authority, including Labour, if they attempt to force through cuts to jobs and services after COVID-19 and beyond. I will support candidates who oppose cuts to Unite members’ jobs and services and Councils and Councillors who fight against them.“ As well as pledging to oppose Labour councils implementing cuts,  this commitment is a radical departure from existing policy as it would also open up space for building support for anti-cuts candidates in councils and constituencies breaking the commitment to only support Labour Party candidates.

Graham also proposes to “Support only MPs or candidates for Parliament who are trade unionists.” This proposal has a limiting workerist flavour to it. Clearly, there will no doubt be candidates who are fantastic community activists or leading figures in social movements who don’t fit this bill but could be great candidates for our movement.

There are limitations with Graham’s campaign. She has taken an anti-machine politics approach, which can appeal to a broader range of members. But this has also meant that she has failed to speak out or support the Kill the Bill movement or the Palestine solidarity movement. These are crucial issues for the left, and we have to fight to ensure that union leaders take a stance on them to help us win these positions across the working class. 

But these shortcomings do not mean that the left should back Turner, who clearly has his own political weaknesses. And neither do they mean that Graham is not a candidate of the left who does not have a stance on major political issues. 

Graham has outlined a two pronged strategy for the union to re-engage with working class communities. In the workplace, Graham proposes first to rebuild shop stewards’ organisations across all sectors of the economy with company and sector wide combines. 

She has also pledged to work with other trade unions to grow and develop power with an approach which could challenge the narrow agendas of competing unions and the failure of the TUC to help us build effective strategies to take on large employers.

Secondly, she says she wants “us to build on our work within the community by ramping up new campaigns that will be led by the people themselves.” Graham wants to “Focus on building a movement for change.” She says, “We will dedicate funds to build a progressive, non-sectarian platform that sits outside of electoral politics. We will grow our influence within marginal seats and organise within ‘left behind’ areas and constituencies where the Union is strong.” 

Getting back to grassroots community organising with funding for political campaigns can help us re-engage with working class communities who no longer see any relevance in the labour movement and have become easy targets for right wing agendas. The reality is that many existing campaigns have little purchase in working class communities. Graham’s strategy is focussed on building up our capacity to resist in both the workplace and communities. Her pledge to use part of the political fund to finance projects beyond the Labour Party is a further significant and important change in direction.  Her strategy would allow the union to use our resources to build in ways that could help encourage working people to identify with the left.

In several campaign meetings, Graham has also argued that Unite should be playing a leading role in the recent movements for justice. The new Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill, if passed, would have a dramatic impact on trade union’s ability to operate effectively. Building a campaign in workplaces and communities against this wretched bill should be a priority for any incoming general secretary.

As a result of her previous campaigning, Graham has won the support of many of the reps most recently involved in major struggles. The lead reps in the successful strikes on Manchester buses, at Thurrock bins and the rank-and-file construction electricians, recently victorious in their battle against the employers’ deskilling agenda have all publicly come out in support of Graham. 

They are attracted to her programme of improving the industrial organisation of Unite in the workplace. This has never been more important as companies threaten workers with ‘fire and rehire’ and look to victimise our reps. When we are thinking of who to vote for, we should take the opinions of our most militant and active members very seriously. 

Splitting the Left?

Owen Jones, Novara and others on the left outside of Unite are in a panic about any potential victory for Coyne. Some of the predictions from the soft left commentariat are cataclysmic, claiming that our influence in the Labour Party will be shattered for years, if not decades. The argument goes that we should back Turner because he is the candidate of the UL, has the most branch nominations, and has been more willing to back political initiatives. But attached to this is the idea of the soft left’s strategy vis a vis the Labour party, and seeing Unite as a tool for waging this fight.  

Putting aside the fact that the right will do everything in their power to ensure that the Corbyn moment will never again be repeated, the left inside the Labour Party have done a pretty miserable job of defending Corbyn and his legacy. He remains kicked out of the party, with barely any resistance from the left. The reality today, despite holding Batley and Spen, is that Labour is facing an organic crisis. The party is losing support across a range of constituencies and that includes trade unionists who increasingly believe that Starmer’s Labour Party doesn’t represent them. With the Bakers union and GMB now questioning the relationship, it’s unsurprising that many in Unite are also doing so.

One of the main problems with the approach of Owen Jones and others is that none of these commentators want to face up to the reality of a strategy that continues to fail Unite members and the wider working class, as long as Unite is seen to support the left. It’s this cynicism that ensures that workers will steer clear of anyone identified with this kind of left. 

While the official left has been dominant for over a decade and a half, the reality is that the left is weaker now in Unite because of a Broad Left strategy that focuses exclusively on winning and maintaining control of the union machine at all costs. This means that the important weaknesses in our union have not been addressed and the relationship with the official left and workplace activists has been eroded. Recent elections in Unite for the executive and General Secretary have shown the strategy of the official left has been one of diminishing returns. Simply arguing for the same approach is leading us to defeat. We were too close last time and with turnout so low, we risk letting the right in every time. 

Conclusion 

Workers are rejecting the status quo wherever you care to look. From Brexit, to establishment Labour, workers are crying out for an alternative. This dynamic can play left or right, however. 

Coyne poses as the outsider but wants to turn the clock back to an era when Unite signed blank cheques to Labour while refusing to criticise their sorry record in Westminster, the mayoralities and council chambers. 

His campaign therefore enjoys significant support from the likes of John Spellar MP and others on the right of the Labour Party and wider movement. However, Coyne is completely divorced from the experience of ordinary Unite members. Despite being dismissed from Unite over four years ago, he lives in a detached country pile in the rolling Worcestershire countryside. 

Back then his house was valued at over £1 million. So he’s not short of a bob or two! However, even his lavish lifestyle can’t explain how he’s funded repeated costly challenges against our union and it’s clear that a well connected right wing which exists outside the union wants to see him do well. 

Members who nominate or vote for Coyne aren’t desperate to elect a new right wing leader who lives in a million plus country pile. They see the existing leadership of Unite as a barrier. They are opposed to the status quo and want change. After years of decline with little sign of improvement, even Gerard Coyne can look attractive to some disengaged members.

The contrast between Turner’s approach and Graham’s is that whilst both have limitations, one is achieved behind closed doors with little if any membership involvement and the other is achieved by campaigning with members and building our workplace strength. 

So, taking sides, confronting aggressive employers and challenging Labour where they are not prepared to support our members, is a necessary part of the struggle if we want to win. It’s also a necessary part of any strategy to rebuild the left in the union. With only 12.2% of members participating in the General Secretary election last time, the key for the left is to encourage greater participation in the election. Setting out a more combative position can help us enthuse more members and build turnout.

Despite being the candidate of the official left in Unite, Turner’s outlook represents a retreat to the right from McCluskey. As we’ve already seen his criticism of Labour will be muted which undermines our members in important battles. His support for partnership and a servicing model of trade unionism – where members are not involved collectively in struggle or the structures of the union leads to disengagement and passivity. It should therefore come as no surprise that right wing Labour MP Jack Dromey who previously backed Coyne is now supporting Turner. Dromey sees Turner as a safe pair of hands.

Unite’s support for the left is crucially important, but cannot be sustained whilst the membership is disengaged from our campaigns; as it is from most of the union’s structures and decisions. We have to move beyond capturing the machine and winning only formal support for decent policies, the social movements and the left in the labour movement. 

We need to re-engage with members, build rank and file organisation and convince them to genuinely support these important positions and campaigns. To stop the right in Unite we have to change the status quo, deal with the real problems members face while providing hope for the future.

While there are valid criticisms about Graham’s reluctance to take up some wider political issues, her approach helps workers build up the capacities needed to resist the employer’s offensive and make it possible to put into practice the positive policies we have. 

Graham’s campaign recognises the problems we face and outlines a strategy that can begin to bring about positive change, help us rebuild the movement with a left that’s connected to workers and communities. However, if elected as General Secretary, we will have to ensure that Graham publicly supports the political views of the union on Palestine in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the ‘Just Transition’ towards green jobs, Defence Diversification and the many other positive policies of Unite. Whilst she has not actively supported these issues, it is misplaced to think that she would seek to drop them from Unite’s policy platform. 

Finally, we should resist the idea that politics and workplace struggles are conducted separately. There is a rich history of well-organised workers taking political action in opposition to war, racism and solidarity with Palestine. It’s important to make the links between these struggles and encourage workers’ self organisation and activity. 

Following the successful bus strike in Manchester, at least 40 Go North West strikers asked Unite to arrange a coach to the People’s Assembly demonstration in London for the 26 June. This example shows how workers can make the connections between their day to day struggles and bigger political questions.

When we win we are at our most radical. To win more consistently and on a sectoral and national basis we need to change our union. Of the three candidates, only Graham offers us the possibility for the kind of change we need.