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Monday, February 22, 2010

Of state and revolution


Historical Actuality of the Socialist Offensive - Parliament’s problems go deeper than duck houses



Mark L Thomas reviews Istvan Meszaros’ new book on the problems with parliamentary democracy

British politics is increasingly being dominated by the looming general election. Yet, paradoxically, parliament is viewed with widespread and growing contempt.

The MPs’ expenses scandal and the Chilcot inquiry have laid bare MPs’ corruption.

Yet as leading Marxist philosopher Istvan Meszaros shows in his new book, Historical Actuality of the Socialist Offensive: Alternative to Parliamentarism, the problem with parliament goes far deeper than duck houses and dirty moats.

Meszaros launches a sustained attack on the very notion that parliament could ever provide a means of ending capitalism.

The belief that there is a “parliamentary road to socialism” has been the dominant idea of the British working class for over a century.

It rests on an illusion that everyone has the same amount of political power because every citizen has one vote in elections.

Supposedly the winner then implements the wishes of the majority, until the next election gives voters a new chance to express their will.

If this were accurate then the task of socialists would simply be to persuade workers to vote for a socialist party – which could then use parliament to pass laws abolishing capitalism.

Majority

Sounds easy enough. So why wouldn’t it work? As Meszaros explains, we have formal political equality but not economic equality.

There is a vast gulf in the economic power we possess – between those who hold the “exclusive proprietorship” over the means of production and the majority forced to work for them to earn a living.

None of this is taken into account when it comes to the voting booth.

Yet this separation of formal political equality from real economic inequality means parliament offers no way of fundamentally challenging the power of big business.

As Meszaros puts it, “Capital is the extraparliamentary force par excellence of our social order.”

Vast unelected centres of power surround parliament, from the military to judges and senior civil servants. They act to safeguard capitalism.

If the power of capitalism lies outside parliament, then the power to defeat capitalism must also be found outside parliament.

The separation of politics and economics in capitalist society is mirrored in the labour movement. It is split into a “political arm”, the Labour Party, and an “economic arm”, unions bargaining over wages and conditions.

In both cases workers are assigned only a limited role. In “politics” they are occasional voters and in “economics” they are paid-up union members, perhaps asked to take limited industrial action every now and again.

Meszaros insists that this separation must be overcome, with workers using their economic power as the real producers of the society’s wealth.

Crucially, this involves workers no longer acting as passive voting fodder or as a stage army for a trade union bureaucracy, but fully participating in their own liberation.

Meszaros believes that parliament can sometimes be a useful platform to rally support for socialists. But he rightly insists that real power lies elsewhere.

Movement

His book is a call for a new type of labour movement – “A revolutionary mass movement capable of fully utilising the parliamentary opportunities when available, limited though they might be under the present circumstances, and above all not shirking back from asserting the necessary demands of defiant extra-parliamentary action.”

Today, New Labour no longer even pretends to challenge capitalism.

Its open celebration of capitalists as “wealth-creators” has cultivated a desire among its MPs to emulate the luxurious lifestyles of the rich.

As Tony Cliff, the founder of the Socialist Workers Party, once observed, “power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts absolutely”.

Meszaros’ language is often demanding and the book is no easy read, but it repays the effort.

His sustained fire at the ideas that have dominated the labour movement for over a century is a welcome and valuable weapon in our armoury.

The challenge for the 21st century is to create a working class movement able to match, and overcome, the extra-parliamentary power of capitalism.



Historical Actuality of the Socialist Offensive

Book Review by Dan Mayer, February 2010

István Mészáros, Bookmarks, £9.99

In this timely polemic, Mészáros argues that the working class movement urgently needs to stop looking to parliament as the centre of social change.

This short book is not an empirical study of our corrupt elected representatives - Mészáros looks deeper than that with a philosophical argument. Starting from the logic of Marx's Capital, and building on his own Beyond Capital, Mészáros argues that it could not be any other way.

Real power lies outside parliament: the army, the civil service and the corporations. So the struggle to defeat capitalism must primarily take place beyond parliament.

Mészáros really comes into his own when he describes the negative ideological impact of parliament. Because it enshrines a separation between the political and the economic spheres, parliament encourages the passivity of the working class: without politics, protests against economic conditions (like long hours and low wages) cannot challenge the fact that workers have no control over the wealth we produce. If parliament has no say in economics, we can do no better than New Labour.

Mészáros argues that our movement doesn't just need to have an extra-parliamentary wing (while using parliamentary opportunities whenever possible) but that it must be focused on workers' struggle at the point of production. This is how the real nature of production becomes clear to people, and the only sort of struggle that prefigures a socialist society, where the producers of wealth take democratic control over it.

In the second half of the book Mészáros develops these arguments. He argues that the time has come to move onto the offensive. Capitalism has always had crises but since the 1970s these crises have become structural rather than cyclical, and a period of system-wide expansion is unlikely.

Some may quibble with the distinction between structural and cyclical crises, but it would be hard to disagree with the thrust of the argument. Capitalism is coming into conflict with its own limits in a period of recurrent economic, military and environmental crises.

Whatever our day to day problems, the left needs to take a long-term view and start acting as though our time has come. We need a revolutionary movement to struggle in the workplace, one that does not shy away from talking about the need to smash the state.

This book does not make for light reading and the language can be difficult, but this is because it is packed full of thought-provoking philosophical insights.

This is not just a welcome intervention in the debate about the role of parliament; it also provides an intriguing glimpse into the mind of one of the world's leading Marxist philosophers.

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