Showing posts with label socialist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialist. Show all posts
Sunday 1 October 2023
Friday 18 August 2023
A level Economics: The 1973 coup against democratic socialism in Chile still matters
It happened 50 years ago, changed the course of world history – and revealed just how authoritarian conservatives are. Andy Beckett in The Guardian
Fifty years on, the 1973 coup in Chile still haunts politics there and far beyond. As we approach its anniversary, on 11 September, the violent overthrow of the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and its replacement by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet are already being marked in Britain, through a period of remembrance scheduled to include dozens of separate exhibitions and events. Among these will be a march in Sheffield, archival displays in Edinburgh, a concert in Swansea, and a conference and picket of the Chilean embassy in London.
Few past events in faraway countries receive this level of attention. Military takeovers were not unusual in South America during the cold war. And Chile has been a relatively stable democracy since the Pinochet dictatorship ended, 33 years ago. So why does the 1973 coup still resonate?
In the UK, one answer is that roughly 2,500 Chilean refugees fled here after the coup, despite an unwelcoming Conservative government. “It is intended to keep the number of refugees to a very small number and, if our criteria are not fully met, we may accept none of them,” said a Foreign Office memo not released until three decades afterwards.
The Chileans came regardless, partly because leftwing activists, trade unionists and politicians including Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn created a solidarity movement – of a scale and duration harder to imagine in our more politically impatient times – which helped the refugees build new lives, and campaigned with them for years against the Pinochet regime. Some of these exiles settled in Britain permanently; veterans of the solidarity movement are involved in this year’s remembrance events, as they have been in earlier anniversaries. The left’s reverence for old struggles can sometimes distract it or weigh it down, but it is also a source of emotional and cultural strength, and an acknowledgment that the past and present are often more linked than we realise.
Two weeks ago, it was revealed that an old army helicopter that stands in a wood in Sussex as part of a paintball course had previously been used by the Pinochet government, to transport dissidents and then throw them into the sea. The dictatorship was a pioneer of this and other methods of “disappearing” its enemies and perceived enemies, believing that lethal abductions would frighten the population into obedience more effectively than conventional state murders.
Not unconnectedly, the regime also pioneered the harsh free-market policies which transformed much of the world – and which are still supported by most Tories, many rightwing politicians in other countries, and many business interests. In Chile, the idea that a deregulated economy required a highly disciplined citizenry, to avoid the economic semi-anarchy spilling over into society, was exhaustively tested and refined, to the great interest of foreign politicians such as Margaret Thatcher.
Fifty years on, the 1973 coup in Chile still haunts politics there and far beyond. As we approach its anniversary, on 11 September, the violent overthrow of the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and its replacement by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet are already being marked in Britain, through a period of remembrance scheduled to include dozens of separate exhibitions and events. Among these will be a march in Sheffield, archival displays in Edinburgh, a concert in Swansea, and a conference and picket of the Chilean embassy in London.
Few past events in faraway countries receive this level of attention. Military takeovers were not unusual in South America during the cold war. And Chile has been a relatively stable democracy since the Pinochet dictatorship ended, 33 years ago. So why does the 1973 coup still resonate?
In the UK, one answer is that roughly 2,500 Chilean refugees fled here after the coup, despite an unwelcoming Conservative government. “It is intended to keep the number of refugees to a very small number and, if our criteria are not fully met, we may accept none of them,” said a Foreign Office memo not released until three decades afterwards.
The Chileans came regardless, partly because leftwing activists, trade unionists and politicians including Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn created a solidarity movement – of a scale and duration harder to imagine in our more politically impatient times – which helped the refugees build new lives, and campaigned with them for years against the Pinochet regime. Some of these exiles settled in Britain permanently; veterans of the solidarity movement are involved in this year’s remembrance events, as they have been in earlier anniversaries. The left’s reverence for old struggles can sometimes distract it or weigh it down, but it is also a source of emotional and cultural strength, and an acknowledgment that the past and present are often more linked than we realise.
Two weeks ago, it was revealed that an old army helicopter that stands in a wood in Sussex as part of a paintball course had previously been used by the Pinochet government, to transport dissidents and then throw them into the sea. The dictatorship was a pioneer of this and other methods of “disappearing” its enemies and perceived enemies, believing that lethal abductions would frighten the population into obedience more effectively than conventional state murders.
Not unconnectedly, the regime also pioneered the harsh free-market policies which transformed much of the world – and which are still supported by most Tories, many rightwing politicians in other countries, and many business interests. In Chile, the idea that a deregulated economy required a highly disciplined citizenry, to avoid the economic semi-anarchy spilling over into society, was exhaustively tested and refined, to the great interest of foreign politicians such as Margaret Thatcher.
Augusto Pinochet, left, and President Salvador Allende attend a ceremony naming Pinochet as commander in chief of the army, 23 August, 1973. Photograph: Enrique Aracena/AP
Another reason that the 1973 coup remains a powerful event is that it left unfinished business at the other end of the political spectrum. The Allende government was an argumentative and ambitious coalition which, almost uniquely, attempted to create a socialist country with plentiful consumer pleasures and modern technology, including a kind of early internet called Project Cybersyn, without Soviet-style repression. For a while, even the Daily Mail was impressed: “An astonishing experiment is taking place,” it reported on the first anniversary of his election. “If it survives, the implications will be immense for other countries.”
The coup happened partly because the government’s popularity, though never overwhelming, rose while it was in office. This rise convinced conservative interests that it would be reelected, and would then take the patchy reforms of its first term much further. For the same reasons, the Allende presidency remains tantalising for some on the left. An updated version of his combination of social liberalism, egalitarianism and mass political participation may still have the potential to transform the left’s prospects, as Corbyn’s successful campaigns in 2015, 2016 and 2017 suggested.
Files reveal Nixon role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
There is one more, bleaker reason to reflect on the coup: for what it revealed about conservatism. When I wrote a book on Chile two decades ago, it was unsettling to learn about how the US Republicans undermined Allende, by covert CIA funding of his enemies, for instance, and how the Conservatives helped Pinochet, through arms sales and diplomatic support. But these moves seemed to be explained largely by cold-war strategies and free-market zealotry, which was fading in the early 21st century.
Yet from today’s perspective, with another Trump presidency threatening, far-right parties in power across Europe, and a Tory government with few, if any, inhibitions about criminalising dissent, the Chile coup looks prophetic. Nowadays the line between conservatism and authoritarianism is not so much blurred occasionally, in national emergencies, as nonexistent in many countries.
Some critics of conservatism would say that it’s naive to think such a line ever existed. In 1930s Europe, for instance, supposedly moderate and pro-democratic rightwing parties often facilitated the rise of fascism. Yet the postwar world, after fascism had been militarily defeated, was meant to be one where such toxic alliances against the left never happened again.
The 1973 coup ended that comfortable assumption. “It is not for us to pass judgment on Chile’s internal affairs,” said the Tory Foreign Office minister Julian Amery in the Commons, two months later, despite the coup having initiated killings and torture on a mass scale. When the coup is remembered, its victims should come first. But the response of conservatives around the world to the crushing of Chile’s democracy and civil liberties should never be forgotten.
Another reason that the 1973 coup remains a powerful event is that it left unfinished business at the other end of the political spectrum. The Allende government was an argumentative and ambitious coalition which, almost uniquely, attempted to create a socialist country with plentiful consumer pleasures and modern technology, including a kind of early internet called Project Cybersyn, without Soviet-style repression. For a while, even the Daily Mail was impressed: “An astonishing experiment is taking place,” it reported on the first anniversary of his election. “If it survives, the implications will be immense for other countries.”
The coup happened partly because the government’s popularity, though never overwhelming, rose while it was in office. This rise convinced conservative interests that it would be reelected, and would then take the patchy reforms of its first term much further. For the same reasons, the Allende presidency remains tantalising for some on the left. An updated version of his combination of social liberalism, egalitarianism and mass political participation may still have the potential to transform the left’s prospects, as Corbyn’s successful campaigns in 2015, 2016 and 2017 suggested.
Files reveal Nixon role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
There is one more, bleaker reason to reflect on the coup: for what it revealed about conservatism. When I wrote a book on Chile two decades ago, it was unsettling to learn about how the US Republicans undermined Allende, by covert CIA funding of his enemies, for instance, and how the Conservatives helped Pinochet, through arms sales and diplomatic support. But these moves seemed to be explained largely by cold-war strategies and free-market zealotry, which was fading in the early 21st century.
Yet from today’s perspective, with another Trump presidency threatening, far-right parties in power across Europe, and a Tory government with few, if any, inhibitions about criminalising dissent, the Chile coup looks prophetic. Nowadays the line between conservatism and authoritarianism is not so much blurred occasionally, in national emergencies, as nonexistent in many countries.
Some critics of conservatism would say that it’s naive to think such a line ever existed. In 1930s Europe, for instance, supposedly moderate and pro-democratic rightwing parties often facilitated the rise of fascism. Yet the postwar world, after fascism had been militarily defeated, was meant to be one where such toxic alliances against the left never happened again.
The 1973 coup ended that comfortable assumption. “It is not for us to pass judgment on Chile’s internal affairs,” said the Tory Foreign Office minister Julian Amery in the Commons, two months later, despite the coup having initiated killings and torture on a mass scale. When the coup is remembered, its victims should come first. But the response of conservatives around the world to the crushing of Chile’s democracy and civil liberties should never be forgotten.
Friday 9 September 2022
Monday 20 September 2021
Eat the rich! Why millennials and generation Z have turned their backs on capitalism
Owen Jones in The Guardian
The young are hungry and the rich are on the menu. This delicacy first appeared in the 18th century, when the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau supposedly declared: “When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!” But today this phrase is all over Twitter and other social media. On TikTok, viral videos feature fresh-faced youngsters menacingly raising their forks at anyone with cars that have start buttons or fridges that have water and ice dispensers.
So should the world’s billionaires – and fridge-owners – start sleeping with one eye open? Hardly. It’s clear that millennials (those born between the early 80s and the mid-90s) and zoomers (the following generation) are not really advocating violence. But it is also clear that this is more than just another viral meme.
The world’s most famous leftwing millennial, New York’s rebellious Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, neatly sums up the generation’s zeitgeist. If leftism often seems to be the preserve of socially awkward nerds – hi! – and shouty older white men, she is the totem of the cool kids who like their redistribution of wealth and power with a hefty side order of mainstream popular culture.
It doesn’t sit easily with some: when the congresswoman accepted a free invitation to the uber-exclusive Met Ball in a dress emblazoned with “Tax the rich”, even some leftists joined the right in puffed-up outrage. Whether you thought it was an audacious demand for the sickeningly rich to cough up at their own exclusive party – or a stunt compromised by taking place in a real-life version of The Hunger Games’s Capitol – it showed that elites can’t escape the young flexing their political muscles.
According to a report published in July by the rightwing thinktank the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), younger Britons have taken a decidedly leftwing turn. Nearly 80% blame capitalism for the housing crisis, while 75% believe the climate emergency is “specifically a capitalist problem” and 72% back sweeping nationalisation. All in all, 67% want to live under a socialist economic system.
With a seemingly hegemonic Tory party on a high after routing Corbynism, the IEA warned that the polling is a “wake-up call” for supporters of market capitalism. “The rejection of capitalism may be an abstract aspiration,” it says. “But so too was Brexit.” It’s a striking phenomenon on the other side of the Atlantic, too: a Harvard University study in 2016 found that more than 50% of young people in the heartland of laissez-faire economics reject capitalism, while a 2018 Gallup poll found that 45% of young Americans saw capitalism favourably, down from 68% in 2010.
Jack Foster, a 33-year-old bank worker from Salford, shows how lived experience has fed this disillusionment with capitalism. After he dropped out of university and worked in a call centre – a “horrible job” – the financial crash shaped his political attitudes, as they did for much of his generation. But housing loomed particularly large. “I was renting, thinking: ‘How will I ever be able to afford a house?’” he says. “My mum was a cleaner, my dad was disabled, and the people I knew who could afford a house got help off their parents. It wasn’t a case of having a job and saving up; you had to inherit money.”
Dating apps are another, less formal way of seeing where the wind blows. The apps have increasingly become no-go zones for Tory supporters. Given Labour had a 43-point lead among the under-25s in the last election – unlike in 1983, when the Tories had a nine-point lead among our youngest voters – the dating pools of the youthful true blue have shrunk. “No Tories – it’s a deal breaker”, “Absolutely no Tories (the left are sexier anyway, facts)”, “Swipe right if you vote left” and “Just looking for someone to hold hands with at the revolution” adorn profiles on Tinder, Hinge and Bumble.
Many of the young have concluded that an economic strategy that penalises them, coupled with a “culture war” that denigrates many of their deeply held values, amounts to a Tory declaration of war on their generation. Anyone who buys into that is, therefore, deemed profoundly unsexy.
For the IEA’s Kristian Niemietz, this is partly down to a “reputational change” for socialism. Once associated with “fringe groups”, he thinks it is now more “a fashion statement, definitely on social media, where people construct a socialist persona which they use for image purposes”. Where he agrees with the left is that an epic housing crisis should receive much of the blame for its renewed attractiveness.
“Whether you ask free marketeers, conservatives, centrists, the centre-left or socialists, all believe the UK has a housing crisis, that it’s a massive problem, but all have different answers about where it comes from and what to do about it,” he says. “If people are getting ripped off and think the market is rigged against them, the one way people can react to that is to generalise: ‘This is what capitalism is like – what the market is like’, making them more sympathetic to socialist ideas.”
Rather than a ‘property-owning democracy’, Britain looks more like a landlord’s paradise. Illustration: Jacky Sheridan/The Guardian
In the 80s, Margaret Thatcher’s ideological mentor Keith Joseph described the push for homeownership as resuming “the forward march of embourgeoisement which went so far in Victorian times”. The great hope, for many Thatcherites, was that the “right to buy” would transform Labour-voting council tenants into Tory-supporting homeowners, a view later echoed by either David Cameron or George Osborne, one of whom Nick Clegg recalled objecting to building more social housing on the grounds that “it just creates Labour voters”.
But rather than the “property-owning democracy” promised by Thatcherism, Britain looks more like a landlords’ paradise. By 2017, 40% of the homes flogged off under right to buy were owned by private landlords charging twice the rent of council properties. Indeed, in the space of two decades, the odds of a young adult on a middle income owning a home more than halved. These young people have been called generation rent, with about half of the under-35s in England renting in a private sector often defined by extortionate rents and insecurity.
Rents in England take up approaching half of a tenants’ take-home pay, and an astonishing 74.8% in London, up one-third since the century began. And if millennials bet the house, so to speak, on a parental lifeboat, disappointment beckons: the typical inheritance age is between 55 and 64, and the median amount handed down is about £11,000, meaning half receive less.
There is no rational reason, of course, for the young to defend this economic system. According to a 2019 poll by the charity Barnardo’s, two-thirds of under-25s believe their generation will be worse off than their parents. Keir Milburn, an academic and the author of Generation Left – which argues widespread leftist sympathies among the young are a modern phenomenon bred by economic conditions – says this pessimism is new. “For someone born in the 60s who came into adulthood, there was a sense of optimism, that things will be better,” he says. “It’s the Enlightenment, modernist attitude that things will get better, society will always generally progress. Now it’s just [the author] Steven Pinker who thinks this.”
David Horner, 30, a charity worker in London, began feeling disenchanted with the prevailing system when he was at university. Now he has a child on the way, he worries about the world he’s bringing them into. From working with younger people from poorer communities to listening to the experiences of friends working in crisis-ridden health and education services, he’s in no doubt about the problem. “But we’re told this is the apex, the best we can get as a political economic system, and any alternative – even if it’s seemingly not that radical – just gets pushed away, that this is the way things have to be,” he says. “As I’ve got older, there’s that unfortunate feeling that you don’t want to accept the way things are, but there’s so much power, and corporations and people with vested interests in capitalism and the way the economy works at the moment.”
A generation was told that it was important to go to university to have a salary you could live on. But the earnings gap between graduates and non-graduates has fallen substantially and, despite England’s graduates accruing a student debt of £40,280 in 2020, more than one-third of employed Britons with a degree work in non-graduate jobs. In the years that followed the financial crash, and austerity in particular, it was the wages of young workers that fell the most in a protracted living-standards squeeze without precedent since the Victorian era.
Formal education plus economic insecurity is a heady mix, but it’s not the only phenomenon at play. Non-academic routes to a secure standard of living have been stripped away, such as the skilled apprenticeships available to so many 16-year-old school leavers in the past. Young working-class voters were considerably more likely to vote Labour in 2017 than their middle-class counterparts.
But a profound existential question has led many young people to question the entire economic system. “I saw a post on Instagram the other day asking if you’d rather travel a hundred years backwards or forwards in time, and all the comments asked: ‘Are we even going to be around in a hundred years?’” says Haroon Faqir, a 22-year-old graduate. “Those comments sum up people my age and our attitudes towards the problems we face in a capitalist system.”
Emily Harris, 20, a student in London, says her biggest worry is that “there’s not even going to be a planet: we’ve got Jeff Bezos launching himself into space while Las Vegas runs out of water and half the world’s on fire. If these billionaires stopped making money they could solve all of these problems and still have billions in the bank.”
While much of the mainstream media offers little sympathy for the insecurities and aspirations of younger Britons, the internet has offered a political education. The journalist Chanté Joseph is 25, placing her in the borderlands between millennial and zoomer. “[The microblogging site] Tumblr radicalised me,” she says. “Reading about race, identity and class made me think: ‘This is all crazy,’ and opened my eyes.”
Many of her generation then migrated to Twitter and TikTok, she says, “where young people create a lot of political content that’s really personable and relatable. That’s why a lot of younger people feel more radical – it seems more normal when these ideas are explained in a way where you think: ‘How can you possibly disagree?’”
More than one-third of workers on zero-hours contracts – often not knowing how much they will be paid week to week – are under 25, while many others are in “bogus self-employment”, where they are registered as self-employed but are actually working on contract for one employer while deprived of rights such as a minimum wage or holiday pay. The free market would bring them freedom, they were told; instead it gifted them insecurity.
The sacrifices made by young people during the pandemic have further crystallised a sense of injustice. Hannah Baird, a 22-year-old student, grew up in Rotherham and has always felt dissatisfied by the status quo. Her fears about the climate emergency, and exposure to dissenting opinions on social media, strengthened her discontent. “During the pandemic it feels like a lot of blame has been put on young people for the cases,” she says. “I still have to pay the full tuition fees when exclusively doing online lessons for a year and a half, which feels like a slap in the face, and it always seems universities were the last to be mentioned in plans for unlocking. It just feels, in general, that the government don’t really care about our generation, like we’re left behind.”
That doesn’t mean the young have been transformed into committed revolutionary socialists, but of those millennials familiar with Karl Marx, half have a positive view of him, compared with 40% of generation X and just 20% of baby boomers.
In Beautiful World, Where Are You – the latest novel by the millennial author Sally Rooney – it’s not just the sex that is sexy. One of her characters mulls over how everyone is talking about communism. “When I first started talking about Marxism, people laughed at me,” they say. “Now it’s everyone’s thing.” While it’s probably not the backbone of the patter at newly bustling nightclubs in Newcastle or Cardiff, there’s no question that a post-cold war youth is far more open to this once roundly condemned 19th-century philosophy.
Many placed their faith in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to offer solutions to their economic grievances; recent polling suggests that younger Labour voters are nearly twice as likely to believe he would be a better leader than Keir Starmer.
Most young people are not immersed in radical literature, yet politicised zoomers and millennials leave an ideological footprint in their friendship groups. But this doesn’t mean the left should simply bank the two rising generations, waiting for demographics to eventually grant the political victory that has so far eluded them. As the economist James Meadway warned in a recent article, entitled Generation Left Might Not Be That Left After All, populist rightwing answers to their disenchantment might cut through. In France, many young people have swung to the far right; in the UK, few are members of trade unions, which historically help craft anti-capitalist attitudes; while some classically rightwing sentiments coexist with leftish attitudes among many young people.
The rich – whose wealth surged during the pandemic – remain uneaten. But it is clear that young people see no rational incentive to back a system that seems to offer little other than insecurity and crisis.
The young are hungry and the rich are on the menu. This delicacy first appeared in the 18th century, when the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau supposedly declared: “When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!” But today this phrase is all over Twitter and other social media. On TikTok, viral videos feature fresh-faced youngsters menacingly raising their forks at anyone with cars that have start buttons or fridges that have water and ice dispensers.
So should the world’s billionaires – and fridge-owners – start sleeping with one eye open? Hardly. It’s clear that millennials (those born between the early 80s and the mid-90s) and zoomers (the following generation) are not really advocating violence. But it is also clear that this is more than just another viral meme.
The world’s most famous leftwing millennial, New York’s rebellious Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, neatly sums up the generation’s zeitgeist. If leftism often seems to be the preserve of socially awkward nerds – hi! – and shouty older white men, she is the totem of the cool kids who like their redistribution of wealth and power with a hefty side order of mainstream popular culture.
It doesn’t sit easily with some: when the congresswoman accepted a free invitation to the uber-exclusive Met Ball in a dress emblazoned with “Tax the rich”, even some leftists joined the right in puffed-up outrage. Whether you thought it was an audacious demand for the sickeningly rich to cough up at their own exclusive party – or a stunt compromised by taking place in a real-life version of The Hunger Games’s Capitol – it showed that elites can’t escape the young flexing their political muscles.
According to a report published in July by the rightwing thinktank the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), younger Britons have taken a decidedly leftwing turn. Nearly 80% blame capitalism for the housing crisis, while 75% believe the climate emergency is “specifically a capitalist problem” and 72% back sweeping nationalisation. All in all, 67% want to live under a socialist economic system.
With a seemingly hegemonic Tory party on a high after routing Corbynism, the IEA warned that the polling is a “wake-up call” for supporters of market capitalism. “The rejection of capitalism may be an abstract aspiration,” it says. “But so too was Brexit.” It’s a striking phenomenon on the other side of the Atlantic, too: a Harvard University study in 2016 found that more than 50% of young people in the heartland of laissez-faire economics reject capitalism, while a 2018 Gallup poll found that 45% of young Americans saw capitalism favourably, down from 68% in 2010.
Jack Foster, a 33-year-old bank worker from Salford, shows how lived experience has fed this disillusionment with capitalism. After he dropped out of university and worked in a call centre – a “horrible job” – the financial crash shaped his political attitudes, as they did for much of his generation. But housing loomed particularly large. “I was renting, thinking: ‘How will I ever be able to afford a house?’” he says. “My mum was a cleaner, my dad was disabled, and the people I knew who could afford a house got help off their parents. It wasn’t a case of having a job and saving up; you had to inherit money.”
Dating apps are another, less formal way of seeing where the wind blows. The apps have increasingly become no-go zones for Tory supporters. Given Labour had a 43-point lead among the under-25s in the last election – unlike in 1983, when the Tories had a nine-point lead among our youngest voters – the dating pools of the youthful true blue have shrunk. “No Tories – it’s a deal breaker”, “Absolutely no Tories (the left are sexier anyway, facts)”, “Swipe right if you vote left” and “Just looking for someone to hold hands with at the revolution” adorn profiles on Tinder, Hinge and Bumble.
Many of the young have concluded that an economic strategy that penalises them, coupled with a “culture war” that denigrates many of their deeply held values, amounts to a Tory declaration of war on their generation. Anyone who buys into that is, therefore, deemed profoundly unsexy.
For the IEA’s Kristian Niemietz, this is partly down to a “reputational change” for socialism. Once associated with “fringe groups”, he thinks it is now more “a fashion statement, definitely on social media, where people construct a socialist persona which they use for image purposes”. Where he agrees with the left is that an epic housing crisis should receive much of the blame for its renewed attractiveness.
“Whether you ask free marketeers, conservatives, centrists, the centre-left or socialists, all believe the UK has a housing crisis, that it’s a massive problem, but all have different answers about where it comes from and what to do about it,” he says. “If people are getting ripped off and think the market is rigged against them, the one way people can react to that is to generalise: ‘This is what capitalism is like – what the market is like’, making them more sympathetic to socialist ideas.”
Rather than a ‘property-owning democracy’, Britain looks more like a landlord’s paradise. Illustration: Jacky Sheridan/The GuardianIn the 80s, Margaret Thatcher’s ideological mentor Keith Joseph described the push for homeownership as resuming “the forward march of embourgeoisement which went so far in Victorian times”. The great hope, for many Thatcherites, was that the “right to buy” would transform Labour-voting council tenants into Tory-supporting homeowners, a view later echoed by either David Cameron or George Osborne, one of whom Nick Clegg recalled objecting to building more social housing on the grounds that “it just creates Labour voters”.
But rather than the “property-owning democracy” promised by Thatcherism, Britain looks more like a landlords’ paradise. By 2017, 40% of the homes flogged off under right to buy were owned by private landlords charging twice the rent of council properties. Indeed, in the space of two decades, the odds of a young adult on a middle income owning a home more than halved. These young people have been called generation rent, with about half of the under-35s in England renting in a private sector often defined by extortionate rents and insecurity.
Rents in England take up approaching half of a tenants’ take-home pay, and an astonishing 74.8% in London, up one-third since the century began. And if millennials bet the house, so to speak, on a parental lifeboat, disappointment beckons: the typical inheritance age is between 55 and 64, and the median amount handed down is about £11,000, meaning half receive less.
There is no rational reason, of course, for the young to defend this economic system. According to a 2019 poll by the charity Barnardo’s, two-thirds of under-25s believe their generation will be worse off than their parents. Keir Milburn, an academic and the author of Generation Left – which argues widespread leftist sympathies among the young are a modern phenomenon bred by economic conditions – says this pessimism is new. “For someone born in the 60s who came into adulthood, there was a sense of optimism, that things will be better,” he says. “It’s the Enlightenment, modernist attitude that things will get better, society will always generally progress. Now it’s just [the author] Steven Pinker who thinks this.”
David Horner, 30, a charity worker in London, began feeling disenchanted with the prevailing system when he was at university. Now he has a child on the way, he worries about the world he’s bringing them into. From working with younger people from poorer communities to listening to the experiences of friends working in crisis-ridden health and education services, he’s in no doubt about the problem. “But we’re told this is the apex, the best we can get as a political economic system, and any alternative – even if it’s seemingly not that radical – just gets pushed away, that this is the way things have to be,” he says. “As I’ve got older, there’s that unfortunate feeling that you don’t want to accept the way things are, but there’s so much power, and corporations and people with vested interests in capitalism and the way the economy works at the moment.”
A generation was told that it was important to go to university to have a salary you could live on. But the earnings gap between graduates and non-graduates has fallen substantially and, despite England’s graduates accruing a student debt of £40,280 in 2020, more than one-third of employed Britons with a degree work in non-graduate jobs. In the years that followed the financial crash, and austerity in particular, it was the wages of young workers that fell the most in a protracted living-standards squeeze without precedent since the Victorian era.
Formal education plus economic insecurity is a heady mix, but it’s not the only phenomenon at play. Non-academic routes to a secure standard of living have been stripped away, such as the skilled apprenticeships available to so many 16-year-old school leavers in the past. Young working-class voters were considerably more likely to vote Labour in 2017 than their middle-class counterparts.
But a profound existential question has led many young people to question the entire economic system. “I saw a post on Instagram the other day asking if you’d rather travel a hundred years backwards or forwards in time, and all the comments asked: ‘Are we even going to be around in a hundred years?’” says Haroon Faqir, a 22-year-old graduate. “Those comments sum up people my age and our attitudes towards the problems we face in a capitalist system.”
Emily Harris, 20, a student in London, says her biggest worry is that “there’s not even going to be a planet: we’ve got Jeff Bezos launching himself into space while Las Vegas runs out of water and half the world’s on fire. If these billionaires stopped making money they could solve all of these problems and still have billions in the bank.”
While much of the mainstream media offers little sympathy for the insecurities and aspirations of younger Britons, the internet has offered a political education. The journalist Chanté Joseph is 25, placing her in the borderlands between millennial and zoomer. “[The microblogging site] Tumblr radicalised me,” she says. “Reading about race, identity and class made me think: ‘This is all crazy,’ and opened my eyes.”
Many of her generation then migrated to Twitter and TikTok, she says, “where young people create a lot of political content that’s really personable and relatable. That’s why a lot of younger people feel more radical – it seems more normal when these ideas are explained in a way where you think: ‘How can you possibly disagree?’”
More than one-third of workers on zero-hours contracts – often not knowing how much they will be paid week to week – are under 25, while many others are in “bogus self-employment”, where they are registered as self-employed but are actually working on contract for one employer while deprived of rights such as a minimum wage or holiday pay. The free market would bring them freedom, they were told; instead it gifted them insecurity.
The sacrifices made by young people during the pandemic have further crystallised a sense of injustice. Hannah Baird, a 22-year-old student, grew up in Rotherham and has always felt dissatisfied by the status quo. Her fears about the climate emergency, and exposure to dissenting opinions on social media, strengthened her discontent. “During the pandemic it feels like a lot of blame has been put on young people for the cases,” she says. “I still have to pay the full tuition fees when exclusively doing online lessons for a year and a half, which feels like a slap in the face, and it always seems universities were the last to be mentioned in plans for unlocking. It just feels, in general, that the government don’t really care about our generation, like we’re left behind.”
That doesn’t mean the young have been transformed into committed revolutionary socialists, but of those millennials familiar with Karl Marx, half have a positive view of him, compared with 40% of generation X and just 20% of baby boomers.
In Beautiful World, Where Are You – the latest novel by the millennial author Sally Rooney – it’s not just the sex that is sexy. One of her characters mulls over how everyone is talking about communism. “When I first started talking about Marxism, people laughed at me,” they say. “Now it’s everyone’s thing.” While it’s probably not the backbone of the patter at newly bustling nightclubs in Newcastle or Cardiff, there’s no question that a post-cold war youth is far more open to this once roundly condemned 19th-century philosophy.
Many placed their faith in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to offer solutions to their economic grievances; recent polling suggests that younger Labour voters are nearly twice as likely to believe he would be a better leader than Keir Starmer.
Most young people are not immersed in radical literature, yet politicised zoomers and millennials leave an ideological footprint in their friendship groups. But this doesn’t mean the left should simply bank the two rising generations, waiting for demographics to eventually grant the political victory that has so far eluded them. As the economist James Meadway warned in a recent article, entitled Generation Left Might Not Be That Left After All, populist rightwing answers to their disenchantment might cut through. In France, many young people have swung to the far right; in the UK, few are members of trade unions, which historically help craft anti-capitalist attitudes; while some classically rightwing sentiments coexist with leftish attitudes among many young people.
The rich – whose wealth surged during the pandemic – remain uneaten. But it is clear that young people see no rational incentive to back a system that seems to offer little other than insecurity and crisis.
Wednesday 26 February 2020
Tuesday 27 August 2019
The revenge of Sukhi Lala
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
THE flag of Jammu & Kashmir, which was taken down from the Srinagar Secretariat over the weekend, carried the symbol of a plough. The Congress party’s election symbol in 1952 under Jawaharlal Nehru was two bullocks in harness — do baelon ki jodi.
In a monsoon-fed agricultural economy, both symbols represented the productive and political power of the peasant. In a 1958 TV interview with American journalist Arnold Michaelis, Nehru spoke of differences between the Muslim League and the Congress over land reforms, which the latter was committed to in independent India.
When Nehru became president of the All India States Peoples Conference (AISPC) at Udaipur in January 1946, he got Sheikh Abdullah elected vice president. They were both committed to land reforms, and AISPC, which was a Congress-backed body that worked to nudge princely states to become part of the future India, was equally determined to uproot feudalism after independence.
This was a quandary Jammu & Kashmir ruler Hari Singh faced. He resented Nehru and Abdullah as socialists, but may not have seen a great future for himself in Muslim Pakistan either. Moreover, the disputed Instrument of Accession he signed described him as ‘Jammu Kashmir Naresh ani Tibet Desh Adhipaty’ (Jammu & Kashmir ruler and sovereign of Tibet nation).
It got Sheikh Abdullah into trouble when he met Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Algiers in 1965, an alleged indiscretion that prompted his arrest upon return. Gandhian pacifist Horace Alexander pleaded on his behalf with then information minister Indira Gandhi, who had sympathy for the Sheikh, but also a word of caution.
“What Sheikh Sahib does not realise is that with the Chinese invasion [1962] and the latest moves in and by Pakistan, the position of Kashmir had completely changed. The frontiers of Kashmir touch China, USSR, Pakistan and India. In the present world situation, an independent Kashmir would become a hotbed of intrigue and, apart from the countries mentioned above, would also attract espionage and other activities from the USA and UK,” Alexander quotes Mrs Gandhi as saying in early 1965.
It is a Hindutva canard that Sardar Patel muscled 560 plus princely states into joining India. Pressure mounted on the monarchs when Nehru declared in his 1946 presidential address at the AISPC that those princely states that refuse to merge with India and join the Constituent Assembly would be considered hostile states. This was the background in which Sukhi Lala had to earn his keep in a new India. Who was Sukhi Lala?
Sukhi Lala generically was the moneylender-land grabber in the 1950s movie Mother India. He also appears as the land shark-zamindar in Bimal Roy’s Do Beegha Zameen, and as decadent Hari Babu in Ganga Jamuna. Sukhi Lala played the stock markets in Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420, and sold adulterated medicines in Nutan’s Anari.
In Zia Sarhadi’s Footpath, Dilip Kumar underscored the evil of stock markets, derisively called satta bazaar in Nehru’s India. Indian peasants suffered Sukhi Lala’s greed and occasionally revolted violently against the excesses. Dilip Kumar’s Ganga and Sunil Dutt’s Birju would be jailed or killed in India today as Maoists.
Manmohan Singh called Maoists his biggest security threat, but offered no comment about why the peasants were committing suicide in thousands following his pro-Sukhi Lala economic policies in 1991. India’s finance minister recently flaunted the bahi-khata cover, the moneylender’s cash register, instead of the briefcase her predecessors carried with the annual budget proposals, perhaps signalling who rules India today.
Gandhiji had many Sukhi Lalas as friends who financed the Congress. He saw in them the future trustees of India. Nehru who was a better student of history took a different view of the business class his political guru was enamoured of. His election symbol of do baelon ki jodi captured an affinity with the peasants, Sukhi Lala’s prey from time immemorial.
Ironically, it was Gandhi who had dispatched Nehru to cut his political teeth among the rural masses of Uttar Pradesh. It was in Rae Bareli from across the Sai river that the future prime minister watched police shooting at unarmed peasants at the behest of the local Sukhi Lala.
Rahul Gandhi’s sharp criticism of Narendra Modi’s wily games in Kashmir deserves an assessment of his politics, which may not be unrelated to his much-discussed Nehru-Gandhi lineage.
The lineage in a nutshell is a challenge to Sukhi Lala. Nehru jailed the tallest of the business tycoons. Indira Gandhi nationalised their banks. Rajiv Gandhi directed them to lay off the backs of the Congress workers. Rahul may have a cleaner slate to work with after leading Lala acolytes in the Congress jumped the ship over Kashmir.
Look at it this way. Modi is sworn to make India a Congress-free country for a reason. But the developments of recent days have shown, like it or not, that there is no Congress party without the leadership of the Gandhi family. Think of the PPP without a Bhutto link or an Awami League without a Mujib association, marked variance from the Bandaranaike and Kennedy clans in the limited sway they held on their respective parties.
Now consider a vengeful possibility. A parliamentary act protects the family of the assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi with the highest grade of security of the Special Protection Group. Given the hatred whipped up against them by India’s new rulers in league with a conniving media, it would not be difficult to immobilise them (from a Srinagar visit, for example) by stripping them of their security in the name of economic prudence. Already a move is afoot, says The Hindu, to remove Manmohan Singh’s SPG cover.
On the other hand, such a move could spur the newly cleansed party to come into its own. The waters are being tested on both sides. Sukhi Lala is drooling.
THE flag of Jammu & Kashmir, which was taken down from the Srinagar Secretariat over the weekend, carried the symbol of a plough. The Congress party’s election symbol in 1952 under Jawaharlal Nehru was two bullocks in harness — do baelon ki jodi.
In a monsoon-fed agricultural economy, both symbols represented the productive and political power of the peasant. In a 1958 TV interview with American journalist Arnold Michaelis, Nehru spoke of differences between the Muslim League and the Congress over land reforms, which the latter was committed to in independent India.
When Nehru became president of the All India States Peoples Conference (AISPC) at Udaipur in January 1946, he got Sheikh Abdullah elected vice president. They were both committed to land reforms, and AISPC, which was a Congress-backed body that worked to nudge princely states to become part of the future India, was equally determined to uproot feudalism after independence.
This was a quandary Jammu & Kashmir ruler Hari Singh faced. He resented Nehru and Abdullah as socialists, but may not have seen a great future for himself in Muslim Pakistan either. Moreover, the disputed Instrument of Accession he signed described him as ‘Jammu Kashmir Naresh ani Tibet Desh Adhipaty’ (Jammu & Kashmir ruler and sovereign of Tibet nation).
It got Sheikh Abdullah into trouble when he met Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Algiers in 1965, an alleged indiscretion that prompted his arrest upon return. Gandhian pacifist Horace Alexander pleaded on his behalf with then information minister Indira Gandhi, who had sympathy for the Sheikh, but also a word of caution.
“What Sheikh Sahib does not realise is that with the Chinese invasion [1962] and the latest moves in and by Pakistan, the position of Kashmir had completely changed. The frontiers of Kashmir touch China, USSR, Pakistan and India. In the present world situation, an independent Kashmir would become a hotbed of intrigue and, apart from the countries mentioned above, would also attract espionage and other activities from the USA and UK,” Alexander quotes Mrs Gandhi as saying in early 1965.
It is a Hindutva canard that Sardar Patel muscled 560 plus princely states into joining India. Pressure mounted on the monarchs when Nehru declared in his 1946 presidential address at the AISPC that those princely states that refuse to merge with India and join the Constituent Assembly would be considered hostile states. This was the background in which Sukhi Lala had to earn his keep in a new India. Who was Sukhi Lala?
Sukhi Lala generically was the moneylender-land grabber in the 1950s movie Mother India. He also appears as the land shark-zamindar in Bimal Roy’s Do Beegha Zameen, and as decadent Hari Babu in Ganga Jamuna. Sukhi Lala played the stock markets in Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420, and sold adulterated medicines in Nutan’s Anari.
In Zia Sarhadi’s Footpath, Dilip Kumar underscored the evil of stock markets, derisively called satta bazaar in Nehru’s India. Indian peasants suffered Sukhi Lala’s greed and occasionally revolted violently against the excesses. Dilip Kumar’s Ganga and Sunil Dutt’s Birju would be jailed or killed in India today as Maoists.
Manmohan Singh called Maoists his biggest security threat, but offered no comment about why the peasants were committing suicide in thousands following his pro-Sukhi Lala economic policies in 1991. India’s finance minister recently flaunted the bahi-khata cover, the moneylender’s cash register, instead of the briefcase her predecessors carried with the annual budget proposals, perhaps signalling who rules India today.
Gandhiji had many Sukhi Lalas as friends who financed the Congress. He saw in them the future trustees of India. Nehru who was a better student of history took a different view of the business class his political guru was enamoured of. His election symbol of do baelon ki jodi captured an affinity with the peasants, Sukhi Lala’s prey from time immemorial.
Ironically, it was Gandhi who had dispatched Nehru to cut his political teeth among the rural masses of Uttar Pradesh. It was in Rae Bareli from across the Sai river that the future prime minister watched police shooting at unarmed peasants at the behest of the local Sukhi Lala.
Rahul Gandhi’s sharp criticism of Narendra Modi’s wily games in Kashmir deserves an assessment of his politics, which may not be unrelated to his much-discussed Nehru-Gandhi lineage.
The lineage in a nutshell is a challenge to Sukhi Lala. Nehru jailed the tallest of the business tycoons. Indira Gandhi nationalised their banks. Rajiv Gandhi directed them to lay off the backs of the Congress workers. Rahul may have a cleaner slate to work with after leading Lala acolytes in the Congress jumped the ship over Kashmir.
Look at it this way. Modi is sworn to make India a Congress-free country for a reason. But the developments of recent days have shown, like it or not, that there is no Congress party without the leadership of the Gandhi family. Think of the PPP without a Bhutto link or an Awami League without a Mujib association, marked variance from the Bandaranaike and Kennedy clans in the limited sway they held on their respective parties.
Now consider a vengeful possibility. A parliamentary act protects the family of the assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi with the highest grade of security of the Special Protection Group. Given the hatred whipped up against them by India’s new rulers in league with a conniving media, it would not be difficult to immobilise them (from a Srinagar visit, for example) by stripping them of their security in the name of economic prudence. Already a move is afoot, says The Hindu, to remove Manmohan Singh’s SPG cover.
On the other hand, such a move could spur the newly cleansed party to come into its own. The waters are being tested on both sides. Sukhi Lala is drooling.
Thursday 12 April 2018
Targeting Corbyn
Mahir Ali in The Dawn
LAST Sunday, many of the participants in the latest protest in London against the Labour Party’s allegedly inadequate response to anti-Semitism are likely to have been buoyed by a report in The Observer about a £50 million project to launch a centrist third force in British politics.
There is no guarantee that such a party will indeed take shape before the next general election, but it does not require much imagination to categorise it as part of the effort to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes prime minister. Whether many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be dumb enough to latch on to such an enterprise, given the dire fate of the last concerted effort to ‘break the mould’ back in the early 1980s, is an open question.
The majority of Labour parliamentarians were discombobulated by a dedicated socialist’s emergence as party leader three years ago, and moves to unseat him were launched almost immediately. The idea of a dedicated socialist leading a party that had once prided itself on its socialism, but had in the 1990s lapsed into a kind of neoliberalism that made it virtually indistinguishable from the Conservative Party, was anathema to the Blairite diehards.
But Corbyn enjoyed mass support among the party membership, and an attempt to replace him led to his re-election with an even bigger majority. Never mind, the malcontents thought, the next general election will render his leadership untenable after Labour is decimated. But when Theresa May made the mistake of calling an early election last year, the opposition made substantial gains while the Tories lost their majority.
Corbyn’s critics were temporarily silenced. A few stepped back, and some opponents even recanted their scepticism about his leadership. The ideological divide remained unbridged, though, and the tendency to latch on to smear campaigns undiminished.
Not long ago, they were heartened by news reports suggesting Corbyn might have been a communist spy, based on the testimony of a delusional former Czechoslovak diplomat. That mud didn’t stick. Corbyn’s considered response to the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury offered another opportunity to malign him, just because the Labour leader sensibly suggested that solid evidence of Russian state complicity in the outrage should precede any action against Moscow.
Reverting to the anti-Semitism trope emerged as the next best option for destabilisation, the latest hook being Corbyn’s sympathy eight years ago in a Facebook post for an artist deploring the erasure of an anti-capitalist mural he had pained on a wall. Corbyn has apologised for failing to notice the mural’s anti-Semitic implications at first glance — namely a couple of stereotypical Jewish faces among the bankers sitting around a table that is crushing the rest of humanity.
It has been claimed the depiction echoes Nazi propaganda, although the critics generally fail to mention that in Germany back then it was common for ‘Jewish financiers’ to be condemned specifically for bankrolling Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, many of whose stalwarts were in turn targeted by their foes on the basis of their Jewish origins.
There is a long history of virulent anti-Semitism across Europe, which contributed to the Holocaust but also survived the Second World War. Its European manifestations today are found mainly on the Continent rather than in Britain, largely on the far right of politics. They are dwarfed, though, by growing anti-Muslim prejudice.
It is perfectly appropriate that even the most passionate critics of the militant Islamic State group or Saudi Arabia, including Corbyn, are seldom branded as Islamophobes. By the same token, it is utterly ridiculous for all critics of Israel, including Jews, to be dubbed anti-Semitic. It is certainly wrong to conflate Jewishness with Israel or with Zionism. But this is a grave error that is routinely compounded by all too many Zionists and most representatives of the Israeli state.
It was in evidence last week when Corbyn was berated for attending a Passover Seder organised by a non-Zionist Jewish collective called Jewdas in his London constituency. To an extent, this particular smear backfired on the Jewish Board of Deputies and other critics. On the other hand, a poll published last Sunday found that half of the British electorate believes — contrary to the evidence, but in keeping with the malign diatribes echoed throughout the mainstream media, from The Guardian to the Daily Mail — that Labour has a bigger anti-Semitism problem than other parties, and that 34 per cent of voters believe Corbyn is among those who hold anti-Semitic views, notwithstanding his unrelenting opposition to all forms of racism.
The latest campaign may have been motivated in part by the May 3 local elections, and its efficacy should be visible in a couple of weeks. It is reassuring, though, that Corbyn has not been cowed into tempering his criticism of the latest atrocities in Gaza.
LAST Sunday, many of the participants in the latest protest in London against the Labour Party’s allegedly inadequate response to anti-Semitism are likely to have been buoyed by a report in The Observer about a £50 million project to launch a centrist third force in British politics.
There is no guarantee that such a party will indeed take shape before the next general election, but it does not require much imagination to categorise it as part of the effort to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes prime minister. Whether many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be dumb enough to latch on to such an enterprise, given the dire fate of the last concerted effort to ‘break the mould’ back in the early 1980s, is an open question.
The majority of Labour parliamentarians were discombobulated by a dedicated socialist’s emergence as party leader three years ago, and moves to unseat him were launched almost immediately. The idea of a dedicated socialist leading a party that had once prided itself on its socialism, but had in the 1990s lapsed into a kind of neoliberalism that made it virtually indistinguishable from the Conservative Party, was anathema to the Blairite diehards.
But Corbyn enjoyed mass support among the party membership, and an attempt to replace him led to his re-election with an even bigger majority. Never mind, the malcontents thought, the next general election will render his leadership untenable after Labour is decimated. But when Theresa May made the mistake of calling an early election last year, the opposition made substantial gains while the Tories lost their majority.
Corbyn’s critics were temporarily silenced. A few stepped back, and some opponents even recanted their scepticism about his leadership. The ideological divide remained unbridged, though, and the tendency to latch on to smear campaigns undiminished.
Not long ago, they were heartened by news reports suggesting Corbyn might have been a communist spy, based on the testimony of a delusional former Czechoslovak diplomat. That mud didn’t stick. Corbyn’s considered response to the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury offered another opportunity to malign him, just because the Labour leader sensibly suggested that solid evidence of Russian state complicity in the outrage should precede any action against Moscow.
Reverting to the anti-Semitism trope emerged as the next best option for destabilisation, the latest hook being Corbyn’s sympathy eight years ago in a Facebook post for an artist deploring the erasure of an anti-capitalist mural he had pained on a wall. Corbyn has apologised for failing to notice the mural’s anti-Semitic implications at first glance — namely a couple of stereotypical Jewish faces among the bankers sitting around a table that is crushing the rest of humanity.
It has been claimed the depiction echoes Nazi propaganda, although the critics generally fail to mention that in Germany back then it was common for ‘Jewish financiers’ to be condemned specifically for bankrolling Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, many of whose stalwarts were in turn targeted by their foes on the basis of their Jewish origins.
There is a long history of virulent anti-Semitism across Europe, which contributed to the Holocaust but also survived the Second World War. Its European manifestations today are found mainly on the Continent rather than in Britain, largely on the far right of politics. They are dwarfed, though, by growing anti-Muslim prejudice.
It is perfectly appropriate that even the most passionate critics of the militant Islamic State group or Saudi Arabia, including Corbyn, are seldom branded as Islamophobes. By the same token, it is utterly ridiculous for all critics of Israel, including Jews, to be dubbed anti-Semitic. It is certainly wrong to conflate Jewishness with Israel or with Zionism. But this is a grave error that is routinely compounded by all too many Zionists and most representatives of the Israeli state.
It was in evidence last week when Corbyn was berated for attending a Passover Seder organised by a non-Zionist Jewish collective called Jewdas in his London constituency. To an extent, this particular smear backfired on the Jewish Board of Deputies and other critics. On the other hand, a poll published last Sunday found that half of the British electorate believes — contrary to the evidence, but in keeping with the malign diatribes echoed throughout the mainstream media, from The Guardian to the Daily Mail — that Labour has a bigger anti-Semitism problem than other parties, and that 34 per cent of voters believe Corbyn is among those who hold anti-Semitic views, notwithstanding his unrelenting opposition to all forms of racism.
The latest campaign may have been motivated in part by the May 3 local elections, and its efficacy should be visible in a couple of weeks. It is reassuring, though, that Corbyn has not been cowed into tempering his criticism of the latest atrocities in Gaza.
Thursday 22 September 2016
Is the Indian economy on Autopilot?
Pulapre Balakrishnan in The Hindu
The Modi government had inherited an economy with quite rapidly accelerating growth and steadily declining inflation. It has barely managed to maintain this scenario
As the Narendra Modi government inches towards its halfway mark, its economic philosophy stands revealed. This appears to consist of aiming at some ideal institutional architecture while leaving economic forces to play out on their own. The criterion of macroeconomic stability, defined mainly by inflation kept within a range, completes the picture. Underpinning such an approach is the premise that the potential of the economy, reflecting the chosen acts of private agents, not only cannot be improved upon by the government but its realisation could actually be stymied by intervention. This is a well-known position in the canon of Anglo-American economics tending towards the view that market outcomes are the best. The maxim ‘minimum government is maximum governance’ could legitimately claim to be its progeny.
Life in the slow lane
How, it may be asked, has this philosophy served the economy? We could start with growth. Since May 2014, growth has accelerated but at a much slower rate than that it already had commenced upon in 2013-14. India today is the world’s fastest growing economy but this we owe to the fact that China has slowed more than India has. India has not exactly surged to number one position. But more importantly, the government has not so far been able to achieve the substantial quickening of the economy that Mr. Modi had promised at election time. The government has on occasion extolled its record in maintaining macroeconomic stability. This is indeed correct. Inflation has declined but this only reflects a downward trend that had started in 2013-14. The government would also no doubt like to take credit for sticking to the pre-announced fiscal consolidation path. The fiscal deficit has steadily declined since May 2014. The Finance Minister’s public statements suggest that he treats this as a significant achievement of his government. Actually, it typifies the search for the ideal architecture without sufficient concern for outcomes. The truth is that this government had inherited an economy with quite rapidly accelerating growth and steadily declining inflation. It has barely managed to maintain this scenario. The promised resurgence has not materialised.
It is with respect to investment that the government’s record is uninspiring. Far from having been able to instil confidence among private investors, the government has been unable to stem a decline in capital formation — as a share of output — in progress for at least half a decade. On its part the government takes recourse to the figures on foreign direct investment (FDI) to signal the effectiveness of its policies. Data from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion show that in the year just passed, the economy attracted increased FDI up to 29 per cent in dollar terms. While this is impressive, and to be welcomed, it is important to have a sense of what it amounts to. In the year 2014-15, FDI amounted to a mere 4 per cent of total capital formation in India. So, while FDI is to be encouraged, its ability to make a significant contribution to growth is limited. On the other hand, over 75 per cent of capital formation is undertaken by the domestic private sector. Any significant change in the investment scenario would depend upon the actions of this segment.
Sticking to fiscal consolidation
Right now private investment is very likely being restrained by the weak balance sheet of firms. The flip side of this is the high level of non-performing assets (NPAs) of the public commercial banks. Forcing these banks to lend would be poor policy. But it is not clear whether everything that can be done to lower the lending rate is being done. After all, consumer price index (CPI) inflation, the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) preferred inflation index, is trending downward and there is a case for lowering lending rates. But the RBI has now been put into the straitjacket of inflation targeting and can no longer respond to considerations of output. This leaves fiscal policy as the only instrument with the government.
The government, however, is reluctant to use it to increase aggregate demand for fear of deviating from its fiscal consolidation path. It is of course possible to step up public investment by trimming subsidies. Here the National Democratic Alliance government’s approach is cravenly political, and no different from that of its predecessor, the United Progressive Alliance. It is reluctant to be seen as cutting subsidies even when it is clear that a rupee-for-rupee swap in certain subsidies for public capital formation is likely to be beneficial for both growth and welfare. The fertilizer subsidy presents the most obvious instance. It has done little to stem the rise in food prices while continuing to take up precious fiscal space. There is a strong case for reviewing its continuation, at least in the present form. Well-designed empirical research alone can settle the matter of its desirability, and one hopes the government will provide this in time for its third annual Budget.
Looking for inspiration
An object of this government’s admiration has been revealed to us in the choice of speaker for the first NITI Aayog Lecture on Transforming India. It chose Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore who was earlier its Finance Minister for close to a decade. A trained economist with considerable international exposure, Mr. Shanmugaratnam typifies the Singapore model, which recognises the value of high human capital in its leadership, something that India has not seen since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru. Prime Minister Modi is right to have invited this global leader to participate in a brainstorming on how to transform India, thus drawing much-needed attention to the achievements of Singapore. Though its cultural policies may not be to everyone’s taste, the economic transformation that this tiny state has so quickly wrought is most impressive indeed. There is an astounding presence there of public capital in the form of infrastructure, the most egregious of which is public housing which hosts over 80 per cent of the population. Along with its approach to political freedoms, Singapore’s record is closer to that of socialist planning rather than free-market capitalism. Its government has not hesitated to intervene in the economy but its interventions have been made with a finesse that has yielded substantial returns. It is ironic that a government that had so ceremoniously replaced the Planning Commission must simultaneously seek clues from the history of a country transformed by economic planning.
There is one specific area in which our own government may learn from the Singapore experience. The government there had instituted a provident fund to which all workers and employees have had to contribute. These contributions ensured a rise in the saving rate which in turn was a source of funding for public investment. In the muddled discourse on fiscal policy in India today, the reigning argument appears to be that a fixed private saving rate sets the limit for the attainable fiscal deficit. This overlooks the possibility of raising the private saving rate, which is precisely what the Singapore government had done early in its history, enabling it to achieve a scale of public capital formation that truly distinguishes it from India. All indications are that the present government of India is striving to replicate Singapore’s institutional architecture, as in laws governing business, rather than the transformative role of public investment that turned a fishing village into a global destination for FDI. What other conclusion can be drawn from the fact that in the Budget for 2016-17 the increase in the allocation for capital expenditure amounted to a mere 2.3 per cent, with inflation running at around 4 per cent per annum?
Bleak agricultural landscape
A sector that is unlikely to be well served by the philosophy than an economy left to its own devices will achieve its potential is agriculture. Three of the past five years in India have been years of poor agricultural performance, reflected in persistent food price inflation. We are very likely witnessing creeping climate change with direct consequences for production. The advisory from most funds in the financial sector is that the economic outlook this year will depend upon the monsoon. It is surprising that the imperative of drought-proofing an increasingly vulnerable Indian agriculture hardly figures in the public discourse on the economy when it is of no less importance than rolling out the Goods and Services Tax. Nothing short of a transformation akin to the Green Revolution can achieve this, and the States would have to be on board. The present government has had little to say on the matter so far. By disbanding the Planning Commission, the Centre has lost a long-standing conduit to the States whose planning boards did have at least a titular connection to the former.
The Modi government had inherited an economy with quite rapidly accelerating growth and steadily declining inflation. It has barely managed to maintain this scenario
As the Narendra Modi government inches towards its halfway mark, its economic philosophy stands revealed. This appears to consist of aiming at some ideal institutional architecture while leaving economic forces to play out on their own. The criterion of macroeconomic stability, defined mainly by inflation kept within a range, completes the picture. Underpinning such an approach is the premise that the potential of the economy, reflecting the chosen acts of private agents, not only cannot be improved upon by the government but its realisation could actually be stymied by intervention. This is a well-known position in the canon of Anglo-American economics tending towards the view that market outcomes are the best. The maxim ‘minimum government is maximum governance’ could legitimately claim to be its progeny.
Life in the slow lane
How, it may be asked, has this philosophy served the economy? We could start with growth. Since May 2014, growth has accelerated but at a much slower rate than that it already had commenced upon in 2013-14. India today is the world’s fastest growing economy but this we owe to the fact that China has slowed more than India has. India has not exactly surged to number one position. But more importantly, the government has not so far been able to achieve the substantial quickening of the economy that Mr. Modi had promised at election time. The government has on occasion extolled its record in maintaining macroeconomic stability. This is indeed correct. Inflation has declined but this only reflects a downward trend that had started in 2013-14. The government would also no doubt like to take credit for sticking to the pre-announced fiscal consolidation path. The fiscal deficit has steadily declined since May 2014. The Finance Minister’s public statements suggest that he treats this as a significant achievement of his government. Actually, it typifies the search for the ideal architecture without sufficient concern for outcomes. The truth is that this government had inherited an economy with quite rapidly accelerating growth and steadily declining inflation. It has barely managed to maintain this scenario. The promised resurgence has not materialised.
It is with respect to investment that the government’s record is uninspiring. Far from having been able to instil confidence among private investors, the government has been unable to stem a decline in capital formation — as a share of output — in progress for at least half a decade. On its part the government takes recourse to the figures on foreign direct investment (FDI) to signal the effectiveness of its policies. Data from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion show that in the year just passed, the economy attracted increased FDI up to 29 per cent in dollar terms. While this is impressive, and to be welcomed, it is important to have a sense of what it amounts to. In the year 2014-15, FDI amounted to a mere 4 per cent of total capital formation in India. So, while FDI is to be encouraged, its ability to make a significant contribution to growth is limited. On the other hand, over 75 per cent of capital formation is undertaken by the domestic private sector. Any significant change in the investment scenario would depend upon the actions of this segment.
Sticking to fiscal consolidation
Right now private investment is very likely being restrained by the weak balance sheet of firms. The flip side of this is the high level of non-performing assets (NPAs) of the public commercial banks. Forcing these banks to lend would be poor policy. But it is not clear whether everything that can be done to lower the lending rate is being done. After all, consumer price index (CPI) inflation, the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) preferred inflation index, is trending downward and there is a case for lowering lending rates. But the RBI has now been put into the straitjacket of inflation targeting and can no longer respond to considerations of output. This leaves fiscal policy as the only instrument with the government.
The government, however, is reluctant to use it to increase aggregate demand for fear of deviating from its fiscal consolidation path. It is of course possible to step up public investment by trimming subsidies. Here the National Democratic Alliance government’s approach is cravenly political, and no different from that of its predecessor, the United Progressive Alliance. It is reluctant to be seen as cutting subsidies even when it is clear that a rupee-for-rupee swap in certain subsidies for public capital formation is likely to be beneficial for both growth and welfare. The fertilizer subsidy presents the most obvious instance. It has done little to stem the rise in food prices while continuing to take up precious fiscal space. There is a strong case for reviewing its continuation, at least in the present form. Well-designed empirical research alone can settle the matter of its desirability, and one hopes the government will provide this in time for its third annual Budget.
Looking for inspiration
An object of this government’s admiration has been revealed to us in the choice of speaker for the first NITI Aayog Lecture on Transforming India. It chose Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore who was earlier its Finance Minister for close to a decade. A trained economist with considerable international exposure, Mr. Shanmugaratnam typifies the Singapore model, which recognises the value of high human capital in its leadership, something that India has not seen since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru. Prime Minister Modi is right to have invited this global leader to participate in a brainstorming on how to transform India, thus drawing much-needed attention to the achievements of Singapore. Though its cultural policies may not be to everyone’s taste, the economic transformation that this tiny state has so quickly wrought is most impressive indeed. There is an astounding presence there of public capital in the form of infrastructure, the most egregious of which is public housing which hosts over 80 per cent of the population. Along with its approach to political freedoms, Singapore’s record is closer to that of socialist planning rather than free-market capitalism. Its government has not hesitated to intervene in the economy but its interventions have been made with a finesse that has yielded substantial returns. It is ironic that a government that had so ceremoniously replaced the Planning Commission must simultaneously seek clues from the history of a country transformed by economic planning.
There is one specific area in which our own government may learn from the Singapore experience. The government there had instituted a provident fund to which all workers and employees have had to contribute. These contributions ensured a rise in the saving rate which in turn was a source of funding for public investment. In the muddled discourse on fiscal policy in India today, the reigning argument appears to be that a fixed private saving rate sets the limit for the attainable fiscal deficit. This overlooks the possibility of raising the private saving rate, which is precisely what the Singapore government had done early in its history, enabling it to achieve a scale of public capital formation that truly distinguishes it from India. All indications are that the present government of India is striving to replicate Singapore’s institutional architecture, as in laws governing business, rather than the transformative role of public investment that turned a fishing village into a global destination for FDI. What other conclusion can be drawn from the fact that in the Budget for 2016-17 the increase in the allocation for capital expenditure amounted to a mere 2.3 per cent, with inflation running at around 4 per cent per annum?
Bleak agricultural landscape
A sector that is unlikely to be well served by the philosophy than an economy left to its own devices will achieve its potential is agriculture. Three of the past five years in India have been years of poor agricultural performance, reflected in persistent food price inflation. We are very likely witnessing creeping climate change with direct consequences for production. The advisory from most funds in the financial sector is that the economic outlook this year will depend upon the monsoon. It is surprising that the imperative of drought-proofing an increasingly vulnerable Indian agriculture hardly figures in the public discourse on the economy when it is of no less importance than rolling out the Goods and Services Tax. Nothing short of a transformation akin to the Green Revolution can achieve this, and the States would have to be on board. The present government has had little to say on the matter so far. By disbanding the Planning Commission, the Centre has lost a long-standing conduit to the States whose planning boards did have at least a titular connection to the former.
Monday 17 March 2014
Tony Benn was defiantly, stroppily, youthfully socialist to the very end
Because somehow he became more defiantly, inspiringly, stroppily, youthfully socialist every year up to 88. If he’d lasted to 90 he’d have been on the news wearing a green Mohican and getting arrested for chaining himself to a banker.
Even more remarkable is that as he became younger with age, so did his audience. In a time when socialist groups despair at how to attract the under-50s, Benn regularly packed out a tent that held 3,000 people at Glastonbury. Anyone passing by outside who heard the roars and squeals as he appeared must have assumed the Arctic Monkeys were making a surprise appearance, but it was a man in his 80s, clambering on stage with a flask of tea.
Then he’d start with: “I’m pleased to say I’ve decided to give up protesting. Instead of protesting I’m going to take up DEMANDING instead.” And teenagers would shriek and raise their arms above their heads and clap, belly button studs wobbling as he recounted the first time he met Clement Attlee.
He filled theatres as well. In places like Telford, the box office manager would say: “The shows that went fastest this year were Tony Benn and a Led Zeppelin tribute act.” Maybe other politicians will try to copy him, before wondering why tickets aren’t selling well for “An evening with David Blunkett”.
He was introduced to socialism during the Second World War, when it became mainstream to suggest that if the nation could collectively pool its resources to fight, it should be able to do the same to provide health and housing. The introduction of the welfare state, along with the movements that won independence in the colonies, must have confirmed for him that mass movements, combined with parliament, can transform society in favour of the poorest people.
Parliament, he insisted, was the pinnacle of democracy, the triumph of radical thinking that went in a line from the early Christians, through the Levellers in the English Civil War and up to the Labour Party (although he’d have told Jesus, “I don’t think you should turn that water into wine as I’ve seen the damage alcohol can do.”).
These ideas can’t have seemed too controversial until the 1970s, when the response to global economic chaos was to blame the unions, taxes and state ownership of anything, and instead hand unrestrained power to big business and the free market.
But Benn stuck to his principles, so Conservatives called him the “most dangerous man in Britain”. He must have consistently disappointed opponents who portrayed him as a figure of evil, as they tried to convince people: “You can tell he’s trying to wreck the country: he’s got a gently persuasive lilting tone and he’s addicted to tea. He’s obviously worse than Stalin.”
Maybe it was the simplicity of his ideals that made him so endearing. If someone suggested immigration was causing our woes, he’d reply that it was odd how a businessman can move his business overseas, but the workforce shouldn’t be allowed to follow it to stay in work.
To anyone who argued that we don’t act collectively any more, he’d recount the day he was on a train that broke down for hours, and “up until then we’d all been individuals on a privatised train, but now we helped each other, lending phones and sharing sandwiches, and by the time it arrived it was a socialist train”.
But despite his reverence for Parliament, in some ways it was once he left it that he became most powerful. With an unfathomable energy he spoke at several events a day. Union meetings, anti-war benefits, campaigns against library closures – he was everywhere. If he was on Tony Blair’s asking rate for speeches he’d have been a billionaire within a month.
It wouldn’t have been surprising to find he was addressing a union conference, then speaking on the Iraq war at a children’s party, before giving a lecture about the peasants’ revolt at a sado-masochists AGM before nipping up to Leicester to appear on Question Time.
I did some filming with him once at seven in the morning, the only time he could do it. I got a taxi to his house, driven by a Pakistani man in a rage about the Iraq war. “Politicians are all crooks,” he kept saying, “The only one I trust is Tony Benn.” “Well,” I said, “strangely, we’re going to his house.” “Tony Benn? House of Tony Benn? We go to house of Tony Benn? Not Tony Benn?” he said.
Tony Benn in 1964 (PA)
So when we arrived I asked Tony Benn: “Would you mind meeting the taxi driver, he’s a huge fan of yours.” Then I went in with the driver who yelped and clasped Benn’s hand, saying “This is such a good day. Oh such a good day. My friends will not believe this.”
And Benn said: “Well I don’t know about that but I’ve got the kettle on if you’d like a cup of tea.”
This seemed to be his life. The more unassuming and down to earth he was, the more he acquired the reputation that narcissists crave.
In later years, when the establishment were unable to damage him or his reputation with their claims of his inherent evil, they labelled him a national sweetheart, and if he’d wanted to, I’m sure he could have presented Countdown and got to the final of Strictly Come Dancing.
But he ignored his new image, almost baffled by the acclaim he drew, and continued to make the case that a world in which the richest 400 have the same wealth as the poorest 2 billion is probably a bit wrong, and could do with putting right. And he did it to the end, in such a way that made anyone listening believe it was possible.
Interviewed a few weeks ago, he was asked how he’d like to be remembered. He said: “With the words ‘he inspired us’.”
Well he’s got no worries there. No worries at all.
Wednesday 6 March 2013
A Record of Hugo Chavez - RIP
by ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN in the hindu
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias, President of Venezuela, who died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58, was a defining figure in Latin American politics for fifteen years, becoming almost synonymous with the popular tide that has elected and reelected left and centre-left governments across the continent in that time.
Mr. Chávez combined courage with immense conviction. Born to schoolteacher parents in Sabaneta in 1954, he qualified in military arts and sciences at the National Military Academy, became an officer in a paratrooper unit, and started his political career in the early 1980s by founding a secret organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, which took its name from the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolivar. His first big move was an attempted military coup in 1992, for which he was imprisoned for two years before being pardoned.
Yet ordinary people’s suffering under austerity measures led Mr. Chávez’s fellow officers to try again, in November 1992; they failed. Mr. Chávez, however, renamed his group the Movement of the Fifth Republic, which later merged with other groups to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and won the 1998 presidential election on a socialist manifesto, promising millions relief from a system which had put oil wealth into luxurious lives for the rich and profits for the oil corporations.
Mr. Chávez removed corrupt military officers and started a national reform programme. Venezuela, according to the United States Department of Energy and a former CIA oil expert, has the world’s largest oil reserves at 1.36 trillion barrels, and the new president promptly nationalised the main oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), putting the profits into very effective social programmes. Carles Mutaner, Joan Benach, and Maria Paez Victor note in CounterPunch that between 2000 and 2010 social spending increased by 61 per cent or $772 billion; the country has the region’s lowest level of inequality, with a reduction in its Gini coefficient of 54 per cent. Poverty is down from 71 per cent in 1996 to 21 now, and extreme poverty is down from 40 per cent to 7.3. The programmes, or Misiones, have reached 20 million people, and 2.1 million have received senior citizens’ pensions, a sevenfold increase under Mr. Chávez.
The country has also cut food imports from 90 per cent to 30 per cent of its consumption, and has reduced child malnutrition from 7.7 per cent in 1990 to 5 today; infant mortality has declined from 25/1000 to 13 in the same period, and the country now has 58 doctors per 10,000 people (as against 18 in 1996). As many as 96 per cent of the population now have access to clean water, and with school attendance at 85 per cent, one in three Venezuelans is enrolled in free education up to and including university.
Oil royalties help. A 2001 law cut foreign companies’ share of the sale price from 84 to 70 per cent, and they now pay royalties of 16.6 per cent on Orinoco basin heavy crude; they used to pay 1 per cent. Exxon and Conoco Philips rejected these terms, as Deepak Bhojwani says in the Economic and Political Weekly (December 22, 2012), and were expelled, but Chevron stayed.
Mr. Chávez of course infuriated the mainly white elites, some of whom talked of him in racist terms, as well as the United States government and press, both of which have consistently vilified him in language bordering on the delusional. The State Department greeted the 2002 coup against Mr. Chávez by expressing solidarity with the Venezuelan people and looking forward to “working with all democratic forces in Venezuela.” The statement also said Mr. Chávez had dismissed the Vice—President and Cabinet. In fact it was the coup figurehead, Pedro Carmona Estanga, who, according to the Notable Names Database NNDB, dissolved the national assembly, disbanded the supreme court, closed the attorney—general’s and comptroller’s offices, and repealed 48 redistributive laws meant to help the poor.
Yet huge public support for Mr. Chávez meant the regime collapsed within days. The President was reinstated, but the then U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hectored him to “respect the constitution”, and Greg Palast points out in The Progressive that in 2006 the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy called him a demagogue out to undermine democracy and destabilise Venezuela.
The U.S. press dutifully played its part. In September 2012, the WorldNet columnist Drew Zahn called Mr. Chávez a “socialist dictator”, when the President was about to win a fourth successive election. All those elections were of far greater probity than the respective U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004; this time Mr. Chávez won by 11 percentage points on a turnout of 80 per cent. Other U.S. media bodies have spread partial truths about the Caracas government, saying it bloats the public sector and lets the budget deficit spiral. In fact, as Mark Weisbrot notes in the Guardian, 18.4 per cent of Venezuela’s work force is in the public sector, in contrast to Norway’s 29 per cent, and its 2012 budget deficit, projected at 51.3 per cent of GDP, is lower than the European Union average of 82.5 per cent; inflation has declined too, from 27 per cent in 2010 to 19 per cent now. Weisbrot also points out that the New York Times — which welcomed the coup — has taken 14 years, longer even than other American media outfits, to publish any arguments for Mr. Chávez. Carles Mutaner and colleagues comment that U.S. analysts ask what Venezuela will do when the oil runs out, but do not ask that about other oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Canada; neither do critics note that the country’s interest payments are only about 3 per cent of export earnings.
One of Washington’s problems is that, as Greg Palast recognises, Mr. Chávez kept oil revenues within Latin America; unlike Saudi Arabia, which buys U.S. treasury bills and other assets, Venezuela at one point withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve, and since 2007 has aided other Latin American countries with $36 billion, most of which has been repaid back. In effect, this supplants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and possibly also its neoliberal fellow—crusader the World Bank. Even more unpalatably for Washington, Chávismo is now a clear political programme towards a Bolivarian Revolution, which Palast calls a close replica of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with progressive income tax, public works, social security, and cheap electricity. For Bolivarians, such things are rights; they are even reminiscent of T.H. Marshall’s view that they are integral to substantive citizenship. Worst of all for U.S. regional hegemony, Mr. Chávez himself said Venezuela is no longer an oil colony, that it has regained its oil sovereignty, and that he wanted to replace the IMF with an International Humanitarian Bank based on cooperation; Uruguay already pays for Venezuelan oil with cows. Mr. Chávez wished the IMF and the World Bank would “disappear”, and his passionate concern for Latin American countries’ sovereignty made him a decisive figure in the 2011 creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac).
Mr. Chávez could be ruthless; in 2010 a military court sentenced his former key ally Raúl Isaias Baduel to just under eight years for embezzlement after a long—delayed trial, and Baduel is now banned from future political office, almost certainly because he criticised constitutional reforms which would allow a president more than two terms. Mr. Chávez was, however, no doctrinaire leader. Although a Christian, he criticised clerical collusion with the ancien régime, and did not accept the Church’s authority in politics. He also thought seriously about political economy. Bhojwani notes that he favoured a form of 21st century socialism partly derived from the work of Heinz Dieterich Steffan. For Mr. Chávez, ethics, morality, cooperativism, and associationism make for strong public economic activity and in turn protects the equality which is essential to liberty; it even includes a respect for private property.
The Venezuelan electorate have repeatedly endorsed this; in the December 2012 gubernatorial elections — the first ones in 14 years in which Mr. Chávez himself did not campaign — Mr. Chávez allies won 20 out of 23 states. After the President’s win in October, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had sent him a message saying, “Your victory is also ours.” Billions, and not only poor people, around the world would agree: Tu victoria es también la nuestra.
Friday 25 May 2012
If socialists really did run the show, working people would benefit
Rather than having to engage in debate, an opponent can be dismissed as extremist
Owen Jones in The Independent
Having just moved to north London, I was perturbed to be woken on Tuesday morning by a whirring sound in the distance. When I glanced at the Telegraph's front page later that day – which revealed that multi-millionaire Tory donor Adrian Beecroft had accused Vince Cable of being a socialist – I realised it must have been Karl Marx spinning violently in his Highgate Cemetery grave. The great man shouldn't take it to heart: Beecroft strikes me as the sort of bloke who would accuse opponents of privatising the first-born for being a bit "pinko".
Beecroft's smear on the good name of socialism was triggered by Cable's description of his proposals to shred Britain's remaining workers' rights (not least by allowing bosses to fire at will) as "bonkers". Given the contents of Beecroft's report for the Conservative Party, the certifiably non-socialist Lib Dem was being rather mild-mannered.
We are in the most protracted economic crisis since the late 19th century because of a financial collapse and the Government's decision to suck demand out of the economy, and yet our economic elite still attempts to scapegoat people's rights in the workplace. I doubt that the Confederation of British Industry – fervent supporters of Beecroft's plans – believes it for a second, of course: they are merely class warriors attempting to exploit a crisis to push policies that would otherwise be politically impossible.
But it does demonstrate how "socialist" is regarded as the ultimate insult by much of our wealthy elite, who have been in a virtually uninterrupted triumphalist mood since Margaret Thatcher defeated their political opponents in the 1980s. Similarly, an increasingly hot-tempered David Cameron routinely slams Ed Miliband for being "left-wing" at Prime Minister's Questions; it was once fashionable for the media to label the Labour leader "Red Ed". It is much like the term "liberal" in the United States: in the 1950s, even Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower described himself as such, as did huge numbers of American voters. Liberal US scholar Lionel Trilling once felt able to dismiss conservatism as "irritable mental gestures". But now "liberal" is largely hurled as a term of abuse in US political debate, with few mainstream politicians willing to associate themselves with the label.
Socialism used to be a term the Labour Party was more than happy to champion. In its historic 1945 manifesto, Labour announced that it was "a Socialist Party, and proud of it", with the ultimate objective of establishing a "Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain". But the word hasn't made an appearance in a Labour Manifesto since 1987. Curiously, Tony Blair repeatedly spoke about socialism in his early days as Labour leader but, given that no one really believed he was a socialist, it was more a case of "the lady doth protest too much". For Blair and his adherents, if there was a rare, sentimental need to dust off "socialism", it was to mean nothing more than platitudes no decent person would disagree with, like "community" and "fairness".
The reason "socialism" came to be seen as a swear word was twofold. First, Thatcher made it abundantly clear that she was at war with what she regarded as socialism. In her memoirs, she described post-war Britain as a "socialist ratchet" and, reflecting on the 1983 general election, she argued that "socialism was still built into the institutions and mentality of Britain". In her mission to "create a wholly new attitude of mind", as she put it soon after her first election victory, she appeared to crush "socialism" into the dust.
In what was fortunate timing for Thatcher's acolytes, the Soviet empire began disintegrating as her project reached its climax. Although almost all socialists abhorred Stalinist totalitarianism (by the 1980s, at least), these were regimes that described themselves as "actually existing socialism". Their collapse was portrayed as the final discrediting of socialism, and the ultimate vindication of capitalism.
Beecroft's use of "socialism", then, relates to a theory called the "Overton window", which describes what is seen as politically acceptable at a given time. Rather than having to engage in a debate over the merits of bosses being able to dismiss their workers at will, an opponent can be dismissed as a "socialist", which – for Beecroft – is code for "extremist" or "someone with views outside of what is politically acceptable".
The irony of it all is that socialism, of a sort, is actually flourishing in Britain – for wealthy people like Beecroft. The taxpayer bailed out the banks that caused the crisis, allowing them to carry on much as before, courtesy of public money. Private companies such as "welfare-to-work" business A4e leech off the state, as do private contractors throughout our public services. Indeed, our NHS is set to become an even more lucrative opportunity (at taxpayers' expense) for private health care firms like Care UK than it was under New Labour.
The taxpayer splashes out three times more subsidies on private train companies than they did on publicly owned British Rail. Private landlords get away with charging extortionate rents, knowing that the state will pay billions subsidising them through housing benefit. Wealthy individuals enjoy tax relief on their pensions worth billions. Socialism for the rich is thriving while, for everybody else, it is capitalism red in tooth and claw.
If socialists really were running the show in Britain, they would be building a society run by, and in the interests of, working people. Our banks – propped by the British people – would be taken under genuine democratic control, forcing them to operate in the interests of society as a whole. Our booming wealthy elite would be forced to pay a fair share of tax (or, in some cases, any tax whatsoever). After the disastrous failures of market economics, real socialists would be taking our utilities – such as the railways and rip-off energy companies – into social ownership: not old-style, statist nationalisation, but democratically run by workers and consumers. They would bring down welfare spending, not by kicking people at the bottom, but by building social housing, introducing a living wage, and creating jobs. And they would be reversing the scandalous lack of rights that workers have in the workplace, which is what ensured that wages were declining for many before the crash had even happened.
Instead, we have a government (of which Vince Cable is a pillar) ruthlessly forcing working people to pay the immense cost of getting capitalism out of its mess. Beecroft may feel frustrated that it is not politically possible to adopt his attacks on workers' rights wholesale, but he can rest assured that this is a government that stands for people like him – and those pesky socialists could not be any further away from the corridors of power.
Wednesday 18 January 2012
Huaxi: The socialist village where everyone is wealthy
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
The sort of oxen you expect to see in Chinese villages tend to be pulling carts or tilling fields, not a beasts made of a ton of gold. This precious cow is located on the 60th floor of a 328m-tall skyscraper in Huaxi, China's richest village, and building that juts out of the eastern landscape like a giant tripod topped by a golden ball.
Huaxi is a "model socialist village", according to local officials,
and was founded by local Communist Party secretary Wu Renbao in 1961.
His foresight was to transform a poor farming community into a super
wealthy community, built on its clever adaptations of modern
agribusiness methods, then its diversification into steel mills, its
logistics firms, and its textile businesses.
The commune listed on the stock exchange in 1998 and is now a major corporation in its own right. Its subsidiary companies, built into something that resembles a modern-day conglomerate, exports to more than 40 countries around the world. Huaxi is where Chinese people come to learn how to get rich. At a time when the rest of the world, and indeed much of China, is trying to absorb an economic slowdown, Huaxi is like a parallel universe.
"This cow cost 300 million yuan (£31m), but now it's worth 500 million yuan," says our guide, Tina Yao, as she steers us from floor to floor in the Zengdi Kongzhong New Village Tower, which is taller than anything in London. "Zengdi" translates as "increase the land" and the skyscraper cost three billion yuan (£310m).
Other floors have giant animals of solid silver. Fearsomely bejewelled chandeliers hang over your head in banquet halls that hold thousands of people. You approach these glittering sites walking on gold-leaf marble, passing aquariums with sharks and stingrays.
Far below, you see the villas and theluxury cars. Every villager gets a share of the corporation's profits and is entitled to a car, a house, free healthcare and free cooking oil.
The village feels a little like Dubai. It is not big on charm – the replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and the Sydney Opera House – are of questionable taste, but where it is widely different is in how well it is able to meet its people's needs. Mr Wu is keen that Huaxi should showcase China's achievements and now some two million visitors come to Huaxi every year to gaze upon its splendour.
The original founding families, who are known as "stakeholders", number around 1,600 and the average household income is around £100,000 a year, once all the bonuses, pensions and wages are factored in. White BMWs are ubiquitous and the murals, instead of depicting socialist realist muscled workers in overalls, have pictures of happy families living in wealthy villas.
This is where Huaxi stands apart from so many other villages in China. While the rest of the country suffers from a yawning wealth gap between the rich cities of the eastern seaboard and southern coasts and the rural hamlets, Huaxi took the initiative, driven by Mr Wu's pragmatism, and headed its own way. It behaved like a city, even importing migrant labour.
"We only ever wanted what was good for our people," is a dictum of Mr Wu, who is now 86 years old and retired. His son has taken over as party secretary, but the father still gives lectures on socialism every day. He avoids allying himself too closely with either capitalism or communism, though his pragmatism has strong elements of the Chinese Communist Party about it.
No one doubts the wisdom of Mr Wu, and looking at the village's wealth, why would they? He broke up the collective system of farming and encouraged people to grow their own crops.
Below the stakeholders in the hierarchy come the residents from neighbouring villages that have been absorbed into Huaxi, and then tens of thousands of migrant workers who perform most of the rest of the work.
Work and wealth are the crowning ideologies. No one takes weekend breaks, and the streets tend to be deserted of residents because they are all off working. The hard work has clearly paid off and the money raised has helped the villagers diversify into other industry.
One of those areas is tourism – wealth tourism – and some of the locals help to meet and greet the two million tourists that come every year to see the village.
A new reason to come is to see the skyscraper, which is impressive, although as there is nothing even remotely as tall in the surrounding countryside, it looks strangely incongruous.
The reason it is so tall is a useful insight into the mindset of the people here. It is, as Mr Wu said in a recent interview, because the people Huaxi can compete with anyone in the country. "Beijing's tallest building is the 328m-tall World Trade Centre. Huaxi wants to maintain the same height with the Central Committee of the Communist Party," he said.
The village's total square area is a little less than one square kilometre, and there are barrack-style dormitories, factories, and pagoda style-buildings for local residents. The skyscraper houses the Longxi International Hotel, which has 2,000 beds and will employ 3,000 people eager to learn how to become wealthy, Huaxi-style.
Intriguingly, in the central village park, there are the statutes of five of the true icons of Communism in China, some more controversial than others. The panoply includes the former mayor of Beijing, Liu Shaoqi, who was purged in the period of ideological frenzy that was the Cultural Revolution and whom many believed Mao had murdered. He has never really been rehabilitated and remains outside the pantheon of true revolutionary heroes.
But then Mr Wu himself suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He set up factories but the Red Guards paraded him in the village as a "capitalist roader" and locked him up, much in the same way as Liu Shaoqi. Like Deng Xiaoping, who also suffered during the Cultural Revolution, Mr Wu bided his time and soon was back on his capitalist track after Mao died in 1976, except that these ideas became formulated as socialism with Chinese characteristics.
All over the village are megaphones blasting out the village anthem, which tells of how communist skies shine down Huaxi, a village of everyday miracles. "I have heard about Huaxi for many years. I have wanted to see it for many years," said one octogenarian visitor from Chengzhou.
Two men, both of them employed in security and not stakeholders in the village, say they love what is going on in Huaxi, but they admit they are a bit jealous of the shareholders who get a stake in the village's profits every year.
Certainly, there is a lot of bluster in the way Huaxi markets itself. The divisions between the stakeholders and the migrants on the streets are large. But no one in China doubts its importance as a model for the success of the nation. And deny at your peril the wisdom of Mr Wu and of the wider Chinese psyche: The song from the public address system says it proud: "Socialism is best."
The commune listed on the stock exchange in 1998 and is now a major corporation in its own right. Its subsidiary companies, built into something that resembles a modern-day conglomerate, exports to more than 40 countries around the world. Huaxi is where Chinese people come to learn how to get rich. At a time when the rest of the world, and indeed much of China, is trying to absorb an economic slowdown, Huaxi is like a parallel universe.
"This cow cost 300 million yuan (£31m), but now it's worth 500 million yuan," says our guide, Tina Yao, as she steers us from floor to floor in the Zengdi Kongzhong New Village Tower, which is taller than anything in London. "Zengdi" translates as "increase the land" and the skyscraper cost three billion yuan (£310m).
Other floors have giant animals of solid silver. Fearsomely bejewelled chandeliers hang over your head in banquet halls that hold thousands of people. You approach these glittering sites walking on gold-leaf marble, passing aquariums with sharks and stingrays.
Far below, you see the villas and theluxury cars. Every villager gets a share of the corporation's profits and is entitled to a car, a house, free healthcare and free cooking oil.
The village feels a little like Dubai. It is not big on charm – the replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and the Sydney Opera House – are of questionable taste, but where it is widely different is in how well it is able to meet its people's needs. Mr Wu is keen that Huaxi should showcase China's achievements and now some two million visitors come to Huaxi every year to gaze upon its splendour.
The original founding families, who are known as "stakeholders", number around 1,600 and the average household income is around £100,000 a year, once all the bonuses, pensions and wages are factored in. White BMWs are ubiquitous and the murals, instead of depicting socialist realist muscled workers in overalls, have pictures of happy families living in wealthy villas.
This is where Huaxi stands apart from so many other villages in China. While the rest of the country suffers from a yawning wealth gap between the rich cities of the eastern seaboard and southern coasts and the rural hamlets, Huaxi took the initiative, driven by Mr Wu's pragmatism, and headed its own way. It behaved like a city, even importing migrant labour.
"We only ever wanted what was good for our people," is a dictum of Mr Wu, who is now 86 years old and retired. His son has taken over as party secretary, but the father still gives lectures on socialism every day. He avoids allying himself too closely with either capitalism or communism, though his pragmatism has strong elements of the Chinese Communist Party about it.
No one doubts the wisdom of Mr Wu, and looking at the village's wealth, why would they? He broke up the collective system of farming and encouraged people to grow their own crops.
Below the stakeholders in the hierarchy come the residents from neighbouring villages that have been absorbed into Huaxi, and then tens of thousands of migrant workers who perform most of the rest of the work.
Work and wealth are the crowning ideologies. No one takes weekend breaks, and the streets tend to be deserted of residents because they are all off working. The hard work has clearly paid off and the money raised has helped the villagers diversify into other industry.
One of those areas is tourism – wealth tourism – and some of the locals help to meet and greet the two million tourists that come every year to see the village.
A new reason to come is to see the skyscraper, which is impressive, although as there is nothing even remotely as tall in the surrounding countryside, it looks strangely incongruous.
The reason it is so tall is a useful insight into the mindset of the people here. It is, as Mr Wu said in a recent interview, because the people Huaxi can compete with anyone in the country. "Beijing's tallest building is the 328m-tall World Trade Centre. Huaxi wants to maintain the same height with the Central Committee of the Communist Party," he said.
The village's total square area is a little less than one square kilometre, and there are barrack-style dormitories, factories, and pagoda style-buildings for local residents. The skyscraper houses the Longxi International Hotel, which has 2,000 beds and will employ 3,000 people eager to learn how to become wealthy, Huaxi-style.
Intriguingly, in the central village park, there are the statutes of five of the true icons of Communism in China, some more controversial than others. The panoply includes the former mayor of Beijing, Liu Shaoqi, who was purged in the period of ideological frenzy that was the Cultural Revolution and whom many believed Mao had murdered. He has never really been rehabilitated and remains outside the pantheon of true revolutionary heroes.
But then Mr Wu himself suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He set up factories but the Red Guards paraded him in the village as a "capitalist roader" and locked him up, much in the same way as Liu Shaoqi. Like Deng Xiaoping, who also suffered during the Cultural Revolution, Mr Wu bided his time and soon was back on his capitalist track after Mao died in 1976, except that these ideas became formulated as socialism with Chinese characteristics.
All over the village are megaphones blasting out the village anthem, which tells of how communist skies shine down Huaxi, a village of everyday miracles. "I have heard about Huaxi for many years. I have wanted to see it for many years," said one octogenarian visitor from Chengzhou.
Two men, both of them employed in security and not stakeholders in the village, say they love what is going on in Huaxi, but they admit they are a bit jealous of the shareholders who get a stake in the village's profits every year.
Certainly, there is a lot of bluster in the way Huaxi markets itself. The divisions between the stakeholders and the migrants on the streets are large. But no one in China doubts its importance as a model for the success of the nation. And deny at your peril the wisdom of Mr Wu and of the wider Chinese psyche: The song from the public address system says it proud: "Socialism is best."
Wednesday 16 November 2011
Pigeonholing protesters as anti capitalist will only allow those who are against reform to avoid the issue
In Singapore 'a staggering 22% of
national output is produced by state-owned enterprises'. Photograph:
Luis Enrique Ascui/Reuters
The Occupy London movement is marking its first month this week. It is routinely described as anti-capitalist, but this label is highly misleading. As I found out when I gave a lecture at its Tent City University last weekend, many of its participants are not against capitalism. They just want it better regulated so that it benefits the greatest possible majority.
But even accepting that the label accurately describes some participants in the movement, what does being anti-capitalist actually mean?
Many Americans, for example, consider countries like France and Sweden to be socialist or anti-capitalist – yet, were their 19th-century ancestors able to time-travel to today, they would almost certainly have called today's US socialist. They would have been shocked to find that their beloved country had decided to punish industry and enterprise with a progressive income tax. To their horror, they would also see that children had been deprived of the freedom to work and adults "the liberty of working as long as [they] wished", as the US supreme court put it in 1905 when ruling unconstitutional a New York state act limiting the working hours of bakers to 10 hours a day. What is capitalist, and thus anti-capitalist, it seems, depends on who you are.
Many institutions that most of us regard as the foundation stones of capitalism were not introduced until the mid-19th century, because they had been seen as undermining capitalism. Adam Smith opposed limited liability companies and Herbert Spencer objected to the central bank, both on the grounds that these institutions dulled market incentives by putting upper limits to investment risk. The same argument was made against the bankruptcy law.
Since the mid-19th century, many measures that were widely regarded as anti-capitalist when first introduced – such as the progressive income tax, the welfare state, child labour regulation and the eight-hour day – have become integral parts of capitalism today.
Capitalism has also evolved in very different ways across countries. They may all be capitalist in that they are predominantly run on the basis of private property and profit motives, but beyond that they are organised very differently.
In Japan interlocking share ownership among friendly enterprises, which once accounted for over 50% of all listed shares and still accounts for around 30%, makes hostile takeover very difficult. This has enabled Japanese companies to invest with a much longer time horizon than their British or American counterparts.
Japanese companies provide lifetime employment for their core workers (accounting for about a third of the workforce), thereby creating strong worker loyalty. They also give the workers a relatively large say in the management of the production process, thus tapping their creative powers. There are heavy regulations in the agricultural and retail sectors against large firms, which complement the weak welfare state by preserving small shops and farms.
German capitalism is as different from the American or British version as Japanese capitalism, but in other ways. Like Japan, Germany gives a relatively big input to workers in the running of a company, but in a collectivist way through the co-determination system, in which worker representation on the supervisory board allows them to have a say in key corporate matters (such as plant closure and takeovers), rather than giving a greater stake in the company to workers as individuals, as in the Japanese system.
Thus, while Japanese companies are protected from hostile takeovers by friendly companies (through interlocking shareholding), German companies are protected by their workers (through co-determination).
Even supposedly similar varieties of capitalism, for example Swedish and German, have important differences. German workers are represented through the co-determination system and through industry-level trade unions, while Swedish workers are represented by a centralised trade union (the Swedish Trade Union Confederation), which engages in centralised wage bargaining with the centralised employers' association (the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise).
Unlike in Germany, where concentrated corporate ownership has been deliberately destroyed, Sweden has arguably the most concentrated corporate ownership in the world. One family – the Wallenbergs – possesses controlling stakes (usually defined as over 20% of voting shares) in most of the key companies in the Swedish economy, including ABB, Ericsson, Electrolux, Saab, SEB and SKF. Some estimate that the Wallenberg companies produce a third of Swedish national output. Despite this, Sweden has built one of the most egalitarian societies in the world because of its large, and largely effective, welfare state.
And then there are hybrids that defy definition: China, with its large socialist legacy, is an obvious case, but Singapore is another, even more interesting, example. Singapore is usually touted as the model student of free-market capitalism, given its free-trade policy and welcoming attitude towards multinational companies. Yet in other ways it is a very socialist country. All land is owned by the government, 85% of housing is supplied by the government-owned housing corporation, and a staggering 22% of national output is produced by state-owned enterprises. (The international average is around 10%.) Would you say that Singapore is capitalist or socialist?
When it is so diverse, criticising capitalism is not very meaningful. What you have to change to improve the Swedish or the Japanese capitalist systems is very different from what you should do for the British one.
In Britain, as already physically identified by the Occupy movement, it is clear the key reforms should be made in the City of London. The fact that the Occupy movement does not have an agreed list of reforms should not be used as an excuse not to engage with it. I'm told there is an economics committee working on it and, more importantly, there are already many financial reform proposals floating around, often supported by very "establishment" figures like Adair Turner, the Financial Services Authority chairman, George Soros, the Open Society Foundations chairman, and Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's executive director for financial stability.
By labelling the Occupy movement "anti-capitalist", those who do not want reforms have been able to avoid the real debate. This has to stop. It is time we use the Occupy movement as the catalyst for a serious debate on alternative institutional arrangements that will make British (or for that matter, any other) capitalism better for the majority of people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)