Just a few years ago it would have seemed most unlikely that among those looking for the renewal of socialist possibilities in the twenty-first century it would be developments in the British Labour Party which would attract the most international attention. That this is the case today is a credit to the enthusiasm and creativity of a new generation of socialist activists in Britain and the political perseverance and dedication of a coterie of long-committed socialists around Jeremy Corbyn. Yet if the election of a Corbyn government in Britain is not to lead to heady euphoria quickly followed by profound disappointment on the left internationally, as was the case with Syriza in Greece, British realities need to be kept in sober perspective.
It is important to appreciate the very limited extent to which socialist commitment has, so far, actually taken shape as socialist strategy inside the Labour Party. At best it might be said that socialists in the leadership and at the base may be seen as engaged in trying to shift the balance of forces inside the party, and outside it in relation to the unions and social movements, and indeed even in Momentum, so as to bring the party to the point that a serious socialist strategy might be developed.
Labour’s popular 2017 Election Manifesto, with its radical articulation of an economic programme ‘for the many not the few’, represents a conspicuous turn away from neoliberal austerity and the accommodation of New Labour governments to the Thatcherite legacy.44 This is to be accomplished through progressive taxation measures, the enhancement of a broad array of public services as well as union and workers’ rights, and the renationalization of railways and public utilities. It sets out an industrial strategy to create an ‘economy that works for all’ through the strategic use of public procurement and national and regional investment banks. Although much of this is cast as a ‘new deal for business’, oriented to making British industry more regionally balanced and internationally competitive, underpinned by what it calls a ‘successful international financial industry’, the emphasis clearly falls on state actions and changes to company law that would require finance and industry to make their activities more ‘diverse’ and ‘socially useful’ to meet the needs of workers, consumers and communities.
More telling regarding the socialist orientation of Corbyn’s inner circle may be the Alternative Models of Ownership report, commissioned by John McDonnell, and released a few days before the election. Though not official party policy, the stress it put on the role of municipal public ownership and procurement policies to seed and nurture worker and community co-operatives was designed to encourage broad discussion of new socialist strategies. Also revived was the concern, always voiced by the Labour left since the nationalizations of the 1945 government, to avoid the replication of top-down corporate management in publicly owned enterprises by encouraging new forms of industrial democracy as well as accountability to ‘diverse publics’.45
This clearly falls well short of representing a strategy for achieving a transition to socialism, whether as conceived in the old Clause IV commitment to ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’; or, as it was later more vaguely put on the Labour left, taking over ‘the commanding heights of the economy’. No less important, proposals for the expansion of co-ops and workers control at the enterprise level, while legitimately raising the potential transformative contribution of workers’ collective knowledge, underplay how far workers’ actual capacities have been constricted under capitalism. Moreover, the emphasis on decentralized forms of common ownership usually skirts the crucial question of how to integrate and coordinate enterprises, sectors and regions through democratic economic planning processes which are so necessary to avoid reproducing the types of particularistic and dysfunctional competitive market behaviour that socialists want to transcend.46
What is perhaps most problematic is the glaring silence on how the promotion of a high-tech, internationally competitive industrial strategy relates to the development of a transformational strategy to socialism.47 And related to this, there are real strategic costs associated with the understandable reluctance to publically broach the vexing question of how and when to introduce capital controls, so essential to investment planning as well as to counter the blackmail of governments via capital flight in open financial markets. In contrast with the new left insurgency of the 1970s, there is a marked avoidance today of openly discussing the question of the need to turn the whole financial system into a public utility. In the absence of this, effective socialist economic and social restructuring of Britain, let alone with decentralization of significant democratic decisions to the local community level, cannot be realized.
This is not to say that merely calling for sweeping immediate nationalizations really addresses the strategic problems this entails. As Tony Benn told the 1979 Labour Party conference in speaking for the NEC against adopting Militant’s ‘resolutionary’ posture of demanding the immediate nationalization of the top 200 industrial and financial corporations, simply failed to take seriously what it meant to be ‘a party of democratic, socialist reform’. While averring he was a ‘Clause IV socialist, becoming more so as the years go by’, Benn nevertheless rightly insisted that any serious socialist strategy had to begin from ‘the usual problems of the reformer: we have to run the economic system to protect our people who are locked into it while we change the system’.48
This stark dilemma was also seriously addressed by Seumas Milne (the former Guardian journalist who is today Corbyn’s right-hand man) in his 1989 co-authored book, Beyond the Casino Economy. On the one hand, it argued that ‘one of the necessary conditions for a socialist society would be to turn [the top] few hundred corporations into democratically owned and accountable public bodies’. On the other, it conceded that ‘in the foreseeable circumstances of the next few years, the socialization of all large-scale private enterprise seems highly unlikely’; this limited ‘what can plausibly be proposed as part of a feasible programme for a Labour government in the coming years – even one elected in an atmosphere of radical expectations’.49
The crucial point here is not to stubbornly insist on an immediate radicalization of policy that can only represent ineffective sloganeering. The constraints of the internal balance of forces in the party, as well as electoral ones, still shaped the Labour Manifesto. The measure of the Corbyn leadership in this regard should not be how explicitly socialist its policies are, but rather the extent to which it problematizes how to implement reform measures in such ways as to advance, rather than close off, future socialist possibilities. That is, to enhance – through the development of class, party and state capacities – the possibility of realizing socialist goals.
Here is where the lessons to be learned from the Syriza experience become especially important. One of its original leading cadre, Andreas Karitzis, who remained in the party apparatus while others rushed into the state, has recently articulated this extremely well in arguing that ‘implementation procedures are the material foundations of a party’s political strategy.’ The advancement of policy goals without consideration of the specific changes that would need to take place in the relevant state apparatuses to actually implement those policies was bound to fail insofar as they did not recognize that decision-making processes at the parliamentary and governmental levels ‘are just the peak of the iceberg of state policy. Implementing procedures are the mass of the iceberg below the water, i.e. the bulk of state policy … there is no possibility that broad political decisions can actually shift state policy, whether through inadvertence or indifference to “how and who” will implement these decisions’50
The question of ‘how’ was disregarded in the party debates over policy before Syriza’s election to government ‘either because of the inability to offer an answer or because it was seen as irrelevant in the face of internal party rivalry’. The result of this was that ‘the dozens of committees that had been formed reproduced vague political confrontations instead of outlining specific implementation plans by sector to overcome obstacles and restructure state functions and institutions with a democratic orientation’. Above all,
at the highest political organs, disagreements over the recommended political decision (about the current banks, debt, and so on) were tediously repeated as if SYRIZA had the ability to implement them … [This] pattern of political behaviour that proved particularly problematic … The end result was that the party did not focus on its basic duty: developing plans of action to address the difficult ‘how?’ of a different policy in the framework of an asphyxiated political environment. The obsessive adherence to lists of demands that are not attached to plans of action, and the acceptance of difficulties as a reason for adopting a more conventional governance mindset, did not advance the party’s operational capability, and did not serve its political strategy.51
This strategic failure also proved critically important in relation to the lack of attention (as much or more by those who argued for ‘Plan B’) to drawing on the knowledges and practices of those at the base of the party in closest touch with the social movements so as to enhance the capacities of those who enter the state to try to change it. Strategic planning to this end must, as Karitzis puts it, ‘not only involve the government, but requires methods of social and political mobilization at multiple levels and of a different nature than movements of social resistance and actions for attaining government power’. The potential for a more productive relationship was there, insofar as so many party members at the base were closely involved with the solidarity networks and other community-based initiatives, which initially became
the spark for acknowledging members’ skills (formal education, technical expertise, work experience, etc.) and highlighting these abilities and qualifications as important elements for party work as well as facilitating the creative and productive inclusion of people outside its membership. Nonetheless, SYRIZA, as a collective political body was unable to utilise this enormous skill pool to expand and support its political strategy, because it did not develop the appropriate organisational receptors and ‘extraction methods’ for harnessing human potential.52
Perhaps the most unfortunate result of this was that grassroots participation exhausted itself ‘in protest or support demonstrations, rather than in substantive and productive engagement’. Party local and regional branches ‘formulated their own activity in the solidarity sector without using the, structure, network, infrastructure, and technical expertise of the Solidarity For All initiative or the party’s central mechanism.’53
In terms of the lessons the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership can draw from this, especially in light of Karitzis’s argument here that ‘effective methods of communication using new technologies in multiple ways’ could have sustained ‘a well-coordinated interface’, it might especially have been hoped that the Labour’s recent Digital Democracy Manifesto might have pointed in that direction. Unfortunately, it betrayed ‘a rather narrow image of technology that concentrates on the internet, end-users and “networked individuals”… an image of publicness in the form of networks that nevertheless has security and privacy at its heart’, as Nina Power has noted. The result is that the report contributes very little to how ‘the new digital technologies help us to think about democratic economic planning’, as Power goes on to do for the care services sector of the economy.54
This needs to be extended to thinking through the role of digital technology in the economic planning needed to turn the Alternative Models of Ownership report into a socialist strategy. Still more ambitiously, it should be applied to thinking through how to develop the planning capacities to transform financial services, Britain’s dominant economic sector, into a public utility (starting with those banks rescued in the wake of the 2007-8 crisis that remain in public hands but are bizarrely still required to operate as competitive commercial enterprises).
To stress the importance of a democratic socialist strategy for entering the state through elections to the end of transforming the state is today less than ever a matter of discovering a smooth gradual road to socialism. Reversals, of various intensities, are inescapable. Governments reaching beyond capitalism will never have the luxury of ‘circumstances they choose for themselves’.55 Moreover, the basic problem for any government oriented to pursuing a socialist project is that the very challenge to capital’s hegemony will likely spark, or aggravate, an economic crisis which will make it difficult to satisfy popular expectations for the promised relief from inequality and austerity. How to cope with this while not pushing off to an indefinite future the measures needed to begin the transformation of the state is the crucial socialist political challenge.
It is this tension among the various new state responsibilities which makes the role of socialist parties that will bring such governments to office so fundamental. Given the legitimacy and resources that inevitably will accrue to those party leaders who form the government, the autonomy of the party, which must more than ever keep its feet in the movements, is necessary in order to counter the pull from inside the state towards social democratization. This is why strategic preparations undertaken well before entering the state on how to avoid replicating the experience with social democracy are so very important. But even with this, the process of transforming the state cannot help but be complex, uncertain, crisis-ridden, with repeated interruptions.
Transformations of state apparatuses at local or regional levels where circumstances and the balance of forces are more favourable may still be pursued, including developing alternative means of producing and distributing food, health care and other necessities at community levels. This could have the further benefit of facilitating and encouraging the involvement of women in local and party organisations, as well as stimulate autonomous movements moving in these directions through takeovers of land, idle buildings, threatened factories and transportation networks. All this may in turn spur developments at the higher levels of state power, ranging over time from codifying new collective property rights to developing and coordinating agencies of democratic planning. At some points in this process more or less dramatic initiatives of nationalization and socialization of industry and finance would have to take place, being careful to ‘mind the gap’ between participatory socialist politics and previous versions of state ownership.
Given how state apparatuses are now structured so as to reproduce capitalist social relations, their institutional modalities would need to undergo fundamental transformations so as to be able to implement all this. Public employees would themselves need to become explicit agents of transformation, aided and sustained in this respect by their unions and the broader labour movement. Rather than expressing defensive particularism, unions themselves would need to be changed fundamentally so as to actively engage in developing state workers’ transformational capacities, including by establishing councils that link them to the recipients of state services.
Of course, the possibility of such state transformations will not be determined by what happens in one country alone. During the era of neoliberalism state apparatuses have become deeply intertwined with international institutions, treaties and regulations to manage and reproduce global capitalism. This has nothing at all to do with capital bypassing the nation state and coming to rely on a transnational state. Both the nature of the current crisis and the responses to it prove once again how much states still matter. Even in the most elaborate transnational institutional formation, the European Union, the centre of political gravity lies not in the supranational state apparatus headquartered in Brussels. It is, rather, the asymmetric economic and political power relations among the states of Europe that really determines what the EU is and does.
Any project for democratization at an international scale, such as those being advanced for the EU by many on the left in the wake of the Syriza experience, still depends on the balance of class forces and the particular institutional structures within each nation state. Changes in international institutions are contingent on transformations at the level of nation states. What above all needs to be born in mind amidst the continuing confusions and manoeuvrings around Brexit is the question of whether the Treaty of Rome let alone the provisions of Economic and Monetary Union always hindered rather than helped in projects for socialist transformation that could only be undertaken, even if not finally accomplished, within each state. The changes in international state apparatuses that should be pursued by socialists are those that would allow them more room for manoeuvre within each state. What socialist internationalism must mean today is an orientation to shifting the balances of forces in other countries and in international bodies so as to create more space for transformative forces in every country. This was one of the key lessons of 1917, and it is all the more true a century later.
The broad point here is that reform versus revolution is not a useful way to frame the dilemmas that socialists must today actually confront. Political hopes are inseparable from notions of what is possible, while possibility is itself intimately related to the role of socialist parties in working-class formation and reformation of the broadest possible kind. If a socialist project is, however, not to be stymied by the inherited state apparatuses, decisive focus on developing the agency and capacity for state transformation will be required. In this respect, socialist parties in the twenty-first century cannot see themselves as a kind of omnipotent deus ex machina. Precisely in order not to draw back from the ‘prodigious scope of their own aims’, as Marx once put it, they must ‘engage in perpetual self-criticism’ and deride ‘the inadequacies, weak points and pitiful aspects of their first attempts’.56