FRAGMENT 6: WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US, AND WHAT’S TO BE DONE?
What, Lenin asked, is to be done? There are several problems in answering this totally reasonable question. What kind of society do we want? More fundamentally, what does a good society look like? Given the present dire and deteriorating state of affairs, how are we to progress towards it? And we must be realistic. In the twenty-first century we inhabit a rapidly changing UK in a rapidly changing world, and one in which for-profit digital platforms are simplifying matters for those who own and operate them, complicating matters for the minority of the global citizenry who are users, and a source of hidden manipulation for the excluded majority.
I have elsewhere set out some concrete proposals for transformative change with special reference to England and the UK. I coined the term ‘permanent reform’ to refer to a strategy of pushing for ‘attainable’ reforms – on-the-surface organisational and institutional reforms that, however unlikely they currently seem, remain politically feasible within our volatile parliamentary version of capitalist democracy – with a view, crucially, to proceeding on to ‘aspirational’ reforms – deeper beneath-the-surface cultural and structural reforms comprising a transition to a post-capitalist society.
Examples of attainable-to-aspirational reforms could assume the following rationale:
- Confronting inequality – as has been documented, the degree of wealth and income inequality in the UK has grown considerably since the 1980s. Recent Conservative governments actively considered scrapping inheritance tax, which is paid only by the top 3-4% of wealth owners. Measures to curtail greed are not hard to fathom, most obviously those involving a rejigging of taxes on wealth and income. For example: a tax on excess corporate profits; increased rentier taxation; a tax on financial transactions; an increase in corporation tax (the UK rate is currently the lowest in high-income countries); the closing down of offshore tax-havens; a phased increase in inheritance tax towards an aspirational target of 100%; an increase in forms of progressive taxation (the top rate of tax on earned income in the UK was 83% in the 1970s, reduced to 60% by Thatcher in 1980 and then to 40% in 1989, increased to 50% by Labour’s Gordon Brown in 2010, and reduced once more by the Conservative/LibDem alliance to 45% in 2013); and a decrease in regressive forms of taxation like Value Added Rax (VAT). As far as welfare support is concerned, reversing the existing measure that halts financial support for families with more than two children tops many people’s list as the optimal way of relieving child poverty. Increasing the state pension, abolishing Universal Credit and supplementing existing support for those most in need, especially those with disabilities, are paramount. The measures currently being taken by the Starmer’s post-2024 Labour government – against the poor, sick and disabled – are catastrophically continuous with those introduced by their Conservative predecessors.
- Promoting public housing – shelter is a basic human need and one, in principle at least, easy to satisfy in a high-income country like Britain. And yet, housing precarity in the UK grown in line with the interests of a small but powerful minority. Thatcher’s introduction of ‘right to buy’ for council house tenants has been described as the most significant privatisation in British history. The ‘unspoken aim’ was to reduce the size of the social rented sector, which is why local councils were not permitted to use the money from the sale of council houses to build more council housing. The result was that many who purchased their council houses at a big discount subsequently sold them on, often to private landlords who cashed in. One in 5 Conservative MPs are landlords. Moreover, unacceptably poor housing conditions now extend beyond the private rental sector into not-for-profit housing associations. In the medium term we need to build more and better public housing stock, but in the interim, housing costs could be reduced by making tenancy agreements more secure, regulating rents, taxing owners of multiple properties and introducing more effective wealth taxes on housing than stamp duty.
- Educating schools and universities – England now has a fragmented amalgam of schools, mostly charged to communicate skill sets judged appropriate for the capitalist ‘imperative to work’. In fact, a proper, worker-friendly introduction of robotics and AI can be plausible forerunners of a standard four-day working week backed by a universal basic income. The major public schools are insulated from the lower reaches of the job market. The grip of the public schools should be loosened, and the elite traffic from these to Oxbridge and thence to elite positions terminated. An obvious attainable objective would be ending the charitably status of the major public schools, a manifesto policy the duplicitous Starmer has yet to backtrack on. But it is critical that these institutions are brought into the state sector. All private schools need to be absorbed into a secular and comprehensive state system. The neoliberal business model deployed in universities must be abandoned, along with university fees and current pressures to restrict the funding of courses in the arts, humanities and social sciences. If not, then only the privileged Russell Group will be engaged in education – properly defined as ‘intrinsically worthwhile’ – as opposed to training. The Oxford/Cambridge axis might be effectively disestablished by taking undergraduate teaching away and making Oxford and Cambridge research institutions only.
- Re-stabilising public utilities – the logical endpoint of capitalism is the commodification of everything. If housing costs are most people’s biggest expense, other ‘unavoidable’ costs include utilities like water, sewage, phones, the Internet, fuel bills, transport and basic goods and services (eg medicines). The fracturing of society in the UK has made accessing such items problematic. In the case of utilities this is largely a consequence of privatisation. A single private firm (Rothschild) was lead adviser or ‘heavily involved’ in the creation of 25 massive new private firms between 1988 and 1991 (British Steel in 1988, the ten UK Water Companies in 1989, the twelve electricity distribution boards in 1990, and British Coal and British Telecom in 1991). If this could be accomplished in so short a period, so too could its reversal. If an attainable objective is a stiffer regulation of privatised monopoly utilities, an aspirational one is their return to the public domain; this would cancel profiteering and drastically reduce prices. A free or low-cost ‘integrated transport system’ would cut car use, CO2 emissions and other forms of pollution.
- Rescuing the NHS – the NHS has been starved of funding post-2010 to rationalise its privatisation. Labour Party policy under Starmer differs little from that of the Conservatives. The NHS, especially in England, needs rescuing. The rhetorical cries for ‘reform’ typically reflect rentier capitalism’s neoliberal ideology (as was the case over the privatisation of utilities). Insinuating for-profit providers into health care is regressive. If the NHS ‘goes the American way’, sacrificed on the altar of greed and money-making, we will look back fondly on the simple tripartite model enacted in 1948, for all its new-born imperfections. What the NHS requires is funding to address the current and growing gaps in provision, a commitment to general practitioners as efficient gatekeepers to expensive specialist care, above-inflation pay increases to retain its health workers, a paring down and rebooting of ‘the new managerialism’, an abandonment of the policy of displacing GPs with lesser qualified Physician Assistants, and a long overdue re-commitment to the NHS’s public health arm. Chronically overdue too is the creation of a National Social Care System to run alongside the NHS, as advocated in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour manifesto for the 2017 general election.
In relation to the global field, with specially relevance to the continuing economic and political domination of the Global South by the Global North, policy recommendations are both harder to come by and to implement. Leading French economist Thomas Piketty has stressed the need for structural changes, such as :
- better forms of exchange for developing countries;
- a global clearing union (after the spirit of that advanced by Keynes in 1943);
- an international reserve currency;
- major reforms of the governance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other postwar institutions to give more voice to the Global South.
Relatedly, there is an evidence-based case for the following:
- switching to drawing most of a country’s financial resources for development from within to reduce dependency on foreign investment and foreign financial markets;
- implementing long postponed measures of income and land redistribution to forge a vibrant internal market that would become the anchor of the economy and create the financial resources for investment;
- de-emphasising growth and maximising equity in order to radically reduce environmental disequilibrium;
- not leaving strategic economic decision-making to the market but making them subject to democratic deliberation and choice;
- subjecting the private sector and the state to constant monitoring by civil society;
- creating a new production and exchange complex that includes community co-operatives, private enterprises and state enterprises, and excludes transnational companies;
- enshrining the principle of subsidiarity in economic life by encouraging production of goods to take place at the community and national level – if it can be done as a reasonable cost – in order to preserve community.
Policies to directly address the global issues of climate change and the growing threat of warfare are likewise easier to promote than to enact. Many of the policies that would reduce economic exploitation, hardship and misery across the semi-peripheral and peripheral countries of the Global South would show a positive return on climate change, and possibly pay a peace dividend too. Scandinavian countries have responded most impressively on climate change to date, but globally the mantra is ‘too little, too late’. Drawing on Marx’s later writings on environmental threat, Kohei Saito suggests we need to:
- shift from prioritising producing for profit (‘exchange values’) over producing for use (‘use values’);
- reduce the working day and increase workers’ autonomy to make jobs more attractive;
- to substitute ‘de-growth’ and economic deceleration for the emphasis on growth via market competition for profits;
- overcome the present division between (prestigious) mental over (less prestigious) physical labour.
With regard to the threat of war, it is apparent, as with climate change, that the existing global network of institutions is failing. The United Nations Charter awarded the five victorious powers after World War Two – the US, the UK, France, the Soviet Union and China – permanent seats on the Security Council (other countries rotate through two-year terms). To sanction military action against a country accused of aggression the five core powers must convince enough temporary members to win a majority vote. But any one of the core powers can itself veto military action, even the majority in favour is 14 to one. As of March 2023, USSR/Russia had used its veto 120 times, the US 82 times, the UK 29 times, France 16 times and China 16 times. Israel is unquestionably guilty of ongoing war crimes in Gaza, but the US has consistently vetoed action against it. The Security Council might reasonably be seen as a matter of poachers turned gamekeepers. So the United Nations clearly needs reform, but wars and the major arms industries based in the Global North remain attractive sources of profit, and wars exercised by or on behalf of its ‘great powers’ can secure exclusive exploitative access to valuable natural and mineral resources across other nations.
There is a strong case that effective action against exploitation and poverty in the Global South – featuring today’s global capital monopolists, sanctioned and often concealed by major powers in the Global North – is the optimum way of countering the imminent threats of both accelerating climate change and the destructive forces of life-threatening weaponry. It is not political decision-makers and arms manufacturers who die or lose loved ones on today’s battlefields.
It might plausibly be objected that these sets of ‘recommendations’ are all very well, but there is little chance either of them being accepted by the UK governing oligarchy or plutocracy, or of them being implemented as a result of collective action via a popular revolt. One of the obstacles here is the splintering of the opposition to the neoliberal status quo. Starmer’s Labour Party has opted to combat Farage’s proto-fascist Reform Party by stealing its policies. It is not inconceivable, given the implosion of the Conservative Party under its latest leader, Badenoch, that Farage could emerge as Prime Minister after the next general election. So much for our capitalist democracy.
As a way of bringing together the UK-wide oppositional groupings found campaigning against one of another facet or product of rentier capitalism, I have a strategy to commend. John McDonnell, key ally of Corbyn and for a time Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a pertinent point. Our problem, he said, was that the cart came before the horse. In other words, significant parliamentary representation was achieved in the absence of a movement empowered to underpin, sustain and see it through ‘permanent’ attainable-to-aspirational reforms and significant societal transition. Furthermore, with the trend towards an ever more formidable ‘globalisation of capital and power’, it is increasingly apparent that any movement for transformative change must be international in outlook and reach. I have alluded to this here and addressed it in some detail in my writings, but in this short pamphlet I will focus on England and the UK.
The lesson I offer here is taken from the Chartist Movement that spanned the years 1832 to the early 1860s. The aim of the manifesto that the Chartists constructed was to unite those who opposed the status quo. It proved effective. Its language was moderate and aimed at (attainable) reforms. But its manifesto was designed to unite the differing and sometimes antagonistic groupings fighting for transformative change. It – consciously and deliberately – consisted of six attainable’ items. These items were naturally ‘of the time’. But my point is that they restricted their immediate demands precisely to garner maximum support. The forces for transformative cultural and structural change had enough in common. So, the question today is which half a dozen general and unifying demands might win popular oppositional assent and do the trick? It is not for me here to adjudicate, but the following are possibilities:
- The ‘slimming down’ of the Monarchy, abolition of other hereditary titles, and abolition of the House of Lords in favour of an elected second chamber.
- The introduction of a written constitution to underwrite citizens’ rights, and to limit the decision-making and potentially repressive powers of executive action on the part of governments
- The closing of UK-governed tax havens, a clamping down on tax evasion and avoidance on the part of individual and corporate bodies, the introduction of a wealth tax, and upping the rate of inheritance tax for the wealthy.
- The instigation of a genuinely de-growth/green economic policy.
- Refunding the NHS as a single payer institution as initially intended, and returning current for-profit utilities and services like water, energy and transport to the public sector.
- Bringing all primary and secondary schools into the state sector and abolishing constraints on education via reliance on targets and metrics.
A unified opposition to the rentier capitalism and the neoliberal status quo is critical. And solutions to our societal problems require turning ‘left’ towards socialism, not ‘right’ towards ‘fascism’. May the distress and anger of the people resonate and become the motor for radical changes in our organisations, institutions, cultures and structures in a society oriented to and for ‘the many’, not ‘the few’.