Will Podmore

In this remarkable book, American journalist and researcher Christian Parenti shows how the USA’s economic and social crisis has produced a huge growth in criminalisation, especially through the war on drugs. He explains how capitalism creates poverty, through both crisis and policy.   From 1966 to 1974, profits fell by 30%. Reagan put interest rates up to 16.4% in 1981, causing a slump – ten million people were unemployed by 1982 and wages were slashed by 8%. Real unemployment for African American men has been more than 25% for three decades.   As Alan Budd, an economic advisor to Thatcher, said, “Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.” Capitalism creates a surplus population, the reserve army of the unemployed, to drive wages down.   To manage the rising poverty, inequality and unemployment that capitalism causes, the state uses paramilitary forms of repression, segregation and criminalisation. These include paramilitary policing, SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, zero tolerance policing, national surveillance and mass imprisonment. Both crime control and crime keep the people suppressed.   The US imprisonment rate was 100/120 per 100,000 until the 1981 slump. 31% of prisoners are in for property offences, 30% for drug offences, 9% for public order offences, and 29% for violent offences.   Parenti examines the USA’s appalling prison industrial complex, which surely provides the rest of us with a model – of how not to run prisons. However, this has not stopped Labour ministers rushing to the USA trying to copy their masters.   Parenti shows how US prison guard unions have often successfully opposed the opening of privatised prisons, which have proved to be even worse than the public ones. Prisons have become ever bigger, with Titan prisons making the problems even bigger as well.   Everyone has to choose whether to blame the system that produces poverty, or to blame the poor. Parenti quotes Lenin, “every state is a ‘special repressive force’ for the suppression of the oppressed class.”   Parenti concludes, “My recommendations, as regards criminal justice, are quite simple: we need less. Less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behaviors, and less obsessive discussion of every lurid crime, less prohibition, and less puritanical concern with ‘freaks’ and ‘deviants’.”

Gregory Wilpert, a freelance writer based in Venezuela’s capital Caracas, has written a very useful study of the history and policies of the Chavez government in Venezuela. He examines its governance policy, economic policy, social policy and foreign policy. He looks at the opportunities, obstacles and prospects facing the Venezuelan people, and explores Chavez’s ideas of 21st-century socialism.   In 1998, the people elected Hugo Chavez President, with 56.2 per cent of the votes. In the 2004 recall referendum, he won 58 per cent of the votes and in the 2006 election, 62.9 per cent.   Wilpert notes that the previous ruling class’s counter-revolutionary acts against the Chavez government have each radicalised the government. He also notes that between 2001 and 2005, the US state sent $27 million to opposition groups.   The government is promoting micro-credits, cooperatives, worker co-management, efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in food production, and skills training and logistical support to help people to start coops and social enterprises. Its social programmes have cut poverty from 44 percent to 38 per cent.   Wilpert shows how the Chavez government is trying to move from representative democracy to a more participatory democracy.   This is an excellent introduction to the history and policies of the Chavez government, joining Eva Golinger’s The Chavez code, and Bart Jones’ Hugo! The Hugo Chavez story: from mud hut to perpetual revolution.

Perry Anderson has produced a brilliant study of the EU, the organisation which poses the greatest threat to us in Britain today. He displays, as usual, his peerless acuity and huge range of reference.   This book includes superb surveys of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey, but not of Britain. Anderson explains grandly, “I do not regret the omission of Britain, whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment.” (It was not a ‘fall’ - we pushed her out.) He refers to ‘England’ three pages later, then to Britain again, then to the UK, a slippage whose uncharacteristic uncertainty betrays his disdain for its object.   He shows that the EU had no democratic foundations. Jean Monnet, the ‘father of Europe’, was an international financier, never elected to anything. Now the EU ‘more and more openly flouts the popular will’.   Anderson rightly cites the falls in EU election turnout as evidence that the EU ‘wants even a modicum of popular credibility’. Yet he inconsistently writes of US elections that high abstention rates are ‘the surest sign of popular contentment with society as it is’.   Anderson observes sensibly of Le Pen’s Front National, “Immigration is a minority phenomenon, virtually by definition, as war between the classes was not. In consequence, xenophobic responses to it, however ugly, have little power of political multiplication. Aron, who had witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and knew what he was talking about, understood this from the start, criticizing panicky over-estimations of the Front. In effect, from the mid-eighties onwards its electoral scores oscillated within a fixed range, never dropping much below a national average of 10 per cent and never rising above 15 per cent.” There is no need to obsess about the far tinier BNP.   On the EU’s economic policies, he quotes EU-enthusiast Andrew Moravcsik: “the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones.” And, “The EU is basically about business.” Its Constitution makes a ‘highly competitive’ market ‘free of distortions’ a legal obligation, wrecking a ‘social Europe’.   Inside monetary union, “The historic commitments … to full employment and social services … cease to have any further institutional purchase.” Growth suffers too. Before the euro started in 1999, growth was 2.4 per cent a year, after, 2.1 per cent. Non-euro EU members grew faster than euro members. Eurozone income per head rose more slowly than in the previous decade, while productivity growth halved.   Anderson points out that British governments always sought a wider EU, wanting to use the ‘vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West’. He shows the EU’s embrace of capitalism, its contempt for democracy and its failure to create either a European society or a common culture.   He ends the book with the feeblest of forecasts – “But it remains unlikely that time and contradiction have come to a halt.” He is brilliant at tracing intellectuals’ responses to problems, but not at engaging with the problems or proposing solutions.  

Perry Anderson wrote, “At least four alternative readings of the times - there may be more - offer diagnoses of the directions in which the world is moving … The best known is, of course, the vision to be found in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to which the other three all refer, at once positively and critically. Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism and forthcoming Global Nations set out a second perspective. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing constitute a third. Malcolm Bull’s recent essays, culminating in ‘States of Failure’, propose a fourth.”[i] Anderson summarised Nairn’s thinking: “Tom Nairn’s account goes roughly like this. Marx-ism was always based on a distortion of Marx’s own thought, formed in the democratic struggles of the Rhineland in the 1840s. For whereas Marx assumed that socialism was possible in the long run, only when capitalism had completed its work of bringing a world market into being, the impatience of both masses and intellectuals led to the fatal short-cuts taken by Lenin and Mao, substituting state power for democracy and economic growth. The result was a diversion of the river of world history into the marshlands of a modern middle ages. But the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 has now allowed the river to flow again to its natural delta—contemporary globalization. For the core meaning of globalization is the generalization of democracy around the world, fulfilling at last the dreams of 1848, crushed during Marx’s life-time. Marx, however, himself made one crucial mistake, in thinking class would be the carrier of historical emancipation, in the shape of the proletariat. In fact, as the European pattern of 1848 already showed, and the whole of the 20th century would confirm, it was nations, not classes, that would become the moving forces of history, and the bearers of the democratic revolution for which he fought. “But, just as a counterfeit democracy would be constructed by Marx-ism, so nationality too was in due course confiscated by national-ism - that is, imperialist great powers - in the period after the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. “Hardt and Negri concur that globalization is essentially a process of emancipation …”[ii] Anderson sums up, “Politically, all four versions agree that globalization is to be welcomed …”[iii] Nairn denies all Marx’s work and thought after he left the Rhineland in 1848. Anderson writes of ‘the fatal short-cuts taken by Lenin and Mao’. This echoes Plekhanov to Lenin, “you shouldn’t have taken power.” Lenin should just have let the First World War carry on, killing yet more millions of Russians and others. He should have reinstalled tsarist feudal absolutism. Mao should have let Japanese aggression succeed, and let Chiang Kai-Shek carry on misruling ever-smaller areas of China.   Anderson writes of Lenin and Mao ‘substituting state power for democracy and economic growth’. So socialism can’t use state power to establish democracy and produce economic growth? And if it does, it’s not socialism?   Anderson writes that capitalism completes its work by creating a world market, but, inconsistently, that ‘the core meaning of globalization is the generalization of democracy around the world’. It is superficial to see globalisation as basically a political process. It is also a ridiculous prettification of the political processes actually occurring in the world. Is the partition of Iraq part of ‘the generalization of democracy’? The destruction of Yugoslavia? The ‘ever closer union’ of the EU?   Anderson writes, ‘national-ism - that is, imperialist great powers’, absurdly equating nationalism (even Scottish?) with ‘imperialist great powers’. In reality globalisation is just a liberals’ word for imperialism.   Countries are right to assert their sovereignty against imperialism. Economist Shahid Alam wrote in his brilliant book Poverty from the wealth of nations (Macmillan, 2000), “In the long run, sovereign countries will structure their international relations to develop manufactures and indigenous capital, enterprises and technological capabilities; they will impose at the outset, or gradually, policies that regulate the entry of imports and foreign capital, labor and enterprises. On the other hand, the quasi-colonies and colonies will implement policies which facilitate the free entry of imports and foreign factors; the establishment of foreign monopolies over their markets; and direct expropriation of their resources. These asymmetries ensure that loss of sovereignty will produce lower levels of industrialisation, lower levels of productivity in the subsistence sector, lower levels of human capital, lower rates of taxation and public expenditure and, finally, lower growth rates of per capita income.”[iv]   He summarised, “All other things remaining the same, the loss of sovereignty retarded industrialisation, human capital formation and economic growth. … The results showed a strong positive correlation between sovereignty and industrialisation.”[v]   This materialist analysis demolishes Anderson and Nairn’s bourgeois idealism. Nairn is a counterfeit Marxist, who distorts Marx’s thought in order to back the reactionary ideal of Scottish nationalism.