"Swamped?" - the Tory crisis over immigration and the European Union

Just a few days ago I argued on this blog that the British ruling class is deeply conflicted. The UK Conservative Party, currently in "disarray" over immigration and the European Union, is at the time of writing proving that argument right in glorious fashion.  

This conflict can be summarised as follows. On the one hand, the wider ruling class holds a sceptical faith in the power of free markets to help develop society as a whole; on the other, it maintains an ideal commitment to the "national economy" (both territorially and commercially homogeneous) as the relevant entity on which to focus developmental efforts. The tension between these two poles is now exploding around the two political flashpoints of immigration and the European Union.

Last night the Conservative Defence Minister Michael Fallon told Newsnight that parts of Britain were at risk of being "swamped", their residents "under siege" by waves of migrants. Fallon is not alone in his fears, despite the obviously enforced speed of his retraction. The UK Conservative Party has recently been committed by David Cameron to a renegotiation of the "principle of the free movement of people" within the Union as part of Britain's future continued involvement. Reports immediately seized on this as further evidence of the Tories moving further to the right under Ukip pressure.

One should be wary, however, of blaming the fiasco of the Tories' EU policies, and of their attitude to immigrants, on Ukip. The latter does not represent any clear shift to the right of the UK electorate. The Tories are not bowing to "popular pressure" as represented by the Ukip insurgency on their right flank. This tirelessly rehearsed explanation assumes that without a popular anti-EU backlash or Little Englander racism, the government would be formulating perfectly consistent and coherent policies on either. The reality of the problem runs deeper for Tories (as it does for all of Britain's historic rulers, bearing to some degree also on capitalists themselves and even the leadership of the Labour Party). The Tory Party is a composite of ideas extracted from a broad array of class roots (from a faded aristocracy to privileged layers of the working class), which rely for their coherence on a careful balancing act by Party officials. On the one hand, the interests of capital as a class must be assured. On the other, the interests of the nation as a whole. Practically, in the building of Conservative culture and in the formulation of Party policy, this is felt in the aforementioned division between developing the "national economy" and preserving the "free market."( The reality of a capitalist society is, of course, that the two are mutually interdependent and conflicting, the nature of their relationship requiring constant renegotiation ).

In short, then, the Tory Party is in a position of grave weakness over both its attitude to the EU and to immigration. On the one hand, many Tory politicians, party members, and voters recognise immigration's vital function in securing returns to capital, with fewer (though a significant minority) acknowledging the positive role played by the EU in securing regional markets (both of commodities and labour). On the other, there is widespread fear of the threat to the "national economy" posed by EU regulation and external competition from low-skilled workers. This is not a purely economic matter, however. Conservatives are by nature deeply committed to the Union of the British Isles. Through precisely its regulated free trade regime, the EU threatens UK sovereignty. The "free market" - which the EU undoubtedly supports in practice - stands less for any unchanging theory of virtue inherent in deregulation, than for what the British ruling class believes will in practice best serve British capital at a given time. The EU impinges on sacred Tory notions of sovereignty and the inner collective coherence of the UK; immigration undermines the social and territorial homogeneity of the British state. Though both the EU and immigration are, in a sense, symptomatic phenomena of free markets, the Tory Party discovers in practice that they threaten their other intellectual commitment to the national economy.

The Conservatives will struggle in the short term to reorganise their political culture so as to incorporate both immigration and the European free-market bloc (in the historical long term, they stand perhaps to gain from both anti-democratic EU tendencies and the loosening of nationally regulated labour markets). This gives the British Left a rare opening: an opportunity, for once, to fight a battle it can actually win. How? While the Tory Party struggles to reconcile itself to a world of permanently diminished stature of the British state, the Left can start organising its own counter-hegemonic bloc. The social forces it can win to its side in forthcoming battles range from the progressive, democratic wing of the middle class to migrant workers themselves. For it to do so, however, will require a reformulation of the terms of the argument in which anti-immigrant sentiment presently dominates (as previously explored, the British working class also suffers from a culture of conservatism when it comes to immigration). This reformulation of terms - made possible by current Conservative weakness - must then be used to formulate concrete proposals. In short, the Left must argue:

- the "free movement of people" doesn't threaten democratic sovereignty; the "free exploitation of labour" does

The Left could demand greater protection of workers' and democratic rights as a condition of Britain's continued EU membership. The €2.1 billion bill dumped on David Cameron by the EU this week could also be used progressively. The Left could challenge European elites to explain the use of these contributions to the electorate, as opposed to addressing themselves exclusively, and clandestinely, to the government ("Play by the rules," was the collective instruction of Barroso, Hollande and Merkel to Cameron this week). This would also form a starting point for addressing British concerns about accountability and democracy within the Union. This would take the form:

- fundamental democratic reforms, including deepening the power of the European Parliament, not withdrawal from the EU

This could be the centrepiece of a progressive Labour platform in a future EU-membership referendum.

Concretely, the Left in Britain could organise around the issue of a strictly enforced, universal living wage to protect migrants from super-exploitation and to strengthen the wider British working class. To those who argue that such a policy would cause unemployment, the Left can argue simply that it is growing consumption (fuelled by wage increases) not profit rates or returns to capital that drives productivity and economic growth in capitalist economies. Higher wages for both British and immigrant workers would help the economy as a whole.

This is a popular-democratic strategy, not a strictly "socialist" one, which draws on a long tradition of Keynesian demand management and social labour-market protection - a shared British and European heritage of the postwar era - whilst deliberately driving at a new, progressive social gain: a universal living wage. I see no reason that the current Labour Party leadership could not be pushed to make such an argument, especially if the Tories and the wider ruling bloc remain divided. The eventual goal would be a European living wage (adjusted for GDP or some other index of national wealth) to energise the renewal of a specifically European working class, to help strengthen its institutions and to create the space for its political culture.

If intellectual and working-class forces to the left of the Labour leadership fail to nudge it in the right direction on immigration by, at the earliest, the May elections or, at the latest, by the time of the proposed membership referendum, the Tories will almost certainly regain the upper-hand. I am inclined to think this outcome even more likely if the Tories are in office when Europe begins a significant economic recovery. Crucially, this could be well under way during the referendum campaign, resulting in renewed membership of an unreformed EU, a growing economy still fuelled by very cheap labour, and the further disenfranchisement of the British and European working class. The benign Tory attitude to the free market, and to European authorities as the regional guarantors of capital circulation and labour movement, will have resurfaced in more assertive form. The Left cannot afford to miss this opportunity.                         

"Dealing with the Problem": European Immigration, the British Working Class, and Ruling-Class Ideology

There is constant confusion within British culture about immigration because it touches upon some of our society's key contradictions. As confused as the masses often seem (telling Ipsos Mori they believe that immigrants make up 31% of the population; in fact it's 13%), our rulers find it no less problematic. Among them we find an intellectual zig-zag movement between celebrating the cultural, social, and economic benefits "over all" of the "free movement of people" while wondering aloud if borders need to be tightened in order to maintain "social cohesion." Thus, in the same breath that calls for "humane" government intervention to help illegal immigrants into Europe, the Economist - the intellectual home of English free traders - notes, "the logic of the free movement of people is that the more open the borders internally, the more tightly external frontiers must be managed." (Needless to say, this makes "free movement" a drastic bit less free) This is partly explained by the fact that, whatever the ideological bon mots of laissez-faire, capitalist markets must always be embedded in complex, carefully delimited social infrastructures. Bound up with this is the only half-complete conversion of the British ruling class to free trade itself. In other words, the Smithian virtues of the market have only ever been sceptically or cynically deployed by the majority of our rulers (the Tory party only coming round to Whiggish notions of free trade in the time of Margaret Thatcher). Free trade is one, partially-integrated, ideological element among others in the wider "articulation" (to use Chantall Mouffe's concept) of the British ruling class. Suspicion of immigration is connected to this wider suspicion of the perils of opening up the "national economy" (sustained historically by prising open other regions and building trade relations favourable to the British) to the convulsions of the free market.

The Economist reveals itself less in the logic of the argument than in its fluffy phrasing: "openness" for a sort of hermetic aristocracy of Schengen labour; the genteel euphemism of "management" for those outside it. On the Labour side things are no more enlightened. Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, recently turned immigrant sage for the Daily Mail: "Labour can no longer ignore immigration." Danczuk's message was entirely contained in the posture: he wanted to look hard in the Mail, an understandable if misguided fetish for one from a party so thoroughly harassed by them. Yet as with the Economist, in place of either fact or policy there was euphemism. This didn't stop a New Statesman editorial of the following week placing a more humane spin on essentially the same incoherent list of popular "grievances", public "perceptions" and vague threats. In all cases, immigration is not condemned per se. Indeed, it is regarded as a vital source of replenishment for labour markets and British national culture. It is seen, however, as getting "out of control" - though not as a result of market pressures themselves but rather because of the specific aspects of the European Union that erode sovereignty. "There's a sense that we can no longer get rid of criminals in our country," Danczuk says. "It would be foolish to deny that immigration from within the European Union and outside brings pressures on housing, schools, maternity units and other public services," the New Statesman says. (Why, if immigration "pressures" are universal, the need to acknowledge the EU separately?) Immigration is flawed in execution, they say, not in nature. The "free movement of people" must, it's assumed, be a good thing. It's only our capacity to "deal with" (in the Economist's vaguely seedy wording) the influx that matters.

Contradicting the established view are two related phenomena, the first objective and the second subjective. Firstly, the constant drive of capital to overcome all spatial, social, and political barriers to circulation rubs up against the institutional, social, and political infrastructures necessary to instigate its "limitless" accumulation in the first place. During intensifying phases capital must draw labour from its periphery into its core regions, generating, as Marx described, a "surplus army of labour" which is quickly and cheaply deployable in new and productive branches of industry. The creation of national - or supra-national - sovereignties is not a secondarily or merely coincidentally simultaneous process: their development in the core is a crucial stage in securing returns to capital and with them market expansion. Undergoing their own crises of "underdevelopment" peripheral regions inject their own, low-paid, hard-working labourers into newly opened production streams in the core. Then, in periods of crisis in the core, capital releases itself from production and floods the market, often in highly damaging speculative financial waves. Importantly, workers are thrown out of work and old, unproductive branches of industry are shuttered or relocated. Thus the territorial and accumulative contradictions of capital structure migration flows, as well as the social conflicts that inevitably arise from them. While capital plays a key part in the development of national cultures, it has absolutely no qualms about abandoning them to their own fates whenever it needs to and the conditions are right. Immigration is one process among others that "de-centres" national development, pushing it down new, contradictory paths. Thus, to Marx's fundamental division within the working class - that of employed and unemployed - we can add the division between privileged workers from the core and those thrust into core labour markets from the periphery. These divisions needn't necessarily take a national form (as evidenced in the case of the Economist's attitude to the EU), but, owing to the relatively few global proletarian experiences of federal or supra-national sovereign systems, they are preponderately national.

This brings us to the second way in which the prevailing view of immigration is contradicted, this time by experience: the general "native" working class opposition to immigration. In a previous article I addressed how the cultural conservatism of the British working class - and of British society generally - developed during the 19th century. There was nothing historically necessary about this: it hinged, as E.P. Thompson wrote, on the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with the counter-revolution of the Napoleonic Wars. In Gramscian terms, the growth of class consciousness was channelled in conservative directions by this specific and contingent tipping of "the balance of class forces." This moment affected the whole history of the British working-class movement. The truisms relentlessly espoused about immigration's "ups and downs" - from the depression of wages to the mass importation of doctors; from the erosion of the "contributory" welfare principle to the cultural vibrancy of immigration - fail to impact upon popular perceptions. This is because, for all their supposed empathic power, they contradict lived experience. From the perspective of the long-term unemployed bricklayer who expects at least the minimum wage, "foreign labour" does indeed pose a direct existential threat. This simple fact is what escapes so many public figures - with all their qualifications and reservations; with all their unevenly buried xenophobia. The reality is that the Labour tradition in Britain - with its patrician commitment to the "national economy" and the "benign" imperialism that once supported it - has no convincing answer to the threat posed by free capitalist labour markets to a workforce that lives under the constant threat of further de-industrialisation. Free labour markets are a necessity for capitalist development; closed industrial and trade regimes vital for the spread of national prosperity within a limited and predetermined social framework. Immigration - as a necessary part of capitalist development - ploughs violently into this web of social contradictions, undercutting pre-established labour and national sovereignty. 

Again, E.P. Thompson's depiction of the Irish immigrant impact on the skilled English working class during the Industrial Revolution is devastating and revealing in equal measures. Thompson quotes a Blue Book report of the 1830s entitled 'Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain', which states:

The Irish emigration into Britain is an example of a less civilized population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilized community; and, without excelling in any branch of industry, obtaining possession of all the lowest departments of manual labour.

"An Englishman could not do the work they do," one employer marvelled. Irish workers flooded the industrial economy, filling any available position. They had few of the cultural aversions of the English working class and none of their developed sense of class consciousness. According to Thompson, the Irish had "escaped the influence of Baxter and Wesley" - in other words, they were lacking in spiritual self-discipline, disregarding of moral qualms around dignity and self-abasement. They did not so much undermine wages (the key obsession of anti-immigration ideologues today) as absorb vast sectors of the economy and make them their own. The important point here is to acknowledge the specifically cultural underpinnings of this development of the Industrial Revolution: abject in Ireland, they were capable of "great feats" in England. Still, despite the obviously unintended intensification of proletarianisation wrought by Irish immigration, Thompson says, "it is not the friction but the relative ease with which the Irish were absorbed into working-class communities which is remarkable." The saving grace of the British working class - the key ingredient in its ability to stave off barbarism in the depths of extraordinary privation - was its collectivism. "By the early years of the nineteenth century it is possible to say that collectivist values are dominant in industrial communities," Thompson says. This collectivism was developed in the factory system and in the towns and villages being drawn into the "devouring jaws" (as Engels repeatedly put it) of industrialism.

In an interview with the New Left Review, the historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that the mass immigration of the Twenty-First Century was constitutively different to its Twentieth Century equivalent because - with the fluidity of postmodern identities - living in a European country no longer entailed the possibility of "assimilation" (as it had quite successfully in both the USA and France). One moved to England to work as a Polish citizen and a few years later simply transferred this new wealth of experience back home. This betrays a lack of awareness of the effect Polish communities have had on British society, and vice versa. National communities - much like capital markets - are not permanently constrained by strict cultural limits. Their evolution, not given by ethnicity, is open to peculiar permutations. If they are in part determined by the channels of culture which develop through capitalist technologies and social relations, their real limits must remain for now unknown. It is only particular interests within national states that are threatened by capitalist market expansion. The European Union may yet prove an unintended transformer of national or working class identity as opposed to their full stop. This, perhaps, is the lesson for the Left in Thompson's account of Irish immigration to England: even in such extraordinarily adverse circumstances, the industrial proletariat - still unsure of itself and of its capacities - proved capable of building real solidarity with new arrivals. This not because of its relative level of "enlightenment" along bourgeois lines, but precisely because of its own (flawed but, in its own way, highly successful) "collectivism". The future of the working class - indeed, of "humane" approaches to immigration - lies not with EU policymakers, but with new solidarities built up among the new and old elements of those whose lives and livelihoods are constantly threatened by capitalist accumulation.

Immigration as a Political Factor

Immigration helps form the deepest cultural division within the working class. Deeper perhaps than the distinction between "honourable" and "dishonourable" work (which it plays into), and unemployment and semi-employment (which it also plays a part in reproducing), the divide created by immigration among workers is no mere ideological dupe of the ruling class, used simply to divide the movement from the outside. The division is essential to capitalist processes of expansion and development; and essential to the formation of working-class consciousness. From the earliest days of capitalism - well before the industrial revolution, when the crisis of feudalism, and its attendant class struggles, drove the development of capitalist social relations - the owners of capital have always required fresh waves of low-paid labour to drive productive expansion and subsequently to undermine existing forms of working-class privilege. Despite the purely economic unity of the working class (that is, its lack of ownership of the means of production and of the means of circulation), the cultural and political unity of the working class in Britain has inevitably been hampered by the movement and subsequent incorporation of "external" populations into the expanding centres of capital accumulation. One sees attempts throughout the earliest phases of artisanal organisation against big capital to control the exploitation of immigrant labour and to steady its impact upon pre-existing skilled labour forces (with the idea of guaranteeing basic wage-rates across industries). Though hardly always "exclusivist" or racist, advanced workers have often sought to consolidate their own positions by patronising the less fortunate.

What, however, explains the acute suspicion of immigrant labour in Britain today? Clearly the current wave of market and institutional globalisation plays a major part in animating prejudice. Yet the argument that, by undermining "native" workers' rights, capital has engendered an accidental civil backlash, is too mechanistic and also plays into the hands of right-wingers who believe that all "aliens" must necessarily be perceived as a threat to the "self-interest" of local populations. On the contrary, the whole national debate about immigration in Britain in recent years has its roots in the particular conservative culture developed in British society as a whole since the industrial revolution. The labour movement, for all its remarkable strengths, has formed an essential part of this conservative culture. Yet this fact does not explain the endurance of British national chauvinism; it merely points to its popular, working-class element. To understand the strength and specificity of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain today we must turn to the evolution of the working class's relationship to capital and to the social system of capitalism itself.

*

Capitalism's longue durée in England meant that class politics in this "most bourgeois of countries" over time developed the most peculiar anomalies. Many commentators have pointed to how the "Glorious Revolution" and the constitution of 1688 foreswore a bourgeois revolution on Britain. At least as important as retrospective cultural reference to that event, however, was the coincidence of popular counter-revolution during the Napoleonic Wars with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. As E.P. Thompson put it in his The Making of the English Working Class, "As new techniques and forms of industrial organisation advanced, so political and social rights receded." The radical Jacobin and Dissenting Protestant traditions of the skilled artisans - with their commitment to the "rights of the free Englishman" were dissolved into reactionary national currents. This complex process of class incorporation into capitalism through both war and political reaction left democratic forces defeated. Although the radical traditions imported from France and from native skilled artisans were defeated, the period after 1790 also saw the development of properly national working-class consciousness. This consciousness was, however, marked by the prior defeat of the radicals along with the slow growth of new trade unionism. Strangely, the working-class insistence on a minimum of human dignity, of protection of wages and welfare, as well as traditional morals, found strange echoes among the Tory aristocracy. As Thompson put it, "Whenever the traditionalist Tory passed beyond mere reflective argument about the factory system, and attempted to give vent to his feelings in action, he found himself in an embarrassing alliance with trade unionists or working-class Radicals." Despite being predominantly bourgeois in terms of social relations, the historical accidents of British social development led its culture to be preponderately conservative, aligned with the forces of tradition. Any nascent alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat against reactionary aristocratic landowners was curtailed by working class material and ideological incorporation into capitalist society.

In subsequent years, as Tom Nairn has described in his assessment of the British Labour Party, the trade union movement - the embodiment of the labour movement as a whole - developed piecemeal and empirically within the confines of British capitalist society. At no point did the union movement attempt to combat capitalism as such. Instead, due to the long-term incorporation of the most advanced elements of the British proletariat into the capitalist state (under the leadership of the Liberal Party), it sought a moral compromise with capital: in short, a "fair share" of the productive pie for its members. This naturally tended to favour the already-organised and well-integrated workers - the so-called "aristocracy of labour" - against those excluded from it. Owing to the "empirical" and purely self-serving nature of the labour movement's analysis - and the shortage of any radical ideas within the movement - the defence of privileged layers within the working class became the foremost priority of organised workers. A long history of gender and racial prejudice within the unions attests to this privileging of the already-organised. Without a radical democratic or egalitarian strand in English culture to draw upon, this meant sclerosis for the movement itself.

*

Immigration has always played a vital part in processes of capitalist creative destruction, allowing capitalist firms the flexibility to restructure and develop new lines of production quickly and efficiently, discarding older labour forces and defunct means of production in the process. Yet different labour movements have developed varying strategies for dealing with the introduction of new labour forces (despite or perhaps because of the historical weakness of organised labour in the US, the Democrats probably feel less compunction about being labelled the party of "immigrant and ethnic minority labour" than would any traditional European Socialist Party). Immigrants - either foreign or internal - hardly form the only new strands introduced into national economies. The introduction of women - a similarly discriminated group - into the labour force has always been met with fierce and contradictory reactions within the existing labour movement.

The organisational tensions between new and old strands within the wider labour forces of capitalist societies will probably not be definitively solved under a capitalist mode of production. Still, there are strategies labour movements can and should engage in to channel those tensions into gains for the class as a whole, as well as promoting a general anti-capitalist consciousness. In Dissent magazine this year, I examined at length the relationship between the international state system, immigration and human trafficking. Interviewing various activists and NGO workers, I was met with a similar line: human trafficking is a humanitarian issue, not a political one, and should be combated through civil pressure groups. I find quite the reverse to be true: only political mobilisation and sustained organisation - the type that fosters new ideas of democratic solidarity and how to enact it - can combat a system built around the exploitation of the weakest for the benefit of the few. Precarity and vulnerability - affecting both older and newer; local and global industrial workforces - are nothing new. Unions of the unemployed - operating beyond legal notions of citizenship or corporatist industrial sectors, not to mention employment as such - could reach outside of the traditional zones of labour organisation to reach the world's most vulnerable and indeed most important workers. There are already unions that seek to protect and defend low-wage, undocumented and precariously employed workers. Here renewed commitment to creating an anti-capitalist culture for all must be brought.                   

"Fuck off moonface!" - Or Why Everyone Hates Politicians

Moon-faced PM with eye-piece

Everybody hates politicians, an aversion that only intensifies the more they declare their love for us. Unsurprising at a psychological level - no one likes a reject who persists - the public's deep dislike of politicians merits scrutiny if only because, for all our vocal and vividly expressed dislike, things at state-level carry on quite as normal. Internet anonymity has much increased the scope for consequence-free mud-slinging, of course. "Fuck off moonface," British Prime Minister David Cameron was eloquently instructed on Twitter not so long ago. He gets a lot of it, some not entirely fair. "What's the growth rate of your forehead?" one follower asked. Yet web-cover only explains the boldness of the public's scorn, not its pervasiveness. In real life, too, encounters between politicians and "normals" take place in a surreal, slow-mo atmosphere of disaster and gloom. "Bigot," was all Gordon Brown could splutter during the 2010 election as his career was ended via confrontation with a middle-aged housewife who, lest we forget, voted lifelong for Brown's own Party. That's some Iron Chancellor. The voter turnout in that election at least partially recovered from its mid-00's doldrums, scraping the mid-60s, down from around 80% in the 1950s. Yet despite the plummeting popular stature of parliamentary democracy, and to the shock and semi-amusement of Britain's elites, nothing has really happened to change all this.

How can this decline in the fortunes of the warhorses of British democracy - Tory, Labour and Liberals alike - be explained alongside the sustained stature of the State proper? I've written before about how the very obscurity of the British constitution - the legal make-up of the State - served to elevate it above the vulgarities of daily political life. This elevation was expressed most powerfully in the Twentieth Century by the symbol of the monarch, whose popularity grew even as Britain's international wealth and power decreased. This surely saved the collective neck of Westminster on multiple occasions. Yet the constitutional dissatisfactions lurking on Britain's periphery have recently become more acute, as a bungled postimperial settlement has come back to haunt our rulers. The referendum in Scotland suggests a new questioning of the balance of power in the State by British citizens.

These are, however, symptoms of political crisis not causes. What explains our abhorrence of politicians as apparently innocuous as Labour's Ed Miliband, a man who conducts his public life with all the endearing clumsiness of a panda cub? How have we summoned such a collective torrent of bile for one so cute? This revulsion has accompanied the decline of the big parties as well as partly aiding it. Attitudes have certainly changed as a result of purely economic changes (the decline of the traditional industrial sites of solidarity of both proletariat and bourgeoisie) but also because of the social and ideological elements now involved in politicisation. Bereft of former certainties, revanchism provides the basic mobilising template for voters. Hence the popularity of 'insurgent' right-wingers Ukip and the contempt reserved for the Conservatives, which in all aspects of sentiment if not of policy very closely resembles Ukip.

Repeated corruption scandals have resulted from what Peter Mair called the withdrawal not only of the public from voting but of the elites from accountability. Conservative critics like Geoffrey Wheatcroft like to blame the "professionalisation" of politics in the modern democratic age: the fact that today MPs collect a handsome pay check means they are in it for themselves - to make a living - not, as with the benevolent aristocrats of a past age, for the sake of charity and a sense of duty. Which burden of prosperity means that, perversely, politics was more meritocratic before market values were brought to bear on its unsuspecting practitioners. More likely is that the intensified "financialisation" of politics since the unleashing of speculative markets (which Wheatcroft applauds as classic Tory "good governance" and "level-headedness") has narrowed the gap between the State and moneyed interests to a crippling degree.

The parliamentary left, gathered intellectually around the New Statesman, performs little better in its diagnoses, energetic and upbeat as they are. The Labour Party's boffins - John Cruddas, MP for Dagenham and Rainham, foremost among them - pop up at intervals to decry in fiercely selected buzzwords the maladies of the age - Rotherham, expenses, hoodies, rampant consumerism, the decline of core values (contorted euphemism for apparently self-elected unemployment). The idea of a crisis of Conservatism is widely-held by the paper's writers, though the depth of the Labour crisis is less ably examined. The nature of Conservatism, moreover, means that those best-placed to pick its practical failings apart - its MPs and "organic intellectuals" (Gramsci's phrase) - are inclined to anonymously denouncing Party personalities (an invisible chairman; a vacillating, conviction-free PM) as if this might draw the poison from the beast. Coded in Tory DNA, after all, is loyalty to the Party, the State and the Union rather than honest critique of the situation.

Wheatcroft identifies (in his book The Strange Death of Tory England) a Left and Right split in the Party - a division the actual Left is wont to dismiss (a Tory is a Tory, after all). In a limited sense he's right, though he doesn't capture why the two fractions of this eminently successful ruling power-bloc - responsible for constructing an almost uninterrupted chain of hegemonic social covenants since the 1830s - have only recently leapt at each other's throats. Conservatism's crisis is so pronounced precisely because of its earlier, extraordinary successes. Thatcherism's popularity and endurance are down to its fusing of two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a conservative drive for "restoration" of moral life and, on the other, the thoroughgoing liberalisation of socio-economic life in Britain. Naturally, these two tendencies existed in a state of contradiction, eventually exploding (under Major) around the totemic issue of Europe. The hard Right - an expression of the most reactionary elements of the Tory petty bourgeoisie - wanted an island empire merciless in its exploitation of the energies of free trade. Liberal "wets," meanwhile, wanted a confident nation firmly ensconced in European affairs, as well as a less unnecessarily punitive legal order. Europe was seen, by this wing of the Tories, not only as a means to weaken the old corporatist trade union settlement but also as a way to humanise the bureaucratic legal system. Mobilising such wide and conflicting strata would do wonders for Thatcherism in the short run, but could only mean its effect on classical Toryism would eventually be more devastating.

The crisis of Labourism is both more easily explained and less interesting: following in the footsteps of Thatcherite predecessors, the Party suffered from the same internal contradictions (having already relinquished its guiding role in the declining labour movement). Exhausting itself through a long series of foreign military interventions and domestic social reforms of Thatcherite prescription, the Party could by 2010 no longer claim much distinction from the Tories. Though they had become a more "natural" party of government than ever before, the institution of government had been discredited in the process. Pre-Blair Labour may have been electorally weak, but it was at least liked. Now the old industrial base had been decimated while no new social alliances had emerged supporting a specifically Labourist ideology - at least none that couldn't easily be wooed by Tory promises of prosperity similar to Labour's own. In a sense, both Parties have suffered dramatic losses among their classical voter bases. The conventional centre-Left account of this change is to blame Thatcherism for disempowering the traditional working class. A more honest account would be that it simply won them over as a broad layer of them got richer (or at least less strapped for cash).

In terms of class, Britain's traditional rulers (which, as Gramsci noted, had always been aristocratic not bourgeois) was wiped out by a Thatcherite "passive revolution" - a delayed ascension of the British bourgeoisie to the commanding heights of the State. Meanwhile, the corporatist class consciousness of the labour movement (as writers from Eric Hobsbawm to Stuart Hall perceived) failed to construct a counter-hegemonic ideology of its own. Ultimately, the working class (always institutionally outgunned) was definitively outmanoeuvred at the level of popular symbols. The industrial working class was, by the 1980s, in no position to speak for the nation as a whole - indeed, its could hardly speak for itself.

The struggle today is between two fractions of the once-hegemonic power bloc, finding themselves in irreconcilable conflict over the future direction and form of the British State. Ed Miliband is trying to position Labour as the Party of national unity (a "One-Nation Party," in the phrase mistakenly attributed to Disraeli). Under Miliband the Party seeks a partial return to the postwar settlement, this time mediated by negotiated, deliberative restructuring in the German style (worker representation and so on). In essence, this is a rehearsal of older, consensus-seeking pro-European arguments within the parliamentary left (think the SDP of the 1980s). Opposed to this rehashing of modified, flexible corporatism is a more muscular group of free marketeers gathered around the current Chancellor, George Osbourne. Certainly more socially liberal than the Thatcherites, they are no less pro-Atlantic nor for that matter militarist in their international outlook. Their weakness is yet again that they risk alienating the Tory old guard. One of the ironies of this generation of Young Conservatives - the first to be feel relatively untroubled by the so-called "permissive" society unleashed by Labour in the 1960s - is that they may govern socially to the left of "Blue" Labour, whose intellectuals are convinced of the need for social "rebalancing" in the face of capital's onslaught. All of this lies far ahead, however. More immediate concerns have arisen in the present scrum regarding the constitution.

Though popular mobilisations in Scotland are today impacting upon the mystical heart of the British State - i.e. its constitution - they will not be decisive in determining allegiances and victories among the ruling power-bloc. Indeed, it will be capital - both big and small - which will give the signal, and clear the ground for a future, renewed hegemony of the British State. People sense this, which is why they don't vote in the first place. With politics in crisis as a result of the decay of the Thatcherite "financialisation" of politics - and with all older models discredited - no party will easily mobilise new voters come May. The power of the average elector has been narrowed and British politics is returning to its core interests: wealth. The conflicts within the power bloc appear as so many scandals to the voters. The loss of order within the ruling class filters out as a collapse of faith among the public, primarily in Westminster but also, in a creeping sense, in the arrangement of power in the British State itself (though perhaps not in the core legitimacy of the State as such). In this context one can only speculate: if what remains of the democratic legacy of the British Twentieth Century is a narrowly capitalist (as opposed to popular-corporatist) State, is it time the electors betrayed by Thatcherism's slow decay militated against its legal, statist and economic modes of organisation? To what specific end is harder to say. 

1000 Words to Screw the Union: Against Yes and No in the Scottish Referendum

The Queen: symbolically efficient

Until a a few days ago the only remarkable thing about the debate over Scottish independence was the orderly manner in which the media had conducted the whole row. Carping on the Right there may inevitably have been, but the immovable objects of civilised opinion - from the Times to the Economist - were largely sanguine. Predictably though, as the No-lead narrowed in the run-up to the vote, the whole of the British establishment ground cohesively into action. The usual hysterics of the Daily Mail ("10 Days to Save the Union!") were tempered in familiar fashion by more sober economic reservations; a raft of quality dailies (the Independent to name but one) confidently republishing the idle threats of mass relocation by top firms and banks. Whatever shrill cries met the narrowing polls, there was an underlying sense of business as usual. Heaping the pressure on referenda - always sneered at for their unintricate populism - is well rehearsed; more a matter of routine than an expression of fear at the impending outcome, the result of which has never been in great doubt.

A few days from now the British establishment expects the Union to be popularly reaffirmed, its existence rubber-stamped for at least another generation. The fear pummelled into the electorate will no doubt have played its part in this. Yet the job was completed long before by the ineptitudes of the "Salmondite insurgency" (to coin a not very convincing phrase) and its uninspiring cheerleaders. The No campaign - headed by Alistair Darling - has been no more interesting at the level of ideas, but they are at least excused the burden of proof. After all, the proof is there in the United pudding. What has de facto been offered by the two sides is either the continuation of a political and constitutional existence no one really understands, or an even more opaque and fiddly set of new divisions. Neither holds out much hope for what, time and again, the British public says it wants: decent jobs and a functioning state. The SNP's historic gamble is that enough Scots will conclude that deepened insulation from Westminster talons will clear space for both of these to grow independently of specific internal arrangements. The pose of national liberator assumed by Salmond remains unconvincing, even for many committed to Scotland's distinctive claim to nationhood. W.H. Auden once advised,

"One should never give a poisoner medicine

A conjurer fine apparatus

A rifle to a melancholic bore."

Nor, one might add, the dream of a nation to a national dreamer.

*

What might, in the most optimistic of assessments, the legacy of the independence vote be? The obvious and intended one, though still not impossible, slightly stretches the rubric of optimism (seguing into blind faith). Rather, the vote risks reminding the English above all that the mysterious power of the British state - what Tom Nairn calls "Ukania" - can yet be demystified. In other words, and as Nairn has repeatedly forecast, a jolt may be delivered to the English in what George Orwell described as their "deep sleep." Guaranteeing this sleep since the end of the War - through decolonisation and de-industrialisation; mass unemployment and mass immigration; corruption and crisis - has been the dream-image of "the people" generated by its resilient ruling class. The very success of the symbolism of the British state - the pomp of Monarchy to the fore - has shielded the flimsy and at times baffling constitutional reality of the United Kingdom from too piercing a popular gaze. The Union's symbolic unity in the face of otherwise complete Imperial decline both insulated the population from the effects of its colonial losses and helped reproduce the legitimacy of the ruling class.

Time was when the Monarchy went unloved by a liberal bourgeoisie that, though it commanded the media, did not yet command the state. An obituary for George IV read: "There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king." Not the words of a radical-democratic pamphleteer but those of a Times obituarist. The essayist Walter Bagehot in the Economist took to calling the Prince of Wales an "unemployed youth." (These quotes are taken from David Cannadine's illuminating essay on the British monarchy from 1820-1977) Indeed Bagehot advocated a ceremonially refined and symbolically efficient monarchy, which after 1870 he would get. As popular suffrage expanded and the Empire grew, the Monarchy developed into a powerful modern political symbol. No royal family in the world commands such deep respect today as the Windsors. The unassailable position of this tribe in popular lore has acted - especially since the loss of the institutional clarity given by colonial administration - as a veil over the internal confusion of the state proper. Its material effect since the 1950s has been to knot the Union together by sublimating the complexities of the constitution within itself. A challenge to the Union in the form of Scottish Nationalism is also a de facto challenge to the zombified imperial state-without-an-empire which has been quietly elevated from view these past seventy years. The Postwar contradictions buried within the British state are finally rippling its surface. A reminder that the British State is neither ethereal nor eternal, but quite material and deeply inegalitarian, may yet prove worthwhile.

*

The arguments around the Scottish vote have underlined the paucity of the British political imagination, capable of serving up only post-imperial pomp or anti-imperial ethnicity. Needless to say, neither will do a proper job of governance in the modern, multicultural world. Wary of falling into the trap of Austrian Marxists who advocated the prolongation of the Hapsburg Empire in the hope of some future democratic federalism developing in imperial territory, I hardly wish to come out in favour of the British state. Nor do I wish to deny the strength of national feeling - surprisingly widespread - on the part of both the British and the Scots. My point is simply that the solutions on offer reproduce the old imperial mystifications and do nothing to advance the social welfare or political interests of either the British or Scottish people. The English songwriter Billy Bragg has suggested the English "take down the Union Jack" and approach the Scots for advice:

"Ask our Scottish neighbours

If independence looks any good

They just might have some clues

About what it really means to be

An Anglo hyphen Saxon in England.co.uk."

It may be that the Scottish nation has a few things to say to its English neighbours. After the vote, however, one wonders if Scotland - indeed the whole Ukania-sphere - will feel any more illuminated on matters of sovereignty than it did before. Another opportunity tripped-over then.

"Rip It Up and Start Again": Malevich at the Tate

Portrait of a Man

"Rip it up and start again," sang Orange Juice in 1983, tearing a choice page from the book of high modernism. In similar if less modest tone, Virginia Woolfe had once observed, "On or around December 1910 the whole of culture changed." Yet beginning again from the beginning could be a perversely conservative gesture, preserving a threatened culture by returning to its roots, a la Eliot or Pound. What differentiated the avant-garde from high modernism - and made its influence on popular culture so pronounced - was not anything more radical in the aesthetics but rather in aestheticism's conventional opposite, politics. Nowhere was more passionately politically radical - nor more belatedly radicalised - than Russia. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the extraordinary social-revolutionary successes of Russian society between 1905 and 1924 enlarged the scope for radicalism and the cultural space for intense scrutiny of the new. A supreme world-historical confidence thus developed, as found in Mayakovsky, poet of the Revolution and fierce Bolshevik prophet:

"Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity."

The simple grammatical injunction ("Throw them overboard!") is here elevated to a grade-a formal topos through which the literary gap between political manifesto and poetry is either narrowed or erased. Needless to say, the first overboard were the paternal improvers of the Russian Nineteenth Century. Rip it up and start again indeed. Yet equally important for the avant-garde as a new direction of travel was the construction of a new mode of travel. Progress as imagined by the nation's forefathers simply wouldn't do. The avant-garde concern with smashing cultural legacy - as opposed to preserving it through radical aesthetic means, a la Elliot or Pound - also explains its great impact on popular culture.

Black Square

So to Kazimir Malevich then. His defining work, The Black Square on White Background, is frequently described in punctuational metaphors: that is, as either exclamation mark or full stop. In this sense Malevich's key work of visual abstraction is quite often grasped in representational terms. More accurate than the punctuational image in this case, however, is the aforementioned syntactical one: that is, the injunction of the avant-garde. Black Square amounts to a kind of visual correlative to Mayakovsky's "Throw them overboard." (The pair collaborated in 1914 on, of all things, some cartoon satires of the German army). So imposing is the legacy of Black Square that the Tate has chosen to offset it by screening an off-kilter American staging of the opera which inspired it, Victory over the Sun (the stage backgrounds designed by Malevich). Thus "The Icon" (a pointed title for the room; one Malevich would probably approve of) is relatively marginalised in an exhibition which builds teleologically towards it. In the midst of such distraction (fuzzy Californian accents from on screen Futurist antics puncturing any air of reverence), Black Square can paradoxically be approached with fresh attentiveness. Its world historical importance is not foisted on the spectator by the gallery but rather left to hang dangerously in the suitably cacophonous air.

The Knife Grinder

In meta- as opposed to micro-narrative terms, however, the exhibition must be deemed a disappointment. Building teleologically through nationalist agrarianism (Malevich's relatively sentimental attempt to build a specifically Russian visual language of the peasant); to the Franco-Italophile high modernist fusion of Futuro-Cubism; to Black Square itself via Victory over the Sun; and on to the high watermark of Suprematism, the remainder of the retrospective (a startling return to representation, if jarringly surreal where deposited within Stalinist realist forms) is necessarily anticlimactic. More than this, such rational progress contradicts both Malevich's intentions and indeed his method. Nicely exemplary of this is the simultaneity of styles displayed on separate sides of a single canvas. A mirror reflects a gaggle of Russian peasant women on the back of a more prominently displayed Futuro-Cubist piece. Russian avant-gardism was neither a purely organic or Narodnik agrarian phenomenon nor was it a cosmopolitan emulation of the West but a complex articulation of multiple cultural elements.

Suprematism

This simultaneity aside, the moment of Suprematism - surely the big draw here - is inescapably singular. Making up the central section of a circuit of rooms charting Malevich's life's work, the exhibition inadvertently makes one thing clear: the attempt to reintegrate abstraction - especially so violently conceived - into a narrative system of technical and rational development will not work. Similarly with the current Mondrian exhibition at the Turner Contemporary, the staged "escape" of the artist from the trappings of representation into the salvation of abstraction only serves to clarify the unbridgeable divide between the two.

Suprematism is supremely historical. The foremost function of art in the age of the avant-garde - at least among its foremost practitioners - was as a socially transformative, even in itself revolutionary practice. Gone were the introspection of Romanticism and the realism of the Victorian era. As Michael Lowy has said, the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin - perhaps the greatest radical thinker of his age - engaged in a lifelong critique of liberal and socialist notions of progress. His intention was to map the possibilities of new modes of artistic and aesthetic production which defied the inhuman development of industrial capitalism. Benjamin was, as Lowy argues, equally an anarchist libertarian and a Jewish spiritualist, grafting Marxian historical materialism onto a Messianic framework of human emancipation from the senseless toil of capitalism. The liberal or socialist ideologies of material progress which had dominated the Nineteenth Century - and which reached their material crisis in the First World War - were rejected in favour of new beginnings declared possible in the here and now - the Jetztseiten - into which the world had by chance been flung. Benjamin's thought was of a very avant-garde disposition, one that confronted the extraordinary barbarity of early Twentieth Century capitalism and responded in turn equally radically. Revolution was to be understood not as history's completion, but as an "interruption" of the relentless technological and industrial carnage wreaked by history.

Malevich himself called for an equally radical political transformation: the dissolution, he said rather casually, of all rational thought. Easier said than done, you might think. Indeed Malevich's wild political optimism can only be understood if it is placed in the revolutionary social context of the War-stricken Russian Empire. Like Benjamin and other Jewish intellectuals of Eastern and Central Europe, the Russian avant-garde was convinced not only of the possibility of radical social transformation but also of the crucial political responsibility of the artist in carrying it out. Artistic production was conceived as an integral part of the politics of the revolution. But what politics and what revolution? Not, as it turned out, the stodgy, ponderous world of the Second Socialist International and its creaking commitment to the development of the means of production, nor with it the incremental building of proletarian consciousness in the decaying husk of the old world. Breaks would become, as the rhythm of the slaughter accelerated, definitive and completely destructive.

The very title Victory over the Sun suggests more than mere Futurist triumphalism but a victory over time itself. The utopianism of Malevich's empty white backgrounds - blank non-places outside of historical time - was the crucial basis out of which the novelty of playful interactions between geometric forms could take place. "Suprematism is the beginning of a new culture," he said, "Our world of art has become new, non-objective, pure. Everything has disappeared; a mass of material is left from which a new form will be built." Echoing the Messianism of Benjamin, Malevich even used Orthodox cultural motifs (placing a black square in the position of an Orthodox religious icon in an exhibition) to express the spiritual element of his critique of rational progress. In some cases Malevich was engaged in a meditation on the dissolution of the symbols of the barbarous old world his art sought to break up, as suggested by a series of studies of the cross, slowly fading out of existence. The "interruption" of history (the white background) created a space in which old forms could be dissolved and new elements combined (Malevich's overlapping geometric shapes).

In his writing Malevich contrasted what he called the "order" established by "accepted additional elements" with "new additional elements" which arise from new social situations to challenge them. Thus out of the conventional philosophical opposition between movement and rest Malevich builds a theory of aesthetic forms based on revolutionary change. Suprematism is one such change, one of Benjamin's "interruptions": a revolutionary and emancipatory intrusion of the "unacceptable" into the flow of representational forms. New elements gain their strength, Malevich writes, "by deforming and reconstructing the opposing element of the norm which falls under its influence." In the last room of the Tate's Malevich retrospective there is clear evidence of this "deforming" and "reconstructing" of the acceptable by the revolutionary: superimposed over sombre representations of the agrarian peasant world butchered by Stalinism are striking geometric shapes in bald primary colours. Here again lurks the formal injunction, now layered into the old world as a part of its transformed substance. After the Revolution - indeed after Stalinism - the world could not simply return to the status quo ante. However gravely, the revolutionary energy of the avant-garde tunnelled on.