"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.

In From The Cold: Post-Soviet Legacies in America

In 1945 two very different types of imperial project met on the continent of Europe. Despite all that might have seemed chaotic and spontaneous in the last years of the Second World War, nothing in this meeting was left to chance:

In Europe the demarcation lines had been drawn between 1943-45, both by agreement at various summits between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, and by virtue of the fact that only the Red Army could defeat Germany.¹

In the town of Plzen the triumphant Sixteenth Division of the Third Army rolled in, only to stop and wait for the Red Army to take Prague. By any standards of realpolitik, such casual ceding of ground to an imperial rival looks absurd. Yet as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out there were real affinities between the US and the Soviet Union at this point of the War, united as they were against the Fascist enemy.² Not only this but the prominence of local communists in resistance movements across the continent produced, for the first time, several mass Communist Parties - notably in France and Italy. In Czechoslovakia the Communist Party had long been a mass political force, but elsewhere small, previously persecuted bands of party cadres were elevated to hero status. Yet as the postwar order began to take shape - in the midst of mass expulsions, expropriation of property, and sometimes ongoing armed insurgency - it was not the heroes of the resistance who took up roles in government, but increasingly a small band of what were known as 'Moscow Communists'. Meanwhile, in the western portion of the continent an epoch-defining plan was being put into effect by the highest brass of the American state. The delayed internationalisation of the Soviet model of rule (not by revolution but by stealth) would coincide with the internationalisation of the American state in the particular form it was given under FDR's New Deal. A global division of power was emerging that, until at least the early 1970s, looked absolute. This division would shape the foreign policies of the two empires in very different ways, and would ultimately produce very different results.

The Two Empires

To what extent is it academically useful, let alone theoretically cogent, to label either the USA or the USSR empires? Certainly neither was overtly colonialist in its ambitions, and formal colonial administration never played a defining role in either of their regional hegemonies. As is often noted, both were revolutionary states that defined themselves in opposition to traditional power hierarchies. While the USA tacitly supported an end to colonialism, the Soviet Union went all out for Third World liberation movements. Even formal colonies like the Philippines were regarded as anomalous, and certainly only temporary. Insofar as the Soviet Union inherited the geographical boundaries of the earlier Tsarist empire it could not help resembling its predecessor. Yet Lenin had from the earliest stages supported the right of national self-determination. The American riposte was President Wilson's Fourteen Points. The Soviet Union and the USA didn't merely voice opposition to Great Power imperialism, they acted differently to those old powers, through entirely different institutional structures of governance. The Soviet Union was a sort of radicalised autocracy which, though reminiscent of Tsarism, was much more brutal in its lack of tolerance for liberal institutions and bourgeois models of incorporation and inclusion of different classes. The Soviet state reflected very little of the kind of "class compromise" that characterised bourgeois liberal states, even those that existed before universal democratic suffrage. Meanwhile, the US had historically needed a much weaker national state, its attentions largely turned towards its own continental divisions. It was only with the recovery from the Long Depression (1873-79) and the creation of the Federal Reserve (1907) that US state capacities began the process of coming up to the levels of centralisation of the European powers, whose warring histories and often expansive empires necessitated more integrated governmental power.

Though they certainly did not resemble past empires, both the Soviet Union and the USA increasingly after 1945, and perhaps even since the Crash of 1929, were forced to take on the role of overseers and regulators of vast territories falling under their informal jurisdiction. Though Stalin's policy of 'Socialism in One Country' had always represented a certain confession of weakness - i.e. that the USSR could neither export its revolution abroad directly - the extraordinary victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War supplied ample space into which previously suppressed political ambitions, along with paranoias, could expand. Eastern Europe was never strategically all that useful to the USSR, and at least initially was met with some lack of enthusiasm. Yet it was widely felt that the Soviet Union had to be compensated for its losses during the War with Germany, and that the territories it now occupied seemed most suitable. Thus Churchill's famous "Soviet sphere", the so called Iron Curtain, was at least partly a matter of his own devising. It was in this "informal" sense that the Soviet Union exerted imperial influence over Eastern Europe. Despite the return, in some form, of most of the east European states to "independent" status, the Soviet union exported its own practices to the region almost immediately. Its principal weapon of coercion and influence was not the state (widely undermined by Nazi occupation) but the formation of secret police forces on the model of the Soviet NKVD. Anne Applebaum writes:

Everywhere the Red Army went - even in Czechoslovakia, from which Soviet troops eventually withdrew - these newly minted secret policemen began to use selective violence, carefully targeting their political enemies according to previously composed lists and criteria.³

Combined with coalition in government (along with communist loyalists infiltrating the interior and defence ministries of the region's states) Moscow-backed communists could soon begin to develop a hegemony that was only narrowly autonomous from the Soviet Union. Descended from the kind of highly secretive, clandestine cells that had also spawned the Russian Bolsheviks, many of the 'Moscow communists' (Walter Ulbricht in East Germany, Matyas Rakosi in Hungary, and Boleslaw Bierut in Poland) were utterly ill-equipped to deal with mass politics. The pervasive presence of Soviet advisers in the region practically guaranteed that the USSR would effect some form of domination over it. The reasons it intended to do this are complex, though undoubtedly the need to buttress itself against the perceived threat of a renascent capitalist Europe was one of them. The name 'People's Democracy', given to the states in the diplomatically negotiated Soviet sphere, was important - it distinguished them from the true home of socialism, the USSR. In this sense, the Soviet Union was merely aiming to turn the its surrounding region away from capitalism.

As with the USSR, the USA's new empire was informal, though much like the carefully orchestrated division of the continent, its acquisition was systematically planned, this time by American minds alone. By 1942 the idea had already filtered through to important elements within US civil society (specifically the leading businessmen who took part in Fortune, Time and Life's joint roundtable discussion and subsequent 'American Proposal') that it would be crucial for the survival of postwar capitalism that America take a leading role in the system's reconstruction. Not only this, but liberalism's catastrophic failure - and the real attraction of socialist policies, along with Fascist and 'economic nationalist' ones - would require that the system be built on very different foundations to the those that had led to the Great Depression. It was also clear to some within the state, like Dean Acheson, that the US would have to direct capital to needy, strategically important states. US capital could no longer take shelter behind British naval pre-eminence. In this both American business and government were in accord. The future for capitalism lay in the building of a "stable international monetary system", one whose channels would be American finance and investment and whose guarantor would be the American state. This would require that the US sacrifice some if its extraordinary competitive advantage whilst funding the redevelopment of the rest of the capitalist world. The trade off, however, was the emergence of an "informal" capitalist hegemony with the US at its centre, in charge of an increasingly integrated world system which, though operating with ever more centrifugal force on small states, also had the potential for extraordinary costliness.

How the West Was Won

By the 1870s the US economy had already overtaken Britain's in terms of industrial output. However, the breakdown of British global hegemony would not be complete until during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the US would not be in a position to take over Britain's mantle until after the Second World War. Thus what happened in the intervening years is essential to an understanding of the global order that emerged following the war.

My account draws heavily from Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's book The Making of Global Capitalism. In it these two leading Marxist economists map in detail the various intersections between an increasingly Americanised capitalist class and the American state. The latter developed through a long series of improvisatory, policy-led responses to real and perceived challenges to its hegemony, not all of them consistent, though most of them directed at developing the tools to govern capitalism and even to direct it towards certain ends. To a certain extent there was a confluence, if not identity, of interests between capital and the American state, and Panitch and Gindin demonstrate that, the more it could be shown that novel state institutions could contribute positively to capitalist accumulation, the more the state was entrusted to do so. In this sense the American state operated under conditions of increasing "relative autonomy" from the capitalist and other pro-capitalist classes it largely represented. In short, during the first third of the 20th century, the American state finalised its ability to deliver harsh medicine to the capitalist system in the name of that system's own interests.

The transformation started at home with "organisational innovations that American companies introduced in both production and consumption" (industrial decentralisation within big corporations; productivity increases through technological innovations and intensifications). Factory productivity alone grew by 75% in the first decades of the century. By the end of the 1920s America's share of total global production stood at 40%. Thus the US was financially transformed from a debtor nation, heavily dependent on Britain, to an export-driven creditor. Yet as contemporary China shows, industrial pre-eminence does not amount of itself to any kind of global hegemony. Not only this but basic weaknesses in the state's ability to manage America's economic expansion were not overcome. Uneven development within the US - especially in the underdeveloped south - along with a lack of income-support programs, growing income inequality, and a wage-productivity gap, making mass consumption vulnerable in a system increasingly reliant on it, left the economy open to shocks. The 1929 stock market crash became a global depression precisely because of the US state's inability, along with the British Treasury, to coordinate an effective global financial response. Deflationary protectionist measures were taken up throughout the capitalist world.

However accurate Giovanni Arrighi's observation that, by contrast to the British "extensive" (naval; imperial; financial) hegemonic cycle of capital, the American was "intensive" (domestic; industrial), the US clearly could not assert its obvious strength until it could coordinate world financial markets to its benefit. Though tentative to begin with, the Democratic government elected in 1932 was returned triumphantly to office in 1936 largely owing to the "social turn" of the New Deal in 1935: the Wagner act legalized union campaigns, collective bargaining and the right to strike; the Social security Act created the US welfare state. Yet, despite Roosevelt's private claim that it was time for America to "turn radical for a generation", the President was a committed capitalist and in many ways a budgetary conservative. More than this (never having voiced public support for the Wagner act), Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau (his Secretary of State) soon set about smoothing over relations with a flustered capitalist class. Not only this but the most militant sections of the working class were (in the era of the Popular Front) at least momentarily submerged within the Democratic Party. According to Panitch and Gindin:

This shift in the balance of class forces effectively ended the reforms of the New Deal's second phase. Nevertheless, a transformation in the capacities of the American state had been effected which the halting of the New Deal's momentum did not undo.⁴

However, there was no "dichotomy of purpose and function between state and capitalist actors" - true to Roosevelt's insistence, the state concerned itself with stimulating investment and stabilizing and rejuvenating capitalist markets. Financial regulation, in which a symbiotic relationship developed between public, semi-public and private bodies, was mostly insulated from democratic pressures. By creating such a complex the "commanding heights" of finance were elevated above the working class, the grounds for the integration of which were laid by the new model of mass consumption. Unions would increasingly trade off workplace control and economic democratisation for negotiated pay increases. For Panitch and Gindin the state had increased its relative autonomy from particular capitalist interests, integrated a broad section of the working class into capitalism (with the promise of steadily increasing wages, home-ownership, and mass consumption), while taking control of many aspects of financial regulation.

After US entry to the Second World War, plans for the internationalisation of the American state were officially laid. As the potential for US hegemony over global financial markets increased, so too did the state's capacity to coordinate markets. The US government continued to believe in free trade and market liberalisation as the key to prosperity. Yet the administration was quick to realise that America's future prosperity and stability lay in the ability of other key countries to catch-up with America's dominance. Thus "trade could only be liberalized on the basis of an international monetary arrangement that would also allow for economic growth and domestic consumption on other countries". This would not be a colonial form of dependency, nor would it rely on the subordination and impoverishment of rivals, but rather the supervision of financial flows to a capitalist 'core' aided and coordinated by the American state. In a sense the New Deal itself was to be internationalised. Less interventionist than regulatory, the planners would become liberal "custodians of an economy owned by the capitalists."

In early drafts of the famous White plan, the World Bank was envisaged as a public lender to redeveloping states. But owing to Roosevelt's desire to integrate Latin America into the word system and align its with the US, and also the need for the US public monies not to be directly responsible for European debt, the Bank became an incentiviser of private investment. J.M. Keynes' proposal, at Bretton Woods, for an international clearing fund and special international currency to facilitate lending to indebted countries on relatively easy terms was summarily ditched. Instead policy-makers within the US administration insisted on tight conditionality of borrowing, thus ensuring a continuous pace of capital liberalisation and expansion of free trade, regardless of the social cost to debtor nations.

In neither Giovanni Arrighi's account of what he calls the "hegemonic cycle of accumulation" of US capital, nor in the economist Robert Brenner's account of America's return to growth do peculiar class composition and alignments play such a central role. Brenner mentions the "containment" of militant US labour, but this appears to play little part in the developing story of American political consensus and disensus. The depression, Brenner confirms, was a major source of 'creative destruction', following which:

The way was prepared for the new epoch of growth by the huge reductions in the costs of production that were achieved during the crisis - by way of the enormous shake-out of obsolete capital stock, the strong downward pressure on real wages that resulted from record levels of unemployment, and the building of a backlog of unused innovations.⁵

For Brenner the huge potential of this process was only realized with the onset of the equally extraordinary mobilisation of the War economy. Nowhere does he mention the integration of the labour movement and the working class as a whole in political terms; nor does he account for what Panitch and Gindin see as the broad development of US state capacities (in the form of New Deal regulatory and institutional expansion) in the making of postwar US hegemony.

The neat division of the postwar era - into the industrially productive, Keynesian Golden Age (1945-1973) and the financialised, monetarist Age of Turbulence - prove to be deceptive. As Panitch and Gindin stress, state regulatory capacity and financial markets grew concurrently, if at different speeds at different times. The immediate postwar years - which spawned such extraordinary rates of growth throughout the capitalist and non-capitalist world - should be understood, they argue, as laying the foundations for the "explosion of global finance that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century." This took place, they stress, "within the framework of the New Deal and Bretton Woods regulations." The reason for this development - and the alliance that quickly developed between postwar European Social Democratic governments and the Democratic Party of the New Deal and Civil Rights era - was the need for urgent redevelopment of a liberal capitalist 'core'. Japan and the rest of South East Asia would later be ushered into this core. And with the expansion and deepening of financial markets as the crucial conduits of developmental capital, so too would the rest of the world become part of capitalism's periphery. Thus western European states found themselves at the centre of a newly globalised capitalist empire, not solely as client states but as competitors within an arrangement of reciprocal expansion.

Dismantling the Cold War

Though stalemate was the default political position of the Cold War balance of forces, from every consideration in the economic sphere the USA was quickly dominant. Although engendering its own contradictions (through which the American state and economy accepted debtor status in orderto maintain its increasingly chaotic financial hegemony), American power - both coercive and consensual - over the world system was never in doubt. While the 1980s generation of neoliberals in Washington, and their bastard offspring the neoconservatives, saw the war of position against the Soviets as vitally strategic, it was in the Third World that American elites found they could fight an ever-spiralling war of manoeuvre. Though the former grabbed more headlines in the neoliberal decade, it was the latter which from our perspective appears more relevant for contemporary struggles. It was, however, the existence of the Soviet empire which inadvertently allowed America to effectively police global order. In an international division of gendarmerie, the American state could allow a drawn out Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to cripple its rival while funding jihadist proxies and engaging in multiple fronts elsewhere. The Soviet collapse would end not only the Cold War stalemate but also the global balance of forces structurally weighted in America's favour.

Though successive Washington administrations were deeply committed to ending the Cold War and subjugating and stabilising the postcommunist states through NATO, these efforts could not stop the spread of ex-Soviet arms, the loss of Soviet demand in the world economy, nor the rapid loss of authoritarian Soviet power. All of these factors would force the US to thrust itself deeper into Middle Eastern and Asian geopolitics with a verve that would once have seemed impolitic. Even if the dollar was ultimately maintained by extraordinary efforts in the State Department and the Foreign Office, via the Plaza Accords and beyond, there was nonethless a creeping fragmentation of global political order. Thus the American state was left to carry the burden of Wall Street's bullishness, its own costly currency hegemony, and a raft of growing economic competitors it could no longer outflank. Not only this but military-industrial complex developed initially to combat communism was now constantly engaged in global fire-fighting efforts in the world communism had now vacated. With the defeat of a long wave of Third World liberation movements have emerged sectarian fundamentalisms promising no hope of a brighter future. A world conjured in the shadow of an American hegemony that is slowly taking on elements of a more straightforward kind of military domination, one certainly familiar to the KGB old guard. This is surely one irony not to escape them.

1Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 226-7

2ibid., 166-67

3Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, xxxi

4Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism,

5Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, 10

Ukraine - A Human Trafficking Case Study

In the wake of Maidan, what future awaits a renewed wave of Ukrainian migration?

A few weeks ago I wrote in Dissent Magazine about human trafficking, labour exploitation, the vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers, and the misplaced criticism of migration by Europe's far-right. In the article I argued that increasingly punitive legal regimes, driven by right-wing reaction, help increase the risks run by vulnerable migrant workers and help expand the informal labour markets on which traffickers thrive. Furthermore, I argued that inter-regional inequality and uneven labour market development compel migrant workers to seek work abroad in increasingly tumultuous conditions. Uneven labour market development - i.e the concentration of demand for certain profitable skills in certain geographical locations at the relative expense of other areas - at once forces migrant workers into seeking unstable work in foreign markets and increases the pressure on national governments to protect their domestic labour markets from foreign workers, thus compounding the problems. Capital benefits from the cost-saving effects of such a social division of labour while governments accrue cheap political capital by punishing foreign workers with legal sanctions. Those who benefit over all are the traffickers, not the workers. What follows is a short case study of Ukraine, a country which perfectly exemplifies the contradictions of the social division of European labour. While immigration as such is both socially and culturally beneficial, the contradictions driving migration from Ukraine at the moment are hardly benign. While welcoming new arrivals, we should bear in mind the price often paid to bring them here.

Much like the Czech Republic, Ukraine has recently become a destination as well as a source and transit country for trafficking victims. According to research by CARIM East, 22,000 Ukrainians were enslaved abroad in the mid-2000s. Approximately 10% of respondents knew victims of human trafficking. Since the mid-2000s there has been a dip in the number of prosecutions for trafficking, though with the political situation as it is in Ukraine, emigration can be expected to increase and not necessarily peaceably.

Most depressingly for Ukrainians hoping to join the European Union, the highest numbers of trafficked individuals come from recent EU member states - namely, Bulgaria and Romania. This suggests that, in the short-term at least, membership of the EU can actually facilitate trafficking rather than dampen it. A "clear majority", in the words of the Eurostat paper, of trafficking victims in the EU are in fact EU citizens (61% according to their data for the years 2008-2010). The EU itself is not able to solve the contradictions of trafficking because of the inequalities that exist between states and different states' abilities to combat the phenomenon at multiple levels. Add to that a rising tide of xenophobia and immigrant bashing in the EU core states and it is easy to see why people are not getting the protection they need. Then there is the matter of sexual exploitation. In a survey of European countries, one research paper found that 62% of victims were trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation with 68% of the total number of victims being women. More pervasive and even more dangerous than exploitation of labour, exploitation of sex is less visible and harder to keep track of.

According to the US State Department, which regularly publishes its global findings on trafficking, Ukraine is a "second tier" country: that is, a country actively engaged in making its institutions meet minimum global standards but which hasn't met them yet. Because of the Ukrainian state's long history of corruption, compliance in these areas has always looked unlikely. Now, given the revanchist mood in Russia and the seeming descent towards civil war, effective action looks impossibly distant.

The Ukrainian state lacks both the institutional capacity and the willpower to assert even a minimum level of effective control over trafficking. Furthermore, Ukraine is caught in a peculiar core-periphery market transition, whereby it is gradually becoming a de facto part of the wider European polity and economy, even as Russia makes aggressive demands on its political and cultural allegiances and attempts to reassert its fading economic and geopolitical influence. The result of such contradictory development in human terms is the widespread exploitation of people, in the form of both sexual slavery and forced labour, in the context of unstable and coercive legal regimes.

The scale and extent of organised crime is often shocking. Terry FitzPatrick of Free The Slaves informed me of the following case, described in detail here by the US Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The crimes are all the more impressive for their unlikely bypassing of the EU and concentration on the US. Omelyan Botsvynyuk, a fifty-two year old Ukrainian national, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in an elaborate trafficking cartel which smuggled Ukrainian labourers into the US via flights to Mexico. Most astounding was their strategy for negotiating the US-Mexico border. Botsvynyuk and his brothers coached Ukrainians on how to approach border guards, dressed them in "US-style" clothes, and had them march straight through border control points. Those caught without papers were merely issued with a court summons, released, and subsequently picked up again by the Botsvynyuk organisation. Once they were back in the hands of the Botsvynyuks on the US side of the border, the workers could easily be transported to the borthers' base in Philadelphia. Keeping their victims in unsafe and dirty living conditions, the whole range of coercive and violent trafficking techniques were then conducted: personal documents and court summons were confiscated; physical force, threats of violence, sexual assault and (in at least two cases) rape were used to cow workers; debt bondage was used to keep victims in their place; threats against family members were used to keep people quiet.

Though extreme in almost every sense - not only in terms of human cost but organisational scale, flagrant defiance of the law, as well as defiance of some of the world's most tightly monitored borders - the case of the Botsvynyuk gang cearly demonstrates the inadequacies of a narrowly legalistic, often border-focused and anti-immigrant approach to ending human trafficking. Police action, with its entrenched institutional and practical biases and ideological limitations, can do little to prevent trafficking. The material conditions which allows traffickers to step in - upheavals and declines in national and regional economies; the mass redundancy by shifts in capital concentration of huge swathes of otherwise able workers; political and social tumult on the capitalist periphery - will have to be addressed by a clearly articulated, political anti-trafficking program. In increasingly strained international regulatory conditions, in which foreign labour is already grossly exploited, more and more Ukrainians will be driven into the arms of opportunist traffickers.