It's all about power

The political crisis that has erupted in Britain following the general election provides a window of opportunity to bring the most basic of questions – who rules the country and in whose interests – right to the top of the agenda.

That is the focus of our ‘Taking the Revolutionary Road’ conference on May 22, which couldn’t be happening at a more opportune moment.

It is all too easy to be sucked into the drama around the frantic efforts being made to put together a coalition government of one variety or another. But behind the to-and-fro in Westminster, as the major capitalist parties jockey for power, is a profound political and economic crisis.

The political system is broken in a deeply significant way. A new system of weighing and distributing votes in the shape of proportional representation wouldn’t even begin to address the heart of the matter.

Many voted reluctantly last week. And a large proportion of those who dragged themselves to a polling station last week have no faith or trust in the parliamentary system. And for sound reasons that go way beyond the expenses scandal of the last parliament or the inadequacies of the first-past-the-post voting system.

As our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions points out: “Full-on globalisation has resulted in an unholy alliance between the state, political parties, corporate and financial power in all the major capitalist countries. From London to Washington, from Berlin to Rome, from Tokyo to Seoul, the reality is essentially the same.

“Democracy is reduced to a sham, a façade behind which real decisions are made and power exercised over ordinary people. The right to vote counts for little and the aspirations of ordinary people are denied by state systems that primarily function in the interests of big business.”

This analysis is borne out by the events since it became clear that the election had produced deadlock. The tell-tale phrase is how all parties at Westminster have pledged to rule in the “national interest”. What this means is all to clear once the patriotic rhetoric is stripped away.

The “interest” in question here is not that of ordinary working people struggling in their daily lives to make ends meet. What Brown, Cameron, Clegg and others are prattling on about is something quite different. The “interest” they will protect at all costs is vested in the financial markets and corporate boardrooms.

So irrespective of the make-up of the next government, it will come down on the interests of ordinary people like a ton of bricks, imposing savage cuts in living standards and services to satisfy the money markets who fund the British state’s massive deficit. The answer to the question about who rules Britain and in whose interests suddenly is made clearer as a result.

The financial and economic crisis can only worsen. At the weekend, the eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund pledged €750 billion in rescue plans to try and reassure the markets that debts will be honoured. It merely serves to postpone the inevitable.

Whatever government emerges in Britain is certain to provoke large-scale resistance by trade unionists and communities as the full horror of the cuts becomes apparent. One of the immediate lessons from Greece, however, is that strikes and protests have not prevented the government from voting the cuts through the country’s parliament.

To fight to win means actually defeating and removing the government of the day, and in the process creating alternative structures to those of the capitalist state such as People’s Assemblies. In this way, ordinary people would get to rule in their own interests, replacing those of the money markets and boardrooms. By registering for the May 22 conference you would give this strategy a real boost.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

PR is not the road to happiness

As the likelihood grows of the Lib Dems holding the balance of power in terms of seats after May 6, so does the debate about what price Nick Clegg’s party might exact for joining a New Labour or Tory-led coalition government. Centre stage is the idea of replacing the present voting system with PR or proportional representation.

The Lib Dems have always been in favour of PR, which is not surprising. Under the present system, they could, for example, gain a larger share of the total votes cast than New Labour and yet end up with fewer than half the number of seats. Even the Tories could poll far higher than Gordon Brown’s party and still have fewer seats than New Labour. Democracy in action this isn’t!

Some people who are fed up with the present political system see PR as a way forward. It would, they argue, allow smaller parties to be represented in Parliament. PR could even open up the floodgates to “revolution or fundamental reform”, according to one response to our election policy of “hang on to your vote – build People’s Assemblies”.

But would it? PR assumes that a) Parliamentary representation is the only possible form of democracy b) Parliament in the shape of the House of Commons has real power c) reforming the voting system will benefit ordinary people d) the Lib Dems are alright really e) the present capitalist state system can become the tribune of the people.

None of these presuppositions holds water, however. As we have demonstrated many times, Parliament has had no real power for over 140 years, when the executive first established a permanent stranglehold over MPs. Representation is an extremely limited form of democracy. It was first elaborated by Alexander Hamilton, one of the key thinkers behind the American Revolution. He saw it as a way of filtering popular sentiment while keeping it at arms length.

So what developed much later in Britain following the 1867 Reform Act was representation – but without power, which lay firmly in the hands of the state. The founding of the Labour Party did not fundamentally alter this relationship, even when it took office for the first time as a minority government in 1923.

This is because the government is only a part of the state system as a whole. And this state is indisputably capitalist by nature in the sense that its primary role is to uphold the status quo of private property and the wage contract system for workers, with force when necessary. Globalisation has brought the character of the state out into the open for all to see, with banks and corporations ruling through parties like New Labour and the state reorganised to facilitate global finance and the free movement of capital.

In this context, PR would not make a jot of difference. Sure, smaller parties would be represented in Parliament – the Greens, the neo-fascist BNP and the ultra-right UKIP to name but three. But the levers of power would remain in the hands of the ruling classes.
The experience of Italy, which elects its MPs through a system of PR, is a clear example that a more balanced voting system does not result in progressive change.

Advocates of PR are in danger of missing the wood for the trees, the form for the content. A fairer voting system is obviously required because the first-past-the-post method used in general elections is clearly weighted against change. But something like PR only makes sense within a truly democratic political system built around ideas like People’s Assemblies. Otherwise PR could actually be used to reinforce the status quo.

This is, we repeat, a crisis election. Britain’s debts are enormous and the crisis convulsing Greece is a warning of what’s to come here. Whatever the manoeuvres around a post-election arrangement, whatever regime emerges will be down on our necks like a ton of bricks because that’s what the money markets are demanding. Voting for any of the parties planning these cuts would be like turkeys voting for Christmas, whatever the merits or otherwise of PR.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor