Tea with Mussolini

Some media commentators have suggested that Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour conference marked a clear break from the politics of the last 30 years and he deserves support.

Seumas Milne in The Guardian was particularly enthusiastic, calling it “the most radical speech by a Labour leader for a generation”, claiming: “Miliband signalled an unmistakable break with the corporate consensus of the past three decades and the model of unfettered market capitalism this has enforced.”

It’s hard to imagine a more wrong-headed assessment of Miliband’s speech than Milne’s, however.

The “break” that Miliband allegedly made in his speech was with a certain kind of capitalism – but only in order to embrace another, potentially even more sinister, version.

Miliband wants the state to decide between “good capitalists” and “bad capitalists”, and between honest, toiling workers and those who should be shunned by society.

The “good capitalists” will get tax breaks and the others won’t. Decent workers will get social housing and the feckless ones will end up living on the streets, denied a roof over their head by the local council.

The state will oppose strikes (Miliband actually praised the anti-union laws passed by Thatcher governments) and deny benefits to those who decline to work for a pittance (which New Labour introduced and the ConDems are implementing with gusto).

What is all this but a recipe for an authoritarian, corporate state? Miliband’s endless talk of “values” – the term peppered his speech – indicated what such a set-up would look like.

On the one side there would be a vast state bureaucracy – with a regulator called OffCapital – which would pronounce on the virtues of this or that capitalist enterprise. On the other side would be the Ministry for Moral Rearmament, implementing “values-based” policies on the majority.

“Radical” this may be. Progressive it isn’t. Red Ed? Give us a break! Radical populism is always right-wing stuff.

More Mussolini than Marx. The Italian dictator’s corporate state springs to mind as the logical outcome of Miliband’s ideas.

The good news is that Miliband – who told News Night, “I am in favour of capitalism, just for the record” – will never get the opportunity to practice his fiendishly unclever plan.

Globalised capitalism is not for reforming or regulating, or being managed like it was after World War II. That epoch came to a deafening end in 1971, when the post-war Bretton Woods system of controls on investment and currency movements crashed to earth.

Capital has subsequently freed itself, as much as possible, from the constraints of national state controls and operates on a global scale. This is true of both production corporations and even more so of the financial system.

Both departments of capitalism demanded and got deregulation so that they could move assets and money without hindrance. Assorted crises were overcome until the meltdown of 2008 plunged the world into recession and in 2011 has taken us to the precipice of outright depression.

The present crisis, however, is not a result of deregulation which is more a consequence than a cause. Inherent flaws within the capitalist system of production and consumption led to the vast overhang of debt that is now overwhelming economies, currencies and countries like Greece in a merciless fashion.

Fiddling about deciding which capitalists are good and which are bad could not be more irrelevant in this situation. Labour is a party that sold its soul to corporate-driven, free market capitalism. Under Miliband, it is a party that is lost in space, floundering around for something to say, appeasing right-wing voters while staying firmly in the capitalist fold.

We are not fooled.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Getting it right about Iran

A little humility is called for in making an assessment of what is at stake in Iran, not only for the sake of the courageous students and others who are in the firing line of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thugs and secret police. Getting it right about the essence of independent mass movements is not just an Iranian question.

Ahmadinejad’s slogan of “death to US imperialism” and the attacks on Britain are being churned out as a desperate ploy to hold sway over a rebellious population who want their basic democratic rights and to come out of the shadows of a theocratic state. In Iran, as in Britain, there is a crisis of legitimacy for the state regime and all sorts of devices, including nationalism, are being used to prop up the political system.

Supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi are continuing to defy the government-imposed ban on demonstrations, arrests, riot police and the thugs of the Basiji militia but now under conditions of fear and terror. Photographs and videos are having to be smuggled out since the regime has clamped down on the internet and live reporting.

On Saturday the state media said that 13 died in clashes with riot police, bringing the official death toll to at least 20. At least 457 people have been arrested, including the family of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani, who is 75, heads the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body which has the power to dismiss or appoint the Supreme Leader, a post presently filled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has staked his position on suppressing the demonstrations.

As the unresolved issues from the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Reza Pahlavi rumble through all levels of society, the seismic shocks of a new mass popular movement are exposing those who, behind their “left” words, reject the ability of the masses to make a challenge for political and state power. Amongst them is Guardian “left” journalist Seumus Milne, who has suggested that the anti-government movement led by Mousavi is simply a US-Western inspired attempt to “neutralise” Iran, thus echoing the words of Khamenei who has denounced Britain as a conspirator against his rule.

Milne and his co-thinkers in the “anti-imperialist” camp seem to have missed the fact that young people inside Tehran are desperately pleading for support. Among those who Milne dismisses as “the gilded youth” of Tehran are students who are laying down their lives.

As an Irish blogger notes: “I wonder if it ever occurred to the likes of Milne that the men and women protesting in Iran are not ‘gilded youth’ but people who are frustrated not only by what they see as a blatantly fraudulent election; they are frustrated by life in an oppressive society, frustrated at being second class citizens (in the case of many of the women, frustrated at high inflation, frustrated at high unemployment). They are angry and they want change.”

Milne is not the only voice on the “left” that finds it impossible to believe that millions are ready to risk all to rid themselves of the backward nationalism and anti-Semitism that characterises the Ahmadinejad regime. As blogger Bill Weinberg notes, other lefts such as “the retro-Stalinist Workers World and its International Action Center” and “Monthly Review and the World Socialist Website have weighed in for Ahmadinejad and dissed the protesters as dupes or pawns of US imperialism. How interesting to see these supposed ‘leftists’ making common cause with right-wing cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes...”

The divisions within the top of Iranian society – Mousavi held leading posts in the Islamic Republic after the revolution of 1979 – reflect the deep movements below in society at large. A secular way forward towards a democratic society based on common ownership and control of the country’s resources is what’s at stake.

Achieving that will require a new, revolutionary leadership in Iran, as elsewhere. A mass movement against the state such as has emerged in Iran, with its growing independence from old leaders, has to be supported, not for what might be achieved in the short term in terms of the disputed presidential election but for the prospects that it holds for deep-going transformation in the longer term.


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Naive and dangerous

As the global credit crisis lurches out of control, you can always find some consolation if you look hard enough, especially if you are a Guardian columnist with words of advice for the political and financial élites who are allegedly in control.

Economics editor Larry Elliott believes that financial market mayhem makes the case for returning to some golden age of regulated capitalism and the policies of the economist Keynes, after which everything will be more or less just hunky dorry. Unfortunately for him, the globalisation of financial markets alongside transnational corporations make this scenario a pipe-dream.

But wait. Today, comment editor Seumas Milne sees hope for the future in the actions of the state in response to the convulsions in the global financial system. “What,” he writes, “last week seemed outlandish becomes today's common sense”. After rather stupidly attacking the Tories for being “irrelevant” (if only that were true!), Milne says the scope for “piecemeal interventions may be coming to an end”, adding:

“In particular, if the HBOS deal, the last rampart of a private solution, were to unravel, there is already speculation that wholesale nationalisation of banks could become unavoidable.” Milne, who likes to think himself as a man of the Left, is particularly infatuated with what’s going on in America, declaring: “When a US Republican treasury secretary comes up with a $700bn bank rescue package, the potential of what governments can do with political will is thrown into unusually sharp relief.”

So all that’s lacking is the “political will”? Milne’s touching faith in the state to provide the answers and solve the crisis is extremely dangerous as well as naïve. When he writes that “the battle has been won over the necessity of intervention”, he is reinforcing the illusion that the crisis can some how be brought under control by a set of rational actions drawn up by the Guardian.

This assumes that the state is actually capable of imposing some sort of order and that this in itself would be a good thing. All the evidence is that recession is turning to slump and the state can do nothing about it, except try to save capitalism from itself at the expense of jobs, homes and living standards. And lest Milne, who has a reputation as an apologist for Stalinism, has forgotten his history, we should remind him that when the capitalist state comes together with corporate and financial power it equals fascism.

We have a double bind. The mass of the people are disenfranchised because the major parties stand for the same thing. And the state is openly the plaything of big business and finance. So the challenge is to create a new democratic politics and state that can propose a sane economic system based on production for need and not profit. Working on that project would be more fruitful than expecting the capitalist state to somehow become progressive in the midst of the gravest crisis since the 1930s.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor