The state and local government
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
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The state and local government towards a new basis for 'local democracy' and the defeat of big business control Peter Latham First published in 2010 by Manifesto Press Contents
Preface and acknowledgements vi Part 1 Theories of the state and local government 1 Methodological considerations 1 2 Orthodox theories 7 3 ‘State Monopoly Capitalist’ theories 17 4 Other British Marxist and radical theories 38 Part 2 New Labour’s ‘local governance’ project 5 Ruling class local government strategies before New Labour 50 6 How local democracy was further undermined by New Labour 60 7 US-style executive mayors in local government 78 8 Local government finance 103 9 Marketisation and privatisation 123 10 The global public private partnership market, South Africa and Britain 144 11 New Labour’s political, ideological, organisational and financial crises 159
12 Local taxation in advanced capitalist countries and orthodox reform proposals 187 13 Annual Land Value Taxation plus major redistribution of income and wealth 197 14 Towards a new basis for ‘local democracy’ and the defeat of big business control 223 15 Ruling Class Offensive – the Con-Lib Dem challenge to the Left and Labour Movement 257 Appendices 279 References 303 Index 316 In memory of Malcolm Campbell (1952-2009) former President of Croydon Trades Union Council and Secretary of Croydon UNISON Branch
Foreword
It explains the essential links between events and the actions of successive governments driven by neo-liberal ideology. That ideology’s modern incarnation began with Fredrich von Hayek and was given impetus by economist Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. In Britain it was right-wing Conservatives Keith Joseph, Nicholas Ridley and others who gave this revival of 19th Century ideology its political kick start. Thatcher was seduced by it. Thus it became the prevailing orthodoxy in British politics and government for three decades. The most astonishing conversion to neo-liberalism was that which overtook the Labour leadership and persisted through the Blair and Brown years. What Peter Latham has done has shown clearly how New Labour policy, each initiative and every new direction was driven by that neo-liberal ideology, down to elected Mayors, social enterprises, housing ALMOS and much more. He has put all in context. It is such analysis which has been so lacking in British Labour politics. There are and have been numerous groups on the Marxist left – although most Labour Party members and supporters have little understanding of what they are all about let alone being able to distinguish one from another. Even on the orthodox Labour left, to which I belong, there are few who have a grasp of ideology. Their politics is motivated by noble concerns for fairness, for equality, for civil liberties, for jobs, decent pay and good public services, but with little philosophical analysis or policy coherence. That is why we are so easily bamboozled by right-wing Labour leaders and their rhetoric, notably the performances of Blair at Labour Party conferences. Peter, like me, was immune to Blair’s vacuous oratory but sadly many comrades fell for it. Some now feel ashamed that they did so, especially over the Iraq war. I said in my 1997 maiden Commons speech that I had come to Parliament to oppose neo-liberalism. Immediately afterwards John McDonnell MP whispered in my ear that “they won’t like that in Gordon Brown’s office”. It was worrying that so few on the left understood what we were saying or foresaw the dangers. So many Party members said to me that as we now had a Labour government we could simply reverse Thatcherism and restore what had gone before. They completely failed to understand that the New Labour hierarchy were Thatcherites themselves. Peter Latham’s book must surely help to protect thoughtful socialists in future from falling again for right-wing Labour demagogues representing the interests of global private corporations and American neo-cons. Peter has also pointed a way forward for socialists in the future. With the final death of New Labour and the departure of Blair, Mandelson and Brown, Peter’s intelligent work is surely well timed.
July 2010 Preface
The main aims of this Marxist study of the state and local government are to: (1) expose the true nature of New Labour’s neoliberal ‘local governance’ project as an intensification of previous Conservative policies to undermine local democracy in the interests of big business; (2) test its central theoretical hypothesis that state monopoly capitalism’s hegemony explains the neoliberal ‘local governance’ arrangements Britain and other advanced capitalist countries have introduced since the 1980s and some medium (for example, post-apartheid South Africa) and low income countries have also adopted in the last decade or so; and (3) demonstrate the continuing relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the historic bloc when devising strategies to develop a hegemonic alternative that will defeat the three main parties neoliberal project for big business control of local government. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) discusses the methodological assumptions underpinning this study; and then critically analyses orthodox, Marxist and radical theories of the state and local government. In Part 2 (chapters 5-11) an assessment of ruling class local government strategies before New Labour is followed by an empirical critique of three key aspects of New Labour’s ‘local governance’ project – internal management/governance, structure and finance; discussion of the significance of the similarities between British and recent developments in South African local government in the context of the global public private partnership market; and an analysis of New Labour’s political, ideological, organisational and financial crises. Part 3 critically discusses local taxation in advanced capitalist countries and orthodox reform proposals (Chapter 12); advocates a new approach to local government finance based on annual land value tax plus major redistribution of wealth and income (Chapter 13); summarises the specific alternative socialist proposals made to reinstate local and national democracy; considers strategies for implementing them (Chapter 14); and maps the contours of the ruling class offensive and challenge presented by the Con-Lib Dem coalition to the Left and Labour Movement (Chapter 15). The struggle between those campaigning for more local democracy, and capitalists seeking to appropriate local government to further their business interests has existed since the birth of capitalism and the beginnings of the organised working class movement. The early trade unionists saw the right of people locally to influence the immediate circumstances of their lives as central to the task of abating the insecurity imposed on working people by the capitalist labour market. This is no less the case today. For, nowhere is the crisis of New Labour more obvious than in local politics and local government. It is here that the detachment of working class voters from their traditional party is most visible. It is here also that the anti-democratic consequences of market-based (big business dictated) policies are most glaring. Thus only by winning the battle for democracy locally and nationally, through broad-based campaigns that unite local community action with the trade union movement, will we be able to defeat the three main parties neoliberal ‘local governance’ project for big business control of local government, and therefore tackle the escalating crisis of capitalism on jobs, housing provision, transport, social services, education – and, not least, environmentally sustainable development. The late Ralph Miliband noted in 1984 that the Marxist mode of analysis has seldom been adopted in relation to the British political system – and this is still the case in 2010. The most recent British Marxist analysis is Paul Feldman’s short book Unmasking the State: which – despite its many insights – does not provide the major critique of New Labour’s ‘local governance’ project that is needed, and its demands are too general. Hence the following chapters attempt to fill the latter vacuum. I therefore hope that this book, which also includes comparative material from low, medium income and other advanced capitalist countries, will be of interest to councillors, political activists, trade unionists, students, teachers and researchers in Britain and beyond. Discussions with the Marxist historian John Foster during the writing of this book helped clarify my thinking and explain why I no longer use the term ‘local state’. I am also indebted to Dave Wetzel (President of the Labour Land Campaign) and Professor Dexter Whitefield who both read an earlier draft version and made valuable suggestions to improve it. I also wish to thank Dominic Tweedie of the South African Communist Party for first making me aware of the similarities between British and post-apartheid South African local government; and the political economist Professor Patrick Bond at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies for his advice regarding the literature on South African local government. This book is dedicated to one existing councillor (Ron Stockbridge [Lewisham] who has survived New Labour’s cull of socialist councillors); four former Labour councillors (Gerry Harrison [Camden], Tom Davidson [Haringey], Brendan Bird [Fulham] and Mick Williams [the Convenor of Democracy4Stoke]). The latter were all leading participants in the LCOLG. Malcolm Campbell (1952/2009) – who was President of Croydon Trades Union Council (CTUC) and Secretary of Croydon Council UNISON – died prematurely in April 2009. The book therefore celebrates Malcolm’s major contribution to trade unionism in Croydon; and, as part of its 120th anniversary celebrations, is published in association with CTUC. I also wish to thank CTUC, the South East Region of the TUC, Unite Branch 1/1148, London Unite Craft Branch, Croydon NUT, Croydon and South London CWU Branch, the Labour Land Campaign and Brendan Bird for the generous financial support they provided to get the book published.
Croydon 23 July 2010 Chapter One
‘The political scientist’, according to John Kingdom, ‘must be attentive to the real world before all else and, like Machiavelli, seek to peel away the facade in search of a deeper reality’.1 Moreover, as Kingdom also argues: Orthodox writing on British politics purports to take an objective position without a commitment to any political ideology. The cogs and cams of the system are detailed in much the same way as the internal combustion engine might be. The implication of this approach is that the state itself is an apolitical machine, not favouring any particular interest within society, which a government takes over like the driver of a car. This belief is a central plank in the theory of British liberal democracy. However, the idea of the neutral state, easily controlled by anyone in the driving seat, may be contested. To Marxists and others it serves the interests of capital and wealth. Hence, writers implying it to be impartial are actually making a political (anti-left) statement. Rather than peeling away the facade they are contributing to the process of concealment.2 This study also rejects ‘the widely-held liberal view that the State is…impartial in the conflict between workers and capitalists’3: because the Marxist ‘mode of analysis’ – which ‘has seldom been adopted in relation to the British political system’ – ‘accords a central place to the containment of class conflict and pressure from below’.4 The exceptions until the 1970s, as Ralph Miliband writing in 1984 noted, were: Harold Laski’s Parliamentary Government in England (1938); John Gollan’s The British Political System(1954); and James Harvey and Katherine Hood’s The British State (1958).5 Similarly, as Miliband also observed in 1984, despite ‘the radical and Marxist oriented work that has been done in the last decade or so’ on local government in Britain, ‘prevailing orthodoxies have remained well entrenched’.6 Some writers have now distanced themselves from their earlier work, however. For example, John Dearlove and Peter Saunders – both cited by Miliband as examples of radical and Marxist writers in 1984 – now conclude that ‘there are no strong grounds for accepting the dramatic claims that have been put forward by Marxist… writers down the years’.7 The following sections discuss key inter-related features of the Marxist method in the social sciences used in this study.8 The distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ According to Marx: ‘All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided’.9 Positivism focuses only on things that can be observed and are therefore ‘on the surface’, rather than things which are hidden or the underlying links between them. Conversely, Marx’s distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, which goes back at least to Descartes’ philosophy, maintains that there is no necessary correspondence between sense-experience and reality. Moreover, as Tony Tant points out: ‘By the nineteenth century Marx had redefined the distinction between appearance and reality, holding the “real” causal relations to lie beneath the surface “appearance”'.10 For example, New Labour’s community empowerment rhetoric (the ‘appearance’) obscures the ‘reality’ that US-style directly-elected mayors with cabinets are the optimal internal management arrangement for privatised local government services. Dialectics Marxist dialectics, as Bertell Ollman states, ‘is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world’, of which Marx used four aspects: identity/difference, interpenetration of opposites, quantity/quality and contradiction.11 In what Marx calls the common sense approach, also found in formal logic, things are either the same/identical or different, not both. On this model, comparisons generally stop after taking note of the way(s) any two entities are either identical or different, but for Marx this is only the first step. For example, orthodox political scientists only describe the obvious differences between the old and the new system of local government introduced by New Labour’s Local Government Act 2000, which deprived most councillors of any role in policy-making by abolishing the committee system in all except the smallest local authorities and introducing US-style executive mayors. Whereas Marxists then go on to show how such policies are crucially related to the privatisation of services and state monopoly capitalism’s attempts to restore the conditions in which profitable investment and capital accumulation can take place. The notion of the interpenetration of opposites stresses that nothing – no event, institution, person or process – is simply and solely what it seems to be at a particular place and time that is situated within a certain set of conditions. Viewed in another way, or by other people or viewing them under drastically changed conditions may produce not only a different but the exact opposite conclusion or effect. For example, in 2001 Doncaster’s citizens voted for the new mayoral system because they thought it would help draw a line under the previous period of sleaze and corruption when Ray Stockhill – a former deputy leader and civic mayor – was given a two-year suspended sentence for receiving bribes totalling more than £30,000 from local property developer Alan Hughes. However, in February 2007, the council received a petition signed by 11,000 calling for a referendum to abolish the US-style executive mayoral system because Doncaster citizens now feel it gives one person too much power. Yet, the referendum will not be held until 2011, because under the existing legislation another referendum cannot be held for 10 years. Initially, movement within any process takes the form of quantitative change. Then, at a certain point – which is different for each process studied – a qualitative transformation takes place, indicated by a change in its appearance and/or function. It has become something else while, in terms of its main constituting relationships, remaining essentially the same. The history of Doncaster’s disillusion with the mayoral system illustrates the latter process, which arose out of the contradiction between New Labour’s community empowerment rhetoric to justify the introduction of such mayors; and the reality that the reign of their former New Labour mayor had been mired in controversy after a series of police and independent inquiries into his conduct. Karl Popper, who dismissed Marxism as one among many ‘pseudo-sciences’, argued that contradictions are logical contradictions, and therefore dialectic is opposed to formal logic.12 Dialectic is not opposed to formal logic, however. For, as the Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth stated the laws of formal logic are of absolute validity, any form of statement which sets them aside becomes thereby incoherent and inconsistent…. Of course, if you ignore the ways things are connected – if you ignore, say, those connections of things which lead to an existing state of affairs generating its own ‘negation’ – you will reach wrong conclusions. That unfortunate result will not then be due to your respect for formal logic, but to your disrespect for real connections.13 In other words, as Berry Groisman – who agrees with Cornforth – recently pointed out formal logic deals with notions or aspects of things abstracted from the real things themselves. Thus, when we consider a hypothesis, even a most simple one, about the real world its very content depends on our inquiry, on other hypotheses, on the history of our views on the problem and so on. Its content is…a product of the process of the inquiry itself. And thus it is a (‘metaphysical’) mistake to think of hypotheses – or indeed any proposition – in isolation from each other and from the process of our inquiry.14 Contrary to Popper, Tant – following his review of recent developments in scientific theory – also noted the ‘congruence between dialectical analysis… Kuhnian “paradigm shifts”, the “phase transitions” of chaos theory’, and ‘the contemporary recognition of the similarity between natural and social science following from the increasing uncertainties found by the so-called “hard” sciences’. Tant therefore concluded that, as ‘the “official” purpose’ of science ‘is to improve human conditions’, the ‘Marxist project is perfectly consistent with the purposive requirements of science’.15 On the surface, the basic meanings of these terms are different, even contradictory. Yet all are claimed to be essential in the framework of Marx’s critical method. If a Marxist thinker employs one set of terms (at the expense of the others) to explain a particular social (or natural) phenomenon, the results may appear to differ from or even contradict the results of another thinker who employs a separate aspect of dialectics to explain that same phenomenon. For example, the famous debates over the role of the state in Marxist theory have contributed to key but apparently competing ideas: the state as a tool of the ruling class and the state as an autonomous regulatory mechanism for capitalism. In Ollman’s view, both theories have correct features, but each depends on the viewpoint of its proponents and the specific features of capitalism that have been used to form the theory. Ollman also stresses, as does this study, the need for Marxists to extract what is beneficial for the Marxist project in non-Marxist thought. The historical-relative character of social laws As Maurice Dobb emphasised – in his little known classic statement on the matter – a key feature of the Marxian method is its insistence on the historical-relative character of social laws. From this it follows that social analysis should concentrate on special and peculiar features of a particular form of society, rather than attempt to abstract certain aspects common to all forms of society and on these assumptions to erect principles of universal application…16 For example, New Labour’s local ‘governance’ project, which is an intensification of previous Conservative policies to undermine local democracy in the interests of big business, cannot adequately be explained unless it is related to the current crisis of British state monopoly capitalism. The Confederation of British Industry on behalf of monopoly capitalism called for a review on how to increase privatisation, which the government immediately agreed to in December 2007; and appointed an advisory panel in which these interests were overwhelmingly represented. The Julius Report’s key recommendations in July 2008 – that, if fewer conditions of a ‘social or environmental kind’ are imposed in contracts, privatisation of services can be significantly increased – were then gushingly endorsed by former Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform John Hutton: I very much welcome Dr. Julius’s analysis. I will be working with colleagues across government over the next few months to consider the recommendations she has made and explore how they can be translated into a tangible programme of action… Yüklə 5,87 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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