Aaron Porter's contortions

So, Aaron Porter – remember him? – warned ahead of yesterday’s student and trade union demonstrations in Manchester and London that ‘[s]tudent infighting harms our cause’ and that the correct strategy is ‘peaceful protests and engaging with politicians – not the violent tactics of a hard-left minority’. That Porter would decry ‘infighting’ in an article that is nothing but is ironic, or would be if he still commanded even a sliver of student support. Generally there is no reason to listen to, much less discuss, Porter’s pathetic mewling as he battles Nick Clegg for the prize of Least Relevant Person in Britain Today. But he uses a number of fairly insidious rhetorical sleights of hand, and those are worth taking apart.

First, Porter’s trying to reassert his leadership over the student movement. He wants to explode the notion that the NUS have been inactive, and he cites what he’s been up to. But of course the issue isn’t that the NUS are doing nothing; it’s that their actions are mostly symbolic and irrelevant. Does anyone remember their glow-stick vigil on 9 December, poorly attended mostly by, one imagines, people who couldn’t find the real protest that was taking place on Parliament Square where thousands were kettled by police for hours?

Now the man is trying to claim the Manchester demonstration while disowning the parallel London protest for being neither ‘supported by students’ unions’ nor having ‘adequate arrangements… for the safety of those involved’. This would be the Manchester demo where Porter had to be escorted by police to escape the wrath of students (so his safety was clearly adequately provided for – go NUS!) and the ‘largely peaceful’ London protest. In reality, of course, Porter is fighting a public relations campaign to persuade the public at large that he is still in charge; students know that he lost leadership of the movement the movement he supported the police and the media against protesters on 10 November.

That, then, is just nonsense. But Porter also claims that those who are in favour of direct action are a ‘hard-left minority’. There’s something really quite pathetic about the man who pledged his support for the UCL and other occupations (after the fact, of course) to now turn on those students and rhetorically marginalise them. First, Porter insists that those in support of and involved in direct action represent a minority of students. Although in my experience they greatly outnumber those who actively support the NUS, in absolute terms Porter’s point is irrefutably true – the majority of students are not well informed or involved. But it does not follow that they are therefore impostors and Porter himself the true embodiment of the will of the student body.

As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, the superstitious belief that ‘in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority’ is a product of ‘parliamentary cretinism’. ‘The same, they [the cretins] say, applies to revolution: first let’s become a “majority”. The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.’ (The Russian Revolution, Ch. 1.) Substitute ‘struggle’ for ‘revolution’ and Luxemburg is clearly right even today.

Without the direct action of tax protests, would corporate tax avoidance have become an issue in the public consciousness? Without direct action at Millbank, on Parliament Square etc., would the student movement have been paid more than cursory attention in the mainstream press? Hardly. Determined minorities can create majorities, and there is nothing undemocratic about that. Opinions are not pre-existing notions stuck in someone’s head; they are created, shaped and reshaped by real events. Direct action is necessary, not in violation of but to create majorities.

Second, Porter claims that because most students’ unions are not opposed to him, the ‘radicals’ are a minority ‘pushed by outside forces on the hard-left of the political spectrum’. It’s not new for Porter to claim that mysterious ‘outside forces’ are the source of his troubles, but the main argument is more interesting. It’s intended to convince not students but readers of the Guardian who may not be aware that one of the major grievances of the ‘radicals’ is that they feel students’ unions as a whole with some laudable exceptions are unrepresentative, opportunistic and conservative.

The reasons why SU sabbatical officers are so often among the most reactionary of the student body are manifold and not relevant here, but it’s important that Porter seeks to hide the struggle between student activists and structurally conservative SUs. As these have often failed to support or sabotaged even the mildest action, real opposition to fees and cuts has in many places been forced to act outside the SU. Thus Porter’s argument is entirely circular: ‘the people who support me support me; therefore the complainers are wrong. QED.’ At many universities student activism is being driven by extra-SU forces, with the SU either totally isolated or being dragged along while bleating feebly about ‘moderation’ and ‘responsibility’. (And oh, see Porter’s insistence that the NUS must ‘play the hand we are dealt’, i.e. capitulate, a lapse into the futile ‘moderate’ NUS policy of the last decade-and-a-half that saw no real NUS opposition to the introduction, trebling, and now trebling again of tuition fees.)

So, let’s just stop listening to this man. But let’s have a debate about the NUS: can it be reformed or should it be ignored and bypassed? Ultimately I tend to the view, adapted from Lenin, that the students must be sought and engaged wherever they are to be found and that to this end working within as well as outside the NUS is important, if only to definitively break down its reactionary structures and revolutionise it to become a genuine fighting organisation for students’ interests. Either way, direct action is the way forward as students seek to unite with the wider working masses in our fight against this government.

Die rote Bedrohung vom Karl-Liebknecht-Haus

Gesine Lötzsch verlangt eine Parteidiktatur sowjetischer Prägung in Deutschland, und zwar sofort. Inspiriert von Stalin, Mao und Pol Pot will sie unser Land in den strahlenden Morgen der kommunistischen Utopie versetzen, selbst – nein, gerade! – wenn es Abermillionen Menschenleben kostet.

Könnte man meinen, wenn man in der letzten Woche die bürgerliche Presse durchblätterte. Der „Spiegel“ hatte die Alarmglocken geläutet ob eines Artikels, den Gesine Lötzsch, Parteichefin der Linken, in der „Jungen Welt“ veröffentlicht hatte, Titel: „Wege zum Kommunismus“. „Klartext bei der Linken“, fand „Spiegel“-Autor Stefan Berg. Jan Fleischhauer setzte noch einen drauf: die Linkspartei nehme Frau Lötzsch „vor allem übel, dass [sic!] sie den Leuten so direkt auf die Nase gebunden hat, wohin die Reise mit der Linkspartei geht, sollte sie wieder [sic!] an die Macht kommen“.

Die Linke, eine Bande gemeinster Verschwörer! Aber sehr marxistisch kann man solches Doppelspiel kaum nennen. Heißt es nicht im „Kommunistischen Manifest“: „Die Kommunisten verschmähen es, ihre Ansichten und Absichten zu verheimlichen. Sie erklären es offen, daß ihre Zwecke nur erreicht werden können durch den gewaltsamen Umsturz aller bisherigen Gesellschaftsordnung“? Da gleicht die Linke dann wohl eher jenen roten Komplotten, die die Phantasie der Kalten Krieger Amerikas zirka 1950 bevölkerten.

Daß der „Spiegel“ sich gerne ab und an als staatstragendes Hetzblatt betätigt, interessiert hier nicht. Es hülfe den Herren Berg und Fleischhauer aber möglicherweise, den anstößigen Artikel auch zu lesen. Reichlich seltsam nimmt sich zum Beispiel Stefan Bergs Ausspruch aus, daß Lötzsch die „Blutspur“ des Kommunismus vergesse: „Kein Wort verliert sie über die Opfer des Kommunismus, über die Lager in der Sowjetunion, in China oder in Korea, die alle im Namen des Kommunismus errichtet wurden.“ Es ist kein Wunder, daß diese Opfer nicht erwähnt werden – lehnt doch Lötzsch einen leninistischen Kurs ausdrücklich ab. Sie spricht sich aus für den „Linksradikalismus – [diese] ‚Kinderkrankheit des Kommunismus‘ (Lenin)“. Für Rosa Luxemburg, deren Ideen hier bewundert werden, war der Sozialismus „kein fertiges Ideal, kein genial entworfener Bauplan, sondern etwas, das aus den realen Kämpfen wachsen würde“, ganz im Gegensatz eben zu den Ideen Lenins und Trotzkis, die zur gleichen Zeit das Sowjetsystem aufbauten.

Tatsächlich tritt Gesine Lötzsch in diesem Artikel ein für etwas, das früher Revisionismus geheißen und vor hundert Jahren noch von der SPD als rechtssektiererisch verdammt wurde: die graduelle Verschiebung des Machtgefüges durch die Demokratisierung und Sozialisierung von Institutionen und Wirtschaftsbereichen, das „Zurückdrängen“ kapitalistischer und imperialistischer Kräfte: „die Profitdominanz über Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft zu überwinden, die Ansätze einer neuen Gesellschaft ‚hineinzupressen‘ in die alte, bis sich beweist, daß dem demokratischen Sozialismus die Zukunft gehört“. Nun ist das natürlich nicht mehr als die seit Jahren aus Wahlprogrammen und dem Parteiprogramms-Entwurf bekannte Strategie der Linkspartei, nicht ganz korrekt präsentiert als ein konsequentes Umsetzen der Ideen Rosa Luxemburgs. Aber so schreiben sich keine reißerischen Artikel: nein, der Russe muß her, wie er mit Plattenbau und Kalaschnikow die abendländische Kultur bedroht.

Das Zahlenspiel über Opfer, das die „Spiegel“-Autoren begeistert herbeirufen, könnte man mitspielen, aber eine solche Instrumentalisierung ermordeter Menschen gereicht den Beteiligten nur zur Schande. Daß aber der Kapitalismus, der in imperialistischen Kriegen, durch Hunger, Krankheit und Schufterei seit über zweihundert Jahren Menschen systematisch hinwegrafft, im Namen der Menschlichkeit verteidigt wird, ist an Zynismus kaum zu überbieten.

Socialism, liberalism, and the student movement

The emerging student movement has seen activists from a huge range of different political backgrounds join forces to resist the government’s onslaught on education. This diversity is one of our strengths, but it will inevitably lead to debates – not just philosophical ones, but concrete disagreements as to the correct course, what allies to choose, how to interpret the cuts etc. This piece examines one ideology common among students, liberalism, and how socialists might best interact with it to help our cause. The terms used here are classically Marxist ones, so be warned if that’s not your cup of tea.

Liberalism is older than socialism. It emerged properly during the enlightenment, as a critique of the repressive authoritarianism of the ancien régime. Liberals championed freedom of speech and conscience, and declared universal human rights considered inviolable by the state. The crucial point here is that liberalism posits a conflict between the individual and the state: the individual is its basic reference point, and that basic unit’s rights are to be defended against the encroachments of the alien, authoritarian force of the state.

It is not difficult to see that liberalism was the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (first merchant and manufacturer, then factory owner), for the hostile state was the still largely feudal establishment that attempted to resist the shift in the economic and political balance of power in favour of the bourgeoisie. In championing the freedom of the individual, liberalism defended a rising class against its opponents: it effectively functioned as a tool of class struggle. That’s not to reduce liberalism to merely a class ideology, for many of its ideals are transparently universally valid, but to see it as also useful to class struggle, and therefore naturally an ideology popular with the bourgeoisie in the late feudal state. The individual central to liberalism appears here as the early capitalist entrepreneur, desiring to pursue his affairs without undue interference.

If liberal ideology was a weapon in the struggle of the bourgeoisie against its aristocratic opponent, its role changed fundamentally once the bourgeoisie had prevailed, either almost completely as in France or by arrangement with the old elites as in Britain. Certainly, a liberal ideology of reason, civilisation and enlightenment was employed in the nineteenth-century imperial conquest of the globe, with the bourgeois state as Hegel’s ‘march of God in the world’. But once it was in power, a strong defence of individual liberty became more of a liability than an asset to the bourgeoisie. As the ruling class – particularly in the financialised, monopolised form capitalism took in the second half of the nineteenth century – the capitalists had no use for these remnants of their own rise. As Adorno explained, liberal ideals fell by the wayside as capitalism created an increasingly total society in the twentieth century, creating ‘enemies’ and persecuting dissenters more subtly but no less effectively than the dictatorships of the East.

But now an interesting moment had come: liberalism regained its critical potential. In the nineteenth century, liberal thought was already invoked in both jingoist and anti-imperial rhetoric (witness, for example, arguments about the British occupation of Egypt in 1882). As capitalist society became total and increasingly authoritarian in its habits of thought and action, liberals began to criticise its excesses: McCarthyism, segregation, the colonial wars in Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam etc. Although their critique was often less fundamental than that put forth by Marxists, liberals nevertheless provided vital opposition to the capitalist and imperial order, especially in the United States where no labour movement comparable to those in Europe had developed. Dissent during the ‘war on terror’ has been liberal to a very significant extent. It is unsurprising that many liberals have also rebelled against the authoritarianism of the current British government, even as a supposedly liberal party is in coalition with the Conservatives.

It follows from liberalism’s class origins that it was an ideology of the privileged. Even today, liberal ideas do not have much traction with the working class, but are mostly espoused by sections of the bourgeoisie, particularly the intellectuals. If liberalism was marked as a bourgeois ideology in its insistence on the individual as the fundamental point of reference, socialism is a proletarian ideology through its casting of classes as the fundamental subjects of history and politics. That’s not to say socialism is somehow the ‘natural’ ideology of the working class: as Lenin recognised, socialism was conceived in the universities, just like liberalism before it, and then carried into the working class, quickly becoming the chief ideology of that class for its clear expression of the workers’ fundamental interests (the socialisation of the means of production and overthrow of the exploiters).

Socialism has always put class front and centre. It does not demand ‘human rights’ in the abstract, but concretely the emancipation of the working class and classes similarly exploited – not because it does not believe in human rights, but because it recognises that only a successful revolution of the working class can end the conditions of oppression and exploitation that affect all of humankind: that is, by recognising the proletariat as the fundamental revolutionary subject. Not the individual’s liberation from an encroaching state, but the proletariat’s self-liberation from its oppression and exploitation is the crucial step towards a society without oppression and exploitation. Liberalism’s revolutionary potential in capitalist society is limited, partly through the largely bourgeois class character of its adherents, partly through its atomised view of society; socialism, by recognising and organising large social forces capable of challenging established power structures, creates that potential. Socialism insists on class as the fundamental reference point because the condition of the worker in industrial society is precisely not one of isolated individual activity, but of labour in mass conditions (factories, call centres, and so on).

Liberalism was and is central to the resistance against the neo-liberal programmes of enriching the wealthy by taking from the working class, e.g. through privatisation, regressive taxation and the dismantling of public services. Liberals have been particularly active in struggling against the attacks on individual liberty of the last ten years, such as ‘anti-terror legislation’ and more recently the practice of kettling and other repressive police tactics. The massive cuts and tuition fee increases in higher education have also spurred liberals who insist on free education as a human right to action.

Socialists have linked up with liberals and others in defence of free education, and must continue to do so. While recognising and stressing our philosophical similarities – evinced by the fact that publications such as the Guardian and the New Statesman unite liberals and leftists, sometimes awkardly –, we must also continue to push the argument, already well understood by many, that the cuts agenda is not merely ‘ill-advised’, but is part of a wider class struggle on behalf of the ruling class. This class struggle does not only affect students alone, but the working class too. In order to succeed, the student movement must ally itself to the organised labour movement: it must recognise, as socialists already know, that there is a very definite class enemy, and definite class allies. Appeals and civilised demonstrations – fighting the ruling class on the ground it has generously set aside for us – will not suffice. Direct action is needed, and for that we need a firm alliance of students and workers.