Our grand liberal, Polly Toynbee
Can you stop people accumulating power and wealth? How can you stop them if they are the ones with all the wealth and influence? Isn't it really a win for some, do well for a few others and then a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose situation for the rest?
You could legislate of course. But the legislators are not unbiased, they favour the powerful, the ones who can pay good money to work the angles in the legal system in their favour. The ones who can buy out the media that would otherwise investigate them for their underhand dealing with the police and politicians. The ones who can spend money to lobby politicians and offer inducements and directorships to those who play ball. You could always vote. But what good does that do, speaking honestly?
In the time of Wilson when the government persued a mild social democratic policy and refused to join the US in its war in Vietnam there was a plot to overthrow Wilson. The Prime Minister of Australia, who was left leaning, was actually fired by the governor of Australia. The Queen's representative.
In 1976 the CIA and their allies were tasked with making sure that the Italian government didn't have a coalition with the Italian Communists. The CIA financed a coup d'etat in Greece that overthrew the socialist government there. The British and the Americans supported the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal to the bitter end. The idea of social democracy is too dangerous for them not in the abstract, but in reality. We don't have the option.
The truth is you can't change the state through a democracy. If you start to do so the real vested interests in society will oppose you tooth and nail. The police will mount baton charges on horseback against 'the enemy within.'
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Unless you can address the ... question [of class] properly, Polly, I think you are whistling in the wind. What can we replace capitalism with? I hear you ask. Well I don't know. But by failing to oppose it we condemn ourselves and billions of others to exploitation, poverty and enslavement.
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The only reason they caved in in 1945 to the building of the welfare state was because there were nearly three million men with military training in the British Army in 1945 and most of them were working class. When they voted Labour the capitalist state jus rolled over. That's partly why our establishment opted for a professional army, so they could never be held to ransom like that again.
The only reason the establishment has to keep the welfare state and to ensure the rights of working people and its citizens is if there is some opposing power. Now that opposing power, with all due respect, is not a journalist with a conscience and strong arguments. It is a trade union movement and organised civil society. Not David Cameron's vigilante neighbourhood watch but joined up civil society capable of really opposing government when it serves the banks.
Ask yourself this. If democracy is no use and no government is capable of withstanding the demands of bankers and if the bankers can guarantee they will be bailed out then what force can oppose them? Who can really stand up to the search of the powerful for profit and super-profit? Certainly not a group of concerned middle class and upper middle class liberals.
The problem is this Polly: you liberals present no alternative to capitalism and class difference and allowing the powerful to rule is the very essence of capitalism. But you don't oppose the essence of capitalism. Why do you think companies end up relocating to China? Simply because they can pay people less, they have a dictatorship that will guarantee no organised protest and they can make more money. You know this. I know this. We all know this. Why get involved in a discourse about 'class' if you can never face up to the real cause of the problem of unfairness in society?
Benevolent capitalism is a myth. When Britain had an empire conditions were atrocious in the factory but they gradually improved. There were reforms. When there were no reforms there was repression, there were Peterloos. Our rich were so rich from exploiting the poor people of the colonies in India and Africa and around the world that they could afford to buy a little security by paying key sections of the British working class a little more money. As you might pay a maid a little more so that she doesn't steal. Or as you pay a security guard to protect your wealth.
The liberal reforms were the result of the successful endeavours of men and women of conscience, but of the fact that men and women of conscience were allowed to implement reform, for example to the labour laws, because the establishment was investing in its security. It was paying people off. It didn't want revolution.
But our government in the UK now seems to have made a conscious decision. It seems to believe that, because it has a huge and quite effective security apparatus with CCTV cameras trained on people living in every estate, and data bases and a professional army and practice at repressing populations at home in Northern Ireland and abroad it can use the security apparatus for its political agenda and squeeze a little more out of the British people.
It can dismantle the welfare state. It can charge us much more for basic services. It can lower the taxes on the rich and allow companies to stay off shore and only pay 20% tax or less because there is nothing we can do about it. The Cameron Clegg coalition is betting on the effectiveness of repression. They have the security service the monitoring and the professional army and the trade unions are weak and all the newspapers back their ideology and so they will do it.
Your liberalism will always fall on deaf ears. It will do so because the establishment no longer want to or need to buy the consent of the British people. They govern through ideological hegemony, through force. Instead what we should be talking about is getting mass movements organised. Powerful mass movements, just as the Arabs have done. Because we are fooling ourselves if we imagine that there is any morality in the way the real world works. money and power talk. That's it. The rest is window dressing, a smear of icing.
Who was it who said that the only way out of the Labyrinth is rationality? Well it is irrational to look at the small picture. It is rational to recognize that class is the product of an economic system and that that system is capitalism. It is irrational to discuss class without discussing the nature of capitalism.
By fooling oneself that we are dealing with moral beings who can act independently and not a group of people acting mainly in their self interest and with nothing to oppose them but the beration of liberals we get absolutely no where. All we do is create the illusion of opposition and salvage our consciences. Isn't that what you are doing Polly - in the end? You appeal to the better instincts of the middle class, of educated people. These people, to the extent that they are in difficult circumstances at the moment, might agree with you. But most of them know what side their bread is buttered on. They serve and are servile. Call hem 'professionals' if you like.
Now you are probably on the editorial board of the Guardian. You should be. And if you are the you see the assumptions that the Guardian makes about British society. Let's be honest here. What are those assumptions? Let's be truthful.
1. Does the Guardian support capitalism?
2. Does the Guardian believe that class difference can be overcome?
3. Does the Guardian believe that class differences can be overcome in capitalism?
4. Does the Guardian hold to Blair's endorsement of the Third Way?
The third question is probably a non sequiitor for you. and I hope the answer to the fourth is not yes because the Third Way has been discredited as capitalism by stealth and ideological entrapment.
Unless you can address the third question properly, Polly, grand as you are, a modern H. L Menken, I think you are whistling in the wind. What can we replace capitalism with? I hear you ask. Well I don't know. But by failing to oppose it we condemn ourselves and billions of others to exploitation, poverty and enslavement.
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