Corbyn, or socialism in words

First, a short cautionary tale for our times.

The top man in an organisation appoints a friend as a senior executive. She proves a most loyal supporter, if far less kind to the other employees, fiercely driving them to accept her rigid discipline, and rewarding them far less than they probably deserve, and certainly need. He awards her a 15% salary increase, putting her on nearly four times the median household salary in Britain, while she limits everyone else to 2.2%.

That’s not just less than a sixth of what she got, it’s less than the rate of inflation (measured by the way retail prices are going), so it’s effectively a pay cut.

It’s the story of Britain over the near-decade of austerity: real wages fell year after year until 2016, since when they have flatlined. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires is rising, and the total fortune they hold keeps going up. Those least able to absorb the pain of austerity are paying the price, while a self-serving elite makes sure it’s well protected from its worst effects.

Real value of wages over the near decade of austerity
from Full Fact

That’s Tory Britain for you.

That’s what Labour exists to combat, and never so energetically than when the Left is in charge. So with Corbyn as leader, we would expect the fight to be waged all the more intensely.

Except that the cautionary tale I started with wasn’t about the Tories. That was the Labour Party. The top man is Jeremy Corbyn. The tough operator he appointed and then rewarded with a 15% increase is his chief of staff, Karie Murphy. Speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, one staff member said of her:

It’s got to the stage where people are afraid to speak up as individuals, because when you do you get sent to Siberia. When an individual has that much power in an organisation, it’s a concern.

Guardian photo of Corbyn with his Chief of Staff, Karie Murphy
Apparently a dangerous woman to challenge

All the worst aspects of a bullying, top-down, private-sector organisation, in fact.

Now when I first posted on this subject, a Corbyn supporter replied to me to point out that decisions on pay weren’t in the leader’s gift. My first response is that this is a standard Corbynist copout: anything good that happens is all down to the revered leader; anything bad is somebody else’s fault.

My second response is that Corbyn is constantly promising a fairer, more equitable, ultimately more socialist distribution of the resources of society. That’s going to take a huge effort from a Labour government (assuming Corbyn can get into government at all, which is by no means a foregone conclusion): convincing parliament to pass the necessary legislation; working with a lot of public and private-sector organisations to ensure not just the letter but the spirit of the measure is applied; convincing many reluctant if not frankly hostile groups to accept the principle on which it’s based.

If Corbyn can’t even get them accepted within his own organisation, the Labour Party, what possible hope is there of his achieving anything in society in general?

But there is another and far more worrying implication of this story.

Does Corbyn really mean what he says? There is a conviction on the far Left, as on the far Right, that anything they say must be correct simply because they say it. Corbyn claims he is a socialist, so what he says, and what he does, is socialism. Consequently he can apply a deeply iniquitous and thoroughly right-wing wages policy, and it’s socialist because it is he who is behind it.

Might that not be exactly what he does if he ever gets into Number 10? Let himself be convinced that a wrong-headed approach to wages must be the Labour way, because he incarnates Labour values? His track record rather suggests that this is just what he’s doing inside the Labour Party, after all.

Or, to put it in simpler terms, if he can’t even implement socialist values within his own party, why should anyone trust him be a socialist for the nation?

Venezuela: the case for just saying “no”

There is a glorious scene in my favourite book of World War One memoirs, Emilio Lussu’s Sardinian Brigade. He describes a moment when his Italian unit is waiting to charge the Austrian lines. The pre-assault artillery barrage starts up but the fire, instead of hitting the Austrians, falls on its own, Italian positions.

While Lussu rushes about trying to restore discipline among the panicking troops, he’s struck by an astonishing sight: one machine gun unit which is under full control of its officer, a friend of his, marching in fine order – towards the rear.

“What on Earth are you doing?” shouts Lussu.

“Attacking those guns,” replies his friend.

“But they’re our guns,” he shouts back.

“They’re firing at me,” comes the calm reply, “so they’re enemy guns.”

That strikes me as a thoroughly sensible, not to say commendable, attitude. By analogous reasoning, if a government is wreaking havoc on the lives of workers and the poor, it is, by that simple fact, a government hostile to the principles of socialism. It’s crucial to bring it down, as quickly as possible. If it claims to be socialist then, as soon as we’ve got our hollow laugh out of the way, we need to devote ourselves still more urgently to the task – a false friend is far more dangerous than an open enemy.

Why do I mention that just now?

Because there seems to be a belief among certain circles of the British Left that we need to back the present government in Venezuela, on the grounds that it’s ‘socialist’. This is a ‘socialist’ government that presided over a reduction in GDP by 18.6% last year. Inflation was running at a yearly rate of 741% in February 2017. Although the official figures are different, many commentators believe that unemployment is climbing towards 20%.

The face of socialism? Not as I see it

Venezuela is sitting on the biggest oil reserves in the world. And yet it’s GDP per head is a little over $12,800 a head and falling, while even Cuba, with no oil, is running at $11,900. How long before Venezuela falls below Cuba?

There’s plenty wrong about Cuba, but at least it’s delivering a stable economy, secure if low living standards and decent healthcare, in spite of decades of US sanctions. Nicolás Maduro’s government is delivering chaos, in which the first victims are the poor and the workers it claims to protect.

Sure, the parties likely to replace his in power may well be pretty awful. At least they’re open enemies and we can get on with opposing them once they’re in office. The one controlling the regime right down is a false friend and it’s wreaking horrific damage on those it should be defending.

Marching on it at the head of a machine gun detachment probably isn’t a good idea. But doing the same thing metaphorically? It’s firing on our people, which makes it the enemy, so why not?

After all, don’t forget Stalin called himself a socialist too. He proved it by taking out 80 million people. Among whom were all the leaders, bar him, of the revolution that was supposed to bring socialism to Russia.

I got tired decades ago of being told that his successors’ governments had to be supported simply for the principles to which they paid lip service. I feel tired when I hear the same stale old rhetoric being dragged out in defence of Maduro. 

We need to find something more innovative. And actually stand up for the people we’re supposed to represent.

Aberfan: man-made disaster

Fifty years ago today I was thirteen years old. I wasn’t highly alert to what might be happening outside the world of school and friends and family. 

Hey, I was thirteen.

Even so, I looked with incomprehension mixed with revulsion at the pictures on TV from a small Welsh village I’d never heard of, where a slag heap had slid down a hill and engulfed a school. 116 children, younger than I, had died as well as 28 adults. I might never have heard the name of Aberfan but after that, I’d never forget it.

Aberfan child coffins: the aftermath of a catastrophe made by man

A slag heap. The waste product of a coal mine. Surely an industry as old and established as mining knew how to handle slag? But it turned out that they didn’t. They’d simply planted it on the slope of a hill that was soaked with rainwater and natural springs. Underneath all that slag, the ground had become saturated and slippery and the whole thing had, eventually, come tumbling down.

A few hours later, and the school would have been empty. But as it was all but a handful of the village’s children were wiped out.

Perhaps even sadder was the other irony, that many had warned of the disaster to come. A year earlier, the head of the school, Ann Jennings had presented a petition about the tip from mothers of pupils, to the local council. No action was taken. And Ann Jennings would be one of the victims of the slip.

One of the most shameful repercussions of that terrible day in 1966 was the behaviour of Lord Robens, then Chairman of the National Coal Board. He denied that the slip could have been prevented, a statement that was found to be false by the enquiry into the disaster. He denied that the Coal Board had any responsibility towards Aberfan other than to stabilise the remains of the tip. When he finally agreed to get rid of it insisted, he had the gall to insist that £150,000 of the money raised for the village by the disaster relief fund (nearly 10% of the total) should be diverted to help pay for that work.

Robens had been a Labour MP – Labour, for Pete’s sake – and even a member of one of the great Labour governments, Attlee’s. The National Coal Board had been set up as a result of the nationalisation of the coal mines.

One of the central aims of socialism is to ensure that the sources of economic wealth, the means of production, should be held by the whole of society on behalf of the whole of society. This strikes me, as it would anyone who feels inspired by socialist views, as a highly laudable objective. I have to admit, though, that it’s hard to see a satisfactory way of achieving it. The shortcut adopted by many socialists or social democrats, from many countries, in the middle of the last century, was to nationalise industries. That means bringing them under state control.

It seems to make sense. At first view, the state represents everyone and belongs to everyone. So if it owns the means of production, then everyone owns them.

The problem comes at second view. Because do we all really own the state? Isn’t it, in reality, controlled by an elite as isolated and opaque as occupants of the board rooms of private industry? If they control the state, how can we say that we own what the state owns?

The lesson of Aberfan seems powerful to me. State ownership is not popular ownership. In that  little Welsh village, a state-owned industry did terrible damage to the people. It was ungenerous in its assistance and then it tried to leech on the support others gave.

Stateism isn’t socialism. The State is capable of being just as oppressive towards people as any private industry. State ownership isn’t in itself a route to liberation, it’s merely an economic tool to be used where it’s useful and avoided where it isn’t: some industries are better state-owned than privately-owned, some are better state-owned today but not tomorrow, others it’s best to keep well away from the state.

Socialism, if it’s to be worth anything, is about doing far more than demanding nationalisation. It’s about helping people like the inhabitants of Aberfan. Doing what we can to make sure that avoidable suffering is never inflicted on them again and, where it’s unavoidable – as in natural rather than man-made disasters – to come to their aid. The rest is just a means to those ends.

For today, though, on the fiftieth anniversary of that catastrophe, we should put all that aside and just focus on the victims. And remember the incomprehension so many of us felt back then. Even callous thirteen-year olds.