chickenfeet

At first glance it might seem odd to compare such apparently mortal enemies as Trotskyists and New Labour but I want to argue that they have a great deal in common and that what they have in common has much to say about the essential impotency of the left.

The essence of the critique is that both groups are centralising elitists who use an artificially constructed "people" to justify their essentially undemocratic nature. This leads logically to an assertion that a genuinely transformational left agenda would be rooted in the needs and aspirations of actually existing people.

Let's look at the Trots first.[1] The essence of Lenin's theory of the party was that the working classes of Tsarist Russia were insufficiently advanced to be trusted with power. Instead, the party as the "true" representative of the most advanced workers, should adopt a custodial role and exercise power through a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (sic) until society had advanced enough for the workers to understand their true interests. This idea became closely coupled to the idea of Democratic Centralism which was originally a pragmatic response to having to operate clandestinely but became elevated to a principle. DC amounts to the belief that the executional organs of the party and its cadres should operate in strict conformance with the directives of the, in principle democratically elected, Central Committee. This concept was, and is, perpetuated by Leninist parties long after the conditions that brought it into being ceased. It is after all a godsend for control freak leaders. Unsurprisingly, 100 years after Lenin formulated the idea, the "people" still need their collective hand held by the party and the party still needs to be tightly directed from the centre.

How about New Labour? New Labour has a very similar view of "the people". They are made up of some sort of mythical collective old lady who needs to be protected from her neighbours[2] by the benificient power of the state. Any actual "ordinary person" who dissents from this view is dismissed and marginalised in various ways, most of which turn on the suggestion that they are too educated to understand the mythical ordinary people. Interestingly the elite that determines what "the people" want is very far from ordinary. The inner circle of New Labour consists largely of people from highly privileged backgrounds and, in many cases, members of families whose members have occupied positions of power and privilege for more than one generation. School teachers and trade union officials, one generation at most removed from manual work, once the backbone of Labour, are conspicuous by their absence.

The other obvious parallel with the Trots is the concentration of power at the centre of the party, thinly veiled by some pretence at democracy. The membership of the party and its institutions; CLP Executives, Party Conference etc have been totally emasculated and power transferred to the Leader, his entourage, and party officials who he appoints. I can't help wondering how much the similarity owes to the fact that so many of New Labour's inner circle cut their political teeth in alliance with the Euro-Stalinists of the 1970s CPGB, many of whom are still profitably hanging around the periphery of New Labour.

I'm not sure at this point how one breaks out of this mould but it seems clear that the key is a polity and policy that focusses on and empowers actually existing people rather ideological constructs. In some way that must include returning the kratia to the demos.

fn1. These remarks apply to any "vanguardist" group in the Leninist tradition.

fn2. Her neighbours appear to be a strange mixture of hooligans, Islamic terrorists and asylum seekers. Naturally she doesn't live next door to corporate fraudsters and bent politicians so doesn't need protecting from them.

Charles Clarke's contribution to today's Guardian is very interesting. On the one hand it's an uncommonly open presentation of the the "New Authoritarianism", on the other it's a series of very obvious and clumsy rhetorical devices.

Let's dissect some of the claims of the "New Authoritarianism". The most interesting and far reaching one is "the modern reality that human rights are wider than those that the individual possesses in relation to the state". Well duh! Delete "modern" there. Law as we understand it in the countries with a Common Law tradition (and others besides) grew up mainly to provide a non-violent means of regulating individual citizens rights with respect to other citizens. It's called civil law. Criminal law regulates the relationship between the state and the citizen (for the most part). What the New Authoritarians are trying to do is move a whole category of disputes into the realm of new kind of criminal law while simultaneously bypassing the normal checks and balances of criminal procedure. That's by any standards an important (and to many worrying) expansion in the role of the administrative arm of the state.

The second claim, in essence, is that "existing democracies, particularly the US and the UK" are by their nature not authoritarian and intrinsically incapable of spawning authoritarian abuses. Those critics who protest at such abuses are accused of equating the US and UK to certain unspecified dictatorships that no longer exist (presumably to differentiate them form the unspecified dictatorships that the UK and US still support). This, of course, is a non-syllogism of the kind that you learned to avoid in your very first formal logic lesson. Nazi Germany gave the police sweeping powers, x points out that New Labour has given the police sweeping powers, x is equating New Labour with Nazi Germany. The implication is either that because there is a ballot periodically authoritarianism is impossible or that there is some sort of dualism elections=freedom, no elections=no freedom, which completely ignores the historical reality of the existence of elected authoritarian regimes; Huey Long's Louisiana, Maurice DuPlessis' Quebec to name but two. To point out that New labour is becoming increasingly authoritarian is not to equate it with Hitler or Stalin, though one might ask what happens if the powers Mr. Clarke claims were to fall into the hands of someone less fastidious thanhis honest self.

The third claim that I find very odd is a causal/temporal claim that Clarke makes;

However, as democracy has advanced so powerfully across the world(1), other rights become important too. The right to go to work safely on the tube. The right not to be killed by someone who has served his sentence for violent crime but remains dangerous. The right to live at home without being disturbed by antisocial behaviour outside the front door

In what sense were these "rights" less important before democracy advanced so powerfully? Did the existence of the USSR make us happier to be blown up on the tube? I don't think so!

So what then is the essence of the critique of the New Authoritarianism and why do I think that Blair and Clarke miss the point. There are a number of grounds.

The first problem is the transfer of a large element of criminal procedure from the relatively public courts to the murkier world of the police and bureaucracy. It's pretty difficult to nobble a judge and jury. It merely needs to be convenient to get a dodgy decision out of a bureaucrat. The possibility for harassment of anyone the government or police choose to harass in the proposed legislation is vast and I'm old enough to remember when "sus", conspiracy charges and the like were routinely used to harass. The proposed powers are much broader and therefore more dangerous. We can already see that the vision is a highly selective use of the powers. Tony Blair, in his weekend email exchange, was happy to propose "harassing" (suspected) drug dealers until their lives became unbearable. I can't see him using the proposed powers to harass insider traders or sellers of peerages. A future government could be just as selective but in quite different ways. It would be the easiest thing in the world to use restrictions on travel and meeting designated persons to cripple political opposition.

The second problem is the idea that simply because a government has a temporary majority in the House of Commons it can do whatever it likes. This apparently is "democracy" and "democracy" is always right and the polar opposite of "tyranny". We are asked to "to applaud the differences between democratic states and dictatorships" but nowhere does Mr. Clarke suggest what those differences might be. It's hard to see how they extend beyond periodic votes in a flawed electoral system because for Mr. Clarke "human rights" (which I think might just define the difference between tyranny and democracy) are whatever the government of the day says they are. There is no room in his world view for a less transient definition or even for the idea that minorities might need protecting from a majority (would that be a "democratic" or a "tyrannical" majority").

All in all, it's a curiously optimistic view that asks us to suspend all critical judgement where "democratic" governments are concerned. Our masters are benevolent. They can be relied on to know what's best for us. We don't need outmoded and clumsy legal protections. It's impossible that anyone less public spirited than messrs Clarke and Blair might be able to cobble together the 25% or so of the electorate needed to gain power. However, don't suppose they are going to let you vote on that in a way that makes any sense any time soon.

fn1: Has "democracy ... advanced so powerfully across the world"? There have been gains but they have either been in relatively small countries or are very shaky. I would hesitate to claim, for example, Indonesia or the Philippines, as stable democracies. There are far more countries where some sort of elections are held than, say, twenty years ago but in most of them the idea that the demos has much influence over the outcome, still less the behaviour of the government is laughable. Clarke's arguments might be a great deal more compelling if he ever defined "democracy".