Nama’s lesson for socialists

NOT THAT you would know it from the Irish experience but there is a strong anti-statist tradition on the left, particularly the Marxist and anarchist left. This tradition was once so strong and such a threat to the then growing socialist orthodoxy that Lenin felt the need to write a pamphlet ‘Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder’ bemoaning it.

All of that is ancient history these days of course, as indeed is old Lenin himself, but it seems that the left remains unable to disentangle itself from state-worship – even now in an era when even the dullest child can see that the state is openly hostile to the public.

What we now call the ‘old left’ was certainly a lot nicer to workers, low-earners and the unemployed than today’s social democrats or conservatives but, truth be told, it was never that wonderful to begin with.

Britain’s NHS was the high-water mark of state socialism and widened access to university education – it’s been downhill ever since. In Ireland the left’s minimal influence on policy since the foundation of the state means we never truly saw either: the health service is an incoherent mish-mash of public and private and while undergraduate degrees are technically free they are structured in such a way as to favour the middle class.

One of the key demands of the old left was that the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy should be nationalised and directed for the good of the people. We can see a pale echo of this in Labour’s 2007 demand that the banks be nationalised. The banks should be owned by the public, goes the theory.

Well, now ‘we’ own not only Anglo Irish Bank and large chunks of others: 70 per cent of Allied Irish Banks and 40 per cent of the Bank of Ireland. We are also about to storm the Winter Palace that is the Irish Nationwide building society.

So, this huge concentration of banking power means the banks are now going to start lending again, helping people out, going easy on people with difficulties paying off mortgages and loans, doesn’t it?

Does it fuck!

The theory that nationalisation equals public ownership has been unmasked as a total fantasy. Sadly the scales are unlikely to fall from the eyes of the Irish left.

As in Britain during the 1970s, only failing industries were ever put under ‘public’ control. Then, when they inevitably failed the ownership structure was blamed. It doesn’t really matter, though. Success or failure, nationalisation is nothing but life-support for capital.

Paul Mattick, the foresighted ‘ultra-left’ Marxist pointed out that in the Soviet Union nationalisation was a hollow and meaningless sham as the people did not have political control of the state.

‘What was, and still is, understood by this movement under ‘workers’ state is governmental rule by the party; what is meant by ‘socialism’ is the nationalisation of the means of production. By adding control over the economy to the political control of the government the totalitarian rule over all of society emerges in full. The government secures its totalitarian rule by way of the party, which maintains the social hierarchy and is itself a hierarchical institution.’ (1)

Without actual democratic control of the state, ‘public’ ownership is a meaningless farce. Ireland is not a totalitarian state by any means but meaningful public control of the economy would require a good deal more democratic control of politics than simply the existence of the Dáil and county councils.

The state with its systems of centralised controls will merely perpetuate itself and prevent any form of political and economic self-determination.

Mattick was a voice in the wilderness but it’s high time he was rediscovered. Writing about the British Labour government, he said the goal was not the liberation of the people but their control:

‘The Labour government and its supporting organisations merely demonstrate, however, that the old labour movement has been brought to an end by its organisational success. It is quite obvious that the Labourites’ sole concern is in maintaining the status quo. They are, of course, still engaged in re-organising the political and governmental structure, but the defence of capitalism has become the defence of their own existence. And to defend capitalism means to continue and to accelerate the concentration and centralisation of economic and political power camouflaged as the ‘nationalisation’ of key industries. It involves social changes which both increase and secure the manipulative and controlling powers of capital and government and which integrate the labour movement into a developing network of totalitarian organisations that serve none but the ruling classes.’

Now what does that sound like?

(1) Review of Bolshevism and Stalinism, Paul Mattick, Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2, March–April 1947
(2) ‘Spontaneity and Organisation’ (in) Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Paul Mattick, Merlin Press, 1978