Defending Modernism? (2005)

Book Review from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi, Continuum, 2004

Frank Furedi takes the opportunity in this book to rail against the modern 'cultural elite' and their 'dumbing down' of political, educational and artistic standards.He forcefully argues that an all pervading desire for 'inclusivity' leading to the flattery of interest groups - has replaced more hard-headed conceptions of scientific rigour, critical thought and above all, standards, as the driving force for decision makers in the modern world. Today, he argues, participation (or the appearance of it) is seen as the key issue, while the role of the 'intellectual', as arbiter of taste, independent critical analyst and robust generator of original ideas, has been compromised and diminished.

This is interesting and provocative, particularly as Furedi - currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent - is better known as the leading theoretician of the Trotskyist political current which called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party until a few years ago, notable for their annual 'Preparing For Power' conferences and their glossily superficial Living Marxism magazine. That his views now seem to have more in common with those routinely expressed in the opinion columns of the Daily Telegraph clearly isn't something he feels the need to apologise for. Strangely enough, Mick Hume, the erstwhile editor of Living Marxism (or 'LM' as it became, in a needless concession to the postmodernist culture and 'dumbing down' Furedi now ironically rails against), happens to be a broadsheet columnist spouting similar views to Furedi himself. This does nothing to diminish the prevalent view on the British left that their organisation was a rather bizarre cross between a cult and a sect with a tendency to say anything controversial if it could get them some media attention.

For all that, Furedi's book is well worth reading. He is a thought-provoking writer and something of a critic of the present 'postmodern condition', where everything seemingly has a value of some sort and banality is elevated into an art form, where science and reason are merely another perspective on the world, and where all attempts at fundamentally changing society are doomed to failure, are dangerous - or both. Here he is tilling fertile ground, and his writing is stimulating and energetic.

A large part of the book focuses on the way in which public policy in the major capitalist states is currently using 'inclusivity' and 'widening access' as bogus ways of enfranchising the disenfranchised, whether it be in political life, the arts, or Higher Education. This involves the recognition and flattery of 'identities' (ethnic, gender, sexual, national) and the promotion of the idea that everyone creates even if some of Furedi's hobby-horses lead him astray periodically.  instance, For the current agenda for 'widening access and participation' in HE is little to do with abstract social engineering but the response of successive governments to the demands of the labour market, including the demands of employers for more vocationally-focused university courses and for the creation of intermediate awards like Foundation Degrees. Indeed, this seems an odd point to need to make to someone who has spent most of his life calling himself a Marxist.

Furthermore, even if Furedi is a half-decent sociologist he is certainly not much of an educationalist, as his comments on modern methods of teaching and learning, accreditation of prior learning and other issues tend to show, for here he is unreliable and his approach lacks the type of rigour and engagement with serious study he otherwise insists on. But where Furedi's book misses the mark most noticeably is in his defence of the 'intellectual' as embodying everything that was good about Enlightenment ideals and modernist conceptions of progress. This is a partial, one-sided analysis and it is tempting to suspect that what Furedi really wants to defend is modernism, science and rationality itself against postmodernism, relativism and our seemingly irrational age.

But this has already been done by others quite recently, such as by Francis Wheen, so Furedi has cast around for a new angle that only serves to distort the picture, robbing it of clarity.

Society doesn't need a new phalanx of intellectuals at all, it needs a reaction against reaction and a confidence that humankind generally can look beyond the fragments of the postmodern condition and collectively work towards a vision of how the world ought to be.

Dave Perrin

History—whose story? (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in times of great change, uncertainty and bewilderment. For many it is hard to see where it is all leading. Empires fall; economies slump; morals are up in the air; riots; new national conflicts; New World Orders that are more wish than substance. Like in the inter-war years, the ruling class seem to be unsure quite what it is they are ruling—and for how long they will do so. The majority of people are a little numbed by it all. Better the devil you know? The atmosphere is one of expectation—often pessimistic and fatalistic, but the assumption is that everything in the known world might soon be not quite the same.

History is society's collective memory. In times of relative stability (capitalism is never stable, but there are some periods when social chaos is less evident) people do not have to worry very much about his­tory. For the conservative, happy with the present and sure that the future will be much like it, the future is a dull continua­tion of today, just as today is a tedious crawl forward from the days before it. In times of change and manifest social contradiction, such as the period we are living through, history becomes a highly contested area. The conservative needs to manufacture a history which teaches the lesson of keeping things as they are. Others will use history as a weapon to forge a different future. These others need not be positive forces in their enthusiastic future-building. For example, there are now plenty of emergent nationalist forces which are busily inventing histories in order to validate their own petty territorial claims. The romance of an idealized national story of the past is the stuff which gets young kids to enter the madness of losing limbs and leaving parents burying their sons in places like Bosnia or Belfast or Beirut or Palestine. The bullets follow the flag-waving rituals and they in turn follow the legendary histories which inspire a false consciousness of pride in our Land: the historically manufactured homeland which the past now calls upon the present to restore.

Flag-waving rituals

In the powerful nations history becomes a means of winning popular emotions to the cause of stability. An influential and well-funded Nostalgia Industry has long been used in Britain to persuade workers that there is something great about being British subjects. The glorification of war, the myths of national gallantry, the culture which emphasises homely values, the stately homes and the magical qualities attributed to the Royal past are all part of this museum-based ideology which all of us are urged to take in almost with our mother's milk.

The patriotic lager louts, handling their flags like medieval weapons which will be used to put the passing "frog" or "paki" in his place, are not grotesque monsters who came from nowhere; they are the children of a particularly sick historical consciousness (for which read unconsciousness) who are only mimicking the Great British past depicted to them through cartoon cinema and school book. Our rulers might be embarrassed by the drunken excesses of the ugly Briton on his mean hols in Benidorm or in the Heysel Stadium, but by and large this Union-Jack-loving moron is the success story of the conservative history project. Better the lout who will read the latest exploits of "his" Queen Mum in the Sun than anyone with real historical questioning: Why more war? Why have a monarchy? Why government? Why accept the present?

The minority who control this society (the capitalists and their salaried functionaries) are spending a great deal of time and money right now making sure that history becomes History: the story of our masters and their good reason to be our masters. Frank Furedi's Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age is a book which gives a very useful account of this battle by uncertain rulers to use the past. He looks at the history debate in Germany, Japan, the USA and Britain and draws the correct conclusion that in all of these countries fear is generating a return to what the rulers call "traditional values" in relation to history, but what is in fact a concerted effort to make it seem as if there can be no future except for the continuation of business as usual. As early as 1975, before becoming Prime Minister, Thatcher announced her historical agenda:

We are witnessing a deliberate attack on . . . our heritage and our past, and there are those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved doom, oppression and failure—as days of hopelessness, not of hope. (Quoted in J .H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, p. 18, London, 1986)

By 1984 one of Thatcher's favourite historians, Lord Elton, the Tudor expert, began his History of England by warning that in times of great social uncertainty and crisis people "can do with the corrective of a past that demonstrates virtue and achievement". Note the ideological language used here: Thatcher speaks of "our heritage" and "our past" and Elton writes not of the past but a past, almost confessing to the use of history as a means to an end, regardless of the objective validity of the past, offered as indoctrination. We know that there is now a major government move to censor school history, to ensure that the text-books uphold the official line, to pursue the Jesuit-like aim of taking children and infecting their minds with national imagery before they are old enough to think critically. Is it an overstatement to claim that the battle to monopolize history has been the greatest ideological enterprise of the capitalist class in the past decade?

As Furedi rightly states:

Historical thinking begins with the recognition that human intervention plays a key role in social development: from this perspective the present is no longer the product of an unchanging past but the result of the actions of human beings. His­torical thinking is directly antithetical to History . . . Whereas History argues that there is no escape from the past, historical thinking gives a decisive role to the subjective factor, to the potential for human action.

This is a crucially important distinction. For how many people is history—more precisely, History—a mere story, an objectified account, a process in which they must look on like loyal subjects at a Royal parade. In fact, to think historically is to become empowered; it is to see that out of the darkness of our rulers' past has emerged us—thinking, active, potentially revolutionary beings with a capacity to make our own history. It is beings like that—like socialists—who are the intended victims of the government's new control of History. They realize that while we are spectators upon history we are malleable; historically conscious we are a force that will combine intelligently and overthrow these useless parasites who monopolize the world and its resources.

Her story—not ours

Speaking of useless parasites, it is worth bringing to light a current episode in their History which is illuminating. In June, while the world looked on as futile talks between legalized robbers of the Earth were held in Rio, the British tabloids were filled with a story which it was decided everyone would want to hear. It seems that all is not well in the marriage of the future King and Queen. This is the pointless, empty, devalued History that they want us to be come excited about. Only now the teaching of historical truth is not to be entrusted to the universities and schools, where strange Marxist and feminist figures have been seen to lurk, but will be issued straight from the banner headlines of the Sun, like the old town-crier bringing the Lord's lies to the peasants.

The new historians of capitalism are drunken little low lives from the tabloids who insult us with their Orwellian Newspeak. One such time waster is Andrew Mor­ton, a journalistic errand boy for the Murdoch Empire, and now a rich man thanks to his horrible little book, Diana: Her True Story. Books about the Royals are always nauseating, but they cannot be dismissed with a joke and a dismissive frown; the magic of monarchy is linked with superglue to the myth of History as an everyday story of Them Up There being observed uncritically by Us Down Here.

The endless tales of monarchy and their extra-special goings-on are a classical example of what the historian E.H. Carr called "The Good Queen Bess" version of history. According to this, history is a story of Good or Evil characters and their exploits in a kind of grand, timeless soap opera. Thus it is that we are presented with Histories of Churchill winning the war, Stalin ruining the Russian Revolution, Thatcher causing the crisis or Kinnock destroying Labour's principles. As if these single beings lived in a vacuum and were immune from the laws of causation. Every act is an effect; every cause of an effect is itself an effect of another cause.

If Royalty matters it is not for who they are or what they do (they are pointless parasites, they do the occasional useful deed), but for what they represent. Ann Morrow, the Court correspondent of the Daily Telegraph wrote an odious little book once called The Queen in which she inadvertently made the point:

They are at the top of a structure which is confidently based on enormous amounts of money, lots of land, a lot of horses, based in a way on agriculture, and secure in the slow turning of the agricultural seasons. As an institution, British royalty works. It provides stability and continuity for the British.

It is taken for granted that the "stability and continuity" of this "structure" wherein a few at the top have "lots" of everything and most of us own hardly anything is a necessary and beneficial thing. What seems to have happened to the monarchy, which is essentially a feudal hangover, is that it has be come increasingly exposed to the crude realities of capitalism and has opened its doors, misguidedly from its own point of view, to crude capitalist daughters of millionaires like Di and Fergie. They have found the suffocating confinement of ritualistic life within a household which still imagines it was divinely appointed too hot to handle; they would rather be with their Sloane Ranger friends indulging in all of the uncontrolled and unpublicized indulgences which are the lifestyles of a very small number of extremely rich idlers. Fer­gie has already decided to leave the Royal soap opera and return to a life of endless partying, like a decaying aristocratic excrescence out of a play by Chekhov—who wrote about these useless dinosaurs better than any historian has. Di is in the difficult position of being unable to get out of her awful marriage to a man who, by Morton's account, is an uncaring and selfish swine because she is afraid of losing her children.

It is an irony of history that even Di, this caricature Princess created to bolster the symbolism of capitalist History, has herself become a victim of it. She is so depressed by her pointless life that she has several times tried to end it, is frequently in tears. has a depression-caused eating disorder and turns to the queerest psychic jokers and magicians for "therapy" . Capitalism must be an awful system if even its most elegant heroine can't stand living out her role any more. If she who has whatever she needs and more is miserable, what hope for the woman with two kids who must survive on income support and a husband who knocks her about?

We can make history

What is interesting about the Morton book—more interesting even than its account of Di's extremely rich background (which exposes the lie that she was just another commoner) and the vast number of people in her circle who were active Tories—is the evidence given that she really believed all the crap about her own importance. Morton's book confirms a suspicion that the ruling class really do imagine themselves to have been born with a mission to be special. If Thatcher did go slightly mad, as her critics have dared to suggest, it was for the same reason; after a while these people start to believe the ideological junk which tabloid myth-makers sit in pubs inventing about them. For example, Carolyn Bartholomew, described as Di's best friend, is quoted as saying:

I'm not a terribly spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what she is doing and she certainly believes that. She was surrounded by this golden aura which stopped men going any further, whether they would have liked to or not, it never happened. She was pro­tected somehow by a perfect light.

Or maybe it was just B.O. It is rather sad to think of these people really believing in the fantasy histories which workers are fed in order to make Royalty believable. Such self-deceit can drive a person crazy, and seems to have done so. What use could these people be to anyone in a society of equality, co-operation and useful production? Charles, whose future wife was obliged to address him as "Sir" until the day he announced their engagement, has spent his early manhood making pious speeches from a position where he has never had to do a stroke of practical work which has given him anything but an aloof picture of the world around him.

This Royal diversion is part of a grand diversion which is what History—their story—is all about. It is the story of their gains, their marriages, their Empire, their importance and our deference to all of that. 

As socialists, who do not aim to change the world here or there, but to turn it on its head and cast aside the whole structure of property and its harmful relationships of exploitation and oppression, it is not as a sideline that we study, discuss and prepare to make history. For history is the struggle for the future—for our own future. If it is to be ours we must make it for ourselves, consciously and democratically. There is no other path to socialism. It was a myth of certain vulgar Marxists of the past that all we need to do is wait and inevitably history would deliver the socialist future to us. Change will not come that way. Indeed, the inevitabilism of vulgar Marxism is best answered in a passage by Marx himself:

History does nothing ; it "possesses no immense wealth", it "wages no battles". It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; "history" is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims."(Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 93)

History is too potent a weapon to be left to text-books or tabloids. It is bigger than the trivial lives of the grandest Princess. It is here, it is us, it is electrifying and exciting, and it is ours for the making.

Steve Coleman

The nature of Russian capitalism (1986)

Book Review from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Soviet Union Demystified by Frank Furedi, (Junius Publications, 1986, £5.95)

This book is not as bad as its front cover - a mystifying photo of Russia's first post-Tsarist dictator Lenin stroking a cat - suggests, even if it is written by a member of the Trotskyite sect, the "Revolutionary Communist Party". The author's knowledge of Russian has allowed him access to first-hand sources about the way the Russian system works and some interesting facts are to be gleaned here and there, but all this is undermined by the mistaken conclusions he draws from these facts.

Nowadays the original trotskyist nonsense about Russia being a "degenerate workers' state" is so absurd that most modern trotskyites dare not defend it; instead they argue that Russia is some new form of society that is neither capitalist nor a "workers' state" (whatever this contradiction in terms might be) and this is the basic thesis of this book.

Furedi gives as some of the reasons why Russia cannot be described as capitalist that labour power is not a commodity. He claims: "Soviet workers do not sell their labour power - labour power is not a commodity, and there is no market in labour". But if this is the case then it is not legitimate even to talk of there existing in Russia a working class in the Marxian sense of a propertyless class forced to sell its labour power for a wage or salary in order to live. The producers in Russia would then have to be described as "state slaves" or "industrial serfs" or some other term denoting their position in the new, non-capitalist social system that supposedly existed there.

But Furedi does not go this far and continues to speak of a working class existing in Russia. This is a concession to the facts which undermines the whole of the rest of his theory. No one can deny that there exists in Russia a class of people who are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and who, in a monetary economy, depend for their survival on the money received from the sale of their mental and physical energies. It is true that the labour (power) market in Russia is not as free as in some other countries — though even Furedi himself cites evidence that enterprises in Russia compete for labour power by offering higher wages and fringe benefits — but workers still sell the only commodity they possess, their ability to work, even if this is restricted by state intervention. It is, if you like, a state-controlled labour market, but a labour market nevertheless. That the Russian producers work for money-wages and that what they produce over and above the value of these wages is appropriated by another group within society is the basis of the Russian economic and social system and a sufficient reason for describing it as capitalist. In fact the terms "wages system" and "capitalist system" are merely alternative ways of describing the same system.

Furedi gets into similar difficulties over the nature of the ruling "group" (to employ a neutral term for the moment) in Russia. According to him, the "bureaucracy" (which corresponds more or less to the famous "nomenklatura") is neither a class nor the caste orthodox Trotskyites describe it as being, but a "political order". He bases this on his view that the bureaucracy has no economic but only  a political, oppressive role within Russian society. But this too is patently absurd: the group which stands between the working class and the means of production and which, indeed, forcibly excludes the workers from these means is said to have no economic role! As a group which monopolises the means of production to the exclusion of the rest of society, the "bureaucracy" is clearly a class in the Marxian sense and as a group which presides over, and benefits from, the accumulation of capital out of the surplus value pumped from the working class through the wages system it is a capitalist class.

In so far as its monopoly rests on its direct control of the state rather than on legal property titles vested in its members individually, it is a collective capitalist class best described as a "state capitalist class", to distinguish it from the species of private capitalists more common in the West. But it is just as much an exploiting, privileged class and Russia is just as much a capitalist country as those which openly admit and proclaim this.

Adam Buick