THE GORILLAS ARE AMONGST US

As I watched a film marking the Pinochet coup – 40 years since Chile’s 9/11 - I found myself thinking about how a person would go about dealing with that sort of abrupt, catastrophic increase in state repression. Would it be possible to scramble together street protests or strikes, or would the level of state violence be such that you’d just have to either go underground or flee? If you were not known to the authorities you’d probably just keep your head down, stay off the streets, and hope for the best.  

But of course in Chile the attack was not just the physical attack on  individuals – arrest, prison, torture, ‘disappearing’ – but the economic shock treatment that came afterwards, and which was inflicted on the whole society. This meant privatisation, deregulation, the introduction of competition and individualism into industrial relations, pensions, health, education. Crucial to the more long term process was the destruction of collectivism, of social solidarity, and the insertion of a ‘me-first’ mentality as atomised consumers compete with each other for resources, jobs, benefits, housing. Eventually repression is internalised. We begin to police ourselves. Does any of this sound eerily familiar?

Chile went from being a democracy with trade unions where a Marxist could be elected president, to a military dictatorship overnight. But turns to increased state repression do not have to be sudden and dramatic. In many ways the UK today is morphing gradually, incrementally, into a more repressive society. This is the ‘darker side’ of economic neoliberalism. There is a direct link between the level of state control & repression & the type of economic structure we have. In post-coup Chile the society became a massive economic laboratory experimenting with the nostrums of the free market. Neoliberalism, as it bulldozes the middle class & immiserates workers & the poor, of necessity will close down those areas of civil society where resistance could begin – trade unions & the organs of political protest. And it will do so piecemeal, in the name of protecting us and improving our lives.

Under neoliberalism banks and big corporations rule, and the state is strengthened to keep order so that these companies can continue to make profits. Anything that gets in the way of this has to be removed. A shift to the free market does not mean the state is done away with, it means that only the more repressive functions of the state remain. Those aspects of state ownership which redistributed money and resources to ordinary people – what used to be called the ‘social wage’ – are sold off to billionaires, hedge fund managers and those corporations already poised to buy up schools, security services and the NHS.

UK governments over the next five years, whether Tory, Lib Dem or Labour, will be seeking to further restructure the economy along these lines without provoking unmanageable social unrest. The move from managing consent to managing coercion will mean the closing down of democratic spaces. Slowly, the unthinkable will become thinkable. It is already happening. The first targets are not yet the beleaguered middle class, but the more peripheral groups: the disabled, the poor, people in social housing, claimants, Travellers, immigrants, asylum seekers…

We who disagree with this social model need a political response. But in electoral terms, this has yet to be constructed. Labour has already sunk into the neoliberal mire and can’t help us. So the long-delayed strikes that are coming, from teachers, firefighters, civil servants and perhaps most importantly, postal workers, are important, as is the demonstration at Tory conference on 29^th September. Large, militant and disruptive strikes and protests would draw a line in the sand. They would be a restatement of social solidarity, shifting the centre of gravity from passive, vapid, atomised consumerism to mass action. They would be a badly-needed reminder of our own collective strength.

Otherwise, we may wake up one day to find that a tolerant, social democratic society can change to a highly repressive one with no space for protest or resistance without the necessity for a violent military coup. Chile 1973 was a combative society with a strong left and powerful unions. The US government, the CIA and the Chilean ruling class understood that an ‘iron fist’ was necessary to smash this, and Pinochet was prepared to be their man. But for any ruling class massive physical force is a huge gamble, fraught with risk. Far better, if possible, to enforce gradual, constitutional changes, dealing with one group after another until you have eliminated all the forces that might resist you.

In many ways, the gorillas are already amongst us…

WARS AND REVOLUTIONS...

When Chinese premier Zhou En-lai said to Richard Nixon in 1972 that it was ‘too early to tell’ what were the implications of the 1789 French Revolution, he was actually referring to the Parisian turmoil of 1968. Still, it was a good quote, and I was put in mind of it in relation to the 2003 movement of protest against the Iraq war. It didn’t manage to stop that war, but it might just have stopped British participation in the attack on Syria.

British politics is in an unpredictable, fractious state. In the vote on Syrian intervention Westminster seemed, in its contradictory fashion, to finally catch up with the mood on the streets of London in 2003. It was as if the energy of 2 million people had at last found expression in the hermetically sealed chambers of the Palace of Westminster. It seemed to happen almost without design, with Ed Miliband stumblingly thrust into a situation where he found himself accidentally giving the Tories a bloody nose on an issue where they were supposedly strong. In truth, Miliband was more object than subject of history here, with the decisive factor being the Tories who voted the other way.

So, the real question is: why did the Tories vote against, particularly on an issue like this?  Leaving aside Cameron’s arrogance and stupidity, and the hash he’s making of domestic policy, the vote shows just how long the shadow of Iraq is, and how deep anti-war culture has penetrated. The biggest demonstration in British history took place on 15 February 2003. It was a real mass movement, with effective, active groups in every major town and city, uniting all ethnic backgrounds and those of all religions and none. It took the arguments against war into every locality, and, through School Students Against the War, into every school. Protests were held in the inner cities but also in the leafy shires. Tory MPs received letters and petitions against attacking Iraq, and saw protests and rallies. The lies and ‘dodgy dossiers’ severely undermined people’s faith in government and in ‘official’ politics. It is to the credit of the Stop the War Coalition that it did not let the fact that Labour were in office inhibit its campaigning in the way that the US peace movement did once Obama was in the White House.

In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the vote Labour politicians seemed to be horrified at what they had done. Certainly the military and political establishment (and the Tory media, including the BBC) were initially furious at what they saw as sidelining of the government at a time of war and international diplomatic posturing. Cameron was no doubt hoping to ‘do a Falklands’ and use his time in the international spotlight to boost his flagging domestic popularity. Noteworthy, too, and chilling, were the voices, including Boris Johnson’s, musing about a re-run of the vote. Bugger democracy, old boy... This disdain for democratic procedure shows how narrow is the thin layer of democratic skin stretched over the machinery of state, and how quickly it would be shed in a real political crisis.

But the other surprise, apart from the Commons vote itself, was the knock-on effect it had on the U.S. and on Obama. It exposed a real popular reluctance to embrace another war, and tapped in to an international weariness towards more Western intervention after the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.  My initial assessment was that the US would go the bombing route alone, but after Obama's apparent acceptance of Putin's plan for a diplomatic solution involving the removal of Syria's chemical weapons, I am not so sure. John Pilger, writing in the Guardian, insists that 'the US intends to crush the last independent states in the Middle East: first Syria, then Iran.' I think he is correct. In which case the question is: will the neocon hawks at the Pentagon win out, or will the pressure of popular revulsion at yet another war succeed in holding this one off?  The stakes are very high. The anti-war movement is still needed. Wars and revolutions, indeed…