STATES OF UNREST

Who runs our society? The handful of people who control the big corporations and financial institutions take all the major economic decisions about investment and jobs. They have only one purpose in mind, that of maintaining profits. The consequences for the millions of people whose labour creates these profits, and whose lives can be ruined by these decisions, are of secondary significance.

If society simply consisted of these two classes, the sharp antagonism between them would create enormous bitterness that would erupt uncontrollably. But these two classes do not exist in a vacuum. The apparatus of the state appears to stand above the conflicts in society and to mediate between them in the interests of society as a whole. In reality, however, it attempts to resolve these conflicts in the interests of the class that shapes society through its economic decision-making. It is not 'our' state, although all the institutions in society, from education to the media, try to reinforce the idea. It is 'their' state.

We can see this in every major strike. The police appear on the picket line to preserve 'law and order'. The framework of 'law' is apparently a neutral space which guarantees the rights of the participants to pursue their opposed interests but arrive at a solution which is tolerable to both sides--and ultimately to the benefit of society as a whole. In reality, the law and the judges who implement it are not neutral arbiters. Anyone who doubts this only has to recall the recent legal judgement about the RMT ballot that had an overwhelming majority in favour of strike action on the London tube. The union, the judge claimed, had broken the law because it had failed to provide the employers with addresses for the members taking part in the vote. But we did not see the judiciary declare the closure of Vauxhall illegal, even though

General Motors failed to consult. The whole legal apparatus is designed to buttress the 'rights' of the propertied against the claims of the poor, the oppressed and those whose labour provides the wealth of the propertied. One expression of this is the extreme difficulty that exists when it comes to corporate crime. No company has been prosecuted for the Paddington rail crash, for example.

Preserving their power

The use of force is crucial in supressing dissent, as is shown in Belfast during 1970(above left) and during recent anti-capitalist demonstrations

If the law and its agents, none of whom are democratically accountable, fail to resolve the conflicts in society, there is a further line of defence in the armed forces and security institutions. Like the judges and the police chiefs, the military top brass and the secret service chiefs come from the same background as the people who sit in the boardrooms of the top financial and business firms. They maintain close connections with many of these firms, particularly the top defence companies. These people represent the core of the state machine and will stop at very little to preserve their power.

It is only rarely that the internal workings of this murky world come to light. The Scott report on arms to Iraq showed the interconnections between arms manufacture (central to British capitalism) and the forces of the state. More recently a court case in France, involving the former Socialist Party foreign minister, has cast the spotlight on the links between political corruption, the oil companies and the inner workings of the state machine. All this negates the claim that the electors control the state through our representatives in parliament.

There is another reason why parliamentary institutions do not allow change to come through the ballot box. We choose our representatives once every four or five years, with no control over them between elections and with no means of holding them to account. Just as real power in the state is concentrated beyond our reach, so the way in which the working class votes--as atomised constituents--emphasises its powerlessness as a class in the face of the ruling class's control over the state.

The state, then, is the instrument by which the ruling class rules. It cannot be reformed. Experience shows that parties elected to shift power away from the minority to the majority invariably end up administering the system they hoped to change. That has always been the case with reformist parties like the Labour Party which in the end have turned on their supporters. The difference between Blair and his predecessors is ultimately only one of degree. New Labour espouses openly and defiantly its belief in the market--Old Labour did so with varying degrees of reluctance.

On the rare occasions in which reformist parties have sought to tamper with the state machine the ruling class has not hesitated to organise counter-revolution. In 1973 General Pinochet's coup destroyed the socialist government in Chile and took the lives of thousands of trade unionists. the way in which Tories like Lord Lamont have defended Pinochet reminds us that respect for democracy is skin deep among our own rulers.

Socialists defend the institutions of parliamentary democracy against dictatorship or fascism. At the same time, the right to vote almost always coexists with other, even more important rights: the right to form trade unions, to organise in the workplace, to withdraw one's labour, and the right to form political parties expressing working class interests. None of these rights exist in perfect form. They reflect the shifts in the balance of class forces--what the ruling class has been forced to accept as the result of past working class victories and what it has been able to claw back as working class confidence has waned. However limited the democracy we have, it is a precious resource we should not disdain. Elections allow us to measure the confidence of our side and can be a very constrained part of democratic expression.

The form of the state is important in other respects. A welfare state is clearly preferable to the kind of state where welfare is minimal, and reflects past gains of the working class. Either reforms were granted rather than risk revolution, or very high levels of militancy left their mark on the capitalist state. Britain 1945 is an example of the first, France 1968 of the second.

The creation of the welfare state by the post-1945 Labour government was possible because ruling class fears about radicalisation combined with ruling class recognition that a healthier workforce would aid postwar reconstruction. With the long postwar boom guaranteeing adequate profits it saw no need to dismantle the essential elements of the welfare state. Once crisis set in, however, in the mid-1970s, the self-same Labour Party which had created the welfare state was not only helpless to protect it but actually started the attack.

The huge struggle, including the 10 million strong factory occupation, which apparently came from nowhere in May 1968 to shake General de Gaulle's government, did not lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the French state. But the ruling class bought its retention of power at enormous economic cost. All kinds of concessions were made over pay, social benefits, pensions and the right of trade unions to 'interfere' in the state. For a long time the French ruling class was too frightened to attempt to take back these concessions, and when it did in the mid-1990s it sparked off a struggle which continues to this day.

In both the British and French cases defence of a certain type of state can be a mobilising slogan. Renationalisation of the railways is a demand that has become deeply popular. Of course, the state that operates with a high level of 'public ownership' is just as much a bourgeois state as one that has massively divested itself of 'national' assets. If the British state were, for example, to renationalise the railway system the ruling class would still be in control. But if it did, it would do so under circumstances that run counter to its wishes and its professed ideology. That would mark a giant step forward in the confidence of workers.

Reforms to the state, then, are not the product of those who preach reformist methods but of the balance of class forces in society. Few activists in today's anti-globalisation movement have much time for traditional reformist parties. But there remains nevertheless the hope that the state can, in some sense, be delivered from the captivity of big business. This emerges in debates about entering into dialogue with the institutions of global capitalism and in the belief that alternative spaces can be created within the system (in partnership, for example, with the local state under control of parties such as Brazil's Workers' Party).

Distrust of institutions is much healthier than the slavish belief in the state which used to mark reformist politics. But it points to a problem about where the movement is going. The bourgeois state, however 'progressive' its form, cannot deliver the kind of change that will end the domination of capital. But does that mean we do not need a state of some kind? The answer given by the Russian revolutionary Lenin in the course of the first world war was based on rejecting both reformist and anarchist views of the state. Both positions in effect disconnect the centrality of working class struggle from the project of bringing about fundamental political change.

Where workers are strongest

The reformists wrongly believe that the electoral system will deliver improvements. Workers are important for reformists as individual voters but not in their collective organisation at the point of production. That operates outside the electoral system. Yet struggle based on collective organisation at the point of production is where workers are strongest, which is not the case when they are considered as no more than passive voters.

The power that workers have to strike at the heart of the profit system will ultimately decide the success of the growing new movement. At some point it will have to confront the state itself. If it ducks the question of political power the ruling class can re-establish its control. This has been the experience of every major revolution in the 20th century. Lenin's argument was that workers' democracy, in the shape of workers' councils, should replace parliamentary democracy, and that these councils should form the basis of a new form of the state.

Unlike any previous state in history it would be a state run directly by the exploited and the oppressed themselves. It would not be like the bourgeois state where at best working class representatives run a relatively impotent aspect of the state machine on our behalf--with no chance of subjecting the unelected core of the state machine or the unelected centres of economic power to popular control. A workers' state would be an instrument wielded by the vast majority against the tiny minority of exploiters trying to hold on to power. It would, in Lenin's words, be a semi-state. Insofar as it is successful in its task it would be doing itself out of a job and on the way to disappearing altogether.

For many of us the question is not whether the abolition of the state is desirable but how to get there. The route to its disappearance lies through the power of the working class not only to smash the economic power of capital but to replace its political power with a power of its own.