Joining the Party (part 2)

Apropos this piece, Professor Eric Hobsbawm is not likely to join the Socialist Party any time soon either.

He wrote an article for Comment is Free recently. It contains the usual rubbish about what capitalism and socialism are

The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy. The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it. The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s. In some ways it is a greater crisis than in the 1930s, because the globalisation of the economy was not then as far advanced as it is today, and the crisis did not affect the planned economy of the Soviet Union. We don't yet know how grave and lasting the consequences of the present world crisis will be, but they certainly mark the end of the sort of free-market capitalism that captured the world and its governments in the years since Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan.

Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

I suppose we couldn't expect anything else from the Professor. He was a long standing member of the (Stalinist) Communist Party of Great Britain before developing into some sort of Labourite.

Hobsbawm is, strictly speaking, wrong to think the past thirty years of Chicago school economics and associated ideology has meant "bourgeois anarchism". There has always been a mixed economy; it has only been a question of scope with regard to the role the state has played in the economy. There are in fact a number of Libertarian Capitalists who say the present credit crunch and stagnating capitalist economy are proof that the state has been interfering too much! (These Libertarians are the true "bourgeois anarchists".)

Seen in this light, what Hobsbawm (and others, incidentally) is proposing is not new; it is a return to a pre-Thatcherite Labour policy.

It all boils down to that old chestnut: "proper capitalism" has privately owned enterprises whereas "socialism" is state (public) ownership. It illustrates why the Socialist Party insists on asking prospective members what they understand by capitalism and socialism before being accepted into the party.

Hobsbawm is a historian of note; politically, he was a (state) capitalism supporting fool as a young man and a capitalism supporting fool today.