IS
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE COMING?
With all the comments in the
Mainstream Media about the cost of living crisis it was very interesting to see
in the excellent Daily Unherd email newsletter an excellent article by Thomas
Fazi entitled “Civil disobedience is coming”.
For those that don’t get Unherd I
reproduce the whole article below as it is well worth reading.
Britain
may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that
winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war broke out, are
policymakers realising the potentially catastrophic implications of their
gung-ho approach towards Russia.
Just last
week, it was revealed
that the UK government is preparing for a “reasonable worst-case scenario” over
the winter in which below-average temperatures and gas shortages could force
authorities to trigger emergency gas-saving measures, including organised
blackouts for industry and even households. And this is as energy prices continue to spiral out of control:
this winter, the average annual energy bill for a typical household is expected
to reach £4,200, or about £350 a month — more than double what households are
currently paying and a four-fold increase on the average bill paid just a year
ago.
The
social consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic, potentially pushing
10.5 million households — a third of the total — into poverty,
exacerbating what is already the UK’s worst cost-of-living
crisis in decades. Yet even when faced with a
campaign of civil disobedience, calling on people to cancel their
energy direct debits, the government hasn’t been able to come up with anything
better than offering households a one-off £400 discount on their fuel bills in
October (and a bit more for those on means-tested benefits). Downing Street’s
“strategy” to get through the winter seems to be to hunker down and hope for
the best.
For all
the Brexiteer’s talk of “taking back control”, the post-Brexit political
establishment doesn’t appear to be in control at all. They’re not alone,
however. All European countries, to varying degrees, are facing the disastrous
consequences of what will go down in history as one of the greatest political
miscalculations ever — the idea that Europe could weaponise
Russian gas supplies without shooting itself in the foot. As the social and
economic costs continue to mount, several countries are now preparing for
blackouts and energy rationing this winter.
And all
European leaders, not to mention the technocrats in Brussels, after
sleepwalking into this crisis, seem equally clueless about how to get out of
this rut. France, for example, is usually considered less exposed due to its
reliance on nuclear energy — and yet, incredibly, nuclear output this winter is
expected to be 25% below that of a normal year, due to maintenance and repairs
taking longer than expected.
Overall,
the entire European political class is proving to be catastrophically
ill-equipped to deal with the increasingly complex, interdependent and
crisis-ridden reality of our 21st-century world. Indeed, manufacturing new
crises, or worsening existing ones, seems to be what they do best. What we need
is knowledge, vision, wisdom, and self-restraint — in short, a forward-thinking
politics geared towards improving the material and spiritual lives of everyone,
including those yet to be born. Instead, what we have is short-termism,
ignorance, arrogance, mediocrity, and self-interest — a politics completely
divorced from the needs and interests of the majority of citizens.
Observing
the actions of our governing elites conjures up the unsettling image of a
monkey handling a shotgun — or a nuclear weapon. Indeed, it’s rather terrifying
to witness the apparent fatuity with which Western governments today take
decisions affecting the lives of millions — from lockdowns to proxy wars with
Russia — without any serious democratic debate and discussion.
How did
the West, the birthplace of the democratic nation-state, reach such poor levels
of statecraft, and equally poor levels of democracy? The two things, it turns
out, are connected.
In many
ways, what we are witnessing is, in Gramscian terms, an “organic crisis” of the
economic-political regime that has dominated Europe, and the West more in
general, over the past 30 years. That is, a “comprehensive crisis” — at once
economic, political, social and ideological — that lays bare fundamental
contradictions in the system that the ruling classes are unable to resolve.
Neoliberalism
is primarily considered an economic project associated with processes of
liberalisation, including privatisation, deregulation and wage compression.
However, it is also, and perhaps most importantly, a political project: the
elites’ anti-democratic response to the ideologically charged and highly
contestatory politics of the Seventies and early Eighties. In sum, it has
entailed a progressive expulsion of the masses (not just workers but also
non-dominant sectors of the economy, such as SMEs) from the democratic
decision-making process, in line with the project outlined in the 1975 Crisis of Democracy Trilateral
Commission report.
The
latter argued that Western societies were plagued by an excess of democracy,
which the authors proposed to resolve not only through a reduction of the
bargaining power of labour, but also through “a greater degree of moderation in
democracy” and a greater disengagement (“non-involvement”) of civil society
from the operations of the political system through the diffusion of “apathy”.
This second objective was achieved primarily through a gradual depoliticisation
of economic policy: that is, through the removal of macroeconomic policy from
democratic parliamentary control and the separation of the “economic” from the
“political”.
A central
feature of this process of depoliticisation was the surrendering of national
prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies —
first and foremost the European Union. In this sense, the process of European
integration shouldn’t be understood as the result of the machinations of an
evil supranational bureaucracy, but rather as a process of self-imposed
reduction of sovereignty by national elites aimed at constraining the ability
of popular-democratic powers to influence economic policy.
As Chris Bickerton has eloquently
argued, joining the EU transforms a nation-state into a member
state. Whereas a nation state is a vertical unit, with elites gaining
legitimacy through representing the citizens (and enjoying a social connection
with a wider section of society that is much deeper and richer than mere
electoral superiority), a member state is a horizontal unit, in which elites
seek legitimacy and policy direction from their interactions with the elites of
other member states and officials in international institutions. This
transformation involves a move to post-political, technocratic forms of
governance.
There is
no denying that this project has been a success, resulting in a near-complete
curtailment of democratic participation — understood, in most basic terms, as
the ability of citizens to have a collective say on the direction of society.
However, we have now reached the point where this project has become too
successful for the system’s own good. This relentless process of
de-democratisation has resulted in our political elites becoming increasingly
captured by Big Business and increasingly insulated from the needs of workers
and the economy at large. Indeed, several Western leaders aren’t just puppets
in the hands of ruling capitalist elites — they are direct representatives of
such elites, such as in the case of Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi. Western countries are no
longer democracies; they are plutocracies.
However,
as economic policies have become tailored to the interests of a handful of
immensely powerful mega-corporations, any sense of the collective or national
interest was lost. A small elite was allowed to accrue immense wealth and
power, while laying waste to our societies’ workforce, industrial capacity,
public services and vital infrastructures, leaving our countries poorer, weaker
and dependent on foreign (and increasingly hostile) nations for the supply of
everything from energy to food to basic medical supplies.
The
interests of this small financial-corporate elite were always at odds with
those of the rest of us. And we have now reached the point where they have
become so divorced from the latter that they threaten the very survival of
society itself — we have, in other words, entered a phase of
self-cannibalisation of Western capital. One need only think back to the
pandemic and how a handful of Big Tech and Big Pharma companies pushed for measures that made them
mind-bogglingly rich, even at the cost of causing incalculable damage to our
societies and economies; or how Western oil companies today are exploiting the energy crisis to
rake in record profits, even at the cost of driving the rest of
the economy into the ground.
And they
are able to get away with it precisely because they have effectively taken
control of our state apparatuses. At the same time, the depoliticisation of
Western societies means that increasingly “apathetic” citizens allow their
leaders to get away with almost anything, in a perverse positive feedback loop.
The
West’s survival depends on freeing ourselves from the grip of this parasitic,
cancerous elite — and of their political henchmen. This, in turn, requires
nothing less than a democratic revolution. Many had hoped that Brexit, with its
promise to “take back control”, could be the first step in a process of
democratic rejuvenation of the country, by making elected officials directly
accountable to the British people for their decisions. The Conservatives have
betrayed this promise.
“Rather
than opening up areas of policy to democratic scrutiny, the Brexit vote seems
to have pushed the government in the opposite direction, a determination to
avoid democratic scrutiny as much as possible,” notes academic Tara McCormack.
This was demonstrated by the way the governing class exploited Covid and then
Ukraine to embrace a politics of emergency that permitted it
“to carry on avoiding democratic accountability to the electorate”.
And yet Brexit’s promise of “taking back control” — the idea that
citizens can and should have a fundamental role in deciding policy, and that
the latter’s role should ultimately be to address people’s needs — remains a
powerful one. Indeed, it’s arguably the only thing that can save Britain — and
the West as a whole. In the short term, this means forcing the government,
including through civil disobedience, to take serious action to solve the
energy crisis in the interests of the people, for example by bringing energy
suppliers into public ownership, which would allow authorities to better
control energy prices. In the longer term, it means taking the struggle to the
heart of the political establishment itself. If this doesn’t happen, it’s all
but certain that the lights will go out this winter — and Europe will enter a
new Dark Age
