Thatcherism: the coming of the strong state
Socialist Outlook magazine1980sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
Has the left underestimated the extent to which state power in Britain is being transformed by Thatcher? PHIL HEARSE argues that it has, and that there is a drift towards a new form of authoritarianism, with some similarities to what Trotsky called 'bonapartism'.
WHILE Mrs Thatcher was in Poland praising free trade unions, drastic new restrictions on the right to strike in Britain were being outlined in a new 'code of practice'. While not being legally enforceable, they will be 'taken into account' by judges when deciding if particular strikes are lawful.
These guidelines are far beyond anything in the judicial armoury of any other advanced capitalist state. The guidelines call for a 70 per cent 'yes' vote in strike ballots before industrial action is undertaken, and conditions on ballots which put all the cards in the hands of scabs and management.
In itself this is a drastic and extremely authoritarian piece of legislation for a bourgeois democracy to introduce in peacetime. But it is just one of an array of violent attacks on democratic rights which are transforming the mode of government and state power in Britain. In assessing this, it is necessary not just to look at formal, juridical forms – although these are very important – but the real social content of various instances of power.
In the 1970s, sections of the left – most notably the Workers Revolutionary Party – argued that Britain already had, or was about to have, a form of dictatorship. These absurd and catastrophist declarations have in my view almost numbed the left to what is, in the third term of Thatcherism, a real drift to the strong state.
Many comrades in the socialist movement are blind to the advent of the strong state because they think that provided we don't have either full military dictatorship or fascism, then we must have an unproblematic 'bourgeois democracy'. This was not Trotsky's approach.
He argued strongly that there can be many different combinations of the parliamentary form with dictatorial government, in which parliament is a 'fig leaf' for executive power. His writings on 'bonapartism' (a term derived by analogy with the French regime of Louis Bonaparte, who seized power in a coup d'etat in December 1851) reveal this concern with the gradations between straightforward bourgeois democracy and the drift to dictatorship.[1]
In order to make an assessment of whether Thatcherism is a new form of state authoritarianism, we have to assess just exactly what the Thatcherite project is about, for the economy, civil society and the state.
Thatcherism has gone well beyond the economic 'monetarism' of the early 1980s to become a huge project of reactionary social engineering. This counter-revolutionary strategy involves dismantling the central props of the post-1945 consensus – the mixed economy and the welfare state. It also involves downgrading the role of social democracy and the trade union bureaucracy as partners of the government.
This counter-revolutionary scheme has also necessitated a counter-revolution in democratic rights and the form of government. Let us first just list some of the areas in which democratic rights have been thrown back:
● Trade union legislation has banned many forms of effective strike action, and the code of conduct will further weaken the legitimate right to strike. The formal right to belong to a trade union has come under attack for the first time.
● Judicial censorship of the media, and informal censorship of the media through government intervention in the broadcasting authorities, has increased drastically.
● The right to demonstration and public assembly has been severely curtailed through new police powers and public order acts.
● A reactionary, almost feudal, poll tax is being introduced which will drive many poorer people off the electoral register altogether.
● The powers of the police and judiciary have been increased in many fields, including the abolition of unanimous jury verdicts, the right to silence, and the automatic right to legal representation during interrogation.
● Additional openly anti-lesbian and gay legislation, clause 28, has been introduced for the first time since 1957.
● New legislation aimed at restricting the rights of black people, the 1988 immigration act, has been introduced.
These attacks on democratic rights are however just part of the picture. What is unique about Thatcherism is the drive to concentrate power in the hands of central government, and within central government in a tiny clique of people around Thatcher, who is taking on more and more of an all-powerful, bonapartist, role.
The centralisation of power is of course illustrated by the attempt to destroy whole areas of potential counter-power – abolishing the metropolitan councils, and attempting to crush all levels of local government as institutions dispensing any real power.
Wielding its huge parliamentary majority when necessary, the Thatcher government has swept aside with contempt many of the arenas of formal consultation with the trade union bureaucracy, and even the official Labour opposition.
Even more striking, however, is the style of government which Thatcher has organised. Tony Benn's recent diaries show that governments of the 1960s and 1970s continued to take votes in cabinet meetings. This is not the case with Thatcher, who increasingly even ignores cabinet meetings. She has developed a web of semi-official committees, including some senior ministers and civil servants, through which all power is uniquely concentrated in her.
Now it is quite true that all forms of capitalist rule combine coercion and consent, and that no 'perfect' bourgeois democracy, in which all the formal legal and political rights of the masses generally ascribed to this form of government has ever actually existed. But it must also be true that when the right to strike is restricted, when legal rights are whittled away, and when even the right to public assembly is severely circumscribed, you have something other than just a 'normal' bourgeois democracy.
The comrades of Socialist Newsletter have described it as 'semi-bonapartism' – something between bonapartist dictatorial rule and bourgeois democracy. I think their characterisation is as good as any. But whatever term we use, we have to accept that what is being put in place is a state apparatus, state powers, and governmental forms qualitatively 'stronger' from a bourgeois viewpoint than at any time this century, outside of war time.
Thatcher has always had strong links with ultra-right wing factions in the Tory party and on its edges. At the time of her election to the Tory leadership, Thatcher's election campaign was masterminded by an ultra-right ideologue called Robert Moss, well known for his association with the Freedom Association. These people always had a much more right wing agenda than the formal election programme of the Tories in 1979 or 1983.
Recent revelations[2] about the role in the Tory party of bodies like the Committee for Free Britain and the International Freedom Federation, and of semi-official Tory bodies like the pro-privatisation pressure group PULSE in local government, make one thing absolutely clear. This government is not only to the right of Ted Heath in 1970-73. Today power is concentrated in a government which ideologically represents the ultra-right of British politics.
The ultra-right in government works together with a whole web of political organisations and associations which are much more serious, and more tapped into the centres of power, than fascist organisations like the National Front. Dictatorship in Britain will not come through these marginal groups, but through much more well-connected groups inside and on the fringes of official Toryism.
The Tory ultra-right has strong links with co-thinkers in the United States. An International Freedom Federation meeting at this year's Tory conference billed Lord Young, David Hart of the Committee for a Free Britain, and Richard Perle, US foreign affairs and arms control 'expert', dubbed 'the Prince of Darkness'. Perle, whose sinister visage can be regularly seen adorning BBC Two's Newsnight programme, is touring the world warning of the dangers of Gorbachev.[3]
Many socialist activists would argue that before we can talk of the imposition of a 'strong state' there have to be major defeats inflicted on the working class – like the coup d'etat which brought De Gaulle to power in France in 1958. I would make two points about this argument.
First, we have seen major defeats of the British working class – the miners' strike, the local government rate-capping struggle, Wapping, and a host of others. These are not world historic defeats like 1933 in Germany, or even of the scale of 1926 in Britain. But they are major defeats which have transformed the relationship of class forces and laid the basis for the strong state.
The second point I would make is that we should not see the transformation of government forms in capitalist society as necessarily involving a putsch or a coup. Hitler became the German chancellor legally in 1933, although he utilised his position at the apex of the state apparatus to organise the Nazi coup against parliamentary democracy and the workers' organisations.
In summary, then, I would say that we have in Thatcherism the extraordinary concentration of government power which is, to a certain extent, 'above' the classes, although like every form of bourgeois rule serving the ultimate interests of capital.[4]
But what are the conclusions of this assessment? Do we not run the risk of demoralising people by telling them that we already have a strong state in place? The current situation of 'semi-bonapartism' is far from being a finished dictatorship, despite enormous government power. And democratic freedoms are far from having been finally crushed. But they will be, inexorably, unless the left is capable of mounting the boldest possible challenge to Tory authoritarianism.
This means – without sacrificing the political independence of the workers' movement – building the broadest possible alliances with democratic public opinion, including in the Liberal democrats, SDP and the Church, and even Tory 'wets' in defence of democratic rights. Many sections of the intelligentsia and middle class can be mobilised around specific questions, especially the right of free speech in the media.
Second, the left has to give thorough and relentless attention to raising issues involving breaches of democratic rights – including issues which are 'difficult' ones, like the fitting up and vicious sentences doled out to alleged Irish republican volunteers.
Third, the left has to constantly pay attention to and denounce the actions of the political police (MI5 and the Special branch), the state's paramilitary gangster forces (SAS and armed 'instant response' police units) and the ordinary police and judiciary. In particular it means defence of those sections of the oppressed, especially black people, for whom the state has always been a 'strong state'.
Every time a bank robber is shot dead without challenge, a republican volunteer sent to prison for 25 years, or a television play is banned – and these things go unchallenged – it brings the epoch of a real dictatorship closer.
Footnotes
1. See for example 'Bonapartism and Fascism' in Writings 1934-5, Pathfinder 1974 edition, page 51.
2. Guardian 4th November 1988
3. Peter Gowan has drawn my attention to the vogue for the writings of Carl Schmitt in ultra-right circles in the US and Britain. Schmitt was a leading Nazi jurist after 1933, but before that was a right wing critic of Hitler, regarding the Nazis as opportunistic. Schmitt argued that the Nazis tended towards the 'total state' which politicised every sphere of civil society around the Nazi project. He put forward the much more Thatcher-like notion of the 'absent state' – the de-politicisation of every instance of civil society and the concentration of the 'right to politics' in the state apparatus. While one involves political mobilisation and the other demobilisation, the effect can end up being the same. On Schmitt, see G. Lukacs The Destruction of Reason (Merlin).
4. As above, page 53.