Reviews: The myth of 'Thatcherism'; The poverty of philosophy; The Japanese miracle; The Satanic Verses: sympathy with the devil; Mandel, Gorbachev and the Western left; Boris Kagarlitsky and the Soviet intelligentsia

"Thatcherism' Jon Hann Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, Macmillan, 1988, pp276, pbk E8.95 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, Verso, 1988, pp290, pbk £8.95 Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley, Bob Jessop and Tom Ling, Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations, Polity, 1988, pp219, pbk £7.95 Peter Jenkins, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution, Cape, 1987, Pp424, cloth €14.95 Hugo Young, One of Us, Macmillan, 1989, pp302, cloth £16.95 Robert Skidelsky (ed), Thatcherism, Chatto & Windus, 1989, pp214, cloth E18 The tenth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's first election victory has provoked a flood of critical appraisals of the Thatcher phenomenon. Gamble, Hall and Bonnett et al are lecturers at various universities. While Gamble provides a synthesis of the radical academic critique of the record of the Thatcher governments, Hall and Bonnett have assembled articles published in various papers and journals in the course of the Thatcher years. Peter Jenkins and Hugo Young, senior political correspondents respectively of the independent and the Guardian.

provide journalistic accounts from the perspective of a disaffected liberal intelligentsia. Robert Skidelsky has brought together a set of lectures given last year at Warwick University.

One of the most striking common themes in the tenth anniversary discussion is the general acceptance-confirmed in 175

the titles of these books-of the term "Thatcherism'. Though historians never speak of 'Chamberlainism", "Churchillism", "Macmillanism' or 'Heathism", the present Conservative prime minister has been credited with founding an eponymous school of political theory and practice. The authors reviewed here share the assumption that "Thatcherism' is a coherent and distinctive ideology. The journalists are most assiduous in tracing the emergence of "Thatcherism' through the development, from the earliest stages, of the Thatcher personality. Young attributes great importance to the carly years in the Grantham grocer's shop in the thirties, where the young Margaret Hilda acquired 'the inextinguishable merit of having watched the meticulous reckoning of income and expenditure. Jenkins puts greater emphasis on her formative years in the forties and fifties: "Her crucial political experiences were gained under socialism at home and communism abroad; she was a daughter of the age of austerity and the Cold War.* However, it was not until the seventies that the future prime minister fused the wisdom of the corner shop with traditional Tory prejudices to form an ideology considered deserving of her personal brand name. Hall sums up the view of the radical academics: "Ideologically, Thatcherism is seen as forging new discursive articulations between the liberal discourses of the "free market" and economic man and the organic conservative themes of tradition, family and nation, respectability, patriarchalism and order.'

Forged in opposition to the governments of Wilson and Callaghan, Thatcherism' triumphed in 1979, and it has since gone from strength to strength.

But is Thatcherism really so distinctive? Economic liberalism has been a central theme of Tory ideology ever since the 1830s; respect for law and order, race and nation, family values and deference to authority-these are the values that have been promoted by Conservative politicians for 150 years and more.

Even during the post-war years when a cross-party consensus on the need for state intervention in industry and welfare prevailed and there was little public enthusiasm for the brash patriotic prejudices of earlier Tory propagandists, the rhetoric of the free 176 market and the imperial race, and demands for hanging and

flogging, always guaranteed an ovation at party conferences.

In the fifties and sixties Enoch Powell boldly upheld laissezfaire economic policies and appealed to racist sentiment on the issue of immigration. Yet Powell's stand against public expenditure in 1958 led to his resignation as a junior treasury minister and his 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968 led to his exclusion from the Tory leadership. In 1975 Thatcher's support for deeper public spending cuts helped her to displace Heath as party leader and her speech of sympathy for British racists who feared they were being 'swamped' by immigrants helped her to victory in the 1979 general election. What was new in the seventies was not the ideology espoused by the Thatcher clique, but the fact that the old crap suddenly achieved a much wider impact. What had changed was not Tory ideology, but the climate within which it was received—a climate that allowed Thatcher to seize the party leadership and promote traditional Tory policies in a particularly aggressive and uncompromising What happened in the seventies to allow a revival of the Conservative Party under a dynamic new leadership? What happened in the eighties to ensure the continued ascendancy of this same party under this same leadership? The answers to these questions are not to be found in studies of the Thatcher persona, nor in the influence of Keith Joseph and all the right-wing think-tanks that equipped Thatcher with off-the-peg reactionary theories such as monetarism which she used to dignify her policies. Nor is the answer to be found in the "Falklands Factor', understood as some deus ex machina which miraculously saved a prime minister sinking in a morass of recession and domestic unpopularity in 1982. Indeed the answer is not to be found in any of the books under review, which all seek to understand "Thatcherism' by studying Thatcher. The secret of "Thatcherism' lies in the impact of the 1974-79 Labour governments and in Labour came to power in 1974 on a wave of industrial militancy provoked by Heath's attempts to overcome the effects of recession through holding down wages and disciplining the unions. At a time of rising unemployment and hyperinflation, workers looked to Labour equipped with the left's alternative economic strategy" to resolve the crisis through 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families", in the words of Tony Benn, faithfully included in the party's programme. The result was profoundly demoralising. The Labour leadership ugh sm, time 100l tare tive e of BeS, nce

ICS,

ble me tive me tal er al tiad ly d 177 manner. Labour's role in opposition in the eighties.

used the left's programme to win union acquiescence, first to wage controls and later to public spending cuts; unemployment doubled, living standards dropped. While austerity bit and disillusionment sank in, the left, utterly compromised with the leadership, fell silent. In the closing years of Labour rule, the Callaghan leadership turned to attack the working class sending in troops to crush strikes by firefighters, ambulance workers and council workers.

Further, the Labour government launched a series of propaganda campaigns which was to have a lasting impact. Threatening anti-union legislation, the Labour leaders created the spectre of "union power' and whipped up public animosity against public service workers. The Labour leadership responded to an upsurge of racism by emphasising its commitment to tighten already racist immigration controls; when young blacks resisted fascist demonstrations, the government sent in paramilitary police squads. Callaghan personally fronted a campaign to uphold traditional family values offering his own as a model against hooliganism and vandalism. When Thatcher's aide Airey Neave was blown up by Irish republicans on the eve of the 1979 election, Callaghan patriotically condemned the incident and loyally promised not to make Ireland an election issue The last Labour government not only created a climate of mass unemployment, welfare cuts and despair, it also provided Thatcher with a country well softened up for her reactionary ideological message. All the major themes of what was to become familiar as Thatcherism'—anti-union prejudice, racism and chauvinism, law and order-were all popularised by Callaghan and Healey in the years before Thatcher came to power. Labour's feeble and defensive response to the Tory attacks on the unions, on black youth, on the Irish hunger-strikers, on Argentina, followed the lines of its earlier policies. Under Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock, the Labour Party in opposition has ensured that Thatcher has steadily gained in confidence and power. Just as Thatcher herself was largely a creation of the left, so it was the left too which invented "Thatcherism'. Hall can justly claim the credit for first popularising the term as carly as January 1979 in the essay "The great moving right show included in this collection. The left began constructing the myth of Thatcherism before Thatcher's victory, but after it was already clear that the left in the Labour Party had been defeated and discredited. The myth of Thatcherism allowed the left to avoid confronting its own responsibility for the debacle of the 178

it to Wilson/Callaghan years. Instead of investigating the inadebent quacies of the programme of the left that had turned so easily and into a weapon for the right, the theorists of Thatcherism the discovered an entirely new target for their studies. The problem was not the catastrophic consequences of Labourism for the hip working class, but the supposed popular appeal of Thatcher and ush her policies. While the debate about "Thatcherism' raged over the next decade, the left's disastrous alternative economic strategy" crs. nda was discreetly forgotten.

One advantage of the "Thatcherism' theory for its proponents ing • of is that, far from blaming Labour and the left for the ascendancy blic of reaction, it allows the radical intelligentsia to blame the working class for voting in the Thatcher government. This also rge ady explains the popularity of "Thatcherism' beyond the left, among cist readers of the independent and the Guardian. The liberal public ace service professionals who read these papers deeply resent the old impact of Conservative government policies in the spheres of nSt education, healthcare, local government, etc, and they yearn for Ive a return to the days of consensus politics and social harmony.

оп, They can join our theorists of "Thatcherism' in snarling bitterly at the prime minister, and join in too in sneering at the 'Sun lly readers who have betrayed radical petit-bourgeois illusions in of the virtues of council housing, nationalised industries and ed shabby council services. iry Though opinion surveys have consistently cast doubt on the popularity of Thatcherite values, and electoral studies confirm that Thatcher's success is more dependent on middle class votes than working class enthusiasm, the Thatcherism theorists are to convinced that the prime minister stirs deep approval in the ks hearts of the British proletariat. Again, this preoccupation with the supposed appeal of Thatcherism allows radical academics to avoid asking potentially troublesome questions about the evident lack of appeal of Labour, its leadership and policies, right, left and centre. But it is the alienation of substantial sections of the working class from Labour over the past 20 years it that is the key to the Thatcher phenomenon. This is why, in ly conclusion, it is difficult to recommend any of these books: all contain some insights into the Thatcher years, but by taking the d myth of Thatcherism' at face value, they all miss the central point.

d d 179

THE SOVIET UNION DEMYSTIFIED

A materialist analysis Frank Füredi £5.95 paperback plus 85p p&p Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev has become a symbol of progress and reform in the East and a force for peace and stability in relations between East and West.

Perestroika, glasnost and détente are celebrated across the political spectrum. But can Gorbachev really restructure and democratise the stagnant and repressive system established under Stalin in the Soviet Union? Can disarmament talks and superpower diplomacy reconcile the Soviet state to the Western imperialist powers? In The Soviet Union Demystified, Frank Füredi tackles these questions through a logical reconstruction of the development of Soviet society. He avoids the tendency to analyse the Soviet Union using concepts and categories derived from capitalist societies, and argues that the Soviet Union is a distinctive social formation governed by its own laws. Füredi goes beyond superficial impressions of the Gorbachev phenomenon to provide a new Marxist perspective on Soviet society.

The book contains 24 pages of photographs, including a selection from the David King Collection.

Frank Füredi is chair of Development Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Make cheques payable to Junius Publications Ltd and send to Junius Publications Ltd (C5), BCM JPLtd, London WC1N 3XX. Phone (01) 375 1485.

Review The poverty of philosophy Mike Freeman GA Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom: Themes from Marx, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp320, pbk E12.50 He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; he is merely the petit-bourgeois, continuously tossed back and forward between capital and labour, political economy and e communism. (K Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Collected Works Vol 6, pl 78) Marx's famous criticism of Proudhon and the utopian socialists of the 1840s can legitimately be levelled at Gerry Cohen and today's academic Marxists. In 1978 the Canadian-born Oxford professor published Karl Marx's Theory of History-a Defence, a work explained in the preface to his latest book as his 'homage to the milieu [communist/ Jewish Montreal] in which I learned the plain Marxism which the book defended: That debt paid, Cohen feels 'no longer obliged to adjust my thinking to that of Marx' and free to pursue an independent course. The collection of essays published here is the fruits of that work over the past 10 years and the author's collaboration with other prominent figures in the school of 'analytic Marxism'-John Elster, John Roemer, Eric Olin Wright.

Cohen discusses at a uniform level of rarefied abstraction a number of familiar controversies in academic Marxism-forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, being and consciousness, historical inevitability and revolutionary agency, 181

human nature and social change, value and exploitation, freedom and justice. His concern is to uphold-against the ideologues of reaction and disillusioned radicals alike-the necessity for a fundamental transformation of capitalist society.

At the same time he wants to dissociate this project from Marx's conception of the process of historical change through the agency of working class revolution: "An appreciation of the principal evils of capitalism, which are its injustice, its hostility to the development of the capacities of the individual, and its voracious ravaging of the natural and built environment, does not depend on ambitious theses about the whole of human history. Nor does the claim that it is possible to establish a society without exploitation which is hospitable to human fulfilment require, or perhaps even follow from, those theses."

In his moralistic critique of capitalism and his preoccupation with the role of an individual abstracted from any social context, Cohen echoes the utopian socialists of the mid-nineteenth century. For Cohen, as for the utopians, there is no objective reason why capitalism should not continue indefinitely. To his own question 'why should capitalism become untenable?'

he replies: 'In my view, it is ultimately because people no longer have to labour in the traditional sense that they no longer be made to labour for capitalists." But why should 'people' decide that they are no longer prepared to labour for capitalists? The utopian socialists believed that the power of radical ideas could overthrow the capitalist order; in the more pessimistic prognoses of today's academics such an outcome is only one possible result of random personal interactions among atomised individuals in modern society.

This perspective explains the popularity among analytic Marxists of sociological approaches, such as game theory, which Cohen considers 'is supremely relevant to certain Marxist concerns. Cohen's whole approach of abstracting elements of Marxist theory from the totality and contemplating them in isolation is alien to Marxism. In this realm of pure theory, any resolution is possible; an author can take up a fiercely revolutionary or a cravenly moderate position and debate can rage indefinitely in learned journals. But the academic method leads to fundamental 182 problems, as Cohen candidly admits:

"I do not now believe that historical materialism is false, but 1 am not This is a problem which did not exist for Marx. As he put it in the second thesis on Feuerbach, the question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question" (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach). He continued, emphasising that the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question'. Marxists test the adequacy of their theory through their intervention in the world of the class struggle, not by the standards of In his polemic against Proudhon Marx distinguished between "humanitarian" and 'philanthropic" critiques of the capitalist system. He noted that the whole theory of [the humanitarian] school rests on interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between idea and application, between content and form, between essence and reality, between law and fact, between the good side and the bad side' (The Poverty of Philosophy, p177). The philanthropic school 'carried to perfection' the humanitarian approach, seeking to realise theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and contains no antagonism'. Marx emphasised that 'in theory, it is easy to make an abstraction of the contradictions that are met with at every moment in actual reality. As theory becomes "idealised reality, the philanthropists could 'retain the categories which express bourgeois relations without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them". With their lofty discussion of theory in isolation from any consideration of class conflict in any determinate capitalist society, the analytic Cohen clings to a radical interpretation of academic Marxism.

In his 1980 Isaac Deutscher memorial lecture at the LSE, republished here under the title "Freedom, justice and capitalism' he inveighs against right wingers and reformists alike and condemns the injustice and exploitation of capitalist society. He concludes with rhetorical flourish, quoting the Communist Manifesto: the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. But let us remind Cohen how Marx viewed this process of abolition: "Since private property, for instance, is not a simple relation or even an abstract principle, but consists in the totality of the bourgeois relations of production...a change in, or even the abolition of these hon, the -the iety. irx's the e its the suilt le of tha sent ion ext, nth Ive his le?' our our ed he in an al ty. Xin is IS a in al 183 sure how to tell whether or not it is true."

philosophy in the classroom.

Marxists are the philanthropists' of the 1980s.

relations can only follow from a change in these classes and their relationships with each other, and a change in the relationship of classes is an historical change, a product of social activity as a whole, in a word, the product of a specific "historical movement". (Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, Collected Works Vol 6, p337) For Marxists the theory of abolishing private property cannot be separated from the project of building a revolutionary working class party capable of achieving this objective. On this central problem of Marxism in the twentieth century Cohen is silent. Marx's final word on the moralising critics of the 1840s is an apposite rejoinder to Cohen and his ilk: "the writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.' (Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, p337) 184

Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan, Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labour Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, /853-1955, Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp524, Kasuo Koike, Understanding Industrial Relations in Modern In 1945 an adviser to the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee recommended the 'almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race' (Schaller, p2). Even the liberal US president Franklin D Roosevelt expressed an interest in a scheme to cross-breed the Japanese with 'docile' Pacific islanders. Compulsory eugenics, he considered, might eradicate the primitive brains and barbarism of the enemy race' (Schaller, p2). With the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it appeared that the USA was set to impose its final solution on the Japanese people. Yet 40 years later Japan has re-emerged to challenge the USA's supremacy as the world's leading their asses Ford, Scism anot пагу On tury san very the and 185 cloth €19.95 capitalist power. Oxford University Press, 1988, pp364, pbk £7.95 Japan, Macmillan, 1988. pp328, pbk £14.95 The Japanese Review miracle Joe Hall

The secret of Japan's revival has variously been sought in the national character or in the country's cultural traditions of respect for authority, discipline and hard work. The value of some recent publications on Japan is that they attempt to go beyond the superficial character of much of the debate about the Japanese miracle and provide some insights into the international and domestic class relations that are the key to understanding post-war developments.

Michael Schaller emphasises the direct role played by the USA in the reconstruction of Japan as a bulwark of US policy in the Western Pacific at a time when it feared the spread of anti-imperialist revolt throughout the hemisphere. He focuses on the period of American occupation between 1945 and 1950, drawing heavily on US official documents released for the first time under freedom of information' rules. These documents reveal that even before the end of the war some influential advisers such as former president Hoover-were urging the rejuvenation of Japan to prevent the spread of communism in the region. However, it was some time before this approach could become the dominant theme in US policy.

Between 1945 and 1947, US policy, enforced by General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander for the Allied powers, aimed to reconstitute Japan as a humble American client, shorn of all its pretensions to a regional role. He forced Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese ruling elite to accept a new constitution, which stripped the emperor of any political authority, and established a rudimentary framework of parliamentary democracy. Defying the established Japanese elite, MacArthur pressed ahead, introducing modest land reforms.

recognising unions and breaking up the massive industrial conglomerates —the zaibatsu—to give the regime a measure of legitimacy. While MacArthur regarded his role in promoting freedom and democracy in Japan as a stepping stone to the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, a growing body of opinion in Washington favoured a bolder reconstruction of Japanese capitalism. The communist-led national revolution in China in 1949, the war in Korea in 1950 and the threat of nationalist revolt throughout south-cast Asia forcefully confirmed the urgency of using Japan's economic potential to consolidate American influence in the region. The wave of Cold War anticommunism which swept the globe in the late forties provided the right ideological climate for a change of US policy in Japan At the end of 1947 Washington began a campaign to isolate 186

MacArthur and to reverse the direction of his reform programme.

Led by prominent figures such as Kenneth Royall and George Kennan, the campaign aimed to end the break-up of the zaibatsu and the discrimination against those involved in Japan's war machine who were 'often the most successful business leaders in the country' (Schaller, pl19). The dollar aid programme was used to stimulate heavy industry and in November 1948 the 'programme for a self-supporting Japanese cconomy", in effect a Marshall plan for south-cast Asia, was launched. In 1949 a ministry of international trade and industry (Miti) was established, with the support the following year of Joseph Dodge's programme to boost domestic industry, especially the zaibatsu, and promote low-cost, high-volume exports to Japan's Asian neighbours. The US authorities also insisted on a harsh domestic austerity programme aimed at reducing inflation and The US army department's Andrews-West mission to southeast Asia in January 1950 summed up the new approach to the 'Japan, through the extension of trade, the extension of credit, the supplying of materials and the supplying of knowledge and personnel could assist the improvement of the total economies of south-cast and south Asia....The region would become an assured market for Japanese knick-knacks and other products suitable for less developed peoples.

Tokyo's influence would promote political stability in the wake of the The Korean War accelerated the re-integration of Japan into the world economy. Special procurements programmes in 1950 and 1952 ensured a steady flow of US orders, technology and cash into the Japanese economy, effectively subsidising the expansion •Moreover, the bulk of the orders were for non-lethal equipment such as clothing, electronics, transportation vehicles and so on. Unlike weapons these had direct consumer counterparts. Thus the factories.

techniques and labour skills required could eventually be utilised in the Thus the USA laid the basis of the Japanese economic miracle. It is striking that many of what are often regarded as the peculiarly Japanese' features of modern Japan-the rapid take-up of technology, the role of Miti and the zaibatsu—are products of the of of go the LeTto the rin of

SCS

50, Irst nts tial the i in ich ral :TS, COr ew cal iate. nS, ial of ап in se in Ast he lte in. ite 187 reconstruction of Japan: suppressing domestic consumption.

European exodus and communist advance. (Schaller, p224) and modernisation of Japanese industry: consumer and export sectors. (Schaller, p295)

the peculiar conditions that were imposed on Japan during the American occupation. Andrew Gordon focuses on the second key factor in the Japanese revival —the defeat of the militant labour movement that emerged in the immediate post-war period. Japanese workers suffered appalling pay and working conditions during the war. They were quick to take advantage of the new legal and political framework established under the American occupation to build up industrial and political organisations. By 1946 nearly five million workers were organised in 17000 unions; both Socialist and Communist parties flourished. Workers used militant and inventive tactics, particularly factory occupations more than 225 such incidents took place in the first six months of 1946, involving 150 000 workers, In April and May there were mass demonstrations in Tokyo and other cities, demanding larger food rations, pay increases and the resignation of the US-imposed stooge government.

Alarmed at the working class upsurge, the employers and the US authorities stepped up the climate of anti-communist hysteria as a prelude to direct repression. In February 1947 US officials decided that it was time to 'housebreak' the trade union movement and a proposed general strike was prohibited (Gordon, p332). Early in 1948 union activity in the public sector was curtailed by law and the US authorities began to promote scab democratic cells' inside the major unions. The anti-union drive culminated in the notorious 'red purge' in 1950, in which some 12 000 workers identified as communists or communist sympathisers were victimised and banned from future trade union activity. Gordon gives detailed examples of how, between 1948 and 1952, major employers launched internal purges of union militants. Take Toshiba, where independent unions were established in 1946-47. In July 1949 management announced the dismissal of 5000 workers, 20 per cent of the workforce, including most known activists and communists. The company claimed that it had carried an excessive pay roll since 1946 out of 'consideration for workers and their families, but was now forced to cut back under the new terms for US investment (Gordon, p332). In the course of the subsequent strike, the employers sponsored scab cells which became the company union when the strike was defeated in November. A similar pattern of sackings and victimisations took place on the railways (100 000 dismissed), at Nissan (23 per cent sacked) and at Isuzu (26 per cent out). Workers faced not only state repression, but 188

he highly organised gangs of company thugs who broke up union meetings and demonstrations.

The return to wartime levels of exploitation in industry and nt the destruction of independent trade unionism were key condi- SC tions for the subsequent economic miracle.

Though Kasuo Koike fails to acknowledge fully the impact of the post-war defeats on modern industrial relations in Japan, his study challenges the widespread view in the West that cultural and psychological factors explain Japan's economic success. He focuses on three prevalent myths-permanent employment, ed 'seniority wages' and company unionism— which are all commonly invoked by Japan's Western admirers and would-be emulators. re Koike shows that Japan's workforce is highly segmented.

1g divided along lines of age, skill, sex, size of workplace, plant or company. Some workers certainly benefited from the high levels of growth in the seventies and many have fared better than workers in the West through the years of recession. These workers, however, are predominantly male, in their twenties and St S thirties and employed by one of the big conglomerates. The hi-tech character of key sectors of the Japanese economy has allowed traditional distinctions between blue and white-collar workers to become blurred and has given rise to the impression that a stable 'core' workforce has emerged.

Yet, as Koike notes, Japanese firms are no more able to offer a h job for life than are companies in other advanced capitalist countries. A recent labour force survey showed that, rather than having a job for life, many Japanese workers could expect to retain a well-paid job till they were around 45, when they could d expect to be made redundant or pushed to take carly retirement.

Negotiating voluntary severance schemes is a major preoccupation of Japanese unions.

e Koike also notes significant differences in employment conditions between big firms and the thousands of smaller companies that act mainly as subcontractors to the conglomerates. In the smaller firms, wage rates and working conditions are much worse. As the rate of bankruptcies is high, employment it is much more insecure.

e In his discussion of company unionism, Koike's sociological approach leads to an exaggeration of the progressive potential of these organisations. He focuses on the collective bargaining institutions within which these unions work, ignoring the class relations that gave rise to them in the first place. But the scope for company unionism depends on the wider balance of class 189

forces. The defeat of the working class in Japan has given them great scope in containing a relatively low level of workplace conflict. When the Japanese working class reasserts its power in society, it will begin by forging new organisations in the workplace. 190

EVER

Review Sympathy with the devil Kenan Malik Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Penguin/ Viking, 1989, pp552, cloth £12.95 'Above all things", writes Salman Rushdie in his first major novel Midnight's Children, 'I fear absurdity'. A distaste for the absurd and irrational conventions that govern human life has been at the core of all Rushdie's work.

The Satanic Verses is the third part of an unacknowledged trilogy, following on from Midnight's Children and Shame.

Each deals with different aspects of the struggle of an emerging nation, and an emerging people, to come to terms with modern society. Midnight's Children is a fictionalised account of the evolution of India since independence; Shame considers the degeneration of Pakistan. Rushdie savages the barbarities of religious, caste and class divisions and ridicules the bigotry, corruption and nepotism that characterise the politics of the subcontinent. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie acknowledges that such irrationality is at the heart of all societies. The central theme of the novel is that all societies, religious and secular, backward and advanced, need to conjure up their own demons and angels.

Only through an appeal to forces outside of society, says Rushdie, can our rulers order human affairs.

191

The Satanic Verses is an epic, a modern-day version of t Ramayana or Mahabharata, both of which it draws upo Rushdie abandons conventional narrative form, adopting i stead the traditions of an oral storyteller. He interweaves fanta and narrative, dreams and reality, folklore and literature create a witches brew. The novel opens with a hijacked Boeing exploding above t Sussex coast. There are only two survivors. Gibreel Farishta is legendary Indian film star who depicts gods in his movies and revered as one by his fans. Saladin Chamcha has contempt for things Indian especially films. He is an Anglophile mor loyal-than-the-Queen, so fanatically British that he wears bowler hat even when tumbling from 33 000 feet.

As they fall, Saladin and Gibreel metamorphose. Salad becomes hairy and goat-like, his feet turn to hooves and sprouts horns. Gibreel acquires a halo. The two men becon unwitting (and unwilling) protagonists in the eternal batt between good and evil, the divine and the Satanic. As th tumble through space and time, their paths criss-crossing dream and in history, in myth and in reality, from Arabia Ayrshire, Rushdie spins an extraordinary web of stori which explores the meaning of good and evil in both religio and secular worlds, The progress of Saladin and Gibreel through the dark, surre landscape of Vilayet Britain —acts as the holding frame for ti novel. Into this frame Rushdie inserts a number of novellas, eac arising out of Gibreel's dreams, which confront the nature religion. The first tells the story of God's Revelation to th Prophet Mohammed and of how the faith of Submissic conquered the city of Jahilia. The second concerns an imam London (who, as Rushdie would put it, both is and is not tl Ayatollah Khomeini exiled in Paris) and his uncompromisir struggle against the ruler of contemporary Jahilia. A third tel of Ayesha, a visionary peasant girl shrouded in butterflies, wh leads an Indian village on an impossible pilgrimage to Mecc Rushdie weaves into this tapestry of tales the threads of oth stories, of love and passion, betrayal and faith, reconciliatio and death. The result is a complex, chaotic, often confusin novel, but whose sheer bravura carries the reader along.

Good and evil, says Rushdie, are not natural aspects of th human condition, but the creation of humanity to satisfy its ow needs and desires. The title of the novel comes from two vers which the Prophet Mohammed removed from the Kora believing them to have been inspired by Satan masquerading 192

the Archangel Gabriel. As Rushdie unfolds his story of the Revelations through Gibreel's dreams, we see that the whole of the Koran is the work of Mohammed masquerading as the Mohammed's scribe-whom Rushdie, with delightful conceit, calls Salman notices 'how useful and well-timed the angel's revelations used to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound". The archangel found himself spouting rules, rules, rules' from "which sexual positions had received divine sanction' to the manner in which a man should be buried, and how a property should be divided. 'It was as if, says Salman, 'no aspect of human existence was to be Salman begins wondering 'what manner of God this was that This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organisation and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very business-like archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non- If religion creates the divine and the Satanic in the image of man, then equally, says Rushdie, secular society creates men in the image of devils and angels. Just as the Archangel Gibreel comes to the aid of Mohammed, so secular angels underpin the rule of capitalist society. And just as every religion needs Satan to justify the existence of God—there is no point in having a saviour unless there is something to be saved from so every secular society needs its own demons as an 'enemy within. In Vilayet black people are the demons. Incarcerated in a detention centre for illegal immigrants, Saladin discovers that, like himself, his fellow inmates have been transformed into beasts water buffaloes, snakes, manticores. How do they do it, he asks one. They describe us", comes the reply, 'that's all. They have the power of description and we succumb to the pictures Since good and evil, devils and angels, are human constructions, they are interchangeable and often indistinguishable.

Which one you are depends on your viewpoint and, most importantly, the viewpoint of your antagonist. Being British is to of the ig inntasy re to re the ta is a and is or all погеars a ladin id he come attle they ag in ia to ories hous treal r the each te of the sion m in the sing tells who сса. ther tion sing the own rses ran g as 193 corporeal, God." prophet of God. left unregulated, free: sounded so much like a businessman?: they construct.

be definitely on the side of the angels. But who is British? Saladin thinks he's more British than the British; but the police who arrest him as an illegal immigrant only see him as a hairy beast with horns, hooves and an outsize prick, the personification of all their worst fears about black people. Mishal and Anahita, two teenage girls, are as Westernised" as any of their English friends. They wear 501s, indulge in sex and refer to their parents' homeland as "Bungleditch". But to Saladin they are 'alien: "They weren't British, he wanted to tell them: not really, not in any way he could recognise.' Throughout the novel Saladin and Gibreel betray the roles assigned to them. When Saladin is arrested Gibreel refuses to help him. When the two meet up again in riot-torn east London, Gibreel appears as Azraeel, the most terrible of angels, wreaking fire and destruction. But even as he is hunted down by Gibreel, Saladin risks his life trying to save a family trapped in a burning house. If the two are indistinguishable, then why is one an angel and the other Satan? Gibreel in spite of born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses, has wished to remain, to a large degree, continuous--that is, joined to and arising from his past.

But Saladin has shown a 'willing reinvention' a 'preferred revolt against history. In other words, angels mean constancy while devils rock the boat. In the struggle between 'good' and 'evil", Rushdie clearly has sympathy for the devil.

Rushdie suggests that the 'pictures' society constructs of the oppressed are both the basis of oppression and a source of defiance. Mohammed adopts the name 'Mahound'-the devil's synonym'-because those on the outside of society 'chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn. When rumours of Saladin's demonic transformation spread through London, the black community adopts him as a symbol of resistance. 'It's an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it. Mishal, the young Asian girl who has befriended him, tells Saladin, 'You know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own: It's a sharp, if ironic, description of Muslim response to The Satanic Verses.

In The Satanic Verses Rushdie has created a universe of his own through which Saladin and Gibreel rampage with abandon.

Rushdie's stated aim was to allow his protagonists freedom of will. Playing God in your universe may be fun for the author and Rushdie as narrator self-consciously assumes the role of the divine, at one point even sitting on Gibreel's bed to admonish the errant angel-but it creates havoc for the reader. Rushdie's 194

In refusal to discipline the wanderings of his imagination makes the 10 novel confusingly arbitrary in its development.

In the absence of a more formal structure, the novel is held of together by a bemusing cat's cradle of cross-referenced names, a, images and allusions. Mount Cone is the name of the mountain sh where Mohammed receives his revelations; Allie Cone is the ts* mountaineer whom Gibreel loves. Allie Cone's dream is a solo ascent of Everest; in Bombay Gibreel lives at the very top of the Everest Apartments. Hind is the wife of the Grandee of Jahilia and Mohammed's mortal enemy; she is also the wife of es Muhammed Sufyan, in whose café Saladin finds refuge. Ayesha is the visionary who leads the pilgrimage from the Indian village п, of Titlipur; she is also the empress of present-day Jahilia against 1g whom the exiled imam wages war. The imam's henchmen are avatars of those in the service of Mohammed. And so it goes on.

Into his stew Rushdie stirs a stream of literary references.

Márquez and Marlowe, Borge and Shakespeare, Ahmed Faiz and WH Hudson, Calvino and Kolatker, Frank Herbert and John Fowles, The Arabian Nights and The Wizard of Oz-all permeate The Satanic Verses.

Too often Rushdie seems to be self-consciously drawing attention to his own erudition and imagination. Too often, too, le his determination to be 'rude about them' becomes an end in itself. He wants us to know that he has something to say about every political issue from "Mrs Torture's' creation of a new be middle class to the Bhopal disaster, from immigration procedures to the three-minute culture. The result is often more clumsy than imaginative. Many of his vignettes of British life- Lo skinheads abusing customers in an Asian café, the Metropolitan Police as a secret witches coven, a television producer's eulogy ch for "Mrs Torture'- are simply embarrassing. The closer Rushdie gets to reality, the less sure his writing becomes.

But what ultimately drives the novel, and makes it such an exhilarating read, is Rushdie's mastery of the art of storytelling.

it, He might lack the poetic fluency of a Márquez, but his exuberant imagination more than makes up for it. Clumsy it may be, even incoherent at times, but the breathless irreverence IS of The Satanic Verses makes it quite bewitching. And in any п. case, Rushdie is on the side of the devils.

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Review Gorbachev and the Western left John Gibson Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev's USSR, Verso, 1989, pp216, pbk £10.95 For 40 years a leading figure in the Trotskyist movement, Ernest Mandel turns in his latest book to examine the origins and nature of the current crisis of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union. Mandel assembles an impressive body of material and presents it well. He proceeds from an assessment of the scale of the economic crisis to examine the effects of the Gorbachev reforms; he concludes by considering the prospects for the future. The strength of Mandel's analysis is his recognition that Gorbachev's reform programme, far from attempting to achieve a revolution, is in fact designed to prevent one: The point of the exercise is to prevent a revolutionary explosion, in other words to prevent a "revolution from below".

Mandel rightly observes that the crisis facing Soviet society today is more profound than at any time since the late twenties when Stalin launched his drastic industrialisation drive. Economic growth came to a halt in the carly eighties and since then there has been, if anything, a decline. As Mandel reveals, Soviet trade more closely resembles that of a third world country than 197

that of a modern industrial state. More than 60 per cent of Soviet exports are natural resources, while 35 per cent of imports are of items of equipment and transport, more than 20 per cent food products and around 12 per cent industrial consumer goods Soviet officials are now openly admitting the extraordinary scale of wasted resources in the economy. Mandel quotes Gorbachev's chief economic adviser, Abel Aganbegyan, as declaring that our country produces four and a half times more tractors than the USA in order to produce a smaller amount of vegetables. The lack of communication between the different enterprises and the breakdown of the transport system-these are the subjects of constant discussion within the bureaucracy.

Mandel's account of the disintegration of the Stalinist system contains much useful information and some valuable insights. It is when he moves from description to analysis that the problems begin. Instead of trying to reveal the underlying processes of the Soviet economy, Mandel seeks to explain its deficiencies by the subjective failings of the bureaucrats themselves: *The contradiction between the private interests of the bureaucracy as consumers and the interests (the possible rationality) of the economic system as a whole expresses itself in the day-to-day behaviour of the bureaucrats, which is the source of increasing waste of human and material resources: false information which makes optimal planning impossible; illegal stockpiling of reserves; massive theft; parallel markets, black markets and moonlighting; generalised corruption and the non-transparency of economic life, etc."

Mandel regards the Soviet system as a planned economy, where the plans are continually subverted by bureaucrats motivated only by personal greed. Though he might come from a different tradition and draw different conclusions, his Trotskyist' analysis of the modern Soviet system is in fact shared by many reformminded Stalinist bureaucrats. The former Hungarian prime minister Andras Hegedus, for example, recently attacked the "generalised irresponsibility of the bureaucracy.

No doubt individual bureaucrats are greedy and corrupt, but the waste, the hoarding of resources and the general inefficiency of the Stalinist system is due to the absence of any real plan, not the subversion of planning by the bureaucracy. In the absence of working class control, planning is a meaningless concept. In the chaos that results in an economy administered by a bureaucratic machine which lacks the active participation of those engaged in production, individual factory managers seek to achieve a 198 degree of self-sufficiency as the only way to guarantee some

control over their activities. If they stockpile tools and raw materials, this is not for their own consumption.

The Soviet economy would have no coherence at all were it not for the central intervention of the bureaucracy, which ensures that certain priorities defence, heavy industry, energy— receive sufficient resources. Indeed, far from being a parasitic excrescence on a planned economy, the bureaucracy is an indispensable element of a system which lacks any plan or dynamic of its own. Mandel is hostile to the bureaucracy and he wisely counsels that the working class should not take sides in its internal squabbles. However, he constantly strives to discover some positive potential in the Gorbachev programme, insisting that m his policies should be considered individually, on merit. While It everyone welcomes the effects of glasnost in opening up political 35 life and allowing scope for opposition forces to organise, it is important to assess the overall impact of Gorbachev's policies.

When Mandel does this he emphasises that the fundamental socio-political dynamic' unleashed by Gorbachev has been to intensify and stimulate the politicisation and the political as differentiation (polarisation) of growing layers of Soviet society: While it is true that Gorbachev's initiatives have had a destabilising effect on Soviet society, it is also important to recognise the usefulness of glasnost in providing a framework let for regulating and containing conflict.

For Mandel, however, the inevitability of greater turmoil in the Soviet Union opens up the prospect of working class revolution: 'In spite of the intentions of Gorbachev, the effects of glasnost on the masses of the Soviet Union, of Eastern Europe ed and, later, of Western Europe, far from discouraging revolution, nt objectively promote it. Indeed Mandel considers that the process through which events in the Soviet Union today will facilitate' world revolution tomorrow is 'not only possible, but despite all appearances to the contrary, is actually inevitable: In his heady optimism about the objectively revolutionary" potential of the Gorbachev phenomenon, Mandel echoes his earlier judgement of developments in the international Stalinist movement in the seventies. In his influential book From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, published in 1978, Mandel argued that the trend towards Eurocommunism in the Western Communist parties opened up the prospect of revolution in the East, because it raised the possibility of alternative 'models of socialism. He concluded that 'we must regard this aspect of 2 Eurocommunism positively and not negatively: In fact by 1978 199

Eurocommunism had already passed its peak and we have yet to witness its positive potential, East or West.

A Marxist assessment of the process of change in the Soviet Union today suggests that the outcome will be a major setback to the class struggle internationally. In the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe more widely, the Gorbachev phenomenon has served to glorify the capitalist market and bourgeois democracy and to destroy the last vestige of popular credibility for Marxism-Leninism. In the West, the explicit repudiation of the historic validity of working class revolution in the world's first proletarian state has further discredited any anti-capitalist alternative. The strengthening of the forces of capitalist reaction East and West is the inevitable consequence of the Gorbachev phenomenon, at least in the short term.

For 40 years Mandel has been searching for some objective trend or alternative social force to lead the anti-capitalist struggle, so that the left could avoid the hard task of building a revolutionary leadership in the Western working class. It is a measure of the bankruptcy of the radical tradition he represents that he can now discover some positive potential in a man who has, in his own charismatic way, done as much to bury Marxism- Leninism as Stalin. 200

Review The Soviet intelligentsia Eve Anderson Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, Verso, 1988, pp384, pbk £9.95 Boris Kagarlitsky is an important figure in the reform movement in the Soviet Union. As a key organiser in the Federation of Socialist Social Clubs (FSOK), part of the recently formed Moscow Popular Front, he campaigned for the radical local candidate, Boris Yeltsin, in the spring elections. Yet only seven years ago, Kagarlitsky was imprisoned for his involvement in the oppositional journal Left Turn. It is a measure of the success of glasnost that he is now free to participate in political campaigns and is even interviewed on state radio and television.

His lively book is an important intervention in the glasnost/ perestroika debate that is currently gripping not only the Soviet Union, but also the Western left. Kagarlitsky's standpoint is that of the left-wing intellectual. He is opposed to capitalism, but also to the Soviet bureaucrats and their slowness in implementing reforms. He is a champion of democracy and wants to see the working class given a greater say. He is highly critical of traditional Soviet dissidents, dismissing their claims to be the true defenders of democracy and humanitarianism. Kagarlitsky exposes the Stalinist mentality of the right wingers who have been hailed in the West as courageous fighters against totalitarianism. He analyses, perceptively, how they take the bureaucrats' claims that the Soviet Union is socialist at face value, rejecting only the consequences.

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This brings us to the key question of the book: which social force is going to lead the struggle for change in the Soviet Union?

Kagarlitsky's final conclusion -that the cause of socialist democracy, traditionally upheld by the intelligentsia, has now passed to the working class—is stated as a mere formality. His real orientation is towards the intelligentsia and it is its development that is the main focus of the book. Though he pays lip-service to the masses and to social revolution, he envisages that the reforming zeal of the intelligentsia allied to a progressive section of the bureaucracy (personified by Yeltsin) will gradually bring about democratic socialism. A political strategy that reduces the working class to the role of an enthusiastic spectator of a revolution imposed from above clearly contains dangerous limitations. In Kagarlitsky's view the peculiar historical development of Russian society made the intelligentsia an inherently progressive force. From the early eighteenth century, when Peter the Great's reforms brought Tsarist Russia into contact with capitalist Europe, intellectuals came to play a prominent role in shaking off backwardness and stimulating Russia's growth into a world power. However, from the start Russian intellectuals influenced by liberal Western ideas came into conflict with the autocratic, semi-feudal Tsarist state. In such a stifling atmosphere, 'any independent action, even if it has no conscious political content, turns out to be an act of rebellion'. As early as December 1825, the newly formed intelligentsia staged an unsuccessful rebellion against the autocracy. Furthermore, Kagarlitsky argues that it was the intelligentsia that laid much of the groundwork for the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The honeymoon period after 1917 was sweet but short. With the imposition of war communism", most of the educated middle classes were alienated from the new regime, and the sphere of culture became, once again, a battle ground for opposition forces. Ultimately, Kagarlitsky blames the defcat of the Russian Revolution on the Bolsheviks' Red Terror, underestimating the importance of the material backwardness and isolation of the early Soviet state: *Lenin also hoped for revolution in the West (not realising that the Bolsheviks' dictatorial methods scared off the Western proletariat, thus postponing socialism rather than bringing it nearer)* In fact the working class, especially its advanced sections, has never recoiled from revolutionary violence. Kagarlitsky simply reveals his own middle class prejudices.

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Kagarlitsky blames the defeat of proletarian power on the attack on culture and the democratic spirit inherent within it as a result of the terror unleashed by civil war, repression and censorship. Hence, for him, it follows that the recapture of this spirit by the intellectuals who are its living embodiment is crucial to the project of socialist renewal in the Soviet Union today. But by placing democracy on a pedestal Kagarlitsky ends up isolating it from the rest of society and the classes within it, Thus he complains that the Bolsheviks did not take into account the indivisibility of democratic principles, the fact that one cannot restrict the democratic freedom of one class in society without at the same time restricting that of the others: This sort of abstract concept of democracy, in the context of a bitter struggle for the very survival of the Soviet state, meant a capitulation to White Terror; the repetition of this hoary prejudice after 70 years places Kagarlitsky firmly in the camp of reaction.

Kagarlitsky argues that the intelligentsia in the modern Soviet Union has been transformed from a section of the middle classes into a proletarian stratum. A process of radicalisation parallel to that which swept petit-bourgeois youth in the West in the sixties has, in his view, transformed the left-wing intelligentsia into the vanguard of the socialist movement. Citing Lenin's What Is To Be Done? he equates today's radical intellectuals with the professional revolutionaries of the Bolshevik Party. Kagarlitsky endows the intelligentsia with the revolutionary characteristics of the proletariat: 'Once it was in the vanguard of the social movement, the intelligentsia had to speak for society as a whole, for the strata that were not yet ready to put forward their own demands, and this meant that the position of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and that of the Soviet intellectuals of the Khrushchey era-and to a considerable extent of the Brezhnev era as well—were similar.* For Marxists only the working class can represent the interests of humanity as a whole. The working class is the 'universal class because it is only workers who have no stake in the existing system and every interest in overthrowing it. The intelligentsia, on the other hand, plays a marginal role in the major productive life of society and its social role is determined by the balance of forces between the major classes. Indeed Kagarlitsky's own account of events in the Soviet Union in the seventies and eighties confirms the instability of the intelligentsia.

After the suppression of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968, the Eastern bloc intelligentsia entered a prolonged cultural 203

and political crisis. The seventies was the decade of stagnation not only in the Soviet economy, but also in intellectual life, as hopes were dashed and the ideas of 'reform communism' were neglected. Many disillusioned intellectuals turned West to embrace the values of the free market. In the eighties the backlash against economic stagnation and political repression has gathered momentum, especially since Gorbachev came to power. Groups espousing reactionary, nationalistic, anti-Semitic and back-to-Stalin sentiments, such as Pamyat (memory) and Rodina (homeland) are now attracting significant support among Soviet intellectuals.

Kagarlitsky notes that the new generation of left-wing radicals has great difficulty in coming to terms with the problems thrown up by the disintegration of the Stalinist system: "The misfortune of the liberal intelligentsia of the eighties lies in their lack of original ideas and their unwillingness to proceed from mere declarations to more profound analysis of the historical situation that has come about.* Paralleling this political paralysis is a crisis of 'high' culture.

Intellectuals have become preoccupied with reviving films, books and other works which were suppressed in the past. This has stultified new creative developments to the point where newspapers are more interesting than novels.

It is at this juncture that Kagarlitsky introduces the working class, to provide muscle for the projects of the intelligentsia. He recognises that, although the intelligentsia has moral superiority over the bureaucracy, it is like Pascal's thinking reed, lacking real power to resist the bureaucracy's policy. However, unlike in the grim Brezhnev years, 'in the eighties it can already rely on the movement of wide sections of the working people and become part of the movement'. Kagarlitsky's personal project is to synthesise progressive aspects of low' culture-rock music ecology groups, youth groups with high' culture, the cream of the left-wing intelligentsia, to push the bureaucracy to speed up the process of reform. The role of the working class as a pressure group on the bureaucracy was clearly revealed in the Yeltsin election campaign. This approach carries serious dangers. Before the election Kagarlitsky rightly warned the working class that the elections were merely a device to contain them, to ensure their support for glasnost. The bureaucracy was so successful in this strategy that Kagarlitsky himself seems to have been duped. Interviewed afterwards he told ITN news: "It was an experiment to show 204

the people that they could do something...affect some part of the system.* Unfortunately for Kagarlitsky, revolutions do not come from above, they come from the working class. Though he opposes both the right-wing dissidents and the bureaucracy, he has not broken politically with either. Rather than build an independent working class party to overthrow the system, Kagarlitsky works within it, appealing to the intelligentsia (the social base of the dissidents) and to sections of the bureaucracy (like Yeltsin and Gorbachev). In the end all he can offer is a version of the British left's "Vote Labour without illusions: Vote perestroika without illusions. Despite his subjective hostility to the bureaucrats he is doing valuable work for them in winning working class support for the existing system, while providing a radical cover for the Soviet authorities. As surely as the British left has failed to influence the working class and change society, so surely, Kagarlitsky's approach will fail to overthrow the Soviet bureaucracy.

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