The sickening spectacle of the Labour Party leadership's support for Thatcher's war in the South Atlantic sharply raises the need for a socialist foreign policy. Alan Freeman takes issue with Tony Benn's notion of Britain being a colony and argues that Britain is the world's most warlike state.
War concentrates the mind wonderfully. Its effect on the British class struggle is what one would expect of a thunderstorm interrupting a muddy midnight football match: it doesn't do much for the game but at least you get to see what the players are up to. This time a fine piece of teamwork by Foot and Healey brought an immaculate own goal while most of the left wing were offside: within a week of a prospective Thatcher self-destruct, Labour's front bench had handed her the backing of sixty per cent of the electorate.
Foreign policy has always been the Achilles heel of our labour movement. As recently as 1975 the Labour left was demolished, not in the first instance by the CBI but by the EEC referendum. Two out of three Labour coalitions were hatched in wartime. The first sent a million workers to their deaths; the second ushered in the postwar consensus in whose aftermath we are now living.
A systematic and deadly weakness is involved here. What is the point of all those patient hours on the doorknocker when the results can be so easily demolished? The problem is not just cynicism or immorality: if anything the left suffers a surfeit of moralism. What it lacks is basic common sense. It has failed to grasp the connection between foreign and domestic policy matters.
It sees foreign adventures as banana skins on the broad road of class emancipation; as interludes after which normal class struggle will be resumed: please do not adjust your programme. Imperialism, it says, is a diversion from unemployment.
The problem is that unemployment is caused by imperialism. The same state, and the same economy, grows wool in the Malvinas and sells it in West Yorkshire. If you can't stop them in Port Stanley, you won't beat them in Bradford.
Indeed this is the key to defeating our ruling classes. If our labour movement could only aspire to the common sense of an average Buenos Aires worker, the Tories would cease to exist. Thatcher's secret weapon is that half our leadership doesn't realise this and the other half support her.
The first task of British Marxism is to get to the root of this weakness, spell out its consequences, and apply them in the fight for a socialist foreign policy for Labour. It may be hard going, but there is no other road. Our job is to begin from what is true and make it popular — not to take what is popular and wish it was true.
We have to begin by rejecting, once and for all, the idea that Britain is no longer an imperial power. Dean Acheson's famous remark that Britain has 'lost an empire and not yet found a role' is common coin. Tony Benn takes it to its limit by claiming that Britain is now a colony. But the idea is persistent even on the Marxist left. Since the empire is in decline, it is argued, surely Britain is now becoming less imperialist? Thus Militant leader Ted Grant jokingly refers to Britain as a 'semicolonial' country; and many on the far left have reacted as if Britain and Argentina were on a more or less equal footing.
Thatcher's exercise should give cause for reflection. Six months ago we said, and still hold, that Britain is more committed overseas than before, more dependent on its imperial income and role, and hence potentially more aggressive than ever. The comparison between Britain and Argentina is a good starting point. The issue is not the relative standard of living — although this disparity is marked enough, especially when [illegible]. The most important point is the ownership of productive assets and the country of origin of those who benefit from them. Britain is a robber country and Argentina is a dependent country: that is the long and the short of it. Argentina's foreign assets are negligible, and two thirds of its industrial assets are in foreign hands. British foreign assets amount to £84 billion — twenty per cent more than British domestic investments at £67¾bn. Argentina is listed by the world bank as the planet's second most indebted country with liabilities of £16.5bn and debt service charges around £2bn a year — nearly a fifth of all profits. Britain, in contrast, has an income from foreign investment alone of £8bn. Together with the City's invisible income of £2bn this adds up to more than half the domestic profits of British industry. Britain has the most overextended ruling class in the world. It is the most parasitic and the most dependent on its foreign activities. Forty two per cent of Britain's production is carried out abroad — higher than any other nation except Switzerland.
But this means that Britain has an invisible empire. It is no less an empire than when half the map was coloured pink. Its true measure is not the number of garrisons we maintain but the number of wage slaves labouring for British masters. This empire is defined politically. Its boundaries are demarcated by the Commonwealth and the Sterling Area.
So much socialist humbug surrounds the Commonwealth that socialists have become blithely ignorant of its origins, extent and function. It was created in 1926 at an 'inter-imperialist conference' following a scheme first evolved by the arch-reactionary Tory MP Joseph Chamberlain. The idea was a simple one: faced with explosions of revolt such as the Irish rebellion, and the erosion of British interests by rivals like America, Britain created a special corner of the world which would trade in sterling behind protectionist barriers against the rest of the world. Nominal independence led to a new enslavement under puppet governments bound to British interests by subservience to the pound. In theory it was a free association of equals. But we have already cited the more jaundiced view put forward in the Penguin history of twentieth century England:
Despite mere 'equality of status' within the dominions, Britain had to bear the main burden of imperial defence and foreign policy, and she had the lion's share of investment and trade. Equality of function or 'stature' could not accompany equality of status.
The outer circle of empire comprises Sterling Area countries who are under treaty obligation to use sterling as a trading currency, keep their reserves in London, and 'pool' gold and dollars to help bail out the pound. There are sixty such countries, whose population exceeds 700 million.
This economic and political empire is also defended militarily. Garrisons and naval outposts in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Belize and Gibraltar neatly control major oceans (with the exception of the South Atlantic); close and friendly military relations with puppets such as the Sultan of Oman mean Britain is on hand should a client state be threatened by revolution, and can demand the appropriate privileges — in effect, protection money — from its clients.
Since the trauma of Suez, followed by Harold Macmillan's famous 'winds of change' speech calling for colonial disengagement, an image has been sold to the British public: the image of generous, peaceloving and humane detachment from old colonial interests; the wise old mother preparing her wayward children for the customs of the civilised world. 'Britain's record in bringing colonies to independence is the finest in the world,' declared Maggie Thatcher on Panorama. Henry VIII divorced more wives than any other monarch but this does not make him the pioneer of women's liberation.
To be sure, the attempt is being made at a change in the form of the empire. The more successful economic empires of Germany and Japan are based on the industrial, and not the military strength of these countries. The modern form of colonialism is a free association of unequals, and Britain has been trying to adapt to it. But this is a change in form only. British economic imperialism as such has increased. 1945 opened the biggest wave of foreign investment in British history — an expansion from £1¼bn in 1945 to £12¼bn in 1967.
Moreover the structure of all world imperialism, despite its allegedly more peaceful methods, is in fact based on the collective military defence of imperialist interests by the two 'great powers': the United States and the United Kingdom. There is a convenient division of labour between the 'peaceloving' Japanese and Europeans and the warlike Great Powers — a division between racketeers and hitmen.
The dynamic duo are the world's bailiffs. But what happens when bailiffs can't pay the rent? They do not cease to be bailiffs: they become more energetic and violent bailiffs. This is the key to Thatcher's apparently Victorian reactions. Britain's military/financial role has become a substitute for other forms of economic development. The present dispute illustrates this graphically.
If Britain had abandoned territorial claims and staked all on direct economic ties with the Argentine junta, it could have had free access to the South Atlantic oil fields. This was undoubtedly the foreign office's longterm objective. Indeed the most astute comment of the war was Tony Benn's remark on Carrington's resignation: 'There are also British interests and British citizens in Argentina', he said, 'and when memoirs are written, in my judgement, Lord Carrington will be shown to have resigned in part because no responsible foreign secretary could put at risk so great a set of British objectives in pursuit of the objectives the Prime Minister has set.'
Yet successive governments have retreated from the Foreign Office line under backwoods pressure. 'The Falklands Islands lobby', said Tam Dalyell MP, 'is the biggest bloody bandwagon in parliament. The Archangel Gabriel couldn't pacify them.' Neither did Carrington. Why did this happen? Britain's problem can be summed up crudely but concisely: it is a second rate military power and a twelfth rate industrial power.
Germany, Japan and the other stronger industrial powers are pressing their advantage in a new wave of foreign investment in the third world. In 'free' competition with German entrepreneurs, Britain doesn't make the grade. It is outclassed: it makes antiquated goods with antiquated machines. German direct investment in Argentina is now three times Britain's. Yet in the middle of the last century Buenos Aires was mortgaged to the City — lock, stock and barrel. In the most dynamic capital export market — secondary manufacturing in the third world — Britain lags far behind its rivals. Around seventy-five per cent of new West German investment in Argentina is in the manufacturing sector; over half of new British investment is in the more backward food and raw material production sector.
In the lead up to the present war, the islands were a bargaining lever. Those who resisted their handover were those whose only advantage over their rivals was the possession of territory. In short they were the most backward monopoly sectors of British capital — those whose superprofits flow not from the application of advanced technology but from the possession of particularly valuable territory, control over finance, or political clout resulting from military/diplomatic client status. This sector is especially strong in Britain, which participated late and little in the postwar explosion of advanced technological investment in the metropolitan world, relying instead on mining, farming and financial interests in the traditional empire. Thatcher's is increasingly the only response left for Britain's ruling classes.
Britain is therefore at one and the same time imperialism's weakest link and the world's most warlike state. The disgrace and tragedy of our labour movement is that it does not perceive this: the central fact of British politics today. The first consequence of this mistake is a deep misunderstanding of US-UK relations. The Labour left see only Britain's subordination to America, and deduce that it has become an American satellite. They conclude that we can break the American connection by severing the alliance in a new declaration of independence without worrying about its foundations. They talk as if we can ditch nuclear weapons, refuse Cruise, and join hands with the non-aligned nations without leaving the collective security framework laid down by Yalta and Teheran. Unilateralism within NATO, neutrality within Western Europe: these are the dreams produced by this outlook.
Counterposing the navy to nuclear weapons comes from the same stable. Healey has been particularly cynical in arguing that Thatcher failed to 'protect' the islands because of expenditure on Trident. Conventional and nuclear weapons are part of the same deal: the attempt to conserve Britain's world role, assigned at the Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences. After and during the war Churchill and Attlee gambled everything on clinging to British overseas interests. They offered Truman a partnership against revolution and a bridgehead into Europe. Britain secured a 'sphere of influence' by becoming America's junior partner.
It is true that the 'special relationship' conceals a deep antagonism, which Trotsky discussed in 1925. But this antagonism did not translate itself into a transatlantic war as Hitler wanted; nor into a European war from which America would be the winner through neutrality, as Roosevelt hoped. Instead the struggle for supremacy was fought out within the framework of the wartime alliance and its aftermath. The antagonism remains: custodianship of the Malvinas may well pass from Britain to America, as did Iran in 1953. But the form of the conflict is that of a struggle between partners — in a partnership against revolution and in defence of world imperialist interests.
British 'subordination' to America is therefore the consequence of a great power role; of playing Robin to America's Batman. As a well-known American economist once said, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Britain survives as a world power on American sufferance: our role as USS Great Britain is the price. Haig crosses the Atlantic with a dove in one pocket and a Cruise missile in the other. Britain's relation with Europe makes no difference. On the contrary Thatcher not only doubles as Reagan's hawk in the EEC, but paves the way for renewed military adventures by France and Germany. They see the day — perhaps not so far off — when they can replace her at Reagan's high table. Thatcher is in turn compelled to keep them at bay by greater and greater attentiveness to their military and financial demands.
No nation that enslaves another can ever itself be free: Britain bows to Washington and Brussels because she rules the waves. But this highlights an even deeper problem in Labour's approach. This is the attempt to deal with domestic issues in the framework of the Western alliance. This ignores the fact that Britain's imperial role is the cause of its domestic decline.
Of course Britain shares in the general mess that followed the end of the postwar boom. But it is worse off than everyone else. It has gone through a relative decline of catastrophic proportions. As figures 1 and 2 show, the two military-financial powers — the USA and the UK — have the lowest rates of domestic investment, and in consequence the lowest rates of productivity growth and per capita income growth among all the advanced capitalist nations. The price paid by these nations for serving as world superpowers is the erosion of the very base on which their supremacy rests.
This is particularly dangerous for Britain, which starts from a far smaller domestic base than America and has been in decline for longer. Britain's imperial crisis has become chronic. During 1965-82 none of the domestic effects of imperial decline have been halted and indeed most have accelerated. For the first time in history Britain has begun to import more manufactured goods than it exports. Employment in the manufacturing industries fell from nine million to under seven million over this period. Investment in productive assets has never risen above £4bn at 1975 prices and in the last two years has taken a nosedive while foreign capital outflow last year reached a staggering £10bn. Per capita national product is now lower than that of East Germany.
There is an absolute and intractable contradiction between Britain's military and financial power and the domestic industrial base on which it rests. This is now ripping through the entire fabric of British domestic politics. The prospects for peaceful resolution of this contradiction are now almost non-existent; in consequence we are witnessing a massive crisis of the British parliamentary state. The insulation of foreign from domestic politics is coming to an end, and with it everything 'normal' and 'traditional' about British politics.
This is particularly important when we come to ask what is specific to the crisis in Britain and above all, what is so peculiar about the English? Everyone who relates British politics to the unique features of its labour movement, party system, disposition towards peace and parliament, or any purely national feature of British politics gets it upside down. What is unique about Britain is its relation to the rest of the world; not at all the nature of its labour movement, traditions of political system, all of which are now passing and will continue to pass through a most dramatic and un-English evolution.
The peculiarities of the English were astutely summed up in a cartoon in Clarin, the Buenos Aires nationalist daily, after the fleet left Portsmouth. 'What do you expect?' runs the caption, 'they were still pirates when we were already Indians.' The anatomy of England is that of a pirate nation grown so flabby that it can scarcely bury its treasure. The diagnosis is not end of empire but extreme excess of it. Britain is sick with terminal imperial decay.
From these facts we can discern the central strategic mistake of the proponents of the Alternative Economic Strategy. Their solution to Britain's problems amounts to an attempt to rebuild the economy by defending it against the rest of the world. Protective tariff barriers will wall us off from the plundering multinationals so that we can build up the economy under government supervision, as did the Germans and Japanese after the war. This is to happen in the framework of a mixed economy. This approach ignores what the Japanese and Germans had to go through before and during the war. It completely underestimates the scale of the class forces which will stand in the way of such a reorientation and therefore the nature and scope of the violence and disruption which would be needed to undertake it. On the one hand the Labour left are therefore still shellshocked by the ferocity of Thatcher's attack because they do not understand how deep are the problems of the capitalist class. On the other hand they cannot face up to the resistance which they themselves encounter when they attempt capitalist reform without its prerequisite — the destruction of British working class organisation as we know it.
They remain mesmerised by the party structure of British politics, unable to discern the underlying class and social structure and its relation to the state. For them the Tories represent the ruling class and the Labour Party the working class and ever more shall do so. The rise of the SDP, the witch hunt, the trade union bureaucracy's attachment to imperialism and its willingness to wreck the Labour Party rather than accept a serious confrontation with capital, the growing spectre of coalition, now ten times nearer since Foot handed Thatcher the gift of national unity against the Argentinians — all these are no more than passing ripples on a pond.
The essence of the matter is very simple. Does the agent of our oppression lie inside or outside the country? For Benn and the supporters of the AES the principal resistance to social change lies outside Britain. The answer is therefore a 'national liberation struggle' to free the land from external pressure. Relatively small layers inside Britain will oppose this, and our main objective is to neutralise them by convincing them we will liberate them from the harsh lash of the foreigner. It follows that reforms will be easy to win; that parliamentary majorities will be easy to obtain and the risk of treachery is low; that the danger of coalition manouevres need not deter us; and that the main thing we have to fear is fear itself.
The criminal error of this idea is its wilful ignorance of the social forces aligned against change inside Britain. In the IMF, which Benn believes is holding Britain to ransom, we meet our own capitalists working on a world scale. The idea that British multinationals and banks have somehow taken wings, and are no longer British because they work outside Britain, is like saying Julius Caesar wasn't really Roman.
Thus Tony Benn treats the 1976 expenditure cuts as an invasion of British decision-making prerogatives by 'IMF imperialism'. But Michael Meacher has a slightly different story. 'The IMF was largely the vehicle,' he said, 'by which domestic groups, including the City, Bank and Treasury, could get extra power behind their elbows to jog elected ministers ... Haines describes this action as an attempted civilian coup against the government.' It is quite important to distinguish an invasion from a coup: it tells you which side the army is on.
Labour's left commit the unpardonable crime of all opportunism; underestimation of the class enemy's determination and resources in the hope of finding a short cut which avoids the need for confrontation. Does this most Protestant of labour movements really imagine that it can so easily avoid an accounting for past sins? The root of resistance to change in Britain was accurately identified by Lenin: the monstrous growth of parasitism brought by living off the labour of others.
Imperialism has created a Britain torn between irreconcilable interests with a vast middle ground facing penury and social disaster. Lenin and Hobson were astonished by a Britain in which a mere 15 per cent of UK wealth lay abroad; the figure is now above forty per cent. The income of the capitalists in the UK is £45bn; £10bn, or nearly a quarter, comes from abroad. Worse still another £15bn takes the form of rent and non-trading, that is, parasitic income. The total parasitic income of the British ruling class is thus £25bn or more than half its total surplus value! These are truly gigantic sums, which render millions of individuals dependent on imperialism. For example one third of all civil servants work for the Ministry of Defence, and some 1.2 million work in insurance and banking.
Moreover our society secretes parasites at all levels who regulate a terrible social compromise between classes: a compromise which has purchased domestic social advance and peace at the expense of foreign plunder. Most disastrous of all, we have created a trade union bureaucracy which is educated and organised around support for imperialism, and which runs the workers' political party. The true class relation of forces in Britain has been laid bare by this crisis: the handful of MPs who stood out against the military adventure represent the outer boundary of those political representatives in whom workers can now place trust.
Of course those who are dependent on foreign income have no interest in it. None of them will be any better off after Thatcher's brigandage. The problem is that their condition cannot be relieved by capitalist means: within a framework of parliamentary reform. Reform is beyond capitalism's scope without the most violent attacks on working people; and beyond socialism's scope without revolution.
Imagine the consequences if Labour were to announce a wholesale onslaught on our imperial role. It would threaten to throw millions on the streets at a stroke. Such huge social dislocation requires tremendous movements of humans and machines for reconversion to productive activity. Under conditions of revolutionary upheaval and working class mobilisation these movements are simple. Capitalism can achieve such changes only under conditions of war or fascism.
Labour's opportunism consists in a moral refusal to face up to the policies which would resolve the problems of millions of frightened people who have been cushioned from the underlying harshness of capitalism by the proceeds of world plunder. Yet there is another way, an alternative to barbarism. This consists in recognising the inevitability of revolutionary upheaval in any serious attempt to defend workers' interests. It consists in recognising that our ruling class's greatest strength — its overseas role — is also the source of its greatest weakness. It consists in recognising that the socialist road for Britain's workers consists in an alliance with all those, throughout the world, who are suffering attack from our own ruling class and that, in distinction to the situation in a dependent country this alliance is the first precondition for social advance. As the Angolan and Mozambican revolutions relieved Portugal of its fascists, so we must link up with the peoples of the Caribbean, Southern Africa, India and the Far East to rid ourselves of Thatcher.
Labour will only start on this road if it renounces Britain's world role and withdraws from imperialist power politics. This means withdrawing the fleet to port and withdrawing from NATO and all colonial outposts. It involves unconditional withdrawal from Ireland. It means winding up the Commonwealth and unilaterally ending all guarantees of military [illegible]. A British government which halted all military and economic assistance to Commonwealth countries, which serve only as an excuse for intervention, [illegible].
But Labour must also attack the economic underpinning of this world role. A new relation with the oppressed of the world calls for unilateral renunciation of British foreign assets. They should be nationalised and handed over to the governments of the country in which they are located. The pound [illegible] should be wound up when the banks are nationalised. [illegible] their sisters and brothers against the multinationals instead of [illegible] and an independent foreign policy. A break with our capitalists will provoke revolution in much of the third world. It will call for alliances with non-capitalist countries, and this will include [illegible] a military pact with the USA. Western Europe is an imperialist alliance whose collective security arrangements are directed against all those who threaten the joint economic empire of the European investing powers. The notion of a 'neutral' Western Europe is absurd: aggression is written into its very foundations.
The alternative is not slavish subservience to Moscow, nor is it splendid isolation. How long would it be before democratic socialist Britain was joined by democratic socialist France, Spain, West Germany, Italy — and East Germany, Poland and Russia? Britain has nothing to fear from alliances with Eastern Europe, and the Kremlin has everything to lose from it. A British government which halted all military and economic sanctions against Russia would be a ten times greater threat to the bureaucracy than Solidarnosc, because it would deprive it of its excuse for existence.
Neutrality in diplomacy is a cover for renouncing support for revolutions: renunciation of all alliances means, in practice, renunciation of all routes to the oppressed of the world. The aim of an independent foreign policy is different: to open the road to an alliance with the workers and oppressed of the world through support for all struggles against imperialism, on the one hand; and through systematic defence of socialist revolution and socialist democracy against all who stand in their way, on the other. This implies support both for the antibureaucratic struggles in the East, and in the dependent countries for those fighting for socialist emancipation.
Any system of alliances, which would change with the changing fortunes of world revolution, should be directed to this end. Its aim is not to conclude pacts of non-interference, or mutual defence against revolution — a modern holy alliance — but to facilitate a meeting of peoples on the ground of common struggle against all oppression and all class rule. For Britain's labour movement this is not just the best road to socialism — it is the only road.
ALAN FREEMAN is the author of a forthcoming book on Tony Benn to be published by Pluto Press, and a regular contributor to International.
References
1. Alan Freeman, Benn and British Socialism, in International Volume 6 No 3, September 1981
2. Statistical Bulletin of the Organisation of American States, 1980.
3. United Kingdom Balance of Payments (The Pink Book) 1981 edition, CSO, p60. Note that this includes banking and public sector assets. Private sector non-bank assets were £48bn in 1980.
4. OECD financial statistics.
5. World Bank debt tables.
6. Ibid.
7. United Kingdom Balance of Payments 1981, CSO, p35.
8. The Alternative Economic Strategy, London CSE and Labour Co-ordinating Committee.
9. David Thompson, England in the Twentieth Century, Penguin 1963, p103.
10. Phillips and Maddock, The Growth of the British Economy, McMillan, p39.
11. Observer 25 April 1982.
12. Interview with Socialist Challenge, 26 April 1982.
13. Statistical Bulletin of the Organisation of American States, 1980.
14. Ibid.
15. LD Trotsky, Where is Britain Going?, New Park 1970, p3.
16. Annual Abstract of Statistics, HMSO, 1981.
17. Le Monde survey of the world economy, 1980.
18. Tony Benn, Britain as a Colony in New Socialist No 1, reprinted in Arguments for Democracy, Jonathan Cape, 1981, pp 10-11.
19. Michael Meacher, Whitehall's Short Way with Democracy in What Went Wrong, Spokesman 1979, p182.
20. VI Lenin, Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism, in Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart 1969, pp241-2.
21. Ibid.
22. See notes 3 and 4.
23. United Kingdom Balance of Payments, op cit.
24. Annual Abstract of Statistics, HMSO, 1981.