An interesting
article on Lenin’s Tomb a few weeks ago on the conjuncture
in Britain introduced the idea of Petty Caesarism. It is a
fascinating idea, debatable, but better than the continued assertion
“this is a weak government”. Oh really, how is a government that
is able to carry out its programme almost unencumbered weak?
The
definition of Caeasarism, at least on
Wikipedia centres on notions of charismatic leadership,
personality cults and military rule. It would be transparently mad to
apply that definition anywhere in Europe, let alone Britain.
Fortunately Antonio Gramsci expanded the term. In his Prison
Notebooks the term also can denote the convergence of party
programmes, coalition government, national government and
technocratic rule, the last is very important in somewhere like
Greece.
The
key point here is that social conflict either ceases or is brought to
a stalemate, allowing an otherwise unrepresentative portion of
society, be it the officer class or the banking or political elite to
rule without the use of formal or informal democratic means, formerly
considered essential. In other words - stasis. In Greece this is the
result of rather intense class struggle. In Britain, if it exists, it
is the result of weak or at least one-sided conflict. Further
elaboration is perhaps needed.
The
point I’m getting to is it made me reflect on a fact of the
anti-fascist struggle (the following btw is not a justification of
the LT article, just inspired by it). Unite Against Fascism and the
English Defence League are clear cut manifestations of two different
and opposing sides of civil society. The former is urban,
multicultural (specifically anti-racist) and collective, the latter
is suburban and rural, mono-cultural (racist) and petty.
The
two groups represent two significant trains of thought in our
society, yet the numbers of people actively battling it out are quite
small. It regularly took tens of thousands to defeat the NF and BNP.
It took at the most 4,000 to turn the EDL back in Walthamstow, and
that has been the high-point of anti-fascist mobilisation this time round
so far.
Compare
this to ten years ago when Stop the War and the Countryside Alliance
held similar marches within a week of each other, hundreds of
thousands strong. It is a perverse fact but now the stakes have been
raised people seem more reluctant than ever to take action. The
Labour Party may have lost the will and the ways to mobilise against
the far-right, or against anything, but it still sits there like the
biggest boulder in the highway, and there is no sustained effort to
remove it or go round.
This
reluctance to come out is the basis of Petty Caesarism in Britain, if
it exists. Power is so well insulated from the population the ruling
class’s response to any challenge is, more or less, “what’re
you going to do about it?”
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