In and Against the State

Discussion Notes for Socialists

London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, Seth Wheeler, Seth Wheeler

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786806918
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Defensa política

Originally published as a pamphlet in 1979 and again by Pluto in 1980, In and Against the State brought together questions of working-class struggle and state power, exploring how revolutionary socialists might reconcile working in the public sector with their radical politics. Informed by autonomist political ideas and practices that were central to the protests of 1968, the book's authors spoke to a generation of activists wrestling withthe question of where to place their energies.

Forty years have passed, yet the questions it posed are still to be answered. As the eclipse of Corbynism and the onslaught of the global pandemic have demonstrated with brutal clarity, a renewed socialist strategy is needed more urgently than ever.

This edition includes a new introduction by Seth Wheeler and an interview with John McDonnell that reflect on the continuing relevance of In and Against the State and the questions it raises.

1

In the State

Many people have started talking about such institutions as schools, hospitals, local councils and local magistrates courts as ‘the state’. Yet just a few years ago it would have seemed quite out of place to most people to use such a hard, ‘political’ term about such familiar, everyday things. In seeing such institutions as part of ‘the state’, we are also asking questions about the state in Britain today. Is it helpful, or neutral, or oppressive to us? How can we influence its actions? And so on.

These questions arise because more and more of us, in more and more ways, are closely tied up with the state’s institutions. Take an average working woman with children. In the mid-19th century her sole contact with the state would have been the Poor Law Guardians and the police. Today such a woman has dealings with the education authority over her children’s schooling; with the doctor and the hospital over her own and her family’s health; with the town hall Directorate of Finance over rates; the Housing Department over rent. Besides, she will be visited by the social worker, the probation officer and possibly the juvenile department of the police, over her kids’ street life; Inland Revenue over her earnings; the Unemployment Benefit Office or Social Security if unemployed. She may well approach an Industrial Tribunal over her unequal pay, or a Rent Tribunal over her unfair rent. In addition it is likely that at some stage in her life she will have a job in some public organisation, because about a third of all people in jobs today are employees of the state – whether as cleaners of buildings or roads, caretakers, clerks, cooks, social workers, architects, teachers, doctors or administrators.

A distinction is often made between our public and our private life. But even the parts of our life designated private do not any longer, if they ever did, seem to be fully under our control or unaffected by the state and its policies. The state seems at times to penetrate even our closest relationships with each other. Apart from the fact that the state marries and divorces us, officialdom has a well-defined view about ‘the family’, and what it should be.

Relations between men and women and their children are relevant to state institutions, they appear to matter to the authorities. Men are designated ‘head of household’ and have certain rights and duties. Women, as housewives and mothers, are expected to carry out, to a certain standard of proficiency, many jobs that the state also has a hand in, such as training children and nursing the old and sick. Women whose husbands have died are treated differently, receive different benefits, from women who are divorced or separated. The imbalance of power and initiative which women have suffered is rooted in the home, in the relations of sex, child-bearing and domestic work. But this imbalance doesn’t stay within the confines of the home – it has spread out to influence the world outside, the world of work and business and of the law, administration and welfare. Women are sometimes noticing and pointing out that their experience with the state (as employees or ‘clients’) is in some ways an extension of the disadvantages they experience in private life.

The state also influences how we relate to our workmates, our bosses, those above and below us in the hierarchy. It determines in part how much our employers can pay us, whether or not we will be made redundant. It puts limits on ways in which we can organise and take action as workers. It affects the way we relate to those we come into contact with through our work – our ‘clients’. This is especially true if we are state workers.

OUR EXPERIENCE OF THE STATE IS CONTRADICTORY

The ways in which we interact with the state are contradictory – they leave many people confused. We seem to need things from the state, such as child care, houses, medical treatment. But what we are given is often shoddy or penny-pinching, and besides, it comes to us in a way that seems to limit our freedom, reduce the control we have over our lives. The tenant of a council house, pleased enough to obtain a tenancy, could still say plenty about inadequate maintenance and restrictive rules and regulations, for instance. As state workers, perhaps voting Labour, we may have hopes that a Labour administration is in the working person’s interest. Yet we find that, as manual workers employed by a Labour-controlled council or government, we are as overworked and underpaid as we would be in a private firm.

As workers in those occupations that are termed ‘professional’, such as social work, or teaching, we are often given impossible problems to solve arising from poverty or from the powerlessness of our ‘clients’. The resources available to back up our intervention – the welfare provision of the state – are a drop in the ocean of need. And besides, it is clear that many other actions of the state and of the economy itself are pulling in the opposite direction, making things worse for the poor. We often feel that we are being asked to manipulate people, to use women’s pride in their home or love of their children, for instance, as well as their need of the practical resources we partially control and can give them access to, to induce co-operation.

As socialists we’re always taught that somehow services provided by the state are better than those from the private sector. Better be in the hands of a council than a private landlord; better our NHS than extortionate private medical insurance schemes – and so on. And this seems to be true, but only up to a point. Somehow what we get is never quite what we asked for. The waiting lists for hospital beds were always too long; gradually charges began to be introduced for this and that. Another example is the promise of the new towns after the war – which made Britain famous for town planning, but were somehow, when it came to it, bleak social deserts to live in. It is not just that state provision is inadequate, under-resourced and on the cheap. The way it is resourced and administered to us doesn’t seem to reflect our real needs. Pensions, for instance, seem to be maintained at a level, and given on terms, that have little to do with the way we experience our old age. They seem geared more to the needs of employers or the state.

State provision leaves a bad taste in our mouths. State institutions are often authoritarian, they put us down, tie us up with regulations. And many of the working class seem to be defined by the state as ‘irresponsible’, as ‘troublemakers’, ‘scroungers’. If we are born out of wedlock it defines us as ‘illegitimate’.

All these things leave us wondering: if the state is not providing these services in the way we want them, it cannot really be doing it for us. Why does the state provide them?

DEEPENING CONTRADICTIONS

A few years back, in late 1975 or early 1976, the long-threatened contraction of state expenditure began in earnest. The pruning of services and the abandonment of capital building programmes only took effect gradually. But it has become increasingly clear to us that assumptions many of us made in the sixties about ‘the welfare state’ were mistaken. Our hopes and demands for general improvements had always been perverted into ‘special case’, selective welfare – inadequate and with strings attached.

The Labour Party has always promised to be a party of ‘reform’. Even those who felt reform was either not enough, or a misguided route to socialism, were at least confident that economic growth combined with working-class pressure would ensure a gradual improvement in standards of housing, of health, of education. People now gradually became aware that the ‘cuts’ signified not a short-term set-back in a general curve of improvement in standards, but a reminder that the term ‘welfare’ has always been ambiguous.

The cuts and the fight-back against them, however, have raised useful questions in people’s minds. Perhaps it never was our welfare state? We are still, somehow, certain that it is right to fight against the sale of council houses into owner-occupation; to fight against turning medicine over to private practice; or the denationalising of the steel industry. But perhaps we should not be looking to defend the state, even the ‘welfare’ state, as it is, but fighting for something better? If so – how do you get what you can, defend yourself against losses, and resist oppressiveness, when losses and gains seem to be two faces of the same coin?

When we first started to write this we already felt that, drawing on our own experience as state workers and as ‘clients’ of the state, we had a clear and painful idea of the predicament in which the state catches us. We wanted to fill out our understanding of it, however, by long conversations with people in different kinds of situations. We decided to include here quite substantial reports of what they told us – because we were amazed by the sharpness of the contradictions people were experiencing, the clarity of their observations and the imagination they were applying to finding a political solution.

The conversations are not put forward as evidence – but as illustration. The people chosen and the kind of relationship they are in with regard to the state, are not an ideal selection and do not cover, or even represent, every facet of our interaction with the state. We recognise that they under-represent manual jobs, for instance, the bulk of state employment. They do not include clerical work. And they don’t express the special pre-dicament of black people, and other groups (Ulster Catholics for instance) up against the state. Nor do they reveal the oppressiveness of the state’s definitions and practices on homosexuals.

• The first conversation was with Maureen, a woman who has raised a large family, needing the state for her income. For her, the state seems to give independence with one hand, while stealing it away with the other.

• The second conversation was designed to raise some of the contradictions in which state manual workers find themselves. We talked to John, about the situation of a conductor on London Transport buses.

• Sarah, Neil, Patrick and Mary are teachers, aware that state education is oppressive in many ways, but each trying to find a way of teaching what they feel is right.

• Joan and Kate work for a Community Health Council. They know that their job for the state is to channel protest into manageable forms, but they talked about the ways in which they found they could use their position to support the struggle for better health.

• The fifth conversation we had was with a number of workers in two community advice centres, overwhelmed with requests for help with housing and other problems, but trying to develop collective and class-conscious forms of organisation in their area.

When we talked to people we made it clear that we ourselves were socialists, and in the case of the state workers we chose them because they were socialists too, asking them about the limitations and possibilities of their position.

Finally, we had a meeting with three Labour Party activists. Two of them were backbench Labour councillors in a Labour-controlled local authority, hoping to use their position to push the Labour leadership to radical policies in support of their working-class constituents. They are a different case from the others we talked to, in that they chose their position precisely for what they felt it could offer a socialist. In this they contrast with a state employee, who may justly say that she or he needs the job and the pay.

The accounts that follow deal mainly with the problems people experience, and in this way they may seem rather depressing. But we felt it important not to skimp on spelling out the contradictions carefully, so that the difficulties should not be underestimated when we later go on to examine the possibilities of finding a way around them. The discussions did lead to constructive and positive ideas about ways of acting as socialists and as feminists in relation to the state and these hopes will surface again later in the book.

MAUREEN

Maureen Murphy lives in south London and has had ten children, all but one now grown up. Her husband died nine years ago when the youngest was six. She has lived her life and brought up her children by means of careful, painstaking dealings with a set of official institutions. Among them, the most important are social security, the housing authority, the health services, the education system and the police and law courts. But it would be possible to list a dozen more types of official with whom she has dealings.

The state is far more important to Maureen than any boss from whom her husband ever earned a wage. So she has never gone out of her way to have a fight with the authorities. ‘It doesn’t get you anywhere. You don’t win. They have the majority every time. You can go down to the council and rant and rave, you still won’t get anything. If you go down and ask in a polite way, then you might get what you want.’ She takes care to keep on the right side of them. After all, ‘They are important to me these people. I do have to depend on them. I can’t afford to take risks.’ This good reputation is particularly important because Maureen believes that there is a connection between the various official bodies. ‘If you get into trouble with one, the other one is likely to know. That is what I think, anyway.’

The family has been dependent for many years on social security. She reckons that she normally gets what is due to her, but occasionally appeals against decisions. ‘About money for Eileen’s shoes, for example. I filled in the little blue slip and explained why they were necessary for her.’ She got the extra allowance without going to a tribunal. Social security don’t visit now, don’t bother her. ‘They know me.’

As far as housing goes, the family has been with the council for 36 years, mainly as GLC tenants. She now has a good rehabilitated house. ‘They give me no bother.’ But neither do they do repairs. She accepts this as a matter of course.

She and her children have grown familiar, through one crisis after another, with many nearby hospitals: Kings, St. Thomas’s, Guys, Great Ormond Street, the Belgrave, the Evelina. Maureen herself has asthma and bronchitis now, and is subject to heart attacks. Her youngest daughter is mildly epileptic. The children have had many alarming illnesses and accidents. One had pneumonia, another polio. One dropped a match in a petrol tank and had serious burns on the face. Another gashed her leg on a steel bar while playing on a bomb site, and had 32 stitches. Maureen became practised in dealing with the health service and with her own worry. ‘You get used to it. It just grows on you. It’s like going and doing the shopping every day.’

She learned what things were serious enough to warrant going to the big teaching hospitals. But she preferred the small local children’s hospital, the Belgrave, now threatened on account of the cuts in government spending. ‘They were very kind to the children there. Eileen had an operation on her head there. It’s a very very good hospital. A lot of women here really use it. You can go in and give the children their lunch and tea. The Evelina was like that too, but it’s been closed a long time now.’ GPs however have not really been much use to the family. ‘I don’t know of any good ones. The doctor across the road, he’ll write me a prescription, but he never asks how you feel. He’s overworked. He needs seeing to himself.’

So crucial is the state health system to Maureen’s family that the strikes of ambulance men, doctors and nurses are moments of real worry for her, for fear of having nowhere to turn. ‘I just say afterwards, thank goodness it passed this time without anything happening.’

The school system has been a problem to all Maureen’s children. Most of the kids spent a lot of their childhood staying away. School could never hold their attention. Eileen, being epileptic, had a specially hard time in the year she spent at the local comprehensive. ‘She just stood outside the classroom door. She wouldn’t go in. She just wasn’t able to mix with people at all. She learned nothing there.’

Then Great Ormond Street hospital, to Maureen’s relief, said she ought to send Eileen to a special school. She was able to use the health system as a lever on the education system. They got her a place. But only after a year of waiting. And during that year Eileen was continually at home in Maureen’s care. ‘You see, I didn’t really want her to go out alone, you never knew when she might have a fit.’ This real additional responsibility for Maureen was caused by a school that had no time or money to spend on an unhappy girl. The work of caring and coping can be passed backwards and forwards in this way between the state and a woman at home.

The comprehensive school was too big. ‘There’s too many children. They can’t cope there. They are just not able to run after every child.’ Maureen had had a formal meeting at the outset with too many different teachers. After that her only contact with the school was through letters. She does not remember ever having had an invitation to any kind of social event, or to a chat with an individual teacher.

The ‘special school’ to which Eileen was eventually sent was not so meanly resourced. It was an ideal school in Maureen’s eyes. ‘The headmaster was ever so nice. And then, parents could go there for all the outings. They’d tell you all about the school and show you round. There would be Christmas parties and open days. Eileen is taken and brought back each day on the bus. She has the same teacher all the time. They give her her tablets at lunch time. And if she isn’t well, they will ring me and tell me. They are very interested in her. She likes it so much she is going to stay on, though she could leave this summer.’

Because the comprehensive schools failed to hold the children’s attention, they were continually being picked up by the authorities. The local policeman, whom Maureen knew and respected as the c...