I well remember the dismay of the comrade charged with getting me through volume one of . . . Capital: A Critique of Political Economy . . . during a discussion of advertising . . . This led me off . . . to an expression of my delight at . . . one set in Smarties Place, an imaginary night club for kids . . . in which 10 year olds were served cocktail glasses full of multi-coloured chocolate Smarties . . . My delight in describing the ad invited an expression of confused disdain.
Probably not the best thing for a communist to admit to in 1981, but then Don Milligan is used to upsetting people.
A former member of CPGB, Workers Fight and the Revolutionary Communist Party as well as a veteran gay rights campaigner, Milligan is in a unique position to discuss why revolution seems further away than ever.
Ostensibly emerging from two essays available on his website, Milligan peppers the book with his own history, such as being arrested for rioting in protest over the execution of Patrice Lumumba through to being disciplined by fellow International Socialists comrades for focusing on gay liberation instead of class politics, to show how the British left has evolved over the last 60 odd years.
And what a journey.
From the layers of confusion as to what constitutes a commercial society as most capitalists seem to be just as much victims of unseen forces (such as globalisation) as employees, old oligarchies feeling the mismatch between themselves and the masses, the difficulty of theoretical differences between productive and unproductive labour, retreating into a mythological realm and the last outburst of class politics of industrial action in the 70’s.
Combine the above with a never-ending parade of theories that do not appeal to the working class (Proudhon may not have been discussing farms and small shops when he described property as being theft but how do you square such thinking with indigenous people wanting their land back) and we can see how some develop the idea of false consciousness.
As you can tell, it’s a dense read which packs an awful lot into its 150-pages. As a result, it’s not one for the casual reader and is bound to annoy a wide spectrum of left-wing activists, but, crucially, Milligan refuses to throw the baby out with the bathwater by wanting to move beyond such trains of thought like:
Traditionally, the left has banked on the dysfunction of capitalism, of the failure of its ‘countervailing tendencies,’ and of the collapse of commerce in a welter of mass unemployment . . . It is often hoped, against all historical evidence to the contrary, that upheaval and economic crisis will improve the prospects of the left. It never has, and probably never will . . . Commercial society will not stand still for us; it is a perpetually moving target.”
Don Milligan, 2022, The Embrace of Capital: Capitalism from the Inside, Zero Books. ISBN-13: 978-1789048018
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
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