Abstract
The Thatcherite Offensive is a highly sophisticated and innovative analysis of Thatcherism as a political project designed to shift the balance of class forces in Britain decisively in favour of capital. Drawing on a range of theoretical resources – key among these the later thought of Nicos Poulantzas – Gallas constructs a conceptual model of key modes of governance and their associated strategic imperatives under capitalist conditions and uses this to periodise and analyse a series of key stages in the development of Thatcherism and British neoliberalism more widely.
Class analysis is pivotal to the book and is applied in a manner, Gallas insists, that differentiates his account both from mainstream and other Marxist accounts of Thatcherism. Against the tenor of ‘historicisation and normalisation’ inherent in much of the former which tends to play down the extent to which Thatcherite politics represented a political rupture and tends to disarticulate issues of class domination, the author shows convincingly that the key agents of Thatcherism implemented a well-prepared strategy to undermine the British labour movement and to smash the institutions that helped underpin its strength. The coherence of Thatcherism as a conscious strategy of class offensive is brought out in particular in a series of case studies in which Gallas analyses key turning points in the development of the Thatcherite project. These include a fascinating close reading of Conservative policy documents that demonstrate that the ascendant New Right faction within the Tory party had formulated a systematic plan for a class offensive well before Thatcher came to power.
In relation to other Marxist accounts, Gallas emphasises that the key innovation in his approach is that it pivots on the understanding ‘that in the first instance, capitalist class domination consists in the extraction of surplus labour in the process of production’ (p. 5). As such, his account brings the way in which the Thatcherite project sought directly to intervene in labour relations to the foreground of his analysis. This is something he insists other radical theorists of Thatcherism such as Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (Hall & Jacques 1983) (with their emphasis on the production of consent) and Simon Clarke (1988) and Werner Bonefeld (1993; 1995) (who emphasise monetary policy) have tended to neglect.
Gallas begins the first part of the book with a critical assessment of key analyses of the Thatcher era, focusing in particular on the debate between Stuart Hall (Hall & Jacques 1983) and Bob Jessop (Jessop et al. 1988) and their respective associates. Gallas extrapolates several themes from this survey which he then combines with Poulantzas’ understanding of the ‘capitalist type of state’ (as especially elaborated in State, Power, Socialism (Poulantzas 1978)) as a material condensation of social relations of force to formulate a conceptual framework for the comprehension and analysis of key fields and levels of top–down, state-centred, policy-formation under capitalism. The core analytical distinction Gallas makes in this regard is between the field of ‘class politics’ – ‘that is, political activities aimed directly at securing the extraction of surplus value’ – on one hand, and, on the other, ‘economic order politics’ – ‘that is, interventions primarily aimed at establishing and securing the preconditions for economic growth, which affect class domination only indirectly’ (p. 7). When these different fields cohere, they form what Gallas calls a ‘regime of condensation’, which is a successful mode of class domination that (in Gallas’ Poulantzasian terms) stabilises a capitalist social formation and secures the unification of the power bloc while simultaneously disorganising the working class as a collective political agent.
This schema is then further refined with the addition of some concepts drawn from Poulantzas’ (1974) thought in Fascism and Dictatorship in relation to the ‘steps and periods of class struggle’. Accordingly, Gallas differentiates between offensive, defensive and consolidating steps in what he calls the ‘cycle of class struggle’ which he further subdivides into successive periods. Gallas argues that the cycle of class struggle fundamentally shapes the context in which political actors formulate strategic calculations and determines the relevance and viability of particular strategies within the two domains of class politics and economic order politics.
Having elaborated this complex conceptual model, Gallas then sets out in the second part of the book to apply this framework as an analytical tool to help map and interpret the historical development of Thatcherism. The structure of the chapters in this, the main section of the book, reflects the periodisation of the cycle of class struggle he sets out in the preceding part. What emerges is a highly sophisticated conceptualisation, grounded in richly detailed historical analysis, of Thatcherism as an offensive step of the capitalist class that generated a new class political order that cohered with the entrenchment of a new regime in the field of economic order politics (which had emerged in embryo under the Callaghan government) to form an overarching ‘neoliberal regime of condensation’. The class political regime combined a ‘repressive extraction strategy’ in relation to labour relations with a ‘mode of leadership and domination’ that pivoted on what Gallas calls a ‘two nations hegemonic project’ that disorganised the working class by binding certain fractions closely to the power bloc. The corresponding realm of economic order politics comprised a finance-driven, free market accumulation strategy with an ‘authoritarian-managerialist’ state strategy that reconfigured the institutional materiality of the state in line with the requirements of the accumulation strategy.
The last two chapters of this second section of the book track the slow erosion of the Thatcherite project which Gallas explains in terms of a shift in the cycle of class struggle. While Thatcherism orchestrated a highly successful class offensive against the organised working class, it was unable as a project to make the transition to a new class political order appropriate for the consolidation of the changes it had wrought once militant trade unionism had been defeated.
In the short final part of the book, Gallas analyses the politics of New Labour, presenting Blairism in terms of a project to modify the neoliberal regime of condensation. According to Gallas, New Labour orchestrated a successful consolidating step of the power bloc by breaking with the class political regime established by their predecessors, while broadly maintaining the economic political order first entrenched by the Thatcherites. For the author, the term ‘Thatcherism’, then, should be reserved for the class political regime instigated under Thatcher herself and continued under Major, while ‘Blairism’ refers to a successive phase in the wider neoliberal regime of condensation that corresponded with a shift in the cycle of class struggle. Thus, British neoliberalism (up until 2010 at least – the scope of Gallas’ focus does not extend further than this) has comprised ‘two different class political regimes accompanying the same economic-political order at different stages of the cycle of class struggle’ (p. 289).
The book draws to a close with some brief comments about the onset of the global economic crisis from 2007 and the demise of Brown’s administration. This, Gallas suggests, marked the end of the Blairite class political project and the end of the consolidating step orchestrated by New Labour – presumably (though Gallas does not clearly indicate this) to be replaced by a new offensive step cohering in the form of Cameron’s austerity project. Interestingly, the fall of the Labour government also reflected deeper problems in the economic-political order because the economic crisis in Britain of course was determined in large part by the weaknesses of British capitalism that had been exacerbated by the finance-driven accumulation strategy entrenched under Thatcherism. This brings us to Gallas’ overall judgement in relation to the Thatcherite project, which is that while it was enormously successful in the class political realm as an offensive to discipline and subordinate labour, it was much less successful – when judged over the longer term at least – in the realm of economic-order politics. While the accumulation strategy the Thatcherites implemented temporarily alleviated some of the symptoms of the ill-health of British capitalism, it intensified the structural weaknesses of the economy in the long run.
The Thatcherite Offensive is by no means easy reading. Part 1 of the book, for all its brilliance, is especially hard going in places. Gallas has a tendency, in my view, to over-complicate things and it is easy to become disoriented amid the almost Byzantine complexity of the first few chapters. Part of the problem here is that Gallas spends much of the first section, in a highly painstaking process, theorising a ‘reconciliation’ between the Hall et al.’s and Jessop et al.’s schools of thought in relation to Thatcherism and hegemony when it is not clear that this is necessary. Of course it makes sense as a point of entry to begin with the classic literature on Thatcherism, but it seems to me that Gallas could probably have taken a rather more direct route to the formulation of his conceptual model.
Furthermore, Gallas’ conceptual category of ‘the political scene’ remains rather under-theorised even though it seems to do quite a lot of work in his schema – particularly in the later chapters. It is fairly clear that the concept refers to the realm of quotidian party politics expressed in day-to-day manoeuvring within and between parties and that this operates with a kind of relative autonomy in relation to the other elements of Gallas’ model of capitalist politics. The way in which this relative autonomy functions, however, is left rather mysterious and he does not explain its articulation with the two modes of governance that he delineates. This imprecision allows Gallas to make what seem like slightly arbitrary statements about the ramifications of particular political developments in relation to his schema. So, for example, Thatcher’s overthrow was, for Gallas, a crisis in the Tory party that was contained within the ‘political scene’, whereas the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) crisis spilled over into the class political realm – but we are not given much of an explanation why only one of these crises took on a class political dimension.
In addition, Gallas makes rather too much, in my view, of what he identifies as the major innovation of his approach – his explicit focus on the class dimension and the analytical priority he assigns to exploitation at the point of production. It is true that Gallas’ schema allows him to articulate class struggle with institutional and policy analysis in a novel way, but theorists such as Bonefeld and Clarke would probably baulk at the suggestion that their thought neglects the dimension of class struggle and exploitation.
Despite these issues, the conceptual framework Gallas develops for the analysis of articulated levels and fields of governance and political strategy in relation to different phases of class struggle under capitalism is extraordinarily powerful. For one thing, this schema enables him to develop a convincing and elegant conceptualisation of the broad trajectory of Thatcherism and indeed of British neoliberalism more widely. It explains, with great lucidity, in Gallas’ words, ‘the uneven temporality of political developments during the Thatcherite era and beyond’, in a way that grasps and accounts for ‘the continuities and discontinuities of neoliberalism’ (p. 7) in Britain. However, the utility and significance of Gallas’ framework, it seems to me, extend much more widely than this. What Gallas develops is no less than a cognitive map of the key political processes under conditions of capitalist democracy. His framework, then, provides a conceptual toolkit for the application of Poulantzas’ relatively abstract insights about state power as a social relation and as a strategic terrain of struggle to conjunctural analysis of specific political-governmental strategies in concrete social formations. As such, Gallas has, in my view, made a hugely important contribution to (neo)Poulantzasian theory.
Overall, The Thatcherite Offensive is a highly impressive book. I certainly have no hesitation in recommending it to all scholars interested in the politics and political economy of Thatcherism, the development of neoliberalism in Britain more widely and indeed to all those interested in the field of (neo)Poulantzasian theory.