The Issues • 23 February 2003

Almost liberating the masses

Booed away from the university! What a sorry end to what could have been capped as a glorious, controversial, and lengthy political career. Father of the Malta Labour Party? Saviour of Malta? No thank you, they say down at Mile End. A traitor more like it. This is the man whose fixation with Cottonera landed the Nationalists back into power, after his abstentions from parliamentary votes brought Labour Leader Alfred Sant to his knees.

He remains a burly character, first taking power as Labour leader after an internal rift with then-leader Paul Boffa in 1949, following the Labour Party’s ultimatum to Britain concerning Marshall Aid.

But his main aim was to give the worker the rights they deserved and improve their standard of living.

He firstly regaled the Maltese with sovereignty. A Fabian socialist, Mintoff returned to Malta from his Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford determined to change things for Malta, then a small island-nation under British rule. Even in his future actions as Labour leader, pushing Integration first, then supporting Independence and finally declaring Malta a Republic in 1974 and a military-free zone in 1979 when the British forces left Malta, Mintoff’s concern was to up Malta’s status as a sovereign nation.

He also worked for the worker. But did he really emancipate the working class?

Some say the working-class no longer exists, but that is a slogan promoted by the figures from the ‘Respectable’ Right, including Thatcher, John Major and historians such as Fukuyama. In the age of neo-liberal democracy, the working class continues to exist under the pressure of capitalist society.

The working class is not a universal relation. Marx’s working class was the British and the German, a relation borne out of the industrial revolution. In Malta, the working class developed under different conditions. British rule and cleric dominance split the nation into two geographical denominations. Those who tilled the fields in the North were generally close to the clergy. Those in which the British set foot and built factories and created ports and dockyards, the South, were peasants who were proletarianised in the first wave of industrialisation.

The missing link is urbanisation. Malta’s industrialisation did not evolve out of changing social relations in its history. It came through external rule, literally boxing workers into a class. Industrialisation provided the infrastructure for a working class (factories, dockyards, etc.). But there was no democracy, no mass-based, cultural movement for the emancipation of the worker, save for the only alternative to British dominance – the clergy and the Partito Nazionalista italophiles.

It is no surprise therefore, that the organic intellectual within the working-class were sole operators, such as Manwel Dimech, or Juan Mamo, working outside the mass-based forces supporting British rule or Italy.

When Mintoff took over the Malta Labour Party, he found a working class that had inherited the same pattern of power relations. There were still clergy-like hierarchical relations between the workers and the Malta Labour Party. Politicians, whose professions were those of doctor, lawyer and architect, built their power on patron-client relations that defied the very condition of emancipation.

Mintoff did not preside over a working class movement that had emancipated itself. There was a cultural limbo. Mintoff gave the working class a social structure for a better living – the welfare state. But surrounding his party with supposed embodiments of the working class – thugs carrying unsavoury nicknames such as Il-Qahbu, Il-Butler, Il-Fusellu, and il-Hawsla – was part of a philosophy that was not committed to meritocracy. It seemed that Mintoff’s idea of class equality was to bypass the basic structures of meritocracy.

From Mintoff the working class did not inherit a culture of liberation but a culture of tribalism spurred on by hierarchical power relations – the patron-client relation – helping to aggravate social relations in Maltese society. It produced a culture of tribalism based on favours and privileges.

The results of Mintoff’s impact on the working class are evident today. Some have graduated into nouveau-riches, and though holding tight to Labour, actively promote consumer fetishism. Nowhere in sight do we see a working class that is critical of the Labour leadership, a ‘Nanni Moretti’ calling out for a stronger opposition.

That much shows a disjointed relation between the social structure Mintoff helped create – the welfare state – and the culture of class politics he helped create through partisan violence, sugar-daddy politics and patron-client relations.

Many critics of Mintoff and the Labour Party during that period believe Mintoff did not have a far reaching vision that would take the working class up the next step of the ladder. Mintoff gave ‘his’ people money, or at least financial security, but having achieved that he seemingly did not know what to do next.

In particular Mintoff did not see to it that his supporters got the same kind of education as the richer Maltese. Mintoff never invested heavily in education to bridge the educational gap between the have’s and have not’s.

He virtually dismantled the university showing a contempt for learning in a manner unknown in any other European countries.

It can be argued that Mintoff would have lost his support had he raised the general level of education in this country; but the fact remains that he did not care to give the working class all the tools that are required to be able to think and act freely.