How much can a Labour government achieve within the confines of a capitalist society? I ask because of a recent tweet by Paul Mason:

taking power is not enough; behind the state, the elite have line after line of trenches with which to their defend privilege and enforced poverty and ignorance for the rest.

We don't need to invoke "deep state" conspiracy theories here*. Elites really do have considerable ability to restrain a Labour government.

We can, roughly speaking, distinguish two types of power here.

One is brute economics. Although talk of capital flight is overdone (if investors want to dump sterling assets to whom will they sell them?) the fact is that capitalists control the bulk of capital spending. And as Michal Kalecki pointed out:

This gives the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis.

On top of this, there's their lobbying power. Capitalists have money; politicians have political influence. And guess what - that means there'll be a trade. As Pablo Torija Jimenez has shown, "politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite" rather than that of the median voter.

There's also the fact that the rich can dodge taxes, by shifting cash offshore or simply by passing on corporate tax rises to workers or customers. They might not therefore be the big source of revenue that social democrats imagine.

And this is not to mention the power of finance to act, in J.W.Mason's words "as the enforcement arm of the capitalist class as a whole." High corporate and personal debt, for example, not only serves as a form of debt bondage but also strengthen's Kalecki's point: it means that "confidence" must be maintained to avoid a credit crunch.

There is, though, a second dimension of capitalist power which means Paul is bank right to invoke Gramsci**.

It was he, more than most Marxists, who emphasized that power is exercised not just through force but through ideology; the ruled come to accept the beliefs of the rulers. This is true today. To give three examples:

- Managerialism. The question: to what extent are bosses parasites rather than value-adders (because of abilities to organize production)? has for years been off the agenda - though maybe Carillion will change this. Instead, they have been portrayed (even by social democrats) as heroic risk-takers to whom we must defer. This, and leadershipitis generally, generates a bias towards hierarchy and against worker control.

- Accepting inequality. Inequality tends to perpetuate (pdf) itself, for example because perceptions of what's fair are shaped by actual inequality, and in part because people just resign themselves to it.

- Anti-politics. Naïve cynicism about politicians ("they're all the same", "in it for themselves") sustains a hostility to collective action and thus to the maintenance of the status quo.

And this is not to mention the media!

It's in this context that the Labour left is right to want to build a mass party. This might act as a form of countervailing power to capitalist elites; millions of everyday conversations between party members and their friends and colleagues might help undermine capitalist hegemony and act as a counterweight to capitalists' influence over a Labour government.

That might be too optimistic. What is clear to me, though, is that winning an election is nothing like sufficient to achieve lasting change. In the face of capitalist hegemony, the idea that being in government gives you all the "levers of power" you need is hopelessly romantic. As I've said, it is centrists who are the dreamy utopians.

* Sentence rewritten thanks to a tweet by @SpinningHugo.

* There's a small but notable stylistic difference between Paul and I. He tweeted that "it begins with Gramsci." I wouldn't say that. I'd say that it begins with the scientific evidence on cognitive biases, which show that Gramsci was right.