LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, March 15, 2010

Basis und Überbau posted by lenin

The excellent blogger Richard Crary cites, among some luminous passages from David Graeber, this criticism of the base/superstructure metaphor:

What has passed for "materialism" in traditional Marxism—the division between material "infrastructure" and ideal "superstructure," is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend to claim that they are dealing with something higher and more abstract than those who plant onions, blow glass, or operate sewing machines. But it's not really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just as material as any other. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of action, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are (a) always motivated by meanings (ideas); and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium (material). Further, that while all systems of domination seem to propose that "no, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all," such claims are, to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit. As John Holloway (2003) has recently reminded us, it is in the nature of systems of domination to take what are really complex interwoven process of action and chop them up and redefine them as discrete, self-identical objects—a song, a school, a meal, etc. There's a simple reason for it. It's only by chopping and freezing them in this way that one can reduce them to property and be able to say one owns them.

A genuine materialism then would not simply privilege a "material" sphere over an ideal one. It would begin by acknowledging that no such ideal sphere actually exists. This, in turn, would make it possible to stop focusing so obsessively on the production of material objects—discrete, self-identical things that one can own—and start the more difficult work of trying to understand the (equally material) processes by which people create and shape one another.

This is a lucid passage, and also a very frustrating one. It is lucid about the fetishism of ruling class ideology, and frustrating in how it represents its supposed foil. To begin with, it is unclear what is meant by "traditional Marxism". Suffice to say that it wouldn't include E M Wood, E P Thompson, Alasdair Macintyre, or any number of anti-Stalinist marxists who have problematised the idea of a base-superstructure dichotomy, either rejecting the whole metaphor, or maintaining that conceiving it as a dichotomy is contrary to Marx's original intention. These arguments were often directed against a highly mechanical and scholastic interpretation of Marx that was popularised by the Soviet Union and its supporters, the purpose of which was to rationalise Stalinist accumulation methods. The logic of the Stalinists was that if the superstructure is determined by the economic base then we must only develop the means of production and the political superstructure of socialism is sure to follow. So it is possible that by "traditional Marxism", Graeber actually means Stalinist vulgarisation. Or it could just be another sock-puppet-as-protagonist, cf. "standard leftist", "typical PC liberal", etc.

That Marx himself does not intend the base-superstructure metaphor as a dichotomy is clear in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the text which Graeber finds particularly problematic (as opposed to, eg, The German Ideology):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

This passage, in which the troublesome base/superstructure metaphor is advanced, is also the basis of many misleading formulations about "the contradiction between the forces and relations of production", which are certainly idealist and mechanical. But it is clear that what this passage does differs from what Graeber supposes "traditional Marxism" does. The superstructure is not posited as a sphere of pure ideality separate from a material base. Rather it is part of the same material process. To speak of "relations of production" and "property relations", Marx says, is to speak of different aspects of the same phenomenon. The economic and juridical are not opposed by Marx in the crass way that this "traditional Marxism" would apparently have us believe.

As importantly, nowhere does Marx suggest that the superstructure is ideal, or that there is actually an "ideal sphere" distinct from material activity. In fact, Marx's position on this is remarkably similar to that of Graeber. Marx, and I suspect most marxists, would not be scandalised by the assertion that the actions which produce law and poetry are themselves material. The thrust of the quoted passage from the 'Preface', as I read it, is not that material processes produce a separate, ideal superstructure. It is that what is referred to as superstructural is in fact a material process - more specifically, a process brought about by human activity. It is, in other words, precisely to reject the reification of social processes and their transformation into autonomous entities that dominate life in an almost god-like fashion. The upshot is that when categories such as property, democracy, law, wages, nations, etc., are discussed, one should look not for some corresponding 'economic base' that determined them, but for the forms of activity which instantiate them, and which produce them, and which are in turn produced by them.

Labels: anarchism, anthropology, historical materialism, marx, marxism

American class self-identification posted by lenin

Pierre Bourdieu said, perhaps not as famously as one would wish, that "public opinion" is an "artifact, pure and simple, the function of which is to dissemble that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces and tensions and that nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage". In particular, he charged that the manufacturers of public opinion in fact produce what they supposedly report: a consensus on what the problems are, what the appropriate questions are, how they should be framed, and so on. With that in mind, I give you this recent ABC/Washington post poll, which tells us that American class self-identification is roughly as follows: 39% say they are working class or worse off, 45% middle class, and 18% upper-middle class or better off. And where the poll does an important part of its work is in this question:

“Necessary elements” of a middle-class life
Being able to...
Own your own home - 80%
Save for the future - 78
Afford things you’d like to have - 77
Afford vacation travel - 71
Buy a new car - 67

This is a very leading question, and a considerable amount of thought must have gone into it, at least in its original formulation (I don't know how long the question has been asked for, in this form). In a previous post, I mentioned research on American 'class consciousness' by Vanneman and Cannon, which pointed out that research on the American class structure was heavily shaped by the activities of the state in that field. In the post-WWII period, the US government funded and drove research which sought to create an understanding of class as status, based on certain patterns of consumption, income and education, rather than an antagonistic relationship centred on production. In that bowdlerised sociology, class is like a continuous ladder of prestige and status, which one might ascend or descend, rather than a conflict built into social relations.

It doesn't actually matter if it was the state or private capital who decisively formulated these conventions, but the poll question cited above is undoubtedly shaped by them. Decades of thought - or doctrine - are embedded in this simple query. It assumes that there is such a thing as a "middle class life", that it would have as its essential characteristics certain consumption patterns, and that the only real disagreement is over how important each element of consumption is. What's interesting about these results is that many respondents appear to have defied the implicit bias in the poll, and defined themselves as, say, working class when their income would give them a reasonable chance of access to all of the "necessary elements" of a "middle class life". The responses would suggest that there are layers of motivation and interest informing the interpretation of the questions, and thus the answers. Even with that, the poll did its job in that, like thousands of other polls framed in much the same way, it obtained a middle class majority.

Labels: "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it" - George Carlin, capitalism, class, middle class, polls, us working class

A bit of assassination humour posted by lenin

Israeli advertisers know their market apparently - violent nationalism sells:

Labels: hamas, Israel, murder, palestine, racism, zionism

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The dignity of labour posted by lenin

Beaten, bullied, shoved, kicked, degraded...

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it has uncovered significant evidence of abuse among producers supplying Britain's big supermarkets. The inquiry includes reports from meat factory workers who say they have had frozen burgers thrown at them by line managers, and accounts of pregnant women being forced to stand for long periods or perform heavy lifting under threat of the sack.
It also contained reports from women with heavy periods and people with bladder problems on production lines being denied toilet breaks and forced to endure the humiliation of bleeding and urinating on themselves.
One-fifth of workers interviewed, from across England and Wales, reported being pushed, kicked or having things thrown at them, while a third had experienced or witnessed verbal abuse.
The EHRC said some examples, such as forcing workers to do double shifts when ill or tired, were in breach of the law and licensing standards, while others were a "clear affront to respect and dignity".
Migrant workers are the most affected because one-third of permanent workers and two-thirds of agency workers in the industry are migrants, but British and other agency employees face similar ill-treatment, the report found.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, wage labour, working class, workplace discipline, zombie labour

Friday, March 12, 2010

A "progressive moment"? posted by lenin

Mehdi Hasan has a powerful piece in today's Guardian attacking liberal "defeatism", and pointing out that the majority of the public are well to the left of New Labour and most of the political and media classes. It's true. People see what's coming. More people are frightened of deep cuts than are worried about the deficit. They should be frightened. The level of public sector cuts being entertained by all mainstream parties are extraordinary, unprecedented. Labour's spending plans, in light of most independent analyses, amount to deep cuts across all government departments. Leaked treasury documents disclosed that the cuts would amount to 9% across all departments, even higher than most experts estimated. If the NHS was ringfenced to protect it from cuts, the impact on other departments - education, social security, transport, etc. - would be much bigger.

Cuts and jobs lesses are already being forced through several departments, which is why the civil servants have been on strike and why lecturers are also taking action, complementing a wave of strike action in private sector businesses like British Airways and Network Rail. The difference between New Labour and the Tories on this question is not enormous, but Cameron and Osborne plan to be more aggressive with cuts, and will cut taxes for the richest and pay for that with more spending cuts (an extra £5bn). The Liberal Democrats say they disagree with the government's formula of paying for the deficit with 80% spending cuts and 20% tax increases, and prefer to cover it with 100% spending cuts.

Let's be clear about this. No government in UK history has ever embarked on such a radical attack on the public sector in this country. The social misery likely to be unleashed is incalculable. If there is something it could be compared to, it might be Labour's deep cuts to wages in the latter half of the 1970s, or Thatcher's deliberate destruction of manufacturing in the early 1980s. And like those comparable instances, it is a class attack. There's a growing recognition of this, I suspect, especially as the impact of the recession - softened as it is by stimulus spending - sinks in. And this is undoubtedly, as Hasan says, a reason why the Tory lead has collapsed, including in the marginals, though it is still hovering around 3-5%, and the swing in most marginal seats would be big enough for the Tories to win. The mirage of 'progressive' conservatism, based on a few 'John Lewis'-style businesses and cooperatives (privatization by another name), is unlikely to compensate for the Tories' cuts. If anything, I would imagine that experimenting with public services is the last thing that is likely to appeal to voters at this point when a dose of good old-fashioned statism seems to be precisely the remedy that is needed.

And it's true that as a result of this, the neoliberal vision that underpinned New Labour is in crisis. The trouble is that for this to become a "progressive moment", the Left would have to grow. Whatever public opinion says, the question ultimately comes down to what kind of agency is in place to support or oppose certain demands. If the majority favour nationalisation of key utilities, that isn't going to happen unless a political machinery is in place that can pressure the government to make it happen. And the Left is not growing in this recession, yet. The Labour left is as moribund as it has ever been, and its new members are likely to be refugees from the extra-parliamentary left, which is also not growing. The fragmented electoral initiatives of the left, essential though they are, are sure to be squeezed by a rush back to Labour, as working class voters seek to keep the Tories out. It is the far right, not the Left, that is presently capitalising most effectively on the recession. Racism, not class politics, has so far been winning the battle of ideas.

That is not irreversible, and things can change very suddenly in politics. But it reminds us that the dilemma of the Left is more intractable than Hasan's diagnosis might allow. I admit that there are those on the liberal-left for whom the phrase "class politics" might seem passe, an historical curiosity to be either nostalgic or condescending about. But without talking about class, and putting it at the centre of the analysis, the Left would deprive itself of both its distinctive analytical tool and its most powerful social agency. It is within the context of a confident working class movement that the Left has previously flourished, and won many of its demands. This has fallen victim to Thatcherism and its successors, as well as the processes of class dislocation and reconstitution that shattered some previously powerful unions. Cooperative, activist cultures of resistance that were once integral to working class experience were diminished by years of neoliberalism, and responses to social distress and deprivation were increasingly individualised. That is the wreckage upon which New Labour was built and its crisis doesn't come at a time when there are mature institutions capable of either replacing it or seriously pressuring it from the Left. This, among other things - to wit, government policy and media hysteria - is why racism and the far right pose such serious challenges today.

Parenthetically, not as a proof but as an example, think about a certain morbid symptom of neoliberalism, that being the emergence of a bowdlerised and racialised kind of 'class politics', in which a fictitious "white working class" is conjured into existence as a passive object for pity or disdain. This is the return-of-the-repressed, in which the disavowed reality of a class-riven society is admitted by mainstream capitalist ideology in the only way that it can be admitted, ie in a racist way that deprives class of its content. Taking the Freudian metaphors further, one could charge that the patronising 'concern' evinced for this "white working class" is just a reaction-formation, recoding the seething fear and loathing that capitalists have for workers as a kind of overbearing and protective love. I maintain that this hollow mockery of the working class as an active subject of politics says a lot about the social psychology relationship between racism and class politics.

At any rate, I'm not selling doom. The materials exist for a renewal of the Left. One sees hope in the resistance of workers to job cuts, the success of initiatives such as Right To Work, the student occupations, and the vital antifascist and anti-racist work of UAF. From public sector resistance to spending cutbacks, one could see a very broad coalition led by trade unionists and the left developing to oppose the cuts. The success or otherwise of TUSC, Respect, et al, might give us some clue as to how viable a future left-wing electoral challenge is likely to be. But the immensity of what has to be reconstructed can't be in doubt, and the possibility of a right-wing backlash with organised racists as its cutting edge cannot be discounted. I don't believe this is a progressive moment. I think that's something we have to build.

Labels: american working class, capitalism, left, neoliberalism, new labour, recession, socialism, tories

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Also appearing posted by lenin

In addition to next week's Left Forum talk, (Saturday 20th, 12.00-13.50), I will be giving a talk for the ISJ about 'Racism in Britain Today' at SOAS on 26th March, from 6pm. This is based on an upcoming article. Email isj[at]swp[dot]org[dot]uk for further information.

Labels: bnp, events, fascism, islamophobia, racism, the complete and utter works of richard seymour

Those progressive Lib Dems posted by lenin

Nick Clegg's magic electoral solution - praise Thatcher, outflank the Tories on cuts:

In an interview with the Spectator, Clegg says he has come to view Thatcher's victory over the unions as "immensely significant" and goes further than the Conservative party in courting economic liberalism, by saying he would end the structural deficit with 100% spending cuts, as opposed to the 80% cuts the Conservatives have proposed.

Labels: lib dems, neoliberalism, public spending, thatcherism, tories

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Making a list, checking it twice... posted by lenin

Far right would-be terrorists are, despite their best efforts, failing to make the news in any serious way. Take the recent ricin plot, which was a) far more serious than the bogus one and b) motivated by neo-Nazi ideology (although the BBC mysteriously failed to mention this). I don't want to bore you with all that stuff about "imagine the media reaction if this was a Muslim". However, imagine the media reaction if this was a Muslim. Imagine the government reaction. These aspiring mass killers are attempting to give people like EDL founder Paul Ray their desired "acts of war" against the Muslim community - apparently, in some cases, involving bombing campaigns against mosques. Given the frequency with which fascists with secret arsenals - oh, guns, swords, chemical weapons, rockets, nail bombs, all that stuff you might pick up from Argos of a Saturday afternoon - are being apprehended by the cops, and the infrequency with which such terror plots are given coverage in the mainstream media, surely someone should be keeping track of it all. Well, Obsolete is.

Labels: bnp scum, far right, fascism, islamophobia, nf, racism, terrorism

Monday, March 08, 2010

PCS strike posted by lenin

Been busy, so I haven't had time to write up this week's civil servants' strike. I thought I'd just post a few useful links. You can read the story behind the strike on the PCS website, and there's a very good interview with Mark Serwotka on Channel 4 News here. Socialist Worker has picket line reports, and Guy Smallman has pictures. And this is what we need to see more of.

Labels: capitalism, jobs, militancy, pcs workers, public sector pay, public spending, recession, trade unions

Saturday, March 06, 2010

The police, the fascists and the antifascists posted by lenin

Fifty UAF protesters were arrested yesterday. No EDL protesters were arrested. All fifty UAF protesters were doing nothing more than making use of their democratic right to protest against fascists and racists. The organisers maintained a disciplined protest, and the speeches at the UAF protest were straightforwardly anti-racist. By contrast, the EDL thugs were plainly up for a fight, and their speeches clearly incited racist hatred, particularly when an EDL speaker, a young Sikh from Nottingham called Guramit Singh, said to ecstatic cheers: "God bless the Muslims... they'll need it when they burn in fucking hell." Singh is the one of the EDL's poster boys, promoted to prove they are a non-racist party. But Singh is a racist, fond of expressing such enlightening thoughts as: "fuck the p*kis … i just think we shud burn the cunts now".

EDL activists, who have a record of violent mayhem, were allowed to roam around, visit the pubs and get tanked up, more or less uninhibited. Meanwhile police attacked peaceful UAF activists, broke them up into four separate groups and kettled them. Some were manhandled before being shoved onto a double decker bus that was procured for the occasion. The EDL message board is filled with praise for the Metropolitan Police and how they handled the "reds and asians". It's a big pick-up for the brain-dead bampots, who are otherwise posting an incredible amount of racist 'poetry' that doesn't scan, though it can only be a matter of time before this horseshit ends up being turned into a 'Great White' record production, with the BNP's Joey Smith vocalising.

There's a lesson in this. The state can definitely shut down the EDL whenever it wants to. It can easily prevent rampages of the kind that have taken place in Luton and Stoke. It had no difficulty in rounding up EDL thugs in Scotland recently. No doubt cops in Bolton would have no serious problem complying with a ban on the EDL in Bolton, should it be decreed. It would be astonishing if the EDL wasn't, like the rest of the far right, penetrated from top to bottom by the security services, so I don't doubt that the police have the information about their tactics and organisation to stop them terrorising communities. But because they can doesn't mean they will, and it is a complacent error to think that this can be treated as a policing matter and ignored by the left. Policing and criminal justice in such matters is highly politicised, and it can't be otherwise.

Think about the context. Just in the last couple of weeks, we've had a number of major, contrived scandals about the influence of Muslims in politics - there was the furore about Amnesty and Moazzam Begg, the disgraceful Andrew Gilligan hit piece on Tower Hamlets council, and the preposterous "hijab gates" conspiracy theory. There is a ceaseless stream of background noise about mosques, mega-mosques, extremists and burqas. On top of which, we have the right-wing still pushing paranoid claims that New Labour deliberately created a multicultural Britain in order to get more Labour voters. We have attempts to normalise racist language, wherein celebs and others seriously tell us that "P*ki" is just an abbreviation. We have pernicious arguments about black criminality, which Rod Liddle didn't invent by his lonesome. And from the government, we have revisionist attacks on 'multiculturalism' and integrationist discourses on citizenship (that's a diplomatic way of talking about state attempts to put manners on black and Asian people). These ideas emanate from the right, but are now being taken up by some on the centre-left, in the vain hope of appropriating their apparent ability to summon loyalty from some voters. New Labour's attacks on minorities, beginning with the vilification of Asians in the spring and summer of 2001, and followed up with repeated attacks on Muslims, have helped normalise this kind of racism.

In broad brush, an elite backlash against the anti-racist consensus of a decade ago has now found its echo in public attitudes - which, on this topic, have moved sharply to the right. It has also galvanised racist violence. The University of Essex study of Islamophobia and hate crime in London confirmed that media reportage and the rhetoric of politicians acted as a decisive motivator and catalyst for violence against Muslims in the capital. That's what is fuelling support for these racist gangs, and that's the adhesive that unites explicit neo-Nazis with right-wing football hooligans. Those who want to respond to this by bigging up the flag while letting the police decide how to handle the far right are missing the scoop. The EDL are a political problem, and they can't be opposed in an apolitical, technocratic way. That is a way of ducking the issue. And nor can they be dealt with by meeting them half-way, or trying to steal their 'patriotic' clothes. That is a futile attempt to find a short-cut, which doesn't exist. The overwhelming burden of evidence is that the more the left validates the politics of nationalism, and concedes territory on 'multiculturalism', the more it feeds into the right's agenda. The agenda of the right on race relations has to be confronted, not accomodated, just as its beneficiaries in the far right must be opposed, not ignored.

Labels: bnp scum, casuals united, edl, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, racism, unite against fascism

Also appearing posted by lenin

Don't forget if you're in Oxford today that I will be speaking at the Oxford Radical Forum from 16.45, alongside Peter Hallward, on Haiti and 'humanitarian intervention'. Come along, why not? I will also be speaking at the Housmans bookshop on Liberal Defence as well as an upcoming book of mine (you'll just have to wait, won't you?) on 26th May. Housmans, like Bookmarks, is a solidly left-wing bookshop that provides an online service for those who wish to avoid buying from Amazon, so check it out. And Americans should come to the Left Forum, where I'll be speaking on Saturday 20th March.

Labels: events, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder