Labour smears Respect. posted by lenin

Yesterday, Labour issued a press-release claiming that an old age pensioner had been assaulted by Respect supporters for refusing to accept a leaflet. No national newspaper has carried this. Only an early edition of the London Evening Standard has done so. (Update: Despite being warned that the story was nonsense, this journo at the Times decided to run with the story). However, one of the Labour Party's most noxious allies, Harry's Place , has taken the press-release and published it in more or less unadulterated form, complete with a picture of Oona King MP meeting the bruised man.

The Claims

Let's get the claims right, first of all. The story goes roughly as follows: The 69-year old Les Dobrovolski was approached in Poplar by Respect members canvassing for George Galloway last Thursday, 21st April. When he refused to accept a leaflet and said he would never vote for George Galloway, he was followed by the group, who then attacked him near Spitalfields market. They pushed him to the floor, and one man stamped on the pensioner's hand before dropping a leaflet on him as he lay in agony - a trophy gesture. He was then taken by ambulance to the local hospital where he was x-rayed and given stitches. Harry's Place follows up with the sentence: "The police were informed of the attack and are currently investigating." Then a few pieties from Oona King.

The Facts

On Thursday 21st April, Les Dobrovolski told the police that he had been attacked, but there was no mention of him having been assaulted by Respect supporters or of any leaflet. The first time such a claim appeared anywhere was in the Labour Party's press-release. The police have confirmed, categorically, that no such claims were made to the police when Mr Dobrovolski was interviewed, and that they are not investigating the Respect party in connection with this. They issued it as a general statement to the press, which is why most papers did not touch it.

The claim that Mr Dobrovolski encountered Respect supporters canvassing for George Galloway in Poplar is highly improbable, to say the least, since Poplar is not in the constituency being contested by George Galloway. There were no canvassers out there. The leaflet that was allegedly dropped on Mr Dobrovolski following the attack was still in the printers on the day of the attack, and was sent out as a postal drop - ie, sent by the printers directly to Royal Mail, and not to Respect leaders or canvassers. The earliest the leaflet could have been sent out was on Saturday's post.

Smears

Oona King has a record of smearing her opponents , even repeating a libel after she had been obliged to pay an out-of-court settlement. She smeared Respect previously by claiming that Respect canvassers were advising voters not to elect Oona King again on account of her Jewish background - unaware, obviously, that Respect had not even begun campaigning in the constituency yet. Her campaign has also involved the suggestion that George Galloway is just like Oswald Mosley, despite the fact that it is her campaign leaflets, directed at 'white' areas, which say: "The Scottish MP George Galloway is stirring things up, especially in the Bengali community. He is a threat to us all." [Emphasis added]. The tactics used by Labour in Bethnal Green & Bow are becoming dirtier and dirtier. They bear the signature of despair and are the hallmark of a party without any principle, and a campaign without any appeal.

Vote Respect .

Kennedy talks tough. posted by lenin

I'm not a fan of the Liberal Democrats, which Dead Men Left aptly describes as "yellow Tories" , and their position on the war was remarkably opportunistic. There are many other reasons why I won't be voting Lib Dem, the planned abolition of the right to strike for key workers being among them, but that made Charles Kennedy's performance on Question Time last night all the more surprising. I've just caught the clip on the BBC, which you can watch here .

Kennedy is not a cunning speaker, and is not up to dealing with heckles and hectoring. David Dimbleby was surprisingly hostile at a number of points, especially given his own support for the Lib Dems. Yet, after batting away some ubiquitous queries about council tax and his own apparent bafflement about Lib Dem economic policy, Kennedy dealt with questions about the war with unusual robustness. For instance, Dimbleby - when he saw that Kennedy's remarks were going down well - tried the "If you had your way..." gambit, as if the war was the only way to bring down Saddam. Kennedy replied, no, not necessarily. After all, the Iraq Survey Group had been into Iraq, studied it closely and found that the regime was ripe for implosion. It would have been sufficient for Iraqis to see how weak Saddam's weapons systems were. He had no more chemical weapons to dump on his people, and his army was a shambles. The Emperor, thus found without his clothes on, would in all likelihood have rapidly fallen on the sword of popular insurrection. Similarly, asked about the prospect of removing troops from Iraq, with the usual complaint that doing so would result in more Iraqi deaths (tenner to anyone who can tell me the ratio of troops to Iraqi deaths at the moment), Kennedy was stoical. Yes, he would withdraw the troops after a year (why not now?), and no it was unlikely to result in increased deaths, since the main cause of civil strife at the moment was the presence of the occupation. Further, the British government had no cause to be talking about civilian deaths in Iraq, since it could not even be bothered to take a proper count of them. "And it's not just that I disagreed with the Prime Minister on the policy here - it's that I'm ashamed of what this government has done."

Tough words from a walking jelly. It is a pity that Kennedy had none of that moral fibre while the war was taking place, and that he only finds it again now that the war is so unpopular and Blair in such trouble for it. And Kennedy admitted that he had favoured the interventions in Afghanistan and Kosovo which could have been exploited for all sorts of inconsistencies, (of which Dimbleby pointed out one or two).

And, of course, the liberal infatuation with 'international law' ought to be reproved by all principled anti-imperialists. I finally picked up a copy of China Mieville's book Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2002) yesterday, the rough contents of which I have regurgitated on this blog more than once. I don't want to reiterate too much, but what do the UN-fetishists say about Haiti, where a UN-endorsed multilateral hit-squad took the country over after the US kidnapped Aristide, and where the imposed government of neoliberals and former genocidaires has been ruthlessly murdering its opponents with US-supplied weapons ? Imagine a mission that has been conducted with the full mandate and protection of international law that also happens to be a classic imperialist venture.

This election is a crashing bore... posted by lenin

At least for television viewers, who are switching off the news to avoid the sterile non-debates and glib casuistries of 'the big three'. For Charlotte Street, language has been hollowed out into noises , designed to appeal to the - what was that phrase? - "gut instincts of the British people". Trouble is, the more politicians go to the gut, the more people want to vomit.

Still, there is the odd risk of excitement here and there. For instance, Labour is being obliged to pay unusual attention to a heartland constituency apparently in part because of local polls showing Respect has a very slight lead, where Peter Hain has been despatched to tell voters that George Galloway is a "playboy politician" . Unto which: "Being called a playboy politician by Peter Hain is like being told to sit up straight by the hunchback of Notre Dame." This campaign has caught the international headlines like no other seat in this election. The Canadians are curious , the Americans are appalled , Tracy Emin is proud , the Cable Street generation are too (what was that about Moseley?), the students are all sorted out for fees and piss, and the international press are watching incredulously...

Meanwhile, I am told that Salma Yaqoob's constituency is going very well in Birmingham Sparbrook. Respect won the most votes in that area during the European elections, and Salma is outdoing the local MP in the placards and posters stakes. Lindsey German is doing surprisingly well in West Ham too.

On top of which, Martin Bell is irking his nephew by supporting Reg Keys in Blair's constituency , where polls apparently show that 60% of voters are 'undecided' and the rest are split evenly between Mr Keys and Mr Blair. And Craig Murray, the former diplomat to Uzbekistan, is seriously worrying Jack Straw .

It will be extraordinarily difficult to win a seat, but the big guns of the antiwar movement are pointed right at the throats of New Labour's hottest stars. We do not have the enormous resources of the main parties, and so rely on what we can say in the few avenues of communication that we have access to. This has gone an incredibly long way so far. And we now have the forced irruption of the war onto the electoral terrain to help. The fact that Labour are feeling so threatened in a heartland constituency is encouraging - but the race is close enough that every last vote matters, including any that might be fraudulently counted . There will be a big Respect outing in the East End over the weekend, and anyone living in Birmingham might want to pop over and help Salma Yaqoob. Every vote matters. It is time for the antiwar movement to take some bodies as well.

Polly, put the kettle on. posted by lenin

And shut your face. Here's Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian, "Angry Labour voters don't care about social justice" :

Poverty and equality are low on the agenda even on the left. Deep in email debate with angry Labour voters threatening not to vote for the party this time, I find it is the war and terror legislation they care about most, not poverty. Time and again they dismiss social justice as a second-order question. All ideological fervour is expended on liberty, very little on equality.

By way of contrast, "The truth about Blair's Britain — born poor, stay poor" :

A new report by the Centre for Economic Performance has found that Britain has one of the developed world’s lowest levels of “social mobility”. It is much worse here than in the five other European countries studied.

The report found that children from poor backgrounds go to poorly funded schools and are less likely to continue their studies. This dramatically limits children’s ability to find better paid employment. And the expansion of university education in the 1980s and 1990s has benefited the wealthiest far more than the poorest.

The proportion of people from the wealthiest 20 percent getting a degree during that time rose from 20 percent to 47 percent, while from the poorest 20 percent it rose from 6 percent to 9 percent.

The report found that, far from becoming more equal, social mobility has fallen over the last 50 years. Those born in 1970 are more likely to be in the same wealth bracket as their parents than those born in 1958. The report blows apart all of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s talk of extending “opportunity for the many”.

Liberty and equality are not competing issues; especially in Blair's Britain, they are contiguous. ASBOs target the poor, the mentally ill and the disenfranchised, not the shiraz-quaffing whatchamacallems. Those targeted by the 'anti-terror' laws and locked up without charge or trial in Belmarsh are unlikely to be captains of British industry. There is much ado about economic criminals from poor backgrounds and the wrong area, while the enormous fraud and theft that takes place in the City of London each day passes with impugnity. It would be silly to take the latest bit of prolier than thou invective from Ms Toynbee seriously. But then, judging from the letters page, The Guardian has some pretty silly readers (woolly, champers-guzzling, Waitrose-shopping, patio-building Hampstead liberals prone to emotional blackmail, I mean).

Principle. posted by lenin

The Late Christopher Hitchens is on the campaign trail for the righteous Blair these days, which is appropriate since they almost match one another in mendacity and opportunism. In doing so, he launches a sloppy attack on Respect and on the Socialist Workers' Party, which is so replete with errors that I feel some tender urge to cough politely, move on and say no more about it. How to summarise the article without being unkind? Well, it is very badly written, it says nothing new and what was worth repeating is obliterated by what was never worth saying in the first place.

Here is what the Hitch needs to know, and apologies to those for whom this is treading old ground. The Muslim Association of Britain is not a part of Respect. Some of its members left the organisation to join Respect, which means that they left an integralist organisation with some debt to Sayid Qutb to join a socialist organisation which defends gay rights and abortion rights as a matter of its constitution and manifesto, which is progress indeed. The attackers of Galloway appear to be the remnants of the violent Islamist group, al-Muhajiroun, not Hizb ut-Tahrir. Similarly, the 'invasion' was of a press release by the Muslim Council of Britain at Regent's Park mosque, not the MAB's office. The attack on the Jewish war memorial does not appear to have been directed at King, if the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland (who was there) is accurate in his observations. It was King who immediately claimed the attack for herself, for the obvious reason that her campaign strategy against Respect has been, from day one, to stress her Jewishness and racial background. No one in Respect has given it a thought, and it has not appeared in our election literature. By way of contrast, Oona's leaflets delivered in 'white' areas efface all mention of Muslims , (a Stalinist exercise in itself), while those delivered to Bangladeshi areas say:

Labour delivers for Muslim communities

Since 1997, together with the British Muslim community, Labour has:

* Established state-funded Muslim faith-schools for the first time.

* Abolished the hated 'primary purpose' rule which stopped many
British Muslims bringing their husband or wife to the UK.

* Safeguarded Halal food production.

* Outlawed religious discrimination in the workplace.

* Doubled bi-lateral aid to Bangladesh.

* Appointed British Muslims as Ambassadors, including to Bangladesh.

* Sent the only state-funded Hajj delegation from a Western Government.

There you have communalism of a kind that would shame Respect.

The rest of Hitchens' article contains the usual array of slandering techniques - his opponents 'admit' to some terrible collusion with Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi resistance consists primarily of Zarqawi-style lunatics, Galloway was a 'loud advocate' of Ba'ath party rule, others - not him - are 'renegade pseudo-Bolsheviks' etc (as if the SWP's position on imperialism, which he would once have accepted, is heterodox). Then there are the pitifully inept formulations that have come to pepper his prose: "Blair's Britain is a sort of post-Keynesian full-employment and welfarist society." By such phrases is a neoliberal government, which has cut welfare and lost a million manufacturing jobs while creating nothing like full employment, redeemed. And the tic-like insistence that his enemies are part of the establishment, are the true conservatives: Blair "took a bold stand against the establishment and against a sullen public opinion". Some boldness that finds allies in the Conservative Party, the Bush administration, Israel, the Daily Telegraph, the Murdoch stable, the British army etc. against the combined might of public opinion.

So far so good. If the old ones don't necessarily turn out to be the best ones, they are at least endearingly familiar. What would be irksome if it weren't so tedious is Hitchens' pretense that his support for the Iraq war, and therefore of Tony Blair, has anything to do with 'principle'. Darling, give that a fucking rest. This is a man who has initially said he would not favour war with Iraq, then decided that he did; would not characterise the Ba'athist regime as fascist to score cheap points, and then decided that he would; was channeling Cassandra over the existence of WMDs in Iraq, then rejoined the chorus (only to bleat more about it when some new wafer-thin 'evidence' emerged); complained vigorously of being misrepresented and smeared by his ex-comrades, while dissembling, condescending & sneering at them himself; accused the Left of changing the subject, while at the same time expending an awful lot of energy discussing anything but the arguments he is supposedly despatching; moralises about the acts of mass murder carried out by the extreme, but minute, Wahabbi sects claiming to be part of the resistance, yet glibly passes over the far greater murder inflicted on Iraqis by the occupiers. It is hard to know which face to slap here.

If Hitchens hasn't an ounce of shame left in him, he could at least have the meaner instincts of self-preservation that would guide away from composing such missives. After all, what man of sanity would advertise to the whole world that he has no principle that he will not discard willy-nilly, and that there are no depths of bad faith that he will not plumb in doing so?

Down with the Meritocracy!! posted by lenin

Meritocracy, which most people equate with 'fairness', 'just desert' and so on, is a remarkable idea in that it is both unattractive in itself, and far too radical for New Labour, which claims to be in the business of replacing class division with meritocracy. Brown's attack on the 'old school ties' at Oxford University amplified and exemplified this tendency: not against inequality as such, just the kind that is unmerited, that doesn't derive from entrepreneurship and 'wealth creation'. This is 'endowment egalitarianism', which seeks to equalise the opportunities that one receives as a result of one's scholastic and vocational achievements.

But even to take this ideal seriously is far too radical for New Labour because in order to achieve it, one would have to take measures that would mantle Blair's cheek with a blush of shame. For instance, when Stephen Aldridge of the Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit produced a report on how meritocracy could be achieved, he wrote that a meritocratic society would involve "high rates of social mobility and the absence of any association between class origins and destinations". This would have to be achieved by, among other things, higher rates of income tax to allow children from poorer income backgrounds access to the highest educational prospects, and also the abolition of inheritance, so that dull middle class children couldn't live off their parents labour and might therefore decline in the social structure. That is, there would have to be the possibility of both upward and downward social mobility. The very day after Aldridge produced his report, the government disowned it.

At the moment, educational outcomes closely correlate to class origins - the children of wealthier children fare better in exams and therefore have better opportunities for advancement in education and employment prospects. This is because their parents are able to secure better schools by moving between catchment areas, typically have more time and money to devote to the education of their children, and don't suffer the emotional problems that poor families are often burdened with. (Fact: the poorer you are, the larger your adrenaline gland is likely to be, since you are likely to suffer more stress in life).

Similarly, one of the main sources of wealth transmission in British society is inheritance - particularly from wealthy parents to their children. The level of social mobility is very low: in 1998, according to the government's Social Trends 28 report, only 2% of people from the top decile moved to the bottom decile - deciles, of course, are very inexact, and don't measure real wealth divisions, since it is likely to be an even smaller number of the top 1% that sinks to the bottom. And, let's face it, you'd have to be pretty stupid with such advantages to end up hitting rock-bottom. To achieve a meritocratic society, enormous redistribution would have to take place, levelling the undeserved advantages of the rich, to give the poor equal opportunity. Yet, the way the current taxation system is structured, the poorest fifth of households pay approximately 41.4 percent of their income in tax, while the richest fifth pay 36.5 percent. This is largely a result of increasing emphasis on forms of indirect taxation like VAT, as well as decreasing taxes on higher income earners under Thatcher and Major, and on corporate profits and inheritance under Blair.

Under New Labour, not only has inequality of income increased , social mobility has actually decreased . This is a direct result of government policies, particularly the acceptance of neoliberal orthodoxy. For instance, in Brown's Mais lecture in 1999, he endorsed the notion of a 'natural rate of unemployment'. That is to say, he endorsed Milton Friedman's notion that full employment cannot be achieved without accelerating the rate of inflation, and therefore it is necessary to maintain people in a state of continued impoverishment. The only way that one can reduce the 'natural rate of unemployment', according to this doctrine, is to increase the profitability of hiring labour. This is achieved either by reducing real wages and taking on the bargaining power of unions, or by improving the productivity of labour - hence, such pettifogging schemes as the New Deal, which has really achieved only a minute fraction of what its proponents claim for it, and has certainly gone no way toward improving social mobility.

But a meritocracy is a fairly repugnant notion on its own terms. It is based on the notion that rewards accrue to talented individuals for their achievements - yet talent has nothing to do with desert. One does not 'merit' one's talent, any more than a disabled person 'merits' not having a pair of working legs. A true meritocracy, implemented wholeheartedly, would leave those of inferior physical and intellectual endowments to perish. Hitler was in some sense a meritocrat. Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, was a satire on the very notion. In it, a meritocratic society is conceived with devastating consequences for the losers. In this winner-takes-all society, the rich are even more than usually smug, more than usually certain in their sense that they are fully entitled to their gains. The society ends up being so hateful that few really want to live in it, and so there is a revolution.

That, at least, would be a highly welcome outcome.

Giving in to the terrorists. posted by lenin

The Department of Homeland Security has, according to this report , produced a document assessing the risk of terrorist attacks from internal foes. In it, no mention is made of the risk of attack from right-wing extremist groups - 'flag n foetus' nutters who are responsible for the bulk of attacks within the US over the past 20 years.

Why? The number of attacks from such groups has diminished in recent years, in large part because their agenda is being implemented by the government. So, the Bush administration has reduced terrorism by giving the terrorists what they want. With any luck, America under Bush will give up being so 'rich n free' and then Al Qaeda will decide to jack it in. Come to think about it, reducing freedoms, ruining the economy and generating increasing poverty appear to be flagship policies of this administration. That Bush is smarter than you think.

American fable. posted by lenin

Never mind Tacitus or Gibbons. It is Aesop that US military planners should be studying. In one of Aesops 'Fables', two hyenas are cohabiting. Now, hyenas were believed by the ancient Greeks to change sex each year. So, the male gets randy and starts trying to take the female up the chocolate donut. The female turns round and says: "If you do that, friend, next year the same thing will happen to you."

Same to Uncle Sam.

While you're here, go read Charlotte Street on Foucault, sexuality and other illusions. He should have mentioned Foucault's propensity for fisting, which surely counts as a kind of technology of the body: a transformation, as Zizek has it, of a bodily organ into an organ without a body, a detached Object, ready-to-hand (or fist) etc.

Jamie Oliver vs The Private Finance Initiative. posted by lenin

Turns out Jamie's plea for nutritious school meals is already biting the dust :

The school meals revolution set in motion by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has already run into difficulties as long-term contracts with private companies prevent schools getting rid of junk food.
The Guardian has learned that new schools locked into 25-year contracts through private finance initiatives are finding that they cannot rid their menus of junk food despite the government's pledge.

Other schools are also running into problems as they discover that they face substantial financial penalties if they try to opt out of long-running contracts with private catering companies.

What are they, Jamie? Muppets.

Fascinating History posted by lenin

A friend of mine maintains a blog which I find very interesting, and I'd like you to have a look at. She is interested in social history, the nitty-gritty of how people lived their lives in ancient, medieval and early-modern times.

It is called Fascinating History , and in my view it lives up to the title.

Priorities. posted by lenin

The religion of socialism, some idiot once said, is the language of priorities. This has allowed every wet-eared reformist to evade choices and propound dogma as if it were pragma.

The fundamental choice of capitalism is always-already made for us, and is not one we can unmake unless we represent a material force greater than the combined power of capital and the various national and transnational institutions which supports and regulates its functioning. If we can't do that, we'd better at least be aware of the choice we are making. Slavery, for instance.

To put a round figure on it, according to US sociologist Kevin Bales there are about 27 million slaves in the world right now. In Brazil, there are said to be thousands of slaves mining charcoal or working on the Amazonian estates, while in India bonded labour is often a life-long obligation. Hardly news. The civilised integument of capital was built around the institution of slavery, and Brazil imported almost 40% of the 11 million Africans transported to the New World. But capitalism was supposed to have somehow got over these serpentine origins - either because of the military genius of Toussaint L'Ouverture or the moral calamity of William Wilberforce, depending on whether you learnt history properly or were taught it at a British school. So, what gives? Answer at the end of this post.

But a much more widespread phenomenon is what is euphemistically known as 'sweated labour'. Yes, yes, yes - you've heard all this before. Nike, Reebok, Gap, exploiting people somewhere over There. Places like Itsamnesia and Wherethefucksthatistad. It's a lot more common than that. Sweat shops persist in developing countries like Haiti, where Disney subcontractors pay 28 cents an hour to workers. (For attempting to rectify this state of affairs, Aristide was removed from power by the US and France, acting under the rubric of the UN). And also in the Phillipines, where people work more than 60 hours a weak to stitch Levi Strauss jeans. Never mind Nike trainers in Vietnam, Adidas and Gap in Indonesia and toy production for Wal Mart, Disney and Hasbro in China. But how about California? At one particular facility in El Monte, workers - mostly illegal immigrants - were found locked into garment factory surrounded by razor-wire. When not working, they slept 10 to a small room. They worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week for 70 cents an hour. That's one example. In the US, the Department of Labor estimates that more than half of the 22,000 clothing manufacturing shops qualify as sweatshops today. The tragic deaths of 21 Chinese cockle-pickers on Morecombe Bay alerted Britain to the fact that sweated labour took place here as well - and prompted Tory MP Ann Winterton to make a filthy racist joke about it.

Then there's child labour. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are 352 million children working in the world today, of whom 211 million are aged between 5 and 14. Suffice to say, we aren't talking about washing the car or cutting the lawn. The overwhelming majority of children who work do so in labour-intensive agriculture.

And the arms trade. This is one of the few remaining industries at which Britain excels, although it faces stiff competition from the United States. It is "dangerously unregulated" according to Oxfam, which is a masterpiece in understatement. It is so protected by government secrecy that only rough estimates can be made as to the scale of the global arms trade (note, this does not include domestic contracts or government guarantees to producers), but as of 1999 it was believed to be worth a total of $20 billion. That's enough to buy Tammy Faye a new wardrobe. It is an industry that governments are curiously eager to sustain at all costs. For instance, although Indonesia is known to engage in war crimes in Aceh, and although it has a record of horrendous human rights abuses, the British government will actually provide Export Credits to Indonesia to help them buy the latest tools. In a nation where 52% of the people live on less than $2 a day, the one thing they really need is for the government to buy more weapons.

These would seem on the face of it to be just a selection of some of the intractable problems that the world is faced with that must arise from a number of causes. What connects them? Simply this. Slavery and sweated labour are forms of hyper-exploitation that are not seperable by any clear line from the ordinary, day to day exploitation that takes place in advanced capitalist societies. For instance, when research into the national minimum wage in Britain was being looked into, it was discovered that among the worst sufferers of low pay in Britain were 16-18 year olds, many of whom had to accept hourly rates of £1.60 an hour and less. Naturally, the government responded to this astounding fact by excluding 16-18 year olds from the national minimum wage. In all sorts of working environments, particularly call centres, workers are subjected to high pressure drives for greater productivity. Often they have to ask permission to visit the toilet, and many are docked for the privilege. Wages are low, hours are long and tedious, and management are often brittle and abrasive.

Similarly, the priorities of profit mean that companies respond to market demand, which is not the same thing as human need. It is need, backed up by purchasing power. If it makes more money to produce guns for warring states than it does to produce medical equipment and food for their populations, then the guns win every time. If it is more profitable to allow Africans to die from AIDS than allow the production of cheap drugs, then AIDS has a free run. If it is profitable to encourage farmers to inject their cattle with chemical substances that poison our milk, that is what will be done. If it creates higher returns to cover food with harmful MSGs that also make it very addictive, then your Happy Meal will be one MSG-covered motherfucker. And if it turns a quick buck to expose citizens to carcinogenous chemicals rather than pursue safer products, you get all the lumps. As the film The Corporation shows, corporations are legally bound to pursue nothing other than the maximisation of shareholder profit. This involves criminality on an epic scale (cue list of companies that have broken the law over the years), as well as the exploitation of people and planet. But, as companies are also "externalising machines", that is to say, organisations structurally compelled to try and transfer costs to someone else, they rely on states to regulate markets, provide infrastructure, use their diplomacy and foreign policy to create good investment climates, fight wars that clear markets etc.

I mean to say, as clearly as I can, that the priorities of capitalism are utterly inhuman, dangerous, driving us toward catastophe in the form of war and environmental breakdown, poisoning us, exploiting us and then lying to us about it. It is a global problem and it can't be shirked by isolating each aspect of it and producing some proposal for reform by stages (or by numbers). At the very least, we can agree that these fuckwits don't have the answer.

Notes and Links. posted by lenin

A reading list, in lieu of a proper post. A Pessimist Leftist has a nice run-down of Ehud Barak's generous offer to the Palestinians - turns out, he really did offer them a choice, which was "fuck off or die". Or both, one assumes.

Then there's this Bionic Octopus . If it sounds like an alarmingly SF-style moniker to adopt, the content is entirely temporal and earthbound. BionOc is, near as I can gather, an American ex-pat whose informed and witty political, economic and cultural ruminations are interpolated by the occasional fashion statement : boho is coming back, 's true. I was thinking of chucking on one of those gypsy skirts all the shops are selling - but like a proper boho, I'll probably nick it.

The radical, internationalist youth journal Left Hook is edited by the invaluable M Junaid Alam, and has the advantage of shredding the hypocrisy of liberal sentimentalists while also executing technically proficient take-downs on the Bush junta.

K-Punk plants a sharp boot in the throat of relativism and 'Menshevitis', recalling Malcolm X's dictum that it was easier to deal with openly racist rednecks than liberal wolves in sheep's clothing ("woolly liberals"?).

Finally, I'll be hosting Carnival of the UnCapitalists in a few weeks' time. The (evil?) genius behind these festivities is Charles Norman Todd of Freiheit und Wissen , yet another blog that I should have linked to some time ago. This week's host will be Red Harvest , and you should send submissions to uncapitalist@gmail.com, probably by tomorrow evening GMT at the latest. Then it'll be the inviting Meat Eating Leftist - the name alone promises a great deal.

Previous hosts have included Majikthise , whose post "Michelle Malkin is certainly not a cunt" should become a classic. Gretchen Ross of The Green Lantern was kind enough to carry my demented rant against hippies despite the fact that she is herself a genuine old school hippy.

I'll be asking for submissions when it's my turn, so do me a favour and check out the submission guidelines . I don't want to have to get rough with anyone.

Pub life. posted by lenin

It'll be time to hit the bar soon.

I don't know about you, but I love pubs with a passion. There are so many different moods you can get and most of them are fabulous. For instance, on a rare working day lunchtime, I might settle for a couple of pints while reading my books or the newspaper. Relaxing, peaceful. Other times, it's just meeting people I haven't seen for ages and smirking about how much better I'm doing in life than they are. Oh yeah, that's a favourite that. "You're a Hollywood producer now? Ha ha ha! You fucking idiot, how did you sink so low?"

Best times are those disputatious evenings in which veiled insults are hurled back and forth during political debate. Sometimes there's a spot of genius. Some one expatiates as if illumined by some rare spark, holds forth on crucial issues, extemporises on philosophical themes, slags off the latest boy-girl band or whatever. Or, best of all, some one breaks down and admits they are really very nice and they can't understand why everyone thinks they're cold and distant. That fucker cracks me up every time.

But the best thing about the British pub is that the unspoken subterranean electricities that are too easily submerged behind professionalism, courtesy or civility are teased out in drunken rages. How often I have heard a noxious conversation begin with the words, "I'm not a racialist, but..." Then: "These fucking asylum seekers, coming over here, taking our fucking top hotels, driving BMWs. Send em back!" Yeah, dude, I think we should send you back to the fucking womb. Dr Lenin does post-natal abortions, you know.

One thing, though. Years of experience have taught me this. Never, ever rise to any bait with a chance of physical violence when you're drunk. The best chance you've got is that they're as drunk as you are, in which case you'll both look fucking stupid as you lob slow, lumpen punches at each other. Far better, I say, to give any would-be assailant a gentle tap on the bum and remind them that Astroglide is available in all good chemists. If you're lucky, you could even get a rough shag out of the deal.

Changing lines. posted by lenin

The Guardian seems to be covering for the government through the election. Its headlines keep altering to more upbeat ones. For instance, yesterday The Guardian began its coverage of crime figures by following the rest of the press in emphasising an increase in violent crime. Then, hours later, the headline had changed to one that stressed the 11% drop in overall crime. Today, the paper carried a story about Blair's "pledge" to clamp down on "illegal immigrants". Just hours later, without irony, the headline reads Blair hits out at Tories over asylum . Typical Blairite triangulation - pander to the right in policy, then massage the left in words.

Anyway, a far more uplifting fact is that univerity lecturers have voted to support a boycott on two Israeli universities for their complicity in Israeli state crimes.

Cue some 'left' Zionist apologia...

City Shit. posted by lenin

It had better be quick if you work for Merril Lynch:

Toilet cubicles have also been fitted with timer switches, and doors will automatically open five minutes after staff have entered to do their business. 60 seconds before the timer is triggered, the overhead lighting in each cubicle will flash intermittently, giving staff time to finish up.

Since I mentioned Dario Fo earlier, I'm just trying to remember what play it is in which he has a character mocking the boss for trying to shorten toilet breaks. I think it's Can't Pay, Won't Pay, about Milan Fiat workers who decided not to pay the bus fares as they'd become too expensive, thus launching a popular movement...

Tis nothing, my lord. posted by lenin

The court jester mocks the King and the divine right he claims to stand on, and is the only one whose symbolic space is so inscribed as to allow him to. Let the truth be told, it seems, as if it were a lie, mere fooling. The Fool in King Lear, aftering teaching the King a frivolous speech, is rebuked:

KENT
This is nothing, fool.

Fool
Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer; you
gave me nothing for't. Can you make no use of
nothing, nuncle?

KING LEAR
Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.

Fool
[To KENT] Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of
his land comes to: he will not believe a fool.

The idea that nothing can come from nothing is firmly embedded in capitalist ideology. Ask a capitalist or one of his trained monkeys who happens to be called 'economist', "from where do profits come?" You'll be told that it is a reward for abstinence, something that accrues to the capitalist (or the landlord) in return for them foregoing consumption in order to invest. "Yes, but where does it come from?" Well, you see, the capitalist puts his money to work, buying machinery, labour, experts, analysts and so on, and if he invests well he is rewarded. "By whom?" The purchasers of his products, no less. "So, the capitalist is rewarded by consumers for abstaining on his own consumption?" Quite so. "Very generous, these consumers. Do they never think of rewarding the workers too?"

But that's all by the by. The main point is that the Fool in traditional ideology, through pun, metaphor, synonymy and homonymy, reflected like a funhouse mirror the lie of the Big Other. The Kings are "histrios not heroes", imbeciles not avatars of Godly wisdom. As well he's only joking, or the wise King would have his head on a spike.

There's a different tradition, of course, and that is the one drawn on by Dario Fo in his plays - the clown as anarchist, or revolutionary. The Fool in Accidental Death of An Anarchist updates the medieval peasant rabble-rouser in Mistero Buffo, plants him in 1970s Italy, and sets him loose on the corrupt, fascist-loving cops. A master of disguise, he places himself in all manner of social roles, from police inspector to judge, exposing their hollowness, using their symbolic power to interrogate the policemen who finally admit to having defenestrated the poor anarchist after having arrested him on bogus charges. (The play, by the way, used the facts of a real case for its plot - an anarchist railway named Giuseppi Pinelli was arrested for a bombing in Milan, after a fascist group distributed leaflets blaming it on the commies and anarchists. Some years later, after Pinelli had already disappeared out the window of the police interrogation room, three fascists were arrested and convicted of the crime. One of them was a paid informer of the Italian police).

But neither of these traditions is quite apt to capture the role of New Labour's court jester, Mr John O'Farrell . A repentant leftie, he uses his wit to charm and pacify his audience into sullenly voting Labour. E-mails from Labour HQ purporting to be from John O'Farrell do indeed bear his trademark of whimsy, routine 'topical' reference and glibness. Absurdity, for him, is by no manner of means a way of revealing the truth - we already know the truth, but are asked to behave as if we do not. New Labour is indeed a lie, he seems to say, but it remains The Best A Man Can Get. He knows the minds of would-be deserters, and says so:

Inside the brain of every thoughtful voter are hundreds of competing concerns and counter arguments: "I was against the war in Iraq but I'm in favour of Labour's big increases in overseas aid."

As another repentant leftist once said, "anyone who can suck like that need never dine alone". It isn't a joke, by the way. O'Farrell genuinely is suggesting that these two, placed adjacent, cancel one another out. But you may as well treat his entire routine as if it were an elaborate satire on New Labour and its willingness to coopt any celebrity, any facade of faux-leftism, any cocaine socialist who can turn a good line or a charming smile. O'Farrell's feeble rib-tickling has a wheedling quality. "Come on", he coaxes, with a devilish little grin while his fingers jiggle in your sides, "who's the best? Who's the number one? You're going to vote Labour, arentcha? Arentcha? Ooh, who's a good boy? You are!" Bite that fucker's hand off.

"Extremism breeds extremism" posted by lenin

Joint appeal for calm, my ass. Here's a snippet from the Beeb's account of last night's hustings:

Miss King said: "I utterly condemn any attacks on George Galloway, or any other politician, and indeed just the general atmosphere of intimidation.

"I have to say it has not been helped by some of the language used by Respect. Extremism breeds extremism."

I'd be interested to know what kind of "language" Ms King has in mind. Perhaps she reads my blog. But she obviously isn't referring to libels , since she is the chief purveyor of those in this campaign. She can't be referring to obloquy in general, since it is her campaign that is firing out slurs and false allegations at an astonishing pace.

So, what is this 'language', unique to the Respect campaign, that is encouraging 'intimidation'? I'd say that comparing someone to a dead fascist is inflammatory to say the least, so it has to be something worse than that. Any takers?

Johann Hari Embarrasses Himself... posted by lenin

File under outlandish reality bloggery. The 'Young Journalist of the Year' is getting a bit desperate in his bid to shed the guilt of having supported the mass murder in Iraq. Tonight, as you will have heard, there were hustings at The East London Communities Organisation’s (Telco) accountability assembly. Security was tight as Galloway and King were set to clash again.

Hari was seen sat at the back, noisily drawing attention to himself throughout the proceedings. He hissed when Galloway spoke, of course, cheered ostentatiously when King spoke, and generally made himself ridiculous. When the debate was finally over, Hari stood up and asked of some Labour delegates, in that stentorian voice of his: "Hey, shall I get a Respect poster and burn it?"

One man turned round at that point to regard the boyish interloper. Hari looked him square in the face and said - "tell Oona she was great, by the way!" The man looked at him and said, with considerable bearded placidity, "I am unlikely to do that since I'm the national secretary of Respect". The silly bastard had accosted John Rees. "How embarrassing," he cooed, "I thought you were her husband!"

Hari then proceeded to try and interrupt the television interviewers as they questioned Galloway. He yelled the usual nonsense, like "Galloway supports genocide, he's a - argh! - he supports a dictator of a - hello?" The reporters who, one expects, exceeded Hari in sobriety, turned round and looked in amazement at this voluble and volumous attention grabber. Hari continued apace, and was seen minutes later bragging loudly into his mobile phone about the incident. There can only be a handful of people in the land that would find that sort of idiocy impressive - but trust Hari to know every one of them.

Rick from the Young Ones is reborn: "the fascist bastard!!!"

Protest on Brick Lane. posted by lenin

That Blair protest was called off since he's decided to tail it up to the North somewhere. But a new protest is on, and Britain's best riot squad - namely the riot police - have turned out in force to contain it.

The riot police aren't there to protect any lowly Blairite MP. No, the Mayor of London himself is descending on the East End to give Oona King a bit of left credibility. She is to to campaign with him on Brick Lane, I'm told, although she will have some difficulty.

Why? There are about a hundred protesters gathered with antiwar placards awaiting her arrival. They're gathered on Hanbury Street just off Brick Lane, and the police are preparing to protect Livingstone and King from ... well, the voters.

Why not pop along and join in?

Hat tip: Guy .

Ugly Rumours... posted by lenin

I heard a strange rumour yesterday that the Prime Minister was bound for the East End for a quick visit - y'know, hi, yah, how d'you do, start the car Nigel... He apparently planned to swish in there at about 1pm today, and was set to be met by noisy protests, but has pulled out at the last second like the good Catholic he is (think about it).

Meanwhile, Galloway has been attacked by members of Hizb-Ut-Tahrir, the far right fundamentalist group, because - like I said the other day - they don't like Respect's socialism, support for gay rights and a woman's right to choose, and they don't like the way we bring Muslims, Jews and Christians together. This group has warned that any Muslim voting for Respect faces a "death sentence". Ironically, new Labour's best allies in Bethnal Green & Bow could be a bunch reactionary Islamists. Fuck em.

Also, Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo detainee who was tortured and witnessed murder, has called for a Respect vote in Birmingham Sparbrook. And the Liberal has withdrawn in West Ham, so it's a Labour-Respect race.

Resistance and representation. posted by lenin

The Gulf War did not happen, except on television. Did Baudrillard mean that there was no fighting, no death, no murder of civilians? In fact, militating against his own philosophical extremities, Baudrillard said that "What's happening on the ground there in Iraq, it's so vile. It's enough to drive you into a depression or into a rage. As an abstract problem of simulation, the war is exciting, but in the real, I experience the same anger as others." There is reality, after all. His argument was that the 'war' was an ideological construct which did not refer to what was actually taking place (or, as Bill Hicks did once put it, "there never was a war ... a war is where two armies are fighting"). True enough, what we experience as 'the war in Iraq' - an ecstatic experience for Fox News watchers, who were treated to blonde, collagen-lipped newsreaders enthusing about Navy SEALS - is indeed a simulacrum, a narrative fiction.

For instance, Patrick Cockburn wrote recently that "one reason why Washington can persuade the outside world that its venture in Iraq is finally coming right is that it is too dangerous for reporters to travel outside Baghdad or stray far from their hotels in the capital ... Most violent incidents in Iraq go unreported. We saw one suicide bomb explosion, clouds of smoke and dust erupting into the air, and heard another in the space of an hour. Neither was mentioned in official reports. Last year US soldiers told the IoS that they do not tell their superiors about attacks on them unless they suffer casualties. This avoids bureaucratic hassle and "our generals want to hear about the number of attacks going down not up". This makes the official Pentagon claim that the number of insurgent attacks is down from 140 a day in January to 40 a day this month dubious".

Similarly, in the interview with Les Roberts linked below, the leading scientist behind the Lancet report complains that: "I get very angry about the coverage of Fallujah. I heard a show last week on public radio in the US. They said that it is believed that half the 200,000 people who used to live in the city had returned. Well, the ministry of health told us the population used to be 310,000." How many times have you heard that? The disappearance of 110,000 people? Unless you're a believer in the supernatural, the obvious conclusion is that what we are seeing on the television and in newspapers is not a representation of the reality in Iraq, but a confection of lies.

The most obvious way in which the Iraq story is being 'produced' for us (and quite successfully) has been in the way the Iraqi resistance has been understood variously as head-choppers, suicide-bombers, Saddam-loyalists, fanatics or corrupt mercenaries being directed from Syria by a lunatic conspiracy between Ba'athists and Al Qaeda. The US-sponsored television network al-Iraqiya creates a spectacle for Iraqi viewers of 'terrorists' 'confessing' to murders of people who are in fact alive and well, to receiving money or intimidation for their efforts from commanders with sexual proclivities designed to scandalise innocent minds. Michael Schwartz dealt one devastating blow to that picture of a command and control structure, drawing on CIA analysis to show that the Iraqi resistance, at least the Sunni component which has been most vilified, is largely dispersed, lacking central control by either Ba'athist or clerics or 'foreign fighters', and is typically composed of nationalists offended by the occupation of their country. Now, another sharp dose of the reality principle has been injected by M Junaid Alam, in this excellent article .

It has been known for some time that the extremist Wahabbi element in the resistance, materialised for ghouls by the video footage of human beings having their heads hacked off with a short-bladed knife by - who else? - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is responsible for a tiny minority of attacks, (but also the bloodiest and most spectacular). They have, by targeting civilians in a bid to create civil war between Sunni and Shi'ite, claimed more victims than all the rest of the resistance combined. Yet, as Alam shows , the number of attacks against civilians is precisely tiny in comparison to the number directed against coalition troops. Attacks specifically targeting civilian areas make up less than 500, as do attacks on the new Iraqi police, on contractors and on public properties. The overwhelming bulk of attacks, numbering approximately 3,200, are directed against coalition forces. Even the New York Times' own graphic , working from DIA figures, show that only a fraction of resistance attacks are directed against civilians. I sense some unease on your part. Incredulity, perhaps. It can't be true! you say. I've seen it on the telly, they're bastards! Well, as Chico Marx once said, who are you going to believe - me or your own eyes?

For the sake of didactic hygeine, it is worth remarking that it is rather fanciful to assume that none of the attacks by genuine resistance groups have been conducted in ways likely to cause a large number of civilian deaths. However, part of the problem has been that as there is no national political unity, no overarching group (like, for example, the FLN) which can say "we did it" or "we denounce this". That said, there are efforts within the resistance to contain those who kill Iraqis. Also, it may be heartless to observe that at least theirs is a just war against occupation and that mistakes will be made - but morality lessons from supporters of the intentional mass murder in Fallujah simply don't sit well.

Consequences? The simulation of reality is not, contra Baudrillard, free-floating. The sign is not totally divorced from reality; rather it produces reality in certain ways, using the rough material provided by witness and official claim. The gap between the real and the phoney still matters. What would seriously disrupt the flow of dissimulation from the Pentagon through military chiefs and embedded correspondents to viewers and readers would be unity of political purpose and action by and within the resistance. By forming even a tentative united, patriotic front, Sunni and Shi'ite groups could both rein in the lunatics (including those on the Shi'ite side who beat students for listening to 'unhealthy' music), while exerting more control over how they are presented.

Malcolm X once observed that whether one is perceived as a monster or a freedom fighter is largely in the hands of who controls the image. "The mau mau," he noted ironically, "weren't image-conscious". They were concerned only with how to free themselves from what we now know to have been an even more brutal and immoral colonial domination than was imagined by anti-imperialists at the time. Having succeeded, within a very short space of time Jomo Kenyatta had become a 'moderate' among the Kikuyu, whom Western leaders prayed would not be overthrown by a more extreme force. "Yes," X chuckled, "they're praying, and they should..."

While Iraqis tend to the liberation of their country, we can tend to the prostration of Bush and his allies.

Interview with author of Lancet report. posted by lenin

Tomorrow's edition of Socialist Worker carries an interview with Les Roberts , the scientist who led the report into Iraqi excess mortality as a result of the war:

Your research on mortality in Iraq, published in the prestigious Lancet journal, made headlines across the globe last November. What motivated you to conduct the survey?

This is about the ninth “hot war” I’ve worked in. In most wars people are killed more by disease and disruption than by bullets and bombs. But when I read the newspaper reports on the war, all I heard about were the bullets and bombs. I didn’t think the reports were describing the suffering of the Iraqis very well.

I thought it would serve the interests of Iraqis if I described what they were really dying of. So, if we found they were dying of diarrhoea we could do something about that.

If they were dying at home in childbirth because they were too scared to go to hospital, we could do something about that. Much to our surprise we found that these things weren’t what they were dying of. Most were dying violent deaths.

Tommy Franks from US Central Command told the press that the US army “don’t do body counts”, despite the duty of care the Geneva Convention imposes on occupying forces. You showed it is possible to make mortality estimates.

Absolutely. I was smuggled across the border into Iraq. I went with just a suitcase and $20,000 in my pocket. All it took was six Iraqis brave enough to do the survey.

During a war things are messy and the Geneva Convention imposes very few constraints. But during an occupation things are quite different.

As I understand it there are obligations for the occupying forces that are similar to the obligations of a police officer on the streets here towards the local population — to arrest them if they step out of line, but to protect them the rest of the time.

Most of the people killed by the coalition were women and children, which implies the use of a lot of force, and perhaps too much.

As far as I’m concerned the exact number of dead is not so important. It is many tens of thousands. Whether it’s 80,000 or 140,000 dead, it’s just not acceptable.

On Reading. posted by lenin

Something odd is happening. In an era of global polarisation of all kinds, some of the most fundamental ideological precepts that one might have taken as agreed, already victorious, truisms, are being challenged. On the one hand, the cynosures of liberal ideology are losing their hegemony. Tolerance, openness, religious freedom, respect for the Other - all that is meeting growing resistance from a section of the population for whom it was never more than a cover for bigotry anyway. Similarly, for most Marxists, it has been shocking enough to discover that a number of erstwhile allies have reached shockingly different conclusions to us on the matter of imperialism, while claiming that they are truly consistent with their intellectual roots and that their faith in the liberatory power of imperialism is not heterodox.

Basic assumptions are having to be revisited, old arguments dredged up, canonical material critically scoured. For that reason, I think socialists and those newly drawn into the radical Left are probably reading and absorbing more information now than they might have done for a generation. In particular, philosophical and sociological arguments that might at one time have seemed obvious or pedantic are regaining considerable importance. The Middle East is an obvious hot topic, while America is a continuing conundrum. Fighting Facism is also an urgent task, particularly for the European Left.

Anyway, I'm seeking book recommendations from you, the public, the consumers and purveyors of bloggery. Stack em up in the comments box. Meanwhile, check out this online library of radical and socialist books. You can search by subject, author, title or whatever. I've just found it particularly useful for locating a copy of Ron Aaronson's Sarte and Camus, an account of that stormy friendship and intellectual rivalry.

BBC propaganda. posted by lenin

Ordinarily, I skate over gibberish and bias in the news with a snarl of irritation while trying to find the useful material. But the report of the execrable Jalal Talabani's desire to form Shi'ite and Kurdish 'militias' to deal with the insurgency is jaw-dropping. Talabani has an abominable human rights record from the period in which he ran half of the northern 'safe zone' in Iraq during the 1990s. His politics are disgracefully sectarian, and the attempt to set Sunni against Shi'ite and Kurd could be seen in the context of that. Yet, the BBC chooses to frame Talabani's recommendations in terms of a commitment to human rights, noting that:

If Saddam Hussein is to go to the gallows, as many of his erstwhile foes insist he must, his death sentence will have to be endorsed by the new Iraqi presidency.

But Mr Talabani, a lawyer and human rights advocate who has always opposed capital punishment, made it clear that his principles would not allow him to sign such a document, despite all the suffering the Baathist regime had inflicted on his Kurdish community.

"Personally, no, I won't sign," he said.

It is often difficult to gauge the proclivities of the various leaders and would-be leaders emerging in the 'new Iraq', since they have no record. Mr Talabani is different, however. He has form. He has a record. During his governance of one half of Iraqi Kurdistan, he had cause to be involved in a civil war with the other half of power in the Kurdish Regional Government, controlled by Massoud Barzani's KDP. It was a dispute originating from control of land, borders and money, but it swiftly took on dimensions of extraordinary cruelty. Talabani deployed his peshmerga in alliance with the Iranian security forces, who in return for their support insisted that he clamp down on Iranian Kurds seeking refuge in his territory. The Iranians, you see, had their own 'Kurdish problem'. To that end, Talabani procured an agreement from those Iranian Kurds that they would cease hostile activities against Iran. What they were not to know when they signed was that Talabani, in pursuit of his war for land and power against Barzani's equally brutal KDP, would allow the Iranian security services to capture, torture and brutally kill his erstwhile comrades.

Talabani is described as a great foe of Hussein. Yet, when his fellow Kurds were butchered by Saddam's army and mukhabarat, Talabani decided to go and make a deal with Saddam. A picture of him kissing the cheek of his apparent enemy can be found in Dilip Hiro's Desert Shield, Desert Storm. Barzani is no better. When Talabani brought in the Iranians to assist his side in the civil war, Barzani invited Saddam's forces to come and kill his fellow Kurds if they happened to be supporters of the PUK. In exchange, Saddam was also allowed to crush non-Kurdish dissidents based in the north. If any judgement fits Talabani, it is that he is an unprincipled opportunist who has, along with Barzani, given terrible leadership to his people. But a supporter of human rights? Irony must have gone to the moon for a day.

The BBC's preference for government-friendly information was also revealed in a recent exchange with MediaLens over claims of the use of banned weapons by US forces in Fallujah. In a Newswatch article over the issue, Helen Boaden of the BBC claimed:

"Compellingly, Paul Wood has had meetings with the relevant specialists at Human Rights Watch, who have been very tough on the US military as regards abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Paul asked them specifically about banned weapons in Falluja. They said they had heard the claims, had made some investigations, and had found no evidence that such weapons had been used."

Now, read on to see what Human Rights Watch said about that claim.

Tories: Enough about immigration! posted by lenin

Good news comes in threes. First the Tories sink behind in the polls; second Howard gets his ass kicked by a television audience in Oldham for promoting xenophobia (his remarks, if reported accurately, reek of Powell's "rivers of blood"); third, and most gloriously of all, leading Tories are now calling on Howard to back off over immigration:

A group of Conservative frontbenchers, including members of the shadow cabinet, have pleaded with Michael Howard to tone down his harsh rhetoric on asylum and immigration.

In the first signs of a Tory wobble - following a series of poor opinion polls - Mr Howard was warned over the weekend that he risked looking like the leader of a single-issue party.

And there is bad news today with a Populus poll in the Times which shows a dramatic leap in Labour's lead from two to nine points. No pollster has previously recorded such a dramatic jump in this election campaign.

It couldn't be sweeter. The Tories, my loves, are curling up, wilting, yellowing and slowly dying before our very eyes. Good. Feel the hate, you fuckers.

Respect Manifesto. posted by lenin

You can download and have a gander at the Respect manifesto now.

Odd to report, it does not contain any recommendations about moving toward Shari'a law, putting Trotskyists in burkas or any of the other nonsense that certain silly-billies concern themselves with. What it does do is outline a decent, if minimal, socialist programme, (including support for a woman's right to choose and ending all forms of discrimination, in case anyone is still shitting themselves about the Muslims - "Aayeee, aayeee, the Muslims are coming!!").

Rough outline, then. The manifesto calls for higher taxes on the wealthy, and on the profits of corporations, to fund lower taxes for the poor, higher pensions and decent public services. It calls for ending the occupation of Iraq. It calls for spending less money on the arms industry, renationalising public utilities and ending PFI schemes. It calls for the abolition of ASBOs, stopping ID cards in their tracks and defending civil liberties. It calls for ending third world debt without strings, and terminating the imposition of structural adjustment programmes. It calls for limits on animal testing, determined implementation of the ban on fox-hunting. It calls for measures to protect the environment, including ending tax breaks for airliners, emergency steps to reduce fossil fuel use and increase the use of renewable energy source. It calls for repealing anti-union laws, full employment rights from day one, a national minimum wage of £7.40 in line with the European Decency Threshold. It calls for measures to end discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexuality, gender or lifestyle choices. It calls for abolishing charges for prescriptions and dental care.

Oh, there's loads of fabulous things in that particular sack of goodies. Go get yourself something nice.

Jewish-Muslim solidarity in the East End. posted by lenin

Jonathan Freedland was right to note that Jews and Muslims in Britain have more in common than many realise. He wrote:

Prewar Jews, like today's East End Muslims, also lived in unforgiving poverty. They too were herded into the cramped streets of East London as the first stop for new immigrants. They too were reviled as outsiders, branded as parasites on the indigenous society. And they too were feared as a potential fifth column, suspected adherents of a violent, supranational ideology. The "Jewish menace" was said to be first anarchism and then Bolshevism. Today's "Muslim peril" is jihadism.

The East End of London has been the home of every great wave of immigrants fleeing oppression or seeking a better life. It has been the better for it. The great symbol of today's East End is the Jamme Masjid mosque on Brick Lane. The building was first founded as a Huguenot Church for Protestants fleeing Catholic oppression in France. It was then used by Methodists before being converted into a synagogue for Jews who had fled Eastern Europe and Russia, the Machzike Adass. As the Jewish community dispersed, the building became a mosque for Bangladeshis in 1976.

Some people imagine that the Middle East is an inevitably divider, cleaving the communities in twain. I don't think so. Some of the finest examples of Muslim-Jewish solidarity I have seen have been on antiwar and pro-Palestine demonstrations. Did I not see orthodox Jewish men holding up Free Palestine placards? Jewish left-wingers selling their magazine, the Jewish Socialist (featuring an interview with the excellent author Kinky Friedman)? Have not Muslims spoken up against the killing of innocent Jews? Did not the antiwar movement contain Jews and Muslims, as well as not a few Christians, Buddhists and Jedis? Does not Respect, which is fighting for seats in the East End, contain socialist Jews as well as left-wing Muslims?

The issues of Palestine and Iraq are universal issues, they are about human rights - not religion or identity, although they inevitably gets entangled in these. This is why organisations which predicate their politics on ultra-identitarian nonsense like Hizb'ut-Tahrir hate Respect. They hate that it unites Muslims with people of other faiths and no faith. They hate that it is an organisation that defends the rights of gays and women. They hate that it stands for election since for them voting and democracy are kufr. They hate the antiwar movement, saying "Don’t Stop the War – Except Through Islamic Politics". (More here ).

So, to the pro-war 'left' carpers, I say get a grip. Yes, you don't like us. No, we don't care.

Sectarianism in Iraq. posted by lenin

Following the 'Terror in the Hands of Justice' show that appears on the US-sponsored television network al-Iraqiya , there can be little doubt that the occupiers intend to fuel and use sectarianism in order to minimise the threat of cross-sectional political collaboration of the kind witnessed recently in Firdus Square. The show features guests who 'confess' to various crimes of insurgency, and usually flesh them out by mentioning the alleged homosexuality of their commander or by painting lurid pictures of insurgents fucking in mosques. Usually, the victims were named as Shi'ite, while the commanders were given Sunni names. As even the timid BBC reported recently, after an item about it had been on their website for several weeks, one person confessed to having killed people who were still very much alive and well.

Now, we learn that the rumours put about of 100 Shi'ites kidnapped and held hostage by Sunni guerillas were false . Allegedly, Sunni guerillas had issued a threat to kill all 100 alleged hostages unless every Shi'ite left the town. It was such a crisis that leading Shi'ite clerics had to appeal for calm, the National Assembly engaged in a flurry of activity worrying about sectarian violence, and Iyad Allawi issued a condemnation of the "savage, filthy, and dirty atrocities" taking place. Yet:

[A]s the army battalions arrived in Madaen, they saw streets full of people calmly sipping tea in cafés and going about their business. There were no armed Sunni mobs, no cowering Shiite victims. After hours of careful searches, the soldiers assisted by air surveillance found no evidence of any kidnappings or refugees at all.

By this afternoon, Iraqi army officials were reporting that the crisis in Madaen, which had been narrated in a stream of breathless television reports and news agency stories, was nothing but a tissue of rumors and politically motivated accusations.

Psyops, anyone?

Spinoza. posted by lenin

One of my favourite critical bloggers (next to Charlotte Street), K-Punk, finally gets round to linking to me . He remarks, on the topic of rationalism and religion:

[M]ost of the great rationalist philosophers - Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant - were religious. It's no surprise, therefore, that Zizek, Zupancic, Copjec Negri and Badiou have returned to rationalist sources to produce a counter-capitalist ethics. Rationalist religion forces a disconnection from the commonsense world of pathological interestedness; contemporary 'realism', by contrast, takes it as read that this is all there is. Religion provides a horizon beyond that of the oed-I-pod, and, at its most powerful, in Spinoza's monontheism, it can elaborate the seeming paradox that pursuing your own interests CAN ONLY be achieved by suspending your animal pathologies.

I think this is perfectly put. I'm reading Spinoza at present, (Theologico-Political Treatise), and the paradox is one that he plays with throughout. Certain naive liberals, following a certain sanitised version of Adam Smith, assume that self-interest and the general interest coincide. Precisely when it seems that this isn't the case - when the aggregate of individual interests produces a general interest that is oppressive, racist etc. - the liberal falls back on conservatism. Reduce the power of democracy, thereby freeing individual liberty.

In fact, David Chandler notes (in From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, Pluto Press, 2002) that a new liberalism is emerging in which evil is the ultimate ethical horizon, and in which the chief problem is the emergence of democratic human rights abusers. Their recommendations usually involve reducing the scope of the democratic state, preferring the Republic of Humanitarian Management to the Democracy of Risk. Hence, Paddy Ashdown's secular-liberal dictatorship in the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Bernard Kouchner's enlightened autocracy in Kosovo. Taking the risk out of democracy is no longer the preserve of the political right; it is a prerogative of "ethical" liberalism too. However, as Chandler points out, human rights are never secure when they are purchased at the expense of political rights.

For instance, those who accept restrictions on the rights of gypsies or asylum seekers out of 'pathological' interests, risk losing their own liberties. If, insteady, they abstracted from their immediate experience (I am not speaking of 'imaginative sympathy', the liberal literateur's answer to every dilemma, but of rationalism as abstraction, of indifference to, say, the apparently obnoxious aspects of gypsies or immigrants) and demanded a principled defense of rights, they would find their own that much more secure.

Drunk poll. posted by lenin

Okay, time to finally announce the results of the poll I've had running down near the bottom of the sidebar. I asked you all to answer the following question: What kind of drunk are you? The answers were as follows:

Sentimental: one glass of lager and you're best mates with everyone, you sad wanker. (11) 5%
Disputatious: one Tia Maria and you're the queen of logic, dispelling all foolish illusions (48) 24%
Peaceful: one glass ay whiskey and yer serene wi it all. (30) 15%
Crazy: one snakebite and you've got the old knob and arse out. (11) 5%
Mean: One Heineken and you've got your whole family pinned against the door with a python arm. (6) 3%
Rambling: One Pina Colada and the old days just come flooding back. Like the time when yer man... (14) 7%
Horny: One soupcon of punch and you want to fuck everything that walks, flies, hops, squats or swims (34) 17%
Oirish: One Guinness and you have everyone doing the Riverdance. (11) 5%
Meta-drunk: One vodka and you want to discuss the merits of being pissed. (18) 9%
British: One Hofmeister and yer out on the terraces with the Stanley Knife. (4) 2%
Depressed/Resentful: One Martini and you sink into despair, bitter self-loathing and loneliness. (15) 7%

Interestingly the two frontrunners haven't changed for some time. Most people prefer to admit to being disputatious or horny, while by far the most unpopular choice (I am glad to say) is the 'British drunk', followed by the 'Mean drunk'. A pleasing number of you are meta-drunkards, but please let's not discuss that (we'll have no meta-meta-drunks in this bar, thanks).

On the whole, there isn't a gang of pissed bastards I would rather share my Tomb with. However, please keep the place tidy. If you have to urinate or vomit, kindly do it round Harry's Place, the bar for bigots and dinner party imperialists. This is a respectable establishment.

A new poll will begin shortly. Most suggestions will be considered.

Desperation. posted by lenin

There's a kind of joy to be had in drawing the venom of the increasingly absurd Nick Cohen . God bless him, the poor man has hardly been able to find a good word to say about the war which he so ardently supported before it began. He could find barely a word to say about Abu Ghraib, or the Lancet study. This is curious, since Cohen is known for wearing his spleen on his sleeve. Indeed, he has been bilious about the alleged desertions of the Left, the supposed fallacies of the antiwar movement and has presented the usual array of fanciful allegations of crimes and complicities. His polemic becomes all the more extreme just as he senses he is losing or has lost the argument. Hence, the Stop the War Coalition, at the height of its powers, was the biggest threat to Iraqi democracy in the world. And today, the Respect coalition, which could well evict the pro-war Blairite MP Oona King from her Bethnal Green & Bow constituency, is variously maligned as anti-Semitic, a vehicle for fascism and so on.

I get the joke, of course. Galloway is a moustache wearing ex-Labour MP campaigning in the East End. So was Oswald Mosely. Ha ha. I got the joke when Oona King's election agent, unfortunately named Graham Taylor, first cracked it at the beginning of this month. I am bereft several ribs, as you must gather.

Well, before despatching what Cohen knows full well to be lunacy and nonsense, I think it's worth pointing out that no one in Respect is guilty of supporting a war which would eventually put British soldiers ('the armed wing of Amnesty International' Cohen called them) in the docks for torture, crippling beatings, rape and so on. Never mind a 'conservative estimate' of 100,000 dead as of last year (how high must the figure be now). After all, Cohen never minds. Or does he? Guilt is one of the primary sources of aggression, and no one is looking shiftier than jolly old Saint Nick.

Working by connotation rather than denotation - as per usual - Cohen avers that in the fight for the East End:

[T]here's a whiff of old hatreds in the air. Oona King, the Labour candidate, is getting fed up with Respect supporters bringing up her Jewish mother, although she says it makes a change from the British National Party bringing up her black father.

This charge has been repeated often enough, but with what cause? What evidence does King present to justify these ridiculous claims? Nil. King remarked that it was Respect "canvassers" who had told people not to vote King on account of her Jewish background, which would be disgusting if true. Sadly for her, Respect had not started canvassing in Bethnal Green & Bow when King made her remarks. Moreover, there is ample evidence to show that King has no particular respect for the truth, at least in this campaign. Here she is hoping the campaign doesn't get too dirty , here she is libelling her opponent and paying an out of court settlement, and here she is repeating the libel . When she was caught encouraging postal voters to send their ballot papers to her campaign headquarters, she claimed that "We are working to an agreed set of rules we have had for decades" , despite the fact that the laws allowing anyone to apply for postal voting were introduced in 2000. Cohen may be right to say the Oona King is a strong woman. She's strong enough to be out the country when there's a vote as to whether her single mother constituents will have their benefits cut. Strong enough to vote for tuition fees and foundation hospitals against the wishes and needs of her constituents. Strong enough to send quite a few of them to war. But, given the above, and also the little gaff when she sent out Eid Mubarak cards to all constituents with faintly Asian names (thus offending her Hindu supporters - who's playing the 'communalism' game now?), I would suggest that whatever else Oona King is, the woman is as thick as shit.

Now, to the latest folly from the King campaign, also recycled by Cohen. It was alleged by King that Respect supporters were behind the disgraceful egging of a war memorial service attended by many Jewish people, King among them:

Last week, King and a group of mainly Jewish pensioners gathered for a 60th anniversary memorial service for the 132 people who died in the last V2 rocket attack on London in 1945. Muslim youths spat and threw eggs at the mourners and shouted: 'You fucking Jews.'

In a letter to the Guardian, members of Respect said there was 'no evidence that this egg-throwing was anti-semitic'. Although it didn't condone them, 'such episodes do occur', and Galloway, John Major, Tony Blair and John Prescott had all had eggs thrown at them.

What can you say to that? Either it's slyly trying to avoid alienating potential supporters or Respect is so morally shrivelled it can't tell the difference between disrupting a political speech and attacking a service for the victims of fascism.

There's not much clarity about who was actually behind these attacks, or what their motives were. King has suggested that the target was her, to which the letter from several Jewish members of Respect can be seen to respond. Jonathan Freedland, who was present, wrote yesterday in The Guardian :

Within minutes, the mourners were pelted, first with vegetables, then with eggs. Some said they saw stones; others said they had been spat at. Gathered in old age to remember their dead, they felt under siege.

Looking around, it was difficult to spot individual culprits. All that were visible were groups of young Asian men, standing on the balconies of the rebuilt block.

Among the dignitaries at the service was the local MP, Oona King. When she spoke, she attacked the "ignorance" of the assailants and insisted that their real target was her ... suggesting the attack was part of an increasingly vicious contest between herself and George Galloway, who is seeking to win Bethnal Green and Bow for his anti-war Respect party.

Indeed, the episode became part of a new escalation in hostilities between the two candidates which would later include King's charge -emphatically denied - that Respect activists were seeking to whip up Muslim antagonism against her by highlighting her Jewish background.

I was there and I must confess it did not look like an attack on Oona King to me. She was not especially visible, and no slogans were chanted or words uttered - as surely they would have been if this was merely a stance against King's support of the Iraq war.

...

Of the dozen or so people I approached, most struggled to converse in English. But not all. Syed Mumin, a 24-year-old student who has lived all his life in the block, was adamant. It was nothing to do with King. "And it's nothing to do with Iraq or Palestine or anything to do with religion," he said.

Instead, Syed explained, the area was overcrowded and rundown. "There's a lot of aggression." The result is that when the police show up they get pelted. If even a resident drives in with a newly clean car, he'll get "egged". Here was a group of outsiders, so they got the treatment too. His friend Bokkar Ali added: "They're just kids having a laugh. They do it to everyone."

Except the culprits did not look like kids; most seemed to be in their late teens or 20s. And there's the testimony of Aminur Rahman, 18, who told me: "There's a lot of hatred towards the Jewish. We've got hatred towards them." He knew Sunday's group were Jewish because of the skullcaps and he knew the story of the 1945 bomb. So was it wrong to attack people who were grieving? "It was wrong in a way, but I think they deserved it because they came into a Muslim community."

I don't know who speaks for his neighbours, Syed or Aminur. Maybe the truth is halfway between them.

I don't doubt that some of the stupider locals will be prejudiced, although it has always been known that King is Jewish, and she has never before had a problem winning a majority of the electorate in a heavily Bangladeshi area. But what is notable from Freedland's account is that it was Oona King, and no one else, who tried to make it into an election issue. From day one it has been clear that her campaign would seek to make it seem as if Respect's challenge was about religious sectarianism. Hence, before the mourners tears are even dry, King is appropriating the incident for her political campaign. Fabulous respect for the dead in that. And the fact is that the only people who are making race an issue in this campaign are Oona's rent-a-crowd .

Cohen goes on to repeat some of the siller charges about Respect - "boring old causes" like gay rights are to be dropped in pursuit of an alliance with Muslims, he claims. Remarkable stuff, but here is the text of a motion passed overwhelmingly at the last Respect national conference:

Motion 57: Gay Pride - Tyneside

This conference welcomes the production of a Respect leaflet for London Pride.

It supports the policies outlined in that leaflet, ie
- an end to discrimination against lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people
- for equal partnership and pension rights
- for strong policies to tackle homophobia in all public bodies
- for an increase in public services that meet the needs of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people, rather than money wasted on war

Conference instructs the incoming National Committee to produce similar material for all Pride events next year and urges local groups to make sure material is distributed at events in their area.

Those policies go further than anything advocated by Labour or the Liberal Democrats. (Incidentally, in case anyone is asking that old question, here is part of the text of Motion 38, also passed overwhelmingly: "Respect ... opposes any change in legislation that restricts abortion rights and supports a woman's right to choose").

Cohen continues:

As the line changed, the party's paper tried to reconcile anti-capitalism and religious fundamentalism by calling on the comrades to protest against Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing clubs.

Galloway's propaganda follows the same pattern. It features a picture of Oona King with a cheesy smile and a low-cut dress. The headline doesn't say 'Decadent Western Bitch', but then it doesn't need to.

The SWP has always protested against these bloody lap-dancing clubs, and it has nothing to do with puritanism and everything to do with sexism. It was a group of our female members who floured the Miss World contest a few years back on national television (the first time Channel Five actually looked half-interesting was when that protest kicked in). I suppose Cohen is entitled to think that Spearmint Rhino clubs are an embodiment of Western secular freedom - aye, when Baghdad and Kabul rock to the sound of drunken salesman roaring at some dancing girls, we will know that freedom has finally greeted those benighted people. Yes, Baghdad Bukakke! I'm sure Nick Cohen's semiological reading of Galloway's election 'propaganda' (not, say, 'campaign material'?) is worthy of comment, but I'm afraid incredulity overwhelms me.

Oh, I could go on. Cohen recycles the old charges against Galloway - he saluted Saddam's indefatiguability. Yes, right he did, although some of Cohen's new allies in the Whitehouse went further and armed the bastard. While Galloway was trying to save lives (fancy that), a certain hard-faced Republican was helping him kill when he popped in for a cuppa. Similarly, the Gorgeous One is maligned for having called Iraqi trade unionists "quislings". This is a beautiful rhetorical technique, by the way. Suppose I criticise a group of people who defend Israel's occupation of Palestine, I remark that they are apologists for mass murder. But say the people thus identified are all Jewish. Now, you can say "the proprietor of Lenin's Tomb has described Jews as apologists for mass murder". The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions does not represent all Iraqi trade unionists - it certainly doesn't, in its support for the occupation and for the old Allawi regime that crushed all other trade unions and murdered Fallujah - nor does it represent the majority of Iraqis. When IFTU representatives attended the Labour conference and allowed themselves to become the tools of the leadership, circulating leaflets urging union leaders in Britain to reject the wishes of the overwhelming majority of their members and support a continued occupation, I don't suppose it is a remarkable fact that those opposed to the occupation criticised such activity. Yet, to do so is to be guilty of - what? - a thought crime. One is in league with the far right for doing so.

Respect, which Cohen cannot touch on its policies, is thus mangled through his kangaroo court, in which only the prosecution may speak and in which any charge, no matter how false or ridiculous, stands. Insinuation, guilt-by-association, blacklisting and interrogation with the use of phoney testimony form the bulk of Cohen's repertoire when attacking the Left. Well, I hate to reply in kind, but that too sounds very familiar.

Branson: Labour same as Tories. posted by lenin

From the horse's mouth :

There would be little difference for businesses between a Labour and Tory government, says Richard Branson.
Asked which party would be better for business, the Virgin tycoon said: "Arguably, it doesn't matter."

He told the BBC Gordon Brown had been a brilliant chancellor, but said Labour had continued Tory policies.

"The difference between having a Labour government for business to having a Tory government has been fairly negligible," he told Newsnight.

If you hate Branson, vote Respect .

Election fraud. posted by lenin

This election, while offering moments of inspiration, is proving to be one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in British parliamentary history since the rotten boroughs. In part, this is because certain candidates feel they won't be able to win without issuing libels left right and centre. But in large part it is because of the huge potential for fraud inherent in the postal voting system. Already, three councillors, encouraged and supported by Labour, have defrauded their way into local seats . Two local officials have been suspended over 1000 unopened postal ballots. In some marginal constituencies, Channel Four news reports, postal voting has increased by as much as 500%, and their polls show that this could seriously skew the results in this areas.

In a particularly tight race in Bethnal Green & Bow, Oona King MP has been encouraging people to send their postal votes - guess - to her campaign headquarters , ignoring advice from the Electoral Commission. Oona King's response was that "We are working to an agreed set of rules we have had for decades" , despite the fact that the laws allowing anyone to apply for postal voting were introduced in 2000.

For the first time, international observers have been invited to monitor polls in Britain including in Tower Hamlets and Bethnal Green. The Evening Standard reports that: "The Crown Prosecution Service is already investigating 39 cases of alleged vote-rigging across the UK."

It is because of this that Respect has launched legal challenges to postal voting in collaboration with the People's Justice Party.

I note that Michael Howard MP has now come out to slag off the government for implementing these policies, but the Tories voted for them and they have also refused to implement many of the proposals of the Electoral Commission for combatting fraud.

ps: Note to Kevin Spacey. I saw you today in your little fake beard. I recognised you. Don't fucking think your silly cloth cap fooled me as you squeezed by in that cake shop. Yeah, I could have hassled you for an autograph worth £400 on e-bay. But your pathetic attempt to conceal your identity made me pity you. Consider yourself warned - stay in the Old Vic during lunch hour, you A-list fuck.

Authenticity. posted by lenin

Suppose you're a second-rate ham actor like Tony Blair, touring the country with a new show called "I Think We're A Clone Now". In it, you produce a wooden ventriloquist's dummy, carved to look a little bit like you. It wears the same banal suit with the same red silk tie, has a demonic grin carved into its face, empty staring blue eyes, with one slightly larger than the other. This is the classic decoy - it is a playful object, raising questions about reality, meaning, similitude etc. But it's non-threatening.

For your next trick, you produce a robot which is similarly designed to look a bit like you, but this time there is no ventriloquism. It speaks on its own accord, barking out those cheap casuistries and cliches that you use like so many crutches. This time, it is equivalent only as an operational process. It is a bit of mechanical efficiency, less a fake than a replica in steel. But it struts robotically about the stage, gesturing, preening, exuding fake sweat and tears, and the audience ooooohs and aaaaaahs.

Nice one. The final part of the show, you pull out a clone. A complete biological replica, grown in some hellish test-tube at Huntingdon's Life Sciences next to where the chimpanzees are smoking forty a day and using cut up rabbits for ashtrays. The clone is an altogether more terrifying creature. It is the original minus x. In all essentials, it seems the same. It simpers, it glowers, it expatiates with cutting hand gestures, its smug, effete voice cuts through you like a dentists drill. Now, you march on 100 or so of these monstrous things, lose yourself in them, and no one can tell one from the other. In fact, as they are all precise clones with every patented strip of DNA replicated there really is no difference between them. Yet, somehow, authenticity has been lost. Not that the original Tony Blair has ceased to exist, you understand, simply that the crucial difference separating real from fake has been collapsed.

In the Prime Minister's simulacrum world, the biggest lies often come precisely in the form of sincerity and truth, as Slavoj Zizek perceptively noted. It is not that Blair himself is not emotionally persuaded of his own case, but that this is precisely the means of delivering falsehood and sophistry. Blair says on television "I'm a pretty straight sort of guy", or evinces familial horror over his son's drinking habits (ASBO the little fucker!), or evinces lachrymosity over the death of a spoilt Royal. To which Zizek retorts:

[T]he public sharing of inner turmoil, the coincidence between public and private, even and especially when it is psychologically 'sincere' is cynical - not because such a public display of private doubts and uncertainties is faked, concealing true privacy: what this display conceals is the objective socio-political and ideological dimension of the policies or decisions under discussion. The more this display is psychologically 'sincere', the more it is 'objectively' cynical in that it mystifies true social meaning and effect of these policies for decisions.

The great thing about these replicants is that, although they are autonomous human agents, they are almost programmed to emote like Blair, occlude real political considerations with phrases like "ah genuinely believe...".

Thomas Carlyle, in one of his hilarious moans about the rising Democracy, complains :

Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:--Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We _are_ poor histrios, we sure enough;--did you want heroes? Don`t kill us; we couldn`t help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors.

Beyond this, we now find Prime Ministers who are unconscious play-actors, living out tragicomic careers as if for all the world they were indeed the authentic rulers of our time. Histrios who mistake their acting out for heroism. The collapse of the distinction between the two, in fact, is what makes our political culture so bizarre that when Prescott lamps someone we celebrate as if at last some Real had irrupted into the simulacrum of politics, forgetting that this Real is exactly what sustains the simulacrum. Prescott may punch from the Left, but he governs from the Right, and talks from his fundament.

The inadequacy of cynicism in the face of this is transparent. For if the liars do not even recognise their own lies, it is far better to take them at their word and realise that they are incapable of seeing beyond the bare-assed stage production they are trapped in. Better to turn our attention to the objective conditions that produce these lies, and seek at last to change them.

Class & Identity. posted by lenin

The Shiraz quaffing Larry Elliot has a message for New Labour :

Instead of shaping capitalism to the needs of the people, Labour policy is now all about shaping the people to the needs of capitalism. The poor are told to eat healthier food, cut down on drinking, give up smoking, watch less TV, exercise more, take lessons in parenting. This may be done with the best of intentions; it may be in society's best interests; it may, indeed, be the best that modern politics can provide. But the evidence suggests that those on the receiving end don't feel grateful. They feel patronised and despised.

Meanwhile, an excellent article in Al-Ahram by an Iraqi human rights activist discusses the way the occupiers of Iraq have promoted sectarianism :

Political sectarianism existed in Iraq since the establishment of the modern state in 1921. After all, to ruling authorities sectarian and ethnic divisions were a useful instrument for consolidating and perpetuating their control. The device was given legal expression in the Nationality Law 42 of 1924, which came into effect even before the promulgation of Iraq's first Constitution, or basic law, in 1925, in the Nationality Law 43 of 1963 and then in the discriminatory decrees issued by the Revolutionary Command Council from 1968 onwards. The most salient repercussions of these laws and decrees was the expulsion of some half a million Iraqis, a phenomenon which reached its peak at the outset of the Iraq-Iran war and the RCC Decree 666 of 7 May 1980. Bremer however elevated sectarianism to an official denominational ordering of society, which is perhaps more potentially dangerous or at best a sanctification of the ugly side of the face of sectarianism.

Sectarian and ethnic tensions mounted considerably under Bremer's rule. Across the religious Shia-Sunni, Kurdish-Turkoman, Arab-Kurdish- Christian-Chaldean divides, barricades have been erected. One is reminded of the observation of the eminent Iraqi sociologist, the late Ali Al-Wardi, who described this phenomenon as sectarianism without religion. What he meant was that the truly pious individual cannot be sectarian because Islam like other religions abhors sectarianism. The existence of diverse sects and denominations is a healthy phenomenon so long as it is a manifestation of constructive plurality and diversity rather than narrow partisanship and mutual hatred.

Freedland on Finkelstein. posted by lenin

Jews Sans Frontieres is promising a bit of a kicking for an old bit of Freedland sophistry. This dishonest, crass and vile review of Norman Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000) indicts the reviewer more than the author. It's well worth thinking about, since I think it illustrates something about the liberal media and its reaction to serious, radical dissent.

The fact that there is so little meat in the review leaves all the more room for venom, and Freedland dishes it out by the bucketload. Finkelstein, we are told, is more critical of his fellow Jews than of the Nazis. Indeed, he uses the same arguments as David Irving, the far-right historian who has been exposed in a court case that he initiated as a charlatan and a fraud. Specifically, "He claims that Jews have made up stories of persecution and that there are too many survivors to be true - another Irving favourite." We are further told that Finkelstein's book "reads like a rant, with splenetic attacks on individuals, many of them survivors, and vast generalisations about the whole of world Jewry." Freedland calls Finkelstein in New York: why don't you criticise the Nazis the way you criticise your fellow Jews? Finkelstein remarks that, had been writing about the Nazis, he might well have done so. Freedland's verdict: feeble. In fact, as far as Jonathan Freedland is concerned, Finkelstein does the work of anti-Semites for them, designing a conspiracy theory in which a Jewish elite coerces a gullible American Jewry into support for Israel.

The conclusion is damning: "Finkelstein sees the Jews as either villains or victims - and that, I fear, takes him closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it." Finkelstein, then, is closer to the Nazis than to those members of his own family who were murdered by them.

I have read the book twice, which is two times more than Freedland has read it, so I'd say I'm in a good position to assess the quality of these criticisms. Finkelstein does not use the same line on survivors as David Irving at all - in fact, it is rather the opposite. His insistence is that the Nazis killed so many people so effectively that the present number of designated survivors is impossibly high. Irving, by contrast, believes that almost all Jews survived, bar a million or so killed in Einsatzgruppen-style killings and one or two gas chamber trucks, which is all he would admit to in court. Similarly, Finkelstein does not regard Jews as being pushed around by a 'wicked' Jewish elite (interestingly, it is Freedland and not Finkelstein who resorts to such polarities). In fact, he argues that the growing importance of Israel among Jewish communities had to do with sociological changes among American Jews. In particular, their growing success within America, the subsumption of many of them into the suburban middle class, and the corrolary conservatism. I can't say if he's right or not, but there's no hint of conspiracy in that. The book does not, as near as I can tell, generalise about "world Jewry", and certainly does not do so in "splenetic" terms.

But Freedland's article connotes more than it denotes. Finkelstein's arguments are overlaid with Irving's rhetoric so as to suggest some overlap where none exists. The only point at which Finkelstein is allowed an answer is carefully framed by Freedland. He called Brooklyn, parsed one reply, and concluded with a malediction. Finkelstein's arguments are not new, we are told - and then again, they are, because otherwise they would not offend. The notion that the Nazi holocaust is not unique has been widely debated among Jews, says Freedland. I don't know if it has or not, but so what? There is no harm in Finkelstein spending a penny or two on the topic. (Of course, Freedland means to convey, whether it is true or not, that this joker Finkelstein thinks he's being original, while we sophisticated Londoners have been shooting this shit for years). Freedland undoes himself from paragraph one, unfortunately, by insisting that this book has nothing new to say and has raised no debate (then why review it?), while any fool who has made any incursion into the topic at all will find that there has erupted the most heated controversy about the book, its contents, the author and his intentions. Meanwhile, Freedland's review is just a little too "crazy with fury" to make a bid for cool contempt.

What Finkelstein argued in the book was as follows: the Nazi holocaust is being usurped by apologists for Israel, typically including groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the World Jewish Congress; these apologists do not act out of ideological conviction (ie are not convicted Zionists), but out of self-interest; they extort large amounts of money on behalf of victims who rarely see a penny; they use the Nazi holocaust as an ideological bludgeon to beat critics of Israel with. The charges he makes are substantial, and disturbing. The best reply that Elan Steinberg could make when asked about the claim that the World Jewish Congress has amassed $7bn in funds was to say that Finkelstein had located this claim in a German newspaper. "And this man thinks he is a scholar?" In fact, the reference was to a conference on the Nazi holocaust in Stockholm at which Edgar Bronfman had made the claim, as relayed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Imagine it. A German newspaper.

So, to conclude where Freedland does, is it true that Finkelstein sees Jews as either villians or victims, thus propelling him in the direction of the Judeocidal villains who obliterated much of his family? Hard to see how it can be, since Freedland charges Finkelstein with considering himself a prophet of some sort, which is neither victim nor villain. But Finkelstein expends a lot of praise on fellow Jews - like Raul Hilberg, the reputed historian of the Nazi holocaust who endorses Finkelstein's book on the cover. When criticising Israel, he routinely cites from Israeli human rights organisations who he presumably is aware are largely Jewish, but are neither villains nor victims.

Nowhere does Freedland's case cohere. Nowhere does he display the remotest understanding of the text he claims to be commenting on. Yet, and this is remarkable, he was actually paid for his work where any decent editor would have chucked it across the desk at him and told him to stop fucking about. That's not a conspiracy, but a fact of life. The left-liberal media frequently interpolate themselves between the reader and truly radical texts, screening off this or that unsavoury piece ("I read this so you don't have to") with some scary rhetoric and fabrications. Far better to stick with some tepid shit that challenges no one, calls for no reform, plays it safe, uses only the most hygeinic language etc. The median is the message.

Labour Manifesto posted by lenin

The Prime Minister should find out who's forging his signature and sending out bullshit e-mails under his name. Because the prankster has now produced a mock 'Labour Manifesto' that is clearly designed to ruin the reputation of the Labour Party and piss off key groups of supporters who might, unfortunately, take it seriously.

At every stage, it parodies New Labourspeak, its wafer-thin commitments, its fudging, its hypocrisy, its celebration of bankrupt and utterly reactionary policies like ASBOs, PFIs, ID cards, attacks on asylum rights, more intensive road-building, low corporation taxes etc. The terminological inexactitude of their commitments is rendered with hilarious acuity: "we will go further than", "we will improve", "we will set a timetable for", "we will commit to faster...", "we will maintain our commitment to" etc etc. The moronic, robotic reproduction of management jargon is almost ball-crunching: "We will empower ... promote ... fasttrack ... foster entrepreneurship ..." etc. The pitifully vague commitments to appease the left are almost carbon copies of reality: Labour will honour the 'Warwick Agreement' it says, although no one will ever know if they do since its provisions are so vague and, had it not been for the threat of strike action during the election campaign by public sector workers, one of the key commitments - to "engage in effective dialogue" with unions over pensions - could have bitten the dust already. Another thing that is expertly sent up is Labour's ceaseless, idiotic bragging. Barely a page goes by that does not 'remind' the voter of some spurious or fabricated 'achievement' that Labour has made since 1997...

Like I say, the document is obviously a fake. It doesn't even have the Prime Minister's picture on the front cover, which is a dead giveaway. I can't wait for the real thing.

Blair-Howard debate. posted by lenin

Oh my. Oh mercy. You have to go have a look at this . Just wait for it to load and then press play when asked to.

Warning: don't try to watch this while at work.

Labour's Plea to Antiwar Voters. posted by lenin

I've been a bit busy all day, so I'm glad Meaders took the trouble to diss the shit out of this fucking idiocy from The Guardian. The Guardian pretends that only woolly middle class liberals care about the war, while Meaders points out that the working class object to murder as well - in fact, the biggest drop in Labour's support has been among manufacturing workers.

However, in what does Labour's appeal to us antiwar voters consist? Well:

Labour plans to win back voters disaffected by the Iraq war with a manifesto pledge for international action on HIV/Aids treatment, a treaty to control the arms trade and a timetable for phasing out export subsidies to the west's farmers.

Yeah, not good enough. I want to see some real grovelling here. Take your clothes off and bend over. That's right. Now, hold your butt-cheeks apart and show me your intestines. Tsch. Alright, come over here and stick your dick in this car's exhaust. Yep, hold it there for a while. Now, walk in a straight line along those discontinuous white lines in the middle of the road. Uh huh. Nice one. Hell, son, do a backflip.

Etc.

Labour's "plea"? You call some vague, watery commitments that allow a multitude of sins a "plea"? I call that contemptuous. I can imagine Blair and his advisers sitting around worrying about the antiwar votes, going "oh yah, let's just buy them off with some puny reforms, always worked in the past, yah". Must try harder.

Links and notes. posted by lenin

A few interesting nuggets.

1) Galloway leads Oona King in Evening Standard online poll , this after King had smeared Respect canvassers, accusing them of telling people not to vote for King because she was Jewish. This would be a more impressive slander if Respect had even started to canvas Bethnal Green & Bow.

2) Iraqi nationalists in the resistance are bringing the Salafists to heel . As growing political unity between Sunni and Shi'ite groups develops in opposition to the occupation, Sunni nationalists are taking action against the murderous Wahabbi fringe, telling them "stop killing Iraqis".

3) The International Socialism journal is now available online and it has some excellent pieces in this quarter's edition, including about Iraq, the resistance and the elections , Egypt , and the British working class .

4) Doug Henwood's excellent book about Wall Street is now available to download for free . Henwood's wit and sharp analytical skill have also been brought to bear in a glorious debunking of 90s quack economic memes, After the New Economy, which I thoroughly recommend.

I'd also like to thank the person who naughtily tried to sign me up for daily updates from Mad Mel's diary. It gave me the opportunity to deliver a swift slap to that tumescent ego. And to the Labour Party, who insist on continuing to send me e-mails from Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair, John O'Farrell and others. Campbell is on fine form today, instructing me in terse paragraphs not only to watch Labour's election broadcast tonight, but also to get my friends round to watch it. Now, I could be sad enough that I'd stay in on a Monday evening to check that shit out, but none of my friends are (at least not that I know of).

Prolier Than Thou posted by lenin

As the election fever heats up ( for fewer and fewer people ), a workmate draws my attention to the Observer's fabulous front-page yesterday. In particular, he was ranting about Peter Hain's quoted remarks, which I excerpt:

'There's now a kind of dinner party critics who quaff shiraz or chardonnay and just sneeringly say, "You are no different from the Tories",' he said. 'Most of the people in this category are pretty comfortably off: it's not going to be the end of the world if they get a Tory government. In a working-class constituency like mine, this is a lifeline. It's not a luxury.'

The only interesting thing about this is that this tired, wearisome hackneyed line is being repeated with greater urgency and frequency at every election, local or national. Peter Hain, the 'left' face of New Labour, is wheeled out to gee up the wilting activists and the inevitable result is some bilge like this. The irony is that the only kinds of people among whom Hain's 'argument' has any currency is among the well to do dinner party critics. They can be fobbed off with liberal guilt - vote for us even if you disagree with us, otherwise the poor get it. That shit won't wash in a working class constituency like Bethnal Green, I fear.

What Hain goes on to do is try to rescue a leftist gloss for Labour:

He promised a third Labour term would be 'redistributionist' in approach, with pledges to boost social mobility expected in the manifesto, but quashed speculation of tax rises.

'I do not think that a progressive party, and certainly the Labour Party, can win an election on a platform of higher taxation.' Using tax revenues to create half a million more public service jobs 'is a form of redistribution', he said.

Hain was infuriated by calls in last week's New Statesman, owned by Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson, for voters to oust more than 40 Labour MPs to teach Blair a lesson. Accusing it of 'levelling a political machine-gun', he said that many of those singled out were precisely those whom progressives should support, including gay and female candidates.

Candidates who progressives should support because they are gay and female? On that logic, votes for Ann Widdecombe or the late and unlamented Pim Fortuyn are 'progressive' votes. Noticeably, the article is full off horrible contradictions. On the one hand, Hain claims that Labour is being secretly progressive (perhaps with an idea that Brown is a secret socialist, treading softly round attentive Daily Mail ears). On the other, Labour cannot increase tax on the rich to help the poor and hope to win an election. Yet, when it comes to discussing how New Labour has changed Britain, the article notes with sadness that views on immigration and civil liberties have gone to the right under Blair - but happily notes that people are "surprisingly liberal" on tax, with 59% supporting higher tax to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Precisely the problem for new Labour. Their argument has always been that they have to be so far right precisely because they can't win an election on an agenda for change - yet 59% in any election would give any government a stonking majority in a first past the post system. Noticeable, when Hain is called on to acclaim the achievements of Labour, he cites very few of the substantial policies - the ones that Blair has made his centrepieces. PFI? Never heard of it, guv. War? Don't mention the fucking war!

Hain adds:

[I]mmigration is the issue that dare not speak its name. I think the left ignores the way the Tories are exploiting these issues at their peril.'

Quite right. But as I can learn, there is little humane or just in New Labour's policies toward asylum, and more than a little exploitation of such issues when the (former) Home Secretary accuses gypsies of shitting in shop doorways.

So, there is New Labour's quandary, its present swamp. Unable to defend its record to its natural supporters, its representatives are obliged to attack imaginary enemies as 'middle class', as if ministers and MPs are salt of the earth common folk. Pretty desperate stuff.

The Paradise Revolution posted by lenin

There, I've done the State Department's work for it. This revolt has also been branded, (note: 'paradise' as in Paradise Square, which is how Firdus Square has been interpreted in the English language press). Paula Dobriansky can make the announcement tomorrow, laud the popular democratic will of the people and note that it just goes to show that the US strategy of 'democratic revolution' in the Middle East.

Capitalism and Narcissism. posted by lenin

SF Capital touches on a theme that anticapitalists had better take note of:

It's of course no accident that the current power elite (Spielberg, Lucas, Gates, Blair) belonged to the so-called counterculture of the 1960s. Capital, needless to say, is indifferent to individual human motivation, but happy slaves are better slaves, and the reprogramming of the way the master class thinks (about itself, about workers, about capital) has been crucial to the presentation of the multi-nationalised capital's current dominion as immutable fact. And George Lucas' 'transubstantiation' of Apocalypse Now into Star Wars is emblematic of the shifts in late capitalism since the 60s. The smooth transition from hippy to hyper-capitalist, from slacker hedonism to authoritarianism, from engagement to entertainment, retrospectively reveals what the punks knew so we when they cackled 'never trust a hippie'. Far from posing any threat to capitalism, the dope-smoking, soap-dodging rockers of the 60s were acting as capitalism's reserve army of exploiters, whose time spent at festivals and on the experimental avant-garde fringe did little or nothing to engineer lines of collective escape, but yielded instead resources for the new forms of enslavement that loom everywhere around us now. Exactly those likely to have 'approved' of Kubrick's critique of corporate-controlled environments in 1968 are now administering their own 'total control' systems, all the more sinister for their shirtsleeves 'informality', all the more enveloping because the bosses wire themselves into the circuit, flaunting their own self-exploitation as both inevitable and exemplary. As Deleuze and Guattari had it in Anti-Oedipus, "The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus value for ends that ... have nothing to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital. 'I too am a slave'- these are the new words spoken by the master."

The hippies are back, pomo-style, replete with quasi-pacifist doxies, New Age mysticism and excursions to some Other scene, (India, Cambodia etc). They have preached the end of this and that (managerial capitalism, class struggle, ideology), insist on the need to 'unplug' from the circuit of consumption like good Western Buddhists. Baudrillard insists that consumption is objectless, the ceaseless acquisition of artefacts that in fact have no end in themselves, and in doing so repeats a theme from Schopenhauer. Consumption is, in its 'social logic', the denial of pleasure, which is no longer a rational end in itself. For Schopenhauer, Desire merely perpetuates itself, serves no end other than its own augmentation and reproduction. Artur's solution, in the end, was to imagine the sound of one hand clapping, which is probably one more than the poor bugger ever heard after one of his bitter soliloquies.

Baudrillard is in fact much more radical - he argues that consumption is a function of production and is therefore 'directly and totally collective'. That is, we are conditioned in systems of signs and codes of ethics to acquire and consume. Individually, we experience pleasure, but that is incidental - the main purpose of our collective consumption is to maintain the circuit of production. (Remember how, after 9/11, US consumers were encouraged to shop and shop big, otherwise "the terrorists win"?) The natural solution, although Baudrillard does not suggest it, is to collectively re-assert the principle of pleasure for itself. To do so, of course, would require us to escape the system of signs that interpellates us as consumers, sieze control of the means of production, and put it to some other use than competitive accumulation.

Consumption has another function, of course. As a consumer, one is never the satiate for more than a few seconds. New shoes, though functional, lose their fetishistic aura after a while. Then they simply become dead objects, ready-to-hand household items.


Detail from Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes.

As a consumer, one's perception of time therefore contracts. There is only this moment, then the next, then the next. In his justly famous, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch notes that the mass exodus to collective narcissism began precisely with the post-Sixties millenarian sense of impending doom. He finds a curious, motley crew of ex-radicals (like Susan Stern of the Weathermen, a terrorist faction of the Students for a Democratic Society; or Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies; or his one-time associate Jerry Rubin) who suddenly, like, totally have to get their heads together. The new objects of mass consciousness are not marches and peace signs, but things like est, gestalt, smorgasbord, hypnotism, tai chi, health food etc etc.

Failing to make the revolution in society, the former Sixties radicals decided to make revolutions in their heads and beds. Since the society had no future, it made sense to retreat to the self. The irony was that this glorification of the individual was coterminous with its complete obliteration. We are celebrated as individuals precisely at the moment when we are most subsumed into the morality of advertising, most integrated into capitalist production and consumption. Our cynicism, Lasch notes, which we are inclined to regard as what preserves our integrity against the illusions of ideology and Hollywood myth-making, in fact makes us more susceptible to accepting our subservience. The dissolution of illusion and myth, far from sharpening one's perception of reality, in fact reduces ones interest in the real world. As it is all lies out there anyway, best to retreat inwards, to this privade monadic self, and nurture it against all the bogey men. This new narcissism is not the rugged invidualism of pioneers, but one that is medicalised, obsessed with self-improvement, and the approbation of peers and authorities. The world, far from being a rough wilderness one has to force into one's own likeness, is now a mirror. Deprived of real control over our lives, of meaningful work and collective social engagement, engendered in a war of all against all by capitalism, we retreat into grandiose phantasies about ourselves which we hope will be confirmed and applauded in the mirror (hence, everyone has their 'fifteen minutes').

Some short time after 9/11, a good friend of mine who regarded himself as a bit of a left-winger, announced that he wasn't into politics any more. He decided that it was better he should improve himself before going out trying to change others. Good luck with that, I thought. What we better realise is that there are people obsessed with such monadic purity, this 'Beautiful Soul' narcissism, in our movement. Those who insist on having blood-free hands. They are terrified of Leninist politics, which is nothing more for them than realpolitik practised by Marxist intellectuals. They practise a formal neutrality toward all religion as if they existed in a vacuum. They are forever 'condemning' this or that atrocity, thereby pleading their innocence before an invisible tribunal. They automatically approve of 'the multitude', which has no nasty connotations of class, race or gender. The undecidability of the multitude, the fact that it may just as well be a mob as a revolutionary mass, and that the outcome may well rest on the conscious intervention of - tighten your sphinctre - a 'vanguard', is glibly skated over. They prefer moralism to analysis. Qua religions, all fundamentalisms are for them the same so that a passionate political stance is necessarily dogmatic, intolerant, irrationalist, prone to violence, anti-democratic.

Naturally, anyone who evinces the slightest passion about anything is convicted of 'religious' fervour. I confess. I give myself up to you and the secular authorities. I am a fanatic, a freak, a wild-eyed messianist, one of Thomas Carlyle's Apostles of Liberty, a worshipper at the Temple of Bronstein, whapping my own bible marked 'Manifesto', worshipping my pantheon of saints and vilifying the devils who tempt the people with 'reform' this and 'tax break' that. The only deal I will accept is total salvation. Precisely, it is the form of religion, not the various mythos, that should be appropriated by the rationalist left. Revolutionary messianism, fanaticism, is the only way to disrupt one's embedment in a system whose hegemony is so thoroughly entrenched. The total identification with a greater collective like class is the only way to break with the narcissism that capitalism as both consumption and production engenders.

Iraq: Shiite resistance returns. posted by lenin

The 'keeping schtum' policy of the Shiite leadership during the run up to the elections in Iraq ensured that such resistance as did take place was largely the confine of Sunni guerilla groups, some of them Salafi extremists. The Shiite resistance has always been much better organised than the Sunni resistance, having as it does a set of nationally unified organisations, leaders and spokespeople. The Sunni resistance, by contrast, has been fragmented, dispersed, with no overall leadership and little clerical control. This has been both a strength and a weakness, the former because it enables groups to operate in a subterranean fashion, smuggling weapons through networks of supportive citizens and carrying out autonomous attacks on Bradley tanks, passing convoys etc with considerable flexibility. It has meant that no leadership has been able to coopt or contain the resistance, while at the same time it has not been possible for the US to simply destroy this or that headquarters or take out a leader or two. On the other hand, it has been a weakness because there has not emerged a coherent political programme with a consistent nationalist pan-Iraq appeal. Solidarity has cut across religious and ethnic boundaries, but in a more accidental and happenstance fashion than is really useful. Similarly, the extreme Wahabbi element has been able to carry out brutal attacks targeting civilians and Shiites with the intention of brewing a civil war, and claim that it is part of the 'resistance'.

It says something about the fragmentary nature of the Sunni resistance that while the US was able to isolate Sadr and his supporters in the centre of Najaf fairly quickly, they actually felt the need to obliterate the whole of Fallujah, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees and killing thousands of civilians. This is no time to rehearse old arguments, but it bears repeating because it is pertinent to the case that it was discovered upon conquering the city that the resistance groups which had stayed and fought were overwhelmingly local. The image of a top down 'command and control' structure in which some noxious collaboration of Baathists and Al Qaeda direct affairs from Syria via local delegates simply does not fit with the reality.

So, having heard so much about how the resistance was weakened by the elections, and how some conservative Sunni leaders are really grovelling, licking coalition arse, begging Sunnis to join the new Iraqi army and police force, it will surprise some to see a massive anti-occupation demonstration led by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad, while Sunnis in Ramadi have also come out in their thousands to support the demo. The Association of Muslim Scholars had called for Sunnis to join the demonstration in Baghdad as well.

What is more, the Baghdad demonstration marched through Firdus Square where Saddam's statue was first felled by the US army. The BBC reports that they were Chanting "No to America" and "No to the occupiers", they pulled down and burned effigies of Saddam Hussein, US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.



This could hardly be a worse omen for the occupiers. Think about this. Sunnis and Shi'ites, arm in arm, marching under the same banners, and gathering in Firdus Square, the scene of the psyops campaign that effectively ended the war for domestic audiences. And they gather there to say things like :

“Oh God, cut off their necks, the way they are cutting off our necks and terrorizing us ... There will be no peace, no security, until the occupation leaves.”

I might as well mention, as no one else is reporting it, that a militant demonstration of some hundreds of Iraqis proceeded up the Edgware Road yesterday, more or less in concert with the events in Baghdad. In fact, there quite frequently are small rallies and gatherings against the occupation of Iraq here, as there must be in other areas and in other countries.

What you want... posted by lenin

...Baby we got it.

Here is Roy Hattersley in The Guardian :

Mustaq voted Labour. Ahmed, although a member of the new Muslim middle class, will vote Respect on May 5. His immediate complaint against the government was the war in Iraq. But he went on to make clear that his criticisms of the coalition are shorthand to describe a deeper resentment. George Galloway chose the name of his new political party with care.

Respect is what the Muslim community - more confident than ever before - demands. They are not sure that it is available within the present political system. And they are certain that the west's war on terror has made its achievement far less likely.

The world is full of crashing bores. posted by lenin

In particular, that fucking idiot 'Dr' Gillian McKeith. This rictus-faced, lying, fraudster media whore is selling a book right now with the imaginative title 'You Are What You Eat'. It has a charming photograph of her on the cover, desperately trying to smile without snapping her frozen ice-maiden face. If she didn't move, I'd swear she was a corpse. As it is, I'm convinced she is the Evil Dead.

If you're interested in perusing the nutty anti-scientific views this alleged nutritionist has, click here and here .

Which makes a perfect mockery of how she comports herself on that stupid Channel Four programme she does. Turns out the best way to get fatties, drunks and tar-breaths to improve their lifestyle is to get them on television and humiliate them. For instance, I once saw her demonstrate the evils of a fat couple's lifestyle by unveiling a mount of bacon, then announcing in a tone of voice that suggested she had personally been wronged:

"Lookit whit yer puttin in yer body. That much fat! Can you see whit yer doin tae yerself?"

That's fucking sensitive.

One of George Carlin's funniest recent skits consisted of a list of 'people who oughta be killed'. I suggest we put this sanctimonious, lachrymose, self-serving careerist at the front of the line. It would glorious if, just once, she patronised some poor sod who'd eaten more than he could vomit, and he just crammed her down his gullet. Roll credits.

Longbridge Closure: Labour's Mess. posted by lenin

The announcement that Longbridge is to be closed and 6,000 jobs are to be lost is electric. Labour, in refusing to offer money unless a deal was reached, has effectively put those jobs at the mercy of a Chinese company that really had little to gain from a deal. They have also, effectively, punched themselves right in the heartland. These workers don't just live in Labour strongholds, but also in key marginals. Further, there will be a knock-on effect on supply industries, which could cost tens of thousands of jobs - adding to the million manufacturing jobs that have been lost since Labour came to power.

Unfortunately, the strategy of Tony Woodley of the TGWU is largely responsible for this state of affairs. In April 2000, I attended a mass rally in Birmingham over the threat that then existed to the plant when BMW wanted to close it. The mood was furious. Posters, banners and placards were all over the city, the local press were full of outrage about it, small businesses had closed for the day to support the march, and a flower trader was - for some reason - giving away free daffodils. The placards saying Organise, Occupy, Renationalise were taken up by marchers in abundance. Marchers chanted "Rover, Rover, take it over!" There was also some silly sod dressed up as John Bull, which the media seemed to love.

A clear mood could be discerned for fighting to renationalise the plant and defend its thousands of jobs. Yet, as the march tailed into a vast park to join a rally, it became clear that the union leaders had organised the whole event to help let off steam. The professional DJ present was a patronising, arrogant dimwit who knew nothing about the situation and spoke in greasy generalities. When a Dagenham worker asked to speak, the DJ said "Eh? What? Oh, you're from Dagenham are you? What? Can't hear ya. Oh, you don't want the same to happen to you? Don't worry about it, mate, I've sorted it. Yeah, taken care of".

The dancing women danced, and a few local singers sang. Then the union leaders spoke. Tony Woodley was heavily booed when he approached the mic because, against the wishes of the members, he was coaching caution. No industrial action, let's just negotiate and 'salvage' what we can. Maybe we can find another buyer. Maybe there can be a deal.

Well, all the deals have been done, and all new buyers tried, and here we are at this terminal state. The only thing that would ever have saved this plant would have been for it to be renationalised and invested in properly. The plant could then be converted for other uses, seeing as there is insufficient demand for Rover cars. When you consider that we already spend a fortune on sustaining the arms industry which could be deployed more usefully elsewhere, it is obvious that only ideology prevents it. Jobs are too precious to be subject to the lunatic logic of profit. Yet, Patricia Hewitt has been almost as delinquent as Stephen Byers, her predecessor in the job, and this resonates well beyond Rover. Dagenham workers are that bit more vulnerable now, as are Vauxhall workers who stormed management offices in 2001 to protect their jobs. Tony Woodley's strategy in these plants has been exactly the same: make a deal, get concessions, find a 'second model'. And this morning, he is talking about the same thing on the news. We've got to 'salvage' what we can.

Well, I am not the sort of person to encourage illegal activity, but in the face of such wilful neglect and destructiveness, flying pickets would not seem out of place.

I'm just saying.

Respect rally. posted by lenin

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is, if you weren't there you missed a fantastic evening. The good news is, what a fantastic evening! Let's talk about turnout first of all. I arrived early and did a quick count of chairs, while John Rees was nervously pacing about and a few people I recognised were setting up equipment. (A stalker complimented me on my undies). 11 rows of 16 seats, that's 176 seats, plus standing room for thirty. I expected most chairs would be filled, with a few standing at the back. Er, no. It was packed. Not only was the room filled to capacity, but another room had to be booked upstairs which had twice as many people in it. 200 downstairs, 400 upstairs. The speakers had to continually disappear to do speeches in the other room. The presence was also significant in that, so far from it being just another outing for the old Left, it mixed a large local contingent with young anticapitalists and greying soixant-huitards.

Craig Murray, the UK's former ambassador to Uzbekistan, spoke first. I expected the cut of a former bureacrat who'd thrown a hissy fit, something on the order of the shabby Steve Moxon. Instead, this quiet, softly spoken man launched into a ferocious attack on imperialism, racism and the attacks on civil liberties of this government. He's standing against Jack Straw , of course, but he didn't have to speak for Respect and to defend in particular the rights of Muslims under attack. He also noted that the people being carted off to prison on the basis of 'intelligence' often extracted through torture were having their liberty done in on account of evidence that would be laughed out of any court. "I've seen this evidence," he said, "and it's dreck!" Big roar from the crowd at this point.

Oli Rahman, struggling with a mic that had suddenly gone to techno-heaven, nevertheless cut some impressive moments. He told of how he had been a Labour supporter, but in the run up to the war on Iraq, had gone to Oona King's constituency office and explained "if you support this war, I will do everything I can to get you out of office". She replied, bless, that "it's not very nice of you to threaten me in my own office." "That's not a threat. It's a promise." A promise looking to be well met, I have to say. Lindsey German also did her usual efficient job, but looked strangely mumsy in her little specs. No pyrotechnics from Lindsey, just a consistent and sometimes witty exposition of the case for Respect, ranging from domestic issues, poverty, housing, education, hospitals and so on to the war. There was a lot of spontaneous warmth for her, deriving from her leadership of the Stop the War Coalition.

Janet Alder, the sister of the late Christopher Alder who died in police custody, startled me with her northern accent at first. I'd been expecting East End for some curious reason. Never mind. This woman was not a professional speaker - she was a natural. In particular, she didn't simply talk about the huge injustice inflicted on her and her family, but universalised - the CCTV pictures of her brother dying, the photos of Iraqis being beaten and tortured by British and American soldiers, the human beings who are clad in orange jump-suits, shackled and led off to extra-legal torture facilities - all part of the same landscape of state oppression. Her voice carried passion, and conviction of the kind that I have never seen arise from the lips of any of the servile New Labour creeps that get sent out to Question Time - like the repulsive Margaret Hodge, whose unctuous smile wilts as though her waxen face was melting, and whose phoney attempt at being 'stirring' fell flat before an audience in Grimsby last week.

Abdul Khaliq Mian struck an entirely different note. He's a soft spoken sort of geezer, who gently adumbrates and extemporises for his audience with undemanding dignity. The religious stuff spoke to a section of the audience, which is fair enough. But more striking was where he decided to talk about life. Seriously. "What happens to us? We are born, and if we are lucky enough we might be born on a hospital bed and not in the corridor. We grow up, go to school. And if we are lucky enough..." You know the drill. He finished by remarking that we are told that we can work hard, and retire with a decent pension. But now we find the pension money is squandered, and we have to work and work longer and harder. "So, you work and work, then you drop dead," he said, pausing for a second, before adding "I think we have endured enough."

Tariq Ali is larger in the flesh than I had remembered him. Last time I saw him speak, I had the impression of a short man with a pronounced pot belly. In his denims, however, he looked tall and broad-shouldered. A street-fightin' man, no less. He sat there, diffidently gazing at the crowd, arms folded tightly, refusing to applaud or laugh when everyone else did. I half-expected him to drift off to sleep until his turn to speak came. Come it did, and the mane of hair bounced over to the mic. The usual sardonic wit and rhetorical flair, the little bit of inside information that he often drip-feeds his audiences when he's just come back from Pakistan or the Middle East. As it happened, this time he had been to Qatar and spoken to the head of Al Jazeera news. "And do you know what he told me?" Al Jazeera had got footage of a US tank firing at a car filled with Iraqi civilians. It was able to do so because it has eighteen reporting teams working in Iraq, and naturally enough, it broadcast the footage. The tank firing shells, the shells hitting the car. Man, woman, children in back all disappear into a conflagration. Within hours of having shown this, the US military commander in Qatar had arrived in a car with bodyguards and backed by a row of military vehicles. He stormed into the director's office and said "you owe us an apology for showing that, you have placed our troops in danger!" So, if a news channel broadcasts evidence of US atrocities, it isn't America who should apologise, but... The director of Al Jazeera, to his credit, said he couldn't apologise for showing the news, but in fact the US army owed Al Jazeera an apology. For blowing up its headquarters in Afghanistan, and for killing its chief correspondent in Baghdad. "When you make a public apology for that, we can talk".

And Galloway. Of course, Galloway. I don't know what lit his bloody fuse, but he took off from the second he hit the mic with a hilarious, impassioned speech, and never touched down. He talked, of course, about the war, but spent most of his time talking about the needs of the East End and of working class people in general. He made tremendous fun out of the Goldman Sachs banker who was so utterly replete with wealth that he didn't notice his secretary had stolen £3 million from him - even when she went to work in her yacht each day, parking it at St Katherine's docks! Then, in the other direction, Bethnal Green and Bow, with its enormous queues of people who have been waiting for houses for five years, and a sitting MP who supports the privatisation of the remaining council houses. With its police stations busily serving ASBOs on poor kids who've got nothing to do, on the mentally unstable, on anyone in fact who engages in any act which could be deemed "alarming" or "offensive" - while the real crooks in the mean square mile engage in massive fraud, tax avoidance, embezzlement, and rarely a damned thing is done about it. The pensioners who are dying because of poverty, and the children who are eating shitty nutrition-free meals at school. The New Labour ministers who slimed the firefighters as fascists and the enemy within. The obscenely wealthy, protected by the City Police, sucked up to by new Labour; the working class, robbed of decent housing, welfare and public services, met only with strident Blairite moralism and police repression. And to all this, Oona King MP says "Amen".

Well, I don't know how many times applause erupted, and I can't tell you for how long the standing ovation lasted. I'd hazard a guess it was longer than anything Blair is likely to receive at the Labour conference after this election. Money was collected in buckets, people signed up to help with local campaigns at the stalls around the room, and I, munching on a bag of jellies and fizzy things, went off with Bat, Meaders, a few stalkers and others to the pub. What happened? Well, I don't remember, but I woke up with footprints on my knees and red underwear over my head. Last time I let anyone persuade me that Rohypnol is a new hallucinogen...

Elections 2005 posted by lenin

I'm kicking off the Tomb's election coverage with a story that will percolate away quietly during this election, just beneath the radar of media attention, is the fact that Respect could well take a seat from Labour right in its heartland. Today, Respect's website carries claims from George Galloway that during the last Euro elections Respect topped the poll in Bethnal & Bow Green. Well, other analyses differ , and I haven't seen the figures, but what is abundantly clear is that Respect has an extraordinary base of support in the East End. We already have had a councillor elected in Poplar, name of Oliur Rahman, and almost took the Isle of Dogs seat too.

Unsurprisingly, the sitting MP in Bethnal Green & Bow, a pro-war airhead known as Oona King, has taken to libelling her Respect opponent . But bar rigging the vote - which is what Labour was found to have been involved in up in Birmingham, where they were faced with the prospect of the People's Justice Party taking seats from them - there is not much else Ms King can do, as she has few appealing policies.

During the vote in parliament over Labour's cuts to benefits for single mothers, Oona King decided to leave the country rather than vote for her constituents and against her leader. She is a particularly lazy MP, attending only 64% of votes in parliament. But of the votes she was interested in, she came out strongly for the Iraq war, top-up fees for students, ID cards, foundation hospitals, and also supported New Labour's "anti-terrorism" laws. The only good left-wing policies she has supported were abolishing section 28, Thatcher's law for homophobes, and ending fox-hunting. Don't shoot the fluffy-wuffy foxes, let's kill Iraqis instead. She is also someone's landlady, owning a two-bedroom flat from which she receives rent. (Here resume is here ).

For these and reasons like these, the enthusiasm that the Respect campaing has generated in the East End is entirely justified. King's politics are an insult to her working class constituents, and she deserves to be ousted in this election.

Note to stalkers: I will be attending this rally tonight. Wear your usual red underwear.

Zorro is not coming to save you. posted by lenin

I'm afraid that privilege is all yours.



Pictures from Diego Rivera's murals on the walls of the Rockefeller Centre, called "Man at the Crossroads" - between socialism and barbarism, in fact. Would science emancipate humanity, or become a new form of enslavement, like crop patents or drug patents ? The portrait of Lenin earned him the sack.

Retorts and rhetoric. posted by lenin

From over the pond, Doug Ireland vends what he advertises as a light "rap on the knuckles" for me regarding my post yesterday on the Italian elections. Well, as Gore Vidal almost said, I am all for corporal punishment as long as it is between consenting adults. Nevertheless, before I can even begin to take my whacks I am obliged to clear up some silliness in Doug's response. He says I have a "permanent disdain for 'bourgeois electoral politics'", as a way of framing my doubts about the PRC joining a Prodi government. The point would be more impressive if I had objected to them participating in electoral politics of any kind, even of a bourgeois variety, or if I hadn't spent an enormous amount of time on this blog commenting on and encouraging one or other player in bourgeois elections across the planet, particularly in this paltry slice of it. Or if, indeed, I hadn't been active in a number of election campaigns, including for Respect and the Socialist Alliance. I even voted Labour in 1997 and for Ken Livingstone in the GLA elections, which is about as bourgeois as it gets. Unfortunately, there is a considerable gulf between what Doug thinks about us Trots and what he knows about us. That point is illustrated by the following remark:

"Moreover, I doubt that you would have opposed the Popular Front against Fascism in the 1930s..."

I'm not about to re-hash the old arguments about the Popular Front vs the United Front , but the distinction exists and is important, and is glaringly apparent to those familiar with the subject.

That stuff aside, Doug offers some serious reasons to consider the PRC's membership of the coalition a positive step, which I'll map out ordinally:

1) The Berlusconi government is in alliance with fascists, it is a deeply reactionary and dangerous government, and Italian workers would benefit enormously from its defeat.

2) "The Rifondazione, in joining the Olive Tree, recognized these facts, and the need to form an alliance to evict Berlusconi and dismantle his most noxious works. The right choice, in my view."

3) Removing Berlusconi from power weakens conservatives in the EU, and helps European workers protect themselves from the onslaught of reactionary Eurocrats.

4) "Finally, those of us who live in Western democracies that have never been under the boot of real fascism should not be so quick to judge as "sellouts" those in countries which, in living memory have, when those folks decide its circle-the-wagons time."

5) "Don't forget that, as my friend Norman Birnbaum--an expert on European politics--has just reminded me, 'Bertinotti put Berlusconi in power at the last national election by rejecting a common candidates list for the Senate.' I, for one, am glad Bertinotti has seen the error of his infantile leftist ways..."

I agree with points 1 and 3, so we'll leave those to linger. Point two is exactly what is to be argued for, and I don't see an argument in there for a 'united front' between the PRC and the Olive Tree coalition in government. If the PRC is prepared to join Prodi's government and accept ministerial posts, which is what is being touted, and which is the policy Bertinotti recently won the party to on a 60% majority at the party conference, then I maintain my point. The PRC is compromising its independence and binding itself to a future government that will almost certainly retreat on even its most limited reform programmes. The PRC did support the last Prodi government between 1996-8, but was compelled by rank and file pressure to break with that administration precisely because of its savage public spending cuts, the casualisation of labour and privatisation. Joining in a united front against fascism is one thing, but being party to attacks on the working class is quite another.

Point four is so extraordinarily ill-conceived that I have had to read it again to persuade myself that an intelligent political commentator like Doug Ireland made it. If the Prodi government does what it did before and reneges on its promises, doing the dirty work of the right for it - what else will this be other than a sell-out? And why one earth would one abstain from criticising this because Italy was once governed by Fascism?

Point five gets one thing right. Norman Birnbaum, whatever else he is not, is indeed an expert on European politics. But I don't know how to defer to experts, and the suggestion that Bertinotti put Berlusconi in power by standing independently requires a bit more psephological analysis than Birnbaum's brief comment offers. For example, it is not necessarily the case that the 5% of the vote that went to the PRC in the May 2001 elections would have gone to the Olive Tree coalition. Suppose it is possible that those who voted for the PRC did so as much out of disillusionment with the centre-left? And suppose further that had the PRC remained part of that slate, they would have been similarly discredited and the votes would either have been abstained or dispersed among smaller parties? It is certainly a possibility worth investigating.

More importantly, what a recipe for reaction and timidity, if one must always align oneself with, encourage and vote for a government that attacks workers rather than risk its defeat by a party further to the right. What a way to ensure a ceaseless race to the bottom, with no pressure coming from the Left and both mainstream parties accelerating further to the right. To the Olive Tree coalition there is only one response to their whining about the defeat in 2001: learn your lesson. Never again use the votes given to you to impose a discredited neoliberal agenda. I am not saying we can afford to be indifferent as to who wins a bourgeois election, so far from that. But neither can we be emotionally black-mailed into never trying to break the electoral deadlock, never trying to shift the coordinates of the situation in which we are working.

Disappointing rebuke from Direland, then, since it engages with what I don't say, caricatures in a fashion I feel fairly familiar with and implies what really needs to be openly stated and argued for.

Wars, Home and Abroad. posted by lenin

In 1962, Secretary of State to President Kennedy, Dean Rusk, composed a list called "Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945", with the intention of persuading members of Congress sceptical about the proposed invasion of Cuba that it was, in fact, a profoundly American venture.

In it, there is only one year in which there is no use of American troops abroad: 1892. What went wrong?

July 1892, a massive strike erupts at Homestead, Pennsylvania, at Andrew Carnegie's steel plant. Carnegie hired Pinkertons to fight the strikers, killing and wounding many. The strike spread to include coal miners in Tennessee, railroad men in Buffalo, copper miners in Idaho. There were huge battles, Pinkertons thugs used the latest weaponry including Gatling guns and Winchester rifles, to sieze factories and break the strikes. In Homestead, when the Pinkertons were defeated by the union who themselves were armed and by then controlled the town, the governor sent the state militia in to defend and protect those who were prepared to break the strike.

The strike, and solidarity action continued until November but it was finished once the militias entered the town. The unions lost heavily both in terms of the strike itself and the funds it had used. Activists were to be subject to harsh legal sanction, except that sympathetic juries kept letting them off the hook. This episode, more than any other, was the experiential background to the formation of mass, industrial unionism, especially in the 1930s.

The point, however, is that while there was class war at home, no imperialist war could take place abroad. During the firefighters' strike, senior army figures pointed out that a continued strike during the war itself would make British participation impossible, as the army would be too busy scabbing. Unfortunately, the leadership of the FBU, unlike the membership, remains umbilically attached to the Labour Party, and was therefore all too easily bought off with vaguely whispered promises, the odd pat on the thigh and hot-breathed seduction. But if you want to stop wars in the future, unionise. If you're unionised, organise - for better pay, conditions etc. Agitate over policies in your union, not just about privatisation but also about Palestine. And, if your bosses won't give on on your pay demands or whatever, strike, go on an indefinite walk-out. Walk out and don't explain when you will return to work - none of this '24 hour action' business. That's a recipe for timidity and defeat, and you will often end up having to re-ballot for the same action over the same issue because the same fucking bosses are doing the same things.

There are just wars, and they are the revolts Malcolm X thought of when he said:

"It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."

Berlusconi Whacked. posted by lenin

Direland brings news of Berlusconi's hammering defeat in the local and regional elections in Italy. Of 13 regions at stake, Berlusconi's mob have lost all but two . One unfortunate aspect of this is that it is hard to detect just how big the vote for the radical Left was because the main socialist party, Rifondazione Comunista, joined with Romano Prodi's centre-left Olive Tree coalition to fight the elections. This was a move promoted by the right-drifing leader Fausto Bertinotti. One has to wonder if, should Berlusconi lose the General Election next year to a broad left coalition including the PRC, how they will be able to retain any independence from a government certain to sell out on even its most limited agenda. It is a simple matter of record that Prodi slashed social welfare just as viciously as Berlusconi.

That said, this is a serious defeat for the war party in one of the most radicalised countries in Europe. Our own war government is unfortunately unlikely to face defeat by anyone to its left, but one can hope for its majority to be slashed, and in particular for it to be gutted of its most snivelling, spineless, nose-tanning MPs. Today's revelations that Labour councillors rigged local elections to the disadvantage of the antiwar Peoples Justice Party who would otherwise have won, should help with that.

Class. posted by lenin

Since this has been a topic of some interest in the comments boxes of late, I thought I'd lay some stats on you and see if we can't work something out.

Just reading Jeremy Seabrook's slender volume for the 'New Internationalist', The No Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste & Hierarchies, I come across the following:

According to the United Nations Human Development Report, the world's richest 20 per cent receive 86 per cent of the world's gross product; the middle 60 per cent 13 per cent, while the poorest 20 per cent receive one per cent. The ratio between the top and bottom fifth of humanity is 74 to 1. In 1960 it was 30 to 1.

This could probably be refined even further, so that one could find the top 5% receiving the lion's share of that 86% etc. There is a global class of the super rich. Among the most wealthy are Bill Gates ($58.7 bn), Warren Buffet ($32.3 bn) and Jim Walton of Wal Mart ($18.8bn). In 1998, the assets of the world's 200 richest individuals stood at £1 trillion. So what, you may ask? Perhaps, like Mary Kenny , the only thing that bothers you about the super rich is their snooty high-falutin attitude.

Well, think about self-interest, damn you! Datamonitor UK estimates that the number of millionaires is growing by 17% a year at the moment, a stupendous rate of growth. In 2001, there were 74,000 millionaires. To compare, between 1979 and 1999, the wealth of the poorest 10% dropped by 9 per cent; for the richest 10% it rose by 70%. Now, currently the average UK income is £408 a week after tax, but over 60% of Britons live below that average. So, while 60% of people live below £21,000 a year, there are a tiny cluster of people hoovering up millions.

But this is inequality, so what is its relation to class? As Jeremy Seabrook points out, inequality is an abstraction. Relations between individuals are unequal, and the only way to group people using such measures are deciles or percentiles of some variety. Class is about the relations of production; one belongs to a class if one wants to advance some reform or change in the society. That money that lines the pockets of the super-rich didn't come from nowhere, and it certainly is unlikely to be as a result of the unique effort and genius of those who have accrued such wealth to themselves. Chances are, if you are among the majority, your work helped create that wealth. If you are among those whose working hours has risen sharply even though you wish it were the contrary, you have probably helped generate super-profits for your lazy-assed fucking bosses.

My suggestion is you get yourself unionised if you aren't already and try to claw some of that back. Take a hint from Woody Allen: "When I left school, I went to work at my father's store. And I unionised the workers. And we struck, and drove him out of business."

Oh, shut up. posted by lenin

Enough about the Pope already. Stop mourning his death. It's been a long, hard eight-four years and, frankly, we could all do with a break. Aside from being a reactionary, obscurantist nutter, he was also one of those tedious little turds who thought his impressions were the life and soul of the party. Check out this impersonation of Dame Edna Everidge, for instance:



I think we can all agree that this was an evil act perpetrated on the innocent.

The Black Spot posted by lenin

I've been handed the black spot , and am obliged to comply for fear of my mother being stolen by gypsies.

Here goes:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest :

Algernon. Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

Lane. I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.

I shall be Algernon, and eat cucumber sandwiches, and dispense witty repartee, and seduce dear Cecily...

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
The Snow Queen. When I was seven, right, I used to fantasise about being her slave and... look, bugger off will you?

The last book you bought is:
I bought two books on Friday at the second hand shop. One was Thomas Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets, which is a series of hilarious, vitriolic and deeply reactionary rants against Democracy and the swinish multitude. The volume is from 1898 and a load of the pages were bound together, so I had to cut them open. The second book I bought, which I have yet to read is Thomas Hylland Eriksen's Small Places, Large Issues: And Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. Sounds snazzy. Has phrases in it, like "the multivocality of symbols".

A note on Jamie's choice (see link above). Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic is a largely discredited thesis if you ask me. Magic did not 'decline' in 16th and 17th Century England - rather, it was de-hegemonised, becoming a subterranean culture for the peasants and proles. It usually co-existed with religious conviction and scientific inquest.

The last book you read:
I rarely read books fully, but the last one I cam close to finishing was Ian Kershaw's The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. It is an extremely useful intro to the various arguments about fascism. Hmmm. Actually, I did finish Richard J Evans' Lying About Hitler, a very entertaining account of the Irving trial.

What are you currently reading?
I rarely read books to the end, preferring to dip in and out, but the ones I am dipping the nacho chip of my curiosity into now are Seumas Milne's The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, said Carlyle tract, Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century, John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket , Dilip Hiro's Secrets & Lies: The Truth Behind the War on Iraq, Justin Rosenberg's The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations, and Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Mood music.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Fuck. Only five? I suppose I'd bring Das Kapital and see if I could finally read the bastard in its entirety. Although, quite frankly, I suppose I could dispense with an analysis of capitalism on a deserted island. Naturally, the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Also, my tattered cheapo volume of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare - have to burn up a lot of time. Then, I suppose Myra Breckinridge/Myron by Gore Vidal, being a most incensed comedy of the sexes and their appendages. And something by Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint, or The Human Stain, or even The Dying Animal. I'll pick closer to the time. Leave me alone.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Doug Ireland , a Mick prole autodidact; Meaders , an urbane economist who doth meddle with things of which we know little; and Chris Tharp , an American socialist comedian presently taking refuge in South Korea where he teaches children how to find psilocybin mushrooms.

Leap of faith. posted by lenin

John Rose has an excellent article recommending "a post-Zionist leap of faith" :

Does the religious and historical attachment of so many Jews to the "land of Israel" justify the Zionist project? The idea of a Jewish homeland continues to pose two problems. The first is the denial of Palestinian rights, especially the rights of the dispossessed refugees, who see an Israel built on their homeland. And the second is what "homeland" means for the Jewish majority that lives outside Israel...

Read on.

Capitalism & Unfreedom. posted by lenin

"The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among men at present", Thomas Carlyle observed in 1850, (before going on to slander the "great dumb inarticulate class" whom he held responsible for most of the misery in society). He might have written the same today more urgently, countenancing the global calamity that confronts and confounds humans daily. The misery and toil of much of the planet; the environmental waste and destruction; the pirates and emperors that compete in bloody carnage; unparalleled corruption and crookedness, often sanctioned by power. Rarely has such attention been drawn to such issues, and rarely has such effort gone into diverting people from them.

Yet on certain questions it seems we are all too easily baffled. I won't exaggerate the point, but it seems to me that there is an easy wisdom, an artefact of received opinion, that prevents people from experiencing their unfreedom and their exploitation for what it is. When Tom Driberg wrote an article for the Express attacking what he called 'wage slavery', his proprietor irately told the editor, "If I have any wage slaves on my staff, you must free them immediately". Although this deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the term 'wage slave', he hit on a common sense that I find recurs from time to time in conversation.

For instance, speaking to a leftish work colleague recently about the firefighters strike, I was met with the rebuke: "Yeah well, they knew what pay they were getting when they took the job, so they can't complain". The illusion of a free and equal contract between employee and employer is one that exerts considerable hold, particularly given the paucity of industrial conflict over the last fifteen years. The thought that the situation might be rigged in advance, by virtue of the capitalists control of the means of production, is so obvious that it eludes many people who otherwise place themselves on the Left.

In part, this is because people are prepared from an early age to expect and accept this state of affairs. In high school Business Studies class, I was shown along with my class mates a video sponsored by some bank which purported to demonstrate how the division of labour came about. It all took place, it seemed, in a relatively benign and peaceful fashion, with no intruding political questions or economic phases. From the cavemen to cashcards, it was really all about work being broken down into separate tasks which would be undertaken by those most able to do them. Then, finding contact with nearby villages, they would trade things that they were good at making for the things that the other villages were good at making. David Ricardo chortled from beyond the grave. The only interesting thing about this propaganda video is that it raised not a single eyebrow - as how could it? One is led to expect to work for a capitalist without seeing anything necessarily unjust about it, and one has nothing to compare it to. The worker is taught to sell herself (all those job interview training schemes) without perceiving herself as a commodity.

The existence of trade unions has been a recognition of the fact that the employment contract is not one taken under conditions of freedom, but under economic compulsion. If it isn't this capitalist, it's that capitalista. Therefore, the only power workers have is their number and their ability to organise collectively. The decline in industrial combativity and the serious beating that the unions have taken has meant that many of these lessons have been lost to a new generation. Anticapitalism and the antiwar movement has pulled many to the Left without acquainting them with the nature of social and political power. I would add parenthetically, and at the risk of annoying one or two of the regular commenters here, that this could partially explain the persistence of conspiracy theories among some of these new radicals. For the conceptual operations of Marxism, as invaluable as they are for understanding capitalism, only really come alive in the day to day struggle of workers in confrontation with their employers. You can understand the labour theory of value in a scholastic way - but on a picket line with mounted police in attendance and employers munching sandwiches by the windows as they watch, the force of the terms exploitation and oppression are immediate and apparent.

Slavoj Zizek tells a joke from the old Soviet Union. Two friends, one living in the USSR, the other living outside it, agree a system for writing to one another to help avoid the censor. The USSR resident agrees to write in red or blue ink, depending on whether or not she is writing is true. If it is in red ink, the letter is false; if in blue, it is true. The first letter arrives in blue ink:

"The shops are full here. Everyone is happy and well-fed. The restaurants are packed with people, wine is readily available, goods are in abundant supply. The only thing you can't get is red ink."

Are we not missing the red ink, Zizek asks? The very means of expressing our unfreedom is precisely what we have been denuded of. It goes almost without saying that the resuscitation of radical critique that penetrates these extraordinary, criminal times, but also the more mundane matters of routine enslavement, will advance in rough proportion to the ability of the working class to perceive itself as a class and fight for its own interests. The resurgence of trade union militancy, as well as mainstream political expression for the Left, are necessary preconditions for this.

On an entirely unrelated matter, Channel 4 News reports tonight that bookies say George Galloway's odds of taking Oona King's constituency in Bethnal Green and Bow have increased dramatically. Good.

Rupert Murdoch "Evil". posted by lenin

According to the humourist Al Franken, (who is quite funny when he isn't licking the arses of centrist Democrats):

"There's one important thing you should know about Murdoch. He's evil. I defer to the . . . Columbia Journalism Review: 'Murdoch uses his diverse holdings . . . to promote his own financial interests at the expense of real news gathering, legal and regulatory rules, and journalistic ethics. He wields his media as instruments of influence with politicians who can aid him, and savages his competitors in his news columns. If ever someone demonstrated the dangers of mass power being concentrated in few hands, it would be Murdoch.'"

(Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, 2003).

One more reason he is evil is that he believes in war for oil. Speaking of the recent invasion of Iraq, he said :

"The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

Well, that didn't work out, did it ?

April Fool. posted by lenin

The pope's not sick at all. He's only putting it on. You mark my words, come this afternoon he'll leap out of bed fit as a Pontiff, radiant with grace. Trust me.


Pope: "Fooled you pious fuckers! Now who wants to play ice hockey!"

"Beat the fuck out of them". posted by lenin

That's how US soldiers were told to treat prisoners in Iraq , according to documents obtained by the ACLU:

The ACLU said the reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents was "evident in the contents," which include reports of brutal beatings, "exercise until exhaustion," and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the f**k out of" detainees. One file cites evidence that military intelligence personnel in Iraq "tortured" detainees held in their custody.

...

And the ACLU has disclosed a Sept. 14, 2003 memo signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo A. Sanchez, then senior commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, authorizing 29 interrogation techniques, including 12 that "far exceeded limits established by the Army's own Field Manual."

And you wonder why they're trying to escape from the prisons over there... The gates of hell are open in Iraq.

Glory, glory hallelujah, la mission civilatrice is on once again.