A Little Massacre Therapy. posted by lenin

Military Inquiry will find that US troops committed Haditha massacre.

(Good article about this by Simon Assaf)

Supposing the findings are as unambiguously damning as expected, this is a serious crisis of legitimation for the occupation which, it has to be said, should only have the support of psychotics and outlandish, hirsuit survivalists by now. However, it reminds me of a comment Alex Cockburn made about the corrections column in the New York Times - its function was to give the impression that everything else printed in the paper had been entirely accurate. Of course, it is unlikely that the US ruling class will be successful in making this the cathartic experience that they hope it will be. Official inquiries are always intended as expiation or, more accurately, to 'put a lid on it', but people know a symptom when they see one. Or at least I hope they do.

Since Zizek is doing his Lacan master-class (that's class as in master-signifier) in Birkbeck these days, perhaps he can be persuaded to riff on that (here comes a blizzard of Badiouese):

The texture of Knowledge is, by definition, always total—that is, for Knowledge of Being, there is no excess; excess and lack of a situation are visible only from the standpoint of the Event, not from the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State. From within this standpoint, of course, one sees ‘problems,’ but they are automatically reduced to ‘local,’ marginal difficulties, to contingent errors—what Truth does is to reveal that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. Crucial for the Event is thus the elevation of an empirical obstacle into a transcendental limitation. With regard to the ancien régime, what the Truth-Event reveals is how injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but pertain to the very structure of the system which is in its essence, as such, ‘corrupt.’ Such an entity—which, misperceived by the system as a local ‘abnormality,’ effectively condenses the global ‘abnormality’ of the system as such, in its entirety—is what, in the Freudo-Marxist tradition, is called the symptom…” The Ticklish Subject(Pg. 131)

Your "knowing servants of the State" are, of course, working hard to re-script the situation. This morning on the BBC, Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones's mother was shown, weeping into the camera and explaining how ill at this shit her her son was - which of course is probably true, since he later told the LA Times what horrible things were done. But you see the picture already: these boys went astray, did something wrong, 99.9% of our boys aren't like that, they have mothers who cry and everything. What's more, the Beeb reports, Americans are upset at the massacre - upset, mark you! Surely this is slander by understatement? They should be going through convulsive political awakening, seething with anger and steeling themselves for the possibility of having to have the entire executive branch of government decapitated, not going through the (e)motions of a Ricki Lake special. How long before all the guilty marines are featured on cushiony chairs against soft pastel backgrounds, having to answer worried questions from studio members, before finally explaining that they've all learned a valuable lesson and intend to get themselves an education? [Whoop, applause] Well, look, anyway, I thought this was worth mentioning:

Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, 20, and Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, 21, were ordered to photograph the scene with personal cameras they happened to be carrying the day of the attack, the families said. Briones' mother, Susie, said her son told her that he saw the bodies of 23 dead Iraqis that day.

Do you understand? They wanted pictures, in the same way as the Military Intelligence officers who directed the Disney-medieval torture scenes at Abu Ghraib wanted pictures. Not to post on NowThatsFuckedUp.com, not to tell all to the President, but to have something to show others who might think of getting in their way. It's called terrorism.

Sacred cows posted by Meaders

There wasn't nearly enough attention paid to this study:

The gap between rich and poor people in Britain has widened since Labour came to power if spending, rather than income, is used to measure poverty, a new report has claimed.

Since 1996/1997 the proportion of people living in households with less than 60 per cent of average spending levels had increased from 20 per cent to 22 percent, the study by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) found.

The government currently measures poverty according to the number of households whose income is less than 60 per cent of the average. Under this definition, figures show that the poverty rate has fallen from 25 per cent to 22 per cent over the same period.

But the IFS said that spending rather than income was a better measure of household wealth because it is a more direct measure of people’s material well-being and reflects their consumption of goods and services.

The full report can be found at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation site (PDF). One of the reasons the report didn't receive more attention, I suspect, is that it does not fit into the conventional left-liberal narrative about New Labour in general, and Gordon Brown in particular: that, yes, the Iraq war was bad, but (in the words of the Observer, talking about Brown):

...Unlike Cameron, he has a proven track record on social justice, child poverty, SureStart and daycare.

If reputable - and broadly Brownite - organisations like the IFS are starting to claim otherwise, the case for an orderly transition to Dr Prudence (and indeed NEw Labour's continued existence) looks ever more ropey. Unfortunately, even if it has not in general delivered, New Labour has so successfully colonised the squishy, leftish, liberalish sectors of politics that it will require more than a few academic studies to dislodge it. The increasing willingness of, for example, organisations like Telco to talk to Respect is heartening, but to get even this far required a real political slog. The choice, in the end, will be fairly stark: do you continue to support a government and a political programme that says all the right things, but delivers little; or do we attempt to construct an opposition to that programme?

...the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also have a little more on why the gap between income and spending appears, and why spending may provide a more accurate picture of poverty and inequality than income:

Using spending as a measure also alters the perception of who is poor. In 2002/03, the income poverty rate for self-employed people (23%) was much higher than the spending poverty rate (13%). The picture was similar for those seeking work. This suggests that low incomes were a transitory state for some of these people, and that they were using savings or borrowing to maintain their standard of living. For retired and pensioner households, spending poverty rates were much higher than income poverty rates, highlighting the fact that many older people spend well below their income level.

Income poverty and spending poverty are quite distinct states: only around half of people classified as poor on one measure would simultaneously be classified as poor on the other. Very low-income households (those in around the bottom 2% of the income distribution) on average have levels of spending much higher than their income alone would suggest (see Figure 2). This phenomenon could be due to two factors: either very low-income households have only temporarily low incomes, and are running down savings or accumulating debt to fund their expenditure; or very low incomes are measured with error. In contrast, very low-spending households tend to have very low incomes, commensurate with their spending levels. This suggests that spending might be a preferable measure of well-being for the very poorest in society. A more reliable impression of those with the lowest standards of living might be obtained by examining those recorded at the bottom of the spending distribution rather than the bottom of the income distribution.

De Cive, or, questions for a worker who reads Hobbes. posted by lenin

I mean the nerve. International Relations exam paper asks: "What is the relationship between Hobbesian man and the Hobbesian state? What are the consequences for international relations?" Who fucking thinks this crap up? So, I fuckin told em. I said, Hobbesian man is a servile, snivelling wretch, a coward who slavers before the King but switches sides the second a new, stronger master arrives. The Hobbesian state is what we get thanks to this cretinous oaf.

Next question: "Is the US an empire? Give reasons for your answer." Oh, fuck off! So, I fuckin told em. I said, no, our American overlords are not imperialists. All will be well. They have promised us many good things if we help them enslave the denizens of the Southern hemisphere. I for one welcome them. I'd like to remind them that as an internet literate citizen of North-western Europe with clerical skills, I can be helpful in rounding up workers to beaver in their fabulous diamond mines. I am Hobbesian man.



(I'm kidding. I haven't even sat the test yet, but I've seen past papers and as you can probably tell, I'm shitting it.)

Racism, capitalism and empire. posted by lenin

Update! I'm reposting this in an expanded version with sources where they need to be and some critical engagement with a few authors and a bit more empirical material and fewer spelling mistakes and a better organised argument.

Periodisation of the Scramble for Africa, says Wesseling (HL Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa 1880-1914, 1996), is no innocent business, and often revolves around attempts to locate motivations of individual statesmen in decisions that supposedly set the whole process off. Yet, at some point, matters did decisively change. After all, the British had been happily pursuing its Free Trade empire, which was preferable to the burden of protectorates or colonies. Successive Prime Ministers since Castlereagh had opposed formal British rule. As Macaulay put it "To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages". This represented what had been a decisive shift - whereas previously Britain had extended itself in colonising the Americas, Australia and parts of Asia, and whereas it had a great deal of 'influence' in West Africa around the slave trade, it subsequently made a decisive break - in 1807, for instance, banning the use of its ships to ferry slaves and later in 1833 extending the ban to all its colonies while maintaining a largely ineffectual blockade. Jurisdiction had been defined in vague terms, allowing for a great deal of ad hoc annexation and jurisdictional innovation. (China Mieville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, 2005, chapter six). Following the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had finished off its former rival for maritime supremacy – it’s position was “unassailable” (Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 1969, chapter twelve; Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations: The Rise of International Law 1871-1960, Cambridge University Press, 2004, chapter 2). The US was busily 'winning the West' against Sioux, Apache and other Indian tribes, and Russia was conquering the Khazaks, Uzbeks and Turkmen - that is, pursuing the overland imperial expansion more common to history (the predominantly overseas expansion of North-west Europe is a decided historical novelty). (D Abernethy, Patterns of Global Domination, 2000). In 1865, a Select Committee had decided that it would be better to restore the colonies to local rule. (Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, 1993, chapter one).

Yet, from the late 1870s, both Britain and France made a sharp turn toward military enclosure (filling up the 'empty map'). From then on, intellectuals offering an alternative to colonization were either treated as nuisances or (after 1917), harrassed, spied on and eventually exiled. There was certainly no room for literate Africans in the running of states - except as clerks or policemen. (Ibid). At the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, the partitioning of Africa had been enacted on paper, using all the diplomatic techniques developed by absolutist states (particularly by France under Louis Quatorze) to negotiate their respective 'rights' - the discourse was decidedly cast in legal terms rather than pure power politics. (D Abernethy, Patterns of Global Domination, 2000, chapter five; Mieville, op cit, chapter six). Partition only started to come into effect properly from the 1890s, and it was imposed through a series of wars that were by no means new, but were certainly greater in scope than ever before. As before, colonial expansion syncopated the rhythms of natural disaster and epidemic disease - according to Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts), the great incidence of drought was frequently used by colonial powers to impose their rule. In South Africa, the chief ally of the Portuguese and British against militarily independent societies was a great drought. Disraeli's designs for a single British hegemony over the southern cone of Africa made use of a great drought in 1877, while famines were ruthlessly used to wipe out the Mahdis. By the same token, the colonial creation of export-led economies was often at the expense of grazing and agrarian subsistence farming, which exacerbated crises. The wars themselves were extremely brutal - Germany's suppression of the Herero people in 1904 wiped out about three quarters of the people, while Britain's war against the white population of Boers involved scorched earth campaigns in which villages were razed and cattle destroyed (Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, 2005, introduction) - although it didn't quite match the ferocity of the campaign to destroy the Zulu kingdom in which, according to Michael Lieven, "Genocide came close to being official policy". (Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso, 2002, chapter three). The ongoing systematic violence continued for several decades - the 'pacification' of Morocco began in 1912 and wasn't complete until well into the 1930s. And of course, the imperial Metropoles were eventually obliged, in some cases after extremely brutal repression (Wesseling, op cit; Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, 2005) to withdraw politically from Africa, having implanted their national capital investments and forced the creation of nation-states.

This has to be placed in the context of overseas expansion that followed the loss of the Americas. The overwhelming tendency was for colonial powers to leave the colonial white overlords to continue to conquer the New World, while colonising the Old World themselves. It is true that the bulk of territorial acquisition took place after the 1870s, (8.6 million square miles were acquired by European powers between 1878 and 1913), but about 5 million square miles had already been taken in the period 1824-70. Some of these advances had been made in Africa in its northern, southern and western extremities, and had been pushing inland in all these territories and even in those which they did not formally rule, with railroad expansion (see Hanna Batatu on the merchant class in Iraq and its dependency on the British commercial ascendancy, for instance). It must also be placed in the context of the unprecedented Hundred Years Peace, in which old colonial powers did not fight one another (albeit Germany did get into the odd scrap when it emerged, and won against Denmark, Austria and France - becoming the main beneficiary of the second industrial revolution in the process and becoming the main European growth centre). It has been suggested that this was a displacement of internal European rivalries and that once the territory was used up and divided, the old rivalries were restored - ironically, Abernethy offers this as a critique of Lenin, but it happens to be one of Lenin's crucial observations. (Abernethy, op cit; VI Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1939, chapter ten).

This details some of the arc of what happened and perhaps explains some of the timing of individual attacks - but the question again is why the change? Given Abernethy’s criticisms, it is worth scrutinising what Lenin says about the Scramble for Africa: "When the colonies of the European powers, for instance, comprised only one-tenth of the territory of Africa (as was the case in 1876), colonial policy was able to develop—by methods other than those of monopoly—by the ‘free grabbing’ of territories, so to speak. But when nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in the era of monopoly possession of colonies and, consequently, of particularly intense struggle for the division and the re-division of the world." He appears to give the impression that monopolisation of capital is the result, rather than the cause, of colonialism, although of course his position throughout the pamphlet is famously that the concentration of capital leads to monopolies, these to finance capital, and it is the merging of finance-capital with the state and the growing importance of its export, that brings about imperialism in the capitalist sense. There are some problems with this picture, but before getting into that, I’ll offer some background that in my view confirms Lenin’s basic diagnosis.

Britain's free trade position hadn't stopped other states from pursuing protectionist policies, particularly when their indigenous economies were weak or nascent. The development of national economies reduced the dependence of the US and European states on Britain, so that between 1860 and 1870, Britain had 54% of its investments in Europe and the US, while by 1911-13, it had only 25% of its investments in these continents. The City of London remained the trading and financial centre of the world, but that had obviously diminished due to protectionist policies, and was to deteriorate further after the First World War. (Hobsbawm, op cit, chapter seven). Britain’s position had started to wane in the 1870s – its share of industrial production falling from 32% in 1870 to 14% in 1913. The US’s share rose in the same period from 23 to 38%. (Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000, MR Press, 2002, chapter four).

Periodisation, as I say, is not innocent, but we can perhaps locate the big shift in 1873, which saw the beginning of a wave of profound crises: the stock exchange in Vienna crashed, followed by bank failures in Austria and Germany; Germany's successful war with France in 1870-1 had involved it in mass construction of railroads and ships, but this resulted in such drastic price rises in cast iron that the construction industry began to contract dramatically - so that the production of cast iron had dropped by 21% in 1874; the US, a big source of British profits, experienced a slump caused by the scarcity of materials and labour during the railroad boom, which caused banks and railroad companies to fail and a panic on the stock market; UK exports fell by some 25% between 1872 and 1875; a stock exchange crash in Lyon in 1882 was followed by a US "railroad panic" in 1884, and this in itself was coterminous with the growing protectionism and cartelisation of the depression-ridden German economy; the Baring Bank had to be saved from ruin in 1890 by the Bank of England, following a series of political and economic crises in Argentina, where it operated; and in the same year, the McKinley protective tariff was introduced, which coincided with the proliferation of large trusts in the US. (Ibid). These crises coincided with a growing working class, and its increasing weight as a political force. In Britain, the working class grew from 5.7 million in 1881 to 8.6 million in 1911 with the number of organised workers doubling from 1.1 million to 2.2 million between 1976 and 1900, while in Germany the number of workers grew from 5.6 million in 1895 to 8.4 million in 1919. Despite anti-socialist laws in Germany, the social-democrats clandestine action had started to pay off by 1884, with them receiving some 550,000 votes. In the United States, an intense period of strikes had taken place throughout the crisis – more than three thousand strikes took place between 1881 and 1885. (Ibid).

At the same time, diamond pipes had been discovered in South Africa, and gold would be discovered there too. Explorers had traversed Africa and established that the place was ripe for exploitation. The French government, in particular, was paying attention. Having lost its maritime power, it sought to recover its imperial losses through territorial acquisition. In 1883, Sir Percy Anderson, the head of the Foreign Office's African bureau, worried that "Action seems to be forced on us ... Protectorates are unwelcome burdens, but in this case it is ... a choice between British protectorates, which would be unwelcome, and French protectorates, which would be fatal." The monopolisation and concentration of capital, and its fusion with the state, was such that when the scramble was over, more than 75% of British territory south of the Sahara was acquired by chartered companies - often, grudgingly, undertaking administrative duties. (Mieville, op cit).

Another aspect of the division of Africa was the creation of nation-states. Even during this period of a 'liberal' foreign policy, the British relied to some extent on the support of a layer of Christianised intellectuals, some of whom were 'recaptives' - that is, had been found crushed as 'stowaways' into ships, destined for slavery, and sent to Freetown by the British authorities. These intellectuals had been educated by Christian missionaries and were overwhelmingly pro-colonial: consequently, they were regarded, quite reasonably, as apologists who had placed themselves outside of the community. But they had hoped that the British were serious when they spoke of some form of self-rule, and that they would benefit from the ideological imperative to 'de-traditionalise' African society, since it was assumed that those 'civilised' by the imperialists would be able to implement nation-statization against 'traditional' rulers who were cast as reactionaries, backward, clinging to fetishistic practises as opposed to good religion. Whatever the merits of the monarchs, they were not opposed to modernisation as such - they simply felt the imposition of a nation-state system was perverse and detrimental to African society, and at any rate they felt the 'modernisers' would make a hash of it. It may seem ironic that the main form of resistance to empire would later become a kind of colonial nationalism imbricated with various Marxist hybrids, but the apparently irresistible virtues of nation-states being granted recognition as sovereign states in an international system had considerably more weight than the canting rhetoric of liberals in the metropole, like Lord Acton insisting that nationalism would "sacrifice liberty and prosperity to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the state". the absence of a sovereign states-system in Africa represented an area which capital had not colonised. Sovereign states are, as Justin Rosenberg has it, the political expression of capitalist social relations, in that the extrusion of the means of violence from the relations of exploitation under capitalism involves the creation of separate private and public spheres. A private 'economic' sphere and a public 'political' sphere in which capitalist class power gives up the means of extra-economic coercion, allowing the state to guarantee its rights, its access, the social-property relations which ensure its dominion. The state does not 'withdraw' from civil society, as it is usually called, but it does differentiate economic and political functions sharply. Private enterprise runs the economy, while the government underpins the legal basis - and indeed, the state can lose some of its sovereignty by becoming involved in direct economic transactions inasmuch as by nationalising industries, it makes economic struggle a political struggle - the Thatcher regime in Britain was about replacing the politicisation of the economy with a strong state which reduced the power of unions and under-girded capitalist class power. (Davidson, op cit; Justin Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society, Verso, 1994).

I have made a case for a version of the Leninist theory of imperialism, yet some criticisms of his method merit consideration. First of all, Wesseling offers a number of explanations which are not all by any means inconsistent with the Leninist account. First of all, there was initially no resistance, since the division of Africa was a ‘paper affair’ with its provisions only being enforced from the 1890s onward. And while Europeans had to compete with the US, Japan and Russia for a share of China, the diplomatic manoeuvring of European powers was uninterrupted by the US and Russia, who were busily pursuing the more traditional overland development. (Abernethy provides this part of the explanation, in fact). Motivations for the division are, for Wesseling, diverse and not entirely consistent. Citing Robinson and Gallagher, he differs with the view offered by Hobson and Lenin that capitalists promoted the division – at least for Britain, part of the motive was supplied by the need to ensure access to the East. As they themselves explain, most of the business and political classes were hostile to formal colonization, while public opinion tended to restrain imperial adventure, albeit some business and ‘imperialist’ lobbies – a distinction without a difference in my view – and the government ended up relying on private corporations. British efforts concentrated on east Africa and the Upper Nile, where direct bounty was less abundantly available – the reason was that “In all regions north of Rhodesia, the broad imperative which decided which territory to reserve and which to renounce, was the safety of routes to the east”, because “Britain’s strength depended upon the possession of India and preponderance in the East almost as much as it did upon the British isles”. The main driving force behind the advance into tropical Africa was the collapse of the Khedivial regime in Egypt, and the desire to secure the route through the Suez Canal. (Wesseling, op cit; Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher (& Alice Denny), Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, 1961, chapter XV.)

Wesseling goes on to add that this motivation could only explain Britain’s conduct, and that only partially. Other motives would have included economic, financial, political and ideological drives (such as national ambition, and the ‘white man’s burden’). A few obvious retorts: why did political motives require this strategy? Why did ‘national ambition’ take the form of imperialism and not, say, levelling economic and political power? In what sense were British interests in the East not to do with those of capitalists? In what meaningful sense are financial motives not capitalist? Why would the ‘white man’s burden’ be a meaningful or necessary ideological appeal if not for the capitalist interests coyly adverted to? Wesseling frequently uses nebulous formulations – explaining why the Dutch didn’t defend their interests in the Congo, he explains that “Dutch foreign interests in general” prevailed but goes on to explain that “there is no such thing as the national interest”, only “various part-interests” interpreted and weighed by the state. Given this, what ‘part-interests’ can be said to have determined the Dutch government’s decision in this case? Wesseling explains that Britain considered the Sudan worthy of a clash with France, but did not simply abandon other ‘interests’ (“empire on the cheap”, good relations with France) – a penumbral plurality of ‘interests’ are adduced, but not connected to the social structure in which they surely reside. He adds: “we can only conclude, therefore, that … various motives played a part” with one motive then “another being paramount at any one time” - an explanation so vacuous that it manages to avoid explanation. (Wesseling, op cit).

The final attempt at an explanation is that whatever the subjective views of statesmen, they were “merely unconscious tools of what Hegel has called the ‘cunning of reason’” since it was “inevitable” that Africa would be drawn into the “European system of international relations”: now why might that be? According to Wesseling, Africans had only “eluded” the system for so long because America had been more suited to emigration and colonization, and Asia to commercial exploitation and trade. Africa became important once the rest of the world had already been divided and improved medical knowledge made it easier for Europeans to live and fight in Africa, while Europe’s military supremacy made conquest much cheaper. What’s more, Britain – having lost its supremacy – saw the second industrial revolution benefit rivals, while Italy and Germany, the new arrivals, were eager for their place in the sun. The politics of imperialism was therefore a “synthesis of social, economic and ‘purely’ political factors”. There are several problems with this account. The “European system of international relations” had not entailed nation-states for some time – instead, the imperial periphery had been composed of zones of influence with shifting frontiers rather than fixed borders (much as in Europe until the rise of absolutist sovereigns and the later formation of capitalist nation-states). Most of the imperial periphery had been subsumed under the sovereignty of European powers only in a juridical sense, while the social structure of the international sphere was characterised by mobility that undermined the notion of discrete societies. (Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations, Verso, 2003; Tarek Barkawi & Mark Laffey, ‘Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations’, Millenium: journal of international studies, 2002, vol. 31, Number 1; Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Verso, 2000, esp chapter 7; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800, Verso, 1997). As I suggest above, the rise of modern nation-states needs to be rooted in an analysis of the rise of capitalism and its geopolitically mediated spread throughout the world. The integration of the imperial periphery into this system can only be considered ‘inevitable’ given the emergence of a capitalist social structure. The strict sense in which Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ is applicable is discussed by Mieville – the British had been entirely unwilling to submit to the logic of colonial ‘nation-states’, preferring informal annexation, and had ensured that the protectorates which it formed were exempt under the agreements ensuing from the Berlin Conference. Yet the logic of legality, of positive law, imposed itself – mercantile companies with private armies had been able to impose rule in their territories in the 16th and 17th centuries, but these were capitalist monopolies and proved incapable of and unwilling to impose rule. This is why protectorates had become the chief form of rule – since capitalist rule involves precisely removing the means of violence from the axis of exploitation, capitalist enterprises were wholly unused to direct political rule, and relied on the growing formalisation and legalisation of political power. (Mieville, op cit). The Italians and Germans seeking their spot in the sun doesn’t explain much, for as late as the 1870s, the Bismarck was still rejecting proposals to set up colonies. It too tried initially to avoid direct responsibility for territory – what Bismarck called the “French system” – and had relied on a tobacco merchant acquiring what would become German South-West Africa on its behalf. (Koskenniemi, op cit). Again and again, Wesseling either loses the specific in the general (as in ‘interests’, the ‘official mind’ and so on), or loses the general in the specific (a disarray of facts that are important but show no sign of being coherently organised).

There have also been a number of criticisms of the Leninist account from sympathetic marxist authors. One of the claims of Gindin and Panitch in their book on Global Capitalism and American Empire is that Lenin elevated the conjunctural situation of inter-imperial rivalry in the early 20th Century to a principle of late capitalism. David Harvey adds that Arendt was right to “interpret the imperialism that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism’ as Lenin depicted it”. (David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 2004; Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, Global Capitalism and American Empire, 2003). Lenin, however, called his pamphlet "Imperialism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism", and that is certainly the phrase he uses in the pamphlet, along with "a special stage of capitalism" (see Lenin, op cit, chapter VII; ‘Notes from the Editors’, Monthly Review, January 2004, Volume 55, Number 8). It may seem that he is pathologising imperialism as something external to 'pure' capitalism, which is another charge Panitch and Gindin make, but a proper reading of the pamphlet, particularly the conclusion, reveals that Lenin in fact was fully aware that a) imperialism is something that had persisted not only in previous capitalist forms (he specifically says so) but has persisted in previous non-capitalist forms, and b) the 'stage' he is describing is indeed 'special', the 'latest' stage but by no means the last (depending on how optimistic one felt).

Nevertheless, the narrative Lenin provides would tend to suggest that there is a unilinear process of concentration, monopolisation, the internationalisation of finance capital and then its merging with the state. The trouble is that, for instance, the US was importing, not exporting, capital prior to 1914. (Mieville, op cit). Further, Gindin and Panitch have a point when they say that the main reason the British resorted to formal colonialism in Africa was that they could not rope the US and Europe under their Free Trade imperium. (Panitch & Gindin, op cit). These states insisted on pursuing their own protected growth strategies and were able to emerge as competing powers. So, the 'scramble for Africa' illustrates on the one hand a conjunctural period of capitalist centralisation, and on the other, the last wave of nation-statization and capitalisation. It also illustrates the racist underpinnings of capital accumulation and imperial expansion, since where the empire was successful it either subjected local non-white populations to superordinate powers that eventually wiped them out, or suppressed them (Australia, Canada, the US, South Africa). Noticeably, in no colonised state were meaningful democratic institutions introduced for a non-white population - white Afrikaaners, white Americans, white Australians etc etc. Only once these states ceased being colonial outposts due to struggles from below and within was this reversed. (Abernethy, op cit). In fact, the precise form of ‘sovereignty’ that was ‘given’ to various states under colonial tutelage or indeed achieved by the colonists was directly bounded up with a discourse of ‘civilisation’ – one shared by liberal and reactionary imperialists alike, and one moreover that was pervasive among international lawyers. Henry Wheaton, an attorney with the US Supreme Court, and a diplomat posted in Europe, explained that “the international law of the civilised, Christian nations of Europe and America, is one thing; and that which governs the intercourse of the Mohammedan nations of the East with each other, and with Christian, is another and very different thing” – European positive law was certainly not applicable to those whose civilisation was lacking. (Koskenniemi, op cit). As late as 1963, an American authority could explain that it would take generations to teach Africans “the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics”. (Davidson, op cit). One suspects that the residues of this now disavowed position informs much of the discourse not only on Africa, but also on other ‘uncivilized’ states that find themselves governed by upstarts.

Killing Blair. posted by lenin

Look, I'm not supposed to be here, I've got exams shortly, but - I'm invited to distance myself from George Galloway for saying that the killing of the Prime Minister would be morally justified. I don't know if GQ fucked up the interview in which he's supposed to have said this, but come on! I'm not going to slag off Galloway merely because he didn't go far enough. Okay, I take the point. He should have said that the best way to spread Blair's philosophy would be to blow his brains out. He should have said that if the Nuremberg laws were applied, he and several of his cronies would be hanging over the Tyburn. He should have said that the only tragedy in the instance of Blair perishing in a suicide attack would be the loss of life on the part of the executor. He should have said that at least if we hung the cabinet, no innocent lives would be lost.

But what do you expect? - the guy's a reformist, a former Labour Party member, of course he's going to let emotions cloud his judgment.

(This is by way of an enormous and gratuitous 'fuck you' to the sanctimonious, unctuous idiots who publicly called for and supported the mass killing of innocents in Iraq. Eat it, and eat it raw, you nauseating pillocks).

The politics of American revivalism. posted by lenin

US imperialists have had this problem ever since they became aware that they would supplant European colonial power. They so wanted everyone to believe they were different. Even when they colonised the Philippines or Haiti, they would have had the subjects believe that the US intended nothing more sinister than their own welfare and the development of market societies with liberal states. Indeed, what is usually referred to as Wilsonian idealism made a virtue of this what with the fourteen points and the self-determination of nations and the 'open door' policy. They were firm with the Europeans - it's tutelary power, Mandate-style, or it's nothing (compromise was reached by Jan Smuts of the British delegation to the Paris Conference of 1919 - there would be Mandates for nations on the verge of civilisation, and there would be prolonged dominion for nations almost solely populated by 'barbarians' - thus appeasing arch-imperialists in Africa). Meanwhile, the US worked to cultivate their own tutelary power in their hemisphere and in South Asia and the Middle East, supporting 'national' elites against the old colonial powers. They would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling communists.

Even where merely reform-minded, the communists denounced US power as simply an update on the old communism. They were, wherever they attained power or fought for it, unwilling to be the pliable patsies that the Americans required. Whereas the US elite had thought that the rise of colonial nationalisms combined with their economic dominance would allow them to lay networks of patronage and control in which 'open markets' would inevitably conduce to their commercial ascendancy, it transpired that even their well-armed placemen often couldn't keep the rabble down. Precisely at the moment where they emerged as the world's foremost military and economic power, they were discovering its limits - in China and Vietnam, then in Iran, and Lebanon. Apparently successful revolutions took place in Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia - the Iranians were stirring it up in Saudi Arabia of all places, while the very fact of the Islamic Republic had removed on of their three main supports in the Middle East. When the Arabs had been acting up over the oil prices, they had planned to invade and secure the oil-fields, but when you're busy bombing Cambodians and coping with fragging in Vietnam, and when you're broke, and Japanese competition is making itself felt, and there's a coup to mount in Chile and lots of little insurgencies to contain and leftist movements across Europe to worry about - Empire can be a harsh and gruelling business. They had used military suppression, genocide even - and still the bastards wouldn't comply.

On the other hand, they and their capitalist allies contained the leftist threat where it mattered most - in Europe, and for the most part in Latin America, and for the most part in Africa. The 'Afghan trap' helped finish off the Russians, while empowering the guys who would later fill in for the Russians as official enemy number one. Sponsoring Iraq helped keep the Iranians down, while arming the Iranians ensured that it wouldn't weaken and succumb to the serenading of the Soviets. A few cyclones of murder, torture and rape across Central America knocked several threats to capital on the head, and many of these 'communist' states - damnedest thing! - were opening themselves up to capitalism. Why, even the most independent Middle Eastern and Maghrebi states were opening themselves up to the IMF. Iraq was destroyed and made into a dependency and after a few years of terror, Aristide and his supporters (the bulk of the Haitian populace) learned to behave themselves. Israel was casually reducing Palestine to a few wards and ghettos presided over by some well-bribed guards, and local ruling classes were too busy containing the Islamist movements that they too had patronised to do anything about it - and those movements, too, were more or less washed up by 1997.

And yet, and yet... a pregnant pause and a wistful sigh... it wouldn't last forever. The Chinese were coming next.

So, this is where the revivalists come in. They had been through the era of sometimes quite catastrophic defeats, especially Dick and Don, they were tough, and they had cultivated along with well-placed media associates an extreme ideology that would reassert US power. They paid much lip service to a couple of revered ancient texts (bible and constitution) and the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs - sorry, Founding Fathers - but were essentially ultra-nationalists preparing for an all-out state-led offensive to assert a Global Capitaliphate with the US guarding the holy cities and, through their servile ulema, propagating the Law of the Market and the Holy Profit. They usurped some of the unctuous 'idealism' of liberal internationalism and paired it with classic realpolitik - no more self-determination, the Dollar-Wall Street regime will be forcibly extended and deepened. They have a megalomaniacal view of their capacities, and of their rights over other human beings, which amount to those of a global dictatorship. Unlike many revivalist ideologies, this was principally an elite affair and the best its adherents could do to broaden its appeal was conjoin their ideals in an amorphous and nebulous association with those of the devout middle class, as well as a slender layer of Zionist fanatics whose aims are broadly contiguous with theirs.

Clinton had been too much of a status-quo conservative for them (albeit he did expand the economic dominion of the US and entrench neoliberalism as a divine and holy writ), and Bush looked too weak initially - but what's this? "Looks like a terrorist attack, Dick." "Did you see that coming, Don?" "Hell no." "Well, fuck, we've got to invade Iraq!" "Got to!" "We'll get the sumbitch now." "We'll get all the sumbitches!"

Having 'got' Iraq, the problem of Iran persisted. You might have noticed that the Iranian bazaari class had been pushing for more privatisation and neoliberalism and closer relations with the US since at least the late 1980s. What had been known as the 'Islamic Left' in the majles had abandoned radical positions and become liberal reformers, often in coalition with centrists and the 'Modern Right' (represented by Rafsanjani). Substantial sectors of industry had been liberalised and, following Khatami's election on a reform ticket in 1997, the US released most of its embargo on the country. Khatami introduced a neoliberal five year development plan starting in 2000, in collegiance with the IMF Prior to Ahmadinejad's election in August 2005, had been seeking entry into the World Trade Organisation. Iran's conservative faction had successfully outmanouevred some of Khatami's political liberalisation, but were fine with economic liberalisation provided it was compatible with their continued privilege (as it invariably was). Having barred several candidates in the 2005 election and used police, Parasdan and 'hezbollahs' against protesters and the opposition, they had assumed I think that Rafsanjani would win it and govern as a moderate rightist.

Trouble is that although Bush had made grateful use of Iran during the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and although the US had been obliged to pragmatically seek Iran's help over Iraq, the sabre-rattling which had been particularly prominent in the early 1990s, with Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the US and Rabin in Israel referring to Iran's alleged terrorism in supporting Hamas (which was actually mainly funded by US allies Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) and nuke-seeking, had been reintroduced big time with the Axis of Evil speech. The continued weather of blustery rhetoric and threats had included attempts to impose sanctions, while neoconservatives were urging attacks on Iran, North Korea, an invasion of Iraq and so on. They were creaming their pants over the possibilities. For this reason, and also because of popular opposition to privatisation which had involved many student protests and clashes with the police, Ahmadinejad won. On the one hand, a better enemy of the month than Khatami - on the other hand, How Dare They Sass Us?

Fanatical American revivalists are thus prepared, whenever and however they can get away with it, for military strikes on Iran. They have devoted large sums of money to a disinformation campaign, used their immense power within international organisations to put pressure on the country, and have an unrealistic and cultish appreciation of their ability to, as one spokesman put it, 'create our own reality'. Their position in the executive branch of the US government, despite some knocks, remains strong. They continue to have a well-paid Greek Chorus in the media. The elite 'opposition' agrees with the bulk of what they stand for, so far being unable to exercise themselves to much opposition over strategic differences, and they certainly don't care to articulate the views of the working class and middle class whom they appeal to for votes from time to time.

Yet, the revivalists keep stumbling upon the same limits as more secular predecessors have: Haiti won't submit, Iraq won't submit, the Palestinians won't give in, Venezuela and Bolivia are teaming up against them, Iran has more or less told them to fuck off, OPEC countries are looking at switching to the euro (as Saddam did in 2000) which could mean a catastrophic decline in the dollar, global oppositional movements are being reconstituted, their allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia are experiencing 'domestic difficulties', South Korea is turning on them, they've even lost their people-boiling dictator in Uzbekistan to the Russians.

Call it the wishful thinking of a Leninist moderate, but I sort of feel that this racist, supremacist ideology reached its apex in mid-2003. Their callousness, bigotry, fanaticism, brutality and extreme fecklessness even on their own terms has generated a backlash within the US ruling class while consolidating anti-imperialist alliances and movements. Market fundamentalism has experienced serious defeats, even in Europe. We may yet survive.

All Hail Aryan Nuclear Fission! posted by lenin

The wrong kind of British posted by bat020

A truly gob-smacking exclusive in this week's Socialist Worker about how the government and courts are trying to deport a British citizen to Pakistan. Yup, you read that right — a British citizen who happens to have been born in Pakistan, and is consequently considered a "foreign criminal" by this disgusting racist government.

Saqib Almas, the guy in question, did time for petty crime a few years back, served his sentence, was released over two years ago and was getting on with his life in east London. Until the government decided that hunting down "foreign criminals" was its number one priority.

Then someone noticed that Saqib had dual nationality (he was born in Pakistan because his mum, a British citizen, happened to be there at the time and has lived in Britain since aged 18 months).

And then another someone decided that this fact made Saqib "foreign". So the immigration officers descended on his house at 8am and now he is sitting in Harmondsworth about to be stuck on a plane to Pakistan. They have basically decided that if you're the "wrong kind of British" they can strip you of your citizenship at will.

The testimony of Sam Almas, Saqib's sister, is worth reading in full:

They came for my brother Saqib at 8am when he was still sleeping. My mother found two vans of police and immigration officers preparing to break our front door down.

Now the government is trying to deport him to Pakistan – even though he is a British citizen. This is blatant racism and arrogance from Tony Blair and his government. We have to challenge them, or they will carry on down this line.

The court issued a warrant for my brother’s arrest on Thursday 11 May. The next day they arrested him and by Saturday he was in Harmondsworth detention centre.

They gave him a document saying that they want to deport him to Pakistan because he has no ties in Britain and he has a criminal record.

This is ridiculous. He grew up here and went to school here. All our close family are here and we are British citizens too.

Yes, he has a criminal record – but for minor offences, and he has been punished for that. He’s done his time and he doesn’t deserve this.

What has happened to my brother makes me rethink my beliefs. I am British. I was born here. My grandfather was invited to live here after he fought for the British in the Second World War.

I’ve never felt that I had to choose between different identities before. But when they are threatening to put my brother on a plane to Pakistan, they are saying that they don’t want us here.

I’ve been a Labour supporter all my life, but now it makes me ashamed to think that I supported Labour. Some of the laws they have brought in are barbaric.

The government is completely blind. At a time when the British National Party is getting large votes in parts of London, anyone with any common sense would realise that what the government is doing is making the situation even more volatile.

Blair’s priorities are all wrong. I work in a hospital and I know that the NHS is in serious trouble with huge cutbacks. Government ministers should be worrying about that. Instead they are continuing with an illegal war, raiding homes and deporting people.

This is a quick fix solution from the government. To them, my brother and other people like him are just statistics. But he is a human being and he should be treated with some respect. I have a three year old daughter and sometimes I wonder whether I really want to bring her up in a society with so much racism and injustice.

Blair thinks he is untouchable. He needs to think about what he is doing before he starts trying to teach the rest of the world about democracy. I have no faith in him or his government. We should remind them that they are answerable to the people.

In other news: a 30 year old Afghan man was stabbed by racist thugs in Barking on Wednesday night - on the same evening that 12 Nazi councillors were sworn in at Barking & Dagenham town hall. They left him for dead - draped in an England flag.

And on Thursday night in Merseyside, Alec McFadden, a prominent local anti-racist campaigner and left wing trade union activist, had his face slashed up on his front doorstep by a knife-wielding Nazi. The attack took place in front of his two young daughters.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair has appointed Liam Byrne as his new immigration minister. You may remember Mr Byrne - he's the toerag who won his Birmingham Hodge Hill seat at a by-election in 2004 by running a blatantly racist election campaign.

Imperialism as a solution to capitalist crisis. posted by lenin

Domination, subjugation, oppression, racism, the master race - keeps the profit margins high and staves off social revolution. And it's good for civilization, too.

Cecil Rhodes, 1895:

I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread," "bread," and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, ie, in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid a civil war, you must become imperialists.

Joseph Chamberlain, 1896, to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce:

If we had remained passive ... the largest part of the African continent would have been occupied by our commercial rivals ... Through our colonial policy, as soon as we acquire and develop a territory, we develop it as agents of civilization, for the growth of world trade.

John Stuart Mill:

It can be affirmed, in the present state of the world, that the founding of colonies is the best business in which the capital of an old and rich country can be invested.

Leroy Beaulieu:

It is neither natural nor just that the civilized people of the West should be indefinitely crowded together and stifled in the restricted spaces that were their first homes, that they shoiuld accumulate there the wonders of science, art, and civilization, that they should see, for lack of profitable jobs, the interest rate of capital fall further every day for them, and that they should leave perhaps half the world to small groups of ignorant men, who are powerless, who are truly retarded children, dispersed over boundless territories, or else to decrepit populations without energy and without direction, truly old men incapable of any effort, of any organized and far-seeing action.

Hobson, 1902:

The new imperialism differs from the older, first in substituting for the ambition of a single growing empire the theory and practice of competing empires, each motivated by similar lusts of political aggrandisement and commercial gain, secondly, in the dominance of financial, or investing, over mercantile interests.

Hilferding, 1910:

[The imperialist] observes with a cold and steady eye the medley of peoples and sees his own nation standing over all of them. For him this nation is real; it lives in the ever increasing power and greatness of the state, and its enhancement deserves every ounce of his effort. The subordination of individual interests to a higher general interest, which is a prerequisite for every vital social ideology, is thus achieved; and the state alien to its people is bound together with the nation in unity while the national idea becomes the driving force of politics.

Otto Bauer, 1913:

Imperialism is in fact a means of extending the limits of accumulation.

"You guys realise you're dying for capitalism, right?"

Latest Hitler: how lies become news. posted by lenin

Canada's National Post ran a false story claiming that Iran was planning to oblige non-Muslims to wear badges to indicate their ethnicity so that they could be distinguished in public. Experts have already dissed the story.





The National Post tries, in a lustrum written by Chris Wattie, to distance itself from the sensationalist item by describing it as a "news story and column" by Amir Taheri - a column, an opinion piece, the work of a malevolent hoaxster perhaps. Except of course that the original news story was by, well, Chris Wattie. Wattie adds, in his own defense: "The Simon Wiesenthal Centre and Iranian expatriates living in Canada had confirmed that the order had been passed, although it still had to be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect." Also cited in its defense is the view of the Simon Weisenthal Centre that, although it had no independent corroboration of the report, they believe it to be true. Further, Stephen Harper, the Tory Prime Minister of Canada, said Iran is "very capable" of enacting laws similar to the Nuremberg Laws under the Nazis.

Amir Taheri, of course, is a dubious figure. He is a sublunary of the Benador Associates, a right-wing PR firm that supplies conservative speakers for all sorts of occasions. He specialises in producing bilge about Iran, interpreting Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush as an attempt to provoke a clash of civilizations so that the Hidden Imam will return, while asserting not only that Iran wants a nuclear bomb, but that it wants one to - well, hasten a clash of civilizations so that the Hidden Imam will return. He has claimed that attacks on London and New York were inspired by a desire by some Muslims to exert total dictatorial control over what you eat for breakfast (which is cartoonish nonsense), referred to Tariq Ramadan as a Muslim Brotherhood militant (which is flatly false), smeared antiwar protesters as defenders of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and asserted that Israel must claim victory over Palestine. As an "Iranian-born analyst" (they never forget to mention this), he is the neoconservative's favourite 'native informant' about Islam, the Middle East and how well various imperialist adventures are going. Commentary Magazine loves him, the Wall Street Journal loves him, the Telegraph loves him, the National Review loves him - to put it mildly, his brand of 'insight' is very popular with that baroque sodality of reactionary imperialists. Noteworthy that, after the story has already been rebutted, Amir Tehari has gone and retold the story to the New York Post with the headline 'Iran OKs "Nazi" Social Fabric'.



But what is more interesting than Tehari's corroborative role is that this utterly false and utterly implausible story was first published by the National Post and then taken up by newspapers and television stations across America and the West, and even a supposedly leftish site called Truthdig. The report cited no solid sources, merely adducing unnamed "human rights groups" were were "raising alarms" and unnamed "Iranian expatriates" who "confirmed reports". Well, I say 'unnamed' - one Iranian expatriate is named, some geezer called 'Ali Behroozian'. Quite how he was able to 'confirm' this claim, what qualified him in other words, is a mystery. Googling yields nothing about him, so either he's a private citizen, in which case the question about his qualifications to confirm anything for the National Post is repeated, or the name is all made up, in which case other questions come to mind. Possibly, these human rights groups and expatriates are of the same character as the Iraqi exiles who obligingly told Bush what he wanted to hear - or what he wanted others to hear - so that he could invade Iraq. Or one could equally suspect the hand of such PR groups as Hill & Knowlton, who famously manufactured a story about Iraqi soldiers ripping babies from incubators and leaving them to die on the floor. But what is clear, abundantly clear, is that any news reporter worth his or her salt would have spotted that this set of claims had fuck all to it. Hardly any sources, obtuse style, vagueness of details, nothing but colourful, arresting and emotionally involving claims and expostulations that divert one from analysis. As Alexandra Kitty explains in her useful book on lies becoming news, those are the absolutely standard tell-tale signs of a hoax. CBS boasts that it did not publish the story because "there were too many red flags" and not enough concrete information. Yet Fox News, MSNBC the New York Post, the New York Sun, the Washington Times, the American Jewish Congress, the Jerusalem Post and any number of wingnut sites and of course our progressive friend Truthdig all repeated these outrageous, obvious lies as if they were fact. Most, including our progressive friend Truthdig, followed the National Post's lead by illustrating their coverage with artefacts or photos from Nazi Germany.

At any rate, bear with me while I ponder the obvious: the sheer volume of misleading, manufactured, slanted, spun, stilted and distorted information being generated about Iran right now - and particularly the time-worn repetition of He's-A-Hitler themes - suggests that some kind of attack is afoot. In order to blast a geopolitical opponent to Hades these days, they must first be portrayed as genocidal maniacs, ready to launch aggressive wars, pointing nukes at us... any war will not only be defensive, therefore, but also an act of humanitarian largesse.

Uprising at Guantanamo posted by lenin

America's own Chateau D'If is experiencing a desperate, doomed revolt by prisoners armed with weapons made of fans and light fixtures. They stand no chance against soldiers and professional torturers armed to the teeth and in control of almost every inch of the base, and so you could reasonably conclude that they are at this point indifferent to death. If you like, the United States has detained large numbers of people - many of whom we now know are to be released uncharged, which is to say that they have been trapped in hell for no reason, let alone a good one - and created suicide attackers out of several of them. This follows attempted suicides by four prisoners, using hoarded medicines. Commander Robert Durand says he can't discern a motive or a message, which means he either intends to insult our intelligence or his own.

The US has supplied the motive in abundance, and the response of many detainees is to attempt slow, agonising suicide. The message is that they are being held by such an inhuman, savage state that they'd rather die than continue in captivity. Donald Rumsfeld, in response to the hunger strikes, was kind enough to confirm this by describing them as "a diet". The invertebrate UN human rights watchdog that asked nicely for Guantanamo's closure because it seemed inapposite for a government so vocal about the human rights record of others to be kidnapping people and detaining them, indefinitely and without trial, and then torturing them, got its response today. The US said that the real problem is there aren't enough interrogators.

Mao more than ever! posted by lenin

I am nothing if not promiscuous. Like Mrs Prentice in What the Butler Saw, I was born with my legs apart and shall go to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin. Of course, I'm not a Maoist and have never supported the Chinese government or revered the rather repulsive figure of Mao himself. But the question we now face is why the Maoist movements are gaining such a foothold across South Asia. This article by Henry Maitles comes some way to answering that question. This follows a somewhat equivocal piece by Alex Callinicos a couple of weeks ago.

Maitles simplifies matters a bit, necessarily so, but the gist of it is correct - the Maoists do not look to the Chinese government as the model for development (rather they see it as a capitalist sell-out); they are successful because they are the most brave and committed fighters; they have generally emerged as national liberation movements; their strategy of rural mobilisation has excelled as a military strategy in economies with strong or majority feudal-agrarian structures, but has the flaw of relegating the role of the working class; and because these post-revolutionary states must survive in a hostile world, they end up being extremely authoritarian and coercive. Maitles doesn't mention the role of Stalin's Comintern in encouraging the Maoists to form a disastrous coalition with 'progressive' capitalists, and it might also be worth going into how the idiom of Marxism had to be adapted by the nationalist intelligentsia who adopted it first to fit their surroundings, which - because the urban centres were hostile and dangerous - inevitably turned to mobilising the peasantry. At any rate, whatever the misgivings one has about Maoism as an ideology, movement and strategy, it is an extremely positive development that these movements are growing in South Asia. To some extent, one has to acknowledge that radicalisation was always likely to be hegemonised by the Maoists because they are the best fighters and also because there is not a real embedded tradition of Trotskyism there - in fact, the Trotskyists in South Asia are by all accounts quite mad.

A couple of other articles worth reading. Yuri Prasad has an article in Nepal here, and Charlie Hore assesses some of the myths and monsters in a bestselling Mao biography.

Shiny new Chernobyls posted by Meaders

You knew it was coming:

Prime Minister Tony Blair is set to give his strongest signal yet that he backs the building of a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK...

BBC political editor Nick Robinson said ministers appeared to be considering changes to the planning process to overcome local resistance to new power stations.

No 10 says Mr Blair will say he has seen a "first cut" of the government-commissioned energy review, which is due by the end of July...

The prime minister is due to say that if current policy remains unchanged there will be a "dramatic gap" on targets to reduce CO2 emissions by 2025 forcing Britain to become heavily dependent on gas.

That old chestnut: it beggars belief that an industry with as dismal an environmental record as nuclear power's should be rebranding itself as a squeaky-clean green crusader - though appointing the ludicrous Bernard Ingham as your Captain Planet hardly suggests they're taking the effort too seriously. Nor should we pretend this stuff is cheap.

If Blair is claiming that nuclear is any solution to Britain's greenhouse gas emissions, he is peddling a myth:

A complete life-cycle analysis shows that generating electricity from nuclear power emits 20-40% of the carbon dioxide per kiloWatt hour ( kWh) of a gas-fired system when the whole system is taken into account (see Nuclear Power: the Energy Balance by Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith).

The nuclear process chain also emits other greenhouse gases besides carbon dioxide with far stronger global-warming potential such as chloro- and fluorohydrocarbons and probably SF6. These emissions are difficult to quantify from the open literature, but the total emission of carbon dioxide equivalents by a nuclear system will be significantly more than 20-40% of a gas-fired system with the same energy output.

...all of which means, far from delivering the magic solution to climate change, nuclear power is barely worth the immense effort:

Research by the SDC suggests that even if the UK's existing nuclear capacity was doubled, it would only provide an 8% cut on CO2 emissions by 2035 (and nothing before 2010).

There is no silver bullet, and it is disturbing that this crass, myopic government is starting to peddle the myth that there is. After the failures of their own energy policies - inherited and all but unchanged, needless to say, from the Tories - failures revealed once more this week, they're thrashing around for a clean quick-fix. That they should end up with the dirtiest, most expensive "quick-fix" imaginable is in character. What we need to tackle carbon emissions is planning: an integrated plan to deal with emissions from transport, housing, food consumption, and the rest. We need a serious research commitment to renewable and genuinely zero-emission fuels. What we do not need is New Labour's wilful short-termism.

Update: The text of Blair's speech to the CBI is now available:

The facts are stark. By 2025, if current policy is unchanged there will be a dramatic gap on our targets to reduce CO2 emissions, we will become heavily dependent on gas and at the same time move from being 80% to 90% self-reliant in gas to 80% to 90% dependent on foreign imports, mostly from the Middle East, and Africa and Russia.

Where, exactly, does the Prime Minister think uranium comes from? Organic farms in Wiltshire?

It'll come as no great surprise, either, to find that the figures making the economic case for nukes are apparently being busily rigged.

Make Richard Branson History. posted by lenin

Give us our colour back, you theiving bastards! Who the fuck entitled you to colour your 'philanthropic' PR operations red? Yes, Product Red is once more upon us. Bono explains his latest enterprise - a slim red mobile phone with an MP3 player on it that will divert a little bit of money to AIDS charities - thus: "We had the student campuses and the church halls but we didn't have the high street". The man couldn't be more of an upstanding pillock if he tried. How simple can it be? Getting the 'high street' means getting the companies who are raking it in off the exploitation, misery, oppression and deaths of the working masses on this planet. You want to tackle AIDS? Get the pharmaceutical companies off their backs. Stop sending Christian far right missionaries to preach 'abstinence' to the poor. How's that for a start? You want to help the poor? Instead of giving GAP some cheap PR, get them to stop using slave labour. Instead of giving American Express a new marketing scheme, how about fighting against the far right neoconservative ideology which they aggressively help promote through the American Enterprise Institute? How about tackling bio-piracy, privatisation (of water and anything else up for grabs), the destruction of welfare systems and labour protections and so on? Instead of encouraging rich Westerners to buy mobile phones, how about considering the way class cuts across from the 'developing' world to the 'developed' world - how can it be that the US is second highest in the world for newborn mortality? How can it be that New Orleans is allowed to be held to ransom by a corporation? How can it be that TB has been making a comeback in parts of the UK where levels of the disease are now higher than in China or India? Why does it fall to the elected leader of a poor country like Venezuela to help out poor Americans and Europeans? Oh, nothing but the usual - capital is the problem and no part of the solution.

You know, a couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune of reading this interview with a rather typical 'cardigan capitalist', one of those 'nice guy' capitalists who expends his wealth behaving like a teenager and pursuing vanity projects. In the interview with a BBC sap, Mr Branson describes how guilty he feels about the plight of the poor in Africa and the terrible burden of having all his wealth while so many die. He says that "the necessary evil of capitalism" must be turned to good. Yeah, if capitalism somehow, inexplicably, mysteriously, ineluctably, enabled you to grab almost three billion pounds in personal wealth (how much in those offshore trust funds, I wonder?), you'd call it a necessary evil too. And you'd cry your little socks off about the terrible, terrible guilt. Simply terrible. Not that you'd have anything to be guilty about, you understand, it's just that the necessary eeeeevvviillll of capitalism made you some money.

So, we are to understand corporate philanthropy as expiation for the capitalist concerned, but also - as explained with abundant clarity by one of the marketing whizzes behind it on C4 News last night - a badge of honour for 'concerned consumers'. No one noticed, not even the news anchor, that what the man had said in his interview was that he had spotted those little wristbands some people were wearing last year that said 'Make Poverty History' - you know, the ones that were made in Chinese sweatshops? And so he thought it would be a nice little profit-spinner if he could make a product that acted as a little badge for customers to say "I care about, er, these people or, er, that cause or this thing" (he really was that vague about it). The news anchor went on to spin this, literally, as "so, the message is, buy a phone and change the world". No no no - the message is, openly, buy our phone for a mere £149 and enjoy the sensation of being part of our little philanthropic circle-jerk.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, a clucking aristocrat mouths obsequies about the terrible problems in the East End. "The problem," replied Lord Henry Wotton, "is one of slavery. And we are trying to solve it by amusing the slaves." Times change - Bono and his greasy ilk are trying to solve it by amusing the masters.

Palestine Demo posted by lenin

This Saturday:

The Palestinian people need your help Israel's brutal occupation of the Palestinian people is creating a humanitarian crisis.


The Israeli government has decided to strengthen the economic blockade of the Palestinian people. Dov Weisglass, the Israeli prime minister's adviser, joked: 'It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die'.


a. According to a January 2006 UN report, 64% of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are living below the poverty line.

b.. In Gaza, 40% of children suffer from malnutrition because of the Israeli occupation. John Ging, director of UN operations there, said: 'This is the first time bread has been rationed.There's no sugar, oil, milk, the basics.'

c.. A UN report in September 2005 said that 60 Palestinian women had given birth at Israeli checkpoints since 2000 and 36 of their babies died as a result.

d.. Since September 2000, over 3,800 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and settlers, and over 29,000 injured.

e.. Israel is building an Apartheid Wall that, when completed, will annex East Jerusalem and almost half of the West Bank, leaving the Palestinians imprisoned in a series of ghettos.

f.. Over half of the Palestinian population were expelled from their homes in the 1947-49 war, and a second wave of refugees was created in 1967. Today, two-thirds of Palestinians are refugees.

So: DEMONSTRATE, Saturday 20 May. Assemble 12noon, Embankment. Rally in Trafalgar Square.

Alo El Presidente! posted by lenin

You've got to love Chavez. He comes to London, much maligned, calls Bush a terrorist, promises cheap oil for poor Europeans, tells an ITN journalist not to be so stupid (for asking why he didn't meet Blair), supports Brian Haw, converts the FT to some befuddled racial theory about Latinos, quotes Rosa Luxemburg, forces the BBC to cave in through a network of Chavistaz and has dinner with Ken Livingstone - all without being shot.

Here's Livingstone interviewed about it on Radio 4. Here's Pilger on the topic, and here's a very biased segment on Jeremy Vine's show in which Vine carefully manages the show on behalf of the coup advocate and multifarious blogger, Aleksander Boyd, "calling from Millbank", against the criticisms of John Rees. Mr Boyd, who has been given plenty of space in The Times and elsewhere to explain his crackpot views, wonders how "democracy can be protected from itself", and concludes "violence is the only recourse left". Not on the radio segment, of course - he's a better PR man for the oligarchy than that. Here. Likewise, coup supporter Maria Corina Machado. Time was, supporters of the Nicaraguan death squads were being puffed by the US as democracy activists. How Washington must yearn for those days...

Socialist Register posted by lenin

Via Marxmail, I learn that all back issues of Socialist Register from 1964 to 1999 are available free of charge. There's a brilliant range of material available there (all on PDF files, which I hate, but this is free!). In particular, I want to draw attention to David Coates' article, Labour Power and International Competitiveness: A Critique of Ruling Orthodoxies. This is the kind of argument that needs to be elaborated when corporations claim to be benefitting workers in poorer countries by shifting production overseas. Coates wrote the brilliant Models of Capitalism, which dealt brilliantly with some of the mythologies by which the Third Way temporarily sustained itself (before collapsing into the Third Empire). Even the left-Keynesian Larry Elliott was plugging it some years ago.

Anyway, it's all free, so go see, go see!

Slum World. posted by lenin

Mike Davis on the cities of the present and future, here and here.

Act of God. posted by lenin

Prologue -

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn't analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Lots of people disagreed with the use of the term 'Polemicist' in the earlier post linking to Charlotte Street's ruminations. What's being got at here is the career Polemicist (hence the capitalisation), the sort of scribe (or radio shock-jock for that matter) whose entire output is directed at this or that deluded sad-sack, these crooks, that enemy of the people. Well, in the absence of an alternative word, just go with it while I try and hammer something out.

The avenger, masked or unmasked, is the fantasy figure of the Polemicist's role-play. In particular, the figure of Monte Cristo is paramount, or at least the major literary expression of the mythology, which has been repeated over and over - to some extent in Zorro, The Shawshank Redemption, V for Vendetta, etc. The story was popular fiction in its time, released in 18 parts over two years, in similar fashion to much popular fiction to follow, in which the same hero did the same thing in book after book after book. The Sherlock Holmes novels were obviously dispensed in this way, and the triumph of market demand over art was established when Holmes was brought back from the dead in that improbable fashion. Holmes' awesome, superhuman talents, petit-bourgeois social position and aristocratic demeanour mark him out as a figure of the same cut as Edmond Dantes, albeit he acts on behalf of 'society' rather than himself. Moriarty is as much an intellectual foe as anything, but his swinishness and deviance is necessary to keep Holmes moving. Holmes perpetually needs problems to solve, otherwise he's stuck with his smack addiction. (I don't suppose it's accidental that this is what we get in much modern 'gumboots' or crime fiction - Franco Moretti has it that there is often a profoundly authoritarian, organicist ethos at work in such novels, in which the world is eminently readable, solveable, in which one can, or wishes one could, peer right into each little house and hovel, in which deviancy and normality are self-evident terms. Total transparency, the panopticon, is what is yearned for. The detective has an affinity with the criminal to the extent that he has eschewed the individualist ethic, but retains a memory of it - he knows the criminal mind. The contrast is that Dumas' popular fiction was profoundly democratic, and that his superman rebuked God and affirmed the individualist ethic).

Dumas based his tale on an apparently true story described in a memoir by Jacques Peuchet of a man named Francois Picaud who, imprisoned on the schemes of four false friends, later escaped with a treasure map bequeathed him by a dying prisoner and used his wealth to build up his resources in advance of a terrible, cruel revenge. How pleasurable to say that, by the way, to say that one will be terrible, cruel, unremitting, an avenging instrument of God, enacting la justice de Dieu. It is partially a male fantasy in Theweleit's sense, in which the man of steel is part of a macro-machine, an intrument of it, whose most "urgent task ... is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that calls itself human." But whether there is a 'true' story behind it or not is irrelevant, for what is striking is the appeal of the superman myth. If Picaud hadn't existed, someone would have invented him.

It is a particularly cherished conception of the petit-bourgeoisie, those whose social position disposes them to distrust the working masses while at the same time bitterly loathing and resenting and envying the ruling class. (I don't mean to say, of course, that one can 'blame' this literary production on the petit-bourgeoisie or 'taint' or 'damn' it by association with that social layer). If you only look at an activity, rather than at the rewards it incidentally manages to accrue in a given situation, it is obvious that the role of the freelance commentator, journalist or even, dary I say it, comedian, is petit-bourgeois. So, a comedian whose fantasy is that he personally is Siva the Destroyer, or the Shepherd, or even Christ-At-His-Angriest, reproduces this literary cliche even if it is occasionally to the detriment of his art. A pugnacious commentator-cum-journalist who explains that hatred of this or that fraud, or mountebank, or charlatan is a good reason to get up in the morning so that he can "continue the fight on CNN" could be said to be doing the same. It goes without saying, or should do, that Bloggery is a very petit-bourgeois activity notwithstanding the social class that any particular blogger belongs to - hence the popularity of fiskers, instant-rebutters, exposers, those who are forever trying to catch this or that threatening figure with his or her pants down.

The admiration for the European blueblood evident in this fantasy is intriguing as well. Thomas Harris's Hannibal absolutely ruined the mystery of Lecter by revealing it: he is merely a disdainful aristocrat, an elitist misanthrope, a refined sociopath, snob and sadist. Had this not been revealed (ie had Harris not written his awful bloody book), readers could have continued to admire the mysterious cannibal. Similarly, Zorro is an aristocrat in mask; Holmes is a lower-middle class detective with an aristocratic comportment; the Scarlet Pimpernel is also a masked aristocrat; Batman likewise... What is it about the aristocrat that we admire? His 'cool' inevitably, his capability, his authority, his rich accent, his learning, his disdain, his wit, his cruelty and his sadism. If only we too could be like that.

But beware, folks, beware... who else thought he was an instrument, not of God, but of Destiny? From one of the Chabert pieces above, a quote from Umberto Eco:

Gramsci's idea charmed me. That the superman cult of nationalist and fascist stock was born from, among other things, a complex of petit-bourgeois frustrations is well known. Gramsci explained clearly how this superman ideal was originally given birth, in the 19th century, at the heart of a literature with open democratic and popular intentions and leanings. "The feuilleton replaced (and favoured at the same time) the imagination of the man of the people, the ordinary man, and was a veritable day dream [...] of extended musings on the idea of vengeance, of punishing the guilty for the injuries they inflicted[...]" Thus it is certainly legitimate to interrogate the origins of the right wing superman cult but also of the equivocations of humanitarian socialism of the 19th century. Consider: Mussolini began as a socialist and ended as a reactionary nationalist; the superman of the popular novel begins as a democratic personnage (Sue and Dumas) only to finish in nationalism (Arsène Lupin).

Prophylactically, I should add and re-emphasise that this is not an attempt to 'incriminate' any particular author or comedian by association with fascism or anything of that kind. It simply happens to be 'there' (and 'here' if you like).

Lockout: the Natfhe/AUT education dispute. posted by lenin

Guest post by John Brissenden:

Lockouts at the universities.

“The shortfall of teaching funding has badly hit the salaries of academic staff, which have shown practically no increase in real terms over two decades. This at a time when professionals in virtually every other sector, including school teaching and the health professions, have improved their positions significantly; and when competition among graduate employers at home and abroad for the most talented potential university researchers and teachers is greater than ever. An estimated 1,000 UK academics have left jobs here for universities abroad, a quarter alone going to the US.” – Tony Blair, 14 January 2004

The media narrative of the current national dispute over university lecturers’ pay follows a traditional pattern for public sector pay disputes: uncaring strikers holding innocent victims to ransom while they hold out for an unreasonable pay increase.

But the reality is that university vice chancellors, with the support of the press and the government, are seeking to exploit the perceived weakness of university teaching unions the AUT and NATFHE to strangle our industrial action. The pay campaign, which dates back to last September, has now entered a critical phase. With exams imminent, and union members across the university sector boycotting assessment, a number of university vice-chancellors have started, or threatened to stop all or part of the salaries of those academics refusing to submit marks or set exams.

In many cases, as here at Bournemouth University, striking lecturers have been turning cartwheels to minimise disruption to students, by continuing to mark, give feedback and letting students know marks while not feeding them into the system. The university’s threat of a de facto lockout has hardened attitudes among staff and prompted sympathy from students. NATFHE is seeking advice about the legality of the threats, while 300 branch members at Northumbria University have voted for all-out strike action until their lock-out threat is lifted.

Our experience does not reflect the views of students reported in the corporate media. Yes, there is widespread concern and frustration. But students understand the chronic crisis in academic pay – a 40 per cent decline in relative salaries since 1992 – that has led to our claim; they resent the fact that the employers refused to respond to the claim until we began our action; and they are horrified that our reasonable approach is being met with the iron fist of suspension without pay.

They are also conscious of what is really at stake here. Writing in this week’s Times Higher Education Supplement, Chaminda Jayanetti says: “Our lecturers were promised that at least a third of tuition-fee income would be used to improve academic pay. If universities are allowed to break their word to academics who have given up trying to hold them to it, then they could consider themselves free to break the promises they made to us students, too.”

As a senior lecturer, I earn £31000. As a computing student at yesterday’s Bournemouth SU UGM pointed out, he earns more than his lecturers when he is on a work placement. Having worked many years in the private sector, I can honestly say that working in a university is the most demanding job I have ever had. The government and the employers accepted that something needed to be done to address the pay crisis back in 2004, when they were pushing through top-up fees in the teeth of opposition from the teaching and student unions. Over the past three years, university vice-chancellors have awarded themselves an average 25 per cent increase, with an average salary of £154000 and nearly half enjoying an increase between 26 per cent and 49 per cent.

The employers’ latest offer, of 12.5 per cent over the next three years, represents an increase barely ahead of inflation, which is why AUT and NATFHE negotiators had no need – despite the weasel words of ultra-Blairite Education Secretary Alan “I’m not getting involved” Johnson – to refer it back to us.

The employers’ position and actions are deeply cynical. With an additional £4 billion coming into higher education over the next three years, they mistakenly believe they can force – starve, if necessary – academics back to work and deny them a once in a generation opportunity to fix the pay crisis.

Peter Knight, vice-chancellor of the University of Central England, has seen his salary increase by 28 per cent, from £130,000 to £160,000 over the past three years, an increase almost equivalent to my total salary. As he put it on the opening day or our action: “If pay is stopped, the action will collapse. While there is proper and understandable loyalty to the unions from their members, there is a limit to that loyalty and it will get severely tested at pay day.”

We cannot and will not give in to cynicism and bullying. If you care about university education in this country, please support us.

(For more information, see Natfhe, AUT and Bournemouth University Strike Blog).

Also worth reading is K-Punk's article here.

Linda grants permission posted by Levi9909

Woops sorry. I said "Linda grants permission" when what I meant to say was "Linda Grant's permission," meaning the permission that belongs to Linda Grant. But that too would have been wrong because I'm not sure that permission in this instance belongs to Linda Grant. That is to say that it is not for Linda Grant to grant or deny me permission to publish correspondence from her to me that is threatening to either sue me unjustly or to have my blog pulled.

A couple of posts ago, in a fit of pique, as I said at the time, I posted some correspondence between myself and Linda Grant. It was about me posting that an incident at Linda Grant's mother's stone-setting (a Jewish memorial ceremony) that Linda claimed in the Guardian had happened, hadn't happened. It doesn't matter now whether it happened or not. Well she, it seemed to me, correctly wrote to complain that there was an innocent person mentioned in her correspondence and asked me to remove the reference, which I did. In fact here's her email with notes by be in [brackets]:

Mark

Your one endearing quality is that you don’t mind looking like a total prat, as your latest blog entry indicates. [I quite enjoyed that line, not Orange prize material but funny]

Nonetheless, while [someone that something she says happened to, might not mind] you still do not have permission to describe [something] which I have not written about anywhere, and you are going to have to remove it. If you don’t I’ll have to go to your blog host which actually has rules on this kind of thing, and if you don’t back off, they’ll close your account. So let’s just do it, without dragging out the whole business and wasting everyone’s time.

Feel free to put this up instead http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=56868800

Linda Grant

Well as you can see from the post, I removed the offending piece but then she sent me the blogger.com terms of service. I assumed that she hadn't seen the change to the original post so I ignored it. But then I got this masterpiece:

Dear Mark

I would like you to read the following very carefully, and absorb what it does and what it does not say.

Last night I had dinner with someone who was explaining that the libel laws are moving in on the internet, and the ISP’s are aware of this.

If you ever mention my mother’s stone-setting again, or make any statement about me fabricating an anti-semitic attack, if you make any reference to [someone] or any other of my relatives, if you make allegations about me being a liar on the prime facie basis that ‘Zionists are liars’, I will take immediate steps, without consulting you, to a) make an immediate report to your blog host under the terms of service and b) seek legal advice. You should be aware that the blog hosts have little interest in protecting the hundreds of thousands of bloggers they host from legal claims, in which they will be also subject to legal proceedings, are usually pull the account of the blogger, which in your case brings in no advertising revenue to them.

I am not doing this because the all-powerful Zionist lobby is seeking to silence the suffering voices of the Palestinian people. I have no objection to your blog post this morning. I am doing this because I will not have my family and friends dragged into your squalid little vendettas and I will of course defend my reputation as a writer.

I do not want to see any further mention of my mother’s stone setting on your site, is this completely clear? I am free to refer to it because it happened to me, and I am free to say what I wish about it. You are not, because you were not present, and your only interest in the occasion is a form of Holocaust-denial lite.

I advise you to hang on to this email, and refer to it when in doubt about what you can and can’t post about me. Any attempt to post this email on your site will automatically trigger the first complaint to your blog host. To sum up, you are free to say what you wish about my politics as long as you do not fabricate views that I do not hold, as Karma Nabulsi did in the case of Samir el Youssef, which she was forced to withdraw. [no she wasn't - the Guardian ran a minor correction - see here. I'll do a separate post on that.] Any attempt to refer to any aspect whatsoever of my private life will automatically incur the first stage of legal action.

I very much hope that this is the final exchange between us and that we should have no further reason to communicate with each other, on or off-line.

Yours sincerely

Linda Grant

Now let's break this down. First up she claims not to have taken actual professional legal advice. She had dinner with someone. Then she tells me that I can't mention something that she has written about in the Guardian and subsequently, in response to a rabbi calling on Linda Grant et al to have a "sense of proportion" over antisemitism in Britain, denied having written about in the Guardian four months later. She then says that whilst she can use her family and friends to promote her agenda (whether personal or political), I can't even do that if she places her family and friends in the public domain, though I'm not sure what friends she's referring to.

Next, what can this mean?

You should be aware that the blog hosts have little interest in protecting the hundreds of thousands of bloggers they host from legal claims, in which they will be also subject to legal proceedings, are usually pull the account of the blogger, which in your case brings in no advertising revenue to them.

Is she saying that all I have to do is offend her and she can get blogger.com to pull my blog? I keep hearing about zionists and neo-cons trying to censor the internet but could Linda Grant really do that? It's quite chilling that a mere threat without any legal procedure could result in an alternative minority media being closed down. Was it the libel lawyer who told her this over dinner?

Next up there's the "my reputation as a writer." What reputation might that be now? I'm sure Guardian readers are getting wise to her mealy mouthed zionist apologetics. But to continue.

What caused me to post the correspondence in the first place was Linda's boast on the Nick Cohen site that she had forced me to remove a post about her from my blog and that she had forced me to apologise. Owing to a little debacle on my site involving Nick Cohen commenting under a false name to accuse me of self-hatred and George Galloway of antisemitism, Nick Cohen has now removed his comments so I posted the whole thing here. Now Linda is boasting that she forced, former PLO rep, Karma Nabulsi to withdraw something written about Linda Grant and a Palestinian chap. Here's that review again just so you know it wasn't withdrawn; it carried quite a mild correction considering Linda Grant has complained on Engage that the error (which I'm sure couldn't have been deliberate) changed the whole thrust of Nabulsi's portrayal of the book as being in the "colonial narrative tradition." If the book is not in that tradition then she must have made a major departure from her usual fare.

As an aside here, when I wrote to the Guardian to say that Linda Grant was wrong to say that she hadn't said anything about antisemitism in the UK and that therefore her criticism of the rabbi who criticised her was wrong, they didn't correct, clarify or disclaim. That is, she could write about an antisemitic incident that happened to her family in the UK and then, when criticised by a rabbi for writing about antisemitism in the UK she could be published again in the Guardian denying that she had ever said, in any way, shape or form, anything about antisemitism in the UK. That wasn't fair on the rabbi and it suggests that Linda Grant does have some influence with the Guardian. Here's hoping she doesn't have the same influence with blogger.com.

And finally:

I very much hope that this is the final exchange between us and that we should have no further reason to communicate with each other, on or off-line.

Yeah, me too Linda, me too.

Also posted to Jews sans frontieres

The Polemicist's Curse. posted by lenin

He needs his Moriarty:

The polemicist is one who must always have an enemy. He must plug in to the enemy to get his desire going, to keep himself awake and angry.This is why the polemicist is a curiously castrated figure.

When he takes a position, makes an argument, this is usually on the rebound from an encounter with his adversary. Once the rebound loses momentum so do the polemicist's principles and logic. He is not the master of his own agenda.

Brown to push further post privatisation. posted by lenin

So, the louring saviour of New Labour, our deformed and quite unfinished Chancellor, has decided that he will support moves to continue the partial-privatisation of the postal service. The tactic being used by Royal Mail management to win support for this move among a hostile workforce is not new - do you want free shares? Oh, come on, it's free money! Don't let your union tell you what to do, take it take it take it!! The Times reports that 199 Labour MPs have supported a motion opposing such a move, while the CWU has been opposed to privatisation all along.

This comes as Royal Mail management impose a pay deal on workers that they have already rejected. The union was supposed to be consulted on this, but the company is now withholding all information, pressing for job cuts and imposing the arrangement without further ado. The CWU's deputy-general secretary David Ward has obligingly stated that "We are refusing to be pulled into the punch", which is about as endearing a way to roll over and play dead as ever was conceived. The intervention by rank and file posties in Socialist Worker is important in this regard. Their leaflet, published as a late Wednesday update says:

The only guarantee is that if we don’t fight now then we’re on the road to disaster, a much weaker union, privatisation and relentless competition from private firms, more part-timers and fewer full-time jobs, and pay based on gimmicky bonuses rather than decent increases in basic pensionable pay.

There is no reason why Leighton should be allowed to get away with his plans. The Blair government (which is his ultimate backer) is incredibly weak. Real resistance can force it to drop the shares plan.

We need an industrial and a political strategy. We have to fight and we have to stop shovelling money to a party and a government which is wrecking our lives. Labour takes our £500,000 a year – and kicks us in the teeth.

Every CWU member must push now for four things to happen:

1) We need to start a strike ballot over pay, the way it has been imposed, and the share issue.
2) We need to suspend money to Labour until the share issue is withdrawn.
3) We need to make the CWU conference, which starts soon, a council of war and a launch pad for resistance.
4) We need to sweep away the north/south divisions which have bedevilled the union. We need unity to fight, and in fighting we will rebuild the unity.

In short, the rank and file is going to have to take the initiative to save the union and their industry. The CWU conference is in a couple of weeks' time. It is expected that there will be another campaign to withhold funds from the Labour Party. Last year, this resulted in a very close victory for those who argued to retain the link. There will be fewer people ready to make that argument this year, and those who do will have a much tougher time. I would anticipate - hopefully, wishfully - a break from the Labour Party and industrial action.

Brown may be hoping for a big showdown with the unions to demonstrate who's going to be boss, and undoubtedly the government has a vendetta with the posties after their wildcat strike during the 2001 election forced a humiliating retreat by management. The British state has not felt obliged or confident enough to take on the unions in any big way since the poll tax riots, but after successive bust-ups with the RMT, Aslef, the FBU, and even Unison, they must now be thinking of how to break the new militancy once and for all. Brown's economic strategy depends on a pliant, 'flexible' workforce and passive acceptance of the neoliberal agenda. Narrow escapes from bruising encounters with mass action cannot continue to be the pattern if the government is to have its way. However, if this is a sign that the Chancellor is picking a fight with the unions, he may well have picked the wrong one.

Whitewash 'unlikely to satisfy'. posted by lenin

The government's 'July 7' reports have failed to silence demands for a public inquiry, and justly so. We are to be told by one, the parliamentary inquiry, that the attacks were 'not preventable' by intelligence officers because of a lack of resources. They had Mohammed Siddique Khan 'in their sights' as it were, and were simply 'diverted' onto another operation. Could happen. "This guy might want to blow himself up and we better... oh cool, a drugs bust! Let's do that!" We are to be told by the other, the Home Office's 'narrative', that Iraq played a part in the motivation for the bombings, but was not "the key contributory factor". The first is by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which is appointed by the Prime Minister, answers to the Prime Minister and has its reports redacted by the PM's office before being released to parliament and the public. Neither the Home Office nor this appointed committee can inspire confidence.

If it was about resources, then one way to tackle this is to stop wasting money and manpower rounding people up for CIA renditions, ensuring that innocent men are locked up until they agree to become informers. But then, MI5 seem to make a lot of these little mistakes. If only they had been allowed to simply Destroy the Brain Instantly Utterly.

If Iraq wasn't the key factor, then more fool the Joint Intelligence Committee for having warned that the war would greatly increase the threat. More fool the ISC for having publicised this information. In 2004 Michael Jay, head of the foreign office, stated that the 'recurring theme' in motivations for 'extremism among Muslims' was 'the issue of British foreign policy', which was a 'key driver' behind recruitment to 'extremist organizations'. The Foreign Office, as part of Operation Contest, drew up a report with the Home Office report entitled 'Young Muslims and Extremism'. This suggested that the main cause of the anger was oppression of Muslims, either tolerated or actively perpetrated - there was a perception that there had been a shift from passive to active oppression with the 'war on terror'. This was compounded by 'a sense of helplessness' and a 'lack of any real opportunities to vent frustration'. Three weeks before July 7th, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) reported to the government that Iraq was acting as the "motivation and focus" of a range of "terrorist-related activities". Further, MI5 said on their website, Iraq was a "dominant issue" for "a range of extremist groups and individuals" operating in the UK.

If the leaked reports are correct, then the Home Office narrative will say that these guys who are alleged to have carried out the bombings were not connected to 'Al Qaeda', there was no fifth man, and the attacks were carried out using a mixture of easily available substances with bomb-making recipes found on the internet. In short, not - as the Prime Minister once tried to claim - simply an Al Qaeda plot using Iraq as 'an excuse' to recruit people on the basis of a 'perverted version of Islam'. As Milan Rai explains in his account, The London Bombings, Islam & The Iraq War, (which I cribbed for some of the above material), the version of Islam to which these four men adhered and in which they were raised would have militated against their alleged actions. As we already know, suicide attackers have been secular and religious, Marxist and nationalist, adherents to different versions of Islam, (not, for instance, a single 'perverted' version). Islam as a religion definitely poses problems since self-murder is haram. As Stephen Holmes notes, many radicalised young men are attracted to the Islamists simply because they appear to be the ones making a call to arms. Religion is involved, but on two levels that are not really compatible with the PM's 'evil ideology' thesis: on the one hand, it is involved as an identification - one sympathises with the oppressed Ummah; on the other hand, it provides a narrative support to one's actions. But these actions are not fundamentally stimulated by religion, and nor could they be. It is not even "killing people for the sake of it" as the PM also tried to say. It is nothing else but the usual, as explained previously. Suicide attackers most frequently emerge in a struggle over occupation, in situations of highly unequal combat. They are efficient for a weaker side - Robert Pape notes that while suicide attacks amounted to only 3% of terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2001, they accounted for 48% of total casualties from terrorism. Those who carry out the attacks tend to be twenty-something males, psychologically normal, well-educated and with a higher income than the reference population. This is not despair in the sense of deprivation and dysfunctionality. It is despair on behalf of their 'imagined community' the nation, (the Ummah in this case). They tend to act, that is, altruistically, not egoistically. Indeed, part of the message of such acts is that those who commit them are not motivated by pathological concerns.

Every reliable bit of evidence suggests that a mixture of foreign policy and domestic policy (with foreign policy the over-riding concern) is behind this. The Blairite clique, its outriders, and its circles of fawning commentators in the media village, are all in wilful denial about this. They have reached for the favourite therapy of the political class: a heavily controlled inquiry whose conclusions can be determined in advance. The majority of people who find no comfort in shamelessly being lied to by the government, and who oppose the brutal occupation of Iraq and the government's despicable support for Israel, are unlikely to be satisfied by the government's efforts.

Report from European Social Forum, Athens. posted by lenin

Guest post from Guy Taylor.

Over 100,000 people flooded the streets of Athens to attend the biggest anti-war demo since 15 February 2003. International, significantly with a large contingent of Turkish activists, and loud, the protest re-stated the antiwar movement is still at full strength. A message of "Don't Attack Iran" was sent out, in solidarity with smaller events across Europe and the world. The demonstration came at the end of the 4th European Social Forum, another great success of the altermondialist, or anticapitalist, movement. After the victories over the EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands, the defeat of the EU Ports Directive and the spectacular hammering of the CPE employment legislation in France again, the movement is in very good shape.

Reportedly 35,000 people attended the forum, it was hard to gauge as the venue so so cavernous, but given that almost every one of the workshops and seminars I saw was packed to the gills that figure is acceptable. More than any of the previous forums, thanks to the venue, there was a large Eastern European delegation there, and unsurprisingly less Scandinavians attending. The disused airport gave the event a strange environment, in places you could wander and feel quite alone, in others the crowds were overwhelming. As usual, the number and diversity of seminars and discussions was spectacular, the sheer number of stalls to browse was impressive.

There was plenty of space too for cultural events and exhibitions. In many rooms and corridors we had quite fantastic displays of images from the movement and imaginative installations. A major installation of sculpture by Danish artist Jens Galschiot entitled "Balancing Act" was again central to the artistic input in Athens. Jens' work is well worth a look. Outside in the huge open space (rather a distance from the city) were two large stages where concerts were performed each night. Unfortunately the rather un-Athenian weather (high winds and quite a chill after sunset) took the edge of what could have been a fantastic party atmosphere.

The movement in Greece makes the UK's look pretty harmonious. Many of the differences of opinion over many different matters were either resolved unsatisfactorily or not at all. Now the idea of the major plenaries has thankfully been ditched (so torturous was organising them), some of the seminars organised by a smaller section of the forum are now fulfilling the 'rally' role. The organisation decided to put two anti-war rallies at the same time, thus promoting the 'Life of Brian' feel. perhaps the most shocking display of sectarianism came on the protest. There was a predictable row over the order of the demo, with the Synapsismos / Greek Social Forum grouping insisting that whatever the theme of the demo, they should go first. To ensure this happened, a large group of all white and pretty macho young men surrounded the Stop the War and Genoa 2001 groups, preventing them from moving as many groups and parties moved ahead. In the predictable furore that ensued some young women (including a member of Globalise Resistance) were struck and injured, thankfully not seriously so.

The demonstration saw worse behaviour on part of some 'activists' not involved in the forum who threw molotovs and firebombed a bank before running to the demo for cover. It appears the COBAS section of the march, near to the front weren't happy with this and a fight ensued. Three protesters needed hospital treatment, at the hands of protesters the cops must have found that highly amusing.

But despite these problems, the movement certainly benefited. The Assembly of the Social Movements, characteristically chaotic made some useful calls, the highlights of which are:

*A week of action from 23 to 30 September 2006 for a complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afganistan, against the threat of a new war in Iran, against the occupation of Palestine, for nuclear disarmament and to eliminate military bases in Europe. [busy week - ed]
*An international day of action and mobilization the 7th of October 2006 in Europe and Africa, for a European unconditional legalization and equal rights to all migrants; for the closure of all detention centres in Europe.
*Campaigning against the casualization and the dismantling of public services and for social rights across Europe in the coming months.
*In January 2007, the WSF will meet in Nairobi. The growth of the African social movements is crucial for the world. Building for the WSF will be an opportunity to fight against European exploitation and neo-colonialism.
*In June 2007, there will be a meeting of the European Union Council and a meeting of the G8 at Rostock in Germany, for which there will be a major mobilisation.

Perhaps it was the animosity, maybe the fear of the sheer volume of work involved, but there has been no potential host country coming forward to organise the next European Social Forum. there will be a meeting in September to discuss this issue. I fear we will be waiting for the 5th Social Forum, maybe even longer than the 18 months we had to wait for the 4th. In the meantime there's work to be done, and a major gathering at Rostock next year.

Blair & Brown: dancing cheek to cheek. posted by lenin

George Galloway has described Blair and Brown as "two cheeks of the same arse". Well, something has certainly come between them.

This morning, The Guardian reports yet another offensive from the Brownites. After all the Hamlet-like procrastination, this morose, bumbling, reactionary Chancellor - who was, until now, too much i'the sun - finally invites the Crown-in-Parliament to drink of his own poison. The most unpopular Labour Prime Minister in history, say the polls. Cameron ahead, say the polls. It's worse than Harold Wilson after devaluation, say the polls. Blairite assurances worthless, say the Brownies. Time to go - either with an orderly transition or with tears and backstabbing.

Obviously, this belated gesture (I daren't call it more than that) involves nothing so vulgar as principle. It is over when Brown will become Prime Minister (since no one has yet emerged to oppose him) and how much control he will exercise over the party apparatus against the Blairites. Brown has been, in many ways, even more right-wing than Blair. I don't know if even the Prime Minister would have had the balls to suggest that Britons be proud of the legacy of the British Empire, for instance. He bankrolled and publicly supported every New Labour war, and has been coming out more and more as something of a neoconservative. Nor is he the economic wizard he is reputed to be, having relied on a mixture of high consumer debt, low wages (which is what the inflation policy is about), and a strong pound which - while beneficial to the financial sector - has destroyed manufacturing jobs. Not a tenable position. He strongly pushes privatisation, while supporting ID cards, longer detention for 'terror suspects' and pension cuts. And his 'vision', such as it is, is raggedly impoverished. Here is how he laid out his pitch to lead New Labour:

We are about propriety, we are about security and law and order, and we are about giving people the best public services.

Propriety? Fucking propriety? Either this was a coded message to someone who has secrets, or Brown simply chose the word out of the same hat that contains 'law', 'order', 'decent', 'respect', 'hardworking', 'best', 'renewed', 'family', 'tough', 'fair', 'sensible', 'British', 'proud', 'honour', 'justice', 'blood', 'soil', 'dealbation', 'haematencephalon', 'scrophulariaceous' and so on.

What is more, I doubt that even with these manoeuvres Brown is going to force the issue, or that his succession will do him any good. He still awaits a seamless transition, and Blair is evidently clever enough to string it out just long enough to avoid his own humiliation while Brown inherits the party in time to lose. Brown has in the past outpolled Cameron by some 12 percentage points on the question of who would make a good Prime Minister, but the latest poll indicates that when it comes to the vote, Brown would lose in this contest. Brown simply has nothing to offer to Labour voters, except those sad, deluded few who actually imagine that Brown is in any conceivable way politically distinguishable from Blair.

That said, and all that taken into account, Blair's departure will certainly be worth a drink accompanied by some random acts of destruction when it eventually comes.

Capital's Decivilising Mission. posted by lenin

A certain tabloid journalist is given to using this oleaginous word, 'civilised'. The 'civilised' left. 'Civilised' politics. He uses it, in fact, so ubiquitously that it strikes one as symptomatic. Its utility as a regulator of discourse is obvious enough, inasmuch as 'civilised' is a synonym in this useage for 'domesticated' and 'bourgeois'. Perhaps it also arises from a repressed awareness that capital, which is what the 'civilised left' and 'civilised politics' ultimately defend, is in its frantic search for new avenues of profit, new market niches, new territory and so on, a brutal, callous, ruthless, motivated destroyer of civilisation.

Capital's destructiveness is remarkably creative, ingenious, and baroque. The perverse imperatives that it can introduce into human behaviour baffle and astonish. A soft drink that dehydrates you! Hospitals that make you sicker! Paradise communities where fires naturally occur! Food production that causes starvation! Sick children who make the pharmaceutical companies feel better! These were some time paradoxes, but now the time gives them proof. Marx's descriptions from the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 of the alchemic power of money merely skated on the surface. Capital as social relation, as the imperative to accumulate in competition with others, to extract ever greater productivity from labour, to augument surplus-value - that is capable of perversity that far outstrips that of mere money.

Capital could only produce more food in Brazilian fruit farms by selling it to Europe and repatriating profits - so that those who had lived and worked on the now enclosed land, starved. Capital could only make Indonesia a fit place to invest in by ensuring that its opponents - nationalist or communist - were murdered in their hundreds of thousands, while a new junta entrenched a state of terror and repression at home and expanded its dominion through genocide in neighbouring territory. Indochina had to be brought to genocide and environmental ruin to make it safe for the sweat shops that now proliferate on it. Latin America was repeatedly made safe for capital through bombardment, mass murder, rape, mutilation, terror, torture.

Formally, while supporting capital, one also supports human rights. One is committed to equality, peace, freedom, security, justice and so on. One is against Bad Things. Why else would one support countless destructive wars, wars that strike most unequally, shatter peace, terminate such meagre freedoms as one has been able to find, introduce permanent insecurity, permanent emergency, impose rank injustice everywhere? Everyone from the UN to the European Union to The Guardian to well-meaning NGOs can be conscripted to the civilising mission - can even, mark you, be moved to beg for its expansion and extension. Civilise Haiti! Civilise Sudan! Civilise Iran! One doesn't want to use violence, of course, but they threaten chaos here, genocide there, nuclear war elsewhere. One doesn't want to - one is obliged to. It is an encumbrance, an albatross that one accepts because of one's overbearing superego ideals. Don't want to - have to. So much for this.

Anyway, I mention all this as a prefatory framing device to the news that Palestinians are untermenschen, skivvies, bare forked creatures, a demographic problem and much else besides. They are not, however, properly human. Hence: no rights as humans. They are to be allowed nothing: not land, not freedom, not water, not meaningful votes, not roads, not legitimacy. So much I infer from the latest insult, the latest interview with some UN humanitarian on Channel Four, in which we are told that the Palestinians are to be starved because they haven't chosen peace, because they are insufficiently obedient, insufficiently mastered.

How much does it take? Ehud Olmert openly professes that he must retreat from some despoiled occupation zones so that he may keep others, openly states that this is to ensure the dominative majority of Jews in Israel. Openly declares this racist imperative before the whole world, the racist imperative on which Israel was founded. Ehud Barak calls Arabs liars by dint of their provenance - no Judeo-Christian guilt about lying, you see. He who will arouse not the slightest arteriole in his cheeks with shame with fabrications about his 'generous offer' to the Palestinians. Benny Morris says that Israel committed ethnic cleansing in its creation, and should have done so more thoroughly. It was "necessary". Further, Muslims are "barbarians". They must be caged. "There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up." Arab "tribal culture" is filled with vengeful fury, which would, if so opportunely positioned, commit genocide. "when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing". Suicide or murder. Don't want to - have to.

Palestinians have arranged their own elections, under occupation, and their decision has so displeased their masters that the few paltry lifelines of aid that were supplied were immediately shut off. Banks in Palestine refuse to deal with the Palestinian government, afraid of running foul of US anti-terror laws, thus making it harder for the government to receive money from sympathetic Arab governments. The Israeli-led economic offensive was more successful than expected - it is now expected that poverty will increase more dramatically than before, that unemployment will be far worse than before. This in a situation that wasn't precisely ideal to begin with, you understand. What sort of supremacist does one have to be, not merely to tactfully not notice, but actually to enforce this kind of suffering? To, by act of policy, impose it? Oh, the usual kind: the concerned liberal supremacist, the nice humanitarian supremacist, the NGO-supremacist. One need only be Bernard Kouchner or Paddy Ashdown, or a UN bureacrat, or a WTO economist, or Alan Greenspan. One need only be an urbane intellectual, one of Chomsky's "backroom boys".

Sharpened posted by Meaders

The Sharpener has relaunched itself; something on there now about Respect in Tower Hamlets, if anyone fancies a look.

Met Police intimidated whistleblower. posted by lenin

Just saw ITN's interview with Lana Vandenberghe, the whistleblower who leaked information about the Metropolitan Police's shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Like one of the ITN journalists who reported her leak, Vandenberghe was arrested for no particular good reason, and eventually released without charge. There had been some possibility that a prosecution would ensue - but that has been dropped.

Lana Vandenberghe said that ten police officers bust into her house, breaking down a door, and charged in. She said that they were bullying and aggressive and treated her as "the worst kind of criminal", and that she was kept in a filthy cell. There was a toilet, and also a camera positioned to see everything one might do - but no toilet paper. They boys at the station must have had some japes over that conundrum. She then lost her house and her job, and had to be treated for depression.

Vandenberghe had seen the tapes - the ones that were supposed to have disappeared:

"He wasn't a terrorist at all, he was just a normal guy, wearing normal jeans and a jacket, going to work.

"And when I saw the videos, then I saw the state after he was shot, my heart ... I just thought, 'oh my God, this could be my daughter'."

"I knew from what I read and from what I learnt that it was a lie, and it appalled me that the police or the Met were not coming to light and saying we were wrong, this was a mistake."

Oh, by the way - remember immediately following the shooting that a number of folks were trying to incriminate Menezes, suggesting with a knowing wink and an indulgent nod that he must have done something? There was all that palaver about his passport with the allegedly forged stamp, and a former bigwig at the Met said on ITN - even as the police officially admitted he was totally innocent - that he must have been doing something. If nothing else, his behaviour was weird and therefore, according to Independent columnist Bruce Anderson, he was "the author of his own misfortune" (penalty for weird behaviour, even if fabricated: death by a Met firing squad). Then, in January, a story came out suggesting that Menezes had been behind a rape, and then that turned out to be bullshit? Well, also note that this claim was leaked to the press by the police, as was practically every other false allegation made in the course of this. The cops are perfectly happy to leak false information, provided it enables them to wipe some of the blood off their fingers and onto the victim.

Put it like this: if Vandenberghe had not released this information, the press would still, with doe-eyed credulity and a doleful sense of duty, be retailing the police's lies about what happened. People go on and on about this being an 'unfortunate tragedy', a sad instance of 'collateral damage' and so on. One must understand, we are told, the terrible pressure the police were under. As detail after detail has emerged, these excuses have become more and more greasy. And after everything the police have done to cover up the truth, to intimidate those who reveal it, to slander the victim as he lies in his grave, to heap calumny and deceit upon the six feet of earth that cover him - after all of this, it seems to me that it's a tiny bit less acceptable to blubber about the onerous burden of the police "marksman", and to prate of the necessity to "get behind" the police.

Constant Gardeners posted by lenin

Hoeing any row, ploughing any furrow, seeding any bed - the pharmaceutical industry plants its money trees everywhere and anywhere.

A PANEL of Nigerian medical experts has concluded that Pfizer violated international law during a 1996 epidemic by testing an unapproved drug on children with brain infections.

That finding is detailed in a lengthy Nigerian Government report that has remained unreleased for five years, despite inquiries from the children's lawyers and from the media. The Washington Post recently obtained a copy of the confidential report, which is attracting congressional interest. It was provided by a source who asked to remain anonymous because of personal safety concerns.

The report concludes that Pfizer never obtained authorisation from the Nigerian Government to give the unproven drug to nearly 100 children and infants. Pfizer selected the patients at a field hospital in the city of Kano, where the children had been taken to be treated for an often deadly strain of meningitis. At the time, Medicins Sans Frontieres was dispensing approved antibiotics at the hospital.

Pfizer's experiment was "an illegal trial of an unregistered drug", the Nigerian panel concluded, and a "clear case of exploitation of the ignorant".

'Tis an unweeded garden/That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/Possess it merely.

Basra - the superior British occupiers again. posted by lenin

Basra is now described as calm after yesterday's clashes with Mahdi Army supporters. The fighting broke out after a British helicopter crashed. It drew out a huge crowd of people who, hearing that it had been downed by a rocket, yelled "Victory to the Mahdi Army!" Then, fighting. I say that, but it is not clear that 'fighting' is the appropriate word, positing as it does a false equivalence between rock-throwing anti-occupation protesters and gun-wielding occupiers. The Observer's report says:

In the ensuing fighting, unconfirmed reports suggested that four Iraqis - some of them bystanders and thought to include a child - had also been killed. Soldiers fired three live rounds as they moved to seal off the area. A curfew was imposed from 8pm local time in a bid to restore calm.

That would be a murder of unarmed civilians rather than fighting. Other reports add that 42 additional people were wounded in "the fighting" (I suspect that if the demonstrators had been in possession of any guns, the word "crossfire" would have been used, albeit their absence has never prevented its use with regard to Palestine).

At any rate, Basra is no longer a 'safe zone' if it ever was. Recent events suggest that the tales of British sensitive handling of their delicate imperial patch are no more convincing for their subjects than they are for those who must retail them. And pity poor Des Browne, the new Defense Secretary, who already sounds like his tongue has turned to wood: "This tragic incident reminds us of the risks our servicemen and women face every day in helping to support the emerging democracy in Iraq and give all Iraqis hope for a better future." Just because he briefly practised at the bar doesn't mean he's going to enjoy that sensation of repeating over and over again what he does not and has never believed.

Tortured Bodies. posted by lenin

By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has 'got rid of the peasant' and given him 'the air of a soldier' ... These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called 'disciplines' ... Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an 'aptitude', a 'capacity' which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power which might result from it, and turns it into a separation of strict subjection. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp 135-8).

Torture, imprisonment, sadism and wrongful death at Fort Sill.

Sadistic sergeant went from Deep Cut to Iraq.

Our flag stays red (and green) posted by Meaders

Finally slept a little and am probably in a better state to assemble words into coherent sentences. A dramatic night in Tower Hamlets, though you knew that already, with a few features sticking out.

It's very pleasing to have won two Respect councillors in Whitechapel - the ward has been solidly Labour as far back as anyone can remember. It was a long, hard election battle, marred by some notable unpleasantness from the Labour Party: deposed council leader, Michael Keith, brazenly lying about one of our candidates on Bengali TV, for example; plus a certain amount of vicious (if predictable) rumour-mongering from (equally predictable) quarters.

It was less pleasing, however, to lose an excellent young Bengali woman, Farhana, to a Labour Party candidate embodying the unpleasant settlement between New Labour and Bengali "village" politics. This little arrangement has served Tower Hamlets' Blairite administration very well; its broker, the aforementioned Prof. Keith, was rather symbolically deposed at about 5am, when Respect swept the board in Shadwell: a ward, note well, that has been in Labour hands since 1919. Times they are a-changing here, if not quite quickly enough. Without Michael Keith and David Edgar, former lead member for housing, the Labour Party locally has been deprived of its leadership; they should be in for a very rough ride. (I notice, by the way, that the two Labour councillors most closely identified with New Labour, and council house transfer, are the ones that get deposed.)

The most significant aspect of the vote, across all parties and in all wards, disappears in the final, public tallies. There was an exceptional level of split voting taking place, with any number of peculiar combinations emerging: Labour, Liberal, Respect; Tory, Green, Labour; Respect, Labour, Tory... there did not appear to be any logic behind the votes, but these random ballots ended up being decisive for several wards.

Take Whitechapel (again). There were 660 block (three vote) Respect ballots, and 594 block Labour. There were then something around 1,800 mixed ballots, or about half the total cast. The mixing effect was what allowed the Labour candidate with the strongest personal vote to squeeze out the third Respect candidate. In Bethnal Green South, the process worked the other way: a significant gap in Labour's favour on block votes was turned into a very narrow, 20-vote lead by the time of the final tally.

The extent of mixed voting was beyond that which you might anticipate from the usual parish pump/local personality politics you get in local council elections - and it's notable that independents in Tower Hamlets generally did rather badly. I think it can be more attributed to both the collapse of party identification across the old major parties, and the inability (thus far) of the new major party, Respect, to establish a solid identification. This varies: Whitechapel, Shadwell and Bethnal Green South all had higher than average block Respect votes; weaker wards had fewer. Everywhere, however, the Respect block was not enough by itself to deliver councillors, and so we have ended up with some slightly peculiar split wards. It is a rather abstract idea, but building upon our existing party identification is our biggest single challenge here. There are no reasons to think this cannot be done, and a significant body of councillors should make it all the easier.

Results summary: socialism versus barbarism. posted by lenin

I can't be bothered waiting for the rest of the results any more. Those who followed the comments to the post below or have simly perused the Respect website will know this already, but I'm just sticking it up here for the sake of posterity.

Respect has 12 seats in Tower Hamlets (Beeb still reporting 11 for some reason, but their coverage has been awful), having taken the seat of council leader Michael Keith and that of his deputy. This is a bigger result than the BNP one in Barking & Dagenham, but inevitably the focus will remain on the fascist filth - partly for good reasons, but mostly for the reason that Labour talked these guys up endlessly before the election, particularly Margaret Hodge who disgusted local Labour activists in giving these bastards such a propaganda boost. Respect also got a stunning result with Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham Sparkbrook - an enormous landslide, with over 4,000 votes. Elsewhere, some excellent seconds and thirds in Birmingham, Preston, Bristol (where Jerry Hicks stood), Manchester, Sheffield, Camden, Ealing and Haringey. One hopes for a seat or two in Newham, where our mayoral candidate got a very strong second. In short, and with some considerable exhaustion of patience, an excellent result for Respect.

Labour still control Tower Hamlets, but the right-wing leadership has been booted out and there will be many Labour councillors who will tend to side with Respect on the key issues for the area.

Perception management from the big three is obviously rife. New Labour did a wee bit better than expected, because they went round telling the papers that they expected to lose 400, and 'only' lost 250. No amount of bullshitting and reshuffling will hide the truth, however: after ten years of Blairism, people are just sick to death of it. The Tories did much better than expected, partly because they were careful to keep quiet before the vote. The 'Cameron Effect' is obviously working with a certain kind of middle class conservative who might previously have been embarrassed by the Tory right's xenophobia. The Lib Dems, by contrast, did shockingly badly, and no amount of spin can cover that up. They were perfectly placed to benefit from any anti-Labour sentiment, much of which was driven - as Respect showed and Newsnight polls suggested - by hostility to war and privatisation. In Tower Hamlets, they were crushed. In many boroughs where they had gained from Labour, they lost seats and in Islington they lost the council to 'No Overall Control'. The foolishness about Charles Kennedy's drinking problem which was the manufactured occasion for the 'Orange Book coup' has probably contributed to this. Menzies Campbell is pleasantly pompous grandee, but is pathetically unappealling as a party leader, and they don't seem to have much to offer in the way of policy.

The BNP approximately doubling their number of seats to get 46 in total is worrying. We shouldn't overstate their success, and their new seats would have been scattered without the Barking & Dagenham result. However, in some areas (such as Stoke-on-Trent and Burnley) these new seats were consolidating a pocket of support they already had. It's easy enough to look for excuses - poor housing, BNP lies, Labour blunders and so on, but the simple fact is that these results would not have taken place without a surge in racism over the last few years. It's going to take a hard antifascist campaign in these areas and what is more, this can't be burdened with a position that says 'you should vote Labour', since it is obvious that people there don't want to vote Labour. As much as racism lies behind these results, the voters who picked the BNP are not largely fascists and if they understood the depth and breadth of the BNP's violent fascism they would be less inclined to vote for them. Campaigns across the country have limited and diminished the fascist vote before, sometimes utterly destroying the bastards. The Nazis could once claim the area around Poplar, Bow, the Isle of Dogs and so on as a potential territory, but they're now a joke in the area. We can do the same in Barking and Dagenham. Also interesting that the Tory, Lib Dem and Residents Association vote was eaten into by the BNP. RA are sometimes used as fronts by the Nazis, but I don't know if that's true here - what I do know is that elsewhere in the country, RAs have been quick to condemn and work against the filth. The Tories and Lib Dems are probably pretty useless, but Labour activists will certainly be central in fighting these scum.

Anyway, new territory is opened up for Respect. In areas where we never really campaigned before, we got some solid votes. And having solidified a base in the East End, we can now start to cultivate this new ground.

Update: Three new councillors in Newham, with one ward to declare. Lots of very very strong Respect seconds and thirds across the borough as well.

Here comes the flood. posted by lenin

It's all going downhill for the government. Amid the highest levels of discontent with the government since 1997, Labour expects to lose 400 councillors. A total of 4,361 seats are up for grabs, so this would represent a substantial haemhorrage. Apparently, a recent spate of issues, from cash-for-peerages to Prescott's affair has consolidated a major decline in the support for the government from Labour supporters (don't ask me why), which is why much of the shift is predicted to be to parties actually or perceived as to the left of the government. The Tories are said to be gaining little, but smaller parties are eroding the Labour vote - inevitably the biggest beneficiary of this process will be the Lib Dems, with their terrible, crooked, privatising record.

The Greens look like they're picking up in a few Labour areas too, such as in Norwich (for some reason, that makes perfect sense). Obviously, Labour are talking up the threat from the fascist filth. As noted here before, they are more likely to eat into the Tory vote, but a number of issues and events have come along to assist them. There is no telling what effect this silly 'scandal' over the failure to deport some migrants who had allegedly been criminals will have, but one suspects the BNP have been milking it, juxtaposing it with their fabrications about an 'Africans for Essex' scheme and so on. Labour's bigging up of the BNP will certainly have given the scum a propaganda boost. The press also have a habit of backing up the BNP's central propaganda claims while formally disavowing their racism by denouncing the beneficiaries of their lies, and this has well-documented effects. At the moment, the BNP have 24 councillors, and all of them are brain-dead, feckless incompetents. I wouldn't be surprised to see a substantial increase in the number of Nazi doorknobs in local government.

Respect has a challenge going on in London, the West Midlands, Preston and a few other areas besides, but Labour doesn't like to talk about us. We'll see how the East End looks by the end of the night. At least 9 councillors in Tower Hamlets, the Telegraph predicted. I'd expect more across the East End as a whole, a few in Preston and certainly some in Birmingham after Salma Yaqoob's performance last year. If I'm right about that, it will be a huge breakthrough.

Weird thing: a number of media outlets are describing the apparently high turnout as being due to the sunshine. As if the first thing you think when the temperature hits 26 degrees is: "I must take this opportunity to ensure that the Liberal Democrats are rewarded for their sound fiscal policies!"

New Labour privatises East London line. posted by lenin

Bad move:

A leaked London Underground memo shows plans for it to be the first Tube line to be run by the private sector, once work is completed in 2009.

The line, which will play a major 2012 Olympic role, will shut in December 2007 for work to be carried out.

The Shoreditch to New Cross line will be extended north to Highbury and south to West Croydon and Clapham Junction.

Once completed it will be handed to a private operator in 2009 when it will be tied into services on the overland North London Line - creating a new franchise.

The RMT has already condemned this decision. Extending the Underground system is certainly a necessary development, but it's utter lunacy to extend the logic of the private sector further into the public transport system. Surprising that Ken Livingstone's office appears to have endorsed this, since Ken made his reputation and bid for mayor on the basis of opposition to privatisation, but then he isn't exactly known for staying the course.

Respect to the ballot box. posted by lenin

More dread communalism from Respect - we didn't pay our bills on time. This is a blatant attempt to appeal to the 'poor' vote, by mimicking behaviour common in working class households. This behaviour makes a mockery of Ordinary Decent Bill Paying Families who shouldn't have to suffer while George Galloway causes trouble.

Anyway. Meaders has a good post highlighting new reports of vote fraud (even more in Birmingham it seems), detailing his experience of campaigning and linking to a couple of articles about Respect.

Don't forget, tomorrow's the big day, Super Thursday - or as New Labour call it 'Oh Shit' Thursday, to be followed by 'Resignation' Friday.

Pomaded Lardies on Shit-flinging Binge. posted by lenin

A couple of lubricious former lefties have been trying to set jaws clapping together down at the slander-mill. First, Marc Cooper, who is by way of joining the Harry's Place tendency of US bloggery (as if that particular niche wasn't amply occupied by Little Green Footballs), has tried to smear Yoshie Furuhashie, the editor of MRZine for a couple of articles about the Save Darfur folks. These articles refer, accurately, to a rag-tag coalition between evangelicals and 'establishment Jews'. The reference to establishment Jews in the coalition derives from an article in the Jerusalem Post with the headline: "US Jews leading Darfur rally planning". Yoshie, quite conscientiously, didn't think it was right to present the information as if all Jews were somehow leading the charge for an invasion of Sudan. That sort of thing could be misunderstood in our very delicate political climate. Some would prefer to say 'evangelicals and leading Zionist organisations', but that too could be misunderstood. And after all, it's not a dirty word is it? The j-word? Certain racists may be persuaded that it is, but who takes their cue on such matters from them? Nevertheless, despite the obvious care taken, Cooper has decided to follow some equally tiresome 'democratic socialist' by the name of Jeff Weintraub in describing the article as antisemitic (Weintraub adds that they involve 'crackpot conspiracy theories' and defense of a 'regime engaged in racist genocide'). Note that no argument is presented in either Weintraub or Cooper's respective whinges - since none could be. To simply refer to a reasonably well reported fact is enough to be accused of antisemitism. To my knowledge, the Jerusalem Post, a Likud-supporting newspaper formerly under the control of Conrad Black and with Richard Perle on the board of directors, has not become an explicitly antisemitic publication, so it might be sensible to infer that the article was not trying to smear Jewish people, some of whom I guess make up a fair proportion of its readership. By the way, this vexatious wheedle was passed to Marc Cooper by a particularly obnoxious character who frequents Doug Henwood's left-wing mailing list, 'LBO Talk', called Michael Pugliese. Sleazy, sneaky little fucker, don't you think?

The other coprological item that is doing the rounds is a bilious article about Juan Cole by the Late Christopher Hitchens, which Cole replies to here. It seems that Hitchens got hold of a couple of confidential e-mails from Cole, and misused them in this polemic. It is almost tautological to say that it is embarrassingly inept (inasmuch as Hitchens engages with what Cole doesn't say, makes glaring logical errors, gets his facts wrong and pads his odyssey of incomprehension out with some tart but irrelevant one-liners), but it is noteworthy that Hitchens refers to Cole as part of the "Muslim apologist community". One is typically an apologist for someone or something considered pernicious. In Hitchens' polemical lexicon, I doubt it has a neutral connotation, so you can add it to the list of anti-Muslim tics in Hitchens' posthumous excretions. Hitchens, of course, used to enjoy his reputation as a Balliol-educated soixant-huitard who could dispense gleefully malicious gossip about politicians and journalists on account of having attended the right parties and listened in on the right conversations. What he enjoys most now is providing pabulum for his audience of imperialist neophytes.

These are just examples, less interesting in themselves than for what they represent. In the former case, you have someone who still claims an affiliation with the left, but takes much trouble to police his comrades when they disturb his imaginary identification as a moral/decent/anti-totalitarian leftie, all the better to service his symbolic identification with the right. In the latter you have - well, just look at him. If the very sight of the man doesn't reduce to hysterics by now, you can chuck it in. Your laughs are through for this lifetime, honey. You may as well flip on the tube and let the studio audience on Will & Grace do your giggling for you, because you're finished.

Footnote. posted by lenin

A tiny bit of background on a tiny bit of that Brenner-Wood thesis. Perry Anderson will relegate an absolutely crucial argument to a footnote for the sake of narrative fluency. This is a footnote from page 182 of Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism:

A full awareness of the dynamism of the feudal mode of production has been one of the most important gains of medieval historiography in the last decades. Just after the Second World War, Maurice Dobb could repeatedly write, in his classic Studies in the Development of Capitalism, of the 'low level of technique' and the 'meagre yield from land', the 'inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production', and 'the stationary state of labour productivity at the time' ... Despite warnings from Engels, such views were at the time probably widespread among Marxists; although it should be noted that Rodney Hilton specifically demurred, criticising Dobb for 'a tendency to assume that feudalism was always and inevitably backward as an economic system ... In actual fact, until the end of the thirteenth century, feudalism was, on the whole, an expanding system. In the ninth century and even earlier there were a number of technical innovations in productive methods which were a great advance on the methods of classical antiquity. Vast areas of forest and marsh were brought into cultivation, population increased, new towns were built, a vigorous and progressive artistic and intellectual life was to be found in all the cultural centres of Western Europe'.

This is the argument not only of Rodney Hilton, but of Guy Bois and Georges Duby and many other recent Marxist historians of feudalism.

Anderson goes on to argue in the main text that the technological developments (water mill, iron-plough, marling and three-field system) were insufficient in and of themselves. There had to be a social form, a mode of production, that would utilise them. Gunpowder was invented either by the Chinese or the Arabs, but its invention has historically been attributed to Roger Bacon because a) the formula for it appeared in work attributed to him and b) it was used widely in the West as a technology of war and class rule. The feudal mode of production facilitated its use, in other words. Similarly, the feudal mode of production had to adapt or become 'crystallised', in Anderson's terms, to put these inventions to general use. Anderson also argues that part of the reason for this dynamism was that the peasants, the direct producers, had a certain amount of independence - and therefore a reason to innovate. Feudal dynamism also fed class struggle. The peasants, whether incipient kulaks (a new stratum of rich peasants) or paupers, were directly aligned against the landlords with their parasitic demands for more tax, more rent service, more Droit Du Seigneur (not merely a right to deflower peasant virgins, whatever you might have heard). Hence, class struggle: appeals to public justice over excessive seigneurial claims, withdrawal of labour services ("proto-strikes", Anderson calls this), chicanery over weights and measures, pressure for rent reduction etc. The lords, ecclesiastical or secular, fought back by fabricating new dues, employing direct violence or seizing communal land. During the 12th and 13th centuries, despite the ability of some peasants and communities of peasants to lease lands from nobles eager for cash, there was a renewed wave of enserfment, and peasant holdings were worn down gradually by the twin pressures of population growth and class struggle. Everywhere, class struggle was what drove and defined economic growth. It was a struggle by peasants and lords to reproduce themselves that created the productive dynamism of feudal Europe.

Similarly, the new urban centres and markets were typically dependent upon the rural elite for protection, and the lords in turn could scoop off quite a substantial chunk of profit from long-distance trade. Even where the urban centres acquired autonomy, the guilds strictly controlled production and there was no general separation between the producer and the means of production. There was some manufacture in northern Italian towns which could be taken for capitalist enterprise, but the largest segments of capital were usuruous and mercantile.

I'll leave the summary there. Just to clarify, this is by way of a partial introduction to a jot or two on critics of that Brenner-Wood thesis I brought up the other day.

American May Day. posted by lenin

The American protests were absolutely massive. It's hard to find an accurate description of the total, but Los Angeles was absolutely paralysed. The media cites police estimates of 400,000 in that city alone. I have heard estimates coming from Chicago of up to 700,000, but media figures put it at 300,000. There were also rallies across the country, with tens of thousands in Denver, San Francisco and Florida, in Dallas, Oakland, New York City, New Haven, Minneapolis and elsewhere. The total figures don't seem to be offered anywhere, but it's put simply at millions. Many factories were closed, and McDonalds was even having to put on a 'limited service'. Let me repeat this: there is no May Day holiday in the US. It was a mass strike. This, after the huge antiwar rally in New York City, is both astonishing and brilliant.

It has to be added that many of the official organisations that are supposed to be fighting the right-wing anti-immigration legislation advised workers and students not to protest, not to leave their jobs and classes. That conservative approach has been dealt a sharp blow, and if the US left and unions aren't organising around this, they're crazy.

Solidarity protests were held across Latin America, in Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and Venezuela. Across the world, huge rallies also took place, particularly in Germany, Indonesia and the Phillipines, against neoliberal 'reforms' and in the latter case against the corrupt, US-backed ruling elite. Some fights broke out with police in Turkey and Chile, and a national strike took place in South Africa. There were protests in Basra too. About ten thousand trade unionists demonstrated in London. And, on that most auspicious day, Morales sent the military into the gas fields of Bolivia to secure them for nationalisation.

America doesn't do May Day. But it did yesterday, and how.

May Day posted by lenin

Two big highlights for May Day: New immigration protests in the US; Huge labour protests in Indonesia and the Phillipines. Significantly, the US protest is composed mainly of migrant labourers who would otherwise be working today. I should, for accuracy's sake, call it a mass strike, and not just a protest. Meanwhile, Indonesian workers are out in force against plans to enforce neoliberal changes to the labour laws. The Indonesian Vice-President had previously refused demands to make May Day a national holiday, so they too are out on strike, with 50,000 alone out in Jakarta. The Manila ruling class is terrified that the protests breaking out across the Phillipines will be a repeat of the same protests that brought down Estrada in 2001.

Some communists have marched in Moscow too. They'll be marching on St Petersburg next.

Also worth noting is the rally by Peugeot workers in Birmingham trying to save their jobs. Yes, we've got a national holiday, and the only people protesting are people who are about to get fired. I expect the reason for this is that a large number of the activists who would ordinarily organise a May Day protest are busily helping Respect out in the East End. If you're able to, why not take the opportunity to go down and help out your local Respect campaign? Make this a May Day for Blair to regret. I can't. I've got a sore foot. I'll go tomorrow.