The just-about-Gramscian theory of successful rioting posted by Roobin

We live in a time when struggle is a war of position. Politics, economics and ideology in Britain have been relatively stable for the past 20-25 years. Just as where peace between states is only the time it takes to prepare for war, peace between classes only means the ruling class and the classes below it are fighting for best position from which to launch the next onslaught. The only difference is that capitalists are generally organised and conscious, whereas the other classes are generally not.

The job for any revolutionary organisation (any) is to shore up its position and its organisation before the advent of a revolution. This means using every available means to renew contact with its base.

In practice this means taking best advantage of each and every crack in mainstream consensus. In Britain we can only refer to the anti-war movement as the last significant, national break. The disintegration of the pro-war argument took place over the summer and autumn of 2002. A growing number of people became convinced a war with Iraq was being organised and that it should be stopped, the war drive was one egregious lie too far.

The fact that a (relatively) small number of people, in particular revolutionaries, took the time beforehand to fight for an organisation that could receive and give expression to this movement paid off. By the time the movement came to a head, provincial market towns and industrial cities in Britain could hold regular activist meetings of 50-100 people. Stop the War groups could call upon a wealth of human talent. One plausible estimate I remember from the height of the movement was 50,000 activists in 500 branches or affiliated organisations.



This number of people could successfully win the political battle amongst the wider population, against the mainstream parties and media (even pulling some in their wake, such as the Liberal Democrats or the Daily Mirror). They could call large local demonstrations, pull off successful direct action and, of course, build huge national marches as part of international demonstrations.

Though by no means permanent, the lasting benefits of the anti-war movement have been a generalised anti-imperialist consciousness, a suspicion of secretive, undemocratic government and a check on the racist backlash against Muslims. These gains must be defended.

When open class struggle with the serious prospect of social revolution breaks out, war of manoeuvre, the better organised a class is the more likely it will hold positions gained. A short example, one of the key reasons behind the bloody stalemate in Iraq is, all other things being equal, the Iraqi resistance simply isn’t united enough to provide a state alternative at the moment (which is not to deny the heroism or necessity of the resistance).

I want to illustrate the point about organization as a product of war of position in a slightly unusual way: through street encounters. The first physical line of defence for the ruling class is the police force. The moment when cohesion of the ruling class has weakened enough so the unity of the lower classes can come together, enough to set a significant portion of them into action, is when the police appear.

The bad news is the police will never be won to our side, not as a rule. They are handsomely paid for their jobs, very tightly controlled and ideologically marshalled by their superiors. Most importantly they are hardened by regular contact with the public. The moment the armed forces are set on the public is an intense psychic test for a revolution, as the members, especially the lower members, of the armed forces are simply not trained for the situation.



The good news is, given preparation (the opportunity for which, of course, is normally denied), the average citizen can match a police officer blow for blow. A police officer has access to hand arms, in particular clubs, but the ordinary citizen can get and/or easily improvise these. The same is true of body armour and self-defence. The police have roadblocks, the people barricades. The police can use sturdy, powerful vehicles, so can the public. The police can use tools such as water cannons to disperse a crowd but a resourceful crowd can use similar devices to reverse effect. The police can use small firearms. Even in Britain it is not impossible for a member of the public to get hold of some. Any weapons won from the police in battle can immediately be used against them.



The point is the police rely upon superior organisation and centralised control, not firepower. There are relatively few police officers in any country, never enough to deal with a general movement of people. This is one of the reasons why movements should be as numerous and broad as possible, to reduce the harm to life and limb to a minimum. When 2 million people are intent on using Hyde Park for a demonstration there is nothing the state can do to stop them (without seriously upping the ante).

When 125,000 miners go on strike (in albeit heightened circumstances), and are hung out to dry by union bureaucracy, the state is able to shift thousands of officers to mining areas to attack pickets and lay siege to villages, concentrating its all its power on its scattered, isolated opponent.

The key is to (1) prepare and organise as best you can, necessary but easier said than done, and (2) turn the tables and strike at their weak points. The police rely on organisation and co-ordination; do your best to break it.

For example, if the police are relying on you using a rigid set of tactics sell them a dummy and do the very opposite of what they want you to. During the anti-G8 demonstrations in Germany recently there was a very successful direct action that blocked the railway line to the summit resort. The police blocked every road route toward the resort. The marchers approached a blockade as a mass before raising a set of flags and dispersing in large, pre-organised groups into fields of shoulder high corn, following the flags. The police had not planned for this and could not cope with it; their organisation had been broken.



The point is there have been several years, and a huge variety of anti-capitalist mobilizations, from strikes to demos to blockades and so on. There is a shared anti-capitalist experience in Europe. On that particular day it became the organization of direct action. Current mass movements should be organized, their experience generalized so their achievements are not lost so when the big break happens we are not starting from zero again.

Labels: gramsci, police, war of position

Acid-filled eggs, Mary Whitehouse and The Doors posted by bat020

I'm sure all but the terminally nostalgic have had more than their fill of 1968 anniversary blather by now, but Newsnight's Paul Mason has got hold of secret police files and uncovered some interesting detail on the sheer level of panic and disinformation surrounding the anti-war demos in London - not the famous March 1968 one that led to clashes in Grovesnor Square, but the much larger one that took place in October. So if you've got a few spare minutes, check out his tale of acid-filled eggs, Mary Whitehouse and The Doors.

Labels: may 1968, newsnight, paul mason

"Islamofascism" posted by lenin

Or, They Are All Hezbollah.

Labels: 'islamofascism', hezbollah

UCU hits back on the 'boycott' hysteria. posted by lenin

I am told that the UCU has overwhelmingly passed three pro-Palestinian motions, an excellent development, particularly since they specifically rebut the storm of hysteria and legal threats raised over the previous 'boycott' motion. Here are the three motions:

SFC10 Composite: Palestine and the occupation University of Brighton – Eastbourne, University of Brighton – Grand Parade, University of East London Docklands, National Executive Committee

Congress notes the

1. continuation of illegal settlement, killing of civilians and the impossibility of civil life, including education;

2. humanitarian catastrophe imposed on Gaza by Israel and the EU;

3. apparent complicity of most of the Israeli academy;

4. legal attempts to prevent UCU debating boycott of Israeli academic institutions; and legal advice that such debates are lawful

Congress affirms that

5. criticism of Israel or Israeli policy are not, as such, anti-semitic;

6. pursuit and dissemination of knowledge are not uniquely immune from their moral and political consequences;

Congress resolves that

7. colleagues be asked to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating;

8. UCU widely disseminate the personal testimonies of UCU and PFUUPE delegations to Palestine and the UK, respectively;

9. the testimonies will be used to promote a wide discussion by colleagues of the appropriateness of continued educational links with Israeli academic institutions;

10. UCU facilitate and encourage twinning arrangements and other direct solidarity with Palestinian institutions;

11. Ariel College, an explicitly colonising institution in the West Bank, be investigated under the formal Greylisting Procedure.

SFC11 Gaza emergency University College London

Congress notes
1. The humanitarian catastrophe that developed in Gaza in March 2008, following a long siege and military bombardment, during which over 100 people died.
2. The call by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) to international trade unions to put pressure on their own governments to take action to stop the escalation of violence and relieve the humanitarian crisis.
3. Students and academics have been among those trapped in Gaza.

Congress resolves
To organise a fact-finding delegation to Gaza after the bombing stops and to send delegates on future TUC-sponsored visits.

SFC12 Palestine National Executive Committee

Congress notes the report of the Trade Union Delegation to Palestine in January 2008, facilitated by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in which 4 representatives of UCU took part.

Congress notes that the delegation was generously hosted in Nablus by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions.

Congress deplores the failure of the Israeli Histadrut to pay the approximately 2.5 million Euros owed to the PGFTU since 1995, representing 50% of the official organisational dues of Palestinian workers working in Israel, under the terms of the Framework Agreement of March 1995 following the Oslo Accords of 1993.

Congress calls on the Histadrut to pay the dues owed to the PGFTU; to call for an end to the siege of Gaza; and to call for an end to the occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory.

The Israeli press are reporting this as a clear resuscitation of the previous 'boycott' motion, although in fact there was never an actual motion to boycott, only a motion to facilitate a debate on the possibility of a boycott. The UK Press Association describes the conference as 'urging' a boycott. Melanie Phillips, bless her bigoted witch-hunting socks, considers it a witch-hunt against the Jews. It has to be good if it's winding these idiots up.

One other piece of good news from the conference. They also voted overwhelmingly to try and stop the deportation of Hicham Yezza, who is due to be deported on Sunday. There was also some pressure on the University administration, whose conduct has been quite shameful (see this, for example). The main event will presumably be when it comes to discussions of future strike action - I would expect to see a big vote for industrial action.

Labels: boycott, Israel, palestine, trade unions, ucu

Cost of Labour II posted by lenin

I'm busy, but I'm too annoyed not to respond quickly to this. The gist of it is that opposing immigration controls is all very well, but to take one's lead from Marx is to subject oneself to misleading Victorian tropes. Hence:

For better or worse the situation in the UK isn't really consistent with Marx's predictions of a vast proletarian class with the capitalists and their retainers living like plantation owners among their slaves.

That is, of course, a caricature of marxism that originates in the revisonist literature of Kautsky and Bernstein. Whatever the connotations of the word 'proletariat', the sociological use to which Marx puts it could hardly be clearer: it refers to those who do not have access to the means of production and are therefore compelled to sell their labour-power in order to live. This does not necessarily entail plantation-like arrangements or any other kind of slavery than economic compulsion. It is quite compatible with higher standards of living - actually the intensity of exploitation may be increased in circumstances where the standard of life is higher. But it is on this basis that the author upbraids me for mixing up 'middle class' and 'working class' wages:

Instead there's something like a working class amounting to 35% of the population, with perhaps 55% of the population belonging to a middle class whose income is subsidised (tactically or accidentally rather than for reasons of social justice etc) by property income.

I'm afraid this is an estranged Blairite fantasy. There is not 55% of the population living on income from property, or even receiving income substantially subsidised by property. Most of the population do not own shares (the vast majority of which are owned either by multinationals or by pension and insurance companies) or second homes from which they could profit (about two million adults own second homes). There are a large number of private shareholders, 11 million in 2004, just over a third of the working population. Millions of those owners will not be part of the working population, so revise the proportion down as you see fit. Most, 56%, do not even have private pension schemes, from which they might indirectly acquire a profit. And realistically, in most cases such schemes will, where they do not disappear into a financial black hole, simply deliver deferred wages. All of which is reflected in the distribution of wealth. The bottom 50% of the population owns less than 6% of the wealth, and the bottom 75% of the population owns just over a quarter of the wealth. So, I search in vain for this 55% of the population who are profiting from the labour of others by virtue of their ownership of property.

All of this builds to what I think is the main point, which is that in adopting Marx's formulation on the determinants of wages (the reproduction of labour power), I produce an argument that is "bizarrely amenable to the kind of xenophobic nonsense Lenin rightly deplores". That argument was that: "The combined costs of reproducing one's labour power as a Polish worker is lower than the cost of reproducing one's labour power as a British worker." In fact, it isn't at all compatible with the anti-immigrant argument that immigration reduces wages. Recall that one of the arguments of the government and various pro-market commentators in general is that immigrants are in fact doing jobs that British workers refuse to do, and that we should welcome this as healthy competition. That is an argument for exploitation, and it assigns to workers themselves the key determining role in the level of unemployment, implying voluntary unemployment due to laziness or being 'spoiled' by a comfy welfare system, and that if they only shifted themselves and accepted a slightly less lavish lifestyle they could have paid employment. In pointing out that wage differentials are socially determined, not the result of some personality quirk or stubbornness on the part of unemployed workers, one concedes nothing to the anti-immigrant argument. In fact, in saying that lower wages for migrant workers are partially the result of the lower socially determined cost of reproducing labour power (that includes the cost of supporting families) in the country to which they will return, one can explain why employment soars as a result of migration. In contrast to the anti-immigrant scenario of scarce jobs being fought over by a large number of people, this analysis (and the empirical data) would indicate that jobs are created by the availability of cheaper labour (this doesn't take into account the large amount of migrant labour that is just making up for specific skill shortages). And by doing these jobs, immigrant workers can actually increase the demand for 'native' workers.

Now I pointed out that overall wages increased. The blogger 'catmint' prefers to talk about a nebulous notion of 'working class wages' - defined apparently by nothing more concrete than their being on the lower end of the income scale. In those lights, 'catmint' maintains that 'working class wages' stagnated as a result of immigration. The study cited in the earlier post indicates that wages didn't rise as quickly as they might have for lower income earners during the period of increased migration of Polish workers. This has been siezed on by reactionary commentators who have long argued that immigration hurts unskilled workers. Let me just point out the general empirical picture on that score. According to Nigel Harris almost 200 econometric studies have looked in vain for this effect in the US, where immigration is much more intense, and haven't found it. You can see one such here. It is a debatable effect, it is temporary, and it is slight where it is detected. Further, "tend to affect earlier cohorts of immigrants rather than the historical poor of the US – blacks or Hispanics". In Europe, a recent analysis of eighteen studies on immigration found that the reported effects on wages vary, but they all tend to "cluster around zero".

About those weasel words, "bizarrely amenable". Might I just point out that conjuring up a middle class majority is "bizarrely amenable" to one kind of right-wing propaganda, and conjuring up an immigrant threat to the working class "bizarrely amenable" to another kind entirely?

Labels: immigration, labour, marx, wages

The superprofits of catastrophe capitalism posted by lenin

I told you that this sort of thing would happen.

Labels: capitalism, disaster politics, environment

Migrant Labour and Xenophobia in South Africa posted by lenin

Xenophobia tears apart South Africa's working class:

Behind some of this tension is the recent expansion of the hated migrant labour system. We thought in 1994 that the ANC government would slowly but surely rid the economy of migrancy, and turn single-sex dormitory hostels into decent family homes. But hostels remain, and in Johannesburg, the ghastly buildings full of unemployed men were the source of many attacks.

Even if racially-defined geographical areas have disappeared from apartheid-era Swiss-cheese maps, the economic logic of drawing inexpensive labour from distant sites is even more extreme (China has also mastered the trick), now that it no longer is stigmatised by apartheid connotations.

Instead of hailing from KwaZulu or Venda or Bophuthatswana or Transkei, the most desperate migrant workers in SA's major cities are from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – countries partially deindustrialised by Johannesburg capital's expansion up-continent.

In a brutally frank admission of self-interest regarding these workers, First National Bank chief economist Cees Bruggemann intoned to Business Report last week: ``They keep the cost of labour down... Their income gets spent here because they do not send the money back to their countries.''

If many immigrants don't send back remittances (because their wages are wickedly low and the cost of living here has soared), that in turn reminds us of how apartheid drew cheap labour from Bantustans: for many years women were coerced into supplying unpaid services -- child-rearing, healthcare and eldercare for retirees -- so as to reproduce fit male workers for the mines, factories and plantations.

Apartheid-era superprofits for capital were the result. Now, with more porous borders and the deep economic crisis Zimbabweans face (in part because South African President Thabo Mbeki still nurtures the Mugabe dictatorship), South African corporate earnings are roaring. After falling due to overproduction and class struggle during the 1970s-80s, profit rates here rose from 1994-2001 to 9th highest in the world, according to a Bank of England study, while the wage share fell from 5% over the same period.

So notwithstanding South Africa's national unemployment rate of 40%, a xenophobia-generated bottleneck in the supply of migrant labour could become a problem for capital, such as occured at Primrose Gold Mine near Johannesburg. The mine's workforce consists nearly entirely of Mozambicans, who much of last week stayed away due to fear, thus shutting the shafts.

Labels: apartheid, colonialism, migrant workers, south africa

Fluff, Stuff and the Joy of James posted by Roobin

When James Joyce was introduced to anthropologist Sir James Frazer he was asked:

'What name?'
'Joyce he said, 'James Joyce'.
'And what do you do?' asked Sir James.
'I write' said Joyce.

James Joyce was not a political writer. What little enthusiasm he had drained away over the years as he found fame and fortune, living in Paris, pampered and flattered, blowing a fortune on fine wine and cravats: an aging, half-blind dandy.

This is an easy story. It fits in nicely with the traditional legend knitted for radical authors. The scandalous rogue evolves into the solid man of letters or else gets burned in the fire of their own genius.

There is a contrast between the arrogant young man who wrote to a publisher, "I seriously believe you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland" by not publishing the collection Dubliners, and the frail old boy who hurried to translate his beloved Anna Livia chapter into French in case he forgot what the whole thing meant. But there's continuity there too.

What do you do, Mr Joyce?

Joyce was an author committed to busting literary taboos, in particular taboos about human sexuality. His determination to explore sexuality in life and in print gave an added twist to his anti-clericalism, which, in turn, was born out of his background in Irish nationalism. His family were bourgeois, followers of the Home Rule party, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell’s political downfall in 1891 at the hands of respectable Irish society (he was caught having an affair with a married woman) coincided with the Joyce family’s tumble into poverty. Joyce’s father spent the rest of his life in semi-employment, grubbing amongst the members of the rabblement. His mother, Mary, died in 1903 from cancer of the liver, weakened by years of poverty and fifteen pregnancies. Joyce was barely 21 at the time. He described the scene in a letter to his future common-law wife:

When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin – a face grey and wasted with cancer – I understood I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.

In his works he took a long hard look at that system: a system that not only exhausted his mother but his mother country, Ireland. Joyce was an implacable opponent of British imperialism, in life and works, from start to end, from the imperialist allegory of After The Race to the shooting of the Russian general in Finnegans Wake.

Joyce lived through tumultuous times. The period of his life as an active writer, 1904-39, spanned a whole cycle of revolution and reaction.

Joyce was an avid reader of socialist and syndicalist literature (very much born out in his critial, political and journalist works). Living for many years in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he witnessed first hand many of the national movements of central Europe. His brother, Stanislaus, lived with him in Trieste was interned during World War One as an Italian Irredentist. At the start of the war Joyce a British subject on the wrong side of the battlefield. He sought refuge in Switzerland, where, incidentally, he dined at the same café as Lenin (no one knows if they met). After the war he moved to Paris, where he would find it easier to publish his masterpiece, Ulysses. It was eventually published on his fortieth birthday, February 2nd 1922. The Irish Free State was born the same year, although he refused all invitations to return. ‘The Blue Book of Eccles’, did not see the light of day in America until 1933, legalised the same month as alcohol. It wasn’t until 1937 that it was published in England, by which time the sequel, Finnegans Wake was nearing completion. Joyce’s nightbook foretold disaster, which was to come in the form of fascism and world war two. As war descended, he fought to protect his mentally ill daughter from imprisonment as well as helping to smuggle several Jewish friends out of German occupied territory. He escaped back into Switzerland in late 1940, dying the following year.

Dubliners

In 1907 James Joyce, aged 25, wrote what was to become the final story in the Dubliners series, called The Dead. It was a project he began in 1904: it wouldn’t see the light of day until 1914.

When author George Russell suggested Joyce write short stories for a magazine called the Irish Homestead he was pointing out a quick and easy way for young writers to make money. As adult literacy rose throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a huge new market opened up for magazines and newspapers. Part of that market was satisfied by short stories and serialised novels. Charles Dickens was an early pioneer. Later on Arthur Conan Doyle enjoyed success with the Sherlock Holmes series. Rudyard Kipling’s tales of imperial derring-do found a large audience.

The new form strongly influenced subject matter. While the novel remained a somewhat bourgeois pastime, the mass market demanded stories that reflected everyday life. Joyce was expected to deliver short, simple, moralistic stories for the Irish Homestead. He gave them something else: The Sisters.

The Sisters begins with an image. A small boy standing in a street staring up at a ‘lighted square of window’ where he knows a priest is lying dead. He repeats to himself the word ‘paralysis’, which brings to his mind the words ‘gnomon’, and ‘simony’. It sounds to him ‘like the name of some maleficent and sinful being’. He is afraid but longs to ‘look upon its deadly work’.

There was ‘something queer’ about the old priest, opines one the boy’s guardian over breakfast. The boy takes exception to this but bites his tongue. It turns out he used to go to the priest for religious instruction.

Later he dreams of the priest: he sees the ‘grey face’ desiring ‘to confess something’. The priest was disabled. The boy used to help him open his snuffbox, half of which ends up sneezed over his garments.

In their time together the priest taught the boy many things. ‘He had told me stories of the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte… he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest’. He repeatedly quizzes the boy on detailed religious questions. He leaves him with the impression that the duties of a priest were ‘so grave’ that he wonders ‘how anybody had found in himself the courage to undertake them’.

We then follow the boy, who goes with his aunt to see the body of the priest, lying in a coffin in his house. There they meet the priest’s two sisters. They eat together, swapping commonplaces and memories of him.

After about a page one of the sisters stops ‘as if she were communing with the past’. The conversation takes a turn. She too noticed ‘something queer’ about the priest. He was ‘too scrupulous’. Priesthood ‘was too much for him’. He was ‘a disappointed man’.

It turns out, during a ceremony, the priest broke a chalice, the cup Catholics believe to carry the blood of Christ. For a priest this would be a serious thing. The sky didn’t open up. The ground didn’t swallow him whole. Nothing happened.

There we have it, a simple tale undermining the institutions ceremonies of the church: clear enough even to the casual reader. The eagle-eyed reader, however, will go back over the pages. Why is the story called The Sisters when they play such a peripheral role? What’s with these heavily emphasised words ‘paralysis’, ‘gnomon’ and ‘simony’?

A ‘gnomon’ is a piece of a parallelogram (we spend much of the story making sense of half finished sentences and suggestive phrases). ‘Simony’, in the Catholic Church, is the act of buying spiritual favours or powers. Think again about the sisters, two unmarried, elderly women of independent means. What was their means? Their brother, of course.

In an impoverished Catholic country like Ireland, sons and daughters were often sent off to join the church as a good source of income for the family. Joyce leaves a few hints in the story as to the class background of the sisters, not least the description of ‘them new fangled carriages that makes no noise… them with the rheumatic wheels’.

The church is a good career move? This was political dynamite! Joyce followed this up with two more stories, one featuring references to mental illness and sexual perversion, the other drinking and gambling. They were turned down by the Homestead. There was further infamy when it was realised the ‘paralysis’ Joyce hinted at in The Sisters could’ve been the ‘general paralysis of the insane’, the latter stages of syphilitic infection.

Already we have teased out a number of themes that run through Dubliners (and on, through the rest of his work). Paralysis: in the form of the old priest’s illness or Mr Duffy’s hermit like life. Paralysis: like Eveline stuck on the wharf, or the canvassers huddling in the committee room because it’s raining. Moments of deception and betrayal are cast through the book. Mrs Mooney’s tender trap in The Boarding House; Corley swindling rich women; the nationalists’ betrayal of the principles of Parnell.

The book Dubliners is very much the product of Joyce’s youth. It is the stuff of a young bourgeois hurled down into Dublin’s petty life. An ex-student stuck in budget Bohemia, suffering intellectual unemployment, he saw his art being perverted by a petty nationalism that was backward looking and essentially put on for the benefit of the English. Dublin had been a capital city with its own parliament in 1800; by 1900 it was merely the fifth city in the British Isles, overtaken even by Belfast. Virtually de-industrialised, what there was of a Dublin proletariat existed almost exclusively for the purpose of shipping food to England. Instead of normal urban life we find the pages populated mostly with clerks, crooks and servants. There are numerous references to Dublin’s poverty in the book. Even the most opulent story, The Dead, hides a sad fact; Gretta and Gabriel are the only married couple at the party.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

… Is the most familiar of Joyce’s books, most obviously a novel. While it may not be Finnegans Wake, it’s far from conservative.

The book is a bildungsroman (more precisely a kunstleroman), a story of development, featuring a young man called Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is the first of Joyce’s major characters, a fictional projection of his youth, sharing many of the young Joyce’s experiences. Its in A Portrait… we see Joyce really putting his literary skills to the test. The techniques of mimetic prose and the epiphany come into their own, charting Stephen’s development.

A Portrait…is also the first occasion when Joyce uses with the ‘mythical method’. He chose Stephen’s strange name with care. Stephen is named after the legendary Greek character Daedalus, the inventor. In one story Daedalus invented a machine enabling a bull to mate with a woman. The result was the minotaur. To prevent the minotaur from running rampage Daedalus built the labyrinth, the world’s most complex and confusing maze, to trap the minotaur. He ended up trapping himself as well. To escape he built a set of wings, and flew away. In a later story, his son Icarus took those wings, flew too close to the sun and came crashing to earth.

In A Portrait…Stephen is both Daedalus and Icarus. Trapped in various mazes, prevented from fulfilling himself as an artist, Stephen tries to flee. Each time he tries to escape he comes back down to earth. Each chapter builds to a resolution, Stephen feels released, only in the following chapter to be recaptured.

For example:

In chapter four Stephen rejects the priesthood for life as an artist. Wandering down by the shore he sees the birdwoman, who captures his heart as an image of mortal beauty. Chapter five immediately swaps glistening rockpools and whispering waves for yellow dripping and pools of weak tea as Stephen contemplates pawning more items.

The book is not apolitical. The fall of Charles Parnell is dealt with most effectively, through the lens of a family argument round Christmas dinner. The ecstatic climax of chapter two conceals the fact it’s about the grubby hypocrisy of prostitution. This leads into the mental terrorism of the hellfire sermon in chapter three. Stephen finds religion to be a hollow con, the priesthood is offered to him as a good choice for a pious, diligent student.

Above all it is the story of someone trying to realise their identity in the face of society. In alienating each individual from the produce of their labour, the thing that makes each person human, capitalism warps personalities, swallowing each individual whole. By trying to realise himself as an artist, Stephen comes into conflict with ideas of the family, sexuality, religion and nationality. The ending is quite lonely. The list of protagonists dwindles throughout the novel until, in the final pages. Stephen ends up talking to himself, through his diary.

Through the novel Stephen realised himself as an artist. The same was true of Joyce. Ten years after leaving Ireland and seven years after beginning the book, Joyce was a published author. Before Ezra Pound discovered him, Joyce was a jobbing teacher, journalist and clerk; at one point he even considered becoming a tweed salesman. In 1914 Dubliners made it into covers and A Portrait…began to be serialised in English magazines, one of which, The Egoist, was edited by a woman called Harriet Weaver. She was a Quaker, a feminist and woman of independent means. Thanks to her financial and literary support Joyce was not only able to feed his family but become a full time writer.

What is Ulysses?

It is an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day… It is also an encyclopedia.

This is a book where a day is as dense as a decade. This is a book exploring the innermost of the mind. This is a book that celebrates the human body, every movement and sensation. This is a book with a huge cast of characters, swarming across the Hibernian Metropolis and yet boils down to the simplest, most common intimate relationship (love, I mean the opposite of hatred).

Ulysses is about a day in the life of three people. Stephen Dedalus, star of A Portrait… Leopold Bloom, ad-canvasser and frustrated entrepreneur and Molly Bloom, opera singer and wife of Leopold.

Stephen gets up at eight. He is ‘displeased’. Having flown the nest in A Portrait…he is back in Dublin, living in a Martello tower with a patronising Englishman called Haines and his jester Buck Mulligan. After finishing his teaching job early, he heads off on an almighty bender, talking philosophy with the green fairy.

By contrast Bloom’s day begins with agreeably, with breakfast, a bath and a trip to an acquaintance’s funeral. He starts work late in the morning. He spends the rest of the day trying to secure an ad for the evening papers but finding himself getting sidetracked, at first trying to avoid his wife’s lover but more and more trying to look after this drunken lad he met in a hospital.

Bloom is unlike all the characters in Joyce’s books so far. He is temperate and kindly, quick-witted and intelligent, never at a loss for words. We notice something different about Bloom from his very first internal dialogue:

They call them stupid [cats]. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

Bloom’s horizons are not blighted and narrow, like other Dubliners. He is sympathetic, imaginative and can see things from another’s point of view. He helps a blind man across the road, imagining what it would be like to be blind. At one point he listens to a printing press, imagining it’s talking to him. He later feeds birds in the Liffey, dreaming up verses in their honour.

Take a random sample of Bloomthought. He sees some Ceylon brand tea and thinks:

Far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Sleep six months out of twelve. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness.

Bloom is the son of a Jewish Hungarian immigrant. He is set apart from Dublin society, where anti-Semitism is rife, not just in the English (Haines) and the Anglo-Irish (Professor Deasy) but even the model Irish Citizen, the bigoted monster confronting Bloom in Barney Kiernan’s pub.

In creating Bloom, Joyce takes some of the most repellent anti-Semitic myths and subverts them. For all the machismo of his rival, Blazes Boylan, it’s Bloom who triumphs because ‘he knew or understood what a woman is’. He is something different; he is a new man. Despite being born in Ireland, Bloom is still considered an outsider. He may be the Wandering Jew of Dublin, but he is also its intrepid explorer, never at a loss, never paralysed.

He is also Odysseus.

There are many myths and backstories woven into Ulysses. The most prominent is the Odyssey. As we know, Bloom is Odysseus. In taking Stephen under his wing, Stephen becomes his ‘son’ Telemachus. Molly is his wife Penelope. Boylan is the suitor Bloom ‘slays’ at the end of the novel.

Each chapter of Ulysses parallels an adventure in the Odyssey. The minor characters, many of them from Dubliners, are also given mythical roles. Bella, the madam, becomes Circe, the sorceress. Gerty McDowell is the princess Nausicaa. The Citizen is the Cyclops. In the ‘Hades’ chapter, Martin Cunningham becomes Sisyphus; at the beginning of every week he has to redeem the items pawned by his drunken wife. In ‘Sirens’ the barmaids become mermaids. Why? Because barmaids wore their finest from the waist up to attract punters, out of sight, beneath the waist they wore work clothes.

But why did Joyce choose to do this?

There was a debate at the time amongst Joyce’s supporters. Some, like Ezra Pound, chose to see the use of myth as an aid to creativity, just as scaffolding is an aid to building a house. In his essay Ulysses: order and myth, T.S Eliot argued that Ulysses put an end to the narrative method, inaugurating the ‘mythical method’; authors were to impose order on a chaotic world not by creating stories but networks of allusion.

Both arguments are right and, at the same time, wrong. Ulysses is a fine story in itself. It is also a treasure trove of puzzles and allegories. However, the epic and the narrative are parts of the whole that is the book. For example, when Bloom tackles the bigot in Barney Kiernan’s pub he is not just a lonely man, out of his depths, tackling a gang of dangerous drunks, he is Odysseus, trying to escape from the Cyclops’ cave without being eaten. It adds to the sense of urgency. Bloom is in danger.

It’s worth noting that Joyce and Eliot represent political opposites within the trend of ‘modernism’. While Eliot saw the modernity as essentially distressing Joyce saw it as containing the potential for liberation. Eliot used myths to put ordinary people in their proper place. Joyce instead deflated myths to elevate the human. In The Wasteland Eliot describes the collapse of society as the end of civilisation. Later on, in The Wake, describes broken civilisation as ‘the midden heap’, the fertile ground on which a new and better society could be built. Perhaps it is coincidence Joyce ended up supporting progressive causes whilst Eliot, like many other modernists, swung hard to the right (Ezra Pound to the extent of visiting Mussolini’s Italy).

It would be senseless not to place Ulysses in a wider context. Joyce wrote the book between 1914 and 1921, a period of war and revolution, tremendous upheaval. Some see Ulysses as hiding from the war, just as Joyce did in Switzerland. It is, in fact, his response to the war: to deflate violent patriotism and heroics, emphasising decency and humanity. The ‘epiphanies’ in Ulysses are those moments where we see the potential for renewal in our old society. It was the kind potential that, for a short while, was unleashed in Russia by the revolution of 1917, something that enthused millions across the globe. While Joyce might not have meant him to be, Bloom, the ‘cultured allroundman’, is his portent of the future, when that potential will be revealed again.

Finn Again

Ulysses published in France in February 1922. For a year, Joyce diddled about, writing nothing. In early 1923 he overcame his block, scratching out a two-page sketch of ‘King Roderick O’Connor’, the last ‘pre-electric’ king of Ireland, as a boozy landlord. He’d begun writing what turned out to be his last book, Finnegans Wake. He expected to have it completed and published before the end of the twenties. It took him until 1939 to finish.

Say you’ve read Finnegans Wake and you’ll be met with either awe or disbelief. On page four, you’ll find:

Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

The book is told in this language: English, but plastic and mutable (and funny), crammed with neologisms, portmanteau and multilingual puns. Joyce justified himself, saying:

One great part of human existence is passed in as state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and a goahead plot.

For the Wake is a book about a dream. The dreamer is a man, although we’re never quite sure who he is. He dreams about his life and family. He feels strangely guilty toward his kindly wife. They have three children, two boys and one girl, tended to by an elderly woman servant. The man is a publican. Twelve regular customers attend his bar.

These ‘characters’ come to life in the dream. The man becomes Humprey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle. Their daughter Isobel is a picture of beauty, their sons Shem and Shaun, typical warring brothers.

HCE as the man is known (his name changes but the initials stay the same) is haunted by two crimes. First, an incident in Phoenix Park, where a trio of soldiers catch him peeping at two temptresses (or exhibiting himself, or masturbating). Secondly, an incestuous longing for his daughter, who reminds him of his wife when younger, and in turn of his own youth.

The other part of the novel is taken up with the brothers and their struggles, with each other and to succeed their father. There’s Shem the Penman, who has an artistic bent, his aim is to tell the truth, he creates the word. Shaun the Postman is a politician at heart who aims to censor and control, he delivers the word.

The familial action in the book revolves around these two axes. They bring to mind the radical critique of the nuclear family. As the book developed, Joyce’s own family came under increasing strain. Throughout the twenties his daughter Lucia’s mental health deteriorated. She finally broke down in 1932. With the onset of blindness and his wife’s cancer, this greatly slowed Joyce’s work rate. His son George Joyce had problems of his own. Living in the shadow of his father, he found it difficult to make a life of his own.

The book goes beyond the mere rise and fall of generations. The characters within characters take on new roles. At points HCE is Moses, Zeus, the Flying Dutchman, Persse O’Reilly, Charles Parnell and so on. Shem and Shaun go through a variety of oppositions (and adventures), Mutt and Jute, Mooske and the Gripes, the Ondt and the Gracehoper. One of my favourite pairings is Butt and Taff, two television comedians (a story written in the late 1920s I must add).

HCE is also the city of Dublin. Anna Livia Plurabelle becomes the Liffey, washing away the dirt of civilisation. When she reaches the sea she is reborn as her daughter, a cloud. The twelve regulars become civilisation, as well as the gossiping ‘guinnesses’ who spread news of HCE’s crimes across Ireland.

The Wake is all this and more. Joyce’s use of flexi-English and the dream-form of storytelling roll back all boundaries, enabling him to encompass all of human history and experience in one book (or at least try).

Like Ulysses, the Wake the book is based on another form of scaffolding. Joyce based the structure of the book on the ideas of Italian Giambattista Vico, who saw history as a giant cycle, proceeding in four wheels, the ‘theocratic’, the ‘heroic’, the ‘democratic’ and the ‘chaotic’, which returned the process to its beginning.

We would recognise the stages as ancient, feudal and bourgeois society (perhaps we wouldn’t recognise the chaotic loop), the rise of each loop as the rise of each society and the fall the beginning of revolution, the hundred letter ‘thunderwords’ announcing the beginning of each age as the act of revolution itself. The process driving the book is history: conflict, cooperation, contradiction and struggle. Each new generation/society on the rise gives birth to the next, which proceeds to undermine and usurp the previous generation/society.

Joyce apparently wanted the Wake to be spiral bound, with no beginning or end. Escape from these loops of history, the end of the neverending book, comes with subjective input. The intimidating nightspeak becomes user friendly. The reader can bring their subjective impressions to bear on the book. You can read it looking for sexual references, historical allusions, myths, jokes and so on, each time finding a different book. The Wake is continuous and at the same time ever changing.

In Finnegans Wake Joyce once again shakes his fist at violent authority. Every ruler, every empire, every tyrant is destined to fall; something that might have seemed unlikely in 1939, when the book was finished, with war brewing and two great tyrants erecting edifices, one of them promising to last for one thousand years. After all the death and destruction, there is nothing left to do except pick up the pieces and start again, with the last sentence flowing into the first:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Labels: James Joyce, Literature

The Cost of Labour posted by lenin

Given that New Labour were the ones who tried to stoke up anti-immigrant xenophobia in Crewe and Nantwhich, on the assumption that the 'white working class' is basically racist and authoritarian, we can almost bet that the government will place themselves to the right of the Tories on this question at the general election despite the evident failure of this strategy by yesterday morning. That is, while the Tories will be trying to position themselves as the nice party of progress, disavowing the furious xenophobia and anti-Islamic bigotry of the Conservative Party from base to peak, New Labour will do all but throw on the jackboots and chant "skinhead, oi oi" in the vain hope of staking out a 'populist' territory. Am I over-stating the case? Is this overly pessimistic? I don't think so. If the experience of Margaret Hodge didn't teach the Labour leadership that pandering to racism just bolsters the far right, then nothing could, not even the loss of 18.2% of the vote in a heartland seat on a high turnout.

Undoubtedly, many Labour members thought the campaign was disgusting. They will agree with Compass that the campaign was "poisonous" and "smacks of the poison spread by the far right". They will plead with the party bosses to come up with something to deal with spiralling inequality and slightly ameliorate the class structure that is generating so much justified resentment. And they can even offer a pragmatic argument, if no one will listen to the principled one. They can say that if the government stokes up racism about immigration, they can't expect to benefit from it because the racists will quite logically say that it happened under New Labour's watch and vote for someone else. But is anyone listening? Are there any forces capable of making this point heard? Does New Labour even have anything else to offer? Like I say, I think not. Brown may be overthrown, but he'll only be replaced by some oleaginous Blairite. We are just going to have to get ready for a 2010 atrocity, with all the filthiest rhetoric about immigrants and 'yobs', and all of the worst aspects of the government's social authoritarianism given a full public airing. The only possible antidote is the antifascist movement which, if it mobilises quickly and en masse, can undermine the vague 'respectability' that the media and politicians have been giving to racist arguments about migration and Muslims. As a start, United Against Fascism and Love Music Hate Racism have called a national demonstration against fascism and racism on 21 June, starting from Tooley Street behind the London Assembly building.

Anyway, that's a long intro to what this post is actually about. Anti-racist argument about immigration rightly stresses the contribution that immigrants make to the economy and the society in general. The TUC points to the benefits to public services, and our growing need to make up a labour shortfall caused by a declining birthrate and a longer life expectancy. We rightly point out that services we value could not have been built without the work of migrant labour. When we are told by some who should know better that immigration pushes wages down, empirical refutation isn't difficult to find. For example, a recent study for the Low Pay Unit found that overall pay tends to increase a bit as a result of immigration, although the lowest paid might experience a slight fall. Even conceding for a moment the ridiculous idea that addressing domestic inequality by raising barriers to preserve global inequality is some form of social justice, the evidence suggests that restricting immigration is a poor way to reduce domestic inequality. One kind of argument that sometimes comes out though, especially from pro-market commentators, such as Nigel Harris (whose book Thinking the Unthinkable is a very good treatment of the whole topic, despite his present neoliberal orientation), is that immigrants do the kinds of jobs that 'indigenous' workers will not, and that this leads to economic growth. Such is the view propounded by the Home Office. Now, it is just uncontroversially the case that, for example, the recently influx of Eastern European workers into the UK did stimulate growth and coincided with an overall rise in real pay for most workers. Undoubtedly, those workers were filling a supply gap that was not being met otherwise. Yet there are two problems with this kind of argument. The first is that it implies a kind of voluntary unemployment by British workers. The second is that it implies that the exploitation of migrant labour is okay, and actually a good thing. This may be a logical argument for some elements of the CBI, but it isn't our argument. It is true that the argument implicitly favours a freer movement of labour, against the global management and coercive systems (border controls, visa and pass systems, detention centres, extensive surveillance etc) which seriously weaken our class. To that extent, it is superior to the anti-immigration argument from the likes of Polly Toynbee, who has falsely argued that higher immigration leads to greater competition for work and lower wages all round. But it still misconstrues the case.

I find it useful just to look at what Marx said about the source of wages. In Capital, Volume I, chapter six, the argument is put that wages are the payment, not for labour, but for labour power. That is, capital is augmented (makes a profit) because it withholds a definite quantity of unpaid labour. What one is paid for is labour power, one's capacity to work, understood as "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description." One is paid so much as is necessary to reproduce that labour power in its "normal state" - Marx speaks of reproducing the means of subsistence, but here he clearly refers to a historically produced subsistence as opposed to the minimum amount of nutrition, clothing and so on that one could possibly live with. The means of one's subsistence can include sufficient wages to use the internet, purchase a car, mortgage a house or pay rent on a flat, have the normal range of consumer durables, including a washing machine and perhaps any other labour-saving device that allows you to get to work on time and have sufficient hours after the working day to unwind and recuperate for the next eight hours. It would also include support for a family, which is after all the unit through which the labour is replaced. If you look at the UK national minimum wage, or the US mimimum wage, the level is determined not by reference to some ahistorical level of bare subsistence, but by how much it costs to reproduce one's labour in the here and now. If the rate is far too low in both cases, this is a concession to the needs of poverty employers whose margin of profit is slight. In comparing the wages of migrant and 'indigenous' workers, one therefore has to look at the determinants of the cost of labour power.

The combined costs of reproducing one's labour power as a Polish worker is lower than the cost of reproducing one's labour power as a British worker. We can suppose this is given some expression in the minimum wage levels in both countries. The British minimum wage is roughly equivalent to 1,190.49 per month, whereas the Polish minimum wage is roughly 329.49 per month. So, suppose a degree-educated twenty-something man migrates from Warsaw to London for a year or two to get some money together. Say he has a wife and small children. As will often be the case, he takes a demotion and works in relatively low-skill jobs for wages that would not sustain much of a life in London, but will support a single man in cheap accomodation and allow him to send a bit home every month. Further, because of his precarious position, the employer has more leverage and can extract more intense work and higher levels of productivity (naturally, the employers prefer to speak of the admirable motivation of such workers, as if it was just a cultural quirk rather than the result of a particular mode of capitalist discipline). In the case of someone who has got here by illegal means, the advantage is even more decisively on the side of the employers. It is a similar story with undocumented workers in the US. So, where a job might have gone unfilled because the cost of reproducing labour was too high for the employer to afford it, suddenly he might be able to hire two or three additional workers. The rate of employment can actually increase dramatically as a result of such immigration, and in fact that seems to have happened.

Necessarily, anti-racists have to play the numbers game. When the right complains that immigration is somehow deleterious to our economy and public services, we rightly point to increased employment, higher growth and increased tax receipts. But of course, the advantage to the employers partially depends upon this international coercive apparatus which loosely corresponds to a global 'colour bar'. It maintains a rough segregation of labour that permits the continued flow of managed migration without allowing the cost of labour power to equalise across nationalities. That is far from the 'free movement of labour', because freedom is impinged variously by quotas, by status differentials, by a plethora of restrictions that are designed to enhance profitability. The basis upon which socialists support free movement for labour is not that it delivers cheaper labour for business, but by contrast that it strengthens us as a class to be able to move wherever there is work, rather than existing as part of a domestically-confined large reserve army of labour. At the moment, European capital supposedly requires 8% unemployment - the 'natural' or 'non-accelerating inflation' rate of unemployment. Anything lower and the bargaining power of labour pushes up the cost of labour power (that's the 'accelerating inflation'), which is disadvantageous to the employers. However, we don't necessarily fancy being appendages to the machinery of capital, and that is what we become when migration is restricted to suit its interests.

Labels: immigration, labour, marx, prices, profits, wages

Arrested for Excessive Diligence posted by lenin

A number of people have brought this shocking story to my attention. An MA student at the University of Nottingham named Rizwaan Sabir and a 30 year old clerical staff member, Hisham Yezza, were arrested by armed* police under the Terrorism Act 2000, and held for six days without charge. The student downloaded a supposed 'Al Qaeda' training manual from a US government website as part of his dissertation on 'Islamic extremism'. I will just mention that there is some doubt as to the document's provenance, which is proliferating in different variations all over the internet. Rizwaan forwarded it to a friend in the Department of Engineering for printing because he couldn't afford the printing costs (1,500 pages at what I guess is 5 pence a page is seventy give quid). Someone, somehow, saw this material on Yezza's computer and, thanks to the culture of prying and snitching encouraged by the government and right-wing media, assumed the worst and told the University authorities. The authorities, instead of checking with the staff member in question, or even making a roundabout preliminary investigation, called the police. The reason the authorities give for this is that Yezza was a clerical member of staff (although he had studied at the University) and therefore no threat to academic freedom was involved. The pair's homes were raided and their families harrassed during the six days of detention. The pair were released on 20 May, but Hisham Yezza was subsequently re-arrested on an unrelated immigration issue and is now at Colnbrook detention centre awaiting deportation to Algeria. The Guardian writes:

Of his detention, Sabir said: "I was absolutely broken. I didn't sleep. I'd close my eyes then hear the keys clanking and I would be up again. As I realised the severity I thought I'd end up in Belmarsh with the nutcases. It was psychological torture.

"On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried."

All of this because the student downloaded a publicly available document in the context of properly directed research. The University authorities had every reason to be aware of the nature of that research and could easily have checked all the relevant facts before ratting on one of their students. So, should this material be banned for the purposes of study? Why don't you have a look at it and tell me? If the US Department of Justice website removes the document for any reason, you can always see it here and here. In fact, the Pavilion Press have published a version which you can purchase via Amazon. If this is an illegal document, as the police appear to have told this student, the cops haven't done much to block access to it. It's probably one of the most easily obtainable documents in the world. I frankly suspect that they were [making shit up] relying on an excessively liberal interpretation of some law that would usually not be applied to retrospectively justify the arrest. And how dangerous is it? Not enough to stop the US government making it available for public consumption.

Here is a press release by Nottingham University Students and Staff:

21 May 2008

PRESS RELEASE
Nottingham University Students and Staff Express Serious Concerns about
Recent Use of the Terrorism Act on Campus and Demand Academic Freedom

Following six days in police custody under terrorism legislation, two
well-known and popular members of the University of Nottingham – a student
and a member of staff – were released without charge on Tuesday, 20 May. A
growing number of students and staff wish to express grave concerns about
the operation on a number of grounds.

1. Academic freedom
The arrests were in relation to alleged 'radical material', which the
student was apparently in possession of for research purposes. Lecturers
in the student's department, as well as academics throughout the
university, are deeply concerned about the ramifications of this arrest
for academia, especially political research. An academic familiar with the
arrested student explained that his research topic was about contemporary
political issues that are highly relevant to current foreign policy. The
criminalisation of this kind of research is an extremely worrying sign for
academic freedom, suggesting sharp limits to what may be researched at
university.

2. Racism and Islamophobia
One of the officers involved in interviewing academic staff openly stated
that: "This would never have happened if the student had been white." It
seems that the over-zealous nature of the operation, causing great injury
and distress to the students, their family, and friends, was spurred on by
the ethnicity and religious background of the students involved. Police
behaviour during the operation, including the apparent targeting of ethnic
minorities for questioning, also suggested institutional racism.

3. Use of Terrorism Act to target political activists
During questioning, the police regularly attempted to collate information
about student activism and peaceful campaigning. They asked numerous
questions about the student peace magazine 'Ceasefire', and other peaceful
student activities. The overt police presence on campus, combined with
increased and intimidating police presence at recent peaceful
demonstrations, has created a climate of fear amongst some students. Many
saw the operation as a message from the police that they are likely to
arrest those who have been engaged in peaceful political activities. There
is widespread concern in the community that the police are criminalising
peaceful activists using terrorism legislation, such as the Prevention of
Terrorism Act 2005.

4. Behaviour of the university
Many of the university's statements during this time have concerned and
angered students and academics. The university put out a great deal of
rhetoric during this period emphasising its support for the police,
refusing to acknowledge either the potential innocence of the people in
question, or the distress caused to them, their families, and friends.
University authorities also spoke of stopping groups or individuals who
"unsettle the harmony of the campus." This appeared to be a direct
reference to recent peaceful student activism and protest, suggesting that
the university is willing to clamp down on political protest using the
Terrorism Act 2000 and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. One lecturer
from the School of Politics suggests that the university called the police
onto campus with the ultimate aim of creating a "depoliticised" body of
students and academics. Throughout this period, the university has
continually ignored the fear caused by police presence and investigation
into legitimate political research and activities. It has also ignored the
concern of staff and students about the criminalisation of research, the
racist and Islamophobic nature of the police action, and the worrying
indication that the university provided intelligence on its own members,
possibly racially profiling its staff and students.

Academics and students from across the University of Nottingham, and
members of the public from the wider community, are calling for:

a) The guaranteed right to academic freedom
b) An end to the criminalisation of political research
c) An end to police and university racism and Islamophobia and the full
assertion of civil rights and liberties on campus

They demand that the University of Nottingham publicly:

a) Acknowledges the disproportionate nature of the police response
b) Acknowledges the unreserved innocence of the student and staff member
in question
c) Apologises for the great distress caused to them, their families, and
their friends
d) Guarantees academic and political freedom on campus
e) Declares its commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression
on campus

To their credit, the staff and students of the University are preparing a public reading of the research material in question.. We're going to find out just how 'illegal' this document really is. If you can't be at the protest, you may as well download the document. I'm sure, readers, that you can do so without succumbing to the temptation to cause a conflagration.

* The University officially denies that the police were armed when they carried out their action.

Update: This is the status of Hisham Yezza's deportation process according to a press release by students, academics and local residents:

Labels: 'war on terror', civil liberties, islamophobia, terrorism

One Israeli airstrike I would have cheered posted by lenin

So close...

Labels: Israel, tony blair

Not So Much Holocaust Denial posted by lenin

As Holocaust praise:

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'And they the hunters should hunt them,' that will be the Jews. 'From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.' If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that."

He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Labels: christian zionism, holocaust, Israel, john hagee, john mccain

Redistribute the Wealth. posted by lenin

Labels: labour left, left party, new labour, redistribution, socialism

Cro-magnon Voter posted by lenin

You there - identify yourself! I suspect you could be an 'aspirational voter', despite the clinging musk of 'core voter' in your demeanour. If not AB then you are at least a C1, I warrant. Let's have a look at you. Yes, you are a bit of a slippery character. The trouble is, we're having difficulty designing a message that will make you vote for us. Last week, in party HQ, we devised a slogan that referred to the opposition as "Absolut Toffs". We thought that rather witty, and would go down as well with the aspiring Surrey single mothers as well as core heartland ordinary decent hard-working families from Blaneau Gwent. Sadly, the opposition routed us with a spin on the original, referring to us as "Absolut Balls", a cunning reference to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Ordinary Decent Hard-working Families. So, we need to pull out the big guns. Judging from various biomorphic measurements, we think you are Middle England personified, the goldilocks of psephology, the sweet spot. You are aspiring but comfortable with your roots, open-minded but also sensibly bigoted, cynical but easily manipulated, a dreamer with one foot on the ground - the sort of person eulogised in Alanis Morrissette's 'Hand in My Pocket'. Sorry, can I ask, how did that reference to popular culture feel to you? I mean, did you believe it, or was it just a little bit strained? We have tried variants referencing Snoop Snoop Icy Dog T, but as yet none of the homeboys have produced a rap about embodying different, mildly opposing states of being. M & Ms, you say? I will look into it. Now, if I were to tell you that I could give you a hundred and twenty pounds, would you consider voting for me? Well, suppose I distributed in your monthly pay packets evenly throughout the year? That's ten pounds a month, enough to subsidise a mild nicotine addiction, or buy a twelve pack of generic imported lager. Now, what if as an added incentive I told you that we really dislike pollution and are totally opposed to the menace of cancer? And we also might brutalise asylum seekers just a tiny little bit? Not too much, just callously break up their families and inflict casual violence and penury on them until they feel a mite unwanted? I think we understand one another...

Yes, it's the bye-election of doom, and the above skit is an introduction to the marvels of Hainite electoralism. Peter Hain's suspicion is that the New Labour coalition that won in 1997 is breaking up, and may not win its 'historic fourth term'. He further avouches that this is because Labour is now offering two extremes. One, favoured by 'New Labour ultras', is the crude mimickry of Toryism that takes Joe Sixpack for granted and will do anything to mobilise the marginals. The other, bruited by ?, is hard left class war politics that will ultimately see Labour retreat to a 'comfort zone' without the votes of swinging suburbia. The Hain option is to steer a middle course between these hazardous extremes, courting all the elements of the coalition that led to New Labour's staggering majority in 1997. The trouble with this logic, as ever, is that it is based on the dismal pseudo-science of psephology, which treats voters as market-tested blocs to be manipulated with policy flavours and a few cheap bribes into prefering one management team over another. Its occasionally self-fulfilling prophesies determine the limits of the possible in the minds of New Labour strategists. Populations are strafed and cleaved with poor substitutes for class and ideology, such as 'identity', 'values', 'social type', and so on. Coventry Woman in coalition with Sierra Man will win it for the team, provided their libidinal 'value' glands are tickled. Then, perhaps by stealth, the team might be able to do a small amount of what it wants to do, provided it doesn't upset the rich and their media outlets. Such a logic is, of course, profoundly anti-democratic. It highlights how little the electoral process now has to do with registering the real needs and desires of the population.

Labour politicians have always thought that the right answer to being defeated by the Tories was to try to imitate them further. They tried it in 1987, and again in 1992, and somehow it didn't work. Time to move even further to the right, get the middle class on-side, flatter big business. By 1997, the Tories were in such a state and their ideas so hated that New Labour could win on less votes than it had lost with in 1992. A broom with a red rosette sellotaped to it could have won the election at that point. Now they are being punished by working class voters for a decade of right-wing rule, and they're still biting their nails about 'aspiring' voters (as if we 'core' voters lack aspiration). So, rather than banging your head against the brick wall of Labourism, you'd do better to have a listen to the surprisingly prophetic discussion by the late Paul Foot, supplied by the excellent resource 'Resistance MP3s': Part I and Part II. This was just after John Smith had died, and Blair and Brown were sealing the deal for what would become the monstrosity that we have lived under for over a decade now. Foot is brilliantly scathing about Blair and his supporters, and the basic analysis has hardly dated.

Labels: elections, gordon brown, new labour, paul foot, tony blair

"Ethnic Cleansing" in Italy posted by lenin

Apropos this, this is depressing. 61% of Italians want the Roma expelled. Got that? Ethnic cleansing is a public priority. In Naples, organised thugs are trying to make this a reality by attacking Roma camps with molotov cocktails, and bragging of "ethnic cleansing". Locals allegedly watched and applauded as this happened, after a woman claimed that gypsies had broken into her flat and tried to steal her baby. The idea that gypsies steal babies is quite a common racist claim. Before travelling to Rome myself in 2006, I read several accounts on travel websites which insisted that this was true, and that sometimes they might even chuck the baby at you as a prelude to stealing your stuff. This isn't a joke. People are being murdered because this sort of tale is widely believed.

So what is going on in Italy? The far right Northern League doubled its electorate in the recent elections, gaining 8.3% of the national vote. Rome now has a neo-fascist mayor. He was greeted by cheers of Duce! when he was elected, while Umberto Bossi told reporters: "I don't know what the left wants [but] we are ready ... If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand." Berlusconi added: "We are the new Falange." And, on top of it all, he was backed by a sizeable portion of Rome's Jewish population because of his support for Israel. (Importantly, however, the Jewish quarter was also the site of early protests against the new mayor). This is a stunning reversal in a country that has hitherto boasted the biggest anti-capitalist and antiwar demonstrations, and one of the strongest votes for an explicitly anti-capitalist party in Europe. There, Berlusconi's government was broken by waves of mass strike action and protest, and eventually kicked out. Now, he's back and his closest ally in government is Bossi.

In truth, the previous centre-left government had connived in the demonisation and repression of Roma gypsies. It was Prodi who introduced an emergency decree authorising expulsion of the Roma in October 2007. And whereas Berlusconi had been unable to drive gypsies outside Rome's city limits because of protest, Veltroni responded to racist hysteria about gypsy criminality by pledging to drive them into 'solidarity villages' - small camps outside Rome controlled by police. It's hard to imagine a more disgusting politically correct term for such an obscenely racist measure. This followed the rape and murder of one Giovanna Reggiani, it turned out by a Roma gypsy. The reason the police were able to track down the suspect quickly was that a resident of the same camp on which the man was living had alerted them. Still, anxious to jump on the racist bandwagon, Veltroni coyly let it be known that 75% of arrestees came from a "particular country" (absolutely untrue, but it became a reference in the Italian media). And it was widely reported that expulsion plans were being expedited. Police statistics had said that gypsies accounted for just over 15.4% of all murders committed by 'foreigners' in Italy, which was the source of some national outrage, except among those who noticed that Roma gypsies accounted for just over 15% of all 'foreigners' in Italy, and that there was no disproportion. Thanks to this racist climate, Roma gypsies have been made to channel everything that's wrong with Italy. From economic failure to crime, they've been successfully depicted as somehow responsible for it all.

Labels: berlusconi, fascism, italy, roma gypsies, umberto bossi

Various Artists II posted by lenin

Second Friday night gig at the Tomb:










(A poor second to Prince's version, but his lawyers are unfortunately all over Youtube).

Labels: various artists

Politics of Disasters posted by Yoshie

A cyclone devastates Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, and an earthquake strikes China's Sichuan Province, and the empire smells blood, itching to send "aid at the point of a gun," urging the United Nations to invoke the "responsibility to protect": "France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta."¹ Why such an unseemly display of arms? Because a natural disaster can turn into a legitimation crisis, giving foreign powers a shot at regime change.

[N]othing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet -- China and Burma -- struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes -- and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.²

A regime's failure to respond promptly and effectively to suffering caused by a natural disaster, the failure that the opposition can exploit, can indeed become a factor in its downfall. Such was the case with the Shah's regime and the earthquake of 1978 that wiped out Tabas and damaged forty other villages in Iran.

Michel Foucault reported in Corriere della sera on 28 September 1978:

Who will rebuild Tabas today? Who will rebuild Iran after the earthquake of Friday, September 8 [Black Friday, when the army massacred hundreds of protesters in Djaleh Square of Tehran], right under the treads of the tanks? The fragile political edifice has not yet fallen to the ground, but it is irreparably cracked from top to bottom.

In the torrid heat, under the only palm trees still standing, the last survivors of Tabas work away at the rubble. The dead are still stretching their arms to hold up walls that no longer exist. Men, their faces turned toward the ground, curse the Shah. The bulldozers have arrived, accompanied by the empress; she was ill received. However, mullahs rush in from the entire region; and young people in Tehran go discreetly from one friendly house to another, collecting funds before leaving for Tabas. "Help your brothers, but nothing through the government, nothing for it," is the call that Ayatollah Khomeini has just issued from exile in Iraq.³

Neither Islamic nor Marxist nor liberal revolutionaries of Iran, however, called upon the West to claim its "right to protect" and send its armies to save them from the Shah. They overthrew the Shah's regime on their own, and Iran's Islamic Revolution has grown into a republic that can survive natural disasters, such as the earthquake of 2003 that destroyed Bam, killing more than 20,000 and injuring many more.

One of the casualties of the Bam earthquake was an American man, Tobb Dell'Oro, who was vacationing with his fiancée Adele Freedman in the city. Freedman, who credits the "kindness of the Iranian people" for her survival,⁴ became the subject of an important documentary film, Bam 6.6: Humanity Has No Borders (Dir. Jahangir Golestan-Parast, 2007), which shows Iranians' solicitude for her wellbeing and gracious hospitality to her parents who initially thought Iran would be a terrible place for Jewish Americans like them to visit but have changed their minds about the Iranian people.

The Bam earthquake also moved many of the normally fractious Iranian diaspora, as well as the populace of Iran, to solidarity, holding benefits and raising funds for their countrymen and women in need back home.

Artists did their part, too. Mohammad Reza Shajarian, the finest musician in Iran, held a concert
همنوا با بم [In Harmony with Bam] with Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor, and Homayoun Shajarian in remembrance of the victims of the earthquake.


Iran's Islamic government, by the way, did not reject international, including American, offers of assistance -- unlike the Bush White House who didn't let Cuba or Iran help Americans after Hurricane Katrina -- and welcomed international NGOs as well, even though well-intentioned outsiders can create as many hindrances as aids they bring:

In a recent lessons-learned meeting on the Bam earthquake in Iran, a polite and respectful colleague from the Iranian Ministry of Health related his frustration at international NGO coordination in the early days of the emergency. He said that, at the same time as he was desperately trying to set up field hospitals and bury the dead, representatives from over 100 international NGOs had individually requested meetings with him. He appreciated their help, he said, but some organisations wanted to ask him about the siting of rural clinics when he was still trying to arrange emergency medical evacuations. Was there no way, he asked, that these agencies could organise themselves better in the early days of a disaster?⁵

But Iran's government, even under President Khatami, would not have accepted international relief if it had been imposed upon it by a show of force.

1 Robert D. Kaplan, "Aid at the Point of a Gun," New York Times, 14 May 2008.

2 Naomi Klein, "Regime-Quakes in Burma and China," The Nation, 15 May 2008.

3 Michel Foucault, "The Army -- When the Earth Quakes," in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, U of Chicago P, 2005, p. 190. An endnote omitted from the quotation and replaced by a parenthetical editorial clarification.

4 Corey Kilgannon, "For One Earthquake Survivor, Joy Is Tempered by Sorrow," New York Times, 10 January 2004.

5 Jenty Wood, "Improving NGO Coordination: Lessons from the Bam Earthquake," Humanitarian Practice Network, 2003.

Labels: burma, china, film review, humanitarian intervention, imperial ideology, imperialism, iran, love music hate racism

Comment Isn't Free posted by lenin

Bell said today that advertising inventory on Comment is Free, the Guardian's discussion site, was fully sold out because advertisers want to reach its audience of high-end, opinion formers.

Labels: advertising, bloggery, cif, guardian unliterate

Their 'fascism', and ours. posted by lenin

Labels: 'fascism', fatah, gaza, hamas, intifada, palestine, west bank

Belfast mural posted by lenin

Labels: nakba, northern ireland, palestine

Maliki & Co. Offer US Forces "A Permanent Home on Our Doorsteps" posted by Yoshie

General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran ("widely described as a charismatic yet modest leader who never abuses his authority," according to McClatchy Newspapers), is right:

On Monday, the hard-line Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-e-Eslami accused al-Maliki of lacking backbone in alks with Washington, which include the long-range status of U.S. military operations in Iraq. The daily, which is considered close to Iran's ruling clerics, claimed Washington wants a "full-fledged colony" in Iraq.

It was a rare public jab at al-Maliki, a Shiite. But it was mild compared with the closed-door recriminations during the high-level Iraqi visit, according to accounts by Shiite politicians close to Iraq's prime minister.

The five-member delegation sought to pressure and cajole the Iranians into cutting suspected support for Shiite militias that have battled U.S. and Iraqi forces. But the Iraqis mostly received a scolding, the politicians said.

"The Iranians were very tough and even angry with us," said one of the delegates in the Tehran talks. "They accused us of being ungrateful to what Iran has done for the Shiites during Saddam's rule and of siding with the Americans against Iran."

The Iraqi politicians, five in all, spoke to the AP in separate interviews on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Two of them took part in the talks with the Iranians. The rest were briefed on the meetings.

At one point, a key leader within Iran's Revolutionary Guards accused the Iraqi delegation and their leaders of being tools of Washington and showing ingratitude for years of Iranian support to Iraqi's majority Shiites, who suffered attacks and persecution under Saddam, the politicians said.

Brig. Gen. Ghassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force unit of the Guards, accused the Iraqis of offering U.S. forces "a permanent home on our doorsteps," the politicians told the AP. (Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, "'Angry' Iran Sharpens Tone with Baghdad's Leaders," Associated Press, 15 May 2008)

Yes, Maliki & Co. are offering the empire "a permanent home" on Iran's doorsteps, against the interests of Iran¹ -- unlike Sadr, who "pledged to come to the defense of neighboring Iran if it were attacked."²

Common people of Iran, already preferring Sadr to Maliki by a substantial margin,³ would side with the general on his assessment of the dominant Shi'i factions in the "Iraqi government."

Now the general ought to build elite consensus on this fact and help the Leader, et al. effect a nuanced shift in Iran's policy toward the Shi'i factions in Iraq.

1 See Hussein Shariatmadari, "Iraq on the Edge," Kayhan International, 11 May 2008; Manal Lutfi, "Iranian Official Accuses al-Maliki of Surrendering to the US," Asharq Al-Awsat, 13 May 2008; and Shadha al-Jubori, "Strategic Agreement with US Is in the Interest of Iraq -- Official," Asharq Al-Awsat, 14 May 2008. Note that so-called hard-liners are far more vigilant on defense of Iran from the empire than reformists, Rafsanjanists, and technocratic neo-conservatives, which is the reason why the Western media promote the latter against the former.

2 Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki, "Iraqi Shiite Cleric Pledges to Defend Iran: Sadr, With Powerful Militia, Vows to Respond to Attack by West on Neighbor," Washington Post, 24 January 2006, A13.

3 Sadr is "viewed favorably by 56 percent [of Iranians] and unfavorably by just 12 percent" whereas "45 percent [of Iranians] have a favorable view of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki while 22 percent have an unfavorable view"(WorldPublicOpinion.org, "Public Opinion in Iran: With Comparisons to American Public Opinion," 7 April 2008, p. 29).

Labels: class, iran, iraq, US imperialism

The (soaring) cost of living under New Labour posted by lenin

The baseline rate of inflation is now 3% and the headline 4.2%. This will clobber workers already suffering pay cuts and Victorian working conditions. The BBC says that the proportion of incomes going on essential goods has risen to over 30% - I don't know where these statistics come from, because in my household, what with the cost of rent, food, clothing, energy, water, council taxes and so on it has always been closer to 75%, and it's higher now. New Labour's neoliberal policy package relies on its promise to keep inflation down, not just as a means of suppressing pay demands, but also as a promise to voters that their incomes won't suffer sudden, big real terms cuts. Aside from everything else that was wrong with the policy, it was always an illusory idea when commodity prices are determined by global speculation without large-scale state intervention. Governments worldwide are talking about raising export tarrifs and price controls, given the furious social upheaval that rising costs have unleashed. Even Hillary Clinton is proposing temporary price controls on petrol and mortage interest (for this, liberal Obama-supporters upbraid her for failing to understand "basic economic theory"), while McCain is co-sponsoring a bill with Ted Kennedy to control prices on medicines. These are hardly radical measures, but don't expect New Labour to imitate them. Any help this government offers with the bills will be strictly in the form of modest tax-cuts, but as tax receipts fall with the economic downturn, the temptation would surely be to raise the shortfall through indirect measures such as VAT, or by borrowing billions. Either way, the Tories - whose past record in government is gradually sliding down the memory hole - are likely to hammer them for this.

Since these price increases are coming at the same time as New Labour pay cuts for the public sector, I would expect an increased tempo in industrial action. In 2007, the number of working days lost to strike action grew 20-fold over the year, with Prison Officers, Royal Mail workers, civil servants, lecturers and others out on the picket lines. It was the second highest rate of strikes in a decade. Although New Labour's early rule was characterised by a decreasing incidence of strike action, a momentum has built up since the firefighters dispute in late 2002. It's pretty far from the peaks of industrial action in the 1970s and 1980s, but as unions increasingly co-ordinate their actions in response to a co-ordinated offensive by the government, last year's record could well be broken. That changes matters. The Tories might like to capitalise on fears of a new 'winter of discontent', but this also serves to remind people of the hated Thatcher years that followed. Given that Cameron's strategy is to try and woo working class voters suffering, and pose as a 'progressive', he won't necessarily do himself any favours with loud union-bashing. Of course, talking to business audiences, the Tories are all for breaking the public sector unions, but in the context of strikes that will widely be seen as legitimate, they may decide to restrain their rhetoric a bit.

Union leaders are pleading with the government to tax the rich and forge a new election deal, modelled on the Warwick Agreement, in advance of 2010. But if New Labour failed to uphold its promises last time round, there is no reason why anyone should believe them this time. And why on earth would union members want to be party to an ass-saving deal with a government that gratuitously attacks them? Fortunately, the PCS is looking at further national strike action at its upcoming conference. Healthcare workers are being balloted on the government's pathetic pay offer, and if they vote against it, they may be out as well. Further education unions have rejected their pay offer. The NUT's recent, highly successful national strike action is likely to result in further action. If you want your money back, you better hope for a big co-ordinated stoppage, and soon.

Labels: gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, strikes, tory scum, trade unions

Friend/enemy distinction posted by lenin

For example, let’s take, again, Iraq. This is my supreme example. They went there to do what? (a) To defundamentalize the country, to introduce their—some kind of a secular democracy, which would then serve as a model for the others; (b) to contain Iran. Now, three, four years later, what’s the result? (a) Almost two million, all the educated, secular, middle classes, majority of them left the country. The country is more religiously fundamentalist than ever. (b) We know that among the Shia political elite, the orientation is fundamentally pro-Iranian. So isn’t this a nice paradox that the ultimate result in Iraq of the US intervention is the exact opposite?

...

This is also my basic view about the entire Middle East Arab-Israeli conflict, that it’s a wrong conflict. There shouldn’t have been that kind of a conflict. Now, of course, we have to deal with it. But this, I think, is the true triumph of the enemy, not that the bad guys win, but that the very conflict you are dealing with is a wrong conflict. If I’m told, “You have to choose Jews or Arabs,” sorry, no, I refuse to choose. I only—the only thing I can do is honestly to criticize both sides.

And so on. It would be useful to know who this "enemy" is that lured the US army into the wrong conflict with Iraq, and forced Zionist armies to ethnically cleanse the greater part of historical Palestine before subjecting the rest to conquest and colonization. I gather that this figure is quite important in Zizek's understanding of the Middle East. This "enemy" doesn't have too many obvious attributes, but we can say for sure he/she/it has been around for a while (at least since 1948 and perhaps since the first Aliya or even before then, who knows?), is capable of Mephistophelean manipulation of great powers at long range, and is somehow connected to the Orient (the 'bad' Orient, the 'Semitic' Orient, the one that failed to exhibit precocious signs of civilization).

It would also be useful to know who this "we" is? And who might be the friends of "we"? Perhaps this "we" is surreptitiously produced after the fact of the "enemy", whose contours remain as yet mysterious. On the other hand, part of what characterises this "we" might be the capitalist mode of production which, strange to relate, is apparently threatened with destruction by torture and gated communities and slums (as in previous Zizekiana, liberalism, capitalism and democracy are almost synonyms). Suppose "we" is a liberal capitalist, faced with crises brought on by "our" system, trying to stop it from going too far ere "we" perish, but lured into fatal misconduct by an enemy who perhaps doesn't share those, er, values. Are we approaching an answer yet? Reductively, "we" could be a Eurocentric cultural theorist for whom facts are relatively unimportant (Lenin did not refer to imperialism as the "last" stage of capitalism, Parisian rioters did not burn down "their own mosques", "state socialist" countries do not in fact have the "worst" ecological record, etc), and who has some fantasies to traverse?

Labels: eurocentrism, friend/enemy distinction, orientalism, schmitt, sizlak

Solution posted by lenin

In times of famine, Vladimir Ilych Lenin took a robust line on speculation. "We can't expect to get anywhere," he told the Petrograd Soviet in 1918, "unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot".

Labels: capitalism, financial sector, food prices, lenin, leninism

The Mahdi Army Survives Undisarmed posted by Yoshie

A new truce between the "Iraqi government" and the Mahdi Army. Citing AFP and Al-Hayat, Juan Cole sums up the key points of the agreement between them:

The al-Maliki government and the Sadrists pulled back from the brink in Sadr City on Saturday. PM Nuri al-Maliki had demanded that the Mahdi Army militia that serves as the Sadrist paramilitary give up its arms and dissolve itself. The compromise simply states that the Iraqi security forces would be allowed in to Sadr City to search for suspected medium and heavy weapons. The implication is that the Mahdi Army may continue to exist and may keep its light weapons (e.g. AK-47s), though it has to pledge not to walk with them in public.

The siege of Sadr City is to be lifted and the major roads in and out of it are to be unblocked, according to the agreement.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the agreement stipulates that the government should have a court order to come into Sadr City. Arrests of rogue commanders had to to be based on warrants and not just 'indiscriminate.' There is nothing in the agreement about the Mahdi Army disarming altogether, as Nuri Al-Maliki initially demanded. ("Maliki-Sadr Agreement on Sadr City; Al-Maliki Heads to Mosul," Informed Comment, 11 May 2008)

The truce is said to have been brokered by Tehran -- again.

While Washington has two enemies -- not just Sunni insurgents but also Shi'i Sadrists -- whom it can neither conquer nor coopt, Tehran has no determined enemy among the Iraqi Shia and has influence over all major factions of them. Ironically, it's Washington's desire to create "an anti-Iranian Iraq," as well as a front of Arab client states against the so-called Shia crescent stretching from Iran to large swathes of Iraq, Lebanon, and even the Gulf states,¹ that has augmented Tehran's influence:

It was the U.S. attempt to create an anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into Iranian hands and produce the very situation that Washington was trying to avoid.

The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its nuclear program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had the potential to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was executed, Sadr I believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had bad relations with Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shia opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But American pressure meant that the Sadrists had to look to Iran for help, and in a military confrontation the Mehdi Army saw Iran as an essential source of weapons and military expertise. (Patrick Cockburn, "Riding the Tiger: Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq," Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, Scribner, 2008)

Thus Tehran alone can help bring stability to at least the areas of Iraq predominantly inhabited by the Shia; and, together with Damascus, which has a certain level of influence over some factions of Sunni insurgents, it may eventually -- in sha' allah -- be able to help broker a government of national unity of sorts in Iraq² if and when Washington ends its occupation of the ruined nation. That's the point that Western leftists should emphasize to counter Washington's propaganda against Iran and Syria. It's the empire, not Iran and Syria, that is the force that perpetuates chaos in Iraq and ends up spreading it everywhere it goes.

1 Washington has, however, failed to move the hearts and minds of Arabs against Iran in particular or the Shia in general. The most admired world leaders among Arabs are Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Al-Assad, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (in that order), according to Shibley Telhami's "2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll."

2 In any such post-occupation government of national unity in Iraq, Sadrists will play a central role. The Iranian people, a majority of whom prefer Sadr to Maliki, correctly understand it:

A plurality [of Iranians] sees the government in Iraq as legitimate -- down from a modest majority in 2006. Asked whether "the current government is . . . the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people," 45 percent said that it is, while 33 percent said that it is not. This is down from December 2006, when 54 percent thought it was legitimate (31% thought it was not).

Similarly, 45 percent have a favorable view of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki while 22 percent have an unfavorable view. This too has drifted down slightly from 2006, when 48 percent had a favorable view.

More popular is Shi'a opposition figure Muqtada al-Sadr, who was viewed favorably by 56 percent and unfavorably by just 12 percent. Similarly, in 2006 58 percent had a favorable view and 12 percent were unfavorable. (WorldPublicOpinion.org, "Public Opinion in Iran: With Comparisons to American Public Opinion," 7 April 2008, p. 29)

Labels: iran, iraq, iraqi resistance, syria, US imperialism

A funny thing happened on the way through W9. posted by lenin

You all know about my hobby of taking photographs of London. Sometimes it's demo pics, sometimes it's pictures of obscure subjects, sometimes it's just pretty little vistas. Well, today I was out riding round the West End and up to Paddington, Harrow Road, Westbourne Park, and then was circling back home when I was stopped by two charming police officers. Now, this was just as I was standing on top of my bike on a bridge taking pictures of the scenery, trying to get a good view from what I guess is quite a lofty position. The trouble is, when some people see you going round taking pictures of things, alarm bells start ringing. Apparently, someone had called the cops, and their car sailed up next to me just as I was getting a lovely view of... what? Among other things, the bloody railway tracks some distance from Paddington Station. They advised me, while one of them looked through all the pictures on my digital camera, that this is the sort of thing that is liable to get one arrested under anti-terrorism legislation, what with it sort of being near a major transport hub. They further advised me that following arrest, one would usually end up being strip-searched and possibly questioned for quite a long time under what might prove to be testing circumstances. Luckily, I wasn't a student named Salam Abdulrahman, so I was not arrested or put through the indignity of being having my bottom examined up close by someone without the relevant proctological qualifications. In fact, I was treated courteously, and permitted to ride off into the sunset after an awkward fifteen minutes on the tarmac, a background check and a brief body search. However, it is interesting to think that, had there been a minor blip in the racial coding, it could have been a much worse experience. Had they not liked my answers, even, I would be answering more questions at Paddington Green nick. Not for illegal activity - of course, they allowed me to keep the pictures, and you can see pictures of Paddington station and the tracks on Google Images anyway - but because of the way in which New Labour legislation tolerates and encourages the selective criminalisation of legal conduct. So, that was a funny thing to happen.

Labels: anti-terrorism legislation, london, new labour, photographs

Latest Iraqi Resistance Stats posted by lenin

The Brookings Institution provides regular updates on all statistics from Iraq in its 'Iraq Index'. It collates a range of different sources, and it isn't necessarily as authoritative as the official Department of Defense reports. However, it is more consistent in what data it presents and generally omits the Bush administration editorials. The latest report, dated 5 May 2008, is here. Here are some of the key results pertaining to resistance attacks (click to enlarge):








I already addressed the reported the issue of the 'surge' and its effects here and here. I noted that the main causes of a reduction in all kinds of attacks were: a) a brief cessation of the war between Sadr and Badr fighters; the near exhaustion of the sectarian war; b) Sadr's ceasefire; c) the co-opting of Sunni fighters in huge numbers. I also pointed out that the Bush administration had only succeeded in reducing the rate of anti-occupation violence by the precise amount that it had increased during the escalations in 2006-7. The statistics above more or less confirm this picture. (Gilbert Achcar, in an interesting discussion of the political background to the 'surge', also reinforces some of these points). They also suggest that US troop deaths fell to a very low rate in December 2007, and have been rising ever since (don't be misled by the drop at the end of the third chart, as that is the figure for the first four days in May). It is currently at a seven-month high. They confirm that the 'foreign fighter' contingent remains puny, about 2,000 at most - in a total insurgency that was estimated to be about 200,000 strong as early as January 2005, that is at most 1% of the total. As the US has been putting 'Iraqi security forces' in the frontline over the past couple of years - the strategy of 'Iraqification' - they are bearing the greater brunt of deaths. Those same 'Iraqi security forces' are, according to this report, carrying out a large number of the patrols - over half at some points, apparently. The pattern of 'Iraqification' has been maintained in Basra and Sadr City recently. The US is backing up said 'security forces' with air strikes that have contributed to the hundreds of deaths (this may actually be more bloody in the end than Fallujah). Partly because of this, the main cause of deaths among US troops is IEDs, rather than gun battles. Even with that in mind, the main gain of the 'surge' - a reduction in attacks on occupation troops - has been reversing for several months now. If the Sadrist militias have held out well enough to cause the government to want another truce, then the other expected gain - using a window of opportunity to smash the main anti-occupation forces - is unlikely to materialise.

Labels: 'surge', iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

Crisis and hegemony posted by lenin

• Labourism is more in crisis than ever before, with its heartland erosions pointing to a long-term breakdown in party identity;
• The Tories didn't win on the basis of Howard-style immigrant-bashing and being 'tough on crime', but by playing on Labour's weakness on the 10p tax and post office closures, so this isn't exactly a Thatcherite resurgence;
• Labour's response is to move to the right. Brown is planning on cutting 'green' taxes, Liam Byrne is imposing a points system on immigrants, and the Home Secretary is pressing ahead on upgrading cannabis against expert advice. Given this, it is unlikely that Labour will benefit from a big rush by left-wingers back into the party in order to save it from the Tories;
• But Labour owes its rich friends millions and has no money repay it. It is therefore entering an almighty battle with the unions over funding. Jack Straw is proposing to force unions to hand over all political funds from 4 million affiliated members straight to Labour HQ, with new legislation. Even the relatively friendly leaderships of the GMB and Unison are talking about breaking from Labour if that happens. If the Blairites get their way, their may be a further push to reduce the union block vote (still 40%), diminish the reliance on union funding, and continue the re-alignment of the party on Democratic Party lines by shifting further to the right and soliciting more funds from business. Even if they don't, something has to give, and this opens opportunities for the Left;
• The Tory vote, despite its recent showing, is also fragmenting over the long term with right-wing voters backing smaller parties like UKIP as well as the Nazis. Far be it from me to use metaphors like "the kaleidoscope has been shaken", but the party system is changing with growing rapidity.
• The antiwar movement has created a kind of common sense, which led people to spontaneously oppose Israel's assault on Lebanon and automatically prefer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's version of events to Tony Blair's during the brief 'hostage crisis'. This is not unassailable but, given the long-term centrality of the 'war on terror', it is a strategically important accomplishment in itself. It has also been significant in combatting the Islamophobia that the far right feeds off.

Labels: gramsci, hegemony, leninism, socialism, war of position

Two Kinds of Image Problem posted by lenin

This:




And this:



(Click on images).

Labels: haiti, iraq, orientalism, racism, the arab mind, torture, US imperialism

The Free Market posted by lenin

Labels: free markets

Nazis out of City Hall - Smash the BNP! posted by lenin

Well, I'm sorry I didn't post pics and footage from yesterday's demo sooner, but by the time I got back I was barely able to regurgitate my lager and cornish pasty never mind write up a post. Anyway, a couple of things: 1) it was an excellent turnout on very short notice and hardly any publicity at all; 2) after all the speeches and that, it was quite a good idea to have everyone surround City Hall chanting "Nazis out of City Hall - Smash the BNP!" I think Richard Barnbrook should have to hear that quite a bit over the next few months; 3) aside from Weyman Bennett being a good laugh, there was quite an interesting mood there. If I may put it like this, the organisers of Hope Not Hate may wish to reconsider their motto. This was hope and hate. I think people are fucking furious about the scum getting into the Assembly, and I would expect some very strong anti-fascist activity in the foreseeable future. Anyway, here's your pics and protest footage.

Labels: bnp scum, gla elections, nazi, unite against fascism

Kisses from Gitmo posted by lenin

Torture kitsch from the new American resort, 'Taliban Towers' in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:

Labels: capital, guantanamo, torture, US imperialism

Contours of New Labour Descent posted by lenin

When Tariq Ali says "New Labour is dead", you don't expect him to be matched in his prognosis by the soft-left Compass group. It is necessary to pause for a second and ask who the gravediggers will be. Arguably in this case the assassins are Labour voters who decided to abandon the party for either the Lib Dems, the nationalists, the Tories, the Nazis, the smaller left parties or - probably by far the biggest beneficiary - abstention. (If the turnout was higher in London, it was higher mainly in the dead zones of the Tory suburbs, which will spend the rest of the summer smelling of bigotry and barbecues until some kind of divine Ballardian punishment crashes the party.) It is certainly true, as Jon Cruddas argues, that working class voters are abandoning Labour in both the heartlands and the marginals, and the Tories are expecting to capitalise on that. This is hardly news, and even New Labour commentators like Jackie Ashley are saying as much.

However, for the electoral slaughter New Labour to be consummated and full burial rites executed in the way that Compass envisions, there would have to be some force within the party that is capable of performing that service. And, as I will not tire of pointing out to those tempted to return to its deathly embrace, there is no such force. Some kid themselves that the stale wreckage of the Labour Left in London, which so assiduously coat-tailed Livingstonite liberalism, has the way forward for New Labour to avoid electoral obliteration in 2010. (Oh, Seumas Milne, you really ought to know better.) It is true that Ken Livingstone didn't poll as poorly as New Labour in general. 36.38% of the mayoral vote went to Livingstone, but only 27.12% backed New Labour on the Assembly London-wide, and only 24% backed the party nationally. So a vague aura of leftism and independence helped Livingstone. But just over a third of the vote is still pretty poor, particularly when you've cut a deal with the Green Party, the Liberals and practically every non-Tory force that will work with you. New Labour is not dead, it is undead. And this is what the zombified party of government will do: it will segment its losses into the middle class, the 'white working class', and Muslims and ethnic minorities, and it will contrive a set of concessions for each group, based on a conservative agenda. To middle class voters it will offer to withdraw 'green' taxes or reduce them severely; to the 'white working class' it will offer a few miserly tax concessions, but try to deflect the main issues with racism by introducing a points system for immigration; to Muslims and other minorities, it will offer a combination of threats, cajolement and 'integration'. That will not work, not least because the Tories can do this stuff much better. And when New Labour loses again, the best organised forces in the party will be the Blairites and they will take the opportunity to move further to the right and replace Brown with Miliband. Don't look to a social movement to make any impact on this: if 2 million people marching in London couldn't find its way onto the conference floor, the party is now almost completely impervious to mass social unrest.

The more aggressive wing of the Tory right is gleefully plotting all sorts of revenge - especially against the unions and against those Muslims who have the run of the place under the communist tyrant 'Red Ken'. Boris Johnson is pleding a 'fightback' against crime (so I'd keep an eye on Jeffrey Archer's house), and hoping with his new confederates to force a no-strike deal on the RMT and Aslef, which is highly unlikely. The Tories may be more aggressive than Ken Livingstone's administratrion, but they'd have to be prepared for an epic combat if they want to break the train unions. No sign of that yet. While Boris Johnson has appeared to accept in public that the PPP on the tube is a failure, his administration is likely to opt for the renegotiation of existing contracts and even sweeten the deal for Metronet rather than accept public ownership. He will keep the congestion charge, but probably protect Tory residents of the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea from expansion, and also guard drivers of 'gas-guzzlers' against planned increases in their charges. His plans for increasing the number of police are actually not very extensive - 440 on first blush, and all of these 'community support officers' to move around on London's massive public transport system. The effect will be negligible. He may have to limit his idea of metal detectors and knife archways on the Underground if he doesn't want millions of pissed-off commuters baying for his blood. These things are not that popular in Heathrow Airport, and I can't see people appreciating being stopped at fast-moving, crowded public transport hubs for having ordinary metal objects on their person. Seriously, has anyone actually thought this through? In all, I can see Boris Johnson running an unpleasant, aggressive and divisive administration, a test-bed for future Tory politics at the national level, but he will not be allowed to go too far lest he ruins things for his boss.

Both New Labour and the Tories are subject to two overarching global pressures that they don't get to control. The first is that the capitalist system is entering its most chaotic phase since the 1930s, and may well experience a global collapse (one in four chance, remember?). Rising food and commodity prices has been coterminous with a real-terms contraction in spending power for many. If capitalism could deliver stable growth and rising living standards without accumulating enormous imbalances that lead to global crises, then New Labour would be alive and kicking. Moderate social democracy would probably be hegemonic. As it is, New Labour's electoral calculus in the face of any crisis is always to move right, throw a sop to middle class voters in the marginals and expect working class acquiescence. That is why they decided to clobber working class taxpayers and give a tax cut to slightly higher income earners. At the same time, their economic rationale is that of neoliberalism: when profits are squeezed, you defend the country's economic competitiveness by attacking the three main costs for any company - taxes, input costs and wages. This commitment to neoliberalism is tempered by the need to keep the unions on-side, but only marginally. This is why corporation taxes and taxes on profits are lower under New Labour, and why inequality has been allowed to soar, despite the minimum wage and some very modest redistributive measures. The Tories will respond in much the same way as New Labour, except that they don't have to answer to unions and working class voters, and so can be much more aggressive. In fact, they positively benefit by throwing red meat to reactionaries of all stripes, provided they don't go too far and alienate centrists.

The second overarching pressure is that the American empire, for which Britain is a big off-shore base, is hurtling toward defeat. It is losing its dollar dominance; it is losing ground economically; it can murder residents of Sadr City and Basra in the hundreds and thousands within days, but it can't defeat Iraq without a draft, and it can't attack Iran except through an Israeli proxy which would be hugely risky; Afghanistan is lost, and the commitment of a few thousand more troops won't change matters. When mainstream American politicians talk about reducing dependence on foreign oil, they tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) appeal to the popular desire to get out of extensive imperial commitments that are costing trillions of dollars and contributing to a great deal of social distress. New Labour's response to this is much like Old Labour's. Cling onto nuclear weapons under the American umbrella, try to act as a bridge between America and Europe, back up US military subventions, and try to neutralise and contain antiwar movements. This logic has taken Gordon Brown toward flirtation with neoconservatism, and David Miliband will probably move even further in that direction. The Tories will not necessarily be more aggressive in that respect. Split between foreign policy 'realists' and neocons, they are also in the position of having to woo antiwar voters in Shropshire, formerly solid Tories who have experienced the civilising influence of mass street protests. Further, it is hard to see how the Tories could be more right-wing in their global orientations than new Labour. Blair backed Berlusconi, Brown backs Sarkozy, both have been comfortable with Bush - the European and American hard right are the natural allies of New Labour. Meanwhile, Cameron is probably not going to have any difficulty dealing with a Democratic presidency.

The countervailing movements against capitalism and empire that opened the 21st Century and made some waves in the UK electoral system are both experiencing set-backs and crises, partly because while they could mobilise people, there was no clear and commonly held vision about how to translate that success into real power. A whole tradition - call it the classical conception of socialism - has been lost here, and needs to be rediscovered. That conception identified both weaknesses in the system that could be systematically attacked and an agency with the power to challenge the system. For all the ingenuity and dynamism of these social movements, without that understanding, a lot of the steam has been lost amid fractures and mutual recrimination. Two temptations have resulted: one has been to relapse into social democracy (or some apparently more radical substitute, such as the Greens), whose crisis helped produce the movements in the first place; the other, less significant but as mistaken, has been to collapse into ultra-left purism and separation from the movement. We had better get this right, because an almost choreographed sequence of global crises is battering us, and if we can't intervene effectively it will not be the centre that holds, it will be the far right that gains.

Labels: boris johnson, ken livingstone, labour left, new labour, tories

Resources of resistance posted by lenin

A few excellent new resources for readers of LT. First of all, for those involved in the fightback against the Tories in London, Boris Watch is hopefully going to be a useful source of information. Second of all, for those watching the US electoral train crash and the economic collapse that is sure to produce some tough struggles in the coming months and years, the new US Socialist Worker website is looking good, and has some star material including from John Pilger and others. I don't know if they're updating regularly throughout the week like our own UK Socialist Worker (where you can find a solid analysis of the latest election results), but if you want insight on last week's shocking verdict on Sean Bell, or on the recent SEIU fiasco, it's got the goods. I see the website is also promoting an ISR article on the Mahalla revolt by my Egyptian comrade Hossam el-Hamalawy. Incidentally, he will be useful for those of you wanting to know about the effects of world food prices on the struggle against the Egyptian dictatorship (Mubarak is looking seriously threatened). For news on Haiti, where the riots and street battles with UN occupiers are reaching a zenith on account of food prices, I would check out Haitianalysis.com. Any other good resources you think of, post them in the comments boxes.

Labels: boris johnson, egypt, food prices, haiti, mubarak, socialist worker

London Meltdown posted by lenin

What could go wrong did go wrong. Boris Johnson is mayor, with a convincing lead. The BNP got a seat on the Assembly. And the Left List failed to make an impact except in a few concentrated areas. The reasons for the latter are obvious enough: launching a new brand name in the space of a couple of months; set-back by a recent split in the organisation; squeezed by the Tory surge and the desire of many to 'Stop Boris' by backing Labour; squeezed by direct competition with those who still had the old name (who did poorly, but better than us overall, and much better in City and East); squeezed by a higher turnout. There were so many things militating against a strong Left List showing. But even I would not have expected last night's atrophy. New Labour has collapsed decisively not on some right-wing hocus-pocus about crime or immigration (although the media hysteria obviously contributed to Livingstone's defeat), but on the ten pence tax rate and the economy and the sense that Labour doesn't even try to represent ordinary working people any more. But the Left has not been in a position to make any inroads as a result. On the contrary - all of the Left experienced a decline, and the right-wing parties got a boost. And, in part because of the poisonous climate generated over immigrants and Muslims, the Nazis of the BNP are on the Assembly while their estranged half-cousins from the National Front (who consider the BNP sell-outs) polled strongly in Bexley and Bromley as well as in Lewisham and Greenwich. There are some hard fights ahead.

The Blairites' advice was evidently no use to Ken, who lost it in the last few days with a series of bizarre declarations, building up to his claim that he wanted to arrest people for littering. Even Boris Johnson didn't go that far. The Blairite strategy is to move so far to the right on certain issues that even the Tories can't criticise you, while giving the left some friendly words. More accurately, this is the Clintonite strategy of triangulation developed by the Republican PR man Dick Morris. Livingstone listened to this kind of advice at his own immense peril, but what else did he have to offer? He tried at the last minute to cut a vaguely 'progressive' looking deal with the Green Party, but I suspect that most Berry voters would have given him a second-preference anyway. And the Greens didn't do all that well in the end, despite some locally strong votes. They kept two seats on the Assembly, but gained little from the extensive media exposure. Livingstone didn't have anything new to offer Labour voters, wasn't really keen to distance himself too much from the government, had no chance with most right-wing voters - his niche was exhausted and depleted. The Tories have been canny in selecting Boris because, despite his obvious unfitness for the role, his burlesque comedy obscures the memory of the 'nasty party'. I suspect that 'nice' centre-right voters who might previously have lumped for the Lib Dems went back to the fold. It's been hard to detect much in the way of policy from the Tories, and certainly little distinctive. Johnson did not win on an aggressive platform of clubbing the unions, hammering immigrants and brutalizing petty criminals. This isn't Margaret Thatcher, the next generation. It is BoJo the Bozo, the clown from hell, all slapstick and bravado. His platform consisted of some relatively unthreatening centre-right soundbites, which is one reason why the (quite legitimate) attempts to make him sound scary didn't work. One very small contributor to Johnson's win is highlighted by John Harris in the Guardian today: "the topsy-turvy, faux-progressive politics minted by the self-styled pro-war left". I don't credit Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and company with very much influence at all, but they certainly contributed to the reactionary media campaign about 'Islamism', providing a 'progressive' proscenium for the racist dramaturgy.

What of Labour's national wipe-out? First of all, we've just seen the complete enervation of the New Labour vision of a Whiggish coalition, a 'progressive' lib-lab bloc for centre-left hegemony in the 21st Century. New Labour collapsed, but the Liberals didn't pick up very much of the slack. In Wales, as in Scotland, the nationalists are getting the benefit of the anti-New Labour vote. In England, the Liberals lost control of some councils and gained some, and they seem to have a net gain overall of just one council. It is surprising in this context to see the Lib Dem result being spoken of as if it's a credible one for Nick Clegg. Commentators have been quick to draw comparisons with 1983, but the last time Labour's share of the vote was this low was in 1968, shortly after Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech and at the height of Harold Wilson's unpopularity over devaluation. Wilson's government had also, despite some moderate reformist pledges, reneged on many commitments at the behest of the IMF. What is different this time round is the extent of Labour's collapse in its heartlands. It didn't just crumble in the marginals. It lost core votes across Wales, in Hartlepool, and in Wolverhampton. It lost a strong presence in Reading, by no means a marginal seat. It was kicked out of Bury in Greater Manchester after 22 years. The rapid erosion that began under Blair is now an avalanche. Blair's 2005 election victory was more of a loss for the Tories than a thumbs-up for New Labour, with just over a third of voters backing the government and with less voters than supported Labour when it lost in 1992. It is now obvious that the Labour Party will crash to a poor second in 2010, while the Tories will pick up around 40% of the vote. The Lib Dems will not match their 22% vote in 2005.

Anyone who thinks that Labour is about to turn left is kidding themselves. Far more likely is that the government will take a more aggressive stance toward the unions (as it did in 1969, with 'In Place of Strife') and make a demonstrative crackdown on immigration (as it did with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968). Labour doesn't contain the resources for a regeneration of its battered left, any more than it did when John McDonnell failed to get enough PLP support to even run a campaign against Gordon Brown. The last vaguely leftish credible alternative to Brown was the late Robin Cook, whose standing after his dignified antiwar resignation speech would have made him the obvious candidate. And even he would have struggled. Just because the left-of-Labour vote was poor, just because the Tories have made a decisive recovery, don't think that we can place our hopes in a New Labour conversion, or that we can avoid continuing to try to build a left-of-Labour alternative. We will be lying to ourselves in quite a dangerous way if we imagine that we can claw back some space by just abandoning the electoral terrain to New Labour. The fact that it is now a more difficult task in the short-term does not mean it can be wished away.

For socialists, however, elections are not our main kind of activity. Saying that, I run the risk of appearing to diminish the hard work put in and the hopes invested in the campaign, and that is not my meaning. However, while we should spare no blushes in being directly honest about what just happened, we should not allow ourselves to disappear up our own ballot-boxes. How we intervene in the coming crises over pay, the economy, and the rising threat of racism and the far right, is far more significant than how many votes we rack up. One of the first things we can do is turn out for the protest against the Nazi BNP outside City Hall, this coming Tuesday at 6pm.

Labels: boris johnson, disaster politics, ken livingstone, left list, london, mayor, new labour

Looks like it's Boris posted by lenin

Unless something weird happens at the last moment, it looks like Boris Johnson has won - he must have quite a convincing lead for Paddy Power to be paying out bets backing the Tory. The Tories are confidently predicting victory. This can only mean one thing: there are at least a million arseholes in this city, and they've just collectively thrown their weight behind the biggest arsehole of them all, head honcho number one arsehole. No wonder I feel like kicking something.

Labels: boris johnson, disaster politics, london, mayor

Early results posted by lenin

Well, first of all for the Left List, not bad so far. The Left List has not stood many candidates outside London, so the main event will be the results for the London mayor and GLA. Nevertheless, according to the Respect website, the results in the local council elections include 37% for Muktar Master in Preston, 23% for Neil McAlister in Bolton, 12.5% for Nahella Ashraf in Manchester, 11% for Raghib Ahsan in Birmingham, and a spate of other strong results. The full results for the Left List candidates are updated regularly here. These reflect continuing pockets of strength despite the obvious difficulty of having undergone a split and then, due to a legal technicality, having to launch a new name in a very short space of time. We're down in some places but notably Muktar Master actually increased his vote somewhat, and was barely kept out by the Labour candidate. Having seen the results for both sides of the split organisation, I can see that both have suffered somewhat in a number of areas. I am not going to get lachrymose about that - we all knew it was coming, and anyone who didn't had their head buried in rocks. The real question from my point of view is what sort of basis the mainstream of Respect that stood as the Left List has for a regroupment, and while we shall have to see how well we've done in London, these few results show that we're in a decent position. (I don't want to be rude, but I honestly don't think the Renewalists have any such basis, simply on account of who they are and the incoherent politics holding the fragile coalition together. My intuition is that they are going to spend a few years guarding diminishing pockets of strength and slowly seeping back into the Labour Party.)

The big picture, beyond insurgent left-of-Labourism, is that the Tories have made significant gains across the board, with 147 new councillors at the minute. According to The Guardian, with a turnout of 35%, "Labour looked set to be pushed into third place, with a meagre 24% share of the vote, trailing the Lib Dems on 25% and the Tories on 44%." This is a catastrophic low of New Labour's making, and it is self-evident that nothing beyond a sudden very popular policy reversal could have saved the situation. And the fact that it is going to continue in 2009 makes the task of building a left alternative all the more urgent. This is a perception quite contrary to the impulses of some who take it as a cue to rush back to the Labour Party. But that is British politics for you - the rats flee onto the sinking ship rather than the other way about. In addition to the Tories' success, the BNP have 8 extra councillors including two in the Labour stronghold of Rotherham and a couple of new ones in Coventry and Warwickshire. From what I gather, their overall vote has not surged and is probably even down a bit, which is a relief. But if the far right can pick up 8 council seats and that is not a big night for them, this just points to how much they have been able to insinuate their way into local politics on the basis of the toxic Islamophobia and bigoted nonsense about asylum seekers that their Express-reading petit-bourgeois constituents lap up. And we haven't seen their results in London yet - if they get someone on the assembly, we're talking about a whole new kind of fight, especially if it coincides with the victory for Boris Johnson that the fascists are eager for.

The liberals have done abysmally. In the prevailing circumstances, they ought to have been taking Labour councils. They certainly did far better under the slightly left-of-centre leadership of Charles Kennedy, but they are crashing and burning under an uncharismatic right-wing leadership after the Orange Book crowd mounted an effective coup. It's not just that they don't have any distinctive policies to speak of. They don't even have any resonant policy flavours. In 2005, they were seen as a major 'anti-war' party, and they made gains as a result. They seemed to stand against the corrupt and hated Blair regime on some principled grounds. Now the co-ordinates of the situation have drastically changed. They no longer have the affable Chuckie-Egg, New Labour no longer has Blair, and the Tories no longer have Michael Howard. Their London candidate is even less memorable than Susan Kramer and will be lucky not to see his vote fall below the 2004 level. True, the war is not as immediate an issue as it was before. If it points to everything that is rotten about New Labour and unites a broad swathe of people against the party, it has been eclipsed by the economic crisis and the government's responses to that - the public sector pay cuts, the blundering over Northern Rock, and the abolition of the ten pence tax rate. However, I can't believe that even supercop Brian Paddick really believed that people would storm the polls on the basis of a promise to 'cut crime'.

If these results are a reliable guide, it seems likely that New Labour are in for a hammering in London. And it's hard to see Ken Livingstone escaping from that - he might just scrape through on the basis of not being Boris Johnson, perhaps with a small lead in second preferences, but if so he's going to be presiding over an Assembly that has more Tories in it. The Greens, who have made a few gains nationally, but are generally on stalemate, may have been boosted by the attention given to them in the press coverage - Sian Berry is seen as somehow the 'natural' fourth candidate, despite the fact that the Greens were beaten by Lindsey German in 2004, and has already received the full backing of the Independent and a nod of approval from the Observer. Yet, the Greens have done little to distinguish themselves from New Labour, and it is hard not see their London campaign as an adjunct of Livingstone's. That is partially a result of a conscious decision not to seem left-wing, as the party's election agent Chris Rose has explained. Further, their record in power is pretty flimsy and sometimes disgusting - as per Jenny Jones' backing for Sir Ian Blair (so much for the party of civil liberties and anti-racism). Given that, it is just possible that they will suffer from some of the same reflux that is about to hit New Labour.

While I don't think people are moving sharply to the Right, the Tories are going to be the main beneficiaries of New Labour's woes for as long as the alternatives are faceless Lib Dems, rightward-moving Greens, and some small radical parties. And the Tories will be much more aggressive on privatization and public sector pay, and may well try to force through strike bans. There is no alternative to the project of realignment, which must be grounded in the organised working class.

Update: We've just got a brilliant result in Sheffield Burngreave, where we came second with about 23% of the vote, beating the Greens and the Tories.

Labels: bnp scum, boris johnson, gla elections, ken livingstone, left list, lindsey german, local council elections, london, sad sack liberals

May Day Greetings posted by lenin

Labels: left list, may 1968, may day, workers solidarity

And we're back. posted by lenin

Just in time for the election, the Tomb returns (like, er, Jesus and Easter and that). Just so that we're clear, this is your programme for today. You have three chances to vote, and what follows is an insultingly obvious step-by-step strategy for you to help secure the best possible result for the Left:

1. The Mayoral vote. PINK BALLOT PAPER
Has first and second preference. If you vote Lindsey 1 and Ken 2, you will in no way jeopardise Ken's chance of beating Boris Johnson. Voting Lindsey first will send a clear message that you are not happy with the way Livingstone is cosying up to City and the property developers.
Once the first preferences are counted, the top two candidates are set aside and everyone else's votes are re-distributed as per the second preferences. Once they are totalled the Mayor is decided. A second preference counts no less than a first preference.
Vote with a cross for No 5 Lindsey in the first column, if you want to put a cross for Ken in the second column.

2. The constituency candidates. YELLOW BALLOT PAPER
We are standing Left List candidates across the city, and the constituency elections are decided just like parliamentary elections - first past the post.
Vote Left List candidate with a cross.

3. The London Wide Assembly Member. PEACH BALLOT PAPER
This is perhaps the most important part of the election. It is proportional representation. If the Left List gets 5% of the vote, Lindsey gets elected. Conversely if the BNP get 5% they get a seat. We need the MAXIMUM turnout in this part of the election to get representation and to keep the BNP out.
One cross, next to No 8 Left List

Interesting to see what note the campaigns are heading to the polls on. Livingstone is rehashing his support for 'zero tolerance' policies, using the language of New Labour's 'Respect agenda'. He may just scrape through, but if he does it will be no thanks to his endless prostration before the Blairite court. Boris Johnson is wisely concealing himself from the public, and not saying too much about anything. This is presumably so that the first thing voters remember will not be a spoiled upper class reactionary who can't remember his lines, but rather a spoiled upper class reactionary who can't remember his lines on Have I Got News For You. The Greens, whose mayoral candidate is supported by the Federation of Small Businesses, have recently consolidated their pact with New Labour by launching a joint 'green manifesto' with Ken Livingstone. Brian Paddick is fading gracefully into the background, registering a pathetic 12% of the vote for the Lib Dems. I still don't know what exactly his campaign is about, beyond the fact that he is an ex-copper and considers himself the 'serious choice' for Londoners. I also heard once that he preferred hope to fear, which is nice, but I both hope and fear that he'll be doing traffic duty before the dust has settled.

So, at this glorious apex of Metropolitan democracy, in which no serious issue has failed to be neglected, there is only one candidate who doesn't believe in unaffordable housing, wants to slash tube and bus fares, isn't afraid to mention the war, and will back trade unionists. You know what to do.

Labels: gla elections, left list, lindsey german, london, mayor, socialism