Miliband strikes posted by lenin

What a day for the androids! Miliband half comes out as a leadership challenger, then backs down under pressure from Downing Street, but then it is noticed that he wouldn't explicitly rule out a leadership challenge. On the basis of this hopeless placard, Labour's demoralised members have nothing - neither policies nor charisma nor added common sense - to hope for in a Miliband leadership. As a pronunciamento from a plotting putschist it lacks everything, including novelty. "Labour needs to change and change now" is how The Guardian summarises Miliband's intervention. In fact, the argument is that Labour must not change under any circumstances, but must defend everything it has done, and insist that the only flaw is that it didn't do it faster and better. Even the language must remain the same, the better to reinforce a stifling orthodoxy - "the many, not the few", "change" this, "radical" that, "modernisation" the other... Whoever wrote this drivel for Miliband has the mind of a small child, and he better give it back.

It was mentioned in the papers the other day that if the swing at Glasgow East were repeated in Labour's remaining heartlands (how hollow that term is beginning to seem), there would only be a dozen Labour MPs left after the next general election. The Tories have a clear plurality in every sector of the electorate, whether you stratify them by gender, region, age, or 'social class' (see poll [pdf]). From leading by 10% this time last year, Labour is now behind 19% (poll [pdf]). Recent polling evidence [pdf] suggests that the government's core policies of pay restraint in the public sector and tax breaks for corporations and the rich are deeply unpopular. Unsurprisingly, a party that assures us there is no such thing as class and then goes on to take the side of the ruling class in every key policy area or battle is making itself look a bit ridiculous and contemptible. Because of the government's commitment to privatization (what Miliband somnolently calls 'NHS reform'), New Labour is now even less trusted on the NHS than the Tories. That is a colossal reversal, and it shows that while people did support massive public investment, you can't disaggregate that investment from what is done with it. If you plough billions into colossally wasteful PFI projects, which everyone knows are wasteful and reduce the quality of care provided, you don't get brownie points. If you ram through a raft of market-driven measures and internal competition, which is the reverse of what Labour promised to do, you don't improve people's experience of the health service. Naturally, people are turning against the governing party on what was once its biggest strength. I don't think I need to keep underlining the point: New Labour is in meltdown on all fronts, and the cause of it is policy. The Miliband clarion call for 'change' actually maintains that all will be well if you only explain to the voters that New Labour was right all along, and that everything is going fabulously well.

This is not just a foolish political logic, but part of a dangerous epoch we are in. When people are suffering, stressed, in pain, they will look for solutions, not soothing bromides. And if real solutions aren't in evidence, the pseudo-solutions of the far right may gain a bigger foothold. Look at what's happened just today: British Gas put up prices by 35%. What can Gordon Brown say about this? He wouldn't dream of nationalising the energy giants. He is unlikely to even consider a tax on energy profits and a mandatory cut in fuel bills. He surely isn't going to ask us to 'stop wasting energy', is he? So, the recession is going to kick in, alongside soaring food and energy prices, and the government can only insist on belt-tightening from its constituents and obedience from its supporters. The trade unions got precious little for their supposedly militant demands in Warwick Two, and there is a reason for this: because they fundamentally accept the system that is crashing and burning, they have to accept that it needs to be rescued with wage restraint and public sector spending curbs. And they are subject to intense pressure to reinforce the government's line on 'belt-tightening' with their membership. Only a powerful, countervailing pressure from the rank and file could possibly stiffen their spines. Without working class militancy of the kind we have seen in Germany and, recently, Poland, we are going to see the politics of despair and reaction thrive.

As for Miliband, one last question: where did this idea that he is some kind of a rising star come from? I gather that the papers like him, but who else does? Is he even remotely electable? Transplanted into one of the safest Labour seats in the country, where his predecessor had a 56.8% majority (Miliband has helped chisel that down to 40.8%, and probably much lower still come 2010), has he ever really been tested? Both Blair and Brown had years of political streetfighting in them before they got to power, but Miliband has always been essentially a Blairite mini-me for as long as he has been in politics. The man is a suit-stuffer, probably set to go down as the Portillo of the 2010 election. So, again, enlighten me: who said he was a star?

Labels: capitalism, david cameron, david miliband, fascism, gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, tories

The religion of the masses posted by Roobin

In 1938 Albert Hoffman developed the most important drug of the 20th century. I am speaking of LSD-25.

LSD is a twentieth century drug. Invented, perfected and propagated in the twentieth century. It reached the height of social significance during a period of upheaval and challenge. People placed great significance on it. Its various advocates saw it as a cure for alcoholism, a lever for psychiatry, a chemical weapon, a sacrament and the agency of revolution.

The period of upheaval is, of course, the nineteen sixties. The fallout from the sixties helped create the stasis of the 80s, 90s and 21st century. It helped make us who we are today and for that reason its worth looking at. It’s also worth noting that acid a social phenomenon will probably never come again.

Why the focus on mind altering substances? More or less for the observation Hunter S Thompson made at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: consciousness expansion went out with the sixties. Looking back in 1971 he recalls:

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

The sixties were a culmination of a slow awakening from the war nightmare (by the way, what a wonderful passage that is!). The war babies had become post war adults. Scarcity and violence had been abolished. The world of virtue and delayed pleasure, the world their parents inhabited, made no sense. What’s rational is actual. The world was ripe for overturning. What do we want? When do we want it?

Now.

The extent to which the world fought back to a greater degree determined the political level of youth culture. In America there was the obvious clash with the Vietnam war draft and Jim Crow. I don’t want to dwell on it, but it’s easy to imagine Sgt Pepper in America as an uptight bureaucrat or politician instead of a charming bandleader.

The sixties were made for uppers, consciousness expansion. Unlimited horizons draw people on, trying to reach vanishing point. Take the spiritual dimension of LSD. Religion in the west taught delayed pleasure and humble worship through powerful institutions (catholic faith has to travel through a middle man, the priest, there is no other way). The youth movement did look to eastern religion for inspiration and a spiritual centre, varieties of Buddhism and Hinduism. But you still have the problem, why wait for pleasure and enlightenment when you can get it all for 3 bucks a hit?

Historians and HST fans know the next line:

So now, less than five years later, you can up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark – that place where the wave broke and rolled back.

Their energy didn’t simply prevail. The kids didn’t break on through to the other side. Youth/drug culture of the seventies was locked in a “survival trip”. Downers became the vogue: “whatever Fucks You Up – whatever short circuits your brain and grounds it out for as long as possible”.

It’s a neat illustration of social change as viewed through drug consumption.

As long as people have had minds they’ve had minds to alter. There is the Terrence McKenna theory of the legend of the fall of man (the tree of knowledge held an ergot infected fruit, which first galvanised our ancestor’s minds). An example: the Chinese were the first people reckoned to have cultivated cannabis, around 2,600 BC. Herodotus, meanwhile, was the first western historian to have recorded its use as drug (in Scythia people used to throw seeds on hot stones, inhale the vapour and “howl with joy”).

But we can already see the interaction of drug and society is more complicated than good times/bad times. Return to the spiritual theme: one of the most famous proselytisers of LSD was Timothy Leary. He promoted LSD as both a force for revolution and the foundation of a new religion (originally predicted by Aldous Huxley).

What he was driving at was the parallel between (in particular) Buddhist concepts of death and reincarnation and familiar psychedelic experiences (ego-loss, oceanic consciousness, “I know what it’s like to be dead” etc). He tried to reconcile these different experiences, to this end he wrote The Psychedelic Experience, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was written to be whispered to the dying as they passed between incarnations.

On this basis he was able to sell LSD as a sacrament to an affluent but alienated generation. By the sixties, western Christianity had long been in decline, its basis worn away by numerous scientific and social discoveries. Perhaps its sole appeal remained as a communal focal point, the ritual being an end in itself (best described, and critiqued in the bleak lyric of Eleanor Rigby: perhaps the Beatles most blunt social commentary).

This had very little appeal for a generation that felt it didn’t have to wait for the afterlife when it knew it could have heaven on earth. But why wasn’t there heaven on earth? Now we get onto the first part of Leary’s prescription.

We've talked a lot about the rise of the military/industrial complex in WW2 and the determining effect it had. While the permanent arms economy was able to deliver a long boom and keep the working class sated it thoroughly smothered all life and vibrancy.

Leary was a renegade Harvard psychologist. His philosophy has been described as a blend of “post-Freudian psychology, zen and New Left utopianism”. When regarding society he drew on the model of the Id, Ego and Superego. The id is unbridled desire: I want, I need. The superego is the conscience: I should, I ought. Where these two meet the ego, the outward personality is formed. What people feel they should or ought to do is determined by society.

In Leary’s (and our) age this is industrial capitalism. If people were so intensely atomised, moulded and reorganised by the capitalist system, introducing a powerful hallucinogenic drug such as LSD, with its sense enhancing, ego-shattering power, could easily catalyse social revolution.

This was a widely held model, from Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies to the Situationists. Sensory disruption, the freak out, the acid test, became a standard tactic for political activists. The fact that any Russian populist could have told them the limits of the “propaganda of the deed” didn’t matter. The target was the head, the military/industrial complex, the rational machine that processed young people into crew cut drones fit for the factory, office or army. Acid would break people’s commitment and belief in that system.

Which is an irony as LSD was, if anything, the creation of the scientific (and military) establishment.

The hallucinogenic properties of LSD-25 were first discovered on April 19th 1943, 5 years after it was created, when Albert Hoffman experimented on himself in what’s now known as the Bicycle Day (Hoffman asked his assistant to escort him home on a bicycle after the effects began to kick in).

LSD was introduced into America in 1948 and was soon hailed as a cure-all for schizophrenia to criminality to alcoholism. In the 50s it was common to use the drug in psychiatry. Between 1950 and 1975 over 1,000 research papers were written into LSD and other hallucinogens. Many of them were connected with research conducted for the American government, who investigated its potential as a truth drug, a form of psychic torture and even a chemical weapon (there’s some wonderful footage still around of the effects of LSD on military discipline).

Thousands upon thousands of people participated in these tests, from Timothy Leary to Ken Kesey to the actor Cary Grant. It was out of military bases, hospitals and, in particular, university campuses that LSD made its way into wider circulation, becoming a recreational drug.

What of drugs and society today? LSD will probably never have the same importance it did forty-fifty years ago. The common reaction to alienation and exploitation over the past twenty-thirty years has been flight. Autonomism came out of Marxism. It was refined into a theory that proposed instead of promoting and organising social confrontation, radicals should aim for immediate, small-scale (but, presumably spreading) rebellion, creating an autonomous space free from capital.

An early example of this would be the flight of the New Left in southern California to agricultural communes in a “back to the land” movement. We might suggest that widely practiced autonomism would be just as unsuccessful as the communes of the sixties and seventies. Without a stable axis, New Left politics and in particular LSD culture, drifted from oceanic consciousness to introspection and finally to outright self-regard and avarice… just in time for the eighties!

The neo-liberal era drug of choice has been ecstasy. In Britain the Second Summer of Love, the anti-poll tax movement and the fall of Thatcher came hot on the heels and complimented each other. They were pivotal in creating modern Britain. MDMA is the running theme of that period.

We live in an age where people are fighting to recover class-consciousness, ideas such as solidarity and social well-being. The job is still at hand. While LSD has a great past Ecstasy could still have a momentous future.

Labels: 60s, Drug Culture, LSD, Military/Industrial Complex, New Left, Post War Boom

"From the Memory of the Class" posted by lenin

Hossam el-Hamalawy discovered scores of prize photographs of our shared history in the Socialist Worker archives, including images from the Russian Revolution. You can watch a brief slide show of some of the collection here.

Labels: history, photographs, socialism, working class

Little evil me? posted by lenin

I really am going to have to insist that Harry's Place stops with its cult of my personality. First they plugged my speech at Marxism, then they, er, 'celebrated' my graduation, and now this. The author, presumably in all seriousness, says that I "supported Serbian territorial expansion" in Croatia. Marko, dearest, I was thirteen when that shit started and wouldn't have known Serbia from a tennis shoe. What he means to say, perhaps, is that I would have supported such a procedure. His 'gotcha' consists of a retort in the comments box to someone brazenly supporting Operation Storm, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed. This is what I said:

So, you just accept the claims of Croatian nationalism, then? No negotiations, no border rectifications, no arrangements for the increasingly oppressed and demonised Serb minority, just take the land and tell the others to fuck off? Some socialist.

...

You’re stuck with your support for Croatian nationalism, then. It doesn’t occur to you for a second that there might be legitimate problems for an oppressed minority following an unnegotiated secession with no dialogue or border rectifications.

Hoare then goes on to offer his interpretation services to HP Sauce readers, who at this point would be snapping their crayons in puzzlement: "he’s saying that the proper solution to the Serb question in Croatia was for part of Croatia’s territory, where Serbs lived, to have been taken from it and annexed to Serbia, thereby creating a ‘Great Serbia’." His over-hasty prosecutorial zeal has led Hoare to neglect to ask the author of the quoted ripostes whether in fact he is indeed "saying" that, but I believe I have the advantage here. After all, I am not the one who [would have] supported the logic of secessionism in the first place, and therefore I would have no problem explaining why the construction of separate states based on ethnic exclusivity would be no solution. It is Hoare who, considering Croatia's secession legitimate and worthy of full-throated support, has to answer why the Krajina Serbs were not entitled to independence from Croatia (and political union with Serbia if they wished). This is particularly the case since the Serbs living in Krajina were, like other Serbs living throughout Croatia, genuinely victims of repression and ethnic hatred by a state whose early gestures included the rescuscitation of fascist symbolism. But if there is going to be secession, ought there not be negotiations as opposed to a unilateral military take-over of the territory? Might there not be a concession of territory by both parties, or are the borders of some states eternal and inviolable, like the Holy Mother's virginity? The logic of supporting ethnic nationalism in Croatia, an ultra-reactionary political project from its inception, is what has produced Hoare's hysterical twaddle. Anything that might appear as remotely sceptical about Croatia's inherent right to dispose of the territory (and the people living there) as it wishes must be taken as an affront.

Hoare also reminds readers that I don't agree with describing the camps run by Bosnian Serbs as 'concentration camps'. He of course redacts my description of said camps, and omits to mention that the main thrust was that there were similar camps with similar atrocities maintained by all the warring parties in Bosnia, with little attention paid by our vigilant press. He also says I am endorsing Living Marxism's claims, which have been 'disproved' in court. In fact, I endorsed the verdict of Phillip Knightley, citing him twice, not that of Thomas Deichmann, cited nowhere. The court did not 'disprove' the points that a) not all those present were emaciated like Fikret Alic, because people could be fed, and therefore the broadcast was wrong to give the impression that people were being forcibly starved; b) many people could come and go, and therefore not all were imprisoned; and c) those who were prisoners were not being held by barbed wire, but by armed guards, which point was obscured because it disrupted the symbolism of the concentration camp. Those were the points I cited. And at at any rate, I am not as content as Hoare evidently is to accept a court's verdict at a libel trial as the final word on a complex, multifaceted historical record. In another bid to establish my evil-doing propinquities, Hoare explains that "Seymour is on record as describing Milosevic’s dictatorship as ‘a state with an elected government, legal opposition parties, independent trade unions, and opposition demonstrations permitted’". It is enough to state the obvious to be indicted in Hoare's petty tribunal. And finally: "He responded to the International Court of Justice’s recognition of the Srebrenica genocide by continuing to deny that genocide had occurred: ‘the massacre of thousands of men of military age is an atrocity, but under no reasonable definition is it genocide’." This point is telling, but not in the way Hoare thinks it is. After all, it would not in itself matter whether such an unspeakable atrocity was genocide or 'merely' a massacre. The condemnation or otherwise of such conduct does not depend on defining it in this way. But for supporters of Croatian and then Bosnian nationalism, it has to be genocide because they know the word functions not in a literal way but in a propagandistic sense. Prophylactically, it isolates the Bosnian Serbs as uniquely malevolent in that conflict, and therefore provides the prior justification for the vicious ethnic nationalism and brutality of the HVO and BiH and their auxiliaries. It affirms a narrative elaborated since 1991, long before Srebrenica became a household name, in which the Serbian government was the Nazi threat refulgent (thus making fascist-loving Tudjman an anti-fascist resistance leader). That is why people like Hoare consider it monstrous to dispute the term - his absurd, whitewashing narrative of heroic Croatian nationalism depends on it.

The entirety of Hoare's infantile imposture is animated by this imperative. The histrionics about me having 'supported' something called 'Great Serbia', based on a couple of flimsily parsed comments box exchanges, truly befit someone who described Operation Storm as "the liberation of Krajina" and who spends much of his time trying to defend the insupportable proposition that the salient characteristics of Croatian nationalism in its militant phase - its reactionary anti-semitic leadership, its revival of fascist regalia, anti-Serb racism, repression, war crimes and ethnic cleansing - were merely incidental to a great liberation struggle.

Labels: bosnia, croatia, serbia, the liberal defense of murder, US imperialism, yugoslavia

Don't ban this filth posted by lenin

Labels: noam chomsky, pornography, sexism, state

Noam Chomsky on Pornography posted by lenin

I am particularly impressed with the way he just trashes the free market arguments of the pornographic industry (as in, 'she chose to do it').

Labels: misogyny, noam chomsky, pornography, women

Back to Trnopolje posted by lenin

Labels: 'death camps', bosnia, itn, lm, serbia, trnopolje, US imperialism, yugoslavia

Unequal before the law posted by lenin

Berlusconi has won legislation that will force illegal immigrants charged with crimes to serve sentences a third longer than Italians. Oh, and they're also going to let soldiers patrol the streets alongside the police. And next year, I'm sure, the camicie nere will be permitted to join them to the soundtrack of Giovinezza.

Labels: berlusconi, fascism, immigration, italy, racism

Last will and testament posted by lenin

It has been said that 'Orwell's Victory' was the late Christopher Hitchens' last decent book before he went fully over to the dark side. It does a decent enough job of defending Orwell from some unfair critics, defends Orwell's anti-imperialism (albeit he doesn't linger on the support for the Palestinians, almost unique among European left-wingers at the time), shows that his insight into 'totalitarianism' in part derived from his experience of the colonial labyrinth, and contains some judicious criticisms of Orwell's prose where necessary. It also has an embarrassingly poor section, seeking to defend Orwell's notion of linguistic transparency against the 'postmodernists', in which he barely sets a foot right (apparently, postmodernism is 'in essence' the proposition that nothing will ever happen again for the first time). There is a dubious defense of a conception of Englishness and bourgeois values such as 'decency'. But what is worse than embarrassing and actually a little sickening is the psychologising about the urge to dominate and be dominated. At the end of chapter 8, Hitchens has this to say:

With a part of themselves, humans relish cruelty and war and absolute capricious authority, are bored by civilized and humane pursuits and understand only too well the latent connection between sexual repression and orgiastic vicarious collectivised release. Some regimes have been popular not in spite of their irrationality and cruelty, but because of it. There will always be Trotskys and Goldsteins and even Winston Smiths, but it must be clearly understood that the odds are overwhelmingly against them, and that as with Camus's rebel, the crowd will yell with joy to see them dragged to the scaffold. This long and steady look into the void was Orwell's apotheosis of 'the power of facing'. (pp 169-70)

I raise this passage because it concentrates in a few sentences a number of themes prized by 'antitotalitarians'. (Hitchens places Orwell alongside that bunch, including Koestler and Silone, which would actually seem vaguely insulting, since Silone was a police informer and Koestler a supporter of Zionist terror, who jokingly referred to himself as a 'colonial'). From the BHLs to the Kanan Makiyas, this posited instinct for cruelty and evil is a mainstay of 'liberal antitotalitarianism'. Nick Cohen's inchoate attempt to 'explain' what he insists is inexplicable (said 'totalitarianism') rests on a mish-mash of pseudo-psychoanalytical motifs - the will to obey, group solidarity, etc. The Cold War psychology of Maslow and the pre-Cold War psychologisms of John Spargo are drawn from the same well. And, of course, the fear of the masses, and the exaltation of Camus and his lone rebel, is commonplace with this crowd. It's a pleasing, self-serving fiction for the soi-disant contrarian, but one already dismantled by Alistair Macintyre. All of which is just to indicate that this flight from serious left-wing politics to individualised moralising about 'integrity' and so on was already much in evidence before the fat Englishman had his meltdown post-9/11.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

"A People's History of the World" posted by lenin

Me, reviewing Chris Harman in the New Statesman.

Labels: a people's history of the world, the complete and utter works of richard seymour

Stick a fork in him posted by lenin

Brown is finished. Let me say that again: Brown is finished. One more time: Brown is finished. I had an inkling this was coming when I saw Margaret Curran's election message for Labour on the BBC - discoursing grimly on the unacceptable inequalities that made Glasgow East so poor, she insisted that the correct response was to ensure everyone had access to sports and ate healthily. Seriously, however, I doubt Curran had much to do with it. And she has every reason to feel disappointed. Labour was ahead in the polls, and there was a jumbo majority that the SNP had a tiny margin of time to erode. But the rate at which New Labour heartlands have been evaporating, turning over to any opposition that runs a half-decent campaign, has been nothing short of astonishing. And look, this turnout may have been down on the general election, but it's actually quite decent for a bye-election. It looks like, alongside glum Labour voters sitting on their hands, there were quite a few motivated voters determined to smack the government.

And let's look at what the Brown administration did to, er, assist its candidate in Glasgow East. They gave in to the City and the rich on tax evasion, declared a freeze on public spending, advertised for bids on the privatised delivery of welfare, and announced a 'revolutionary' shake-up of benefits for the unemployed and incapacitated that will treat both like criminals. Everybody knows by now that Glasgow East is an overwhelmingly working class constituency, with life expectancy in some areas lower than in Gaza. Unemployment is well above the national average: 10% for men over 25, 25% for women. It contains Shettleston, the most deprived area in Britain according to the UN. This is a place where even the Tory candidate was a trade union branch secretary. This is Labour turf, has been for generations, and it has stuck with Labour during the worst of the Blair years, through gritted teeth. A little bit of imagination should tell you something about the combination of fury and heartbreak that produced a 23% swing to an SNP candidate with no profile, no charisma and not much in the way of policy. Not only does the government have no solution for those squeezed by soaring food and fuel prices but to scrap the winter fuel allowance and abolish the 10p tax rate, they decide to go after those on benefits while allowing criminal companies to engage in tax evasion.

Commentators marvel at the government's apparent determination to make itself unelectable. It was once the Tories doing that, with a succession of bland right-wing leaders talking 'tough' on crime or asylum. Let me tell you something - I'm reluctant to link to the Tories, but they are actually running a petition against Brown's NHS cuts. They frame it in terms of inefficiency, of course, but in every other respect it looks like the kind of campaign one would see on a trade union website. The Tory strategy is unmistakeably to pitch for the slightly-left-of-New-Labour vote, and it may have some success. Now the government, aside from constantly attacking its own electoral base, frequently indulges in the right-wing populism that made the Tories look hateful and unelectable to many centre-right voters. (Not least of which, on Labour's part, is the surreptitious Islamophobic poison about the liberal blogger Osama Saeed, the SNP's candidate in Glasgow Central at the next election - a naked attempt to smear all SNP candidates by association with an "Islamic fundamentalist"). The story of the next election will probably be a continuation of the same: New Labour heartlands tumbling one after the others, as working class voters vent their fury about - well, take your pick from Post Office closures, privatisation, benefit cuts, public sector pay, tax breaks for the rich, the abolition of the ten pence tax rate, the abolition of the winter fuel allowance, soaring inequality, tuition fees, etc etc. So, the columnists wonder whether New Labour's head has disappeared up Brown's crack - surely, cabinet ministers with sense can see what's being done? Surely, the backbenchers can understand that their careers are at risk? Why isn't there a revolt? Well, there may be a revolt, but I suspect it would be a Blairite one aimed at removing an elephantine social misfit from a post that they would rather trust to Charles Clarke or Alan Milburn. There will not be a change of course. And the reason is simple: they are committed to this, they like doing what they're doing, they think it's sound economics and good politics. The Labour Party has spent twenty years talking itself into this happy little rut, and it no longer has the means to think that it might be good to get out.

All of which raises the question: what is to be done? My favourite kind of question as it happens. The left has to have a strategy for coping with the collapse of Labourism that doesn't threaten to drag it down with the irreparable hulk. That can neither take the form of sectarian disengagement with Labour supporters, nor can it take the form of some 'progressive alliance' uniting the various fragments of the radical left, since a) it would not necessarily be more than the sum of its parts, b) it is not going to happen anyway, and c) even if it did, it would in practise be tied to the Labour Party. Both of the above solutions are tempting short-cuts, to be sure, especially when there appears to be a paucity of alternatives. But an alternative to Labourism cannot be built from above by a loose association of 'ecosocialists' and Eurocommunists who flee under the Labour umbrella when there is the slightest of sign of precipitation. It has to come from below, and to that extent it has to come from the ongoing revival of trade union militancy, particularly from the fightback against Brown's government by the very working class who can no longer stand to vote for that shower. As these strike waves become more frequent and longer, as they are sure to do, the question that has dogged previous trade union conferences - why are we funding these bastards? - will return with force. The hardcore of Labour left hangers-on will have to look increasingly outward, toward alignments beyond the party that it is kicking them. Of course, no alternative that could conceivably be built would be a 'pure' working class movement, or from the old left. It would embrace all the diverse campaigns that the Left has thrown itself into, including defending council housing, defending asylum seekers, fighting the BNP, resisting the war, and so on.

I suppose it's about time I mentioned the People Before Profit charter, which has got the support of Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn MP, John Pilger and others. The purpose of the charter is to formulate a set of demands and signposts for the way forward. It expresses some basic requirements that the left can agree on - no wage increases below the rate of inflation, tax businesses and the rich to fund welfare and public services (particularly impose a windfall tax on energy companies), repeal anti-union laws etc. It also commits to support for various essential campaigns such as Stop the War, Unite Against Fascism, Keep Our NHS Public, and so on. You can read it in full here [pdf], although I believe a separate website is being developed for this. And you can sign it by e-mailing your name and details to: peoplebeforeprofitcharter@googlemail.com.

Labels: gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, snp, tories, working class

What are the odds? posted by lenin

Labels: 'war on terror', bosnia, genocide, iraq, radovan karadzic, torture, US imperialism, yugoslavia

"Failed by the system" posted by lenin

One of the ways the tabloids exhibit their basic indifference to the real problems around knife crime is in their indifference to its victims. When Leon Francis was stabbed to death at the age of 24, newspapers like The Sun chose to focus on his conviction for armed robbery, and to treat his murder as a matter of gang warfare. What they didn't care to know was that Leon Francis, having emerged from prison, had been trying to change his life around, and was frustrated by those supposedly there to help. Socialist Worker did what the big newspapers ought to have done. They spoke to his mother, Jackie Ranger, and found out about how the system failed him. Read on...

Labels: knife crime, racism, tabloid frenzy

Another assault on Fallujah? posted by lenin

U.S. and Iraqi forces are preparing another siege of Fallujah under the pretext of combating "terror", residents and officials say.

Located 69 km west of Baghdad, the city that suffered two devastating U.S. attacks in 2004 has watched security degrade over recent months.

"Ruling powers in the city fighting to gain full control seem willing to use the security collapse to accuse each other of either conspiracy (in lawlessness) or incapability of control," Sufian Ahmed, a lawyer and human rights activist in Fallujah told IPS.

"They suddenly changed their tone from saying that the city was the safest in Iraq to claiming that al-Qaeda is a serious threat. Fallujah residents know their so-called leaders are using security threats to terrify them for their own political interests."

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

Why don't they simply bring back the workhouses? posted by lenin

Labels: capitalism, inequality, neoliberalism, new labour, tories, welfare

Richard Seymour and his critics posted by lenin

Labels: belligerati, christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

Crime and punishment in the neoliberal twilight posted by lenin

Last year it was gun crime, this year it is knife crime, and next year it will be blunt object crime. There is hardly a day that passes without a headline about another young man who has been stabbed, usually in south London. And this is not to be dismissed. It is a serious issue. Regardless of the overall statistics, which show violent crime to be quite low compared to, say, the early 1990s, the problem is concentrated in a number of run-down working class areas and the risk is experienced in an elevated way there. And while it is true that people generally overestimate their own chances of being subject to violent crime, an artefact of a politically-driven campaign to frighten and demoralise people, in some areas and for some population groups the risk is very real. Yet, to have the issue serialised as a tabloid shriek-fest is possibly the least appropriate way to address the problem. Joan Smith pointed out the other day that serious and ongoing violent crime against women isn't receiving this treatment (apparently she has forgotten that misogynistic violence is only a media topic if Muslims are involved). Endemic violence against children by authority figures is also generally ignored.

Nonetheless, this being the topic du jour, and quite a serious one, what is the cause of it? One hears from pundits that young black men in particular are prone to violence because they exist in a survivalist subculture that values macho behaviour and endorses violence (blame Fifty Cent again). One also hears that they often come from 'broken homes' (those 'deadbeat dads' and 'absent black fathers') and thus don't form a strong identification with social norms. Various associated explanations - drugs, 'gang culture' etc - are posited with equal gravity. I simply take it as obvious that these kinds of explanations, more often than not, are about scapegoating population groups deemed in the ruling culture to be somehow 'alien' and a problem in and of themselves. Moreover, these explanations are incoherent. There are those who have listened to the So Solid Crew without blasting someone's head off. There are those who have bought and even sold drugs without knifing someone to death. And some people from single parent families are perfectly average human beings who don't carry knives with them. Again, the fact that these explanations neither explain nor cohere is not strictly relevant, since their purpose is to create an overriding impression of menace and disorder. A problem whose boundaries are not defined by race is given a racist twist in such analyses. It is the 'New Barbarism' thesis transplanted into New Cross and Stockwell. Even where it isn't explicitly racist, it is doggedly reactionary, as when commentators recycle Blair's old speeches on 'respect' and its putative breakdown. Can't we just go back to the 1930s, when everyone knew their place and the kids could get a clip round the ear from a disgruntled bobby if they misbehaved?

The scholarly research points to alternative conclusions, with radical policy implications. For example, one recent study by Fajnzylber et al on the causes of violent crime took a trans-national analysis of various trends and found one outstanding factor: income inequality raises violent crime rates dramatically. This is backed up by earlier research. Related factors such as educational inequality, and 'ethnic polarisation' (racism in the society) contribute as well, while the rate of such crimes fluctuates with the economic cycle (much of violent crime being property-related). The dry statistics point to a reality that is palpable for anyone who lives in London, where all of these social ills co-exist, and where inequality of all kinds is glaringly apparent. It is not so surprising that there are a relatively small number of extremely damaged individuals who, as Yuri Prasad argues, "see little value in human life – neither theirs, nor anyone else's".

What about drugs? Andrew Resignato at Florida State University has summed up a wealth of literature on this topic, and concludes that there is in fact scarce data to support the thesis of a positive correlation between drug use and violent crime. On the contrary, there is a much stronger correlation between the enforcement of drug laws and violent crime. Drug users who do have to support the cost of their habit (inflated by dint of its control by criminal cartels) through crime tend to opt for non-violent means. On the other hand, the more investment in policing to control the sumptuary habits of the poor, the more likely there is to be violent crime. This is unsurprising. Create an illicit capitalist economy in the hands of extra-legal cartels embroiled in competition with one another, with that competition delegated down to those lowest in the hierarchy, and you get a great deal of violence in the process. I strongly suspect that states which impose drug laws are well aware of this, and that their function is to facilitate a strongly interventionist police force with ready-made pretexts for detaining and imprisoning people considered dysfunctional to the society's requirements. It keeps 'problem' populations, generally the urban poor, under tight surveillance. It criminalises them before they have necessarily even broken the law.

If talking tough and ratcheting up repression, with heavily policed schools and widely used stop-and-search applied in a racist fashion, worked, then American cities would be the safest in the world. Yet this is exactly what New Labour, and the Tories after them, will continue to do. Can we even take them seriously when they claim to want to deal with the problem? Is it not obvious that the periodic episodes of hysteria on what are chronic problems are opportunistic attempts to expand the state's repressive capacities? Isn't this just what we have seen in other fields, such as 'anti-terror' legislation, whose dystopian precepts were being driven through parliament by New Labour well before 9/11 or 7/7? We now have a criminal justice system with an extraordinary scope for control, with such disgraceful policies as curfews and ASBOs, in which non-criminal behaviour becomes the subject of sanction. Given that crime rates are not soaring, given that the risks that people face of encountering violence have not substantially altered, the most likely explanation is that as the neoliberal era enters its most decadent phase, states are attempting to manage the adverse social by-products of the descent with an iron fist.

And next year, when they've got round to blunt object crime, the newspapers and politicians will pretend that it's all new again, that we've never been here before, and that whatever repression is in place isn't enough.

Labels: 'war on drugs', crime, inequality, knife crime, neoliberalism, racism

Graduated posted by lenin

BA in Politics, Philosophy and History, first class with honours. One step closer to world domination.

Labels: world domination

Union militancy and New Labour posted by lenin

This week's big two-day public sector strikes (detailed coverage with pics and on-scene reports here) is to be followed up by further local actions by PCS workers. There are picket lines by the Coastguard and Home Office employees across the country today. A nationwide three-day strike is now planned for Autumn. Passport workers in Northern Ireland have just voted for strike action as well. Employers are predictably talking down the success of the strike, saying only 100,000 turned out, but they protest too much. As Socialist Worker points out, the BBC regional correspondent reported 70,000 on strike in Yorkshire and Humberside alone.

Much as one may wish that strike actions were not so brief and the period between them so long, there is evidently something bigger percolating away here. The rate at which public sector workers are opting to fight the government is not just a manifestation of reviving industrial militancy in the most unionised sectors of the economy. It is poison for the government's electoral chances, who are now positioning themselves as the class enemy of some of their key constituents. Yet New Labour is so wedded to this policy that it is trying to defend a heartland Glasgow seat with a mountainous but threatened majority with a candidate who will not say a single word of criticism about the policy, preferring to rely on contrived prolier-than-thou credentials. Clearly, the SNP would have to fight a serious battle to take the seat, but the difficulty for New Labour is that its voters won't turn out to match their standing in the polls. The union leadership is evidently still hoping to force a change of policy with this rank-and-file pressure as an added bargaining lever. They know the governing party is short of cash and will be tapping them for it, just as surely as they know they will provide it unless the members force a decisive break with Labour. Despite the calamitous state of would-be alternatives for the time being, the scale of the government's attack on workers is likely to intensify moves in that direction. Absent a viable national alternative, funding may well tend to be distributed in a more fragmented fashion with some even going to the Liberals (yech, can you imagine?).

The opposition, despite its venomous hostility to trade unions, is keeping relatively quiet about this. In fact, it is bigging itself up as the party of the poor. Not only that, but when David Cameron made his lousy statement about absentee black fathers, he got the backing of a selection of 'community leaders' (how I hate that phrase and everything it implies), who said that the Tories were more progressive on social investment than Labour. This probably doesn't forebode an upsurge of working class conservatism as in 1979. After all, the Tories are concealing their agenda, not aggressively propounding it as the way forward. But with every passing day and every new action by the government, which has never seen a bungled attempt at right-wing 'populism' that it didn't like, it becomes more and more obvious that Labour voters are going to stay at home in droves, repelled by the government and unafraid of the Tories. New Labour is about to discover the true meaning of the phrase 'things can only get better'.

Labels: gordon brown, new labour, public sector pay, strikes, tories, trade unions

Idea for a play posted by lenin

Genoa, 2001: a haphazardly dressed 'maniac' penetrates police headquarters in the Bolzaneto district, shortly after a mysterious incident in which hundreds of international anticapitalist protesters are ferociously beaten to injury and near-death. With no clues, no leads, and no suspects except the victims themselves, the police are anxiously attempting to secure the arrest of old ladies with cracked skulls. The 'maniac', adopting a variety of disguises, induces the police to leap through the hoops of their own illogical explanations for what took place: they weren't really injured, or if they were, the injuries were old; they attacked the police first; they were fighting among themselves; they were Black Bloc... Gradually, one by one, he provokes the officers to admit the sinister truth - that under the guidance of the neo-fascist deputy Prime Minister, and with assurances of impunity, the police systematically attacked, beat, tortured, humiliated and threatened with rape hundreds of people they knew to be innocent of any crime, for the purpose of terrorising them and the movement they represented. The police officers pour out their hatred for the dirty queers and communists and environmentalists and gypsies who pollute the otherwise pristine body of beautiful Italy. They reminisce about fascists - Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, all great men. They sing the old fascist songs, and laugh about how easy it is to con the bourgeois press into swallowing any lies, any contortions, any manifest absurdities. But just as the play reaches its finale, the 'maniac' is exposed as a fraud and a penetrator - one of those filthy communists, no less. They prepare to defenestrate him. But, just as they have him by the ankles, his bag of disguises begins to tick noisily. Inside it, they find a bomb, but it's too late. The play ends with a bang.

What? What do you mean you've heard this before?

Labels: accidental death of an anarchist, anticapitalism, fascism, genoa, police

Beat Primer, part 2: Burroughs posted by Roobin

Who monopolised immortality?
Who monopolised cosmic consciousness?
Who monopolised Love Sex and Dream? …
Who took from you what is yours?
Now will they give it back?
Did they ever give anything away for nothing?
Did they ever give any more than they had to give?
Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was?

The purpose of writing on this blog is to expose and arrest the Nova Criminals… We show who they are and what they are doing and what they’ll do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly.

Burroughs is an idiosyncratic but politically committed writer. He is the most modern of the key Beats. If Kerouac is hipness was then we make Ginsberg into hipness is and Burroughs, in his most utopian moments, hipness to be.

Burroughs was an exceptionally consistent writer, true to who he was. In life and in work he was the perfect declassed bourgeois anarchist, as likely to appear on the left or right wing spectrum. He could hold very advanced views on personal liberty as well as be a vile misogynist. He was bitterly opposed to bureaucracy and coercion but scornful of anything beyond individual organisation. He could work up a stinging satire on militarism on one page and denounce the welfare state on the next. Despite being, arguably, more sophisticated than his contemporaries he was never active in social movements, unlike, say, Allen Ginsberg.

Personal and Political Bio

Despite the dazzling narrative and linguistic devices, Burroughs content is personal. In this respect he is like the other Beats. So what well was he drawing from?

Burroughs was older than the rest of the Beat Generation. He was born in 1914 into a well to do family. The family fortune was built on grandpa Burroughs patented refinement of the adding machine, the early computer. The Burroughs became idle rich. William was due to inherit part of the wealth.

By most accounts, including his early autobiography, Burroughs was a strange child. He describes his earliest memories being coloured by fear of nightmares. He was conscious of his sexuality, a key form of difference, from an early age. He was acutely but passively aware of his alienation. Alienation is felt keenly by wageworkers, but they aren’t the only ones touched by it.

When the bourgeoisie was the middle-class, young, pioneering and revolutionary, it had a life-affirming link with the world. Its members were industrialists and merchants, its advocates lawyers, doctors and journalists. The average bourgeois was seen in the thick of the workplace, anxiously directing the work going, pouring over facts and figures, profit and loss.

With the arrival of modern capitalism, the capitalist retreated from active life. Capital grew and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Capitalists could no longer marshal their empires. They delegated to a new class of managers, executives, foremen and so on. They became, as Rosa Luxemburg once described, “coupon clippers”.

Young Burroughs lived an essentially pointless life. He went to university, graduated in 1936 with a degree in English literature and a $150 a month trust. At the height of the depression he didn’t need to get a job. He drifted around Europe for a while, with enough money to “buy a good percentage of the inhabitants… male or female”. He came back to America, diddled around with graduate courses and eventually fell into drug use.

The questions, of course, could be asked: why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction… Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience.

We don’t have to take his word about addiction but his early life does confirm the archetype of the poor little rich boy. In the prison notebooks Antonio Gramsci, at one point, compares typical attitudes of American and Italian wealth. In America there is the legend of the pioneer, the bootstrap capitalist who builds an empire from dust and, importantly dedicates his life to hard work. In Italy, by comparison, it was considered bad form for a wealthy family to keep working.

This led Gramsci to draw conclusions about the quality of bourgeois life and politics. If the bourgeoisie play no active role in public life they will surely lose the knack for rule, the generations that scrapped for power will be replaced by decadent dullards.

There is a degree of truth in that observation. Gramsci wrote his notes in Mussolini’s prison. Mussolini was a fascist, the leader of a lumpen middle class movement of students and ex soldiers, which rose to power, in part, on the incapability of the Italian bourgeoisie to rule.

There is also a degree to which the observation is false. Capitalism is still here. There are many great leaders of politics, industry and commerce left. While the modern bourgeoisie may have Paris Hilton and Pixie Geldof they also have Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

Back to Burroughs: his encounter with heroin was the start of his downward spiral (for one thing, it meant he had to take up manual labour). It was also became a focal point for his literature.

On cue, here come the appetisers!



We’ve already had a couple of snippets from his early work. It’s time to introduce some of his books. Meet Junky and Queer.

In many ways they are his only two novels. Two short books about his overriding preoccupations: sex and drugs. You can read them and understand most of what he was driving at.

Their fate as books tells us something about contemporary politics and taste, particularly in publishing. Junky was first published as “Junkie: confessions of an unredeemed drug addict”, by a pulp novel publisher. Pulp novels were (and still are) cheap and sensationalist fare, designed to excite. Yet Junky is flat and matter of fact about its subject and, as the original title suggests, the subject pays no regard to traditional moral positions on narcotics. Junky was paired with another tale, a balancing story about a narcotics agent, in a super-cheap 2 for 1 deal. Queer was originally part of the same manuscript, but the material about homosexuality was hived off and allowed to gather dust until 1985.

Part of the reason for the strange, dead tone was (at least for Burroughs) his ongoing opiate addiction. Burroughs made many interesting extrapolations from drug addiction, the trade, and the nature of narcotics generally. One of the first, and clearest, was his distinction between front and back brain drugs, stimulants and depressants.

Burroughs considered opiates to be depressants. They work on the back of the brain, suppressing the emotional and social centres of thought. This for him was part of the addiction. An addict does not need society, feels no love or hate. Once they get a habit they shift to junk time, their mind and body become regulated by their addiction. While their appetite is sated they can happily sit and stare at their shoe for eight hours.

What remains of brain function is rational and fact orientated. Junkies can absorb large amounts of information uncritically and without emotional response or diversion. A famous addict, John Lennon was an avid reader. Around the time of his heroin addiction he apparently developed the knack of reading piles of newspapers from top to bottom, front to back.

To return to Burroughs, And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks title came from Kerouac and Burroughs sitting in a bar listening to a report on a fire in a zoo. The newscaster was audibly distressed. What Burroughs latched onto was not the emotion in the voice but the striking phrase.

Here you can see the building blocks of his theory of control and domination. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves.

When asked to define himself in print Burroughs wrote Junky and Queer. What’s so striking about them is they are honest but untroubled accounts of what were then (and to an extent still are) supposed to be painful subjects. The subculture Burroughs found himself in felt like home. He built on this conclusion, later expelling straights of all kinds from his pirate utopia, Interzone.

How are radicals made?

Radicals are made in response to radical situations. People make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Why did Burroughs become an individualist anarchist while others of his class and circumstances, say James Joyce or Charles Dickens (criteria: bourgeois fallen on hard times) turn to a different types of politics?

The society we live in creates determining pressures on individuals. People are developed and shaped so they can fulfil certain roles in the perpetuation of that society. People are defined in certain ways (we are common because of X: we are different because of Y). This lays the basis for common perspectives, points of view from which to view society.

Ideology is a collection of ideas based around a common point of view. Politics is a method through which those ideas can be realised. Class is a crucial defining factor in any society. In a democratic capitalist society ideology and politics are openly contested. The contest usually takes place along class lines, through parties, trade unions, chambers of commerce, newspapers and so on.

The vital classes in our society are the capitalists and the wageworkers. There are capitalist ideas and there are working class ideas, based around their perspective on society. Each class has different ways of advancing those ideas, different politics. Current capitalist politics is a competitive synthesis between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Working class politics is less well defined but still divided between those who want to fight for reform within the system and those who see struggle as a process leading beyond into a new society: reform versus revolution.

What about anarchism? Where does that fit in?

Anarchism is unlike other politics. It doesn’t struggle for power but against it in total. There have been many anarchist movements, but they’ve all suffered from the same problem. Social change doesn’t make sense without taking into account power (the history of all hitherto existing societies). Probably the greatest anarchist movement, the CNT union federation in Spain, at its crucial moment couldn’t ignore the question of power. It joined the republican government during the civil war.

It’s sometimes traditional to file anarchism under the label “petty bourgeois”. This tends to be a bit of dustbin for Marxists to chuck anomalous movements and social phenomena. A better description would be to say anarchism is a permanent fringe movement on mainstream politics.

There are two factors that can raise anarchism to prominence. The first is obvious, a dominant, all-pervasive state. The second is a lack of clear opposition politics, especially if the opposition is compromised or absorbed within the system.

Back to Burroughs

Before we go out further on a limb… The above scheme certainly applies to Burroughs political development. He left university and bummed around Europe, politics caught between the rise of Hitler and the decline of the two internationals. The labour movement in America in this time went through the popular front period followed by McCarthyism before it fell into endemic corruption.

The post-war period was characterised by witch-hunts and climb-downs. Two huge military-industrial complexes dominated the world, dominating politics and absorbing life. Given this background and his own personal history the limitations of his politics are understandable. Within this framework, however, he shows great insight.

The main course



1. Never give anything away for nothing.
2. Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait)
3. Always take everything back if you possibly can.

These are Burroughs principles of monopoly (take them and apply them to the means of production, what do you have?). They are the premise of The Naked Lunch.

Naked Lunch is what Burroughs is most famous for. More than any other writer (except perhaps James Joyce) a page of Burroughs stands alone and obvious. He took the basic themes of Junky and Queer and began building on them.

He builds through a new method of ‘routines’. The Naked Lunch can be consumed in any order. The chapters do not lead into each other or explain each other. There is a hero (of sorts) but no moral or redeeming message.

Psychology and morality have been banished altogether. Instead there is a much broader picture arising from the general collage. Naked Lunch is in many ways post-literature. It is an attempt to come to terms with new visual media, such as film and television. Parts of the book are written in script form. There are graphic scene changes, fadeouts etc. Parts of the book flip between short, graphic sentences, creating strong images.

Another comparison might be with music. Rock and roll took the very precise terms of the folk/blues lyric (I woke up this morning… My baby done gone now… etc) and broadened it out. Instead of a quick-fire narrative you have a broad appeal to the senses and the emotions. You can’t say what “a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop” literally means, you just know. This is what Naked Lunch tries to do.

What does Naked Lunch mean? It was a phrase coined by Jack Kerouac. It is the moment when you realise exactly what’s on the end of your fork. Put it another way. The French have a phrase, jamais vu, never seen. It means to regard a commonplace object with an unaccountably fresh eye.

In Naked Lunch Burroughs draws our eye toward the carefully hidden underbelly of modern capitalism. The true satire and obscenity is that madmen and perverts don’t just dine at the same table as the rich and powerful, like the pigs and men in Animal Farm, they are the one and the same: be they Doctor Benway, A.J or the County Clerk.

But Naked Lunch is more than just straight satire. It is set in a city called Interzone. It is a completely unaccountable pirate utopia where the people expelled by society as freaks gather and turn the tables (you know something is happening/but you don’t know what it is/do you/Mr Jones?). Interzone is a rich and ambivalent setting, suited to Naked Lunch’s cast of anti-heroes. It is based on the city of Tangier.

The prelude to World War One and climax of the imperial period was an incident in 1911 where Germany tried to assert its dominance over the Gibraltar straights. Part of the settlement was the division of influence in Morocco. Tangier was declared an international zone, officially (mis)administered by several European powers. For over forty years it effectively had no government. After the war it became a popular bohemian location. Many writers and artists (Mohamed Choukri, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Paul Bowles) made their way to Tangier: a little rough and tumble but cheap, laid back and with plenty of freely available keif.

Naked Lunch may never have reached print without help from his friends, Ginsberg, effectively his early agent, and Kerouac, who typed up the manuscript (which had spent months or even years scattered around Burroughs Tangier abode) at the cost of having vivid nightmares. It was published in 1959, in the face of outrage and obscenity trials. Naked Lunch is the literary revenge of the alienated and marginalized. Burroughs once described his writing as purposefully obscene, “shitting out” his Middle American background. The powers that be were right to fear Burroughs writing as it pointed out the ultimate nightmare was essential to the system itself.

Cheese and biscuits

Naked Lunch is a slim book drawn from a fat deposit of pages. The “word hoard” built up in Tangier, became the basis of his sixties output. He developed and sharpened the political thrust of Naked Lunch. Inspired by the artist Bryon Gysin, Burroughs attacks the sentence, very unit of meaning and communication through the cut-up method.

He severs and reassembles sentences, developing motifs (no bueno, c’lom Friday, minutes to go and so on) and even appropriating other authors’ works (TS Eliot’s The Wasteland is used heavily). His abiding metaphor became the word as virus.

Religion, politics or philosophy, human systems of power and control, are designed to win acceptance and reproduce themselves. They are all built on texts. Burroughs assault is deconstruction. Deconstruction has become debased in the hands of postmodernists, a deeply cynical tool (Burroughs wasn’t above cynicism). It’s easy to forget that people once saw it as a radical, emancipatory tool. In a way Burroughs anticipated the socialist/situationist outburst of May 68, the manic desire to raze stale, state philosophies to the ground.

Bureaucracy is built up from text (red tape); ever multiplying and self-justifying text. Into this mix he chucks Inspector Bill Lee of the Nova Police, in hot pursuit of the Nova Mob, a gang of protean criminals bent on hooking populations on the word (word as drug) as a means of control and eventually destruction (word as virus). In the motif of the “nova ovens” Burroughs brilliantly conveys the horror of the century, the nazi holocaust, and the potential final holocaust, nuclear war. The Nova Mob books were written during and after the Cuban missile crisis, adding an extra dimension to the criminal gang bent on destruction.

Inspector Lee’s programme is one of “apomorphine and silence”. Lee’s department is the only non-bureaucratic police force. It does not perpetuate crime. Like apomorphine (which Burroughs credited with helping him beat his addiction) it does its job and departs.

Will Inspector Lee succeed and catch the Nova Mob? In every sense its up to you.

Coffee and mints

I hope I have shown, in a not too round-a-bout way, that Burroughs is a modern and engaging writer.

Labels: Beat Generation, Literature, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

Now You're Talking . . . to Iran! posted by Yoshie

Among all the factors impacting oil prices -- many years of underinvestment and little spare production capacity, expectations of long-term demand growth in China and other countries in the South, dollar depreciation, pension funds and others investing in commodity futures, failure to massively invest in energy conservation and renewable fuels, etc. -- the only one that is entirely and immediately under Washington's control is some of the geopolitical risk premiums that it has foolishly created itself. Most importantly, it can tell Israel to shut up, and accept nuclear Iran. Maybe even the Bush administration has finally realized that: Elaine Sciolino and Steven Lee Myers, "Policy Shift Seen in U.S. Decision on Iran Talks" (New York Times, 17 July 2008); and Ewen MacAskill, "US Plans to Station Diplomats in Iran for First Time since 1979" (Guardian, 17 July 2008).

Update

See? It's already working: "'There's been a lot of talk about what the administration would have to do to lower oil prices,' [John] Kilduff [vice president of risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York] said. 'Making a peace overture to Iran is doing the job'" (Mark Shenk, "Oil Falls for a Fourth Day as Iran Talks Ease Supply Concern," Bloomberg, 18 July 2008). Fast relief!

Be sure to communicate this message to the White House and the Congress: no peace, no oil. Make peace with Iran, whether or not it suspends uranium enrichment.

Labels: american empire, imperialism, iran, oil, stop the war

Comments posted by lenin

Everyone is banned again. Actually, Haloscan is just acting up again, so apologies to those who can't see their comments at the moment. These comments still appear in my account but they don't appear on the site - others are having a similar problem. I am turning on the Blogger comment function for the time being.

Labels: comments, everyone is banned

Charisma posted by lenin

A Weberian on the police department:

Now, in contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate administration of violence is turned over to what is euphemistically referred to as "law enforcement" — particularly, to police officers, whose real role, as police sociologists have repeatedly demonstrated, has much less to do with enforcing criminal law than with the scientific application of physical force to aid in the resolution of administrative problems. Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons. At the same time, they have, significantly, over the last fifty years or so become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. If nothing else, all this throws an odd wrinkle in Weber’s dire prophecies about the iron cage: as it turns out, faceless bureaucracies do seem inclined to throw up charismatic heroes of a sort, in the form of an endless assortment of mythic detectives, spies, and police officers—all, significantly, figures whose job is to operate precisely where the bureaucratic structures for ordering information encounter, and appeal to, genuine physical violence

...

A former LAPD officer turned sociologist (Cooper 1991) observed that the overwhelming majority of those beaten by police turn out not to be guilty of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars”, he observed. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to “define the situation.” If what I’ve been saying is true this is just what we’d expect. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema, and its monopoly of coercive force, come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

Labels: lapd, police, state, violence

Torturing Immigrants posted by lenin

Ever anxious to find ways to apply more pressure to immigrants, to keep the flow of cheap labour sufficient but also to keep them in a sufficiently precarious state that they don't get ideas about their entitlements, politicians are trying tougher new schemes. In the US, they're bragging that if you toss them prison for a while, 'illegal' Mexican labourers won't be so keen to have their little protests or get organised and run unions. In Britain, well, we do things differently. What we do is find those immigrants who are most vulnerable - those seeking asylum - break up their families, toss the men in 'detention centres' (privatised jails) and then throw them back to the misery they were trying to escape. Liam Byrne, the ultra-reactionary Home Office minister, is now warning that if your folks come to visit and stay too long, you might end up in the slammer.

And we have some rather primitive technologies for disciplining recalcitrantly mobile flesh, such as outsourced GBH [pdf]. While most of the abuse described in the linked report is casual violence inflicted by immigration officers at airports, often accompanied by racist abuse ("black bitch", "black monkey, go back to your own country"), there is some alarming evidence of high-octane battery being inflicted by officials at all levels, including in the detention centres run by private security forces. Bruised and swollen faces, fractures to the ankles and ribs, a leg that had to be plastered. Among the victims are women and children, and sometimes the whole family can look forward to a beating. One of the most telling instances is where officers administer violence to subdue someone who is being illegitimately removed. In other words, people are being detained and deported when they have representations being made or are legally present in the country. That violence is occurring because of the government's fanatical drive to deter asylum seekers in particular - Liam Byrne boasts that an immigrant is being deported every eight minutes. Still, as the report makes clear at several points, the government has a track record of paying absolutely zero attention to such problems, preferring to deny that they exist in the first place. In fact, if I may be uncharacteristically cynical for a moment, I strongly suspect that the government might actually prefer this state of affairs. Let the rough boys kick the immigrants around, make sure they know who's boss and what their status is, get the asylum numbers down and maybe one day the Daily Mail will make its peace with New Labour.

To persist with this unbecoming dubiety, I also can't help but notice the vast gulf between the alleged humanitarian concern that motivates the deployment of billion-dollar war machines and the vicious and hateful rhetoric and treatment of refugees. I can't help but notice it because everytime the government is thinking about bombing somewhere, you will find its ministers 'cracking down' on those who happen to be from that somewhere: Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe... "Tortured and emaciated? Bollocks, all I see is a very thin man. Put him on the plane. Next?" The most shameful example of this turned Jack Straw into a Saddam apologist, but it's pretty routine.

Labels: detention without trial, immigration, racism, violence

Key Points posted by lenin

On the segregation wall:

• This route will run to 723 kilometres, more than double the length of the 1949 Armistice (Green Line), with 87% located inside the West Bank (including East Jerusalem).
• The Barrier will isolate approximately 9.8% of West Bank territory, including East Jerusalem and No-Man’s Land.
• Approximately 420,000 settlers in 80 settlements will be located between the Barrier and the Green Line.
• Approximately 35,000 West Bank Palestinians will be located between the Barrier and the Green Line, in addition to the majority of the approximately 250,000 residents of East Jerusalem.
• Approximately 125,000 Palestinians in 28 communities will be surrounded on three sides by the Barrier.
• Approximately, 26,000 Palestinians in 8 communities will be surrounded on four sides by the Barrier, with a tunnel or road connection to the rest of the West Bank.

Labels: Israel, palestine, racism, west bank

Empire of sadism posted by lenin

Stories like this are news because they supposedly represent an aberration from the norm in which good-hearted British soldiers extend the best care to the natives. But look at what happened:

The victim ... says he was rounded up with a friend while trying to steal milk cartons from a food distribution centre. He was whipped, beaten and forced to strip naked.

"They made us sit on each other's laps," he said. "They were enjoying humiliating and abusing us, I wished I was dead at this moment. Then they made me sit with Tariq... where I was forced to put Tariq's penis in my mouth. The other two were made to do the same."

The opportunity for sexual sadism in this case was supplied by the ordinary run of martial law that has been imposed on Iraq. Had it been left at a whipping and beating for the crime of stealing milk, it may not have ever been reported. This sort of daily, often quite arbitrary, violence by forces who accept the minimum possible responsibility for their behaviour is just so much background noise to the war against barbarism/extremism/terrorism/savagery/etc. It just blends into the screams from the torture chambers and the crunch of metal against bone as troops shoot up cars at checkpoints or lob missiles into houses. The fact that this is perfectly ordinary behaviour by imperialist troops, under whatever authority and of whatever nationality, is always missed. Whether in Kosovo, Somalia or Haiti, whether the military mission is conducted under the NATO brand or the UN brand, there always emerges some sickening stories of systematic physical and sexual abuse of the supposed recipients of humanitarian largesse. This is not mentioned, I suspect, because most journalists wouldn't notice the connection. And though I could not help but think of a colonial officer whipping 'coolies' for similarly petty offenses (or none at all), that comparison depends on a limited background knowledge of the British empire which is generally absent in our culture. To the extent that empire did become a fashionable topic in television programmes and books in recent years, it was almost invariably to celebrate its achievements and obscure its crimes. Recent BBC series have sometimes discussed British atrocities only to cast them in light of a 'clash of civilizations' in which the anti-colonial forces were always even more savage.

Which prompts another point. Those who rightly point out the utter weirdness, the sheer lunacy, of some of the products of the industry devoted to attacking Islam, ought by now to have got the message. There can be no let up in production, no matter how absurd it is. To render these crimes tolerable requires a culture in which Amis could write and publish The Second Plane without producing an avalanche of laughter and derision. It requires a culture acclimatised to absurdity, and of constant genuflection to chimerical 'Western values', defined in opposition to putative Islamic/Islamist/Islamofascist/Islamototalitarian/etc. As an instance of the latter, take Hitchens' crude sophistry during his recent torture spiel:

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

This isn't an argument for torture (at least inasmuch as it isn't an argument), but it is an apologia. It says there is something understandable and perhaps forgiveable about subjecting a terrified prisoner to slow drowning. It says that there is something identifiable as a 'civilization' at stake (the American empire); that these men whom Hitchens so admires are the bearers of the 'values' of that civilization (what Thomas Jefferson said); that the people they put through this procedure behave in much worse ways and that anyway they bear opposing 'values' or perhaps none at all (in the fashion of Kaplan's 'new barbarism' thesis); and that to accuse the US (the Bush administration, the state and the military apparatus) of torture is to posit a 'moral equivalence' (cf Jeanne Kirkpatrick) that only the lame and the diseased (lame liberals, diseased intellectuals) would venture. All this on the basis of eleven seconds of a carefully planned and, er, watered down performance. For this impressionistic layering of pseudo-axioms to work, the barbarity of the other chaps has to have been asserted frequently and forcefully enough as to provide an automatic context. Intellectual coherence is a subordinate concern for the muses of empire; as with advertising, the efficacy of the impressions themselves is key. It is not an accident, as people used to say, that the pattern of these arguments closely follows the pattern of advertising, that mass industry devoted to mass ignorance and irrationalism, whose credo is that Toxic Sludge is Good For You.

If you take all the polemical output devoted to running down Muslims, portraying them as uniquely weird and in need of torture and extermination ("there is no talking to some people"), and reduce it to its Thirty-Nine Articles, you might well end up with a series of advertising slogans. "Waterboarding is Good Gor You!" "Mass Murder Keeps America Safe!" "We Must Not Be Afraid to Assert the Superiority of Western Values!" And so on.

Labels: american empire, british empire, imperial ideology, islam, islamophobia, torture

Islamophobia in the US posted by lenin

I just found this very interesting video from ABC News, in which the programme sets up an experiment to detect Islamophobia among random Americans. An actor portrays a shop clerk refusing to serve a Muslim woman and humiliating her with vile racist rhetoric (she is also an actress, but it's still quite distressing to watch). The reactions from the customers vary wildly. A large number side with the clerk explicitly, and the largest number of people are silent bystanders. But a good number of them respond with brilliant outrage. Unfortunately, the whole thing is couched in terms of 'what does it mean to be an American' and that whole narcissistic melodrama, but it's still quite a telling piece.

Labels: america, islam, islamophobia, racism

Are they building up for an attack on Iran? posted by lenin

Belligerent rhetoric about Iran's global status is business as usual. Plans for an attack of some kind are a frequent feature of Israeli gasconade, and the propaganda machine is constantly churning out new intrigues - with confections about the scale of Iran's putative nuclear threat now on the agenda of many pro-Washington reporters, as they attempt to efface the memory of the calamitous NIE. Incidentally, an attempt by MediaLens to check one of the journalists involved in reproducing such guff, one Bronwen Maddox of The Times, resulted in an absurd legal threat from one of Murdoch's lawyers. There is, detectibly, an escalation in the war rhetoric. Ehud Barak has indicated that Israel is ready to do to Iran what it did to Iraq in 1981 (which would actually be very difficult because Iran's nuclear energy programme - not nuclear weapons programme - is far better protected than Saddam's weapons systems).

The US is now permitting Israeli planes to use Iraqi air space and American air bases in Iraq - they presumably don't have to ask Maliki what he thinks about it. And though it has sort of slipped into the recesses of media memory, the recent Iranian missile tests were preceded by Israeli military exercises in the Mediterranean. The US is already escalating its campaign of subversion and terrorism inside Iran. Every major contender in US politics, including Barack 'sweetie' Obama, has to pay lip service to the supposed threat from Iran - about which something must be done.

So, is it serious, or are they just paper tigers? Are the running dogs of imperialism all bark and no bite, as Tom Engelhardt suggests? I must admit that I don't find myself reassured by his answers. Yes, oil prices could soar catastrophically, but so far the Bush administration has not demonstrated much concern about high oil prices, in part because the energy sector that backs them so heavily is making a killing out of this. Yes, Iran could retaliate, but if they really want to whack Iran they would be willing to risk that. It's small beer compared to letting that punk Ahmadinejad run his mouth whenever he feels like it. One possible counterargument is that Iran is a stabilising factor in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the protestations of the US government and its Israeli ally. But this all depends on a calculation about Iranian behaviour in the event of a short, sharp attack. If they calculate that the Iranian ruling class is divided and that a substantial enough sector would prefer a Modern Right president to Ahmadinejad's 'populist' administration, then they might see a bombing raid as a perfect catalyst to open those divisions and weaken the Iranian president. There may indeed be substantial opposition within the US ruling class and the state apparatus to such an attack, but this adventurist administration not only ruled out reality - we create our own reality, remember? - but sidelined sizeable dissidence from within the state. One can talk about Bush being a lame duck, but neither he nor his confederates show any sign of being chastened (Bush has recently shared one of his little 'jokes' which roughly resembles a large, bony middle-finger to the world). Certainly they have had to deal with political realities that override their urge to radically restructure the global order, as in the removal of North Korea from the 'Axis of Evil', but Iran is far more geopolitically central to US designs than North Korea, and actually doesn't have the nuclear weapons programmes that North Korea does have, and openly states it has. The causes for trepidation in the case of North Korea, and sensible bargaining, are not necessarily present to the same degree in Iran. And while they are no longer threatening North Korea, they are threatening Iran, big time. Besides, it would be nice to leave Bush's successor with a little parting gift.

And if the belligerents can't force the policy through at a national level, they can always egg Israel on. Israel may be susceptible to counter-attack. It may have been humiliated by Hezbollah when it tried to subsume Lebanon as the basis for a proxy strike on Iran and Syria. But it is hardly the sort of state to simply absorbe defeat and sit on its hands. It likes to be in charge, and its military leadership would probably like to deliver a punishment beating to its most vocal and potentially most powerful opponent in the region. It wouldn't have to be major, just enough to let the world know they still mean business. And the political culture inside an increasingly crazed and bunkered state is such that most Israelis would probably cheer it on, and reward the government with renewed popularity.

I'm not saying they're going to do it, because how the hell would I know, but can you really put it past them?

Labels: george w bush, iran, Israel, stop the war coalition, US imperialism

The wrong sort of person posted by lenin

A liberal conspirator interrogates the police on Boris Johnson's new metal scanners...

Labels: boris johnson, knife crime, metropolitian police, racism

Moral education posted by lenin

Q: "How would you go about the moral education of a Papuan?"

A: "Provisionally I would make a slave of him, and this would be the pedagogy in his case, except to see whether a start could be made on using something of our pedagogy with his grandsons and great grandsons".

The tradition of pro-colonial evolutionary socialism summed up.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', antonio labriola, colonialism, evolutionary socialism, slavery

Liberal Imperialism: from the Boers to Basra posted by lenin

I was asked by some people to upload my speech from Marxism, for those who were unable to attend. Having listened to the damned thing, I am reluctant to allow this talk to be used for anything other than a form of slow torture. And, at any rate, the organisers of Marxism partially rely on sales of the CDs of the talks (which cost a measly £3 a go and can be ordered from Bookmarks). But I don't suppose they would mind if I posted a segment. So here is the first fifteen minutes of me babbling, stumbling over syllables, and offering a potted analysis of liberal justification for the 'war on terror':



Call Bookmarks and offer them three quid plus postage for the CD, why not?

Labels: colonialism, imperial ideology, imperialism, marxism 2008, the liberal defense of murder

Evil Rising: demonising the Mau Mau posted by lenin

The history of anti-imperialist insurgency is predictably littered with demonic imagery. The foes of empire are invariably barbarised, and of course this is as true of the Iraqi resistance as it once was of the Mau Mau. But the Mau Mau were considered uniquely evil, unlike other enemies of the British Empire such as the Communists in Malaysia, even though the suppression of the latter was almost as brutal. The Mau Mau was a movement that the British could only consider a recrudescence of African savagery and tribalism. Louis Leakey's 1954 book, Defeating Mau Mau, described the movement as an essentially religious one, a debased version of Christianity, that had attempted to usurp legitimate grievances for its own unspecified (but nefarious) ends. Those grievances, for Leakey, did not call into question the supposition that "European civilization" or "the white man was superior", but rather confirmed it. The grievances had only arisen as a result of the civilizing impact of whitey, so the argument went. The settler leaders, who relied on the labour of the Kikuyu on the 'White Highlands', were certainly convinced of their innate superiority, and were enraged by the resistance to their dominance.

The Mau Mau had emerged initially in 1948, just when the old European colonial powers were looking vulnerable, and just after the Kikuyu Central Association - the main political organisation that had existed beforehand - was banned. The immediate cause of their emergence was the occupation of lands in the central highlands by 30,000 white settlers, who appropriated the labour of 250,000 indigenous workers in the process and had to defeat often highly localised resistance to achieve dominance. The Kikuyu were those most affected by this process, with 1 and a quarter million of them driven into a 2000 square miles of land. By 1948, the reserve system - strikingly similar to the forms of segregation that had existed in South Africa until that time - was entering into a severe crisis. A chiefly minority remained wealthy, but the majority were being driven into utter destitution as they were worked to the bone and subject to austere political surveillance and repression. The colonial authorities believed that the declining returns experienced by the Kikuyu on their diminished land was really the result of the 'primitive' farming methods of the natives, and so restricted them to subsistence production, denying them access to the expanding colonial market, which of course made the problem worse. So, although they had provided not only the stock troops of the labour market but also fought on Britain's behalf during the Second World War (in fact many of the early Mau Mau had been soldiers for the British), they were treated contemptuously, exploited intensely, and their political demands were ignored. Such were the "legitimate grievances" that colonial writers paid patronising lip service to.

The longer term cause of the emergence of the Mau Mau was the rise of nationalism, particularly among Kikuyu women, since the 1920s. And this is such an important element of the story that early accounts tended to give it as little attention as possible. Women were central to the Mau Mau's non-combatant wing, the 'passive wing' as the British called it, and were thus a target of British policies and propaganda designed to wean them away from the movement. In fact, the colonial records tended to treat the women in the movement as either victims or prostitutes who had become intimate with Mau Mau members. They were either 'forced' into the movement through degrading rituals, or taken up as 'concubines'. And, in the course of Mau Mau resistance, the British made a great effort to portray women as the main victims of its (actual and alleged) atrocities, even though women constituted a small minority of those actually killed.

Aside from denying that crucial role of women in the insurgency, the British had to separate the Mau Mau from any claim on Kenyan nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. Instead, it had to be seen as an exclusively tribal movement, not only predominantly Kikuyu but in strict opposition to other tribal/ethnic groups in the country. (This happens an enduring issue in the historiography, with anti-Mau Mau intellectuals both inside and outside Kenya benefiting in part from a refulgence of imperialist sentiment in the 1980s and 1990s.) Leakey's account of the movement during the 1950s was the dominant one in colonial accounts of the period: the Mau Mau were tribalist and religious, not nationalist. Their "insane frenzy" and "fanatical discipline" could only be the manifestation of a cultish outfit, organised around leaders lusting for power (whereas the white settler elite and the colonial powers were apparently averse to their own enormous power). The Colonial Office held that the Mau Mau leaders not only wanted power, not only could not be animated by the real injustices of the colonial system, but were rejecting its benefits. Thus, the Mau Mau "seeks to lead the Africans of Kenya back to the bush and savagery, not forward into progress", according to a report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In fact, as the historian Bruce Berman explains, this account of the Mau Mau as a fanatical cult was immediately taken up by the Western academia, particularly American anthropologists who inserted it into an account of "tribal revival movements" and "crisis cults" which had been developed to explain native American resistance to the white colonials.

Secrecy was a crucial component of the counterinsurgency, in part because it was decided that the less that left-wing anti-colonialists in Britain knew about what was going on, the better. What was known was therefore bound to lead to erroneous conclusions, even among the principled minority who were vocally hostile to colonialism. Of course, to the extent that this was successful, it enabled the British to subject people to processes of 'villagization' (concentration camps) and mass executions. Together with the hangings, the horrible conditions in the 'villages' for the duration of the war killed up to 100,000 Kenyans according to Caroline Elkins. British officials used a range of measures for controlling the imprisoned population, including sexual violence and physical punishment. Of course, it need hardly be added that the main victims of this widespread sexual violence were women, precisely the supposed objects of British paternal protection.

Well, today's counterinsurgency propaganda has as its goals the desire to separate the resistance from any claim on Iraqi nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. It has to bestialise the resistance by making it seems as if the minority of atrocities characterise the whole. It has to demonise it as inherently, and essentially, misogynistic, as well as a religious/tribal affair. And it has to deprive us of access to honest reporting on the situation, through various strategies of media management, including the odd ad hoc death penalty for those not embedded with the troops. To the extent that it is successful, it acculturates people to the grave atrocities that the occupiers see as necessary to maintain their rule and secure a pliant regime.

Labels: british empire, colonialism, concentration camps, kenya, kikuyu, mau mau, resistance

Resistance in Egypt posted by lenin

Hossam el-Hamalawy:

Labels: egypt, socialism, strikes

The Pearsonian mystique posted by lenin

Just as 'the West' overlaps with 'the White' (in most historical formulations, the West has included apartheid South Africa and White Australia, but no country in between those two former colonial states), so the 'English-speaking peoples' overlaps with the 'Anglo-Saxon race'. While the most popular mysticism today is that of the 'civilization' fantasy, the Spenglerian conception of organic entities that bear certain 'values', a pertinent culture and a telos to boot, racial metaphysics is hardly far beneath the surface. Exoteric race theory was resuscitated, along with eugenics, throughout the politically conservative 1990s under the stamp of the 'Bell Curve' and certain variants of genomics (a lengthy portion of Edwin Black's War Against the Weak is given over to warning against such trends). At any rate, it isn't as if the two strands are clearly separable. The main precursor to Oswald Spengler's orphic opus, The Decline of the West, was Charles Henry Pearson's National Life and Character: A Forecast, all about the decline of the 'white man'.

Writing from Australia, where he had spent much of his adult life in liberal politics, Pearson augured ominously about the prospect of a world "girdled with a continuous zone of black and yellow races" in which the white man has been "elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside". What may be described as Pearson's Fear of a Black Planet was precocious, and quite out of tune with the racial triumphalism of late 19th Century imperialism, particularly British imperialism. At the time, the contours of a 'Greater Britain' that had taken hold in the 1860s (it is probably not a coincidence that this triumphalism emerged in the era of the Great Indian Rebellion and the Jamaican Revolt) were still being celebrated. Even so, it proved remarkably popular with political elites who tended not to share his pessimism. Theodore Roosevelt lauded it, as did Gladstone. And in considering the reasoning of his argument, it is not difficult to see why. For Pearson, the state of racial decline was brought about by familial decline, and also by 'State Socialism' which had produced a lower birth rate and an increasingly sedentary condition even as the Chinese, Indians and Africans reasserted their racial vitality. "[T]he lower races of men," he mused, "increase faster than the higher." Given the unlikelihood of a radical alteration in the political state of the 'higher races', the only way to manage the human tide was to strictly control immigration, which both Australian and American governments were beginning to do. The concern with the state of sex, families and the relations of children to parents, of course, coincided with the obsessions of Progressive and liberal opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. This was, after all, an era in which eugenics, patriarchy and master-race-thinking were still firmly entrenched. The women, said Roosevelt, were committing race suicide by entertaining cheap marital commitments and not raising young Rough Riders schooled in a life of vigour. For Wilson, the whole strength of the 'Aryan' race was its patriarchical family form which, as a basic unit of self-government (government here used in the sense of restraint - for Wilson, self-government was a cultural state before it was a political one) produced the most advanced forms of statehood. So, when Pearson maintained that state socialism was destroying the church, the family, and the virtues of frugality and self-reliance that made the white man powerful, he was drawing from a common well.

But racial stratification, as I mentioned, isn't always arranged on biological lines. The lines of culture and ethos are as definitive, and indeed have tended to shade into outright biological racism. And at any rate, the politics of liberal racism today would tend to rule out demands for women to obey their husbands, stay at home, look after their children, and stop having abortions. That is not the way that the survivors of the sexual revolution wish to go. Still, responding to a hitherto unacknowledged crisis of confidence, the intellectual lackeys are at work trying to formulate the virile reflex that says all is well. The 'new atheism' industry, particularly Sam Harris' 'The End of Faith' (which is really about ending only one faith, since he finds the others have largely been civilized) and Hitchens' scampish observation that 'God is Not Great' (which, if the humour were not largely unintentional, might have been called 'The Hitch's Guide to the Galaxy'), is about just this. Ideas and cultures - namely those associated with Islam - are held to be at the root of the world's gravest ills. The occasionally surreptitious corollary is that the world's greatest goods are furnished by nicer ideas and cultures, those of the Jeffersonian variety, those that purportedly animate US imperialism. The real powers on this earth, according to these soi-disant atheists, are God and the shades of dead white men. At any rate, the supposedly subversive charge of atheism supplies the moral ballast for a cultural supremacism which haughtily dismisses centuries if not millenia of ideological, intellectual and cultural production by those not fortunate enough to be 'Western' or 'Westernised'. And, quite logically, this Fear of a Muslim Planet has taken its ultimate form in the vocal vaticinations about the birth rate among those Mohammedans.

Labels: 'new atheism', 'war on terror', charles pearson, imperial ideology, islamophobia, racism

Humanitarian cluster bombing posted by lenin

Following the recent banning of cluster bombs by a number of states (including, to my surprise, the UK), the United States government has been at pains to stress that it only wants to keep the humane cluster bombs. And so:

Faced with growing international pressure, the Pentagon is changing its policy on cluster bombs and plans to reduce the danger of unexploded munitions in the deadly explosives.

The policy shift, which is outlined in a three-page memo signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, would require that after 2018, more than 99 percent of the bomblets in a cluster bomb must detonate.

Awfully sweet of them, don't you think?

Labels: cluster bombs, humanitarianism, US imperialism

Is Trevor Kavanagh an Islamophobe? posted by lenin

You don't necessarily have to know anything about Islam to be an Islamophobe. Quite the reverse, in fact. The more ignorant about Islam and everything else, the better it is for the hopeful candidate for Islamophobia. So, just because Trevor Kavanagh thinks that "Sunni Iran" is "oil hungry", don't think that he can't possibly be an Islamophobe. The reason this has come up is that Peter Oborne, the right-wing journalist and documentary maker, has recently struck gold with an attack on Islamophobia - a quite unsporting thing for a right-wing commentator of any description to do, so far as his co-ideologues are concerned. Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun, responsible for some of the worst delirium that appears on that paper's front pages, was interviewed for the programme, took umbrage at the fact that he evidently came across as a guttersnipe, and has composed a bilious response.

Kavanagh's reply, unlike the original documentary and pamphlet that produced it, will be read by millions. His argument, such as it is, boils down to the assertion that there are indeed 'extremists' and bad people, doing very bad things, and the implication that these are somehow a manifestation of something essential to Islam. Rather than rely on such antiquated practises as logical argument, which is to The Sun as daylight is to the vampire, Kavanagh relies on the simple procedure of citing approved Muslim voices. For example:

In the wake of 9/11, the Muslim head of Al Arabiya TV, Abdul Rahman al Rashed, said: "Not all Muslims are terrorists but, with deep regret, we must admit that almost all terrorists are Muslims."

Is he an Islamophobe?

Try watching Syrian-born Dr Wafa Sultan on YouTube as she challenges a furious cleric to name a single Jew or Buddhist suicide bomber.

"Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by killing people, burning churches and bombing embassies," she storms.

Is she Islamophobic? Or simply spelling out the facts?

Dr Sultan also condemned the way Muslim hardliners "treat women like beasts".

Al Rashed's stupid comment (stupid, both because it was untrue and because it is liable to feed an atmosphere of violent anti-Muslim feeling) is quite widely repeated in one version or another. Hitchens likes it a lot, for example, as he would. But it was not made "in the wake of 9/11", (and nor was Al Rashed the head of Al Arabiya television at that time, since Al Arabiya television didn't come into existence until 2004). The comment was published in a Saudi-run newspaper based in London and Jeddah following the Beslan massacre. It was made at a time when Russian troops had been terrorising Chechnyans for some years - strange to relate, those Russian troops were not, on the whole, of the Muslim persuasion. Wafa Sultan, for those of you who don't know her, is hardly even worth your attention. She is adored by the Luce media and the NYT, because she says the right things: only Muslims do wicked things, Islam is responsible, Muslims are medieval, the West is enlightened and modern. Were it not for the patronage, she could summarise her views on the back of a postage stamp and mail it to her brain, presently lodged halfway up her colon, and save us all the trouble. I assume no one needs me to rebut the view that only Muslims defend their beliefs by killing people (but if you do, just supply your address and I'll come and sort you out).

Anyway, having run out of native informers, Kavanagh finally resorts to his own expertise:

Muslim men are entitled to beat their wives and take more than one wife. Women are automatically suspect, banned in some communities from showing their faces or limbs because they are sexually tempting — to men. Visit an Arab country, or watch TV shows about them, and you will see plenty of men and boys.

Women appear rarely and, when they do, are covered head to toe. The rest are under virtual house arrest, living behind closed doors in ignorance and isolation.

We cannot interfere in the way other countries order their societies.

But such barbaric treatment of women has been imported and thrives here.

The Sun, would you believe it, is now a feminist concern. We can assume that those many forms of misogyny that were not 'imported' will now feature as a daily concern in that paper, next to Mandy, aged 23. I doubt Trevor Kavanagh has actually visited an "Arab country" for longer than fifteen minutes, during which time his feet would have been firmly planted in a Mercedes, although I am sure he has seen "TV shows" about them. But which Arab countries is he watching? Oh, it doesn't matter: I'm sure he is as learned about Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Mauritania, Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait as he is about Sunni Iran. And I'm sure that when it comes to Muslim populations beyond the Arab world, he could discourse eloquently on the fate of the Indonesian women who stitch his Gucci soles in what is colloquially known as a sweatshop (the 18 hour shift in the high security compounds is like house arrest, only with added slavery).

Is Trevor Kavanagh an Islamophobe? Well, he passes the first qualification at least: he doesn't know shit about Islam.

Labels: islam, islamophobia, racism, the sun, trevor kavanagh

David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party posted by lenin

Labels: black panthers, marxism 2008

The Story of 'O' posted by lenin

Barack Obama has animated commentators and polarised debate without necessarily leaving us any the wiser as to what to expect. A man who seems at pains to distance himself from much of black America, and yet needs to draw on the tradition of anti-racism and the Civil Rights movement. A man who needs to stimulate excitement about his campaign while reducing expectations as to what he might deliver (so as not to scare a constituency of white voters). A man who has spoken eloquently on the topic of racism in America, and yet often is all too willing to pander to the worst prejudices in America. Gary Younge's meeting at Marxism today sought to explain the apparent antilogies of BHO's campaign, both the irresistible allure for layers of hitherto passive voters and the inevitable ways in which he will disappoint. The strangeness of Obamamania was summed up as equivalent to the hysteria in the few weeks following the death of Princess Diana, in which rational discussion was suspended for several weeks. The temptation either to dismiss Obama entirely or embrace him so totally that there is no critical distance remaining is a temptation that eschews analysis, and it is analysis that we need.

Younge took pains to disrupt the fantasy of a racial nirvana signalled by the Obama campaign. An America whose ideology of 'opportunity' places undue weight on the symbolic, in which the token placement of an African American in a prominent position is used to override the horrible reality that most African Americans face in terms of poverty and incarceration, invites cynicism when it comes to claims that it has at last achieved colour-blindness. In fact, such putative colour-blindness can be seen as purblindess: it whitewashes everything, including racism. It is such colour-blindness, after all, that invariably sees a harsh racial hierarchy in which black people are allotted the bottom of every available pile, as a 'meritocracy'. And it comes after a generation in which 'white' America has been energetically re-ethnicised, in an effort at unloading historical 'guilt' or responsibility for white supremacy. (There is an anecdote in Matthew Frye Jacobson's Roots Too, about the re-discovery of 'ethnic roots' among white Americans in the post-Civil Rights era, in which a well-attended anti-racist meeting in New York sees several white participants noisily declaiming that they are in fact not really white but Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Lithuanian. The instructor is left wondering where the hell all the white people went.) Younge reminds us that Hillary Clinton lost by a mere 0.4% of the popular vote; that her vote remained resilient long after her campaign was obviously lost; that Obama tended to lose in states where black voters were present enough to inject race into the conversation but not enough to swing the result toward Obama; and that Obama's own campaign was not multiracial but bi-racial, largely failing to win over Latino voters except by a narrow margin in his home state. This hardly epitomises a country in which 'race no longer matters'. Notwithstanding all this, and 'all this' counts for a great deal, Obama's candidacy is still a historical and symbolically important moment.

One cannot afford, in this instance, to "leave symbols to the symbol-minded" as the late George Carlin once put it. Symbols are efficacious in their own right, and in this case the striking thing about BHO is the extent to which he has generated enthusiasm and popular participation in politics of a kind that was depleted during the Bush years. The historical significance of the campaign, meanwhile, is manifold, and Younge has outlined this in numerous articles (for example). Obama's success, made possible by the civil rights movement, comes at a time when the movements that galvanised Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are exhausted. But this also gives us an insight into the 'dignity' that right-wing racists admire Obama for (why is it, Younge wonders, that black people in particular are supposed to have 'dignity'?). Republican commentators enthuse about a black candidate whose sensibilities appear so distant from the old church-formed radicals of the Civil Rights generation. Obama was able to benefit from access to an ivy league education because of the civil rights movement, but was not himself the product of a movement. Rather, his success had to emerge in a highly individual fashion (in his case by working his way up through the Democratic Party machine). And even if Obama's own situation is abberant - that is, his success comes in an era of growing stagnation for black Americans - it also comes at a time when it is possible for an African American to make a serious run at the White House. While once 56% of voters confessed that they would never vote for a black presidential candidate (and at least half of the rest were probably liars), today it is 6%. So that means Obama can appeal to a new potential constituency: "They're called 'white people'". Whereas previously, politics was seen as a step in the broader civil rights movement, it no longer is. And, as such, it has become necessary to cultivate new bases while not frightening off a crucial layer of white voters. And this means that the one thing we can be absolutely certain that Obama will disappoint on is race.

The one time that Obama made a positive and important statement about race in American politics was when he was cornered by the right over Reverend Wright. In that speech, he had to explain one part of America to another. "Every now and again, Obama has been 'outed' as a black man," Younge explained. "It's as if white Americans discovered a black friend they were comfortable with, but then it turned out that he had friends of his own...". As such, the more he attempts to closet himself, as he can be relied upon to do, the more the Republican attack machine will try to 'out' him, as they did with this ridiculous 'terrorist fist-jab' episode. Nonetheless, it is because Obama 'looks' like change, because he isn't just a member of the old dynastic political elite in the US, because every signal in his campaign points to the change promised in the civil rights movement (without being so vulgar as to explicitly reference it), that he taps into a mood among Americans. The nearly half of Americans who think its best days are behind it, the three quarters who believe the economy is getting worse, the two thirds who disapprove of the occupation of Iraq, the majority who are losing out because of stagnant wages and soaring food and energy prices - their enthusiasm for the Obama campaign which maintains such a commanding lead in the polls is not the same as Wall Street's enthusiasm for Obama. They are demonstrating, at least, that they hate war, recession and poverty more than they hate black people.

Much of the discussion from the floor was given over to the argument that the American left should in no sense simply second the Obama campaign, but rather should try and wean those enthusiastic new voters off the Democratic Party machine. There are concrete reasons for this. The sheer fact of the Obama campaign has apparently led much of the organised American left to shut down its campaigns for fear of making things difficult for Obama. My guess is that one thing that would indirectly favour Obama's campaign, even to his discomfort, would be an atmosphere of energetic left-wing activism. Turning off the politics is one sure way to send voters back to sleep. However, one can't second guess the effect that the campaign is having. Younge is certainly correct that one could not have expected such enthusiasm for a Gore or Kerry campaign. The question then is how to relate to the 'grassroots', the movement which is not yet a movement, the base which is hitherto rigidly confined to the single task of securing the election of the first black president of the United States. It will clearly not do to just point out the inevitable disappointment as the candidate most favoured by American capital gets to work intensifying the occupation of Afghanistan, sabre-rattling against Iran, coddling Israel and seeing to it that Jerusalem 'remains' its capital (though it is not actually the capital of Israel), and retreating on even his most modest proposals on Iraq. Corporate America is indeed anxious to rebrand American imperialism, and Obama is certainly a more plausibly salesman for 'humanitarian intervention' than an upper class white Texan conservative. However, we relate to those who wish to campaign for him because they are anti-war not pro-imperialist. So, there seems to be a real dilemma for the left here. Abstention is not an option, but neither is being seconded to 'Obamamania' in either its official or unofficial capacity.

Labels: barack obama, racism, socialism, US imperialism, us politics

What went wrong in Italy? posted by lenin

A good meeting at Marxism yesterday involved a discussion of what happened to the Italian left in the recent elections, at which the right not only won massively, but the far right groups and particularly the racist Lega Nord made real increases in their vote. The Lega increased its vote by a third, while the left vote organised through the 'rainbow coalition' collapsed so much that for the first time since WWII, the communists have no representation in parliament. This is the third time, meanwhile, the Lega Nord have been participants in a Berlusconi-led government. The focus of the discussion by Tom Behan, and Cinzia Arruzza of Sinistra Critica (formerly a critical marxist group within the Rifondazione Comunista that broke away in December last year to form a new party when it was clear just how much the RC had broke with radical policies), was mainly on the horrendous strategic errors of the radical left. The coalition with a neoliberal government saw the Rifondazione vote to send troops to Afghanistan despite the fact that it had been elected as an antiwar party. As one speaker put it "we went from 'Another World is Possible' to 'it isn't even possible to vote against the war'": a drastic contraction of vision. This is very important for the British left, which risks being pulled down with New Labour if it attaches itself to that sinking vessel. And what consistently came through in the contributions was just how much the left has collapsed after the elections - not in numerical terms, but organisationally. There has been precious little mobilisation against the far right as it has engaged in shocking attacks on immigrants with a more or less free hand, with the centre-left preferring to pander to the rhetoric of the far right. Even the 'neutral' organs of the state, as Alberto Toscano pointed out, are becoming the vectors for these racist attacks, as when a court of appeals kicked out a conviction of a far right activist who had agitating against gypsies as 'thieves', on the grounds that gypsies were indeed all thieves (I paraphrase, but it really was something as toxic as that). Toscano's analysis, described a number of times as pessimistic (usually a curse word in such venues, but not on this occasion), was the best by far. I was without pen and paper, so I am unable to give a detailed description of what he said. Instead, I just wanted to try and pursue some of the themes he raised.

What is distinctive, and dangerous, about the Lega Nord is that it has established a sizeable voting base in the working class, particularly the working class in the northern regions, which they refer to as 'Padania'. As Toscano pointed out, the LN is not just a 'protest' party: it has built up support over successive generations, often where the Italian communist party has collapsed. In traditionally left-leaning regions such as Lombardy and Piedmont, it gained votes sometimes in excess of 25%, and among industrial workers has gained as much as 37% of the vote. Although it has drawn on the iconography of Italian fascism, it is not an Italian nationalist party. Rather it has promised to defend fiscal regionalism and has at times explicitly called for Padanian secession. There is a slightly boneheaded analysis in some left websites, which contends that the LN is really defending the northern industrial ruling class from being taxed to support the poorer south. There is an element of this, and racism toward southern Italians has played a role in LN propaganda, but this doesn't explain how it could have gained the support of industrial workers in the north. In part, the answer is that the LN has successfully vocalised the politics of resentment, often using the methods of street politics learned from the left: house occupations in defense of the rights of 'indigenous' people against immigrants, for example.

Part of LN's strength results from a re-alignment of the Italian right. Regionalist parties had been developing since the 1970s, and Umberto Bossi had founded the Lega Lombardy in 1984, which by 1991 had gained 18.9% of the vote in Lombardy regional elections, prompting him to unite with other regional leagues to form the Lega Nord. By June 1993, the LN had won 40% of the local elections in Milan, and was displacing the Christian Democrats as the dominant party of the north. This was the basis upon which it was able to participate, in a turbulent way, in Berlusconi's first administration. What distinguished the Lega Nord apart from its truculent xenophobia was its successful parlaying of social distress into attacks on the corrupt and inefficient 'palazzo' (loosely, the headquarters of the political class), and the defense of a specifically territorial integrity. From its beginnings, it proved able to weld a cross-class coalition on the basis of this mix. Although, for example, the Lega Lombardy's earliest base of support was among wealthier areas that were abandoning the Christian Democrats, the destruction of several manufacturing areas allowed it to pose as the only party interested in defending the local economy. The LN has frequently complained in its propaganda that northern Italians and businesses based there pay very high taxes and get poor services in return. And a consistent theme, repeated in this 2005 election poster, is that immigrants get first place over the 'indigenous'. It complains that the public sector overtaxes and undermines local dynamism in order to subsidise a southern economy permeated by foreign drug-runners, black marketeers Its territorial solution to the social distress brought about by neoliberal capitalism also allows it to oppose the EU, including the Constitutional Treaty, and while it has been supportive of the 'war on terror' and particularly its Islamophobic thrust, it has frequently opposed US imperialism. In other words, it has occupied some of the political space that parties like the Rifondazione Comunista might otherwise fill. The regionalism, incidentally, is inchoate, with a tendency to subdivide into further localisms (a particular Trento identity, for example). And partially as a consequence of this, the Lega Nord sometimes vacillated between asserting that Padania is a specific territorial-cultural entity that ought to be separate, and asserting that its just a metaphor for the historical and cultural unity of the north.

It's important to recognise that the LN's story is not simply one of unbroken upward ascent. For a long time from 1996, its vote was in serious decline. By 2001, in the wake of the refulgence of mass anticapitalism, the party recorded a vote of 3.9%, down from 10.1% in 1996. Not only was it down nationally, it was substantially abridged in several key areas of the north, its vote halved or worse across Lombardy and slashed by two-thirds in Veneto, Piedmont and Friuli Venezia-Giulia. Even so, it had been instrumental to helping the centre-right Berlusconi-led coalition defeat Massimo D'Alema's Ulivo coalition in regional elections in 2000, and was gaining an important foothold in national right-wing politics, despite its apparent alienation from the political establishment. And despite its electoral decline, it was given a privileged position in the second Berlusconi administration, from 2001-2005, with Bossi enjoying a close relationship with both Berlusconi and his finance minister Giulio Tremonti. A regionalist party participating in a national government has a freight of oppositionism to bear, and in this case Bossi chose to oppose other junior coalition partners such as the 'post-fascist' Alleanza Nazionale rather than the more explicitly pro-business Forza Italia (FI). The Lega's position was improved as it, along with other coalition partners, made up for the declined in FI votes in the 2004 Euro elections. And while it has not yet recovered its 1996 position, it has more than doubled its 2006 national vote of 4.1% to 8.3% in 2008.

The Lega Nord's current strength rests largely on its vociferous, and quite successful, scapegoating of immigrants for Italy's manifest economic woes. Umberto Bossi is demanding 'reforms', and threatening that his supporters will take up arms if they don't come: "We have no fear of taking things to the piazzas. We have 300,000 martyrs ready to come down from the mountains. Our rifles are always smoking." The Lega is using "citizen street patrols" in some areas to terrorise immigrant, and particularly Muslim, communities. Deploying a language of insecurity and tension, it has transposed a class antagonism into a territorial antagonism, and now leads the calls for a purge of that territory. The ease with which this can morph into outright fascist politics is obvious from the fascist salutes and cries of 'Duce' that greeted Rome's neo-fascist mayor. Given the sheer redundancy of the left response so far, groups like Sinistra Critica have to be at the centre of reviving Italy's venerable anti-fascist tradition.

Labels: fausto bertinotti, italy, lega nord, rifondazione comunista, roma gypsies, romano prodi

Reviewed, ergo sum posted by lenin

Scribo Ergo Sum has reviewed yours truly at Marxism 2008 in very generous terms:

It was now nearing 7 o’clock and I had a decision to make: Tariq Ali or Lenin. The latter was, of course, the blogger Richard Seymour, who was here under that name rather than his provocative nom de plume. The primary factor in my opting for the latter was my total lack of cash. No money to obtain tickets meant that opting for the room with spare seats was unquestionably preferable.

In the event Seymour’s room was pretty packed as well, but there was enough space for me not to be acting as a seat robber. I had a whole spiel planned involving mentioning that I was a victim of sub prime and still seeking employment in this crisis stricken economy (both true) but as it happens I turned up slightly late and the man on the door just waved me through.

Seymour was perhaps not how I’d imagined him but that was largely in the voice, which was a soft Irish one I probably should have anticipated more given he’s mentioned his origins on the blog. I was still expecting something a tad more harsh, firm, clipped and firebrand.

As for content, well it was concerning the pro-war left, who are his targets in “The Liberal Defence of Murder” (although interestingly three of his main subjects, Johann Hari, Nick Cohen and the especially despised Christopher Hitchens are all socialists or social democrats of some sort, although Hitchens seems to have shifted into not calling himself anything yet referencing Marx almost as much as before, if not more).

Both in person and in comments Lenin has described himself as “all over the place” structurally; but if this was truth instead of modesty it certainly didn’t show. There was clearly plenty he’d had planned but couldn’t get in, but this was seemingly because he’d done a vast amount of reading and research and it was to the degree that he couldn’t possibly cram it all in. He’d probably intended to say something about Yugoslavia, I suppose, but I never found that topic immensely interesting anyway so I’m rather glad he failed to. Likewise with Ol*ver K*mm.

As it was he managed to fill forty five minutes and then additional response time with a pleasingly fact dense speech that outlined the nature, power, motivations, methods and follies of the pro-war left. The talk traced how liberal interventionists of the contemporary era had directly borrowed from the colonial tradition (both of the far-right and of thinkers such as Mill and Tocqueville, not to mentioned the much-loathed Reformist Marxist Bernstein) and were now using rhetoric barely adapted from the times when you could get away with phrases such as “Adult race”.

Inbetween these two book-ends there was a discussion point where a surprisingly large number of audience members (including myself) were coaxed on stage to give views or ask questions. This felt pleasingly participative and it’s certainly a tradition I’m glad shows no signs of being abandoned.

He is right about my soft Irish voice. There is a brief video of myself answering questions at the talk here. I will be posting on the event later, which I think has gone brilliantly (except for the, er, poet who gave an impromptu reading at yesterday's meeting on The Politics of Islamism and then left in a huff), and particularly on the meeting about what went wrong in Italy. There was also a very talk meeting by a lissom young humorist/economist named Jacob Middleton on 'theories of neoliberalism' which brought to light the founding ideas of the 'neoliberal' revolution, particularly those of Hayek and Friedman. In a truly lapidary fashion, he described Hayek's 'The Constitution of Liberty' as "the Communist Manifesto for complete arseholes". I was surprised to see it so packed at 10am on a Saturday morning, but it just goes to show how important the topic is given our current dilemma. Hossam el-Hamalawy has posted his speech at the opening rally here. Anyway, more later, and I will also be fulfilling a comments box request for a post in Sierra Leone.

Labels: marxism 2008, the liberal defense of murder

The going rate of exploitation posted by lenin

Found on the Marxmail mailing list, this little beauty from the Irish Times. It tells us that the average Irish worker produces 48,500 euros of profit per year for the owners. These figures were produced by the Unite union to disprove the idea that profits for Irish capitalists are somehow 'too low' or being squeezed by unjustifiably higher wages. Actually, it suggests an extraordinary rate of exploitation. According to the Industrial Development Agency [pdf], the average wage in Ireland was 627.24 euros per week in 2007, which is just over 32,000 euros per year. This figure is offered by the IDA as an instance of how competitive the Irish labour market is for foreign direct investors. It boasts of a skilled, educated labour force capable of the production of a great deal of value at lower cost than German or Dutch workers (but, interestingly, a bit more expensive than the average UK worker). According to Unite: "In total terms, profits in the sector increased by over €5.6 billion in the five-year period [2000 - 2005], while total wages - despite a substantial increase in employees [over 50,000] rose by well under half". Some industrial sectors experienced a rate of profit as high as 40%, which is well above average, comparable to the UK Continental Shelf (north sea oil) in recent years.

Where to begin? With the fact that for every 2.5 euros of value produced by an Irish worker, the capitalists get to keep 1.5, just because they own the means of production? Or with the fact that the rate of exploitation has clearly risen quite dramatically, and Irish capitalists are complaining about this state of affairs? "No fair! Every increase in value produced should go to us exclusively, not those greedy bloody workers!" It is just this core aspect of production that should be borne in mind when you read statistics about inequality, usually couched in moralistic terms or those of social cohesion. Growing inequality is a state of affairs produced by class struggle, by capital's endeavour for more profit in particular. It is a social injustice rooted in the system, not a deviation from it. The Irish employers' yelp for more profit is just the latest phase in that struggle. The other context to be remembered is the recent push by Irish corporate capital for acceptance of the Lisbon Treaty - disgracefully supported by Labour, just under two-thirds of Green Party members, and some trade unions in Ireland. Sinn Fein and the Irish SWP were integral to the campaign for a 'No' vote. Much of big business rallied for the Treaty through Ibec, the Irish equivalent of the CBI, which welcomed the Treaty's 'liberalisation' components. What did they expect to get out of the deal? Same thing as when they backed the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005, before French workers blew the thing to kingdom come. More privatisation and deregulation, further opportunities for accumulation. As Ibec said: "A yes vote for the Lisbon Treaty creates the potential for increased opportunities for Irish business particularly in areas subject to increasing liberalisation such as Health, Education, Transport, Energy and the Environment." The Treaty also vaunted increased militarisation as part of the EU's supporting role for the American empire. It's extremely important that Ireland voted 'No' to this measure, because Ireland is the only state that is required by law to hold a referendum on EU Treaties. Gordon Brown, for example, has no intention of offering British workers the chance to express their view - it's far too risky, and there is too much at stake, particularly when he's busy slashing wages for millions of public sector workers.

Incidentally, Richard Boyd Barrett, a key anti-Treaty campaigner, will be at Marxism on Sunday to give a bit of background. If you're there, you might check him out.

Labels: capital, eu treaty, exploitation, rate of profit, wages

Afghanistan under the knife and hammer posted by lenin

The procedure is quite simple. Choose a country in the world that seems to be suffering, in some way dysfunctional, ripe for 'intervention'. Perform some 'surgical' air strikes and, after a quick and painless stitch-up, auction it off to the highest bidders. Having done that, so the theory goes, you can return home and contemplate your good deeds. But, sticking with the medical metaphor for a second, you are not a doctor and you wouldn't know the hippocratic oath if it was printed in reverse lettering on your forehead. Whatever 'illness' you were supposedly dealing with has metastasized while the body is resisting your implants. In fact, the 'patient' keeps trying to kick your ass every time you come near him. Time to give up? Hell no. While Bush sends more troops to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown has insisted that there will be no 'artificial timetable' for British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Okay, but how about a real timetable?

Take a look at what's happening. The current propaganda, being widely repeated in various fora, is that the occupation - despite all the difficulties and the terrible burdens we must bear - is ameliorating the situation of Afghanistan. Thus, practically every commentator is repeating the incorrect claim, floated by Laura Bush, that infant mortality has declined by 25% since the occupation began. In fact, one study led by the World Bank, which is heading reconstruction and development programmes in Afghanistan, said last year that infant mortality had fallen - not by 25% or 26%, but by 18%. And that study excluded the worst-hit regions of Afghanistan, such as Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Zabul and Nuristan, because of security concerns. That is, it excluded 15% of the population from its scope. On the other hand, mortality among under fives has certainly risen. So, in 2005, 20% of the under-five population perished. In 2006, 25% died. Okay, so infant mortality in the least war-torn regions fell by 18% in five years, while in just one year, the rate of child mortality across the whole country increased by 25%. So, what are we supposed to be celebrating? More children get to live beyond their first 12 months before biting the dust from starvation, treatable diseases and, er, the odd bomb or bullet? As for the 75% who get past the age of five, if they do ever get to be grown-ups, they will at least have some interesting prospects - the torture chamber, rape, starvation, the destruction of their farms at the hands of DynCorp, murder at the hands of a local patriarch flush with dollars and self-regarding pomp, thermobaric bombardment...

There is no Lancet survey for Afghanistan. We have had some estimates of deaths in the first year of the war, the highest of which was supplied by Jonathan Steele of The Guardian, who estimated 49,000 direct and indirect deaths resulting from the war. There are occasional estimates of civilians killed, but the detection rate is likely to be extremely low - to my knowledge, there is no consistent effort to actually trace the number of deaths there. The UN provides figures, estimating the rate of deaths among civilians in the hundreds over the last six months. Frankly, that is just unbelievable (and, actually, I would like to know how they distinguish between a combatant and a civilian - presumably they rely on the occupation authorities for this kind of information). Consider just one facet of the war. In Iraq, between 50 and 100 Iraqis die as a result of air strikes every day. When the secret air war on both Iraq and Afghanistan was confirmed, the figures showed that the biggest spike in bombings was in Afghanistan where the number of major raids reached more than 800 per month. And we're supposed to believe that the death rate resulting from air strikes alone is lower than in Iraq, where the number of mass bombings - though very high - was less? In Iraq, in a period of three years, 78,000 violent deaths were caused by air strikes in Iraq (this was before the big spike in aerial bombardments). In Afghanistan, where the rate of aerial bombardment has always been higher, the figure must be higher. One informal estimate of deaths last year was carried out by Associated Press. It suggested that a total of 5,100 people had died violently in the first 9 months of 2007 (and most were killed by the occupation). Given that such passive surveys tend to massively underestimate the true scale of deaths, we are really talking about tens of thousands of deaths in that period, at least if we want to be realistic. Given the longevity of the war and its increasing brutality, if a Lancet-style survey can ever be carried out in Afghanistan, the total deaths may even be higher than in Iraq.

One index of the rate of destruction is the rate at which the insurgents are able to recruit and expand. Where the occupation is most bloody, the resistance is most concentrated. Until recently, south-west Afghanistan has been what the 'Sunni triangle' was in Iraq. It was where the US was most unpopular, and where attacks generally occurred most frequently. But now, the 'Taliban' - realistically, we know that most insurgents are not actually Talibs, and many of the actual Taliban leaders are on the receiving end of serenades from Hamid Karzai - are controlling more of the country than the US. The rate at which occupying troops are being killed has been rising year on year, peaking in June this year, and surpassing the rate of 'coalition' deaths in Iraq for the first time. The insurgency controls ever larger tracts of the country.

The verities of Afghanistan are poorly gauged, as I have indicated, but so far as we can tell what is happening, we know that the occupiers no longer command the support of most Afghans. The patience and forebearance of Afghans was and is enormous, despite the abuses, despite the torture chambers, despite the indiscriminate killings, the bombing raids resulting in massacres, and despite the obscene 'Green Zone' style luxury for occupiers and their auxiliaries in Kabul while much of the population is actually starving. Despite the obvious unpopularity of the Taliban, most people appear to want to negotiate a deal with them rather than prosecute a long and bloody war. Even the puppet administration of Hamid Karzai and the very meek and gentle General Rashid Dostum would like to cut some sort of a deal. Of course, there are those for whom the war is working out just swell. The warlords whom the US pays off to keep order are seeing their private armies expand greatly as they reap greater profits from the opium crop. Power is increasingly localised, and Hamid Karzai doesn't have a finger of real influence beyond Kabul. Contractors such as DynCorp are making out as well, because their role is to destroy the opium farms (those belonging to the poor farmers, not the big local rulers who are effectively under Nato protection). Curiously, DynCorp never seem to succeed in reducing drugs production wherever they are despatched to do so, yet they continually get the contracts. And as for Washington? The last thing they want is to get out. Both Democrats and Republicans are intent on increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, if necessary by scaling back the war in Iraq. They know they are in danger of losing the whole situation. Not only is the war in Afghanistan turning the population against the occupiers. In Pakistan, where the government is assaulting 'Taliban strongholds' with great ferocity, local populations are actually becoming more and not less supportive of the Talibs. The US is increasingly projecting its force across the border, and sabre-rattling against the Pakistani government (even Karzai is getting in on that act). The danger of a regional war is escalating in that "global Balkans" - as Brezinski, Obama's foreign policy advisor, dubs the region - and the United States government is raising the stakes.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, pakistan, taliban, US imperialism

What happens if you embarrass the IDF? posted by lenin

This:

Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza's borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out. Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel's infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. "Where's the money?" he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. "Where is the English pound you have?"

"I realised," said Mohammed, "he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn prize. I told him I didn't have it with me. 'You are lying', he said. I was now surrounded by eight Shin Bet officers, all armed. The man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: 'Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.' He said, 'This is nothing compared with what you will see now.' He took his gun out, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said, 'Why are you bringing perfumes?' I replied, 'They are gifts for the people I love'. He said, 'Oh, do you have love in your culture?'

"As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror."

An ambulance was called and told to take Mohammed to a hospital, but only after he had signed a statement indemnifying the Israelis from his suffering in their custody. The Palestinian medic refused, courageously, and said he would contact the Dutch embassy escort. Alarmed, the Israelis let the ambulance go. The Israeli response has been the familiar line that Mohammed was "suspected" of smuggling and "lost his balance" during a "fair" interrogation, Reuters reported yesterday.

Labels: idf, Israel, journalist, palestine, torture

The long kiss goodbye posted by lenin

What are the odds that Gordon Brown will be deposed by a Blairite challenger before the next election? According to the FT, Brown is banking on a short recession and rapid recovery, and most New Labourites are backing him in that assessment. When the economy turns around, they imagine, all will be well. Voters will reward him for steering Britain through a crisis with steely resolve, and a masterful strategy of triangulation will appropriate Tory policies in order to win over the middle class voters that might otherwise desert the New Labour coalition. If this really is the view of New Labour, not only are they economically purblind but they are as distant from political reality as Jim Davidson is from comedy.

Face facts. New Labour is not experiencing mid-term blues, or the blowback from a manageable economic crisis. It is heading toward a defeat of a magnitude that would once have called into question the future longevity of the party itself. Even consider recent news. Brown has just had another mini rebellion on the 10p tax issue, the polls are so catastrophic that it doesn't look reversible and the government faces yet another crucial by-election just as Wendy Alexander has to step down from the leadership of Scottish Labour over breaking donation rules. It isn't beyond the range of possibilities that a seat with a mountainous Labour majority will turn SNP. In fact, Brown's decision to make the election as soon as possible reflects his awareness that as time goes on it becomes not only possible but increasingly probable that the government will be hammered again. If Brown doesn't maintain a respectable majority, that may be it for him.

I suppose the natural inclination of any challenger, be it Charles Clarke or David Miliband (two curiously unattractive prospects), would be to wait until after an election disaster, but that all depends on how suicidal Labour MPs, and particularly those closest to the Brownite inner circle, are. If they really have an instinct for survival, they may create the crisis 'prematurely', within months. Hacks close to the government, such as Andrew Rawnsley of The Observer, have been hinting for some time that Brown's closest advisors are increasingly ready to dump him. Place your bets now.

Labels: gordon brown, new labour, tories

Drowning Christopher Hitchens posted by lenin

Whose idea was it to stop?

Labels: christopher hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

"Intervention" posted by lenin

Is it still too late to ban this term from serious political discourse? I ask because - well, you know, because of everything, but because of this in particular. It is one of the worst articles I've read in some time, and I read the Telegraph. Everything that is wrong with a particular kind of journalism, the kind that accrues awards and moral approbation, is present. Sentimental kitsch ('...in a country that no longer exists called Yugoslavia, people were begging for help. And we did nothing'), nationalist trivia ('"Someone told us the Americans are coming." Then they turned desperate, grabbing my hands, begging for help, to send a message to a relative, to get them medicine, money, food, a radio, wood to burn, a newspaper, a way to feel that they were not enduring living hell. "Is it true? Is it true? Are they coming to save us?"'), moral imposture (every word), narcissism ('I am often accused of being boring about the war in the Balkans. It's over, move on, people tell me. I'm glad I am a bore'), and casual factual inaccuracy (a quarter of a million people did not die in the Balkans wars of the 1990s, and 'we' did not do 'nothing').

This is the story: some cynical foreign policy wonks who outrageously want grants to produce their work do not think it right to 'intervene' to save anyone from murder or rape, but she (Janine Di Giovanni, an American-born writer who styles herself as one of Europe's most respected journalists) has seen the suffering first hand and knows too well the cost of such indifference. Only someone with military experience can understand her outrage. That's it. That's the entire article. Largely to my relief, I am unfamiliar with this particular journalist. But I recognise the genre. Journalism on the Balkans is replete with this kind of horseshit and publishers lap it up because they know that most of those who pick up a journalistic book about Yugoslavia and its break-up have no intention of actually learning anything. In one sense is mood music for the American empire - the world is afflicted, and only yankee supermen (with suitable auxiliaries in tow) can save it. In another, it appropriates suffering for narcissism. In the mere act of encountering another's suffering, meditating on it and irresponsibly calling on an imperial hyperpower to do something about it, one becomes virtuous and loveable. I do need to say that I despise these people, and I could not say how much.

However, to return to what is motivating this tirade, can we not do away with 'intervention', at least in this context, as a gross abuse of the language? Can we not finally force people, at gunpoint, to say what they mean? Calls for 'intervention' typically involve a plea for a major military power to deploy some of its troops and hardware in zones of conflict or humanitarian disaster (notwithstanding any complicity that power might have in that catastrophe or any concurrent one of equal or greater calamity). They usually call upon the American state to invade, or bomb, or overthrow the government of another society. In light of what can reasonably be expected to be among the outcomes of such a venture, the term 'intervention' is even more furtive than 'enhanced interrogation technique', 'collateral damage', and a thesaurus of similar euphemisms. I suggest the following alternatives in future: conquer, subjugate, annexe, vanquish, overthrow, subdue, destroy, crush, bombard and attack. There are probably hundreds of vocables that would pithily express a call for the global projection of violence, and 'intervene' isn't among them.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', yugoslavia