Judith's point is very valid...

I have just spent an exhilarating day with comrades in Thanet campaigning against Nigel Farage and for his Labour opponent. When one has been exposed to real politics, to racism and its interaction with other issues in the lives of real women and men, it is always a little dispiriting to return to the bosom of that most self-hating of beasts, the British left. But despise it though I sometimes do, it is home, and so I dutifully logged in to my computer this evening to find - would you believe it? - said left fighting itself.

The issue is that Socialist Resistance, a fourth internationalist outfit, has hosted a debate between feminists who take differing views on transgenderism. In response a petition has been set up, signed by some quite prominent leftists, and not a few men (there's, as you might imagine, an overlap between these two groups) criticising SR for hosting 'transphobes'.

As will rapidly become clear I do not think my views on this issue matter very much. Questions around transphobia are current on the left. For what its worth, I get the impression that people talk past each other quite a lot on this subject (for example, around the question of who qualifies as a woman, differing positions on which seem often to turn on differing prior definitions of the word) - this is exactly the kind of situation I would expect to be helped by open debate. There does also seem to me to be an almost perverse desire taken by some on the left, and I'm thinking here of cis-gendered straight people, to take delight in 'calling out' people as transphobes. I'm not talking here about Julie Bindel and her odious ilk, no - it seems quite easy to be a transphobe. Believing, for instance, that people suffer oppression on the grounds of sex, as distinguished from gender, seems sufficient. There's an uncomfortable whiff of thoughtcrime here, as well as hints towards more general issues on the left: an individualistic moralism and a hyper-identification with victims that seems to me to say more about those doing the identifying than it does about oppression.

I might, however, be wrong about all of this. It's not an area I've thought a great deal about. But even if I had the surprising certainty other male leftists seem to have about matters close to the heart of others' identity (this, if anywhere, is surely somewhere we should tread gently, for we step on dreams, and much else besides) I would not sign the petition. Nor would I sign a counter-petition. And the clue here is in the adjective 'male'.

I am a man in a patriarchal society. Let's, to reappropriate a phrase from John Major, get back to basics. Men, as a group and as individuals, benefit from women's oppression. Yes, it ultimately impoverishes us, much as the wage-relation ultimately alienates the bourgeoisie. But we, like them, do well in penultimate terms. We get more chances in life, we tend to get privileges in relationships - because patriarchy runs deep; like original sin, it inscribes itself into our very being, a being much of which is hidden from us at any given time. We cannot take ourselves out of this situation by a sheer act of will; one no more becomes a 'new man' by a virtue of a momentary decision than the flirtatious born again Christian is miraculously delivered from libido. I think that we have all, pretty much certainly, not only benefited from, but contributed to, women's oppression at some time or other, even whilst declaring ourselves feminists. This stuff is structural; that is not to say there is nothing we can do as individuals. It is to say that the fight against patriarchy must be a political affair.

And as a political affair, it ought to be guided by a principle that - one might naively have hoped - is part of the (non-Stalinist) socialist's ABC. The liberation of oppressed people must be the act of the oppressed themselves.

Which is to say, amongst other things, that men could usefully shut the fuck up about a debate within feminism, all sides of which are already well-represented among women. There is, to my mind, something particularly distasteful about men appearing to want to silence, or at least deny, a platform to a woman (with whom, it should be noted, another woman taking an opposing view was happy to debate). Just stop it.

Sort out the way we as individuals relate to women, in our relationships, in our workplaces - there is plenty of work to be done here. Offer support and solidarity where appropriate - of course. But acting as referees or censors to feminism? That is not our task.

Friday Video Corner

To pun tastelessly on the previous post, this is not safe for work.

Death, depression, and the logic of the workhouse

One hundred and fifty people died on Tuesday when a plane crashed into the French alps. The Daily Express communicated this fact in a revealing fashion: 

Lubitz and 149 people - including passengers and members of crew - died on Tuesday when Germanwings Flight 4U9525 crashed into the French Alps.

Those who themselves kill are not to be counted among the dead. They belong in a separate category. One such category is evil. Evil, on the tabloid understanding, is other-than-us, without cause or explanation, rare, and present only in monsters. The reassuring thought is, presumably, supposed to be that people like us are not evil, people like us - ordinary, decent, people - do not have it within themselves to maim, destroy, or senselessly kill. It is not a thought that would survive any time in the company of Freud or Arendt.

There are ways, other than being evil, in which someone can cease to be one of us. Top of the list is being mad. The mad lack what, even in as implausible a case study as that of Express journalists, is taken to be definitive of humanity - rational agency. As with evil, the suspicion has to be that ostracising the mad functions to hide the uncomfortable truth that this condition is rather more general than we might hope.

The British tabloid press has a less than exalted history as regards showing sensitivity towards those with mental illnesses (as we are now called, the word 'mad' wearing its ideology too much on its sleeves to be fit for decent use). Here's a couple of Sun front pages turned up by a Google search:

You get the idea. All the platitudes that are said in response to this sort of thing are true: that people with mental illnesses are far more likely to harm ourselves than others, that most are in no danger of harming anyone, and so forth. The only problem with this line of argument is that it assumes, naively, that the editors of tabloid newspapers number amongst their objectives the accurate presentation of medical truths.

Anyway, the Express excelled itself this morning:

Cue a well-meaning storm of outrage. The New Statesman quickly weighed in with a piece which, whilst making much-needed observations (1 in 4 British adults have a diagnosable mental health problem in any given year) homed in on one particular line of argument:

As prescient commentators were quick to point out, it’s statistically likely that the paper has a number of people on staff who suffer from one. All over the world, people with mental health problems manage to work reliably in important jobs: as doctors and nurses, in the police, as firefighters, as politicians.

 The truth is, most of us rely on people with depression all throughout our everyday lives – in the vast majority of cases, we don’t even spot it.

People with depression are, you see, useful. They do jobs. That in fact was the NS headline: "Shock news: contra to this morning's headlines, people with depression have jobs".

Mind echoed this:

There will be pilots with experience of depression who have flown safely for decades, and assessments should be made on a case by case basis. 

 We should not, in other words, rule out a priori that a depressed person can earn an honest living by being a pilot.

Now all of this is humane and no doubt well-intended. Its certainly preferable to the folk-devil making of the sewer press. But it leaves me troubled. This response to the stigmatising of people with mental illness -- that we are useful members of society, this being understood broadly in terms of our ability to sell our labour - starkly reveals the implicit terms in which human beings are valued in capitalist society. Our value is not intrinsic, we are not and in of ourselves deserving of recognition. Nor are we even valuable in virtue of the dazzling variety of human traits, capabilities, and vulnerabilities which lend life a rich texture (our personality, our interests, our capacity to make others happy, to challenge others...) We are valuable because we can produce value in the economic sense of that word.

Even were this not in itself an indictment of a cruel, philistine, society, there's a problem with this line of thought as a strategy for mental health advocacy. Because it's just not always true that people with illnesses - let's at this point abandon the problematic dualism of mental and physical illness - can work*. If I'm sleeping for two-thirds of the day, or randomly breaking into tears, or terrified of any other human being, I quite obviously cannot sign up for the day shift at Pizza Express. Only ATOS and Christian Scientists think otherwise. Perhaps I might go my entire adult life without being able to participate in the labour market.

That does not make me worthless, and it is playing with fire to deploy arguments that leave space for claiming otherwise. It gives rise to a political logic akin to that of the workhouse, one that looks nightmarishly close to the intellectual path to the door of a Dignitas clinic. By contrast, I suggest the way we think about this area begins with an axiom: people matter regardless of the use capital can make of them. The reason, of course, that mental health advocacy doesn't go down this route is that it leads inexorably to politics; politics in a more fundamental sense than mere tinkering with the benefits system.


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*By work here, I mean 'work' as in sell labour. People can do creative stuff that is not work, and might well be in a position to do this when they are not in a position to submit to the discipline of labouring for other people. It's no small fault of capitalism that this distinction is systematically elided.

Theses on the new new left

(1.) There is no hierarchy of oppression. The complexities of difference, the negotiations, misunderstanding, and mistakes that navigating these inevitably involve can only be worked out concretely in a political movement, not abstractly in a conference hall.

(2.) Perfectiblism is a form of idealism. We will never be entirely rid of awkwardnesses, imperfections, unhappiness, anxieties.. The condition of our freedom is our materiality, but our materiality constrains and frustrates our freedom. The point is to develop a politics that allows us to flourish in the face of this reality.

(3.) Safety is a characteristic trope of the conservative tradition. The moralist and the police officer make us 'safe'. Radical politics challenges safety in the cause of humanity.

(4.) The victim does not have an absolute epistemological privilege. No system of oppression survives without inserting itself into the minds of the oppressed.

(5.) Oppression is a social reality. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for someone's being oppressed that they believe themselves to be oppressed.

(6.) The new new left is the morality of victimhood. Socialism is the politics of human frailty.

I'm writing, nudge nudge, a book

Perceptive readers will be aware that your host is none-too-well at the moment, which isn't exactly a state conducive to political activity. I've decided to make a virtue of a necessity and write a book.

The Fires of Molech will be published by Zero and is about religion, politics, and violence. It's an attempt to think through these issues, which are of pretty obvious contemporary relevance, from a left-wing perspective. It will include, for instance,  stuff about the place of religion in modern society, a critique of liberal approaches to religion, reflections on Islamophobia, and discussions of the potential for left-aligned religious thought and practice.

What, other than narcissism, causes me to tell you this? Well, partly it's a thoroughly generous forewarning, so that you can save up your pennies, leave space on your Christmas lists, and so forth. But also, it's pretty likely that my blogposts over the coming month will focus on this area. So apologies in advance if it ain't your bag - I'll throw you the occasional bone of economics or irrational loathing for Jim Murphy just to keep you hanging on.

There's no inflation in a graveyard

Whilst everyone's been fretting about which privately-educated white person will succeed David Cameron as leader of the Tory party, a significant economic statistic was published. The Consumer Price Index  was 0% p.a.  in February, down 0.3% from January, raising the spectre of deflation, falling prices.

This is the first time on record that the CPI has been zero. George Osborne's response was upbeat:

Osborne said zero inflation was “a first for the British economy” and good news for family budgets.

Is he right? Well, suppose the downward trend continues - you'll be able to buy more stuff in British shops for the same amount of money. In this very minimal sense Osborne's clearly correct. It's also pretty clear that interest rates aren't going to take a hike any time soon. So credit where credit's due, there's two positives for every family budget*.

But whenever I hear a multi-millionaire talk about something being good for 'families', I ask myself 'which families?' Suppose your family isn't so rich that no member of it will ever need to work or claim benefits in order to maintain a non-destitute standard of living.   That is, suppose you are one of the vast majority of people in Britain.

You have good reason to be worried by the inflation statistics. First, employers are far less likely to make wage concessions if prices are falling: they have an excuse handed to them on a plate by the economy - "you are already better off on the same amount of pay". Deflation weakens the bargaining power of labour. Likewise, political pressure to increase benefit payments, already minimal, will be muted.

More alarmingly, deflation can wreak havoc on an economy in a way that threatens jobs themselves. If deflation settles in, people defer purchases, in the hope that prices will fall. Why should I buy that new TV this month, if I think that it's likely to be cheaper next month? Demand for goods and services falls, and so does output and employment. Similarly, firms defer capital investment, and those structural weaknesses of British capitalism, investment and productivity, will take a hit they can ill afford.

Now imagine you're in debt - like most people, and for that matter most corporations. If prices are falling, the purchasing power of a fixed amount of money increases. In particular, the real value of debt increases. Once again, hardly good news for most families.

The line amongst orthodox economic opinion about the possibility of development in this direction seems to be relaxed. The line is that low unemployment will put upward pressure on wages, and thus prevent persistent deflation setting in. The problem with this way of looking at things is that 'unemployment' isn't simply a number in an economic model, which correlates in a law-like fashion with the bargaining power of labour. Behind these abstractions lie real human beings, in real jobs, in real power relationships with their employers. And the nature of the jobs that have decreased unemployment in recent years does not look encouraging for wage settlements - they are insecure, often part-time, zero hour contracts proliferate. This is not a situation that lends itself to confident wage demands. Once a general lack of confidence, low unionisation, low levels of strikes and successful (from a trade union perspective) wage settlements is factored in, the picture looks bleak.

Or at least bleak for families unlike Osborne's.



*And for the budgets of people who don't happen to have families, who seem to have fallen out of the political picture of late.

Total Eclipse of the Arse

So there was a total eclipse this morning. I wonder, I found myself thinking, what Richard Dawkins thinks about this. As luck would have it, he took to Twitter to tell us:

Solar eclipse visible in Medina, Jan 632. If only the true nature of eclipses had been Koranically 'revealed', that would be impressive!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 20, 2015

My immediate thought was that this exhibits the philistinism of the man. Well, my first thought was in fact, "you utter wanker". But the philistinism one was definitely near the top of the list. The point is that the mirror-image fundamentalism with which Dawkins approaches religious texts betrays an incomprehension that people might use language to do anything other than communicate facts, or at least purported facts, about the physical world. There's nothing peculiarly religious to this line of criticism. For much the same reason you wouldn't want to read a critical essay on Middlemarch by Dawkins, and wouldn't bother to turn up to a rap-battle at which he was a contestant. In fact, when you think about the range of human endeavours that must for him be as baffling as the Quaranic text, the title of his autobiography An Appetite for Wonder seems about as apt as that of Mel C's little known memoir An Appetite for Twelve-Tone Serialism.

The purpose of this blog is to talk about left-wing politics, rather than to slag off Richard Dawkins, laudible though that activity always is. There is, I think, a political question along the lines of: what is it about our contemporary society that produces public intellectuals like Dawkins and how do we get rid of it as quickly as possible? But the real action is elsewhere.

Because what's really wrong with Dawkins' tweet is the Islamophobia. Because be in no doubt that is what's going on here. The irrational other, Islam, bays for blood at the gates of Western civilisation, whose only hope is that the beast be tamed by Reason, as dispensed by the likes of Dawkins. So far, so much a standard orientalist trope (I am so tempted to use the word 'meme' here, but I'd feel dirty). But this irrational dark-skinned other is a particularly dangerous one. For Islam, by Dawkins own admission, is a uniquely dangerous inhabitant of the religious zoo. So much so, that he has even flirted with the idea of supporting Christian missionaries in Africa to stem the tide of Islamicisation he, like his sound-alikes at the EDL, sees everywhere. He presumably thinks Islam is the most evil religion in the world, since he declared Catholic Christianity to be only the second most evil a few years back. I myself am devastated by this under-par performance by the home team, and am certainly hoping we can get our hands on Anjem Choudary before this season's transfer window closes. 

Islam, this non-too-subtle line of thought goes, equals irrationality, equals violence. For the slow learners amongst us, Dawkins spelled it out post-9/11:

It [9/11] came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

All of which conveniently lets imperialism, capitalism, and good old-fashioned racism off the hook. In any case the piece is disingenuous: by "religion of the Abrahamic kind", he means first and foremost Islam, as he makes perfectly clear elsewhere, and as his fellow New Atheist Sam Harris emphasises like a racist on speed. The political cash value of this is twofold. First, a bevy of impressionable followers are left with an utterly inadequate understanding of the contours of power in the world. Marx's plea to turn the criticism of heaven into the criticism of earth certainly wouldn't be out of place here. Second, Dawkins, Harris, et. al. (whatever their intentions) provide a secular variant of the clash of civilisations narrative that, in its Pentagon version, is normally littered with evangelical Christian theology. They supply a legitimatory weapon to the occidental warriors in far off lands. It's almost as though, well, they were littering the streets with loaded guns.

Friday video corner

Friday Video Corner

Too many Florence Nightingales, not enough Robin Hoods.

We need to talk about Jeremy

A wag on Facebook suggests that, with Jeremy Clarkson's suspension leaving the future of Top Gear in doubt, the programme's title could be re-used for a show that samples and rates legal highs. In a similar vein, I suggest, 'top gear' might well be the explanation for why the powers-that-be at the BBC weren't sufficiently compos mentis to get rid of Clarkson several years ago. After a series of racial incidents, and a bizarre call for striking public sector workers to be shot, it seems that in punching an underling Clarkson has gone too far.

What deserves comment is not the man's arseholery. Arsholes, like the biblical poor, are with us always, and the law of averages means that from time to time one or two of them will find their way into the broadcast media. Rather, what's interesting is the amount of support this particular arsehole has found in his adversity.

Top gear runs through this story like a thread, for a former prime mover in the acid house scene, Guido Fawkes, or Paul Staines as the man is in fact called, has started a petition calling on the BBC to reinstate Clarkson. In itself this is to be expected. There is honour even amongst aresholes, and it is almost touching to see one member of the arsehole community prepared to help out another who has got himself into a bit of a scrape. No, what demands attention is the fact that over half a million people to date have signed the thing. What on earth is that about?

It is not, one assumes, that half a million people are so devoid of any moral sensibility to think that it's OK to go around hitting staff who fail to supply you with hot dinners on demand. Instead, what the petition reflects is Clarkson's popularity. The man is well-liked by a significant proportion of the British population, much though it might pain the more pollyannaish kind of liberal to admit it. Why?

Well, since the 1960s British society has changed for the better, as well as for the worse. The past half century hasn't just been all about closing coal mines and selling council houses. There have been strides forward in opposing racism, in securing gains for women, for LGBTQ people, and in many other ways the adoption of more humane approaches to a broad spectrum of human situations. This is in no small part owing to the victories of liberation campaigns. And, guess what? Not everybody likes this.

However much I might be, and I am, signed up to the views that patriarchy is bad for men as well, that racism damages white workers by dividing them against black workers and so on, these positions are true  only, as they say, in the final analysis. Prior to that, men - #yesallmen - benefit from sexism. We are more likely to get jobs, and be paid more than women. We might well find ourselves in situations where we benefit from women's unpaid domestic work, and so on. White people - yes, all of us - benefit from racism. And so on. You get the idea.

Now it's by no means inevitable that someone who benefits from oppression in the short-run seeks to defend that oppression; things like experience and politics can play a part here. Never the less, it's entirely unsurprising that a good number of people who in various ways have done rather well out of unequal relations to others resent the fact that those relations have been eroded. Hence the backlash against feminism, hence the rallying cry 'political correctness gone mad', and hence Jeremy fucking Clarkson. He is a standard bearer for reaction against the trendy view that foreigners aren't all that bad, or the bleating communist insistence that women can drive sports cars too. He provides a voice for the unspoken resentments behind many a suburban front door. He is the arsehole of all our hearts.

And the fact that he is so popular serves as a timely reminder that there is a job to be done defending the gains of the last fifty years.

The rise of the political wife

The woman the media are calling "Justine Miliband", married to Ed, is not standing for election in May. She just happens to be the spouse of somebody who is. Why, you might then wonder, is she being subjected to pre-election interviews?

The political wife, and it is always a wife, has been a feature of the American political landscape for years. She exists to stand beside her husband, to express concern for him and stick up for him-  "I think over the next couple of months it's going to get really vicious, really personal, but I'm totally up for this fight," Justine told the BBC's James Landale. Above all she reassures us of the persistence that most feminine of spheres, the domestic, which lurks behind the front doors of even the most powerful. In possibly the most banal caption ever published on a reputable news website, the BBC tell us that "The Milibands share the family chores, such as loading their dishwasher". Look here, they are:

Notice that in order to make the, apparently weakly feminist point, that Ed does some housework, his wife is required. For the domestic is her sphere.

Now this is all so much sexist claptrap. It is no doubt a by-product, along with those wretched leaders debates we're hearing a lot about, of the presidentialisation of British politics during the Blair era. It is encouraged by a collective flight to the maternal and homely, of proportions large enough to keep Freudians in PhD theses for a generation, in response to the anxieties of the age. There may be recessions, Ebola, and the growth of ISIS, but at least we have cupcakes and the option to watch people decorating their dream homes on TV (even if we can't actually afford homes of our own).

Anyhow, the indignity of Justine Thornton, as she in fact calls herself, a barrister, having to talk to journalists about household chores is by no means the worst effect of the rise of the political wife. When Sally Bercow, married to the Speaker, did a photo-shoot for the Evening Standard, her husband is reported to have "read the Riot Act" at her. Certainly the none-too-subtle subtext of right-wing sniping about Bercow's Twitter activity and appearance on Big Brother is that the Speaker can't control his wife.

Welcome to Britain in the 21st century.