Friday Video Corner

Continuing the shoplifting theme:

The Mill

I kind of liked the series of The Mill that finished airing last Sunday. Based around the life of a textile mill at Cheshire in the late 1830s and early 1840s, this dealt with the peak in Chartist activity around the petition of 1842, and participation of mill workers in the General Strike of that year. This was presented sympathetically (if anything, a little too sympathetically - would that all members of the ruling class were classic villains, and all union supporters basically solid people), and with a good understanding of the underlying politics. It doesn't represent a high point of writing, it was frequently predictable, and often unhelpfully sentimental. Nevertheless, it's good that stuff like this is being made.

However, the sadness is that it is perfectly safe to approach Britain's most radical mass working class movement through the lens of historical drama. The past, with its funny costumes and improbable background music, is a foreign country that can be served up in commodified dollops without there being much danger of many viewers' attitudes towards their own situation being changed. For sure, we might admire the passion, the commitment, the values of a revolutionary in a drama series, but the feelings thus stirred are easily packaged up and consigned to the domain of nostalgia - oh for the days when people believed in something.

The challenge is to provide a way of approaching radical history that presents it as part of an unfinished story in which we ourselves participate.

Two really unhelpful political terms

...are:

1. Islamism. This is supposed to refer to the view that Islamic faith should impact on one's political views. Guess what? A lot of Muslims think that - and quite frankly, good for them: the idea that one should (or even can) separate one's politics from one's substantial ethical commitments being a liberal prejudice we'd all be better off without. Amongst the Muslims signed up to this view are socialists and feminists, think Salma Yaqoob, any number of tedious and unremarkable parliamentarians the world over, oh, and ISIS. I wonder who out of that list you think of when you hear the word 'Islamist'. Oh, and 'Islamist' sounds quite a lot like 'Islam'. You see where this is going? Compare the hardly-ever-used term 'political Christianity'. This would encompass Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Ian Paisley, the Ku-Klux Klan, German Christian Democrats, Chinese underground Catholics, some of the Palestinian resistance, a good proportion of Tea Party members, liberationist fighters in Latin America.... Do you find it a particularly helpful political category? Well, then.
2. Extremism. This is the current term for Bad Things on the part of UK (and wider) state agencies and media. Thus ISIS are, when they are not being Islamists, extremists. Sometimes they are Islamist extremists; more worryingly they are often Islamic extremists, of which more post haste. The thought presumably is that were ISIS moderate theocratic murderers, that would be all well and good. Why must people always take things too far? Related to the extremism trope is the perennial creed of the English bourgeoisie, that the truth always lies midway between two extremes. Faced with two proposed answers to the question "What is twice eleven?", twenty two and three thousand, a certain type of calculating pragmatist would split the difference somewhere in the mid thousands. Anyway, extremism, to the extent that the word means anything at all, is surely a good idea. We should react in an extreme way to a world in which millions starve needlessly. Also notice the danger of modifying "Islam" with "extreme" to describe ISIS - as one recently blocked Facebook 'friend' put it, "If Islam really is a religion of peace, why aren't their extremists really peaceful?". The KKK are never "extreme Christians". Once "extremists" have been established as people who blow up shopping centres and behead soldiers on the street, however, animal rights protestors, peaceniks and other similar enemies of civilisation become "domestic extremists".

Anyway, thanks for letting me get that rant off my chest. I've been on holiday.

"God said to Abraham, kill me a son"

The Guardian is running this advert tomorrow:

The 'human shield' slander against Palestine has been dispatched elsewhere. The echoes of the historic anti-Semitic blood libel in the 'child sacrifice' claim have been noted. Let me, then, draw your attention to some lines from the advert:

More than three thousand years ago, Abraham had two children. One son had been sent into the wilderness and was in danger of dying. God saved him with water from a spring.

The other son was bound, his throat about to be cut by his own father. But God stayed the knife.

Both sons – Ishmael and Isaac – received promises that they would father great nations.

With these narratives, monotheism and western civilization begin. And the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch are forever left behind by the descendants of Abraham.

Except they are not.

You may be unfamiliar with the Abraham story. Here's an interesting thing - on the Jewish and Christian version of the story, the one you'd find in the book of Genesis, the son who is not nearly sacrificed is Ishmael. So, if you like, the rejection of child sacrifice begins with the other son - Isaac, who is the father of Jacob (also known as Israel), and a foundational figure in the history of Judaism. Ishmael becomes associated with ethnic arabs and is an important figure in Islam (for whose characteristic traditions  Ishmael, rather than Isaac, is the son who escapes the knife).

Let me spell out the message here. One son - because these sons really stand for entire ethno-religious groups - has stopped killing its children. Over to you, the other son.

Or to put it more briefly: those Muslims, they kill their children.

This, apparently, is the kind of stuff that liberals think they should use their newspapers to disseminate.

Friday Video Corner

A goodie from the days when musical genius went hand in hand with miming whilst simulating some kind of indeterminate medical emergency.

Scottish Independence : Yes (with no illusions) (ii)

Neither party in last night's depressing exercise in presidential politics should convince anyone. Nor should anyone interested in the politics of human emancipation cast their vote on the basis of which of two white male bourgeois politicians performed better in an overgrown student debate in front of the TV cameras. So let's proceed to ignore Messrs Darling and Salmond. The point is to bring about a world where our collective life involves more than sitting in front of one box before deciding which vote to cast into another.

The immediate issue facing Scotland's electorate is not, of course, whether they prefer Darling or Salmond, New Labour or the SNP, but whether they want Scotland to be politically independent. I argued last time why I don't buy arguments commonly advanced on the Labour Left in favour of a 'no' vote. Now I want to consider reasons to support a 'yes' vote.

National liberation

A standard move in the Scottish (and Welsh) Labour circles is to criticise nationalism - possibly with a hint that it promotes anti-English 'racism' (note to self: do future post on why it is simply not possible to be a racist, as opposed to rude/ dickish/ unpleasant, to someone in Britain on the basis of their Englishness). Here's one recent case in point on Left Foot Forward.

The first point to make here is that support for independence is not the same thing as nationalism. The second is that there is a clear and obvious difference between subaltern nationalisms and the nationalisms of world imperial powers, such as England/ the UK, has been. To fail to recognise this is to fail to recognise asymmetries of power and domination, a failure which should prove fatal for left-wing politics.  And there is a strong case that Scotland stands in need of national liberation. Scotland continues as an politico-economic periphery to the UK, frequently subjected to Tory governments for which its populace did not vote. Anti-Scots racism is more common throughout Britain than many care to admit.

That's the present. Nor do I think the past is irrelevant to the argument here - that we should 'move on' from the past, rather than - say - redeem it, is a liberal commonplace that betrays the emotionally dessicated humanity from which a lot of what passes for politics proceeds. I'm reminded of Walter Benjamin's words about being 'nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.' It is OK to vote 'yes' on behalf of those cleared from their land by English aristocrats, those sent from the Isles to the Somme, the schoolchildren caned for speaking Gaelic. Of course, the story of national oppression and human exploitation of which these are part also includes the stories of immigrants from every corner of the earth - the half-starved Irish immigrant, the Bangladeshi seprated from family by immigration laws. And it is a more compelling story for that reason.




Trident

Probably quite a good indicator of the aforementioned national oppression is the fact that the Westminster government uses Scotland as a storehouse for its weapons of mass destruction. It is is everyone's interests, throughout Scotland, throughout Britain, throughout the world, that the Trident programme is upset. Voting 'yes' is an excellent way to achieve this.


Ireland

Britain's still got part of Ireland in its murky hands. The resulting partition messes with Irish politics on both sides of the border. Scotland leaving the union will weaken the union overall, and given the significance of Scottish identity for unionist ideology in the north of Ireland, could be quite significant there.


Class

Workers, as the old slogan has it, have no country. Actually, the old slogan has it that working men have no country, which should be a warning to us that the hard work to be done here lies at the intersections. Whilst it is perfectly true that working class interests are international, it is equally true that those interests, as they find expression here and now, are mediated by, and distorted by, national politics.

Take Scotland. A significant proportion of the working class vote for the SNP. As a consequence of this, along with the comparative strength of old-style social democracy, the SNP pitches itself left-of-Labour. This in spite of the fact that the SNP is a coalition, many of whose members have interests deeply divergent from those of working people, and support political agendas far to the right of Labour. I merely name Brian Souter at this point.

This is to say that the SNP is a classic populist bourgeois nationalist party. And many Scottish workers are tied to it. This provides a case study in support of a general principle: once a national question has been raised, socialists should support its resolution in order to fracture bourgeois nationalist movements and reintroduce class politics. The current SNP wouldn't survive in an independent Scotland - no doubt something called the SNP would survive, like some kind of albannaich  Fianna Fáil. But the coalition of party activists and voters currently grouped around the bundle of charisma and dialectic precision that is Alex Salmond will not survive in the absence of a live national question. We can expect a split to the left, and a regrouping with unions, people from Left groups, and some Labour people. In other words, something looking like a workers party. Ensuring this would need to be a priority for socialists in a newly independent Scotland.

So there you have it, far from being a vote for the SNP, a vote for independence is a vote to split the SNP along class lines. Something we should all support.

Scottish Independence : Yes (with no illusions) (i)

This is a two-part piece, a polemic,  on why socialists should support a 'yes' vote in Scotland in September. It does not aim to convince people in general to line up behind independence; as it happens I don't think any argument to this effect is possible. There is no such thing as 'people in general'; interests and opinions diverge widely. The kind of reasons that might convince famous homophobe and millionaire Brian Souter to put his not inconsiderable assets behind the 'yes' campaign are very different from those that will be considered here. We'll return to Souter in due course.

This piece is also written by a Labour Party member. It is striking that, whilst the Scottish Left outside Labour has pretty solidly positioned itself in support of independence, the Labour 'Yes' camp is small. If anything this is more true on the Labour Left than for the Scottish Party in general. The balance of pieces in Labour Briefing, for instance, has clearly been pro-union. I dissent from this majority view, although there will be reason to pause and consider why it is the majority view.

At no point do I intend to argue that Scottish independence will transform Scottish society, or British society, beyond recognition, that it will herald in socialism, that it will safeguard the welfare state, or anything else. Over a century ago, in the context of the (still unfinished) Irish struggle for independence, James Connolly penned the purple passage,

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

What was true of Ireland then, is true of Scotland now. Political independence will not disentangle Scotland economically from British capitalism, still less from capitalism in general. A good proportion of the country's land would still be owned by English aristocrats and London-based financial institutions the day after a 'yes' vote (and a miserably small proportion of it owned by anyone other than super-rich individuals and institutions) . Regardless of the outcomes of wranglings over currency, whether or not an independent Scotland remained in sterling, its currency would at least be pegged to sterling (and, if nominally independent, vulnerable to speculative attack on this basis) leaving its government a limited amount of wiggle-room with respect to Westminster's economic policy. For the foreseeable future, "Westminster's economic policy" means austerity. As, to pre-empt it being mooted, does "Frankfurt's economic policy".

But the fact that a brand new world isn't at stake in this referendum doesn't mean that nothing is at stake. And I support a 'yes' vote.

Bad Reasons to Oppose Independence

Let's start by dismissing some very bad reasons to oppose independence. One, often repeated, is that Scotland leaving the UK would leave the rest of the Union doomed to perpetual Tory government. This is simply not true. As this blog showed some time ago, here.

Even worse, and frequently heard on the Labour Left, is an appeal to class unity. "The British working class should fight British capitalism together". The problem here is at least two-fold. First, if the existence of state borders renders impossible working class unity against capital then, faced with global capitalism, we might as well all give up and go home now. Second, the idea that all struggles against non class oppression should take a definite back seat to the class struggle is the worst kind of retrograde workerism. It is not even good class politics, since it fails to recognise the intersection between class exploitation and national, gender, racial etc. oppression. All too recently the British Left has seen the horrors that result from suggesting that feminism should take a back seat in socialist politics. Neither should national liberation movements be shelved until the important business of class struggle has been completed.

A less well-defined Labour unionist tribalism is more common than explicit class politics. This has been cynically exploited by the Party machine up north. It is certainly the case, although to a lesser extent than during the heyday of New Labour's Scottish PLP base, that the Labour leadership benefits from unionism in terms of intra-Party power. However, grassroots support for a 'no' vote can't simply be attributed to top-down manipulation - real, and sometimes comical, though that is. It is inevitable that if Labour activists get used on a day-to-day basis to electoral campaigns in which a significant opponent, often the main opponent, is a nationalist party, there will be a tendency for their politics to take on a unionist colouring. The kind of caricaturing and nurturing of a developed dislike which follows on from any kind of persistent political campaign will be directed at the SNP, and via them to nationalism, and to support for independence (these not being quite the same thing). Nothing short of a deliberate injection of politics will halt this slide into unreflective unionism.

To be continued...

Friday Video Corner

Readers, I give you the "well, there's wrong on both sides" position on Israel-Palestine. In the medium of song:

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