Out with the old

Apparently Hogmanay got going as a result of the Calvinist Kirk having a downer on the celebration of Christmas, which smacked of both popery and fun. It is fair to say that these days the festivities don't wear their puritanical origins on their sleeve. Your host is, alas, prevented by reasons of health from participating in the occasion with full dionysian vigour this year. It's probable, however, that I'll be spending midnight with Mr Jools Holland and his orchestra. So I'll offer you my reflections now. You're on the edge of your collective seat; I can sense it.

When I say 'my reflections', I don't mean my reflection on the state of things in 2014. When viewed with sufficient generality, the situation is perfectly clear already: things are shit, but could get better if enough of us do something about them. We make history, as Marx reminded us, but not in conditions of our own choosing. The mere fact that our present unchosen conditions are to history as Coldplay are to the avant-garde is no good reason not to make some more history.

I want to blog instead about New Year celebrations themselves. There is a increasing tendency for people to adopt a cynical distance from these: "we're only celebrating a arbitrary unit of time passing", "we might have chosen some other measure of time, how can the fact that we didn't be important, or worth celebrating?" It's not that people who say these sort of things don't go on to celebrate the New Year; it's just that they do so in knowing detachment from the whole meaningless affair, presumably smugly fancying that their co-revellers suppose that the gods have decreed that it is 2015, or something. One word for this state of mind is "nihilism".

The arbitrary, you see, matters. Signification is arbitrary, that is to say, meaning is arbitrary. Yet we are language using creatures, we succeed in meaning things. We do this with times and seasons just as readily as we do with words. The randomly chosen measure of time, the festival that so easily could have been elsewhen (or not occured at all), the anniversary, the birthday - all of these serve as landmarks, fixed points around which we structure the narratives of our lives. They lend a life-giving rhythm to our reality, rather like a healthy heart-beat as contrasted with the morbid tremor of fibrillation. The relentless forward march of capital lends to our time the features of the latter: it is not that things are still, after all capital cannot be accumulated without constantly revolutionising the means of production. But the movement we experience is, in the main, unstructured, chaotic. It cares not tuppence for us, our loves and our observances. One moment of time is no more or less important than any other - each moment is abstractly equivalent, equally apt for production and consumption. It's unsurprising, then, that this society finds itself wondering whether the arbitrariness of its new year celebration negates its meaningfulness.

It's similar with Christmas itself. The bonanza of consumption for which this provides the opportunity has become indispensable to the process of circulation in Western capitalism. And yet the cultural logic of the system itself cannot make any sense of the feast. The problem isn't particularly the widespread disbelief in the religious basis of Christmas; we can still just about appreciate a good story. The same kind of worry that we have about the arbitrariness of New Year reappears, of course. There is always some pub bore who can relied upon to tell us, perfectly truthfully, that we don't know the day of Jesus' birth.

The real problem late capitalism has with Christmas lies not with the foundations but with the actuality of the feast in its classical form. Think about it: a significant period of time, twelve days, set apart, marked with special observances and the absence of productive labour, and, in pre-modern times, prepared for by Advent, a period of abstinence. This is hardly the stuff that brings a smile to the face of the bourgeoisie, whose unobtainable fantasy is of constant production alongside constant consumption (this latter somehow obtained without undue encroachment on the wages bill). And so Christmas collapses into an amorphous blob of a Christmas season, starting in October, when the shops lose the Halloween decorations and the restaurants introduce their Christmas menu. It is mostly over by Boxing Day. For all but the statutory bank holidays, business continues as usual, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word 'business', only with a backing soundtrack of Jingle Bells and the occasional offer of a mince pie. Even attempts to re-sanctify Christmas don't re-establish the fine structure of the liturgical year. Carol services can be attended any time from mid-November onwards. The year is flattened at the behest of capital.

Left stranded, as we are, in a time without landmarks, there is a temptation to recover the past, with its organic ebb and flow of the seasons. This dream of a restored temporality is the natural pairing of a vision of a restored order, that is of the politics of conservatism, even fascism. Yet the need for structure and narrative, for history rather than an encounter with time as an alien presence, is real and pressing. It's just that the cure proffered for our lost condition is worse than the disease. Adorno once wrote,

As long as the face of the earth keeps being ravished by utilitarian pseudo-progress, it will turn out to be impossible to disabuse human intelligence of the notion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the pre-modern world was better and more humane, its backwardness nothwithstanding.

So there's one excellent reason to be a socialist in 2015, to safeguard the future from both chaos and the death-dealing power of the past.

2014 video corner

As we say goodbye to the year that marks a significant anniversary of both the Miners Strike and the 1914 Christmas truce.

Prospects for Syriza

Just a quick bit of linkage on the snap elections in Greece, and the prospect of a Syriza victory.

There is never anyone better to read on the Eurozone crisis than Costas Lapavitsas, and his take on the present situation in Greece is typically perceptive (the background context is his scepticism about a happy outcome for the Greek economy for as long as it remains in the Eurozone). His final paragraph is this:

A Syriza government will probably face an ultimatum to capitulate, perhaps by being offered some watered-down version of austerity. This would be a disaster for Greece and a major defeat for opponents of austerity in Europe. It is vital that Syriza wins and applies its programme without flinching, helped by international support. The battle lines are forming in Greece.

 Owen Jones also deserves a look. He also emphasises that Syriza would need support in the aftermath of an election victory:

That’s why Greece desperately needs solidarity. Firstly, there’s a point of principle: to defend sovereignty and democracy from attack, whether from within or without. But a Syriza government could spur on other anti-austerity forces across the continent. It is conceivable that Podemos could assume power in Spain later in 2015. The likes of Die Linke in Germany – the country at the very heart of the EU’s austerity drive – could be given a boost, too.

Those who advocate ongoing austerity in Greece can summon powerful extra-parliamentary forces to their aid: the IMF, the EU, and key personnel in Greek state institutions, including a fascist-infilitrated police force. Unless the left can summon an even greater extra-parliamentary contingent, a Syriza government alone will be powerless to halt the attack on Greece's working class. First and foremost, this needs to include broad organised working class support for a Syriza programme from within Greece itself (and the quid pro quo therefore of that programme being held accountable to the labour movement). But the struggle against austerity is as international as the institutions imposing it. Solidarity with Greece is the number one immediate priority for the left in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, in the coming year.

Danczuk and the 'white working class'

New Left Project are running a series on race and class in Britain. It's deserving of a look. In particular, Jon Lawrence's piece, published today, Why the Working Class was never 'White', is excellent, and speaks to a particularly unhelpful idea that has currency in the labour movement. I quote the final paragraph:

The sooner we recognise that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing, but rather an unhelpful media construction which the left must eschew, the better. Not only does it deflect attention from the virulent racism in other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping what they deserve.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of Simon Danczuk. The voice of Labour's hard right in England, and a serial complainer - sadly against all the evidence - that the leadership don't say very much about immigration, Danczuk is also a self-proclaimed advocate for the working class and/ or 'ordinary people'. He considers himself to be part of the former, 'a working class MP'. It has to be said that, in spite of an impeccably proletarian background, his last job before entering parliament was as director and co-owner of a public affairs consultancy, but working class status is presumably supposed to be something like Catholic baptism, indelible.

The brand of populism Danczuk promotes combines a class rhetoric with a campaigning stance on tabloid-pleasing issues; he has been a prominent voice around the scandal of child sex abuse. A nostalgic, romantic, attachment to the constructed white working class of yesteryear co-exists in Danczuk's mind with an outright rejection of the kind of reformist mitigation of capitalism's worst excesses one might imagine to feature, 'Spirit of '45' style, in the narrative. The Blue Labour constituency, close to the Labour leadership, sell the purer product. For both, however, there is an old working class Labour following, which is understood as both racialised and racist. Until the 'legitimate' concerns of 'ordinary voters' are addressed, Labour will lose out to UKIP or abstention. There's an element of truth in this, as I've said before, but not in the way the purveyors of Hovis kitsch politics suppose.

How did this discourse come into its own? As Lawrence notes, it was the media and academics who constructed the white working class before it was seized on by politicians and entered into the nexus of cultural self-understanding. But an ideology must have some kind of purchase on truth, however perverse and one-sided, to get a grip on the hearts and minds of any significant number of people. Scientology is always likely to remain a niche pursuit. And the truth, of course, is that large numbers of working class people do feel left behind; large numbers of working class people do feel distant from a political elite. In both cases the feeling is entirely veridical: it's just that the 'white working class story' gets things wrong by supposing this estrangement has anything to do with skin colour.

Matters were not helped by the fact that there was a measure of social liberalism in the New Labour years - although not especially around the issue of immigration: increases in immigrant numbers resulted from the global economic and political context rather than the Blair-Brown governments, which were quite happy to leave asylum seekers languishing in detention centres, being a 'soft touch'. To the extent that a certain liberalism - over civil unions, for example - did co-exist, however, with the absence of any serious reformism in the socio-economic sphere, this helped to give rise to the 'Hampstead Heath politics' tale told by Danczuk. The concurrent demonisation of the working class, documented by Owen Jones and others, provided a context where it could be imagined that council estates were full of resentful xenophobes. Chavs were not only idle, they were racist. Think about how the average BNP supporter was imagined in the media - he or she had an Essex accent and probably the odd tatoo. She lived in a council flat, decked out with England flags. Polling data in fact suggests this character was far more likely to live in a relatively affluent suburb.

Danczuk is just taking the whole story full circle. Rather than turn up his nose in disgust at the reactionary proletarian of metropolitan imagining, he has set himself up as their champion. Much the same dynamic was at work around Emily Thornberry's forced resignation. The flag-waving cage fighter at the centre of that particular episode is a living caricature of the working class as projected from Westminster. Until a better class politics becomes articulate, expect to hear more about the white working class.

On Christmas

It's not a novel point, but there's a strange ideological two-facedness around the religious side of Christmas celebrations. The central narrative, or more strictly speaking narratives - Matthew and Luke offer us inconsistent accounts - is one in which that which is most significant in humankind is found in the poor and dispossessed, where deity is found in a manger, and which - in its Lukan version - is prefaced by an episode in which the newborn child's mother sings about the overthrow of the rich and powerful. This is not generally the kind of stuff that goes down well in Downing Street.

And yet, there's a notable trend amongst our ruling class to push for a more explicitly 'Christian' celebration of the season. David Cameron's Christmas message, not something - I have to say - that I make a priority on 25th December, has taken a more stridently religious tone over the past couple of years. This is of a piece with his rather improbable recent claim that he is an 'evangelical' about the Christian faith.

Even in secular Britain, religious stories, if not the content of religious belief, have a symbolic power, a capacity to secure a certain social unity in a world whose every tendency is to dissolve social bonds. This is too much of a gift for the guardians of that world to give up. Not only can the Christmas story bind together symbol, emotion, and collectivity: its background religious basis can be invoked on behalf of 'morality'. The characteristic bourgeois use for religion is as a kind of celestial superego, a means of establishing moral norms and an economy of reward and blame long after the social basis that would make such things genuinely intelligible has been swept away by the drive for profit. This policing function would have surprised no small number of more classical Christian authors, for whom their faith has rather more to do with human moral failure, and its overcoming by a thoroughly unsentimental yet gratuitous love, than with securing social respectability. No matter; austerity Britain needs a populace who behave.

There is a circle to be squared, then. How to tell the Christmas story in a way that serves order, without awakening what Bloch called 'the subversive memory' of the text? One way, of course, is the typical ideological disavowal whereby the manner in which something is said shows the speaker not to mean what they are really saying. When the words "he hath put down the mighty from their seats" are proclaimed in a crisp RP accent in King's chapel, Cambridge, even the most anxious burgher is unlikely to call the police. Things have been different when those same words issue from the mouths of Latin American protesters.

These days sentiment and nostalgia play an equal part. We live in a gruesomely mawkish age, moved to tears by the most superficial, manufactured, feelings, yet unmoved by the starvation of a good proportion of the world's population. We are encouraged to yearn for an imagined national past, replete with bunting, cupcakes, parsons on bicycles, and Bisto in a jug on the table. It's a vision that looks a bit like the 1950s, is suspiciously white, and offers a world where women seem to spend most of their time in aprons. We pretend to remember an age when things were more straightforward, where at least we had a place, and could navigate our way around the world - even if our wanderings only ever lead us from the kitchen to the factory and back again. Better that than zero hour contracts and the relentless threat of the future. Christmas, or rather, the celebration of Christmas, fits nicely into this cultural niche. Remember when we all believed? Let's sing along like we used to, for old time's sake. And we'll do it as a family. Just like the good old days, simpler, days. It causes the eyes to well up, and the mind to conjure smell of chestnuts roasting. The child in the crib ceases to be a sign of contradiction, and becomes a prop in a living museum.

All of which is really to say that religion, like the rest of the culture in which it exists, is a site of ideological contest. Remember that when you're eating your sprouts.

Comradely greetings

I've downloaded Verso's 2014 Mixtape. Well worth doing; get it here.

I was particularly struck by a letter from Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, written as part of a correspondence with Slavoj Žižek. I'm going to order the book. From what I've seen, it ought to - but probably won't - provide food for thought on those sections of the left who are reluctant to criticise the Putin regime for fear of giving comfort to the West. On Edward Snowden, for example, Tolokonnikova writes:

Slavoj, it wasn’t too long ago that you suggested it might be a good idea for Masha and me to speak our minds about Edward Snowden. This is no simple thing to do when Snowden is living in your country under the protection of the same intelligence services that have ordered and overseen physical violence against you and your friends. At the same moment that we two were in prison, Edward Snowden was finding himself in quite an awkward situation—a fighter for the free dissemination of information, he found himself in Russia, where, like it or not, his presence inevitably conferred legitimacy on the Kremlin’s information policy. The same Kremlin that was directing an aggressive propaganda campaign on TV, destroying all independent channels, condoning the murder of independent journalists—professionals, heroes like Anna Politkovskaya. Snowden, however, had been cornered into a dismal position from which he could not expose any of this. He now lives in Russia, but he can’t tell the truth about how information is collected and disseminated here. He has no choice but to keep his mouth shut. Russia’s intelligence and propaganda sectors have used Snowden for their own grubby games. And for me, as one of Russia’s activists, it’s horrible to watch. There’s no doubt that his persecution is a drastic misstep by the US, which is keeping far too busy destroying the possibilities for true democracy around the world. This error is made visible by Russia’s cynical use of the whistleblower to stabilize the Kremlin’s own reactionary information policy.

Friday Video Corner

A good number of people I know seem to have gone to the Manic Street Preachers gig at the Roundhouse earlier in the week. I'm insanely jealous.

Birchall on the SWP crisis

I used to have a soft spot for the SWP. In spite of growing up in a left-wing family, and having left home already a Labour Party member in a pretty hard-left CLP, my first exposure to Marxist ideas outside the printed page was through conservations with SWP members at university. I used to attend SWSS meetings, and people from the group would take me along to demonstrations and rallies. The Cliffites served as socialist babysitters for a small-town boy in a big city, and I remain grateful to them for an education and a welcome, although I remained in Labour. A good number of SWP members are people of whom I'm personally fond.

The party's intellectual traditions are an important bequest to the wider Left. In particular Tony Cliff and Chris Harman will remain essential reading for many years to come. The state capitalism analysis of Stalinism was, in my view, a step forward and has a renewed relevance in a post-Cold War context, where 'it didn't work in Russia' is easily the most frequent objection to communism. Organisationally, the SWP and its predecessors played a central part in many struggles. The Anti-Nazi League, in particular, stands out as an achievement.

For these, and many other reasons, it's impossible to take pleasure in the SWP crisis, and subsequent splintering of break-away groups, quite apart from the appalling treatment of women that heralded the schism. Whilst I am certainly not of the 'ban the SWP' tendency that is bringing a new intolerance to university campuses at the moment, the whole episode is a sobering reminder of the persistence of sexism on the Left. At the same time, it has weakened the Left collectively and threatened the vital heritage of the IS tradition.

There is no better account to be had of the crisis than Ian Birchall's recently published one. I commend it to you. But I do do with a word of caution: those of us who read it as observers rather than participants will, if we are honest, recognise echoes of the problems Birchall identifies in the SWP throughout the British Left. If any good can come of the past few years, it will consist in us learning and changing.

Jim Murphy : forerunner of the death of labourism?

Well, the votes are in, and the remaining few members of the Labour Party in Scotland have voted for Jim Murphy as their leader. As did, pretty enthusiastically, the MPs and MSPs. The affiliates, which is mainly to say unions, didn't - of which more presently. Cue obligatory comment about Turkeys and Christmas.

I have form with Jim Murphy. He was president of the NUS and a big thing in Labour Students when I was an undergraduate. He didn't seem to like me. In fairness to our protagonist, the feeling was mutual; I thought he was terrible then, and he is beyond terrible now. Be quite certain, this is the most right-wing person ever to be elected to a leadership position in the Labour Party, and I include Blair in that reckoning. An unpleasant political fixer avant la lettre, he is, quite incredibly, a member of the Henry Jackson Society. The immediate consequence of his election will be Labour haemorrhaging votes to the SNP next year, when the now certain strategy of opposing them from the right will go down like a lead balloon with the Scottish electorate.

Murphy did not win amongst trade unions, in spite apparently of some SNP trade unionists voting for him as an act of political euthanasia. Calls are already being made for unions to disaffiliate from the party in Scotland. More intriguingly, there are rumours of significant unions - I've heard Unison named - taking this call seriously. 

Working class politics in Britain has been dominated for over a century by the unique phenomenon of labourism. The dual premises of the labourist settlement are the link between trade unions and the Labour Party and Labour functioning as the 'natural party' for working class voters. The correct answer to the question, "is labourism a good or a bad thing?" is a resounding "yes and no". On the one hand, labourism has kept class allegiance in focus in British electoral politics, given a certain political voice to trade unions, and won reforms, most notably the welfare state. On the other, labourism has undoubtedly functioned as a political brake on the working class, at once forcing a division of labour between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement whilst making trade union bureaucracies unhealthily beholden to Labour leaderships. Either way, labourism is real, and has needed to be reckoned with by anyone serious about socialist politics in Britain. The two word answer to the question why I remain in the Labour Party is "labourism persists".

But for how much longer? Labourism is under pressure throughout Britain. It was deliberately targeted in the New Labour era, and faces a renewed threat from the implementation of the Collins reforms. Meanwhile we're witnessing a certain fracturing of traditional party allegiances, with the rise of what has been misleadingly christened 'anti-politics', the Jeckyl and Hyde personae of which are Nigel Farage and Russell Brand.

What is somewhat true throughout Britain, however, is true with a vengeance in Scotland. The SNP has already undermined Labour allegiance in a layer of the working class, and the impact of the referendum, and the major parties back-peddling on their 'vow' to implement devomax will hasten this. With Jim Murphy, who opposed even a referendum on independence, behind the wheel the acceleration will be great indeed. Labour will be fighting the next election in Scotland as the major opponent of the SNP from the right, and this will push their status as a party of reform to breaking point. Meanwhile, the union link is threatened north of the border with more immediacy than in England and Wales. Remember that the disaffiliation of the RMT from the Labour Party throughout Britain was a product of Scottish politics; history could yet repeat.

It is foolish to make predictions in this area, but it is not beyond the bounds of imagination that yesterday's election result was a decisive moment in the death of labourism.

Friday Video Corner : #AllLivesMatter

Foyles war

The flagship London bookshop Foyles has what you might call a colourful political history. Founder Christina Foyle was a notorious union-buster, and frequently sacked staff just before they had been employed long enough to get employment rights. In the inter-war years, she founded a Right Book Club to counter the influence of the Left Book Club.

You get the idea.

But that was all some time ago. Things have changed, right?

Seemingly not. Campaigner Lindsay Woods has started a petition which draws attention to the fact that some workers at Foyles are not paid the London Living Wage. You can sign it here. Also check out Lindsay's Twitter feed here for the latest on this campaign.

Pay in the retail sector is a live campaigning issue; the Stop Scrooging website has been getting a lot of attention. It would be the absolute jewel in the crown of a successful push for retail wages if the historically recalcitrant Foyles were forced to come good.

This bibliophile wishes Foyles workers all the best in this fight to escape poverty pay.

Friday Video Corner - December Autumn Statement Edition