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

You have nothing to lose but your van

Phraow. Look at him. He's a real man. Not like Ed Miliband.

Well, if nothing else, Britain now has its very own version of Joe the Plumber. Dan the Van, the emblematic man (and, really, notice he's a man - a manly man at that) on the street. He'd be the man on the Clapham omnibus, were it not for the fact that he has a van, and therefore doesn't need to get the bus. But not just any old man, oh no. He's a common-or-garden salt of the earth working class man. And if you diss Dan, and don't you dare diss Dan, you hate the working class. You're a snob. And probably a member of the metropolitan elite. So don't diss Dan, OK?

There is, of course, a metropolitan elite in Britain. It does indeed make up the social base of New Labour, whose rejection of its core electorate partially explains the exit of a minority of that electorate to UKIP.  Emily Thornberry, a decent soft-left sort from a working class background, isn't really part of it. But then car salesman Dan isn't really part of the working class on any reasonable definition either. Core reality isn't important here. This is about narrative.

Richard Seymour here is good on the details of the class issue here; and this blogpost, which I promoted yesterday, is definitely worth a read. I'd just like to make one observation - the reason the forces around the Labour leadership have been so rattled by Vangate is that Thornberry's tweet upsets their preferred class narrative. This issues from the bowels of Blue Labour, and finds expression in the whole One Nation brand. It surfaced around the debate on Scottish independence, is a nationalistic ally orientated, culturally homogenising story about what it is to be working class. It is deeply reactionary in content, and its effect can only be to cede political terrain which UKIP will work more effectively than Labour.

And Ed Miliband's wedded to it. We're screwed.

Friday Video Corner - Emily Thornberry memorial edition

And if you want something sensible on the bizarre Thick of It style events of the past twenty four hours, I can't recommend this blogpost too much.

Swamped

Pause for a moment and consider why, amid the relentless targeting of immigrants to this country, a minister claiming that some UK towns are 'swamped' with EU immigrants is too much even for his Westminster paymasters. There is, after all, solid precedent for this kind of talk amongst leading Tories:



To say that we are swamped by something, is to imply that this thing is part of the non-human world. Flood waters swamp (note the language of floodgates that is never far behind talk of immigrants swamping). An office worker might be swamped by paperwork. That which swamps me is at once alien to me and something I want to do away with. When I say of people that they are swamping me I both 'other' them and to set them up as a legitimate target of hostility. And that - thanks to several decades of sustained anti-racist campaigning, these days so quickly dismissed as 'political correctness' - is no longer openly acceptable in their discourse of our leaders. Only irrelevant has-beens can now talk this way without censure.

Don't suppose for one moment, however, that this change in acceptable language reflects a change in heart. Those who thought that it was actually, as it were, wrong to treat immigrants as though they were so many pests to be exterminated would think twice before leaving them to die a hellish death in the Mediterranean.

Johann Lamont resigns

Last month's referendum certainly has the politicians dropping like flies. The latest to go is Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont. See the Graun here. George Eaton's analysis here deserves a perusal as well.

Much quoted are Lamont's scathing words about the Westminster leadership:

The Labour Party must recognise that the Scottish party has to be autonomous and not just a branch office of a party based in London.

She's right, and the criticism of over-centralisation is all the more telling coming, as it does, from someone who is a long way from being a left-wing rebel. The lording it over Scotland by Westminster Labour isn't utterly unique: absolutely definitive of New Labour was a paranoid centralism and utter fear of any public Labour figure saying anything that lacked the imprimatur of the leader's office (Lamont herself was apparently prevented from criticising the Bedroom Tax). This centralisation in the cause of the New Labour project is a good part of what lies behind Miliband's tethering of Lamont, and is equally apparent in dodgy selections, on-the-hoof policy decisions bypassing Conference and the NPF, anti-democratic 'reforms', and a good deal else on top of that.

This having been admitted, the Lamont saga cannot be entirely explained as the fallout of UK-wide institutional power-grabbing by the Labour leadership. There is a distinctively Scottish element to the tale. And with this in mind, I leave you with a question: might it not be the case that it is inevitable, for as long as the Union persists, that the London offices of UK-wide parties will be forced, by the logic of union itself, to severely restrict the autonomy of their colleagues north of the Border?

TUC Demonstration, London, 18th October

Now, as you will know, I am on the pessimism-without-hopelessness wing of the British Left. I think a lot of stuff, not least the Left itself, is rubbish, and things are not going to get a whole lot better until we realise this. This said, yesterday's TUC 'Britain Needs a Payrise' march was really quite good.

I measure the size of political demonstrations, thus: I start at the front of the march, peel off to a cafe en route, and count the number of courses I can eat whilst the march files past. I then rejoin the back. This was at least a two course and coffee affair, but I got distracted when a friend turned up, so it could well have been considerably bigger. Those preferring the more orthodox method of counting demonstrators to assess size place the numbers around the 90,000 mark.

This was pretty impressive, especially on a day when the weather was far from wonderful, and had been forecast to be worse. There was a really good feel about the demo - and an incredibly diverse bunch of marchers. The big unions were out in force, but so were smaller, and significant groups - fast food workers, the brilliant Focus E15 Mothers, peace and environmental groups, and many, many, others. Against those who question the point of A-to-B marches: one of the great things about big demonstrations around trade union issues is that they bring different groups of workers into contact, giving everyone present a sense that they are not alone, offering inspiration and providing an opportunity for conversations. They also say something pretty powerful to those who watch them pass.

Given that pessimism I was talking about, there has to be a 'but' doesn't there? Here it comes. But whilst A-to-B marches are worthwhile, they are not enough. It was brilliant that we were demonstrating the weekend after 400,000 healthcare workers had taken strike action. Wouldn't it have been better if we were doing so additionally the weekend after local government workers had also been on strike? The timidity of the Unison bureaucracy in calling off that strike in favour of 'consultation' on a sub-inflation pay proposal, is shameful. If we want the pay increases advocated by union leaderships yesterday, industrial action will be needed. There is simply no point in standing on a podium uttering fine words about pay, unless those words are followed up by sustained action.

Whilst we're on the subject of action, union bosses are supposed to be in the business of political, as well as industrial action. Here again, the leaders of the UK's big unions struck exactly the right chord yesterday. As reported by the Mirror, Unite's Len McCluskey said,

The Tory mission is to destroy the welfare state, characterising anyone on benefit as a scrounger. This country needs more than a pay rise. We need a government that fights against cuts. We say to the corporate giants who say we can’t afford it: Pay your taxes.

Bang on the the money, Len. Meanwhile Unison's Dave Prentis told the crowd,

We are here to say enough is enough. We shall no longer sit back and allow pay to decline

Exactly right.

Unison and Unite, along with other unions represented at the demo in large numbers (such as the CWU) are affiliated to the Labour Party. Given the, admirable, opposition the leaderships of these unions have expressed to austerity and low pay, you'd assume that they'd use this affiliation to push Labour towards anti-austerity, pro-worker policies, wouldn't you? Yet here's a curious fact for you to mull over. With the sole exception of BECTU, the representatives of all affiliated unions at July's national policy forum voted against a future Labour government rejecting Tory spending plans. That is to say, they voted in favour of continued austerity.

Britain certainly does need a payrise. Or rather, the British working class, or even better, the working class, need a payrise. (Some bits of Britain seem quite adequately paid already). We won't get it unless we fight for it, and increase pressure on those who are supposed to represent us.

Unpleasant

Your host is not, in the great scheme of things, poor.

I can, however, only dream of being able to pay £2,800 a month for a flat.

Alas, it is not only Boris who is pushing 'affordable' housing ("affordable" meaning, in general, 80% of market price - reduced to a still astronomical 60% in the Mount Pleasant case). The term is all over Labour policy documents, in London and nationally. A modest proposal for you to ponder over the weekend: let's stop talking about 'affordable' housing and start talking about social, or even better council housing, which is increasingly the only sort of housing that any normal person can actually afford.

Friday Video Corner

This week, NICE want you to be very frightened of alcohol in order to save money and make you a more productive worker. I paraphrase this news story.

Anyway, here's my considered response.

Missing in Action

The evil of ISIS understandably provokes a desire to 'do something', and this has caused not a few people who should know better down a bellicose path. One voice of wise caution in recent weeks has been Michael Meacher, who - in an interesting blogpost - said this,

It is imperative that Britain isn’t drawn into this imbroglio all over again. Britain’s record in the Middle East has been irredeemably negative and counter-productive from the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, through backing for the Shah as a weak Western puppet and then the arming of Saddam Hussein to fight the proxy war against Iran, and then to the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003 on utterly false pretences to gain a permanent foothold on the oil.

Quite.

Yesterday, parliament voted to authorise air-strikes on ISIS. Labour whipped in favour, 23 MPs rebelled . They were:

Diane Abbott (Hackney North & Stoke Newington), Graham Allen (Nottingham North), Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Martin Caton (Gower), Katy Clark (Ayrshire North & Arran), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West), Paul Flynn (Newport West), Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow), Kate Hoey (Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Sian James (Swansea East), Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North & Leith), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington), Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde), Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby), Grahame Morris (Easington), George Mudie (Leeds East), Linda Riordan (Halifax), Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Graham Stringer (Blackley & Broughton) and Mike Wood (Batley & Spen).

Notice a significant absence?

Michael Meacher was in parliament yesterday.

Off message

Harry Leslie Smith is the author of Harry's Last Stand, an engaging book calling - on the basis of his experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War - for the preservation of the Welfare State. He is the face of a politics of social democratic nostalgia, tinged with a certain 'progressive' British (or perhaps, these days, English) nationalism. This is not without severe problems - see Owen Hatherley here, or comments in Richard Seymour's latest book. That said, there is a dignity and conviction about the man, and he serves as a living reminder of the horrors that devastated lives before the 1945 settlement.

Earlier this week, Harry Leslie Smith gave a speech at the Labour Party Conference:


His role in the conference, carefully carved out for him by Party managers was to speak about the NHS. Notice, however, that at key points he goes beyond this brief. He talks about "welfare cuts" and "austerity". And what he says about these things is spot on.

But here's the problem. The Labour leadership is committed to both austerity and welfare cuts. Ed Balls has pledged repeatedly to constrain a future Labour government with current Tory spending limits. Not only is there precious little sign of Tory benefit cuts being reversed, but this week Balls promised more - announcing a policy of real terms cuts in child benefit.

Austerity destroys lives. That is indeed the message of history. Is it one that the Labour front bench is prepared to hear?

Friday Video Corner - Mitford Family Memorial Edition

So farewell then...

Alex Salmond; well you've got to feel sorry for him today. An unremarkable social democratic politician, heading a party that isn't even that good, thrust into the limelight by the national question and the dreadfulness of New Labour.

The SNP, under a new leadership, could be set to storm home in Scotland next year. For years, Labour has relied on West of Scotland seats returning Labour MPs on derisory turnouts. Yesterday these seats turned out at around the 75% mark. And they voted 'Yes'. If I were Ed Miliband, I'd be worried.

Friday Video Corner

Something could have happened

And something did happen, to the extent that the Yes campaign galvanised wide support and showed us a different way of doing politics. Turnout was incredible, especially in Glasgow and as a friend reminded me, this at least has the virtuous effect of undermining the complacency with which dull, leadership loyal, Labour MPs have treated West of Scotland seats as sinecures. It also shows up commonplace assertions about 'apathy' to be the over-simplifications they are. Start talking about things that matter, and people vote.

All of that said, it was a decisive 'no' vote, at the time of writing looking about 54%, 46%. Your host is tired, hungover from whisky and hope, and doesn't have too much to say at this stage. A few bullet points then:

• The secure result was secured on the basis of panicked promises of devomax, and threats about currency and business exodus. 
• That said, it was probably too secure to undermine Cameron's position.
• Expect, however, Tory infighting and attempts to retreat from the promises of the campaign's last week. 
• The UK's third largest city voted decisively against being part of the UK, as did Scotland's own third city. This should prompt a bit of reflection.
• UKIP are already positioning themselves as a 'pro-English' party with respect to debates around devomax, federalism, and the Barnett formula. This is concerning and needs watching.
• It looks like the 'yes' vote was higher amongst younger people. If that is right, then this has not been settled for good.
• What McDonnell said:

Can say it now polls have closed.Never again should Labour go in with Tories in a campaign coalition.Disillusions & divides our supporters.
— John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP) September 18, 2014

Vote 'yes' in Scotland

And when I am in the boards
my words will be a prophecy.

They will return, the stock of the crofters
Who were driven out of the sea.

And the aristocratic 'beggars'
will be routed as they were.

Deer and sheep will be carted away
and the glens will be tilled;

A time of sowing and a time of reaping,
and a time to reward the robbers.

And the cold ruined houses
will be built up by our kind.

The last poem of Mary MacDonald, marking the end of an artistic life set against the horror of the Highland Clearances.

If you are registered to vote in Scotland tomorrow, you have the chance to redeem some of the bloody history of that country's oppression. You should do so, and vote 'yes'. And, wherever you are, the ultimate task is to consign to history the capitalist system which destroyed lives for profit years ago in the Highlands, and continues to do so today.

The working class is better together, the British state isn't

I've already explained why I support a 'yes' vote tomorrow here and here.

A brief post, then, merely to deride the last desperate recourse of the red-tinged wing of Better Together. It is about class unity. Don't divide Britain and Scotland! That will divide the working class. So say the dimmer recesses of ultra-leftism, and, um, Ed Miliband.

The thought that working class solidarity can, and does, cross borders doesn't occur. Nor does the thought that, if solidarity stops at borders then - given global capitalism - we are all well and truly fucked. Already.

Look, however, it the version of 'working class' identity that is being offered by, at least, the Labour leadership. It is a distinctly Blue Labour vision of a class whose solidarity stops at national borders (there, is, for instance, no question of solidarity with undocumented workers). Wrapped in the Union Jack and nostalgic talk of togetherness and community, like some kind of past-it mod revival, the proponents of this view lecture a 'yes' movement that has been marked by left-wing politics and internationalism about the dangers of nationalism from a position of British chauvinism. Their picture of the working class belongs in a living museum. Let's put it out of its misery, and breathe life into the real thing.

Friday Video Corner - Scottish Referendum Special

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:

.

Anti-Semitism is anti-Palestine

Look, I'm an anti-Zionist. I oppose the State of Israel, as I oppose in general the idea of a state being set apart exclusively for one ethno-religious group as racist. I support a secular one-state solution, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the peaceful co-existence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Palestine. I am, I take it, in no danger of confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

But, to say that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism is not to deny the reality of anti-Semitism. And the sad fact is that some anti-Semites have attached themselves, like the racist parasites they are, to the pro-Palestine movement here and elsewhere. Sometimes the language of anti-Zionism gets appropriated, as with this delightful character, going on about "The Zionists, the Illuminati and Mr Rothschild himself, and the illegitimate child of Adolf Hitler!":




Other manifestations of anti-Semitism I've witnessed include:

• Placards featuring stars of David, sometimes in association with swastikas.
• Holocaust references.
• Use of the phrase 'the Jews', when referring to the State of Israel, as in 'the Jews forced the Palestinians out of their homes'. Often this co-exists with classical anti-Semitic tropes such as bloodthirstiness or acquisitiveness.
• A particular insistence that Jewish people condemn the actions of Israel more exacting than any similar insistence directed at the population in general.

These are all in and of themselves unacceptable, and deserve outright condemnation as racism. People saying and doing these kind of things should not be welcome on pro-Palestine demonstrations, and we should have the courage to confront them in the same way we would any other kind of racist. And that involves everything usually implied by the slogan 'no platform'.

Because not only are these things vile in their own right. They actively work against the Palestinian cause, providing a propaganda coup for Israel's explicit supporters as well as for those whose less honest and direct positions are effectively pro-Israeli (I have one well-known ultra-left sect in mind; I shall not give them publicity). It divides our movement and plays straight into the hands of those who would have us believe that diversity will always give rise to hostility.

Selling Labour versus Being Labour

Over the weekend I had an altercation on Twitter with a man in his twenties who seemed to hold me personally responsible for the actions of the Blair governments. "How can you condemn what's going on in Gaza - you gave us Iraq?". I am, the argument seemed to be, a member of the Labour Party. And Labour was responsible for Iraq. Therefore I was responsible for Iraq. Bastard.

What I find interesting about these kind of debates, and I have a lot of them (generally with activists younger than myself), is that they quickly reach an impasse. I say things like, "I was utterly opposed to Iraq. I am on the Left of the Labour Party, and oppose the leadership on many things. Within the Party I vote, argue, and organise against the kind of things you - left-wing activist - dislike". And my interlocutor says things like, "No, you're wrong. Labour supported the Iraq war. So if you're in Labour, you must support it. Otherwise you should leave."

The problem here is that two basically different conceptions of political parties are going head-to-head. I believe that an electoral party like Labour is a coalition of interests, a movement and a site of struggle. To be sure, it is one in which the Left is at an historically low point, but that doesn't alter the fact that what Labour is, or stands for, is constantly contested - and not in a vacuum, but within the broader setting of the labour movement and Labour's electoral base. Against me is posed a passive, consumerist, version of electoral politics. Political parties are brands; I pick the one that suits me (my lifestyle, my values, my economic interests) most exactly, perhaps after perusing a few manifestos. If I'm very enthusiastic, a brand junkie, I might even join a party. My role within the Party, on the current model, is as an electoral footsoldier, a volunteer. Labour and its policy are just there, prior to and independent of me. My role is to sell them to a wider public.

One of Tony Blair's crowning achievements was to popularise the consumerist model of politics, and to partially restructure Labour on the basis of it. A generation of left-wing activists has unconsciously taken it on board. It is entirely pointless for the Labour Left to attempt recruitment to the Party from among activists of this sort unless we are prepared to address, and argue against, basic assumptions about the nature of party politics itself.

Friday Video Corner

Thanks to Rhian for making me aware of this.

Stop it, again

Right, here's the thing. The Russian government is really quite shit. To be specific, it is a homophobic shower of authoritarians serving a particularly brutal and oligarchic imposition of neoliberalism combined with an expansionist imperialism. This is Not Good.

It is not the kind of thing socialists should support. Really.

Said government is up to its neck in support for separatists in Ukraine, who almost certainly shot down an airliner causing massive loss of innocent life.

All of this is true. It is not some kind of imperialist lie. And, really, the combination of residual Stalinism and conspiracy theory wingnuttery on elements of the British Left that makes people claim otherwise both impedes our ability to understand the world properly and makes all of us look bonkers.

Stop it. Now.

(If you want more productive politics from the region, please do look at Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity).
------------------------

And here's another thing. Yes, obviously, Palestinians have a right to armed struggle. Tonnes of people have said that. But David Ward:

(a) is a Liberal Democrat MP. Enough said.
(b) has said clearly anti-Semitic things in the past. This provides the context to some of the reaction to him today.

Palestine needs friends. But it really doesn't need every friend that offers themself. Beware the thought that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Sometimes my enemy's enemy is simply a muppet