Friday Video Corner

The curse of the undead parrot

So the Liberal Democrats have released their manifesto. If you want to know what they won't do if they are in government after May, wags might add, read it.

Because of their two-faced jumping into bed with the Tories and, in particular, their back-tracking on their promise not to raise tuition fees, the LibDems are on target for electoral homicide next month. Never the less, if polls are to be believed they might hang onto about twenty seats, and in a tight parliament, that is enough for them to be potential power-brokers. Nick Clegg, who, morally backward engineer of human misery as he might be, is not stupid realises this. Hence his jaw-droppingly arrogant claim that the LibDems will be "the heart of Tory-led government or the head of a Labour-led one". The reference is to the Wizard of Oz, which - you may recall - is a story about deceipt.

The LibDems have said that they will prioritise five policies in any deal:

• A £12,500 personal tax allowance.
• •A balanced budget on current spending by 2017-18 which would be achieved “fairly”.
• •£8bn extra spending for the NHS including equal status for mental health.
• •A real terms increase in education department spending in line with increase in pupils by 2020.
• •Five green laws including decarbonisation of electricity.

The second pledge is the one that rings alarm bells. The LibDems want zero current spending deficit two years earlier than Balls' - already in my view unobtainable - target  this spells souped-up austerity and, as the economy teeters on the edge of deflation, serious consequences for jobs and wages. 

The danger is that the LibDems on the basis of this commitment will be the favoured coalition partners of the Labour right, who will be strong in the next PLP (although, hopefully, a little less so than last parliament). Government alongside the LibDems would cement Ed Balls' austerity-lite economic strategy, and provide a basis on which to sideline the left.

We need to say now that the LibDems are not a coalition partner. Email your Labour PPC and let them know your feelings. And, if you're able, attend the post-election Left Platform. The message there has to be clear. If Labour needs to talk to someone after the election, we should talk to the SNP. 

Green? Stay red

So, you're considering voting for the Green Party?

I suspect I like you. I suspect, at least, we have a great deal in common politically. I mean there is just the outside possibility that you're some Barbour-clad NIBMYish eco-fascist, in which case I have nothing to say to you. Vote Green, for all I care, they're welcome to you. But you're probably not like that at all.

In all likelihood you're the kind of person who ends up in the bottom left hand corner of those 'what's your political alignment?' quiz things. You are probably anti-austerity, supportive of feminism,  clear about migrants' rights, anti-Trident, and in favour of public ownership of utilities. You, like me, realise that things need to be done to safeguard the environment, but you will want those things done in a way that makes big polluting business, rather than ordinary people, bear the brunt of the cost. You, like me, will have been underwhelmed by the Labour manifesto launch earlier today. Sure there was some welcome stuff - commitments on health, education, zero-hours contracts, and non-doms. But the broader context was set by acceptance of the iron-logic of austerity, and that's before we even get near the horrible, indefensible, pledge about immigration controls. It's not good enough. We agree on that.

Yet I am suggesting you don't vote Green, but vote Labour instead. Isn't this madness? Don't the Green Party's policies fit much better with those you and I would both like to see? I don't deny it for one moment. But I don't think elections should be viewed as a form of policy bingo.

More about that in a moment. First, it is at least rehashing one of the tired old objections to voting Green in a First Past the Post electoral system. Like many tired, old, objections there is something to it. Do you really want to help a Tory or Lib Dem candidate? In only a handful of seats are the Greens realistic contenders; elsewhere, in an incredibly tight election, you are in danger, by voting Green, of helping your least favourite parties. Because, and here I will part company with the more fundamentalist anti-Labourites, there is a difference between the Tories and Labour. Not enough of a difference, to be sure, but a real difference. A difference that will be felt most by those in our society least able to afford it. As the local elections last year in the notorious Tory borough of Barnet demonstrate.

But that's not my main argument. I think that the impulse to vote Green often arises because someone, not unreasonably, thinks: there's an election coming up, whose policies most fit with my own preferences? If you're in any way left-of-centre, and live in England or Wales, the Green Party are likely to be the best fit.

Yet there's a basic contradiction here. You are minded to vote Green because you think there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, and that radical change is needed. Perhaps you might go so far as to describe yourself as an anti-capitalist. Certainly, you are likely to be hostile to the individualistic, market-driven nature of our society. And yet you are, I claim, adopting an approach to elections that is a product of that society. You, the isolated individual political consumer, pick the product from the shelf that best fulfils your bespoke requirements.

The politics I am interested in starts from a very different perspective - not with lone electoral consumers, but with the recognition that real social change comes through movements of people, through our collective strength. It is about more than voting once every five years. It is about winning change in our workplaces and local areas; about exerting pressure continuously on those at Westminster and elsewhere who claim to represent us. This has to be a collective endeavour, and so the question arises, which movement of people is best placed to win the change we want to see, and how does this relate to voting?

The trade union movement, for all its imperfections, is the only millions-strong movement of working class people in Britain with the history and present capacity to win any serious level of change. The Labour Party was its hard won creation; and what makes the worst Labour government better than the best Tory government continues to be the pressure to which it is susceptible from trade unions. It was this that made even Blair introduce a minimum wage. It anchors Labour in working class politics in a way that the Greens, ecclectic and unpredictable as they have been in local office, are not. Electing Labour representatives strengthens the union's voice, and empowers us to fight for ourselves 365 days a year outside parliament. A Labour vote is a vote for a movement, for our collective strength - whichever political inadequate standing on a lightly-rewarmed neo-liberal ticket might have the Labour candidacy. (And if you're, rightly, angry about that, why not join the LRC and help to change Labour?)

You may or may not be convinced. But at the very least I want to hear your alternative. Not simply your alternative on voting day. That's one day in five years. I want to hear about your alternative movement for transforming society at the root. That's my truth - the working class and its institutions - you tell me yours.

Election campaign going well, and then there's Scotland

I thought I'd take a few moments out of my Easter holiday to share my thoughts on the election with you all. It was either that or continue watching my way through Buffy on Netflix, and to be honest I can take or leave the middle seasons.

These thoughts are, perhaps uncharacteristically, positive, at least from a UK-wide perspective. Labour has moved ahead of the Tories in key polls, with the Tories negative campaign against Ed Miliband seemingly backfiring. Labour's welcome attack on non-dom status has proved popular, confirming the position beloved of this blogger that more clear red water will not damage Labour's electoral standing. On that basis, the Tories' latest bung to the wealthy will do no harm at all.

There is, of course, a but. Scotland.

Labour will be slaughtered up north. To be frank, we deserve it. Annihilation has been on the cards since senior Party figures shared platforms with Tories as part of the Better Together campaign. It has been assured by the collective backtracking by the Westminster parties on devo-max.

Like a wounded beast in its final throes, Murphy-led Labour are fighting a vicious campaign. Mud is being thrown at the SNP in the hope that some of it sticks. There was the claim that Nicola Sturgeon wants David Cameron as PM. Then there is the disgraceful tabloid attack on Mhairi Black, a pleasingly straight-talking young SNP candidate, being shared on Facebook by Scottish Labour campaigners and their English supporters. There are a raft of attacks on the SNP policy, largely from the right, regardless of the nominal position of those making them. Such are the contradictions of post-referendum Scottish politics, with Labour forced into a position of opposing the SNP from the right. To my mind, it is highly doubtful that anything like labourism will survive much longer in Scotland. The best hope would be if Labour were to neutralise the national question, by officially admitting a plurality of views. Yet it is too tied into a unionist logic to make that likely.

This matters outside Scotland. Why? Because Labour is likely to be the largest party, yet without an overall majority in May. This means the leadership will be looking for someone with whom to do a deal. There are basically two options here: the LibDems and a rainbow coalition of the SNP and others (SDLP, Plaid, Greens). Such is the level of anti-SNP animosity that has trickled down south, that the latter option doesn't have the level of grassroots support than it deserves. Left MPs were more hostile than they needed to be at the suggestion of an SNP pact recently.

This should be a no brainer. Socialists in the Labour Party want two things: working class representation and left-wing policies. The LibDems offer neither, and any kind of deal with them should be ruled out. The SNP are qualitatively different in both respects. The grassroots left should prepare now to exert pressure in favour of the more left-leaning option in the days following a close election.

In good old tub-thumping left-wing fashion, that pressure ought to be exerted on MPs with two demands in view:

No to a deal with either Coalition party.

No to austerity.

Now, Buffy.

Judith's point is very valid...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Video Corner

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

Death, depression, and the logic of the workhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, the Express excelled itself this morning:

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

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

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

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

Mind echoed this:

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

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

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

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

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


-----


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