Who's afraid of Diane Abbott?

So Corbyn's new Shadow Cabinet has been announced and Diane Abbott is now Shadow Home Secretary.

This is, on any sensible reckoning, a good thing. Leaving aside, although we shouldn't, the fact that two of the three senior offices of state are now shadowed by women, Diane is an asset to the Labour Party. Articulate, and sometimes masterly in her parliamentary interventions, she has been a consistent voice against racism and in favour of immigrants' rights more generally. This record matters now more than ever. A disgracefully xenophobic government is trampling on the victories of recent decades in its attacks on migrants, overseas students, and even non-UK nationals working as government advisors. It is shameful that the PLP's prioritising of attacking Corbyn over exploiting Tory divisions allowed May to respond to the referendum result in this way. But given that it did, Abbott is the person to respond.

Yet she gets ridicule of a sort not thrown at any other politician from one of the main parties. Leaving aside the dregs of the internet, who are fond of accusing her of 'racism against white people', as though that were a thing, people who fancy themselves as political commentators don't take well to her. "Even you can't take this seriously": a dyed-in-the-wool liberal complained about the appointment on a friend's Facebook wall.

The left joins in its own way. I don't mean the kind of socially and humanly challenged leftist who can't get their head round the idea that Abbott might be friendly with the odd Tory. I mean the way her undoubted mistakes are remembered and regurgitated in a manner that is not the case with any other Labour MP. Reformist politicians will be reformist politicians: perfection is too high a bar to set. Disappointment is inevitable this side of the end of capitalism. You need to go for the best of the bunch, and Abbott is amongst them. Yet people who seem to understand this in the case of other figures - including much, much, more problematic ones (Ken Livingstone, for instance) - seem uncomprehending in the case of Diane.

What is it about Diane that attracts this, in a way that so many of her colleagues don't? I'm stumped.

Anyway, here's a picture of Diane Abbott:

Jackie Walker suspended

Jackie Walker has been suspended from the Labour Party for saying that 'she had not found a definition of antisemitism [she] could work with' and, seemingly also for calling for the inclusion of other genocides in Holocaust Memorial Day celebrations (something that has already happened). Many people within the labour movement are applauding the suspension, including figures from its left-wing. In fact, a spokesperson for Momentum is reported as saying that the organisation is looking to exclude Walker - as a Momentum member myself, I am keen to know how this has been decided, who these spokespeople are, and to whom they are accountable. If nothing else, this sorry episode serves as a reminder that Momentum stands in urgent need of democratisation.

I do not support Walker's suspension. This will no doubt prove controversial, and that is entirely understandable. People are rightly worried about anti-Semitism on the left and in wider society, and do not want to be seen to be sitting lightly to this growing and grotesque racism. This case however stands at the complex intersection of two racisms and the internal politics of the Labour Party and deserves careful thought.

Jackie Walker, a lifelong and courageous campaigner against racism who has written a moving and very personal account of one woman - her mother's - experience of the Windrush migration, is herself of Jewish heritage. She has a consistent history of taking a stand against the far right and their targeting of Jews and other minorities. She is in no way an anti-Semite. In the current pressure cooker environment of the Labour Party that truth, which should be obvious, requires stating firmly. Does that make her comments wise? Not in my opinion, although I'll say something about context in a moment. Nor, however, were those comments anti-Semitic. To say something else that should be obvious, Walker's claim that she had not found a good definition of anti-Semitism is not an assertion that there is no such thing as anti-Semitism. And a context in which the charge of anti-Semitism is quite cynically and disgraceful being used as a weapon in the internal politics of the Labour Party, definitions matter. Nor does tactlessness or ignorance regarding Shoah commemorations constitute anti-Semitism. Jackie Walker is not a professional politician; mistakes made in a tense and hostile situation deserve to be treated with sympathy.

It matters, you see, who is speaking; the power relations which frame a context of speaking cannot be ignored. Jackie Walker is a black woman who has been subject to vicious invasions of privacy, press intrusion, and hostility in recent months. She is not a powerful person; she is an activist trying to work through the relationship between two racisms, each of which is not an abstract matter for her, but rather a threat to be both feared and fought. She was speaking to a hostile audience. This last point might not be obvious, indeed the suggestion that something called the 'Jewish Labour Movement' is a hostile audience might sound problematic in itself. Now, the Jewish Labour Movement is not, as its name might suggest, an organisation for all Jews within the labour movement. It is an affiliate of the World Labour Zionist Movement and an enthusiastic supporter of the state of Israel. Anti-Zionist Jews are effectively excluded from the organisation, which has a particular political agenda, and one to which Walker is opposed. Good socialists disagree about the issue of Israel, and I don't want to rehearse that particular debate now. But Walker was not amongst political friends, and was facing hostile questioning of a type she lacks the professional training to face.

The accusation of anti-Semitism is being mobilised by the right as a way of attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that supports him. A dangerous and cynical tactic, this undermines the fight against anti-Semitism. The left should think very carefully before helping in this; we should at least make ourselves more sensitive to the possibility of alternative perspectives.

The Nye and Owen Show

The greatest of thinkers stand on the shoulders of giants. Owen Smith, it is fair to say, is not a great political thinker. Still, he tells us that he is standing on the shoulder of one the labour movement's giants. Debating with Jeremy Corbyn on television he said:

I want to be a force for good in the world. Therefore, you need to achieve power. Nye Bevan, my great hero, said it’s all about achieving and exercising power. I’ve devoted my life to that.

(Stolen from Left Foot Forward)

I'm a little confused about this, I must confess. Is the Nye Bevan being spoken about here the same Nye Bevan who said this?

The Right Wing of the Labour Party would rather see it fall into perpetual decline rather than abide by its democratic decisions.

What about this, given that people have been expelled from the Labour Party recently for saying far less barbed things?

That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. 

Then there's this, a Bevan quote favoured by today's self-professed moderates, but in actual fact a neat statement of a basic of historical materialism:

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Let's face it, Nye Bevan would have been expelled from today's Labour Party. Because the Compliance Unit would know all too well who would be getting his vote.

Dispatch Dispatches

There are times when you can't escape realising how far your opinions lie from that dullest of social constructs that goes by the name of mainstream opinion. The current public notoreity of Momentum is a case in point.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that my issue with Momentum, of which I am an active member, is that we are not left-wing enough. That is to say, we're not - at a national level - sufficiently resigned to the inevitability of fights within the Labour Party (still, in spite of it all, I hear hopes for 'Party unity' being expressed), and the need to organise to win these, and win them decisively. Nor are we doing nearly enough to form the new generation of activists which is likely to be the lasting legacy of the Corbyn surge.

A Momentum activist - still from tomorrow's documentary

Quite incredibly, it seems that the makers of Dispatches don't share this outlook. The programme, to be broadcast tomorrow, targets people I know and like. It also makes the bizarre claim that Momentum is a hotbed of Trotskyist entryists, an accusation from which the organisation alas distances itself. On the on hand, the claim is too ridiculous to warrant an answer; on the other, even if it were true, the Labour Party has always contained Marxists - starting with the plodding second internationalist Marxism of Hyndman's SDF, compared to which the AWL represent a distinct improvement. In fact your host here is a Marxist.

Still there is a comforting familiarity about journalists seeing Leon Trotsky lurking within every GC. This, at least, is standard issue reds-under-the-bed fare. Altogether more disturbing, albeit hardly without historical precedent, is the focus on  selections, deselections, and mandatory reselection.

I leave you with one question: since when is the ability of members of a political party to choose who represents that party in elections something sinister?

Shadow Cabinet Elections

On a day when the forces of entitlement scorned took to the streets to articulate the demand of Brecht's Writers' Union that we dissolve the people and elect another, I should start by saying that I am heartily in favour of democracy. One of the many problems with capitalism, whether run from Brussels or London, is that it is not nearly democratic enough.

So, then, I support the demand of some Labour MPs to restore Shadow Cabinet elections, right? Well, as it happens, no. At least not in the terms in which they're being requested.

The internal democracy of the Labour Party is about the democracy of a movement or it is a hollow sham. The Labour Party I am interested in being a member of is about the political representation of a mass of working people and their allies, not least as organised in trade unions. Labour MPs matter in as much as they are the parliamentary expression of this movement, but they are not the Labour Party. We are, all of us.

In the heady days of the late 70s and early 80s, the Labour Left supported Shadow Cabinet elections in combination with a raft of measures designed to secure the accountability of the PLP to the wider Party and the election of the leader by the entire Party. Subsequent history has brought us a situation in which there are no Shadow Cabinet elections, the PLP is packed full of MPs more right-wing than the Party at large, and yet Jeremy Corbyn is - and in all likelihood will still be at the end of the month - Labour leader. In this context the demand for the PLP to elect the Shadow Cabinet is not a democratic demand. It is all about a right-wing PLP blocking the ability of a leader supported by the mass membership to implement policies supported by that membership. And it should be opposed.

However, electing the Shadow Cabinet isn't a bad idea in itself. Why not allow every member of the Labour Party and its affiliates to participate, holding elections at the same time as NEC elections?

Socialism, ethics, and humanity (III)

(Last in series here)

Socialism could provide us with a chance to flourish, to fulfil our natures, in a way that is not possible under capitalism. There's a bitter irony about this, since capitalism itself is responsible for transforming both what it is to be human and the capacity to realise the possibilities inherent in this far beyond the imaginings of any previous age. Technology has stretched our potential for creativity, communications have broadened our imaginations and deepened our needs, and labour-saving innovations offer us the hope of producing all that we want in a fraction of the time and with far less effort than could ever have been contemplated. All of this has been conjured up by the very same capitalism that stunts its potential, producing as it does for profit rather than human need. The task of realising capitalism's potential falls to socialism. More concretely, it falls to another of capitalism's creations, the working class.

What does this picture mean imply about our politics, which was after all where this series started? Socialism, as I've sketched it, is about the big picture. It concerns how we organise the world in a way that our lives can be good. This is not the fare of those who for whom the horizons of politics do not go beyond marginal tax rates or urban traffic schemes. The picture is not naive; contrary to almost every textbook portrayal of Marx's thought, socialism is not inevitable. It might not even be particularly likely; still we socialists, with a cold hardened realism, think that it is the only option for an unfulfilled and divided humanity threatened with environmental catastrophe. The diagnosis becomes even more severe now that capitalism cannot afford social democracy.

This picture has to be communicated. In our conversations, not least with all those new Labour Party members, at meetings, in print, we should be talking about socialism. It is a persistent temptation for the Left to play its ideas close to its chest, keeping a conspiratorial silence about its thoughts on the means of production and preferring instead to talk about the minimum wage and Trident. Delicate judgements need to be made here, of course. There are times for forming broad alliances, and no profitable conversation has ever been had by not meeting somebody where they are at. Yet, meeting somebody where they are at is one thing, leaving them there something altogether.

Now is a time for laying out the socialist stall. Thousands of people have wandered into a place where they can inspect its wares, because of the so-called Corbyn surge. Contrary to all that excitable stuff about entryism, the politics of this group are mixed, and often vague. Retaining these people will need something that warrants commitment: we have that and we should share it. This is the case not least because there is a rough road ahead, the present purge being one intimation of this, and without a framework within which peoples' experiences can be situated, a good number are likely simply to walk away. Even if the party bureaucrats tire of purging, the initial enthusiasm of Labour's new members will either fade away, or worse be converted into the reality-denying optimism that pollutes too much of the Left: the stable alternative lies in the realm of ideas.

The mention of optimism leads me to another aspect of this understanding of socialism that deserves mention. A political outlook that recognises the animal, embodied nature of human beings, as this one does - it is this nature to which socialism speaks - can be far more nuanced in its view of our prospects and more sensitive to our fragility than is often the case on the Left. One popular story goes as follows: conservatives have a dim view of human nature, which is enmeshed in Original Sin, or held back by genetics, depending on the conservative account in question. Humanity's grand projects are doomed to fail; society will not improve, at least not consistently, and the best that can be done is to insulate ourselves from violent motion with a generous layer of tradition and order. Progressives meanwhile (note the word) see human beings as perfectable. With a good amount of social progress, and perhaps a bit of luck, the New Jerusalem can be built on earth.

There is a very obvious sense in which human beings are not perfectable. People are not going to stop dying, or mourning. No matter who owns the means of production, it is likely that couples will still have acrimonious break ups, people will be thoughtless, and lives go inexplicably wrong. It is certainly true that human history is littered with progress and triumphs, and to be a socialist is not least to hope for a good deal more progress. It's just that a genuinely radical, rather than deludedly progressive, outlook recognises that progress is itself not without ambiguity, tragedy even. The capitalism that lends substance to the hopes I have been describing also led now forgotten children to deaths in hellish mills. The 20th century witnessed victories for women's liberation and anti-colonialism; it also saw the doctrine of human rights that had motivated many participants in this struggles used to justify brutal wars. The light-headed and cheaply upbeat attitude that has, unfortunately, followed in the wake of the Corbyn victory, if it is to give rise to a sustainable socialism, has to mature into a more sensitive and ambivalent take on our species and its history.

Stripped of unwarranted euphoria, counting the costs of struggle, the aim of this politics is to allow us to be ourselves. That is what the emphasis on fulfilling our nature amounts to. Ours is not a programme for angels or robots, but for the wonderful, tormented, ageing, animal beings that we in fact are. It cannot offer us limitless possibilities, because our possibilities are not limitless. However much the Situationists asked us to demand the impossible (and there is a sense in which that is the right thing to demand), we cannot travel faster than light, live a thousand lives, resurrect the dead, or do more than our energies, physical or emotional, allow us. Fashionable though it is in millenial circles to talk about 'self-definition' I cannot define myself, and much unnecessary anxiety has been caused by suggesting otherwise. Nor does our politics promise to do away with flaws, mistakes, irritations, or limitations. Socialism is a politics of human frailty: its simple suggestion is that we live in the world as the kind of beings that we are in fact. To make this more than a pipedream would indeed take a revolution, but perhaps one a good deal more compassionate in its aims than many think.

If we think this it should affect the way we conduct and understand ourselves. There is a relentlessness and puritan earnestness about parts of the Left, the latter being a correlate of underestimating the scope and difficulty of transformation. Taking frailty more seriously would be an important counterbalance here, and is one of our most urgent tasks.

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 8: Foo Fighters are a Trotskyist front organisation.

Lie 8:

Tweeting about Foo Fighters is out of order.

Bollocks because:

Before we get to this, we should note the hypocrisy. The people making this judgement are the rump of a political movement that used D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better as a campaign song. They are in no position to adjudicate on musical taste. 

But really, you should fucking love Foo Fighters.