Bashing the Bishops

If it is true, as I think, that the class struggle is the revolution - not just a means towards it, but the thing itself - and if it is true that the Christian gospel of love is incompatible with this, then quite evidently the Christian gospel is incompatible with revolutionary liberation: one of the few positions shared by the International Marxist Group, Mrs Thatcher and Joseph Stalin.

Thus the late Dominican friar and socialist Herbert McCabe sets up the position he will argue against in his wonderful essay 'The class struggle and Christian love' (published as part of his book God Matters). Of McCabe more later. For now we must turn our attention to less sublime intellects. I refer to the Archbishop of Canterbury who, along with his fellow Anglican hierarchs, has offered his lucky flock advice on the coming General Election.

The earnest, aphorism sodden, tract will not be remembered as a great moment in political thought, and I would not trouble you with it - dear readers - were it not for the following  passage, which a friend draws to my attention:

Parties of the extreme right and extreme left have sometimes sought to rekindle the language of class – but by trying to tap into class resentments rather than speaking of the warmer virtues of mutuality and solidarity. Stirring up resentment against some identifiable “other” always dehumanises some social group or people. Ethnic minorities, immigrants, welfare claimants, bankers and oligarchs – all have been called up as threats to some fictitious “us”. They become the hated “other” without whose presence among us all would be well. It is a deep irony that the whole political class is often regarded as an alien “other” by many sectors of the population.

Where to start? Well, I'm very much in favour of extremism, and to that extent thankful to their Lordships for putting it on the political map - the no doubt thousands upon thousands of eager readers who download  "Who is my neighbour?" from the internet will know that there is such a thing as extremism. Like the Tree of Knowledge it lurks beyond the bounds of the permissible and is therefore tantalising. For this publicity for my political creed, I am profoundly grateful to the authors. It is curious that people, who presumably subscribe (as indeed do I), a religion brimful of claims about the eschatological overthrow of the existing order should think extremism a bad thing; refusing to stay dead when the State have killed you is, by anybody's standards, fairly extreme. But we'll allow these matters to rest there.

I must confess to being confused about which parties of the extreme right are rekindling the language of class. I must further admit to being surprised that TUSC and/ or Left Unity are even on the radar. Although perhaps  Ed Miliband is the 'extreme leftist' foremost in the mitred minds; he did after all appeal to the transnational unity of the working class in his bid to persuade the Scots to stay in the Union. Clarification would be welcome, but never appears.

The action is elsewhere in any case: for we are bidden to think of the victims of the world. Those castigated and ignored; those persecuted, slandered, and outcast. To such the Kingdom belongs. Lest we not be able to identify these abandoned souls, a list is provided: "Ethnic minorities, immigrants, welfare claimants, bankers and oligarchs".

Yes, the oligarchs. Will nobody think of the oligarchs? In the spirit of this admirable solidarity, one assumes, all of that awkward stuff about the rich being put down from their seats will be excised from CofE bibles for the duration of the election season. Anyhow. 

It is all too easy, if fun, to mock this tripe; and it wouldn't matter too much were it not for the fact that the pious appeals for class peace find echoes far beyond the walls of Lambeth Palace. Many people who want the world to be a better place, many who hate capitalism, many even who would describe themselves as socialists draw the line at the language of class struggle. It all sounds rather violent, and isn't there something worrying about picking out one section of society and blaming them? Anyway, surely bankers aren't evil ? So, with variations, I've heard numerous thoroughly sincere and committed political activists, amongst others, argue.

Well, yes. Class struggle isn't particularly nice. It would indeed be better if human beings lived alongside one another peaceful and united, were this presently possible. But here's the thing - capitalism is premised on conflicting classes (and for that matter on conflicting corporations and - as it progresses - on the bloody conflict of nation-states*). The form of society we inhabit is one in which the bulk of the population are devoid of the means to produce the goods necessary for their existence and are compelled therefore to work for others, who do own those means. There is, as an immediate consequence of this, a basic conflict of material interests between these two groups. That this is the case is a fact about our society, it is a fact that obtains independent of anyone deciding to dislike people in another class, independent of some group of conspirators sitting down and deciding to have a class struggle. This is why, amongst other reasons, the comparison between appeals to class and politics which demonises immigrants and welfare claimants is dishonest.

Nevertheless, the report is correct in at least one thing that it seems to imply. Bankers, oligarchs and the rest of the ruling class are generally not uniquely dreadful people. They no doubt love their families, help elderly people onto tube trains, listen to their friends' problems, and give money to charity. Conversely, some members of the working class are bastards. The point of class politics is not that of finding a moral scapegoat for society's ills. That is not to say there isn't an ethical imperative behind it. For the commodity trader who kissed his kids goodbye fondly before setting off to work, when he arrives at that work starves hundreds of other peoples' children with the click of a mouse. The CEO of the 'ethical' food chain, who prides herself on the work her business is doing with women's co-operatives in the developing world holds down the wages of her already hard-up staff to face down competitive pressure. The pensions of those of those staff lucky enough to have them are invested, amongst other things, in a firm that makes a good living supplying the bombs that rain down not far from some of those co-operatives. In these, and a myriad other ways, the lives of people who are in many senses morally unremarkable are tied up with carnage, oppression, forced starvation, and every other imaginable form of avoidable human misery. So talk of "dehumanisation" is profoundly applicable. It's just the dehumanisation is real rather than imaginary - the point is not, as Welby et. al. seem to think - that the cruel propaganda of extreme leftists dehumanises an otherwise saintly bourgeoisie. No, the dehumanisation is implicit in the very workings of capitalism itself. Real alienation, real constraints on human flourishing are necessarily features of the way we currently live as a species. The banker is dehumanised simply by being a banker. He is fortunate in being dehumanised in such a slight way; capital dehumanises many others in a quite literal sense, by robbing them of life.

This hellish reality deserves all the condemnation it can get. More than that, it needs to be done away with. Then we will be rid of class struggle. As McCabe put it, "the only way to win the class war is to win it".

And to do that one needs to choose sides. Failure to do so is simply to side with the currently dominant, exploitative side. That is the path the Church of England's leaders have chosen.



*An attentive reader adds: " conflict between people for work, within the working class itself."

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.