Don't organise, celebrate

If, like me, you think today's leadership result is fantastic news, do spare a thought for Alistair Campbell. He's clearly a little upset:

@OwenJones84 come back after you've won a few general elections and start lecturing about winning. Enjoy your evening

— Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret) September 12, 2015

This, in general, seems to be the strategy of Labour's hard right: repeating, mantra-like and with an air of genuine incomprehension, "but, but.. we won in 1997". A problem with this approach is that 1997 was a long time ago. Campbell and his soundalikes are really the political equivalent of someone who insists that we recognise that Genesis' Nursery Crimes was a pretty good album, without even pausing to acknowledge the subsequent attrocities of Phil Collins' solo career.

Other prime examples of the throwing-the-toys-out-of the pram genre were forthcoming today from Dan Hodges here and the New Statesperson here. The latter is notable for its attempt to claim the mantle of feminism for its opposition to the only leadership candidate to have voted against benefit cuts which disproportionately affect women, and who secured the votes of 61% of women who voted. One notes in passing that the NS's commitment to the political representation of non-white non-men wasn't quite fervent enough to get the organ's weight behind Diane Abbott's mayoral campaign.

But, enough. It is not only a good day because lots of really terrible human beings are upset. We also have a leader of the Labour Party who can make speeches that don't make me cringe:


And does stuff like support refugees:



I wrote after the general election about my dislike of the slogan "don't mourn organise". The converse, "don't celebrate, organise" is no better. Tonight we celebrate. In the days, weeks, and months ahead the issues I wrote about then - not least the neo-liberal hegemony which still has an absolutely stranglehold over British society - will need thought and action. There are fights ahead, within and beyond the Labour Party; there is a battle of ideas to be won. But tonight, I'll end by saying that this is the best day in my political memory. We won.

Take off the tinfoil hat

Sometimes I wish the world was run by a secretive elite. If it was, it would be a lot more interesting than it in fact is. There is a certain romance in believing one is facing down Bond-villains, nestled away in shadowy bunkers, in which they feed disloyal acolytes to crocodiles. This romance is lacking in Michael Gove. In fact not a single one of the British ruling class lives up to the standards of proper archetypical evil. They don't have lairs, they have villas in Tuscany. And not one of them has ever bitten the head off a live chicken. Although at a push Prince Philip has done this to a swan. We are, alas, doomed to mediocre malice in our rulers.

Nor, it has to be said, are this crowd especially secretive. Take the Conservative Party. They stood for election saying that they were going to impose massive cuts and attack trade unions. And having won the election they are proceeding to do just that. They may be bastards, but they are not sneaky bastards by any stretch of the imagination.

Perhaps it is a desire for a bit of excitement that drives 25% per cent of Corbyn supporters to believe that, contrary to fact, the world is run by a secretive elite. Like crazed lefty adrenaline junkies that these comrades of mine clearly are not content with nationalising the railways; they hope that they have to fight the CIA-Zionist-Lizards to do so. I'll come back to the 'Zionist' bit of that, since there's a darker side to all this conspiracy theory stuff.

'Conspiracy theory' - that's right. A striking feature of the 21st century left, which no doubt reflects a wider trend in our society, is the prevalence of so much conspiracy theoretic murk. I challenge you to go to more than a couple of demos without encountering some excitable character in a Guy Fawkes mask talking about the New World Order. If you're lucky, they might hand you a typewritten leaflet all about it. More mainstream, but in perpetual danger of slippage into conspiracy-talk, is the idea that there is an all-pervasive thing called 'the establishment' - the category, popularised by Owen Jones, has all but replaced the older, more nuanced, language of class and the state on much of the broad left. Put 'the establishment' together with an emotive topic like paedophilia, as recent news stories have done, and the crowd go wild - the number of supposed 'revelations' on this topic I've seen shared on left-wing social media is genuinely disturbing. Meanwhile the near-paranoid sense that everything is done with an ulterior motive has led numerous people to know better to support Julian Assange's attempt to avoid rape charges, on the basis that 'they' are out to get him. Indeed, the popularity of Wikileaks on the left -- the project in fact has its origins in the libertarian right -- is largely owing to the desire to know what they are hiding from us.

The striking reality of capitalist society, on contrary, is that everything is done in the open. I'm not denying, of course, the sordid reality of secret police forces and backroom deals. But the basic business of exploitation, the key structural features of the kind of society we inhabit: it's all out there in the open for everyone to see. The world is run for profit and proudly wears that fact on its sleeves, even as CEOs and Prime Ministers alike speak aloud about the need to reduce labour costs. In as much as this world is sustained by illusions, they are remarkably egalitarian illusions. The CEO and the bond trader, just as much as the shop worker and the pensioner, invest markets, currencies, and other creatures of our making, with an agency independent of the humanity that fashioned them. If you like, the system itself produces the illusions. The only secret is that there is nobody pulling the strings: we are not dealing with puppets, but with automata. The upside to this sorry state of affairs is that we are capable of distancing ourselves from it and stating the truth of the matter. As I just did.

That last paragraph is a standard old-fashioned leftist response to conspiracy theory. Why does it no longer convince a good number of people on the left? Partly, I think because, contemporary capitalist societies move at such a dizzying pace that peoples' experience of their lives is utterly disorientated and piecemeal -- the idea that 'They' are behind it all can be oddly comforting in such circumstances: there is an ultimate order and purpose, even if it is hostile. The Lizards are a Calvinist God for an unbelieving age.

Then there's the spectacular own-goal that was postmodernism. More than a generation of left-wingers have been schooled, with varying degrees of success, in the idea that reason, evidence, and the normal criteria by which we, as responsible agents, choose between competing accounts of the world are nothing more than veils worn by power. They are certainly not guides to objective truth, not least because there is no such thing as objective truth. The case for this view, which on the face of it renders any attempt at emancipatory theory and practice self-defeating, has been helped along by the fact that a certain kind of rearguard academic reaction certainly does appeal to Reason to bolster its own dubious interests. The name 'Richard Dawkins' suffices here to gesture in the direction of what I mean.

Then of course there was the decline of Marxism. In part this has to be attributed to the welcome collapse of the vile regimes that claimed it as their creed. But it's not just that: after all, there is a proud tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism. Partly it's down to postmodernism. But whatever the full reason, one searches in vain on the left for a coherent, rigorously argued, account of the world which explains events and injustices not simply in terms of individual agency, but in terms of a social whole that - far from being shadowy - is amenable to critical scrutiny. Instead we have individual campaigns, united by nothing other than anger, often couched in moralistic terms (the moralism of the contemporary left; that's a whole other blogpost...) It's a volatile brew of raw emotion, indignation and confusion. Rich pickings for conspiracy theory.

This wouldn't matter so much were conspiracy theories not utterly disempowering. If They really are pulling the strings; what can we do? If we are being kept in the dark by networks of baffling complexity, what response is there other than fear? Perhaps the best we can do is search Google, looking for clues, trying to find out about Them. It's an atomised, self-enclosed, self-reinforcing way of 'finding out' about the world, which slides easily into genuine paranoia. Contrast this with the Marxian insistence that we learn about the world through collective engagement with it, seeking to change it and reflecting together on our efforts.

Then there's the anti-Semitism. The Rothschilds, the Zionists, Goldman-Sachs: the cast list in some of the accounts is tediously familiar fare. Living, as we still do, in the aftermath of a capitalist crisis focused in the financial sector, and blamed somewhat simplistically and moralistically on 'the bankers', the ground is fertile for the anti-Jewish tropes that run deep through the Western cultural unconscious to surface. And not nearly enough is being done to stop that.

Purge away

"Politics is all about struggle", so began the first lecture on political ideas I attended as a new undergraduate. The lecturer, a brilliant amalgam of Marxist and anarchist, took a deep breath before delivering his punchline: "This is what Tony Blair doesn't realise; hence the inane grin on his face".

It was a good line. As a Labour Party member in the mid-90s I knew however that, like many good lines, it was untrue. The Blairite project, that partially successful push to capture the Labour Party for big business, was about nothing if it was not about struggle. The generation of Labour staffers, hacks, and aspiring student politicians (one Jim Murphy was particularly prominent at the time) needed no lessons from the far left on this front. Elections were rigged, candidates parachuted in, leftists denounced (the word 'Trotskyist' during this period lost any meaning other than 'someone more left-wing than me'), and the Party gradually staffed with people on board with the gospel according to Blair. In the rare eventuality that these measures failed to secure the desired end, there was always the last resort of brute diktat: witness Liz Davies deselection as candidate for Leeds North East.

I tell you this not by way of reminiscence but in order to, as kindly as possible, point out that Blairism was never going to roll over and die. It was born out of a struggle for the soul of the labour movement, and will kick and bite until its last breath. Corbyn has been leading the polls for weeks, seemingly unstoppable, his meetings packed, and his campaign gaining momentum. The spads and hacks, a good number of whom make up the PLP, were hardly about to shrug their shoulders and tut 'well that's that, then' before giving up politics in favour of gardening. Over two decades Blairism gained near total control of the party machine, both at the level of full-time staff and of officers in many CLPs. It was inevitable that it would use that positional advantage in an attempt to stop Corbyn.

This is what is happening at the moment. Social media is awash with stories of left-wingers having their applications for supporter status, or even membership, refused. People who campaigned for Labour in May have been turned down, as have some who have gone to the super-rogatory extreme of attending CLP meetings. Attempting to defend the purge, right-wingers make vague noises about people "campaigning against Labour", a charge that often seems to amount to little more than having tweeted something unfavourable about the party leadership. In some cases the grounds are even weaker:

Heard a woman was barred from voting in the leadership because the Labour employee doing the purging knew her to be left wing. #LabourPurge

— Ellie Mae O'Hagan (@MissEllieMae) August 20, 2015

The right is actively soliciting the details of people which it thinks it can get away with barring from voting:

The catch-all email sent out to the purged states that the Party has "reason to believe" they do not share Labour values. In many cases, people have interpreted this as meaning that they have supported non-Labour candidates, however much in the distant past that may have been. One notes that a similar rationale isn't applied to floor-crossing Tory MPs, whom Labour has always greeted with open arms. Nor were the membership applications of scores of ex-SDPers, some of them central to the Blair project, at least one of them (Polly Toynbee) a very active anti-Corbynite at the present moment, who have joined since the Blair years.

The Blairites are in full counter-attack. The left must stand our ground; so much is at stake. If you have been purged, don't just drift off in a sulk: that is the intended effect of this. Challenge it, make a noise about it, and register your details here.

The best form of defence, of course is attack. And if nothing else, the events of the past few days should convince us that winning the leadership is not enough. To undo the Blair project, we have to oust it from CLPs, the party machine, and the PLP. The CLP left, dormant for far too long, has to wake up, contest positions and vote in trigger ballots. It's not always clear to me that the need for this kind of action - which will inevitably be pretty tough and uncomfortable - at times has sunk in. There is a lot of talk at the moment about consensus building. This is no doubt well-intentioned, but seems to be grounded in an out-of-date analysis of where the Labour left is at: the Corbyn surge renders the project of winning the hearts and minds of a shrinking Labour centre irrelevant, for the time being at least.The sad truth is that consensus is not always possible. Two utterly incompatible visions for the labour movement are coming head to head. And one of them must lose.

Right to strike

Just a very quick post to plug the Right to Strike campaign - there is no more important battle in Britain at the moment than the one against the Tories' proposed anti-union laws that will impose harsh turnout limits on strike ballots, effectively counting every abstention as a 'No' vote, legalise the use of agency scabs, and undermine political funds. These rights are the result of a history of struggle, and are needed today more than ever, as working life is being subjected to casualisation and insecurity.

The initial target are public sector unions. In particular, I'm convinced that the Tories have RMT members on the London Underground squarely in their sights. The capacity of a union to bring the capital to a halt is an asset to our movement and an embarrassment to Cameron, who views them as Thatcher viewed the NUM.

Pass motions in support of the campaign at your union branch and local Labour Party, and keep an eye on the website. There are mobilising meetings coming up.

Video from Stronger Unions

Friday Video Corner

As the Tories unveil new anti-union legislation.

The lessons of Greece

The word 'tragedy' is over-used in politics. But if has application anywhere it is surely to the journey from the high-point of Syriza's election - here was the socialist left getting an electoral mandate in a European country - to this week's climb down. An austerity package, the price of liquidity exacted by the EU institutions, will mean misery for millions, rising unemployment, stagnant wages, and may well not succeed even in the ECB's own terms. It should be seen, at least in part, as the punishment of an electorate for daring to elect a left-wing government and for voting 'no' in the referendum. It is a warning shot across the bow of voters in other countries, Spain and Ireland for instance - don't even try it...

There is resistance in Greece. Workers struck and marched yesterday. Thirty two Syriza MPs, including four ministers, voted against the bailout terms. These deserve our solidarity. More than that, such is the ferocity of the austerity that will now be unleashed that material support is essential. Please support Medical Aid for Greece.

There are lessons to be learned from Greece. Power in capitalist societies does not rest solely, or even primarily, with parliaments. Any serious challenge to capital will be met by extra-parliamentary action on the part of the capitalist class. They will use their newspapers, their money, and the international institutions that defend their interest, such as the institutions of the EU. Any left-wing government serious about implementing even moderate reforms is likely to be forced to break with those institutions. But more importantly, it needs to able to rely on extra-parliamentary action of its own. It is only the power of workers to withdraw our labour, to take control, and to unify internationally that is ultimately able to stand up to capital.

And that means that even at a time when we in the UK are rightly upbeat about happenings in parliament - Jeremy Corbyn's success and Mhairi Black's rallying call - we cannot focus all our energies there. Without a mass workers movement, militant trade unions and protest groups, and without a widespread commitment to socialist ideas and values, we might have the best MPs imaginable, but we will fail. The Greek electorate put a Marxist in the finance ministry. In the months that follow they will watch their hospitals close and their pensioners go hungry. There's been a lot of talk of a British Syriza. That is the last thing we need.

Ten years ago

Ten years ago today I was at home. A plumber was doing some work on the boiler. As the horrible events of the morning unfolded I, like other Londoners, became aware of them gradually. Partial, confused information, began coming in. The plumber couldn't contact his wife, who was in central London; the mobile networks were down. The radio started reporting that something had happened: perhaps it was an electrical fire. The subsequent blasts made it clear that this wasn't the case. News of casualties came, then images - we were by this time glued to the television, fixated on pictures that had an uncanny quality. Here was the city we knew, loved, and worked in; so familiar, yet so utterly different.

The feeling was one of utter confusion; nobody knew what would happen next. The media reflected this : armed police had drawn their weapons outside the Downing Street gates, what was going on? Rumours and misinformation spread - someone had been shot at Canary Wharf, my neighbours falsely claimed. Finally, as thousands of commuters struggled to get home across a city whose public transport was shut down, the grim realisation of the extent of what had happened began to settle in. The skies were eerily quiet, all planes had been diverted; millions of Londoners were similarly stunned into silence. This was an attack that was felt.

That was the thing about 7th July 2005. Its initial impact was to unify. Against those sections of the left who cannot see an outbreak of the collective with any popular purchase without sniffing reaction in the wings, this was something to celebrate, the human determination breaking through an otherwise relentless darkness. The shared grief, the shared efforts of emergency and tube workers (will we remember the latter when they are demonised for striking tomorrow?), the collective  resolve of those struggling to walk home in their office shoes. It was a spirit captured by Ken Livingstone's response, surely his finest moment. Our response, he said, must be unified. This was an assault on working class people, of all faiths. We must not allow ourselves to be divided. In terms that stand as a marker of the extent to which attitudes to migration hardened in the subsequent decade, he ended:

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

 They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

What followed, on the part of central government and security agencies, was the systematic negation of the attitude proposed by Livingstone. One person fitting Livingstone's description of someone coming to London to live their life was Jean Charles de Menezes,  who should be counted the 53rd victim of 7/7 - murdered by police in a moment of paranoid frenzy. The New Labour government rolled out successive pieces of anti-terror legislation at a dizzying pace - only being prevented by a parliamentary vote from implementing 90 days detention without trial. MI5 recruited as never before; its staff has doubled since 2005. London's Muslim communities were criminalised and surveilled.

London became a city increasingly dominated, and policed, by fear. We have become used to armed police, as we before became used to the street homeless. The years since 2005 have seen the city change in other ways. Gentrification has accelerated: the multicultural diversity and the capacity of ordinary people to live and work in this city which were both integral to the city's initial resolution in 2005 have suffered at the hands of the housing market. We are, these days, a superficially hip city whose well-groomed exterior hides a fear all too willing to lash out if provoked. We have lost so much, and those who have lost most are given least opportunity to tell their stories.