Against Marxist Messianism.

AGAINST MARXIST MESSIANISM.

Important New (very largely) Statement from Tendance Coatesy.

NOTES ON RELIGION

“Tout commence par la mystique et tout finit en Politique.”

Everything starts in mysticism and ends in politics.

“la mystique ne soit point dévorée par la politique à laquelle elle a donné naissance.”

Mysticism must not be devoured by the politics to which it gave it birth.

Notre jeunesse. Charles Péguy. (1910)

“Did Péguy kill Jaurès? Did he incite

the assassin? Must men stand by what they write

as by their camp-beds or their weaponry

or shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?”

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Geoffrey Hill. (1)

Does Christianity in its “fabulous unreality” contains “love, hope and faith, beyond the realm of the state and of authority?” Was Jesus the bearer whose message may yet bring “Utopian light on the problem of universal alienation and its cure?” To Ernst Bloch the real Christ was less important than what he was, has been, and is seen to be. Standing at the gateway of Time. The revival of this Messianic thread in Marxism – the belief that communism is woven in the pattern of religious tapestry – needs materialist critique. Starting from the Herald of Good News. Yet, it is widely accepted, that we will never end the Quest for the Historical Jesus. That is, the search, carried out by sceptics such as David Strauss, and, later by Ernest Renan as thoroughly by Christians as dedicated as Albert Schweitzer, for the ‘real’ history of the Messiah, peeled away from all the idolatry, superstitions and myths of centuries. Or – without a purely theological (critical, that is) excursion into how to begin to conceptualise the Life, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection – to even approach the issue of what this means. Or grapple with what God presented, in believers’ minds – across the ages. One should, as a materialist, surely refuse to separate wholly the areas of what we can know about the Messiah and what his Crucifixion signified theologically. The documents we have, the witnesses collected in the New Testament, and the context, the culture and social structure of the time, are rich enough to sustain the voyage of many present and future quests. We shall only try to keep our journey on one path. That is we can start in one of its dimensions: the historical record of how Christianity became a Church, the moments when profane existence took up a picture of the Divine and built an institution around it. For an influential strand of thought, portraying Messianism and eschatology, within Christianity, above all in Saint Paul, that there is a relation (hidden through many dark glasses) between the “living hope” of the Resurrection-Event, followed by the Second Coming (Parousia) and “invariant communism.” And that by probing these mysteries (set down by Badiou, Amabgan, Žižek and others), that, we may discover Toni Negri’s “religion without God”? Or, as John Roberts asserts, “Marxists have to become messianists in order to live and struggle and organise in the here and now.”

Chris Harman is Dead: Expanded Political Obituary.

Contested Till Death.

Chris Harman, a leading figure for decades in the SWP (more here), died last night (here).

There will be many obituaries. This is a critical-political one. That is, like the SWP, we do not feel a need to wrap and hide underneath sentiment fundamental  political disgreements. Tendance Coatesy comes from a very different political tradition, of Continental Marxist unorthodoxy. For us, anti-Stalinists and anti-anti-Communists,  the SWP’s main defining feature, its ’state capitalist’ theory, is of little interest. That is, the line against Stalinism has already been drawn, and there are better historical and theoretical explanations of the fate of the Soviet Union around. Perhaps more significant to our political activity has been the SWP’s political theory and practice. The organisation changed from an originally open Marxist grouping into the fractured, intolerant, opportunist mess we see today. We can see in Harman’s writings, noted for their lucidity and seriousness,  both sides of the SWP.

I wish therefore to make some comments on Harman’s political legacy.  It is far richer and more positive than today’s SWP party-structure would suggest. But not exactly without faults. These are some aspects,

Many of Harman’s political ideas, formed in the early International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP), has originally a libertarian cast. That is, their version of Marxism was based on socialism being introduced through a party which was  part of the self-organisation of the working class. Against what Trotsky called ’subsitutionism’, and taking something of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the importance of spontaneous democratic ferment, they were set out in the pamphlet below,

Party and Class (1969) (Here) Harman concluded that,

“The need is still to build an organisation of revolutionary Marxists that will subject their situation and that of the class as a whole to scientific scrutiny, will ruthlessly criticise their own mistakes, and will, while engaging in the everyday struggles of the mass of workers, attempt to increase their independent self-activity by unremittingly opposing their ideological and practical subservience to the old society. A reaction against the identification of class and party elite made by both Social Democracy and Stalinism is very healthy. It should not, however, prevent a clear-sighted perspective of what we have to do to overcome their legacy.”

No doubt most people on the left remember more clearly the turn to Lenin in the 1970s, and the founding of the SWP on more inflexible democratic centralist grounds. The present-day regime of the Party stems from this period. It  as a time of expulsions, rules about limited factional rights (if at all), and the entrenchment of a quasi-eternal Central Committee. It should not be forgotten that the SWP was not alone in its ‘Bolshevisation’ – the IMG and most of the SWPs splinters (with the notable exception of the working class opposition – that left for ever-  based in the Midlands) were also seized with this delusion.  There is a massive literature on this. On this time it’s often said that Jim Higgin’s More Years for the Locust (here) is the best critical account and explanation.

This bureaucratic orthodoxy-in-perpetual-activism, did not prevent Harman from retaining a critical spirit.

Example, The  Prophet and the Proletariat (here)

The book contains a balanced analysis of Islamism - very different to the one promoted during the SWP’s time in respect (or the relativist views of present-day Islamophiles). Not that it’s without problems. Its conclusion is worth citing in full. Not the least because in its death notice the SWP for reasons not alien to its continuing attempts to trawl in Islamist waters claims that it said that (here),

One of Chris Harman’s articles ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ was written to help prevent the marginalisation of the Arab left before the rising tide of political Islam. The article attacked claims that political Islam represented a form of fascism and sought to explain its rise in terms of the failure of the nationalist left; the appeal that a return to pure Islam had for a middle class intelligentsia who suffered from the insults imposed on them by the empire; and the ability of such groups to garner support from sections of the urban poor.

Harman indeed engaged in some superficial class analysis of Islamism (neglecting its strong bourgeois roots and pro-mercantile and state bureaucratic capitalist direction). But his main focus was unrelentingly critical of Islamic groups and the reactionary nature of their politics. What it actually written is that,

“It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically reactionary and “fascist” or as automatically “anti-imperialist” and “progressive”. Radical Islamism, with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century Arabia, is, in fact, a “utopia” emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class. As with any “petty bourgeois utopia” [128], its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation. It is this which leads inevitably to splits between a radical, terrorist wing of Islamism on the one hand, and a reformist wing on the others. It is also this which leads some of the radicals to switch from using arms to try to bring about a society without “oppressors” to using them to impose “Islamic” forms of behaviour on individuals.”

Precisely. Opposing the imposition of ‘Islamic norms of behaviour’ is the dividing line between socialists and reactionary ‘anti-imperialists’, and multi-cultural relativists. Such Islamophile riff-raff has recently been libelling gay campaigners like Peter Tatchell for defending universalism against religious norms.

It would have been interesting to know Harman’s views on this.

“… socialists cannot support the state against the Islamists. Those who do so, on the grounds that the Islamists threaten secular values, merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray the left as part of an “infidel”, “secularist” conspiracy of the “oppressors” against the most impoverished sections of society. They repeat the mistakes made by the left in Algeria and Egypt when they praised regimes that were doing nothing for the mass of people as “progressive’ – mistakes that enabled the Islamists to grow. And they forget that any support the state gives to secularist values is only contingent: when it suits it, it will do a deal with the more conservative of the Islamists to impose bits of the shariah – especially the bits which inflict harsh punishment on people – in return for ditching the radicals with their belief in challenging oppression. This is what happened in Pakistan under Zia and the Sudan under Nimeiry, and it is apparently what the Clinton adminstration has been advising the Algerian generals to do.

But socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes “Islamic” forms. It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.”

The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system – or often to the first followed by the second.”

Naturally one would say that Islamist movements are in theory and in practice demonstrably reactionary. Nor the central importance of secularism for socialists. As an explanation it lacks the central role in Islamism of the pious national bourgeoisie. Nor the irreconcilable principle of democratic Marxists that one would never align with such groups.  But at least Harman did not exalt Islamists as automatically on the ‘right side’ of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Unfortunately the third aspect of Harman’s SWP’s work (below) shows just how far they had gone down the road of treating social movements as fodder for recruitment. After the 1970s the SWP, stuck in a permanent round of recruitment through moving campaigns, period purges of anyone awkward, and ‘get rich quick’ schemes. That is winning central positions in perceived rising trends of political unrest. Their ‘united front’ strategy meant co-operation with anyone who seemed to be going in the direction of opposing the existing political system. Or at least who had a vaguely radical sound.

This example explains how the Party saw the one-time important ‘anti-Globalisation’ wave.

Spontaneity, Strategy, Politics 2004. (here)

“ In other words, a visible revolutionary organisation is a necessity, not an optional extra. Its members need to take part in the wider struggles and operate through party groups in localities and workplaces. They have to organise people around them through regular paper sales and draw them to meetings. And the discussion cannot just be about immediate tactics, but has to raise the question of transforming society in its totality, of revolution, not reform. Only in this way can we move towards fulfilling the full potential of the last five years—towards overthrowing this system and creating a better one.”

In fact in Britain the ‘anti-gloablisation’ movement was a heteroclite mixture of well-meaning NGOs, other left groups, individuals (Ken Livingstone onwards), fading magazines like Red Pepper,  and trade unions searching for new blood and inspired by anti-globalisation unrest in other countries which and genuine impact. It equally involved cranks of a variety of  stripes (Greens, animal rights nutters, onwards), all wrapped in an unwieldy Social Forum network, run in the interests of grandstanding various large egos. The SWP failed to get many recruits from this pool and turned to other fishing grounds. What Marxism, in the sense of basing politics on the self-activity of the masses, remained was soon channelled into the ever-turning priorities of sustaining the organisation. We might say that the SWP’s version of Leninism resembled a business plan, constantly drawing up not SWOTs (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) but OTs – Opportunities and Threats. Harman either instigated or, at the very least, connived, in this development. That is, under a lot of guff about the Party as the People’s Tribune.

The Respect Party was the culmination of this approach, aligning right up with the extreme-right-wing Islamists of the East London Mosque.  Of which it is hardly necessary to add further comment.

In conclusion, for all these remarks, Harman had a lot to offer. His original standpoint was not far from genuine democratic Marxism. That he, and the SWP, evolved into the hysterical dead-end we see today, requires more explanation than can be put into a few pages. One might feel that it’s a shame Harman bound himself to the SWP political project so thoroughly. That intense committment would have been better spent elsewhere. But, then, that is not a matter for us to choose.

Hezbollah Censors the Diary of Anne Frank.

 

Anne Frank: “Emotional”, ‘Zionist Promoter”?

Hezbollah censors the Diary of Anne Frank (Here).

“BEIRUT (AFP) – – Anne Frank’s diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the militant group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism.

The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank” were included in the textbook used by a private English-language school in western Beirut.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews.

“What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted,” said the report aired last week and also published on the station’s website.”

Does one need to comment?

BNP Funded by Suffolk Toff.

Friston Scene.

Friston is a village near Aldeburgh. Nearby is the home of a scion of the Wentworth family, Charles Vernon Wentworth  - once the most prominent aristocrats of  the district. During many years the  hamlet was very much “an estate village”. But their property has gradually been sold off, including the family home,  Blackheath Mansion. Even so Wentworth retains some of the clan’s fortune. He lives, apparently at Friston Hall. (More here) The gentleman farmer has been revealed to be a the biggest cash  donor to the British National Party. Personally I find his Suffolk and class background more interesting than the marriage to a woman of Serbian origins.

Friston was also home, in retirement, to my father and mother. Their house, Windmill Cottage, was bought from the Estate. They were Chair and Secretary of near-by Leiston Labour Party for over a decade. That’s to say, I know the village well. Though they moved from Friston at the end of the ‘eighties, and have now passed away, I still keep an interest in the place. The pubs in Snape, however, are better than the Chequers.

It’s worth saying that the hamlet should not be remembered as the residence of a loud-mouthed reactionary. Friston is better recalled as the site of great Chartist agitation,

One leading local chartist put Friston on the map in 1839. He was Thomas Hearn, a local shopkeeper who opened a branch of the Working Men’s Association in the village and aimed to make Friston the ‘metropolis of chartism’. The Friston meetings were held in the Chequers Inn and the Baptist Chapel and the following was good. A rally for farm-workers was held in Friston wd 1,000 people were present. The farmers were alarmed at this and laid on alternative entertainment, and one threatened dismissal for any worker found attending. Later in the same year, on Boxing Day, 5,000 people attended a second rally, some of whom had walked from Ipswich to meet up with Hearn’s group and others at Carlton. Although the Chartists failed to get their demands at that time, Thomas Hearn continued to support the movement. In 1851 he was living in Grove Road, probably on the site of the later grocer’s shop.”

There is more information in this book here.

Back to Charles Wentworth. I have always heard that he had a ‘colourful’ freedom-loving youth. Yet still, according to the Daily Mail, his upbringing and breeding tells,

His inherited wealth includes a 660-acre farm in Friston – a pretty hamlet of pink-washed cottages and narrow lanes. The village green and meeting hall also belong to him, so parishioners must seek his permission to stage fairs and other events there, just like commoners of old.

This fact (rather well-known to inhabitants) might be a reasonable explanation why Mary Wright, Chair of the Village Hall Committee (and former Independent Councillor for the Coastal District)  refused to comment on the BNP to the Ipswich Evening Star.

Protests in Iran Wednesday.

Will the Religious Regime Evolve Peacefully?

Agence France Press reports that there will be protests against the Iranian regime on Wednesday (in English here).

November 4 has emerged as an anti-US day in Iran, with thousands of Iranians, mostly students, gathering annually outside the US embassy building, dubbed the ‘Den of Spies’, to shout slogans such as “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” The event marks the capture of the embassy on November 4, 1979 — just months after the Islamic revolution toppled the US-backed shah — by radical Islamist students who took American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

Since then, the event which was aimed at condemning US policies towards Iran, has become one of the cornerstones of the Islamic regime.But this year the annual anti-US day could be marked by street protests against Ahmadinejad, whose re-election on June 12 triggered the worst political crisis in the 30-year history of the Islamic republic.

This is the time for genuine progressives to stand with the protestors. The movement’s detailed demands and aims are hard to judge from the outside. But we can agree that their fight for democracy against the Islamicist dictatorship has to be completely supported. ,

One wonders what the pro-faith left-leaning apologists for Islamisism  in  Britain will do.

On second thoughts, I’d prefer not to.

The Coming Insurrection. Review.

 

The Coming Insurrection has just been published in English. Under the prestigious MIT label (here) and the no less highly regarded Semiotexte (an imprint gracing all the best crystal tables of the Manhattan left). meanwhile the Tarnac Affair (details here) continues, at a slower pace.  The site just cited does not refer to the controversy which has shaken the French anarchist milieu over sabotage – the root accusation. Which it would be too dreary to detail, except to say it revolves around accusations against the ‘Official’ anarchists by the ‘real-Continuity’ anarchists that the former distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sabotage. More important news can be found on this Blog (here)

Be that as it may, this review, written as the Coming Insurrection gained notoriety, retains its relevance. Though some of its heat and rapidness. As we recently saw in Poitiers the autonomist left is capable of open street fighting on a scale not seen in France since the 1980s. Calls have been renewed for a ban on these groups. For all those buyers of the English version, and fans of these ideas, I republish it.

L’Insurrection qui vient. Le comité Invisible. © La fabrique éditions, 2007

To the French Police and (some) Magistrates the country is menaced by the avatars of the Bande à Bonnot. These libertarian, individualist, anarchists, carried out the first motorised hold-up in France (1911), in the Rue Ordener, Montmartre. Some in the modern equivalent of the Sûreté have dreamt up a similar threat from anarchists. They are echoed by right-wing politicians.

Dieudonné: Fine for Anti-Semitism.

Not Welcome Here.

Our old friend Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala has been fined 10, 000 Euros for anti-Semitism (here). Dieudonné associates with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, radical Islamicists, ultra-orthodox Jews, the French ultra-Right, 9/11 Truthers, and  ’anti-imperialists’. He is the nearest we’ve got to living proof  of  theories about the sleep of reason leading to monsters.

Worth bearing in mind when he visits the UK again.

How far into the future this will be is anyone’s guess.

His coming show at Leicester Square has just been unceremoniously axed (here).

Anti-Postie Picket: The Shame of Ipswich.

 

The Sorrow of Ipswich.

Local Conservative Councillor Steven Wells yesterday led an anti-Postal Strike Picket outside Ipswich Royal Mail Offices. (More info: here) Standing on the opposite side of the road to the CWU picket the Tory-led suits attacked workers. They demanded ‘their’ post. The demonstration was composed (according to Socialist Worker here)  of paid employees of Steven Wells’ company, Experience Direct.

Socialist Worker does not mention that Steven Wells lost his Ipswich Borough Council Housing Portfolio earlier this year. A sign of the esteem the local Tories hold him in is that he is now on the Community Improvements Committee (as a Substitute).

 

Those who seek a better postal service might be interested in this. Not long ago the Royal Mail commissioned a computer-based survey (Pegasus) in Ipswich. To improve deliveries it recommended employing much higher levels of staff.

 

Strange to say it was ignored.

Blair, j’peux pas le blairer!* Jean-Claude Juncker for Prez.

People’s Choice for European President.

So it goes.

Blair for this.

Blair for that.

Blair’s like a cat that’s got the cream.

It is hard to imagine anyone who has done nothing at all for Europe except smirk is now, trying to be, well we know what.

Le Monde carries the news today that Blair faces competition for the post of European President (here). Jean-Claude Juncker, of Luxembourg, the plucky chap, is entering into the race. He is described as a David standing up to Goliath (shouldn’t that be Godzilla?) Blair.

Jean-Claude (as I call him) sounds a bit of a lad. Or an utter bastard to be frank. I once met the Luxembourg left. He was at a meeting in Paris. The country does not seem a workers’ paradise.

No matter.

Jean-Claude it is, and Jean-Claude it must be.

(*) I claim to have invented this pun btw. I made it back in 1996.

Front de Gauche. Better than Front on No-Platform for the BNP.

While the British Left is absorbed in a debate about whether to ‘No-Platform’ the BNP the French ‘left of the left’  is taking steps towards a political challenge. That is to ecocapitalists, social liberals, and the right. No prizes for guessing which more-to-the-centre parties the first two bits of jargon refer to. The occasion? Next year’s Regional elections (under decentralisation, the stake is a large amount of local government responsibility).  It would be good if we had this alternative. Rather more productive than discussing how horrible Nick Griffin and his policies are. Indeed it hard to imagine anyone in France even thinking about a strategy of denying the (declining) Front National space in the public media. Were the left in the UK serious we would spend some time looking at the Front de Gauche. Its strategy of successfully aligning separate left parties, and independent currents has something to say to our own fragmented left.

“Le PCF, fort de l’expérience positive du Front de gauche pour les élections souhaite contribuer à la formation d’un front de gauche élargi, ouverts à des forces nouvelles, à des personnalités, à des militants du monde syndical associatif travaillant autour de projets régionaux bien ancrés à gauche. (Here)

The PCF, strong following the positive experience of the Front de Gauche for the European elections (where they won seats for the European Parliament) supports creating a wider Left Front, with new forces, ‘personalities’, trade unionists, social movement activists, to work together on projects for the regional elections that are solidly anchored on the left.

This, involving the PCF, the Parti de Gauche (left wing democratic socialists), ex-NGA supporters and other left currents (alternatives, left republicans),  will be independent of the Parti Socialiste and the Greens. It would stand lists on own for the first round of the elections. However, negotiations with the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA)  have been less fruitful. The PCF would welcome their co-operation,

Le NPA aurait sa place dans ce mouvement, mais de la même manière qu’aux élections européennes, la formation d’Olivier Besancenot se refuse à prendre sa place dans des majorités de gauche dès lors que le PS y participerait.La semaine dernière, alors que Jean-Luc Mélenchon venait de déclarer qu’un accord était proche, la direction du NPA durcissait le ton sur le thème des « deux gauches inconciliables ».

The NPA will have its place in this movement but, showing the same behaviour as they did during the European elections, Olivier Besancenot’s Party has refused (in advance) to join with any left majority administration as soon as the Parti Socialiste is involved. Last week when Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Parti de Gauche) claimed agreement was close the NPA began to harden its line around the theme of the ‘two irreconcilable lefts’.

The sticking point remains the issue of alliances behind the Socialist Party (or Greens) in the second round of elections. For the NPA it is unthinkable that any backing could be formally given to the these parties. The reason? This would be negotiated by the Front de Gauche as a precondition for joining with them in local government. Which would imply more than blocking the route to the Right; it means co-operation with their policies. Or, as the Front would argue, putting more pressure on them to change them.

The Gauche Unitaire (ex-NPA) states (here) that a debate on this legitimate,

 Un débat est ouvert, au sein de la gauche de gauche, à  propos de la participation aux exécutifs des régions avec le Parti socialiste et Régions écologie. Ce débat a sa légitimité. Il n’en fait pas moins l’objet, depuis longtemps, d’échanges multiples. Il ne saurait, pour cette raison, constituer un préalable conditionnant la formation de listes unitaires de premier tour.

A debate is open, inside the left of the left, regarding participation with the Parti Socialiste and Ecologists,  in regional council executive.  This is a legitimate debate. However, despite this, acceptance of such participation should not constitute a condition for forming joint-lists in the first round of elections.

I would have thought that the issue is not really a question of fixed principle, but whether the Parti Socialiste and the Verts (Greens) have policies – in the Regional Government context – which make them beyond the pale for the left. It seems doubtful that they do have any. The relatively modest programmes they do have (a kind of  watered down version of municipal socialism with a green tinge), and the fact that they are mainly interested in sustaining the full-time political (paid) layer that dominates both parties (in the Verts over one third – 2,000 out of 5,000 -  of its real membership!) make one wary of them. What do you think of parties where the widely circulated  joke on their activists is they can be divided into two groups: those making a living out of politics, and those who’d like to. But does that mean refusing all co-operation? Before you’ve even had good enough electoral results to be asked?

A rather pleasanter dilemma than the one we face here. At least.

Rime of the Ancient Socialist

 

 

September the 20th-25^th sees the Manchester Convention of the Left.             

 

 

(http://www.conventionoftheleft.org/  Coming from many quarters of the left the organisers are “united in our determination to combine our strengths”. They hope to “open a debate”. Chris Strafford in the Weekly Worker asks “what is the point?” of this. Bruce Robinson of the AWL notes that the Convention is designed to “avoid controversy”.  Indeed apart from rallying the committed, attracting (?) new blood, and having face-to-face discussions – not such bad ideas – it is unclear what the goal is. The final session is named “Question Time for the Left.” The BBC programme of that name is a platform for the loud-mouthed, the know-alls, and the – interesting – know somethings. Select your own featured speakers to fit that description. Only the most ecumenical will foresee much value in George Galloway or Lindsey German’s perspectives.

 

The hubris staring Brown in the face after a decade of overweening self-confidence in his own merits and the virtues of the market economy overshadows everything. As a response it is surely important to discuss a socialist economic project. From the global re-regulation of finance and banking, we ought to look at a European-wide strategy to bring (first) utilities and public transport under social ownership, and an equally cross-Continental centralisation of upgraded social rights and benefits. Brown’s market state is uniquely vulnerable to the banking and credit crisis through its dependence on private finance, and (incompetent) private contractors. Instead of farming out services (in the NHS for example) to instruments like problem-ridden Equity Funds, renewed publicly funded Welfare institutions need to be expanded to cope with the existing inequality and potential economic disaster. To propel this we have to have strong trade unions with expanded rights.

 

No doubt there will be many at Manchester with their own ideas on these topics. Not to mention others, from feminism, anti-racism, local government, anti-war action and ecology. The Socialist Movement published nearly two decades back still useful documents on many of these subjects – indicating how much we have retreated in the intervening years.

 

Anyway, this may not be welcome (hah!). But like the Ancient Mariner collaring the Wedding Guest I would like to tell the Convention a few things. Let’s clear the decks of a few albatrosses, and if we have to do penance for this, so be it.

To begin with, Nick Wrack of Respect Renewal is right to say that, The experience of the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party and, latterly, the split in Respect would make the most optimistic exponent of left unity reach for the nearest barge pole.” The fall-out from this squabbling has not gone away (nor the guilty parties held to account). Nevertheless an inability to win large-scale political (as opposed to union) support is common to all the left. Inside the Labour Party John McDonnell has not made great headway either. Next, a major unresolved issue is the failure of the Respect/Left List factions to confront their own communalist and opportunist alliance with cross-class Muslim notables and Islamist groups. This has been combined with covering for Islamicist bodies violently opposed to the most minimal of progressive politics and human rights. Domestically there has been an inability to build a democratic programme axed around the kind of secular equality which can confront communitarians and racists. Finally, the Convention’s call for serious thinking makes no sense if the left jumps, without some of this, at the latest get-rich-quick scheme: a turn to the Green Party, whose identity as “on the left” is not at all clearly established in the eyes of many of us. There’s a lot to say on this, but my glimmering eye fades and I turn away – for now. 

Last of the Pabolites. Utopie-Critique

This interesting journal is the home of the last of the Paboites. It contains articles on self-management, radical socialist republicanism and a host of other criticial Marxist contributions. Highly recommended. Utopie-Critique seems one of the most interesting left publications around.

Sommaire Utopie Critique N°45

Par Utopie Critique

Gordon Brown.

Hysteria no doubt will reign today at the Labour Party Conference. Gordon Brown will no doubt be welcomed with enough enthusiasm to send shivers down the spines of the panicking delegates. Fear strikes the soul of the Labour Party. Yuck!

Cartoon, Sep 23 2008:

French Socialists

 

I will post on this in detail later but it seems that the Parti Socialiste Francais is in a real state: no enthusiasm, no deeply-felt ideology, or clear platform of any kind, a collapse around its central spine, and just the everlasting battle between the ‘elephants’ for leadership in the coming Party Congress.

Lutte Ouvriere Expels ‘the Spark’.

 

 22 septembre 2008

Lutte Ouvriere has expelled ”l’Enticelle’ (the Spark), its permanent faction. Reports state that this is due to the faction’s closeness to the LCR’s project of a New Anti-Capitalist Party. It is believed the people affected number a few dozen at most. Given LO’s regime – they are compared to ’soldier  monks’ – this is a sign of an even tighter internal grip on members. Obviously the attraction of the LCR-led new party (which has had enormous publicity in the French media and seems to have had genuine resonance amongst a wide swathe of people) is being resisted by pulling up the drawbridge.

 

 

     Réunis en conférence nationale, le 21 septembre 2008, pour examiner les relations entre la majorité de Lutte Ouvrière et la fraction L’Étincelle, les militants ont voté à une majorité de 97,3 % la motion suivante :
     ”Le constat qui s’impose est que la Fraction L’Étincelle s’est, depuis sa création, de plus en plus éloignée de la majorité de Lutte Ouvrière, au point de constituer aujourd’hui une organisation complètement indépendante et autonome n’ayant plus aucun lien politique avec Lutte Ouvrière.
     Pendant toutes ces années, elle n’a pour ainsi dire jamais accepté de soumettre ses projets, non seulement à une discussion véritable, mais à un vote pouvant décider d’une attitude commune. Elle a toujours confondu « informer » les instances de Lutte Ouvrière avec débattre et décider en commun.
     En dernier lieu, avant les élections municipales, elle a décidé unilatéralement de soutenir et de participer à des listes de la LCR et surtout de soutenir, à Wattrelos, des dissidents n’ayant plus rien à voir avec Lutte Ouvrière. C’est son refus affirmé de respecter la décision prise par la majorité qui a amené celle-ci à la suspendre jusqu’à ce qu’une décision statutaire puisse être prise à leur propos.
     A cela s’est ajoutée leur participation à la construction d’un NPA, ce qui les place non seulement en dehors mais très loin de Lutte Ouvrière.
     L’existence d’une fraction faisant partie de Lutte Ouvrière est donc une fiction depuis déjà longtemps, et il est temps d’entériner cet état de choses.”
     Ce vote décide en conséquence la fin de toute relation entre Lutte Ouvrière et le groupe nommé jusqu’à présent Fraction Lutte Ouvrière – L’Étincelle.

 

The reply by L’Étincelle is here, which describes LO’s drawbridge strategy (replie sur soi), criticises their alliance in some municpalities with the Parti Socialiste, and refers (rather obliquely) to exploring the possibility of a new left party (that is, the Besancenot project) :

         

 

22 septembre 2008

 Après avoir suspendu la Fraction l’Etincelle de Lutte Ouvrière, le parti d’Arlette Laguiller l’a exclue ce dimanche 21 septembre lors d’une conférence nationale extraordinaire convoquée tout exprès deux mois avant le congrès annuel de décembre prochain qui devait débattre de cette suspension ainsi que des orientations politiques de l’organisation. De toute évidence la direction de LO ne pouvait supporter ni les critiques concernant sa politique de soutien à l’union de la gauche et au PS lors des dernières municipales ni surtout le débat sur le bilan de cette politique désastreuse : d’une part LO n’a absolument pas obtenu le nombre d’élus escomptés de la petite place qui lui avait été consentie sur les listes du PS, du PC ou des deux contre son soutien à des programmes et des politiques qui n’étaient pas les siens ; d’autre part cette politique opportuniste a terni auprès d’un certain nombre de ses partisans et de travailleurs l’image de rigueur et de fermeté qu’elle avait gagné à juste titre par sa politique antérieure.

Les raisons invoquées pour l’exclusion de la Fraction sont soit un prétexte grossier (reproche d’une alliance passée avec la LCR aux municipales à Agen alors que la majorité de LO s’est retrouvée dans d’autres villes sur des listes avec la même LCR, ou encore d’avoir refusé que à Wattrelos des conseillers municipaux sortants LO, proches de la Fraction, soient écartés pour ne pas accepter la nouvelle alliance électorale avec le PS), soit la démonstration du repli sur soi et de la frilosité politique actuelle de Lutte Ouvrière (accusation d’avoir entrepris d’explorer avec d’autres courants d’extrême gauche les possibilités de construire un Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste proposé par Olivier Besancenot).

L’exclusion ne change évidemment ni l’activité, ni la politique ni les orientations fondamentales de la Fraction l’Etincelle de Lutte Ouvrière qui milite pour la construction d’un parti communiste prolétarien révolutionnaire, l’implantation du courant trotskiste dans la classe ouvrière et le développement d’un mouvement d’ensemble des salariés, nécessaire pour s’opposer aux attaques redoublées du patronat et du gouvernement contre le monde du travail et les classes populaires.

I can’t say I see much immediate future for LO – the ‘eternal candidate’ for  French Presidential elections will not re-present herself (she has been in eclipse anyway) and its Marxism is, to say the least, a kind of unappealling dogmatism. Their full members – real cadres – are enormously dedicated and have to be given credit for that. But faced with Olivier Besancenot they have lost much of their popular attraction. As Krivine (love to name drop!)  finished a sentence of mine at the Conway Hall May Event: I was describing to him how I found the LCR’s video clips of their campaigning moving and how in them “les gens etaient ….” (people in them were)  he popped in the obvious word  - “normaux” (normal). Quite.

See: Lutte Ouvriere in Wikipedia (English).

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That Brown Speech.

So it’s all hard-working families again (Guardian). Plenty of the predicted hysterical aplause, delegates in a willing-state-of-believing, the nerves frayed. Shame about the Srah being dragged into the public psycodrama, she came across as a pleasant enough sort. New Labour relies ever more heavily on the Hunting of the Snark  device of saying things three times so they must be true: witness repetition about having made Britian fairer and life being better for ordinary folk. Not to mention the references about progress in ending child poverty, and shameless sentiment to helping deal with the injustices facing the world’s poor.

Or maybe not, since I barely listened to it all.

Some questions:

• If Brown is ending poverty how is that unemployed people without children will not get a penny to help them cope with massive fuel price-rises?
• We all know – even a babe in a buggy must be partly aware – that Brown loves, absolutely loves, hard-working families. But what of us drink-sodden idlers? Eh? How is Brown going to deal with unemployed anyway? How is his New Deal Deal scheme – an open prison for many of those on it, a business opportunity for those private and ‘voluntary’ bodies cashing in on it – going to deal with a rising dole queue?  How will the Minisiter of Work and Pensions – undoubtably one of the most repellent creatures in the Cabinet - introduce his forthcoming legislation to bring in forced labour – workfare – when there is growing unemployment?
• If Brown believes in fairness how is it that he is pledged to introduce yet more repressive social legislation to busy the Courts and fill the Gaols – this time against the sex trade?
• If Brown believes in ending world injustice what are his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan? I don’t have an easy answer even remotely to offer, but surely Mr Brown  who plans to finish off the planet’s poverty could at least start by looking at these lands’s problems. From him till now: motus.
• Apart from a few feeble criticisms of the kind of shark-toothed (do sharks have teeth or fangs?) City types, what are Brown and Darling going to do about the Rich? In Coatesy’s view doing nothing is not an option. Where are the public trials for profiteering, the lengthy sentences, the permanent loss of civic rights?

Terror and Consent. The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. Philip Bobbitt.

  

Phillip Bobbitt has already made a name for himself, in the realms of high politics, and Academies closely chained to Power in the West, as the author of The Shield of Achilles (2002). This described the replacement of nation-states (jealously sovereign, territory-bound, responsible for its citizens’ well-being) by market-states (inter-linked at all levels, enabling people to produce wealth, not redistributing it, guaranteeing protection and human rights). Economically this change-over resulted (rather vaguely) from the kind of ‘connectivity’, networking of finance and information, and contracting out of state activities, readers of globalisation literature are only too familiar with. Constitutionally, and above all, militarily (Bobbitt’s fortes), the market-state appeared to give priority to new criteria of legality. Weapons of mass destruction, mass abuses of human rights, from ethnic cleansing to residual totalitarian regimes   destroyed the case for recognising the sovereignty of every state. The new technologies of war (extending the planetary reach of armed force) made possible targeted interventions to correct these abuses. As Gopal Balakrishnan remarks (Algorithms of War New Left Review. No 23. 2003) “In Bobbit’s terms, the American regime is the detonator of an expanding legal universe of market-state, bursting asunder an old international order based on the nominal recognition of the sovereignty of all nation-states.”(P 25) A world in which, Balakrishnan observes, Bobbitt foresaw looming threats to the “new constitutional order.”

 

A few years later, post post 9/11, and the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, these menaces have taken definite shape. Above all in terrorism.  In Terror and Consent (2008)  “The looming combination of a global terrorist network, weapons of mass destruction, and the heightening vulnerability of enormous numbers of civilians emphatically require a basic transformation of the conventional wisdom in international security.”(P 5) Just as the market-state works in tandem with “global, networked, decentralised, and devolved” instruments so its opponents (a nebulous category in the book) have their own international vision, and reply on equally transnational link-ups, outsourcing and incentivising (translation: providing incentives per piece of work, rather than permanently). Terrorist organisations are the most dangerous of these enemies of the market-states; “Terrorism will become a far more important security issue because market state terrorists, unlike their twentieth century predecessors, would actually use WMD against civilians.”(P 9)

 

Terrorism and Consent is centred on the war on terror. Bobbitt has no time for those who claim that terrorism is a method not an object. There are networked, non-state, organisations, such as Al-Qaeda, using extreme violence against civilians for political ends, which amount to the same thing: pretty real entities with pretty real murderous acts. So,

 

A war against terror makes sense, as an idea, because terrorism has become more warlike, and war is becoming indistinguishable from counterinsurgency and counter terrorism operations…. the war aim of the U.S and the U.K. is to preserve states of consent by protecting civilians, and this means that the Wars against terror will pursue three intertwined objectives; to pre-empt twenty-first century market state terrorism, to prevent WMD proliferation when these weapons would be used for compellance rather than deterrence, and to prevent or mitigate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the human rights consequences of civilian catastrophes. (P 236)

 

Let us hold in suspension numerous doubts about this analysis. These range from the obvious: the Islamicist doctrines of Jihadists merit a study of their own. To piece together this network you have to have in common not just terror but a common ideological basis. Support is needed in the frustrated sections of pious Moslem bourgeoisies. An ability to secure a social base around a project of a restored Caliphate which rejects the creeping – or ‘consensual’ – repressive moral order of such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliates. What sections of these classes, and in what nations, does Al-Qaeda appeal to, and why. Or the less clear: if terrorism is a kind of necessary doppelgänger of market-states’ military structures, and a reaction to their monopoly of violence, it seems at times to function in Terror and Consent as a Manichean devil: the darkness produced by the light. Human rights will thus always produce human wrongs.

 

The important point here however lies elsewhere. Bobbitt’s book is not a disinterested academic study: it is full of words of power. He asserts that the UN must become a  “claviger and steward”. That is a club and a guardian, not a (Achilles) shield to stand behind. The point at which this weapon is wielded is the crucial one. Bobbitt has doubts about the results of existing US policies, and “lawless behaviour in its penal colonies”.  But note the word, “pre-empt.” Both candidates for the US presidential elections have taken Bobbit’s ideas seriously. Both equivocate on exactly what this term means. Does it signify yet more armed interventions, notably to pre-empt Iranian development of weapons of mass destruction? Does it imply anything about the crisis unfolding in Pakistan, where Islamicist groups swarm and terrorist atrocities have reached a new peak?

 

Perhaps it is the latter difficulty that indicates just how shallow Bobbitt can be. He fails to offer any indication of Pakistan; the hurricane-eye of modern Jihadism can repair its nation. The problems there are so deep, from the religious exclusive nature of the state, its military-as-ruling-class, to its economic failures, that to talk of ‘terrorism’ in general without delving into this is frankly ridiculous.

 

Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos. (2008) is a searing commentary on the nature of the ‘war on terrorism’. He – from a liberal position informed by human rights  - describes how the US began waging the war on terrorism by rejecting the Geneva Convention, “denying justice at home, undermining the U.S. Constitution, and then pressuring its allies to do the same set in motion a devastating denial of civilised instincts. America’s example had the most impact in Afghanistan, where no legal system existed; in Pakistan, ruled by a military dictatorship; and in central Asia, where the world’s most repressive dictatorships flourished. By following America’s lead in promoting or condoning disappearances, torture, and secret jails, these countries found their path to democracy and their struggle against Islamic extremism set back by decades.”(P 293) So much then for the market-state’s (the US Template at any rate) ability to uphold the rule of universal law and supersede obsolete doctrines of sovereignty. 

 

It is not only the principles of democratic Constitutions and Treaties that are disregarded, or people’s most basic rights violated. The legacy is one of overwhelming social disaster, “The enormous cost of these wars has crippled the Untied States and world economies, the military deployments have shattered the U.S. and British armies, and the death and destruction have bled civilian populations and worsened the humanitarian crisis for neighbouring countries.”(P 401)

 

If this is the legacy of pre-emption and humanitarian intervention is it any wonder than many people are hostile to both of them?  And worry about any future American leader who clings to these doctrines? If Bobbitt leaves us with anything it is that a serious human rights left should have no truck with the wanton use of power in disregard of basic principles. A left that took such values seriously would be fighting the terrorism of Islamicist Jihadism by building amongst these populations to fight oppression and exploitation, to build real democracy. Support the world’s superpowers, in the guise of humanitarian interventions, or the removal of tyrants such as Saddam. This position is visibly weakening even amongst those ‘muscular liberals’ who saw this, with all their reservations, as at least a step in the right direction. 

 

AWL Versus CPGB

 

Weekly Worker versus the AWL: should people take sides?

 

The Debate of the Decade, Mosover versus Matgamna, (or ‘M/M’) will be held (according to the latest Weekly Worker, hot off the Memory Stick) on October the 12^th.  Perhaps this is the moment to post the following comments.

 

It is without the slightest qualm about the fact that the Tendance Coatesy is almost entirely  irrelevant to the whole debate that I enter to the fray – or put my toes gingerly into it. These are some points of a very recent E-Mail correspondence – initiated by Martin Thomas of the AWL, with some bearing on the Historic M/M Encounter:  

 

 

Coatesey: “the debate with Machover. There are serious points
 made on both sides.
 But I am really not the person to take sides.”

 

 

AWL, “Apart from the taking-sides-in-debate question, there is the question of
basic truthfulness. As you say, “the stuff about driving the AWL out of
the workers’ movement is frankly silly – possibly worse”; but it is in
its turn based on something else “frankly silly – possibly worse”, i.e.
the lie that Sean “excused” Israeli nuclear-bombing of Iran.
 
If straightforward lies like this go little-challenged (“not the person
to take sides”) and become widespread in diluted versions, then the
whole currency of ideas on the left is debased. We had the same
experience with the Healyite WRP, though they never went in for lies as
gross as the WW.

 

The WW construes it into positive advocacy of an Israeli attack,
constructs a technical argument that nothing short of a full-scale
nuclear-armed attack could dent Iran’s nuclear programme, and
“deduces” that Sean is “excusing” a nuclear attack on Iran.
Then they follow up with the wild stuff about driving the AWL out of
the labour movement.

In the same way as we tried to rally people when the Healy WRP ranted
against us in similar style, we want to encourage people who are
within earshot of the WW to voice a protest.

 What do you think?”

 

A good point.

 

Now we have some clarity: the CPGB’s Mark Fisher’s latest (this week) contribution to the furore:

 

 

To clarify the point about ‘driving out’ the AWL made by Peter Manson, Mark Fisher cites the original:  “We shall strive to defeat the ideas of first campism and seek to drive them out of the workers’ movement. Hence we not only fight the AWL minnows, but the rightwing and Blairite parasites who dominate the Labour Party, the TUC and many trade unions. Of course, that does not mean witch-hunting the AWL (as they accuse us of wanting to do). We are against proscribed lists, bureaucratic bans, etc. But, yes, because we recognise that the AWL’s politics represent alien, reactionary, antiworking class ideas in our movement and have a terrible and treacherous logic, it is quite right to clear out those leaders who insist on upholding them” (Weekly Worker September 4).

Moshé Machover (who holds some similar views on the Middle East and has been a fierce critic of the AWL’s leading figure) and Matgamna will debate in London... Mark Fisher concludes, “I can assure the AWL that CPGB comrades will be very much in evidence at the October 12 debate (assuming the AWL finally agrees to it), will make their views of Matgamna’s scab, pro-imperialist line very explicit, ill record the proceedings for wider dissemination and will write an extensive report for

the following issue of our paper.”

 

Now, I broadly sympathise with the CPGB on many issues. The fact is that Matgamna’s written opinions on Israel are open to question, and not only by the virulent anti-Zionist. But the tone of the whole exchange is, well, hard to justify. Does the heat of the polemic means it’s fine calling him a ’scab’? It should be said that in response the AWL has used its full share and more of ‘ripe’ expressions and its most famous Web supporter (a certain JD) has engaged in, let us politely say, in somewhat fruity language in attacking the CPGB. 

 

Far be it from me to put my oar in. Coatesim is famous in the movement for its loathing of sectarianism, specifically, revisionists, backsliders, anti-Coatesite elements, queasy quisling quacks and slobbering hyenas of the international bourgeoisie dressed up in wolf’s clothing. But chaps, and indeed chapettes, isn’t this going it a bit far?

 

 

 

Charlie Hebdo.

 Charlie Hebdo should be Veiled!

The Danish Mohammed cartoons – unpublished by an allegedly ‘Islamophobic’ British media – were reprinted in France by the weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. With many of France’s finest radical cartoonists contributing their own designs, notably the front page. That,  by leftist Cabu,  had Mohammed saying, “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons” (it’s hard being loved by prats). Such  is now the title of a just released documentary on the trial of Charlie Hebdo that resulted. The charges were brought by the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman, In contrast to the British liberal and left’s pandering to religious community leaders, in France almost the entire left, from liberals to Marxists, backed Charlie’s freedom of expression. I haven’t seen the film, though no doubt there will be ways through the Web to get hold of it.  

 

Unfortunately my anticipated pleasure is already spoilt by the ructions of the present Chief Editor of Charlie, Philippe Val. This man does a frequent early morning ‘thought for the day’ (chronique) on France Inter, the most-listened to French Public radio station. Now it is well-known that self-styled ’social democrat’ Val is a ferocious ‘anti-totalitarian’ and backer of humanitarian interventions left-right-and-centre and whether-they-like-it-or-not. He showed his own commitment to absolute free-speech by recently sacking much-loved cartoonist Siné (here) amid allegations (hotly disputed) of anti-semitism (more).

 

This morning Val was in full-throttle: mud-slinging at the French Socialists for voting against continuing to send French troops to assist with the occupation of Afghanistan. Peppering his rant with laboured ’satirical’ remarks, with a simpering France-Inter type sniggering in the background, he declared it was Western Troops or the Taliban.  No mention of the corrupt, piously Islamic, violent, torturing, forces clustering around the Kabul regime, the attrocities of the occupying forces, or indeed the failure of the occupation to achieve a secular democracy. That much of the inability to deal with the Taliban stems from a long-standing complicity of the US with the Pakistan army and its intelligence services is beyond question. So, a result, rather than unbending support for the the Carrying On Up the Kyber we are faced with plenty of doubts. The Left in the French National Assembly is therefore justified in seeking alternative ways to encourage nation building and liberty in Afghanistan.

Charlie: good cartoonists, shame about the Editor.

Breaking the Conventions of the Left.

 

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.* The world’s financial institutions are in chaos, Marx gets cited everywhere, and capitalism looks shaky. Time for a socialist revival? In fact the left faces a profound dilemma. Despite all this  the main political choice in the UK, for the foreseeable future, will be between centre-of-right Gordon Brown’s responsible capitalism, and David Cameron’s, right-of-centre sensible free-market.

Any attempt to break out of this impasse is welcome. Last week’s Manchester Convention of the Left attracted around 300 participants. Their ambition: to define a working platform for co-operation between all sections of the left, from Greens, Left Labour, social movements, Communists to Marxists. This was, and is, despite reservations, a good beginning. The call-back meeting in November should, it is to be hoped, take into account the views of a larger swathe of the left than made its way to Manchester.

 

These are some reflections, largely about the democratic demands of the left:

• The Convention appeared to accept the ‘break-up of Britain’ principle. That is that the UK is a ‘prison of the peoples’ and that it is progressive to form independent states, notably Scotland and Wales (Ireland’s Unity remains controversial). It is said that there were calls for an English parliament as well. The basis for this view, and its use in the Charter 88 campaign (who?), supported in previous left gathering (Chesterfield Conferences) by Convention sponsors, the main writers of Red Pepper, is open to serious question (The Break-Up of Tom Nairn). Such small nations are vulnerable to competitive tendering (lowest bid on social conditions and taxes) for investment and business on the global market. They encourage the growth of a political and administrative class who existence depends on accentuating differences between nations. Finally, they split working class and popular unity, notably by the kind of incessant squabbling about constitutional rights and the division of resources between devolved or breaking-up lands. This can be witnessed in Catalonia and, most viciously, in the Flemish nationalists’ demands on Belgium.
• In place of the Break-up of Britain we should aim for a European Social Republic.  That is, one that unites peoples around the class demands of raised welfare and labour rights (equally set out), and democratic devolution within a common political structure. A host of demands of the Convention, from measures to control finance to taxation, need (at least) European-wide implementation to be realistic. Furthermore as capital internationalises ownership, such as the French EDF’s take-over of British nuclear, we need a European strategy, in and against the state to build a new Continental pattern of socially owned, and democratically managed, industries. Obviously this would be premised on introducing democratic principles, a massive task, to transform the existing European Union. Nevertheless, such an aim, a minimum democratic platform (in traditional socialist language) could serve as a launch-pad for an outward-looking movement to confront the real problems of capitalism. Real internationalism is not about general calls for solidarity with those in other countries fighting against exploitation and oppression: it means constructing real mechanisms – in our case in Europe within a revolutionised EU – with political and economic clout to do so.  
• No democratic strategy for the left can ignore the importance of secularism. The Conservatives have ditched an already discredited multiculturalism, for Britishness, as has Brown, though both still stick to the ‘diversity’ agenda (empowering ‘community leaders’)  that has encouraged ethnic, communal and, above all, religious reaction. A secular programme, based on a complete removal of religious privilege from the state and education, and an anti-racism that unites people rather than encourages difference, is more than ever urgently needed. In particular no form, however ‘anti-imperialist’ (in appearance), of Islamicism is an ally of the left, though the SWP and Galloway’s Respect (the latter most fervently) seems to think it is. The Convention showed no sign of confronting these issues, and indeed continued the path of encouraging reactionary religious ideology with its acceptance of the chief culprits.

* So much better than that ‘between a rock and hard place’ don’t you think?

The Camerons are Coming.

 ”A Future Conservative Britain”.

Michael Grove takes a leaf out of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s book by Inviting key Blairites into a future Tory Cabinet. This news, part of the build-up to next week’s Conservative Conference,illustrates how, like the resident of the Élysée ,  David Cameron out-steps his opponents by co-opting the most self-seeking amongst them. No doubt figures like James Purnell (the Minister for Forced Work) and Andrew Adonois (Selling off Education) are much further to the right than, say, the Gallic Minister Foreign Minister and former Socialist, Bernard Kouchner. But the Conservative Party gathering of the power, and attention-seeking clans, already experimented with green gestures and the wooing of the Goldsmith Boy,  or, in London by Johnson’s liberal advisers, such as Rosie Boycott, is mustering.

 

The Conservatives’ strategy is taking root largely because there is so much in Brown’s legacy to fertilise it. Not least is New Labour’s creation of a vast para-state – private contractors or ‘partnership’ arrangements- which are institutional supports for even further privatisation.  What is there to fear from Tory plans to get those on the Dole into chain-gangs? Purnell already intends  quasi-Workhouse conditions (forced labour, minimum benefits, constant surveillance) for the unemployed. They even agree on making the workless sweep the streets. Both want to reward handsomely the companies with overseeing the job. This similarity can be extended right across social policy, and governance. What are the differences? Cameron wants to be an ‘architect of choice’ , not a statist, Brown has had to admit that the State is the decider of last resort when the present financial crisis broke. Does this mean that the Tories will oppose this? Sarkozy in Paris now hails a positive role for the State. It is probable that they will, as with their Cabinet plans above, take notice of this, and, if in power, follow suit.

 

Many British voters, a massive chunk of them, have abandoned faith in the Labour government. They are looking for an excuse to vote Tory. Unfortunately there is no other political pole of attraction able to draw them away. Cameron’s team are free to perfect their vote-winning strategy and PR. Hence the big marquee Tory trend. Hence the fuzzy liberal edge: many of them oppose the harshest anti-terror legislation (for the moment) and their hearts bleed over civil rights. They are against multi-culturalist ‘excess’, but back diversity and tolerance. And Greenery. Especially Greenery. Though no liberalism for criminals, the work-shy and the wrong kind of migrants.  Soft words for soft liberals, hard words for hard rightists, all wrapped up in ‘libertarian paternalism’.

It’s working.

The Tories’ Local Laboratories.

“Tory Municipal Leader.”

The shape of a future Conservative government is emerging. Some of its contours can be seen in Tory-led local councils. Obviously there are major differences between a party in a position to legislate and one which is largely confined to administration. Particularly as Municipal powers have famously shrunk – a  process begun by Margaret Thatcher herself. But there are plenty of signs in the Town Halls to indicate the direction they will take. Better guides than this week’s Birmingham Tory Conference.

Ipswich, Suffolk, is a fairly typical-untypical town, a very urban district in a rural county. It is predominantly working class . After decades of Labour control it is now run by a Conservative-Liberal  Coalition (or the Junta). Despite the local Liberals’ claim to be on the centre-left (the Lib-Dem Council Group Leader Andrew Cann, is the son of the former Labour M.P. Jamie Cann, and therein lies a bitter tale, or so he likes to tell it) there is no doubt that the administration has a clear class bias. It is for those who elect it (Ipswich’s minority Middle Class, the constituency that votes the most). While not overtly hostile to the Working class, it has no time for the undeserving poor, or the “riff raff” as a prominent Tory Councillor calls us. The Tory Leader, Liz, is a bit of a Fluffy with a Spikey edge. Not surprisingly it’s the latter that runs the show. The real power in this Alliance lies in the hands of a certain John Carnall, a free-market Tory, whose main objective is to reduce Council Tax. His long-term goal is: the Council pared-down to a contractor for private service providers (a return to the job-stocking Victorian Municipality that did much to thwart Ipswich’s entry into the Twentieth Century). To this aim some community resources are hived off (Cinema, Foundry Road Resource Centre now in the charge, nominally, of the ‘voluntary’ sector), the International Community Centre threatened with closure, some closed, Ipswich Buses (Council owned) are squeezed of resources and made ripe for privatisation, and a host of measures are taken to favour the comfortably off (the jewel being the new tea-rooms in St Lawrence Church). Not much by national standards of course. The legacy of one of the last social democratic (and generally decent, anti-privatising)  local Labour administrations is too heavy to cast off in a couple of years. It’s coming though.  

 However, and this gives a clue to how a Cameron Cabinet would operate, the local Tories recognise not only the need to appease Liberal Councillors, but to attract the wrong-headed voters who thought that Clegg’s party was to the left of Labour and who now need convincing to cross a Ballot Paper for the Tories (in this case their singularly unattractive prospective Candidate, the son of John Gummer). Hence there are, (what could be better to win over the worthy and well-meaning?), expanding spending on culture. New galleries in the Old Town Hall, and arts-exhibition centres in medieval churches. A welcome for the East of England Dance Centre. That keeps the chattered up classes quiet, and indulges the pretensions of the Tory Councillor in charge of this. Her nibs, Judy Terry, is at the moment even relatively calm (though she does tend to go off the rails: she has been obliged to undergo a special training course on ‘bullying’). Go for some old fashioned moral panics clamp down on street prostitution (a cross-party project), and anti-social behaviour, drinking in public (without the slightest effect), and the vital issue of litter. Next, however, do not ruffle any liberal feathers too much: go for the  multi-cultural/Britishness Cameron mix, fair-trade, and green awareness. Much of this is the Right’s own gesture politics, a lot of it is about the essential: winning support, dampening down fears of a reactionary clamp-down while still, er, clamping down.

 

This strategy of paternalistic liberalism was much in evidence at the local Community Fair I attended on Saturday: loads of rozzers(Community Police), Councillors, the Labour MP Chris Mole, and voluntary groups, gay, ethnic, social campaigns, and the usual crowd of us activists and social ‘entrepreneurs’. About the only group missing (or not very visible) were local Christian or other religious proselytisers  who have been encouraged in Ipswich (as elsewhere), by local politicians of many stripes anxious to give ‘faith communities’ a greater Say over how the rest of us should live our lives. One scene struck: there was the Tory Mayor David Halle chatting in a friendly way to a SWP member staffing the Love Music Hate Racism stall. And some star out of Big Brother, though not, alas,  George Galloway.

I should underline that the Swoppie, she still is a ‘Tory hater’.   But I can’t help feeling that, amongst all the other aspects of such events, one that the Conservatives are ardently pursuing is an outreach programme to assuage the feelings of sensitive liberals.

Capitalising on the State.

“New-Look Tory Candidate.”

 

The Tories have got a glossy make-over. Why not the Left? Panic strikes the stock-markets, banks are going for  a Burton, and recession peaks over the horizon. Socialist economists surely have something to say. But one area, where left explanations have been strong in the not-so-distant past, the state, dominates attempts to grapple with the market’s utter failure. Congress rejected the Bush bail-out plan partly because of a horror of public, apparently socialist, intervention in capitalism. Gordon Brown sees his role as the embodiment of the collective capitalist to make it work smoothly. Is there not a space for an anti-capitalist, in and against, the state, left strategy to pose an alternative?

 

In the 1970s Marxist discussion on the state reached a crescendo around the Miliband- Poulantzas debate. This centred on left criticisms of pluralism (sociological, the theory that the state was made of up of multiple and conflicting pressure groups). Miliband claimed demonstrated empirically that business dominated. Poultazas concurred but made this a structural feature of the capitalist state. Much ink was spilled, and many undergraduates disputed, a further argument over the  relative autonomy of the state, a political arrangement with room to manoeuvre to ensure the economy worked, exploitation continued, and the working class was subordinated to the existing order.

 

This discussion became rather pointless when Thatcher, and other free-marketeers across the planet,  came to power. She declared that the state should aggresively serve capitalism, strengthed its market underpinning, and dragooned the population behind this. Enterprirse culture was a centrla part of its ‘ideological apparatus’. Exit relative autonomy. State theory gradually ebbed away, replaced by discussion about the economy, post-Fordism, post-modernism, and, latterly, globalisation. If the state had become a ‘market state’ whose objective was to prepare its citizens for market competition with only a minimal safety net left of the welfare state, then this too obvious to need much theorising. A few individuals, notably the always interesting Bob Jessop, continued to plough their state-centred furrow. Jessop has synthesised Poulantzas’ last works (which conceived of states as a ‘condensation’ of complex class conflicts, with Foucault’s account of the meshing of surveillance techniques and ‘mico’ power), with post-Fordism and theories of globalisation (finance and capital flows). However this research has become largely academic even for academics.

 

Perhaps not for much longer. First signs of its relevance were in the growth in the importance of a social group Poulantzas identified as the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’, the managerial, clerical and state functionaries whose numbers, post-Second World War, kept expanding. Leaving abstract categories aside (about their ‘unproductive/productive nature in Marxist theory) this is clearly a social group that rose enormously with the information technology switch-over. Most significantly a minority within the new ‘petty’ bourgeoisie became not so small. Market states gave birth to a full blown para-state capitalist class, exploiting the hiving-off of public functions, making profit out of tax -guaranteed revenue. It is now one of the chief drags on New Labour, a source of incompetent second-rate public provision, and financial abuse. This layer, now wooed by the Conservatives, is an underlying cause of the crumbling of Brown’s popularity.

 

Secondly, the early Poulantzas tended to consider, in a very traditional Marxist fashion, that the state in the West existed to automatically guarantee capitalism’s survival. Can we say this now? Is the gulf  between its deregulation role (a kind of regulation of markets in itself) and clumsy attempts to come to grips with the banking crisis not signs that it is not able to do this at present?  If hard-right American Congress members scupper rescue plans for the market what of the theory of the state as the ‘collective committee of the bourgeoisie’ . In any case the State, notably the US one, doesn’t seem to be doing a good job in saving the market.

 

Why is this. It is in the ideas of the latter Poulatzas that, perhaps, answers could be explored: how compteition between the state’s interests, banks, finance, and other ‘factions’ of capital develop, how its administrative technology evolves (or fails to adapt), how the state can be vulnerable to pressure. We can see here that the market state is clearly not fit for purpose if he has fostered the present mess. This gap in the market lets open room for new proposals.  For the left the issue is, how it could be shaped in an alternative direction, maybe even to a new society, where banking and stock-market crises are, well, not there. That’s another half-forgotten debate due for revival: the transition to socialism.

Tories’ Libertarian Paternalism: Working on the Chain-Gang.

“Don’t Demonise us Tories !“

Just in case you thought that all the Tories had become fluffy  social liberals here’s Chris Grayling the shadow work and pensions secretary speaking against the ’something for nothing’ Welfare State (Here):

 

And for those who don’t manage to find work and claim jobseeker’s allowance for more than two years, we’ll introduce a year-long community work programme to get them back into the work habit.

“No one benefits from sitting at home on benefits doing nothing.”

Grayling said the chaos in the economy should not distract from the social problems facing the UK and added that he had learned from the success of welfare schemes in New York during the downturn after the dot-com bubble burst.

Setting an example: “Let’s party: Empty bottles of alcohol await collection outside Birmingham’s International Convention Centre during the Conservative Party conference.” (Daily Mail  Ist of October).

 

 

Curious Support for New Anti-Capitalists.

 

Interesting case of someone claiming to be on the left who’s not learned anything from his own experience, the misery he casued, and history. Who refuses to condemn or regret his past acts:

ACTION DIRECTE (the French violent ultra-leftist group|): Nouvel Observateur 1st of October. They refer to Rousillan, one of its historic leaders, convicted for murder, now in ’semi-liberty’.

 

Jean-Marc Rouillan

“Jean-Marc Rouillan, le cofondateur d’Action Directe aujourd’hui en semi-liberté, laisse entendre qu’il ne nourrit aucun regret pour l’assassinat du patron de Renault Georges Besse et s’explique sur son engagement auprès d’Olivier Besancenot, dans une interview à L’Express à paraître jeudi 2 octobre.”
Interrogé sur l’assassinat de Georges Besse le 17 novembre 1986.

Apart from not having any regrets about killling Georges Besse he was asked about the LCR’s new anti-capitalist party, which he has expressed sympathy for:

“Au sujet de l’intention qu’il a exprimée d’adhérer au Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste qui doit voir le jour fin janvier 2009 pour prendre la succession de la LCR d’Olivier Besancenot, Jean-Marc Rouillan évoque son besoin de se réapproprier “vingt ans d’histoire de ce pays” en rencontrant “des gens d’origines et d’obédiences extrêmement différentes”.
“Je peux faire peur à beaucoup de monde… A notre première rencontre, j’ai prévenu Besancenot : ‘ma présence peut faire du bordel. Réfléchissez, vous pouvez dire non’… Il m’a dit que c’était réfléchi et qu’ils étaient d’accord”.

 

He admitted then, that his support for the new anti-capitalist party could cause fear amongst many people, make trouble (to say the least!) but then claims Besancenot was fine with his adhesion. Still there’s a silver-lining for sanity,
“Au sujet du nom du futur parti, aujourd’hui en débat, il estime que si le mot “révolution” en était absent “ce serait une démission”, vouant cette formation à n’être qu’un “petit parti électoral”.
Dans ces conditions, “à plus ou moins longue échéance, je serais naturellement éliminé de ce processus”, confie-t-il, soulignant: “Pas besoin d’envoyer une lettre de démission”.”

So, the new anti-capitalist party is not revolutionary enough. And he won’t try to join up when the (revolution-less named) party is born.The curious point here is why did Besancenot ever speak to this man who has such a misguided violent past? Roullin it should be noted was originally a ‘marxist-leninist’ (spontex as we say, Maoist sponteneist), very far from the LCR’s Trotskyism.  

The French Alternatifs.

 

Action Directe’s Jean-Marc Roullian is grabbing the French headlines. Besancenot’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, might have a little contretemps. Apart from what he said, or rather didn’t say, about his involvement in ‘armed struggle’ how can they explain that Rouillan had joined them in the first place?  

The convicted terrorist, a Bourbon who has forgotten nothing and learnt not a jot, lays claim to the revolutionary legacy of May 68. The nearest Action Directe came to mass action was during the first half of the 1980s with its squat in the Parisian 18ème Arrondisment. At the same time the left of the French left had its own activity in the area, linking up the LCR, some former Marxist-Leninists (Parti pour une Alternative Communiste), the PSU, and the Fédération pour une Gauche Alternative. Their politics were expressed in various united campaigns (defending Greenpeace after the Rainbow Warrior for example), and an electoral bloc in Paris, called The Alternative, which received 0.26% of the vote in 1986.

It was from the PSU and FGA, through a complex, not to say, convoluted, political process that the French federal organisation called the Alternatifs emerged. The organisation’s politics are a historical enrichment of the French current of ‘autogestion’ (self-management) – with roots in the Parti socialiste unifié, (itself influenced in this respect by Britain’s C.D.H.Cole and the 50s Bevanites). Another input was the tradition known as ‘Pabloism’, which rallied around the objective of the “self-managed republic”. This fused with the social movements that arose in post-69 politics (feminism, gay rights, anti-racism). The Alternatifs have a very strong ecological commitment. They criticise the official French Green party (les Verts) for their compromises with the French Socialist party in government, and their embrace of the liberal and ‘humanitarian’ interventionist policies of such as Daniel Cohen-Bendit. The  Alternatifs illustrate the kind of grass-roots politics and authentic radicalism which stands in contrast to the managerial fuzziness of the bulk of the British green leadership.  They have around 800 members and 50 local councillors. During last year’s Presidential elections they largely backed José Bové and criticised what many considered the LCR Majority’s candidate, Besancenot,  for putting their own interests first.  As one can imagine the Alternatifs tend to be more than sceptical about the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste.

 

In the UK the self-serving interests of most of the left organisations (none of which have a stake in popularising this tradition)  have meant this important political current has been largely ignored (except for one figure, whom modesty forbids me to name). The affinity, say, between green politics anti-capitalism and secular social republicanism is, however, important in France. There are ideological, cultural and individual cross-overs between the Alterntifs and the Ligue’s Minority current (Christian Picquet and Léonce Aguirre), as well as some parts of the Parti Socialiste (which stand for a ‘Social Republic’ and self-management).  The Alternatifs’ criticisms of liberal globalisation are untainted by the ulterior motives of the oldstyle Leninists.  Better investigate their politics than the failed ones of Action Directe.

LCR Statement on Rouillan

 

This is taken from the LCR site:

 

La LCR est en désaccord avec les déclarations récentes de J.M.Rouillan, publiées dans le prochain numéro de l’Express.

Ayant purgé sa peine, il a bien le droit à l’engagement politique. Il a demandé son adhésion au NPA. Du point de vue de la LCR, il avait sa place dans ce nouveau parti à partir du moment où il renonçait à ses actions du passé.

La LCR dénonce enfin une opération politique visant à tenter de criminaliser le NPA au moment où les préoccupations principales des français, de la population tournent autour de la crise économique et de ses conséquences et au moment où les réponses politiques du NPA rentrent de plus en plus en écho avec ces préoccupations.

Le 1er octobre 2008.

 

“The LCR disagrees with the recent statements of Monsieur Rouillon, published in the latest issue of L’Express. Having finished his prison sentence he has the right to be politically active. He asked to join the NPA (new anti-capitalist party). For the LCR he has his place in the party from the moment that he renounces his past activites.

Finally, the LCR denounces a politically motivated stunt: an attempt to criminalise the NAP at the very moment when the people are preoccupied with the effects of the capitalist crisis and the political responses of the NPA have found a widening echo amongst the population. “

 

This response itself is pretty blatant at avoiding the point everyone is asking: why on earth accept dealings with a man who is well-known, indeed hyper-well-known, for not abandoning his ‘ideals’ and the violent means to implement them that Action Directe used.

 

I am not overly moralistic about this. The folly of AD was pretty small beer (though hardly for its victims, naturally). But let’s not forget that some are still defending the cause (here) . More seriously the AD contributed to a criminal complaisance towards all types of ‘anti-imperialism’ (abandoning democratic class politics in the process). European leftist armed-struggle has largely (Spain excepted) disappeared. But the  devastating legacy of romanticising violent ‘anti-imperialism’ can be seen in those who ally with, apologise for,  or tolerate in any shape or form, Jihadism.

Just from the Nouvel Observateur Site:

La question du jour

Action Directe : Jean-Marc Rouillan ne regrette pas l’assassinat du PDG de Renault il doit s’excuser (he must apologise) il doit quitter la LCR (he must leave the LCR) il doit retourner en prison (he must go back to Prison) c’est son droit (it’s his right – to say that)       Nombre de votants : 2208 Votez !

Voir les résultats Les autres questions

Rouillan Back Full-time in Prison

Rouillan privé de sa semi-liberté

Dès le lendemain de la diffusion d’une interview dans laquelle il laissait entendre qu’il n’éprouvait pas de regret pour l’assassinat en 1986 du PDG de Renault, le cofondateur d’Action directe a été privé de son régime de semi-liberté. (from here)

“The morning after an interview, in which he gave the impression that he did not regret the 1986 murder of the Renault CO, the co-founder of Action Directe’s partial liberty (he. under Court licence. works during the day for a Printer’s) has been revoked.”

Amongst the LCR rank-and-file there seems heated  discussion (from some) as to whether they have given in to “respectabilité bourgeoise” by criticising “armed struggle”.  It is said though, as noted here, that Rouillan is “incorrigible.” I still ask how on earth is this political error corrected by skirting around the whole issue of revolution?  This was, and I cede to no-one in my dislike for him, Cohen-Bendit’s point.

I might be one of the few on the left to think this an awkward question. But does the NPA seriously think that a revolutionary violent struggle is either going to happen in France, and is it, in any case, desirable?

Yeah, all those the previous ones have been such blood-free democratic successes in building socialism.

Besancenot: Mobilise for Jean-Marc Rouillan

Action Directe’s Journal, early ‘eighties. Curiously,  this was available in French kiosks.

 

 

Since no-one else on the British left (of which more below) seems to be blogging about this, here is the latest:

 

Besancenot calls for a ‘unitary campaign’ to defend Rouillon.

 

Olivier Besancenot a dénoncé, vendredi 3 octobre, la réincarcération de Jean-Marc Rouillan, et appelé à une “mobilisation unitaire” contre ce qu’il considère comme une “double peine”, précisant que le cofondateur d’Action directe est membre à Marseille d’un comité local pour la construction du NPA.

(Besancenot has denounced, Friday October the 3rd, sending Jean-Marc Roullianbackto Prison and called for a ‘unitary moblisation’ against what he considers to be a ‘double sentence’. He specified that the confounder of Action Directe is a member, in Marseille, of a local committee for the construction of the NPA (new anti-capitalist party).

“Jean-Marc Rouillan est incarcéré de nouveau, ce qui est absolument révoltant, puisqu’il a purgé sa peine”, a affirmé à l’AFP le porte-parole de la LCR.

(‘Jean-Marc Rouillan is back in Prison, which is completely revolting, as he has served his sentence’ affirmed the Principal Speaker of the LCR)

“Légalement, il a le droit de sortir et il n’y a rien qui justifie le fait qu’il retourne en prison, si ce n’est un acharnement judiciaire de la part de l’Etat” qui invoque “non pas ce qu’il a fait, mais ce qu’il a dit et même sous-entendu”, ajoute Olivier Besancenot.
“L’heure pour nous est à une mobilisation unitaire de toute la gauche sur la question de la liberté d’expression pour défendre les libertés démocratiques”, et pour que “la loi soit respectée”.

 

(Legally he has the right to go out, and nothing justifies the fact that he is going back to gaol, other than a relentless use of the judiciary by the State.  (This measure) is based not on what he did, or even said, but what he implied.The time has come for a unitary mobilisation of the left to defend free speech and democratic freedoms in order that the law be respected.”  (Nouvel Observateur).

I leave it to those with a legal background to judge much of this. However it is noteworthy that, firstly,  Besancenot is taking a risky, ‘double or quits’, strategy by publicly standing up for Rouillan. I am not at all sure that it is wise to pursue the claims of the convicted AD founder so far. Obviously some of the French left will be embarrassed, and the Ligue have put them in a spot because of their long history of supporting the legal rights of such ‘armed struggle’ prisoners when the state has been heavy-handed with them (though the less said about Sartre etc and the RAF prisoners  many would say…the better). Even so many would not have much sympathy for AD in any shape or form.

 

Secondly, we are still unsure about how far the LCR differs not just from the strategy of AD but political violence as such. On the former, I recall a complete divorce between AD and all the French left. So if the LCR opposes, completely,  AD’s past activities what is meant by Besancenot’s call? The ’co-founder’ of AD doesn’t help matters. His present position remains ambiguous: what is being defended by Rouillan is not just ‘words’ but words and silences relating to actions. Will the LCR elaborate on their judgement about the latter? By no means everyone feels inclined to accept the whispered hint, that somewhere somehow, AD members have, may be, might in some fashion, face up to their actions. Or on what basis, regarding their stand on political violence, might the Ligue disagree with Rouillan, agreee to disagree, or what?

 

Finally, it will be interesting to see the reaction of the British left, if any, to this. I have always had the impression that there is a distorting prism at work here: people see the French left through the lens of our left (giving importance, for example, to insignificant grouplets like the SWP’s French sympathisers, or any other, however minuscule, faction aligned with UK organisations). Here we are dealing with something that doesn’t fit easily into any of these people’s schema (including mine). But which has become extremely important in real French politics. Not to mention wider implications (about ‘revolution’ and the left). Well, for the UK left’s response, I’m waiting….

MacShane Shows the Way!

Nil desperandum.

Mandelson is coming back to British politics. Denis MacShane (of the Henry Jackson Society and here) and very former Minister of State for Europe is due to lecture France. About his and New Labour’s successes and the future of the European left (here). 

We’re saved!

Prochain débat : lundi 13 octobre 2008 à 20 h 30 sur le thème
“Gauches européennes : quel avenir face à la crise ?”

Avec :

• François Hollande, premier secrétaire du PS
  
• Jean-Pierre Jouyet, secrétaire d’Etat chargé des affaires européennes
  
• Denis MacShane, député travailliste britanique

Are you’re going (and who isn’t )? It’s worth remembering that a few years back MacShane made an indelible impression on French left-wing opponents of the Referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. He called them the ‘con-tres’. A no doubt drôle play on the words ‘con’ and ‘contres’ (against, that is). Unfortunately MacShane’s wit went down less well amongst Socialist Party ‘non’ backers than expected. I wonder why ?

Hats off to Mandelson!

It’s not often that we at Tendance Coatesy disagree with the esteemed comrades at Stroppy Blog. Yet is this fair? Is it just? Describing the return of Peter Mandelson to British Politics as Business Minister in these terms? “Back again like a bad penny, a blast from the Blairite past.”

It’s this kind of sour reaction that has got the British left a bad name.

Peter, as we at the Tendance call Mr Mandelson, stands on the world stage like a colossus. A Prince amongst darkness. His achievements in the British Labour Party speak for themselves.  As European Commissioner for Trade he has certainly made his mark. A People Person, he will find a warm welcome amongst his colleagues.

Now is not the time for leftist shilly-shallying. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Get down to Business. For Britain, for Gordon Brown, for Labour, there’s a job to be done.

Well done Peter!

Blunkett to Stage Come-Back: Tendance Coatesy Salutes!

“David Blunkett and Patriotic Friend.”

Good News always comes doubly: Blunkett looks set to return to Cabinet as Mandy wrecks Miliband’s leadership bid (Mail on Sunday).

Tendance Coatesy has had its differences, with former Home Secretary, and all round good-natured, working-class, Sheffield-lad-made-extremely-good, David Blunkett.

Hence the threatening letter which comrade Blunkett sent us, menacing legal proceedings were it suggested that the Man brimming with Blunt Commonsense had spoken utter reactionary gibberish at some public meeting (details lost in the mists of time).  True it’s value has depreciated over the years as many (how many? we shall never total them all) similar communications have been sent out to all who cross the Man of the People, Mr David Blunkett.

Some may ask, rudely, why a laughing-stock, a grasping right-wing pillock, and an enemy of all progressive humanity, should be sought, or be seeking, a position, under Gordon Brown. Ian Bone may have made, in impolite terms, suggestions about the ex-Secretary of State for Work and Pension’s alleged weakness for pecuniary reward, and asked why he was such as “fecking greedy bastard”. Others point to his toadying to right-wing toffs, and his own private welfare-state. Then there is his overweening dippy vanity.  Is this the man for the job of getting Gordon re-elected, and dealing with approaching State bankruptcy?

Frankly, do we need to pose such questions?

We at the Tendance are rolling up our sleeves  and learning to love Peter. David, though a hard-case, will make good our word of law.

Debates of the Decade.

Two Debates of the Decade, one after another:

First there is this:

“Iran and the left – a public debate between Sean Matgamna and Moshe Machover.

Start: 12 Oct 2008 – 5:15pm - 7:15pm

The Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross.

A joint Workers’ Liberty-Campaign for a Marxist Party event.”

Then there is the Paris Debate with Denis MacShane the following day.

Crowds are assured for the London event. Dave Osler is “turning up outside the pub with a sleeping bag the night before, just to be assured of a place.” Sparks are certain to fly – though if they will shed any light is not certain. Jim Denham is rumoured to be descending from the West Midlands in a tank (gas fueled) to lend support to Sean Matgamna. The CPGB, marshalled to back Moshe Machover, are accused of synthesising enriched uranium.

No doubt the kitsch left will whinge if cde Denham obliterates Sommer’s Town and the CPGB (Provisional) CC. But does not he have the right to self-defence? Are the claims that The Weekly Worker is manufacturing uranium only for civil purposes to be taken seriously, eh?

The next day in Paris  will be a unique opportunity of another kind. It will be the occasion to hear MacShane, one of the European Left’s giants, speak the mellifluous French he learnt in Geneva from a Swiss Yodeler Professeur. Oh, and say something or other.

 

Not to be missed: neither.

Lend me Ten Pounds and I’ll Buy Ye a Drink.

 

Bankers’ Confidence.

Maybe I am terminally thick. Or just terminal. But this plan to buy up the UK banks to restore confidence in lending strikes me as a wee bit odd.

I mean.

 

‘Mad’ Timmy Palfry asks me to lend him a tenner pretty regularly. He’ll give it back in the morning.

 

Now as the chances of him doing this are about as sure as the Orwell Estuary turning into pea-soup, I politely decline.

 

Is Gordon Brown saying that I should trust Timmy?

A Must Read: Mike Marqusee.

 

 

“Mike’s Favourite Marxist Practice.”

A must-read in the run-up for the Debate of the Decade:

Mike Marqusee, If I am not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso 2008).

Mike stands out on the British Left in a) being American and b) liking Cricket as much as CLR James. He has also found time to,  amongst other things, being the brilliant editor of Labour Briefing, and writing a string of excellent books on such varied subjects as Mohammad Ali, the Labour Party, Bob Dylan and, er cricket. He is also from a Jewish background, (hence the book) something I personally was unaware of, which just goes to show how far Coatesism is interested in the whole subject of Israel and indeed Jewishness.

The centre of the book is an account of Mike’s grandad,  Ed Morand. who is captured in the kind of heart-felt prose he obviously deserves. He was an activist in the New York Labor Party, which (and believe me I really didn’t know this) had City councillors and a real presence in the US in the late ‘thirties. Another part of the autobiography which I found showed light on something I was unaware of is Mike’s description of his break with his family over Israel.

This seems to be a big question. No doubt this book is at Sean Matgmana’s bedside as I write.

Stalinist liars and petty bourgeois poseurs.

Just thought I’d post this latest pensée of the gas-fueled Jim Denham (pictured above).

 

Re CPGB et al: “ Stalinist liars and petty bourgeois poseurs.”

 

Now remind me why most of the left Ioathes the AWL and all of its works?

Iceland: Stop Screwing My Bird.

Those of us who are North London echt will grasp this.

 

But don’t it really get on your bleeding tits that Gordon Brown is picking on Iceland (and Birds, famous national dish, Puffin Pie)  to blame for the collapse of international capitalism?

 

I mean what have them there lot done to him.

 

My sister visited Iceland. Once.

 

For the duration, the entire Troll population went into voluntary political exile.

Ian Bone

 

Just on the subject of plugging books (done Mike’s), here is another must read, Bash the Rich.

Ian is something of a hero of mine: a fellow enemy of ponce David Blunkett.

 

The history of how Class War came to be, and, notably, the stuff about his Cardiff activities..well, top class. The book is one of the best written, witty, and all-round can’t-put-down stuff I’ve seen in a long time.  My mate Steve, and my matette Sarah, rave about it.

 

I was interested to read that his dad was a bitter lefty Scot – like mine.

Give my regards to Tom.

 

 

In Defence of Iceland.

Zenobia makes the point that it’s all a question of who has money in Iceland  in this financial débâcle. To read the British press, and hear the media, one would think that the Icelandic Folk are some kind of hereditary enemy of us English. Last night on Channel Four there was some Trustafarian given prime-time telly space to whingeing about her Nana losing loads-a-dosh in an Iceland bank.

 

I would like to point out the following points about Iceland:

 

1) It has one of the most brilliant and good-looking populations in the world (see above).

 

2) Its people are, generally speaking,  left-wing.

 

3) It stood by Blighty in the Second World War.

 

Now in Coatesy’s reckoning these are strong pluses.

Obviously not for Gordon Brown who is now on a doomed mission to save global capitalism and crush the Icelandic economy.

Remind Me Again of Why the Left Loathes, really Loathes, the AWL?

 

 

Sean of the AWL pictured on  a good day.

 

From what I take to be an AWLer (Okay it’s Jim), ,

 

“we have the most liberal, tolerant and multicultural society in the Middle East – the state of Israel.”

 

The rest of the post is devoted to saying nice things about Julie Burchill.

 

Vomit…I nearly did.

Brown Goes Europe

 

 It’s all go with international capitalism showing what a useless load actually run the show.

The French and the rest of the European media, dripping with sarcasm, seems to accept that Brown’s ‘plan’ to save global finance, is going to work.

Dave, on his Blog,  recently featured a necessary re-reading, Galbraith’s book on the Great Crash.

 

I submit my own recommended reading on the present crisis (above).

Coates Goes Roofie

Mass unemployment is returning.

 

Brown thinks the way to solve this problem (after he’s done with the rest of the world and the solar system and a few more galaxies en plus) .

 

His latest plan is get us work-shy lazy-lubbers to toil  repairing the roofs of houses, and do insulation work,  to , er save, energy.

 

 

MInd you he’s not going to pay us to do it.

 

 

Picture of Coatesy hard at work insulating houses below,

 

 

 

 

 

ERr he’s not visible. He’s  down the local Wetherspoon’s.

Besancenot in Le Monde

 

I am not going to link this because I feel that reading hard-copy is important (get mine from my local newsagent in Ipswich so it can’t be that difficult to find elsewhere).

There was an important interview with Olivier Besancenot in Le Monde yesterday.

 

On the economic crisis. It expresses the view that faced with the obvious (bleeding obvious) failure of capitalism the left may be coming out of its doldrums and seeing new possibilities.

 

A must read.

Obama and the Wetherspoon’s Underground.

Tendance Coatesy HQ.

Tendance Coatesy is not noted for its interest in America, its politics, well, frankly its culture (apart from Buffy and the Simpsons). Hey?

Nevertheless the allegation that American Presidential Candidate Obama was a member of the Wetherspoon’s Underground has been brought to our attention. Or he was best mates with one of the founders.

 This heroic comrade deserves all our support from now on!

Another Reason to Loathe the AWL.

 

 

Sean M on an even better day.

Well there is the little matter of their ‘merger’ with Labour Briefing, which strangely does not figure on the Wikipdeia entry on the AWL (though I note that most of their ‘unity’ campaigns and mergers do). As Sean no doubt does not recall, I was one of the principal LB comrades to back this move.  The Bash though had reservations. 

Bitterness, ashes and tears.

 

Ô  sweet memories!

 

 

The comrades are still waiting for the dosh, Sean.

Slime Monsters and the AWL.

AWL cadre in training.

 

Mike  Macnair provides a pretty cogent explanation of the AWL’s history. That its background is from some American variety of Trotskyism that no-one in Europe (apart from the UK) gives a toss about.

 

However on the interests of furthering historical materialism there is a more profound, dialectical, and materialist, explanation.

 

The AWL is actually a movement of primeval slime monsters which was spawned in the Bayou in the Deep South.

Every three years they feel the urge to mate and propagate their kind. To this end they assume forms resembling human beings (very briefly). And get us innocent lefties ensnared in their ways.

 

When the horrible truth is revealed the victims of these unseemly copulations turn on the monsters and attempt to slay them (as seen in the CPGB/Weekly Worker).

Palin, Sarah: the Mark Thatcher Connection

 

Sarah Palin and Mark Thatcher?

 

You’d betta believe it.

 

The hockey mum from some deep-freezer is said, by reliable sources, to have a secret love-nest with the UK’s most popular neo-conservative.

 

This makes her victory in the US Presidentials certain.

On the Greenstein Affair.

 

 

There is a post by Mickey on Harry’s Place alleging acts of violence by comrade Tony Greenstein at some obscure ‘anti-Zionist’ event.

 

Let me point out two salient points about Comrade Greenstein.

 

One, if (as one of the posters at Harry’s pointed out) he has the political electoral weight of a gnat, he is also a thoroughly decent activist who does work for the popular masses, which the Harry’s Place types don’t give him credit for.

 

The second is that he is engaged in the extremely dodgy ‘don’t buy yid‘ (aka boycott Israel) campaign of his madder anti-Zionist mates.

 

When challenged on the latter he regularly throws wobblies.

 

Above is a photo of Comrade Greenstein’s Hove Rest Home, from which he normally goes to shoot seagulls with his blunderbuss.

Badiou on Renegacy.

Affiche chinoise avec Marx, Engels, Lénine, Staline et Mao ; légende : « Vive le marxisme-léninisme et le maoïsme »

 

Badiou on Renegacy.

There is an article in the latest NLR  and interview with Alain Badiou on the history of French Maoism trying to explain why a certain level of French Maoists has become, as he puts it, like Doriot, (now that is a pretty strong comparison to say the least) and moved from left to hard-right.

 

A few points.

Badiou makes the distinction between ordinary members of the Gauche prolétarienne and other ‘Maoist groups’, who who have, by in large remained on the the left, and the careers of the likes of Glucksman and BHL. This is of course true, (having known a few ex-GP members myself) . However he offers absolutely no self-critique for the idiotic ideology he himself still half-believes in, so-called Marxism-Leninism.

 

Not that most people can grasp a word of the philosophical gibberish he utters (and I say that in a kinda caring way).

 

Furthermore he makes some imbecile side-swipes against French secularist left republicans. Who are the true anti-racist French left. Unlike his pitiful group of mates, the modestly entitled : l’organisation politique

 

Oh well that’s New Left Review these days for you.

Prescott Paradox.

 

Telephone call to chez Coatesy a few years back. From John Prescott.

 

Thought of it when I watched Prescott on Class on the telly last night.

 

Instant connection. Real row (we were both half-cut) but real contact. Liked the bloke immensely.

 

Watching the telly last night I had to strive to resolve two things about John. First, he was an utter class traitor in aligning with Blair, someone, and I say this politely, who is and was a despicable piece of cack. Second, that Prescott is the kinda bloke you’d get on well with. A real class conscious geezer.

 

It warmed the cockles of me heart that all the Henley Regatta crew hated him with venom. And that he got on well with some young birds from a London Housing Estate. Instantly.

 

So how is a bloke you’d trust your life blood with, become the ally of that them there Blair?

 

I out it down to ambition.

 

Pure naked ambition.

On James P. Cannon and Slime.

 

 Genesis of Cannonism.

What is the enduring fascination of one of the most repulsive figures in the history of the Trotskyist movement, James P. Cannon ?

 

He ran some organisation in the US which had the distinction of being one of the most unsuccessful political movements in the history of the planet. One that spawned renegades a minute. As a legacy his organisational practices left a legacy of hate and bitterness that survives to this day.

 

He wrote Prison Diaries (Letters from Prison) which far from rivalling Gramsci would be well considered a candidate for the Mills and Boon collection. My favourite is a bit where he mentions his a-readin’ Aris-tootle (as I believe Americans pronounce the name).

 

Oh and he didn’t like my mate Michel Pablo (Rapitis).

 

But the AWL consider him some paragon.

Mind you Higgins put them and all Cannon’s mates in their place on that one.

Defend Foreign Extremists!

 Our Future Constitution

Plans to ban ‘foreign extemists’ from the UK are rightly condemned by notable democrats, such as George Galloway and his influential Islamicist/Radio Show/Iranian/Footy/ Spankers’ Telly Party Respect (George since we are such old mates I take the liberty of attributing your denunciation before you wrote it).

Tendance Coatesy has always been a defender of free speech.

 

The plight of Islamicists in this country, suffering under the iron heel of international imperialist monopoly globalised neo-liberal capitalism has been brought to our attention, as indeed it has has been to all class conscious leftists.

 

Liberty of expression is very important.

 

Therefore Tendance Coatesy stands for the very seductive teaching of Islamicism to be broadcast every day directly into every living room.

 

Surely with ideas such as killing all gays, and feminists, trade unionists, Jews, Secularists, Socialists, Communists, non-Muslims, these views need constant exposure?

Liberate the Rossites!

Poor old Ross.

It is rare that Tendance Coatesy disagrees with our normally sage mentor, David Osler.

 

But this really is an outrageous act of class treachery. Comrade Dave has backed the imperialist-Zionist pre-nuke strike attack on Jonathan Ross and some other geezer whose name I forget.

 

The fact  that pompous tossers on the Socialist Unity site have joined in the rush to condemn should have alerted our beloved comrade Dave.

 

Yet, no. He has rushed like a Garadene swine into the sea of despondency.

 

As Marx explained in Wages Prices and Profit, a labourer is worthy of his hire. The fact that Ross only has to scratch his arse to get a few hundred quid, is surely a just reward for his toil.

 

Now he faces a life of exile, persecution, ashes and sackcloth.

 

An international campaign to back to the two latest victims of Imperialist brutality is as I speak being launched.

 

Please give generously: C/O the Vaults Ipswich.

Don’t buy Yid? Er buy me a Bagel.

 

 Coatesy’s Lunch.

The campaign waged by certain elements on the Left to ‘Boycott Israel’ really sticks in my craw.

 

It is so totally misconceived I hardly know where to begin.

 

But here I start: it panders to the anti-Semitic ideology of the far-right racist Islamicists who in point of fact began their own ’campaign’ to boycott Israel  some time back. It will not succeed in giving a drop of support to the legitimate demands of the Palestinians, for it will focus attention not on politics but on gestures. Finally, the whole thing stinks of the don’t buy Yid campaigns of the Nazi scum.

 

Tendance Coatesy is a historic friend of the Jewish people (Not the state of Israel, very obviously).

 It is also a friend of the oppressed peoples of the world, in this case the Palestinians. Who we know suffer.

 

So, it is not going to countenance this farcical ‘campaign’ any longer.

 

The last time it came up at our Trades Council it was the Socialist Party who said it was a load of cack.

Well if it comes round again they’ll get me leading the charge,

‘Boycotting Jews’ in Action.

 

Sans commentaire.

We’re a Jolly Ploughman.

 

Now as an old lefty with a bit of an Irish in me (me Dad’s middle name was Kelly) I recall a certain Rebel song about a Jolly Ploughman.

 

I wonder if Mr Wetherspoon knows that his guest ale has this connotation.

Ultra-Left Binge: Weekly Worker.

CPGB (Provisional Committee) Editorial Meeting

The Weekly Worker is undergoing one of its periodic ultra-left binges.

 

Apart from calling not to vote for comrade Obama, it published some drivel about Action DIrecte. Saying they were some kind of class heroes.

 

I have some news for you in the CPGB. I know rather a lot more about AD (and perso stuff, like they tried to recruit me,  just to cite one minor example)  than you do, and can honestly say, that that the bloke in question Jean-Marc Rouillan, is a class A nutter and can go and se faire foutre.

Coatesy Goes Obama Mania.

 Am I not a Man and Brother?

It’s been said before, many a time, (and by me, but hey I like repetition) but there is an immense hope growing amongst the popular masses of the world that Obama will win today.

 

Us European leftists no doubt feel that he will still carry on the imperialist politics of the US and will not abolish capitalism. Tendance Coatesy is about as far from empathy with American politics as you can get. On these and just about every other issue.

 

But I do know a few things.

 

Firstly the fact is that Obama is better than a doddering old fool and some far-right Christo cretin (who’d sell her grandmother for tuppence) who are standing against him. He is apparently a fairly decent bloke.

 

Secondly the fact that he is mixed race. There are at lot of feelings on this. Mine is: I like the African-American people.They are our mates.  It will be an historic victory for all progressive peoples of the world if a mixed race type gets to be President.

 

Finally when I see the bleeding poor people in the US queuing up to vote for him I feel a shiver of real emotion.

Hail to the Chief!

 

It has been my deepest wish that Obama was elected. Now he has got elected!

 Hail to the Chief!

We know that he is not going to change the world towards socialism. But as the American Communist Party put it in the Morning Star yesterday, he is a force for progress, and if they can create a movement on the ground he will be susceptible to pressure from the left.

 

As a Marxist obviously I regard him as a lackey of neo-Liberalism and imperialism. But, blimey, as a human being I am filled with joy,

 

The fact that he is mixed race (and clearly a progressive in the broad sense)  is an historic advance of such magnitude that it makes my heart bleed.

Rejoice Ye Starvlings!

 

Still on a high about Obama winning.

 

Watching on the telly last night after my T & G Branch Meeting I was deeply moved.

 

The Republican Party slave-drivers with their bullwhips are cowed, the popular masses of the world are rejoicing, and the Islamicist reactionary filth are in mortal fear.

 

Let’s savour the moment, before we get back to our critical Marxist analysis of the politics here.

SNP: a Wee Greet (not)

Scots Tosser.

The Glenrothes by-election victory of the Labour candidate should give pause for reflection for the Scots ‘left’ nationalists. Solidarity got less votes than the ultimate’ Brit’ candidate, UKIP, Kris Seunarine, UKIP: 117,Louise McLeary, Solidarity: 87 ) and the Scottish Socialist Party got joke candidate ballots, Morag Balfour, SSP: 212.  In fact they looked like a bunch of tossers.

Main point,  the SNP has got well and truly shafted by the Labour candidate Lindsay Roy, Labour: 19,946 Peter Grant, SNP: 13,209 (Labour majority: 6,737).

Why?

Could it be that the kenspeckle cretinism of a political project for an  ’independent’ Scotland, home of kelpies, mists, tattie scones and tartan social democracy, finally free from the horrid imperialist ‘Brits’ is now seen as a load of cack?

 

We realise that nationalists, whether of the ‘left’ or the right, are usually impervious to reason.

 

But surely even they must recognise that the global financial crisis is proof positive of the global nature of the most fundamental parts of capitalism, which you cannot escape by denouncing UKANIA? That an international left response is needed? Beginning with a United European Left in a Europe-wide Social Republic.  Not some retreat to your ain folk and the kaleyard.

Small wonder after the Bank of Scotland went into crisis and so on and so forth people lost interest in the SNP. This is a  party whose leader is so vain he sniffs his own armpits to get high. They equally failed to turn to ‘left’ versions of the same nationalism.

They voted for safe-pair-of-hands, Banker Gordon. Full stop.

Tom Nairn: An Obituary.

Model of Future Nairn Home.

Pasted: Tom Nairn is an expert on globalisation, nationalism, British institutions and Scotland. He is professorof globalisation at the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His many books include Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State- terrorism (2005), The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its monarchy (1994) and After Britain (2000).

 

As a main man in New Left Review, and the split from the Scottish Labour Party that joined the SNP (aka Alex Salmond), he is also one of the central people responsible for the pathetic delusion that the SNP are some kind of progressive force.

 

He is also a first rate Scottish nationalist tosser. As expounded here.

I’m, as a Marxist Internationalist,  just enjoying his misery today.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon Leaves Parti Socialiste

Halycon Days in the Parti Socialiste

The French  Parti Socialiste  is in a mess. This weekend, before their national conference the vote was, frankly, pathetic. Ségolène Royal’s Motion (one only the most dedicated can even be bothered to read) at their congrès de Reims won. The left got a respectable score (19% for the Benoît Hamon platform). The various rights still hold significant power (not least the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë). But frankly the whole direction of the socialists is awry. Are they really for an alliance with the centre, are they becoming social liberals?

 Who really cares?

 The most significant for me is the resignation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Elected senator. All round lefty, and pole of all the alliances on the left.

 

 What Party is he going to align himself with? Le Monde yesterday (Print edition) said that he admired Die Linke. Will he go with the new anti-capitalist Party of Besancenot? I have my doubts there.

Former Lambertist, but evolved in a direction not too far from Coatesy (Republican Socialist), he is apparently a bit offy but not too bad a bloke. Politically I suspect he could not hack the way the Parti Socialiste has gone, and the type of quivering liberal free market politics it has got itself involved with.

Simpson and the Transport and General Workers’ Union

 

This deserves the  widest circulation. From an E-Mail to T & G activists.

 

Subject: Derek Simpson’s address to officers and staff in Scotland

 We have heard a number of reports over recent months of Derek’s addresses to meetings of lay activists, and officers and staff, where he has criticised the T&G, blamed us (quite wrongly) for the delay in integration, attacked certain individuals in the T&G and denigrated the organising department etc. He has also criticised the Executive Council for electing Tony Woodhouse from the T&G Section as its Chair, as if this was in breach of some deal or agreement. Last month he made an outrageous outburst at the Executive Finance and General Purposes Committee which he taped and sent a copy of to Tony Woodley!

 

Last week Derek Simpson addressed officers and staff from Scotland in the Glasgow office.This time he appears to have gone way beyond any acceptable standard of behaviour. I am reliably informed that he referred to those who work in the Organising Dept as “SS Officers” – a clear Nazi reference and a most outrageous insult to some of the most hardworking and enthusiastic people working for us in UNITE. He also made some derisory remarks about them wearing ra-ra skirts and pom-poms.

 

Tony Woodley has received a written report from a senior officer present at Derek Simpson’s address, and I am pleased to say Tony has reacted swiftly and effectively. He has written to all officers and staff in Scotland rebutting Derek’s remarks and reiterating not just his support for the Organising agenda but that of the Executive and indeed UNITE under its instrument of amalgamation. He has also written a very strong letter personally to Derek Simpson.

 

I am aware that lay activists across the country are also reacting to this news. I understand that Region 1 T&G E&GP earlier this week has agreed to write a letter of protest to the Chair of the Executive and Region 7 has just agreed to do the same at its meeting yesterday. I am sure all of us in the T&G Broad Left would welcome a similar response across the union to make it clear once and for all that Derek’s behaviour at these meetings is not acceptable in a progressive democratic trade union.

 

I am copying this email to colleagues in AMICUS Unity Gazette

 

Martin Mayer

I must say that we lay activists in the T & G in Suffolk are very concerned about these developments. We have heard of them on the grapevine for some months now. We talked about our worries regarding the internal situation at our Branch meeting last week. We love our union, its fight for the working class, its  progressive politics, and are (despite all our criticisms) deeply loyal to it.

Now this…..

Rodents of the World Unite!

 

 The Most Oppressed Species on the Planet. 

This is a Guest Post by Revolutionary Rodents React-Back.

The Oxford Animal Laboratory is up and running. The first animals moved in were mice, and rodents will make up 98% of the inhabitants.

First they came for the mice, then for us rats!

 

As a pillar of neo-liberal imperialist capitalist exploitation this so-called Laboratory (more like concentration camp) is backed by such bogus neo-liberal imperialist gangs as the Pro-test group.

 

Centuries of suffering under the capitalist boot  have left us rats with a ‘bad reputation’and like all oppressed groups get called vicious names, such as ‘vermin’, and ‘pests’ not to mention the verb ‘to rat on someone’. We were blamed for the Black Death and Bubonic Plague (in reality caused by a feudal coterie, early so-called ’scientists’ and animal testers, and this myth blaming us created by the usual alliance of ‘rationalist’ Enlightenment figures and other racists).  The memory of the old ‘rat-catcher’ is still fresh in our minds as we rise up to fight for equality and our rights.

 

We are glad to hear that the Green Party has recently backed the struggle of rodents. In pursuit of equal opportunities the SWP has elected several rats to its leadership. Respect (Renewal) is now led by a rat (though Comrade Galloway we have political differences about your role trying to make alliances with cats by dressing up as a feline).

 

Forward to true animal liberation! Defend the excluded. Fight imperialist science!

Ca suffit comme ça! Jean-Luc Mélenchon et Marc Dolez

For a Real Republic!

Mélenchon’s New site: http://www.casuffitcommeca.fr/

This describes their call for a new party and appeals for support.

 

I can’t help being reminded of the doomed split of  Jean-Pierre Chevènement, sénateur du Territoire de Belfort, président du Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen (MRC), from the PS, also on a ‘republican’ line. That was way back of course. And mind you I like Jean-Luc much much better. He is definitely a socialist.

Parti Socialiste at Reims: After the Vote, the Battle Commences

Royal in an Exalted mood.

The Parti Socialist’s congrès de Reims opens tomorrow. The party membership votes, sorted by motion, which determine the composition of the national leadership, have been cast and counted. But all is not decided. The PS is descending in an orgy of in-fighting as the rivals of Ségolène Royal search all means to beat her off from assuming real control of the Party.

 

It will be a sad weekend for the European Left to see a party, which still has a strong Left (though it lost half its votes this year round) centre on a personality clash. The ideas of Royal, which offer some way of synthesising participative (though not self-management) democracy and classical social democracy would be more deserving of debate were it not for her desire for an alliance with the Centre party of F. Bayrou. Who is a smug toss-pot, or gentleman farmer as they say in French.

Puff for New Interventions and Chartist.

 

 Weekly Worker Sub-Editors Discuss French Politics.

New Interventions is a brilliant Socialist discussion journal. The latest issue has a particularly interesting article by Paul Flewers on the Soviet Union. A real forum for the left it is growing in importance. This Review is very internationalist. C’est très recommandé…

 

The Other is Chartist. Ultimate (with the Briefing) rampart of the left of the Labour Party and other democratic socialist forces.

 

Us liquidationist Pabloites, who back the the er, liquidationists in the LCR (Picquet), plus the other sneerers and nay-sayers of the ultra-left binge of the Ligue and the Weekly Worker,  not to mention having at least understanding for Jean-Luc Mélenchon et Marc Dolez, have, naturally, associations with both journals.

Obama Against Gay Marriage.

Obama’s Tootsies.

It had to come. It has come: Obama stands on feet of clay.

 

His opposition to Gay marriage is becoming an issue.

 

Coatesy feels very strongly in favour of gay rights, or LGBT rights as we very correct people always call them. We are particularly in favour of what we in the UK call ‘civil partnerships’. We once saw a film on the telly about an American woman whose female partner died. All the property and assets were in the partner’s name. A profoundly loving relationship they had made no formal documents to show joint contributions. After the death the family of her beloved came, took the house, and turfed the poor woman onto the street.

 

We asked a local gay activist who is Labour Councillor about this. He said that he knew of a number of cases where this had happened in England, and that was one of the principal reasons for civil partnerships, though naturally an open declaration of love was somewhat of a factor as well.

 

Shame on you Obama.

Parti Socialiste: Dégringolade

 

Latest news, despite the dominance of Royal’s Motion she has failed to draw under her wing the other competing tendencies (which together outnumber her). Tout sauf Ségolène (anyone but Royal) seems to be a pretty dominant mood amongst them. The whole charade is having the effect of winding down/ruining the party and the tumble  (dégringolade) of its support. Even the British Guardian is commenting (in a relatively well-informed piece, that misses out mention of Jean-Luc Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s resignation) on the looming disaster and basket case that is the PS.

On the Mélenchon, it is reported the Parti Communiste wants negotiations with him for an electoral alliance for the European elections, and that some prominent other social-republican leftists have joined up with him, as well as people from ‘anti-liberal’ collectives.

Besancenot Lurks.

 Besancenot Gives a Lesson.

Hovering in the background to the Parti Socialiste Congress (unfolding in all its misery)  is the rather visible presence of Olivier Besancenot. Him of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire and the nouveau parti anticapitaliste. The Rhinoceros in Le Living who’s turned up with attitude.

Opinion polls give him between 11% and 12% of the vote in a future Presidential contest. Given that the Parti Socialiste’s potential candidates only get mid-20s% voting intentions this is a lot.

 

I am writing some stuff in more detail about this but here are some preliminary observations.

 

Before I get the usual accusations against our proud tradition of liquidationism, I would like to point out that I have an extremely long connection with the Ligue, going back to my IMG Cell in Central London in the mid-1970s where two members were French; one is still an active member of the ISG. Culturally and politically I have been, since adolescence, close to the LCR (though closeness does not mean sameness). As I was saying to Krivine in May (this is not made up), at the Conway Hall May event, I was very impressed by the NPA’s ability attract ‘normal’ people (one can see clips of this on the LCR’s site) who were outside the milieu the far-left normally comes from. He was visibly glowing.

 

That was not all we chatted about. Actually if anyone’s interested, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it publicly (which shows how much it affected me),  we spent most of our conversation  talking about the tragic death of our dear comrade and beloved friend Maurice Najman.

But let’s face facts.

Fine, they’ve got around 11,000 card-holders (maybe more). They have workers (the PS by contrast is estimated to have around 5% of its membership who are working class). But, but but. The NPA runs against the grain of unity amongst the left: it is launched on its own and brooks no opposition from the Left. Its attitude towards the left of the PS, and those who have broken from the PS (such as MÉLENCHON)  shows just how far they are inflating their own sense of self-important  donneurs de leçons (‘lesson givers’). The PCF have accused Besancenot of sectarianism. Given that they are world-class experts in this I think their judgement must be given weight.

 

Let’s not forget that the structure of French Presidential elections (two rounds) is designed for the voters to ‘dream’ for their ideal candidate, and then (second round) vote for the real one. Somehow I do not think that Besancenot is going to get far towards that.

 

Naturally there’s always the revolution!

PS: Nothing Decided. Paris is surely a Mess!

 

 Has Known Better Days.

Parti Socialiste Congress. Nothing really decided. No synthesis (agreed platform). No agreement on the leadership. Hate in the gut.

Ce sera donc aux militants de trancher puisque les chefs ont été incapables de s’entendre. Le congrès de Reims s’est achevé, dimanche 16 novembre, sans que l’on puisse deviner qui succédera à François Hollande à la tête du PS. (Le Monde)

It will be the activists who decide, since the leaders are incapable of reaching an agreement. The Congress of Reims has finished, on Sunday the 16th of November, without anyone being sure who will succeed  François Holland at the head of the PS.

 

What a bleeding Mess!

Defend the AWL.

 

Readers of this Blog may have got the (correct) impression that Tendance Coatesy loathes the AWL. But here is a good reason to stand in their defence. Like a rock.

 

Something called  David Ellis has been making these accusations on Stroppy Blog: “ VP [Volatire's Priest and a mate] is simply a useful arse hole for the AWL and Jim Denham is paid by their wealthy Zionist supporters to propagandise for the Zionist cause. Clive is a prick and Janine is autistic.”

He also has opinions about Israel (no doubt also on the 9/11 ‘myth’ and those Jews who were ‘absent’ from the Twin Towers). Apparently it is building the biggest concentration camp in history (naturally the ‘myth’ of the Shoah  is another one these wise guys wish to demolish).

 

Which gives a sick taste in my mouth.

 

Apparently the creature is a member of the Galloway Respect.

Ségolène Royal on France-Inter.

 Members will Decide.

This morning I listened to Ségolène Royal on France-Inter. In the run-up to the direct vote (by the membership of the PS) for General Secretary (Premier secrétaire) or one could say, the Parti Socialiste Chair, she will be standing against Martine Aubry. At times Royal sounded like a wounded animal. She did however declare that she will stand up for the victims of capitalism, was for socialism, and (this repeated) that she was a staunch defender of La laïcité (secularism). Very ambiguous about an alliance with Modem François Bayrou  though. Still it was so obviously heart-felt and genuine that even a political opponent ( I would count myself amongst them) would have been touched. She admitted that there a “front” against her, notably endorsed by ’social-liberal’ Mayor of Paris,  Bertrand Delanoé. I would put it no lower, but there is obviously an element of bullying against her.

 

These are terrible times for the Parti Socialiste.

 

Were I a member I would  say vote Benoît Hamon.

Don’t criminalise the Sex Trade!

The English Collective of Prostitutes showed true love in our hour of need.

Ipswich Trades Council  has worked with this group. As hardened leftists we are well aware of the background of the Kings Cross Women’s Centre (now relocated to Kilburn).  However it must be said that they have treated us with great respect. The two young and wonderful anarchist women who  organised the Ipswich Reclaim the Night demo say the same.  I need not say why Ipswich comrades are involved in the issue.

 

Plans to criminalise the buying of sex, are now afoot. The influence of scum like Julie Bindel, in the media and other reactionaries is well known. But…

“Public opinion is increasingly hostile to repressive policies that force prostitution underground, and make it less safe for sex workers. 

 

o        In February, the Safety First Coalition with MPs and Peers defeated government attempts to “rehabilitate” sex workers and increase arrests. 

o        On 14 November, the IQ2 debate at the Royal Geographical Society defeated “It is Wrong to Pay for Sex “by 449 to 203.

o        The Communications Workers Union has voted for decriminalisation.

o        Long established women’s organisations are canvassing their members.

o        Lapdancers handed into Downing Street a 3,000-strong petition against tightening licensing laws.

o        Internationally, New Zealand’s five-year review showed decriminalisation is a success. In US, the historical election that voted Barrack Obama as president by a landslide, was also memorable in San Francisco for Proposition K to decriminalise prostitution in the city. Prop K got 43% of the votes – astonishing given that its sex-worker-led campaign had no funding, and that the police, District Attorney and Mayor used their position to misinform and scare voters. 

 

Workers don’t benefit from criminalisation.The ECP has been inundated by women who have been raided, arrested and charged, and face imprisonment for running safe, discrete premises where no coercion is taking place. Anti-trafficking legislation is being used to justify these raids. Who will support families hit by recession when mothers and daughters who sell sex are imprisoned? How can women who want to get out of prostitution find another job if they have a criminal record?

 

Pimps, violent men and “rehabilitation” projects benefit. Pimps are attracted by any illegal economy. Violent men know that illegal workers can’t report violence or exploitation. And more anti-prostitution projects will be funded to “save” the rest of us.

 

Why are resources wasted on policing consenting sex when most rapists are getting away with it? Why are anti-trafficking laws used to deport women? 

 

Sex workers want rights, not charity. We want safety, not prison.

Listen to the workers, not the preachers.

 

 

ecp@allwomencount.net

www.prostitutescollective.net

 

 The spine of the oppressed rises with this call.

 

 

 

When the Victory of Communism Comes.

 

.

Symbol of Hope and Freedom.

 

When the the Red flag flutters from Capitol Hill, Big Ben and the  Élysée. When we can have a decent pint of real ale in Mecca, and the capitalist roaders have been expelled from the Kremlin and Beijing.

When true human liberty is established. And there is an equal association of the producers and all human kind.

When every pauvre hères stands upright, and the capitalist crooks, racists, and religious bigots are cowed.

Just a Thursday dream, eh?

Parti Socialiste: Totale Verklopps.

Socialist Party Maître Penseur  at work.

Actually I thought I’d just made the word Verklopps up. Though I found when Googling that it has an existence in German.

 

But it seems to me that the Parti Socialiste is in such a mess that something needs making up.

 

There will be a second round in the election of their General Secretary. The fight between Martine Aubry, Benoît Hamon et Ségolène Royal has been reduced to one between the two women.

 

Bienvenue  à la misère!

To the Glory of the Working Class.

 Every propeller is straining in Defence of the Working Class.

Getting on my tits.

 

This association  made by people between the BNP and the English working class.

 

The working class is full of people who are anti-racist, violently anti-racist I would say. The English labour movement is one of the prime vectors of anti-racism. The toffs think we lot (I am intelligentsia but closely aligned) are thick and chavs. I ask: who are the blokes and blokettes who stand up for socialism when shove comes to push? Answer: the working class.

 

Its political formation in Chartism was led by Irish men. My own mates are a group of mixed Caribbean, Irish, Bengalis, Londoners, oh and a few Ipswich and Suffolk  lads. We talk about such political subjects as food (in fact our main topic), birds, films, what we saw on the telly, football (well there I couldn’t give a toss about football), ancient philosophy (I am not making this up), and politics. Yesterday in the pub one very working class bloke said to me how pleased he was to see that the BNP got their comeuppance when after the publication of their membership list someone shoved a Molotov cocktail up their arses. We really do not like racists.

Aubry: PS Winner by 42 Votes

 Martine Aubry looking very Christian.

Socailist Party. election of First Secretary. I seem to be rather alone on this but it is one of the most important events for the European Left. Anyway, “Il y a eu une avance très faible, mais une avance pour Martine Aubry de 42 voix”.  That is Martine won by a sliver of 42. Bad looser Royal says this:

 

Ségolène Royal ne s’avoue pas vaincue et réclame un vote “clair”

PARIS – Ségolène Royal a refusé de s’avouer vaincue, après l’annonce de la courte victoire de Martine Aubry dans la course à la tête du Parti socialiste.

 

That is, she refuses to accept defeat. In fact she is calling for another vote. There are plenty of allegations circulating that votes went ‘missing’ and that the ballot boxes got interfered with.

They don’t make stuff like this up.

 

Plug for La Commune

 Que les réacs crèvent !

It is very encouraging to see that a  new group is now standing up for self-management, workers’ control and communism from below.  The Commune has produced an excellent magazine and web-site. I notice that an old mucker of mine, Terry Liddle, has an article in it. All tip-top material.

 

Personally I thought our tendency, for self-management, had all but died. Ken Coates sent me a reprint of articles on workers’ control about three years back and I felt that it was but of historic interest.

 

My own first contact with this current came from when I was about fourteen and used to buy stuff from Collet’s in Charing Cross Road. From the Institute for Workers’ Control. And Solidarity. I left school at sixteen and did a string of manual and clerical jobs where these ideas (that is, we should be in charge not the bosses) had great appeal. When still a teenager and back in part-time in education I was very closely involved with the Portuguese Workers’ Co-ordinating Committee (actually I was a student organiser when it became the Campaign to defend the Portuguese working class) many of whose members were supporters of the MES (Movimento de Esquerda Socialista), a ‘centrist’ organisation which stood for democratic self-managed socialism during the Carnation Revolution.

 

Centrist, for those of us who are on the left, means a democratic Marxist, disliked by Troskyistsand right-wing social democrats alike. Our heritage lies in the Independent Labour Party, Austro-Marxism, the independent Russian Marxists, the Spanish POUM and the French PSU. In some ways (on this subject of workers’ power) we are similar to the ‘left-communists’

 

I have been involved with the self-management tendency in France (FGA/PSU and the ‘Pabloites’). When I came back to Britain, the ‘centrist’ group the Socialist Society (I was on their Steering Committee). Noticed a few embers glowing, mainly around the anarchist left. Red Pepper does have the occasional article, (though since it published a few articles grovelling to the Islamicists I have don’t have much time for it). Not much in general.

 

As I say I really though our lot had died out in the UK.

 

Apparently Dave Broder and his mates are doing sterling work.

 

Vive La Commune!

Shocked and Stunned: French Parti Socialiste Members.

La Tristesse.

From le Monde today, the unfolding débâcle that is the French Parti Socialiste and its failure to  settle on a new First Secretary clearly (this will be formally resolved by the Party shortly but I have a feeling that it won’t end there). Just one example, 40 federations are already the subject of legal actions.

 

Les militants du PS, choqués, ne voient pas d’issue à la crise.

Members of the PS, shocked, don’t see an end to the crisis.

“Grande tristesse, grosse frustration”

 Great sadness, great frustration.

There is talk of an open split in the Party.

Less than Four votes separate the PS candidates. Allegedly.

Julien Dray, former leading LCR member, then of the Gauche Socialiste, now lieutenant of Ségolène Royal.

From le Monde:

Selon le “royaliste” Peillon, plus que quatre voix séparent les deux candidates.

According to the ‘royalist’ Peillon (Euro-deputy) less than four votes separate the two candidates.

From  Libération

Les partisans de Ségolène Royal posent un ultimatum à la commission de récolement, menaçant de saisir la justice et d’appeler à une manif devant le siège du PS si la commission ne se saisit pas de certains cas litigieux.

 The supporters of Ségolène Royal have laid down an ultimation to the (PS) control committee, threatening to to go to the courts and have called for a demonstration outside the PS HQ if it does not deal with the votes that are in doubt.

In principle the Commision will make a decision today.

I realise the British left is more interested in its own internal obsessions, like whether George Galloway will appear as a Panto Dame ‘Kitty’ this year, the fate of the various left ‘unity’ groupings (all strangely rather separate) or where the the CPGB/AWL battles are leading.  But I think that the vicious internal quarrels of one of the most important social democratic parties in the world, that contains an important socialist minority, merit some attention.

French Parti Socialiste on E-Bay.

In the light of Aubry’s short victory, endorsed last night by the PS, in an atmosphere said to be like the ‘Supreme Soviet’ (by Le Monde) today’s  Nouvel Observateur carries this story which casts doubt on the Head Command:

“Un internaute a mis en vente le Parti socialiste sur ebay.fr, l’annonce faisant état d’un parti “peu utilisé” mais vendu “sans capitaine”. Le prix a déjà atteint 10 millions d’euros mais la livraison est offerte.”

 

Someone has put the Parti Socialiste up for sale on ebay.fr. The ad stated that it was little used and up for offer however ‘without a captain’. The price has already got up to 10 millions but the delivery is included.

More comment about the PS (in French and from a while back)  which gives reasons why she is not universally loved.

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=D0gjvrmDXA4

So Farewell then John Rees.

 John Rees with Friends.

It is with great sorrow that we learn of the SWP’s decision to dismiss Comrade John Rees  (and here) from its Central Committee. The pro-imperialists and globalising liquidators  may have criticised his alliance with the murdering clerical fascists of al-sadar (see above photo), his role in destroying the Socialist Alliance in order to huddle up with huckster Kitty Galloway, Islamicist communalists, businessmen, and his personal obnoxious arrogance. We say: nay, nay, thrice nay!

Tendance Coatesy’s Court Poet, Emily Thribbs (aged eight) immediately penned this moving ode in commemoration of one of the great leaders of the International Proletariat.

 

So Farewell then to John Rees?

“Ress, the most unhappy of men,

Wither the whistling Swoppie tend his line?

Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers, that wish for thee: smog, dirt and spit

There’s not a breath of the flatulent wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies,

Thy friends are exhalations, agonies,

And goatee beards”

Sarkozy Nous Voilà!

 

This fantastic satire, with acid sarcasm, sends shivers down yer spine. It is to remind us what the real class enemy is like.

Here Sarkozy takes the place of Pétain, following the famous song Maréchal, nous voilà!! It was an anthem of the Vichy regime. The fascist French daily Présent takes its name from a line in this chant.

 

The music was stolen from Casimir Oberfeld who was murdered in Auswitch – because he was Jewish.

Indian Communists Condemn Mumbai Attack.

 There is no image for this post: it is too painful.

 Communist Party of India (Marxist)

 

November 27, 2008  Press Statement  The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:  On Terrorist Strike in Mumbai  The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) expresses its deep shock and outrage at the multiple attacks in Mumbai city which have led to the loss of more than a hundred lives and injuries to many. These attacks targeting a railway station, hotels and other places by groups of heavily armed men accompanied by explosions, bear the hallmark of a carefully planned terrorist strike.  The country expects the government and the security agencies to uncover the full scope of this nefarious attack and the forces behind it. Given the recurring and widespread pattern of terrorist attacks occurring in the country, the Central Government has to assure the people that concerted efforts are being made to tackle the problem.  The immediate need is for the people to face this grim situation with fortitude and foil any sectarian attempts to exploit the situation. The entire country expresses its solidarity with the people of Mumbai in this difficult situation.  The Polit Bureau conveys its heartfelt sympathy to all those who have lost their loved ones including the police personnel who have died.  The loss of Hemant Karkare, the brave officer who was heading the Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad and other police officials is especially grievous.

Simple, dignified and to the point.

 

[I wonder how long it will be before some British liberal Islamophile or 'anti-imperialist' will come out with a comment 'understanding' why these creatures attacked the beloved people of Mumbai. Suggestions: US oppression of Muslims, European oppression of Muslims, British oppression of Muslims, India's oppression of Muslims, Zionist oppression of Muslims.]

[Note added to Note. I spoke too soon. Tariq Ali has already been at work finding ‘reasons’ for mass murder. With explanations at hand for the Mumbai attack he pontificates that“It’s hardlty a secret that there has been much anger”within the poorest sections of the Muslim community against the systematic discrimation and acts of violence (in India.)”.

Tariq since you speak all tongues and are an expert on every country on the globe, and their politics, as well as those of a few planets outside the solar system, you’ll get this expression in French that sums up your stand, ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’. Roughly to ‘to say you have ‘understanding’ for something, is to excuse it.’

Gramsci: Death Bed Conversion to Catholicism?

Gramsci is Buried in the Protestant Cemetery (for all non-Catholics in fact) in Rome (I have visited his grave).

‘Revelations’ that Gramsci converted to Catholicism  on his death-bed (here) have been made. This claim surfaced through the mouth of Luigi de Magistris, a former Apostolic Penitentiary Archbishop. This week on the Vatican Radio he made the assertion that the Italian Communist Party leader returned to the faith of his childhood before dying.

 

This (similar claims were made in the late sixties) has been vigorously denied by the Philosopher and ex-Parliamentary deputy Beppe Vacca, President of the Gramsci Institute. “None of the numerous documents, published or unpublished, about the last hours of Antonio Gramsci give any support to the suggestion that he was converted”. (le Monde) There is no proof (here). Apperently there aren’t any journalists on the Times who know much about Gramsci or who can read French* well enough to include these statements in their piss-poor report on the matter.

Most secular people would have thought that the Catholic Church, indeed any Church, had given up that little trick about last-moment confessions and dying sinners embracing the faith, in, well, say the late Victorian era.

 

Obviously not.

 

* Added following day: or Italian. Story here rigorously exposing the falsity of the claim.

Robert Hue leaves Parti Communiste National Council.

After John Rees another Dodgy Beardy who brought Failure in his Wake.

From Libération:

 ”L’ancien leader du Parti communiste français Robert Hue a annoncé dans une lettre à la secrétaire nationale du PCF, Marie-George Buffet, qu’il quittait le Conseil national (parlement) du parti, et entendait prendre prochainement une “initiative”.”

The former leader of the French Communist party Robert Hue has stated in a letter to the National Secretary of the PCF, Marie-George Buffet, that he has resigned from the National Council (Parlement) of the party and intends shortly to take an ‘initiative’.

Robert Hue was in charge of the PCF (1994 – 2001) during its most dramatic period of decline. From a national force capable of getting in 1969 21,5% in the Presidential election, and even in 1981, obtaining 15% ,  to his own score of 8,6% as Candidate in 1995 , to, finally, 3,37% in 2002. Party membership went from 200,000 in 1998 to 138,000 in 2001.

 

Hue has always given me the creeps.

 

Perhaps that because his beard resembles a bit Raymond’s, the psycopath in the film, The Vanishing.

 

The Question everyone on the Left is asking: what is it about Beards?

Tariq Ali: Renegade or Patrician Pillock?

Back to the Sixties: Ali with Kindred Spirit.

‘The East is Green’ announced Tariq Ali in New Left Review 38 (2006). Now we have news that he has definitely passed over the the Green side, praising the Taliban and Hamas.

In NLR (after some vile comments calling the Iraqi Kurds the ‘Gurkhas of the invador’) he described the present rise of Islamism, from the Middle East to Iran,

“A radical wind is blowing from the allies and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous oil wealth. The limits of this radicalism, so long as it is captured by the Koran, are clear enough. The impulses of charity and solidarity are infinitely better than those of imperial greed and comprador submission, but so long they offer as what they offer is social amelioration rather than reconstruction, then they are are sooner or latter liable to recuperation by the existing order .”

What they need is someone resembling Simon Bolivar,  a Morales, a Chávez .

Put simply, come back 1960s third-worldism. Fanon was right. On one side stand the ‘wretched of the earth’, in this case the Muslim masses bound by ’solidarity and charity’. On the other ‘imperial greed’. Ali helpfully notes that the Qu’ran has ‘limits’ (surely not!). But in any case a great leader is needed, a Helmsman perhaps, to steer the masses away from the ‘existing order’.  

This dérive, as we say, has not drifted away. Imtiaz Baloch reports an Ali speech made  In Toronto, Canada,  on November the 14th this year.  All began well, with Ali sagely giving the usual round-up of the world conflict between imperialism and the oppressed,  offering his opinions on the US elections, many many other lands, the situation in South Asia, and no doubt the price of milk in Sainsbury’s.

Then doubt began to surface in Baloch’s mind,

He also managed to present one dramatized case of forcible disappearance of a Pakistani citizen Aafia Siddiquiin US custody for alleged links with Al-Qaida.

Speaking of torture, Tariq Ali slammed Hasni Mobarak’s Egypt, but a kept a complete silence on the brutal practices of torture by the Islamic Republic of Iran where thousands of progressive activists have been tortured and hanged publicly.

He praised Sheikh Nasarullah’s Hezbollah in Lebanon as “heroic”, conveniently forgetting to mention this group’s ideological, financial, and military support from the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria.
The two states, one theocratic and the other a dictatorship – both infamous for brutally repressing their own people including torture and murder of communists.

Then the ‘bombshell’. Talking of Afghanistan,

Instead of denouncing the atrocities carried out by the Taliban, the beheadings and the throwing of acid on the faces of schoolgirls, Tariq Ali eulogized the neo-Taliban as an indigenous movement representing Pashtun nationalism.

Baloch comments,

The old Left and the neo-Taliban have bonded into a new friendship with a common cause – Bush-bashing, for which, Islamic populist sentimentalism, state and strong army have become important tools of the trade. Today, it is not surprising to see former Marxists collude with Jihadis, but to see Tariq Ali in that role was a huge let down.

Now much of Baloch’s post is taken up with discussion of  Balochistan and Ali’s denial of its right to self-determination. Tendance Coatesy is not capable of judging this cause (unlike Ali we do not have the patrician desire to be a a Universal Pundit), except to back the comrades fight for democratic rights to the hilt.

Once upon a time Ali denounced the clash of fundementalisms:  neo-liberalism-imperialism, and Islamisim. Now he has found virtue in the latter, a mask (as Fanon might have put it) for the legitimate aspirations of the world’s oppressed, or maybe (as he gets ever more doting towards his new found friends) the vehicle of the wretched that will bring down the US and its comprador allies.

Is this a case of the ‘eternal return’? Further back sixties ‘fightin’ man’ Ali indulged himself fully in the romance of third-worldism, in which class was obscured by a fog of rhetoric, and national liberation over-rode democracy and socialism.

Today democracy and socialism have been shown, in the most forceful manner, to be indissolubly linked. In all its various forms Islamism is a enemy of democracy, and the movements Ali now admires are its most brutal opponent. Every Islamist party or faction, from ‘moderates’ to jihadists,  is led by the pious Islamic bourgeoisie, and represent this class interest. It aims to destroy class solidarity in favour of the united community of the believers in a capitalist theocracy. While ‘consensual’ oppression may be the declared aim of some, no type of Islamism has ever liberated anyone. These forces are opposed by the entire progressive left. From the gaols of Tehran to the killing fields of Sudan, the masses of the world cry out for democracy, an end to Islamic oppression and racism. Without being in the slightest emotional Tendance Coatesy says that the bloody corpses of our fallen comrades scream out for justiceagainst their Qu’ranic inspired foe.

 

Apparently their voices haven’t reached Ali’s chocolate box village of Sweffling in Norfolk.

Workfare: Slouching Roughly Towards the Workhouse.

Workfare Has A Long History of Success.

The BBC Reports today that the Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech will contain Welfare ‘reform’ measures and that, “Almost everyone on benefits would have to prepare themselves for work or face sanctions under proposals in a report commissioned by the government. ” and that, “unemployed people should do a 9-5 day looking for work or doing community work, to tackle joblessness.”

A central issue is: how exactly will these the workfare proposals be organised?

We know that Gordon Brown’s words about prioritising ‘hard-working’ people and families are not mere rhetoric (he has a tendresse for those who sweat it out in order to rake money off the backs of the poor). Now he intends to force the unemployed (of all categories, including the disabled and lone parents) to piss around all day staring at the ever-decreasing pool of job vacancies, and filling in application forms asking questions about your sexuality and religious beliefs. Or do ‘community’ stuff and  work bloody hard, be it for a pittance.

Compass has published a declaration (here) against the Government’s new welfare ‘reform’ measures. This follows the National Conference of Trades Councils which passed a resolution (here) earlier this year (originally from Ipswich and District TUC). It noted that existing New Deal programmes were rife with exploitation, riddled with the potential for bullying, that the private companies and ‘voluntary’ bodies offering them made large profits while offering a very variable level of training (often of no value whatsoever) and that work ‘placements’ were open to abuse by employers who used them as as a source of free labour. The Trades Councils called for (notably): the end of compulsion in existing schemes, a decent level of pay for any work undertaken, full workers’ rights for those on such schemes, independent tribunals to supervise the system, and the creation of real jobs.

It seems (see Compass) that our concerns are being heeded by a growing section of the labour movement and the left.

Already Income Support is explicitly based on the Poor Law criterion of ‘least eligibility’. That is, the standard of living on the Dole is worse than that of the worst possible employment. A blitz on Incapacity Benefit claimants is already causing great distress and cuts in benefits as they are aligned to the same principle.

It will get worse. If the government presses ahead (and there is no reason at present to think otherwise) we will see (at a time of rising unemployment) massive amounts of money transferred to an already multi-million pound cluster of businesses engaged in ‘training’ and obliging people to take up ‘placements’ (three months work of a kind for Dole plus £15 a week). I am not an expert on single-parents and Incapacity Benefit, but it is certain that many people’s lives will be made worse as they come under close inspection by these bodies. In future no doubt they will supervise the gangs of the out-of-work made to carry out tasks previously undertaken by those sentenced by the Courts to do Community Service. The existing period of ‘placements’ will be extended indefinitely. Services offered by existing public bodies (such as the notorious ‘cleaning the streets’ proposals) will be done on the cheap. Without any rights, bullying and intimidation will relentlessly expand. This will undermine the existing pay and conditions of public sector workers. Finally, since the ‘reform’ contains ‘tough love’ clauses about cutting off benefits to those who do no comply, there will be a growth in absolute destitution.

Are Gordon Brown’s New Poor Laws a reasonable answer to mass unemployment.

 

I think not.

Gordon Brown’s Mentor.

Brown’s Mentor with Unemployed Trainees.

Much has been made claiming that the Government’s Welfare ‘reforms’ (to be announced today in the Queen’s Speech), are inspired by Nordic social democracy. Like bleeding hell they are. In these lands the benefits and genuine training would make the average UK doley, disabled and lone parent, weep (though Denmark has its vicious liberal market side, no doubt the bit Brown likes). But in general this reference is sand in the eyes of Labour supporters, to make them feel better (not that sand in your peepers  makes you feel anything but irritation).

There are two real inspirations.

The first lies in Brown’s idea of making social policy fit a ‘market state’.Instead of welfare to support people in tough times (a ’safe home’) , which encourages you to go out an explore the world in security, this entails endless ‘training’ to ‘equip’ you to compete in the market economy. The fact that the training offered is patently incapable of teaching more than basic literacy and numeracy (no doubt useful for workless bankers), is passed over. To make this system function all benefits have to be set at the lowest possible level, as an ‘incentive’ to find employment. The clearest proof of this is that there are no payment increases whatsoever in the pipe-line to compensate the out-of-work on JSA for the massive gas and electricity rises underway.

The second is more colourful. Tendance Coatesy can exclusively reveal the identity of the Cabinet Adviser (pictured above) behind the latest welfare legislation. He is Deputy Dawg of Houndstown Texas. We talked to him in his home town last week. His own ‘Workfare Program’, affectionately known as the ‘Chain Gang’, has, in his own words,  reduced the number of “criters lazin’ round town.” From picking cotton, to cleaning the sidewalk, to shining honest citizens’ shoes, a variety of skills are learnt. Not forgetting diversity issues Dawg has made sure that “them colored folks” are fully participating. Indeed they make up over 50% of the intake (an encouraging figure since African-Americans are only 5% of the population of Houndstown). The dedicated Deputy is the source for the bright idea of using lie-detectors to sniff out false benefit claims. he has further ideas, “Old Sparkey is a sure way to keepthem mean varmits on their toes.” He looks wistful, “But while my lille Buddy Parnell likes the idea some of them tree-huggers are agin it.”

There are plans for the Deputy to produce a new series of his evergreen cartoons, broadcasting this example, to be shown in Schools and Job Centres.

Review: Strange Fruit Indeed.

Strange Fruit. Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate. Kenan Malik Oneworld 2008.

 

Kenan Malik has a mixed reputation. He is best known for his criticisms of race ‘realism’ (or bluntly – racism), conventional multiculturalism, and his defence of the scientific traditions of the Enlightenment against cultural relativism. Whatever their stand on this, to some on the left he may as well have scarlet letters branded on his breast reading Living Marxism. To others however, who have long developed a parallel critical stand on these issues, his writings are stimulating and always worth reading. Though, sometimes, he can seriously irritate.

 

Proving he has not lost the capacity to annoy, Strange Fruit begins with a contestable claim. That, “racial talk today is as likely to come out of the mouths of liberal antiracists as of reactionary racial scientists. The affirmation of difference, which once was at the heart of racial science, has become a key plank of the anti-racist outlook.”(P 5) While ‘difference’ remains a popular principle amongst a certain kind of leftist (public employees and academics), and the idea that people should replace fear of the Other with Respect, is still a liberal hobby-horse, it seems that its high-water mark has passed. Equality and rationality are coming back into fashion. Malik’s book therefore raises reservations, above all on the claim that “Antiracism has become an irrational, anti-scientific philosophy”. (P 6) A growing number of anti-racists are, as some have long been, opposed to precisely the relativist and romantic ideas of race and culture that Malik so forcefully attacks. 

 

The core of Strange Fruit is its discussion of the role of genetics of race-thinking. Classic old style racism has continued in the belief that our genes show profound differences in humans, and there are still psuedo-scientific studies claiming differences of intelligence. He demolishes these (largely socio-biological) theories  by a clear overview of the Human Genome project, and other elements such as discoveries about the distribution (mixed everywhere) of blood groups. Clearly race is not a scientific category in any real sense, it is a cultural one. Unfortunately as Malik demonstrates for many (the givers of courses in ‘diversity’ are a notorious case) identity is seen as a “genetic heritage, inextricably linking race, culture and belonging.”(P 63) The world is divided into distinct blocks of different human kinds, Diversity against Unity.

 

Where does this come from? Why pit these against each other? One source is a would-be radical assault on ‘rationality’ and ‘Euro-centeredness’. The notion that science and rationality are bureaucratic monsters (Foucault’s power-making-truth machine) has played a part. That there is something particularly obnoxious in European civilisation that smothers other societies.  That, in particular, the Enlightenment annihilated the cultural worth of non-Europeans. That it denied any merit to Non-European thought, making its science the sole criterion of knowledge.  That it was racist. Even (to the kind of theorist who finds even Cloud Cuckoo Land a bit too mundane) that it is ultimately linked to the Holocaust.

 

Malik tackles the assertion that the Enlightenment is to blame for racialism. Obviously real race-ideology derives from its opponents: the Counter-Enlightenment (Gobineau to cite but one). He points out that its universalist principles offered ‘civilisation’ even to those from cultures which were at present deemed (from their 18^thcentury vantage point) as primitive or barbarian. Equal worth and capacity were the essence of the human condition, only circumstances marred them. He divides the Enlightenment (following Jonathan Israel), rather schematically into radicals and conservatives “whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition, the mainstream view.” (P 88) Malik puts Kant in the latter category, even though the author of What is Enlightenment? answered his own question as: it meant above all the use of your own reason with no deference to authority. Diderot, hard to classify, has a cautious strain but was very anti-colonialist. And so it goes..

 

His claim that “toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge” comes from the Radical Enlightenment. (P 89) equally needs some needs qualifications. These would bring him down from the world of ideas to that of politics, supremely those of the French Revolution. There he would have been able to explore the beginnings of social institutions that put these into practice, the barriers faced by the radicals, their heroism and their shameful defeat. He would consider the brilliant Olympe de Gouges, the feminist pioneer, guillotined for her pains, the paradoxes of the anti-Slavery founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs, Abbé Grégoire (Anti-racist but anti-regional French languages), and the philosophe turned politician, Condorcet.  This might have shaped the direction of Strange Fruit away from the ideological heavens, and hells,  to the politics which play the decisive role in the present power of multiculturalism (from a state desire to incorporate ethnic groups to the interests of self-appointed ‘community leaders’). Not to mention the occasions when politicians play the ‘race card’.

 

There is a great deal of interest in Malik’s outline of how UNESCO’s attempt to confront racism after the Second World War, and cultural anthropologists wish to reject assumptions of Western superiority ended up approaching a relativism so pure it cannot even stand for basic scientific rationality. Enter ’science’ of every kind of magic and alternative gibberish. Authenticity (a modern invention) leads to worshiping one’s (race-cultural) roots. The volkish notion of culture at its heart lent support for the notorious case of human remains, ‘Kennewick Man’ in the US. Discovered in Washington State these ancient bones, of enormous antiquity,  appear to be of no known human group, but were claimed by the local Native Americans as their own and tried to prevent scientific research on their origin.  In this case even the dead are instructed that they had “to bear a particular culture.”(P 177)

 

Another jump and we find Mailk baldly claiming that that the New Left adopted similar ideas, dropping the working class for new agencies in splintered cultural identities, each fighting its own oppressions. This may be true for some of the wilder forms of the US left, and remains a truism amongst the dying embers of post-modernism and such sects as the British Socialist Action (Ken Livingstone’s bag-people). But Malik would here again have benefited from having a wider political background than British groupuscules: these opinions are, and have always been, ultra-minority amongst most of the European left which has always tried to unite class movements and those of the oppressed (objectively oppressed that is, not by their ‘identity’ being thwarted). Cultural assertions have an importance nevertheless. Languages, like species, should be allowed to flourish and die without being suppressed or starved of oxygen. There is no contradiction between supporting, say, regional languages, which bear a culture that, to cite but literature and poetry which is unique, and standing for universal rights (equality before the law). The universalistic argument was made effectively long ago (by Saint Augustine in On Christian Doctrine) that while some judgements and tastes are properly relative (dress, family arrangements) some maxims are without exception. Augustine sharply cited the key test of the exceptions’ rule, “Treat others as you would be treated yourself.” Secularism which Malik unfortunately does not discuss, could be said to be an extended working out of this basic principle. Which itself deserves discussing within the broader context of a Marxist approach to ‘identity’ (what of nationality by the way? Malik barely mentions this) that links it to class and political forms, hey, let’s just call them states.

 

Malik only touches on Marxism in the vaguest terms, referring to its stand on human liberation, opposition to class exploitation, and positive attitude towards reason. But he does call for a return to the fight  for, ”humanism and reason.”(P 288)

 

 

Many of us have never abandoned it.

 

 

 

French Ultra Left Faces Unhinged Repression: Tarnac Affair.

Dangerous Stuff.

The French Political Police (okay, the  La Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur ) has developed an obsession with what it calls ‘ideological terrorism’. The arrests of nine young people at Tarnac (Corrèze) andParis, which have caused a national scandal, form part of what the DCRI calls the “return of Action Directe and the RAF”.

They stand accused of criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise. Specifically five of them are charged with having sabotaged TGV rail tracks on the 7th of November. The Paris Public Prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, has not hesitated to describe this as “armed struggle”. That is despite having no proof of this ‘project’ nor having found a single real weapon They did find  ’engines explosives’. Nevertheless that word generally (though not always)  designates, in French,  not bombs designed to kill but to cause damage. Like their British counterparts in similar circumstances the Prosecution has refused to divulge all the information which led to the arrests on the grounds that to do so  would affect  national security.

The basis for these claims lies in a wider thesis: that after the collapse of the French Communist Party (PCF) radicals would increasingly find turn to violent methods of opposition. The criminologue Alain Bauer, a self-styled ‘expert’ on political extremism, played a significant part in creating this climate.  On the Internet site of the Fnac (Paris’s biggest bookshop)  and  Amazon.com he discovered  L’insurrection qui vient (éd. la Fabrique). Claiming to foresee a strategy in  this text which resembled that of Action Directe he bought forty copies and sent them off to the head of the French police. In other words, here are people plotting a new wave of armed struggle, in a short time they will be acting on their words.

This annoymous work, produced by an ‘invisible committee’, has been clearly attributed by the Police to Julien Coupat, the principal accused in ’ l’affaire de Tarnac’. So it was a but a matter of when the opportunity cropped up before the Police went for him. Police raids discovered anarchist literature and (as mentioned) small explosive devices.  (Based on le Monde)

On the alleged sabotage the French Fédération Anarchiste comments,

Que sont quelques caténaires arrachées (parmi 27 000 actes de malveillances recensées par la SNCF pour la seule année 2007) causant le retard de quelques dizaines de trains 

It was a few catenaries (don’t ask me – I don’t know what this word means in English either) ripped up (amongst 27,000 acts of vandalism listed by the French Train Service for 2007 alone) which caused delays for a few dozen trains. 

At present, of the nine people arrested on the 11th of  November at  Tarnac (Corrèze) and  Paris, only two remain in prison, Julien Coupat  34 ans, considered as the group’s leader and Yldune, 25, his companion.  Both face charges of having deliberately damaged rail lines (Here) The actual shape of the trial will become clear in the coming weeks. 

Tendance Coatesy has no time whatsoever for any form of terrorism, and is not too fond of ‘autonomes’ in general either. But there is something about this whole affair, and the French state’s role in it, that stinks. To begin with the charge, that these people form an « association de malfaiteurs en vue d’une entreprise terroriste » (a criminal  association  with terrorist  objectives), is ambiguous, to say the least. Next, the central accusation, of sabotage, may or may not be true. But by whom and for what reason?  On the first question nothing is at all clear. On the second,  if these acts were committed for political reasons  I would strongly suppose that they were a gesture of solidarity with something or other (rather a futile one I would say, like autonomism and anarchism generally). Sabotage of course is said to derive from the ’sabots’ (clogs) which 19th century trade unionists put on rail tracks and the symbolism is obvious to all. However, and it’s a big however, the main evidence for the prosecution lies in this accusation of  ’ideological terrorism’. That is from reading ‘between the lines’ of anarchist and autonomist literature. This is quite a step to take. Unlike, say, Jihadist material, which urges the murder of all Kufers and contains detailed instructions on killing, the ultra-left does not revel in massacre, or even advocate what is conventionally called individual or elitist terrorism. This was one of their big differences with, say the Italian ‘armed struggle’. So, we say: halt this farce of a trial and end the repression!

Hilary Wainwright Goes Localist: Why the Left Is Barely Fighting Workfare.

From Popular Democracy to Parish Pump Politics. 

 

Today the Sunday Times  leads with the much pre-publicised news that James Purnell is to introduce a ’shake up’ of the Welfare State. This includes plans to turf the jobless onto the street if they live in large houses, allow companies to profit from getting the long-term unemployed into work, introduce a rigorous ‘medical testing’ procedure for the disabled (on the 1st World War Conscription template), make the long-term unemployed carry out ‘workfare’ (US style), and to make ’welfare mothers’ (charming expression) work.  

Now it has been a source of wonder to myself, and the few comrades who have been agitating about this looming threat for many months now (such as the brilliant Louise and the Sheffield Welfare Action Network), why the left and the labour movement has not moved heaven and earth to set up a mass campaign against these moves. Still, at least, the labour movement has begun to build its forces to oppose them now, the greatest attack on democracy and the welfare state since it was founded, as the excellent initiative by Compass  powerfully demonstrates. But from the famous social movements (apart from those very directly concerned) barely a peep.

I suggest that one reason is that the part of the left which is capable of organising grass-roots campaigns has been caught up in nationalist and localist hallucinations. That it sees its future in the ‘break up of Britain’ rather than a united fight-backs across the land. That it lost the ability to campaign on class issues outside of  the  the unions. It has become obsessed with a dead-end retreat to its patch, its nation (Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, English) its soil (‘green politics’). That it considers, as Hilary Wainwright puts it,  that “a left that is based on a recognition of national and regional autonomy and creativity” is the way forward.

Here is the sad evidence. Hilary Wainwright ’s Editorial in the October/November issue of Red Pepper (which is the Heimat of this trend).

Where the left is having an impact is where it is part of – and has helped to create – initiatives that reach beyond itself, to challenge the political class with a vision of a radical and egalitarian democracy. This is invariably a vision that is not explicitly socialist. Look at the Convention for Scottish Independence, Plaid Cymru’s coalition-building work in Wales or the broad-based coalition to save democracy in the NUS. Look too at the movements in support of Barack Obama in the US.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the Convention for Scottish Independence endorsed the project of a venal  party, the SNP, which is in thrall to the bankers, Edinburgh businessmen, is planning to flog off large part of public forests to private firms, and is full of smug self-satisfied right-wing gits. That Plaid is weak reed which has a valuable role in defending its culture, and language, but has  done little else. That both are, er nationalists. That Obama is, well for the left what is Obama? The essential is the simple fact is there is no radical egalitarian democracy when you split people on national grounds. Full stop.

She continues,

In the UK, Europe’s most centralised and executive-dominated of political systems, the loyalties and sense of rights associated with place are an important base of this democratic challenge. This is obvious in the nations of the UK but it applies also to English cities.

This particular fantasy, that UK centralisation is a major source of our woes, goes against the reality that all European countries, without exception, and with wildly differing constitutional and administrative structures, have suffered from neo-liberalism, mass unemployment and the massive economic crisis and quasi-slump unfolding as I write. Europe’s  economies are dominated by,wait for it, centralised transnational corporations. And many are pretty politically centralised as well. Or hasn’t she heard of how the French state retains control despite ‘decentralisation’, to cite but one case. Quoi qu’il en soit, it is not ‘centralisation’ that is the problem in itself. Many social policies would be better centralised on a Europe-wide basis, on the principle of raising Welfare standards to the highest level offered. Decentralisation all to often leads to a beggar-thy-neighbour polity, as the consequences of Catalan and Northern Italian and Flemish nationalism clearly demonstrate. The real difficulty is the lack of  radical democracy at the base, and ensuring means to communicate deliberations and decisions to any level, local, national or trans-Continental, or Planetary.

As national political structures crack and lose their authority, initiatives from Scotland, Wales and the English cities and regions will have the chance to break through, setting a new kind of example, stimulating a new direction for debate and developing their own international links.

The importance of place is not as a romantic retreat for the left. On the contrary, it offers a base for creating a left that is sufficiently rooted to be effective and a source of autonomy from the Westminster/Whitehall rootless elite. More immediately it provides the basis for the cross-party kind of left politics that must surely be the way to avoid the Tory dystopia that hovers ominously on the horizon   

So now we have it. The common folk of this country are there underneath the iron heel of centralised UKANIA.  Truly as Hilary’s forerunner, G.K.Chesterton said, The People of England have not Spoken Yet. When they do, their authentic voices (drowning out the Man from Whitehall and the Metropolitan elite) will  emerge and they will explode into political creativity. The ‘rooted’ (in place) left will flower.  Cross-party radical politics will bloom. Hilary Wainwright will become a MP under Proportional Representation.

Of course this is not a ‘romantic retreat’. And the dog ate my Communist Manifesto. Maybe all this will come to pass….. But there is another possibility: look at Holyrood. Local cliques and local bosses are just as bad, if not worse, than national ones. This dream too could end in tears.

 

In the meantime James Purnell’s steel-capped boot will be firmly placed on the throats of single mothers, the disabled and the unemployed.

 

Bye Bye Arlette, Wotcha Nathalie

Even Nathalie doesn’t actually read LO’s terminally boring  paper.

 

Changing of the Guard at Lutte ouvrière.  Just announced (here) Nathalie Arthaud, 38 ans, will be the organisation’s porte-parole (public spokesperson, and eventual candidate). She faces stiff competition in the shape of Olivier Besancenot. Described as an « Arlette bis » (second Arlette) it remains to be seen if she will halt the decline in the Party’s fortunes.

Milton: Herald of Freedom

 

Would that Thou wert Alive Today

John Milton (1608-1674),was a wonderful poet and a voice which, across the centuries, still sounds in the cause of freedom. Today is the anniversary of his birth.

True, many of his ideas were of the time. It would take a Quentin Skinner to unravel all his philosophical, cultural and political references, deeply embedded as he was in the unfolding of the English Revolution. His paean of praise to ‘unlicensed printing’ – liberty of expression – was hemmed in by his virulent anti-Catholicism. But his very courage in defending freedom of thought echoes throughout the ages.

Milton’s poetry, above all Paradise Lost, has made a deep impression for centuries. For us leftists perhaps lines such as Satan’s pledge to have “courage never to submit or yield”, to “eternal war, irreconcilable to our grand Foe”, and that it were “Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n” rest dear to our hearts.

This extract from the densely argued prose poem, Areopagitica (1644), in defence of free-expression, remains a thunderous riposte to every would-be censor, political tyrant or religious bigot (Priest, Imam, Rabbi), on the planet.

“Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when ascended, and his apostles after him were laid to asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon, who with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that is made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up an down gathering up limb and limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall we do, till her Master’s second coming; he shall bring together every joint and members, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibition to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to out obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.

Welfare Reform: Purnell, Nous Voilà!

 

“I would Prefer Not to.”

“Family, Work, Country.”

(Marshall Gordon Brown’s Device)

 

“It is the duty of the workless Bloke,

to toil and serve the Gentlefolk.”

(Labour jingle)

 

“And Blokettes.”

(Harriet Harman)

 

 

 Now we have it. The White Paper on Welfare Reform (Here ), and  James Purnell everywhere. With the media  indulging him by  interviews with people saying, “make the idle break rocks” (strangely no show for the out-of-work who’d done existing worthless New Deal schemes – I wonder why..).  How folk love to tell others how to live their lives!

 A few points.

Firstly, if we are forced to labour for our benefits, why won’t we get the rate for the job? Or the same rights as other workers? Why indeed is this described as a punishment, “mandatory community service” (BBC site’s words) ? Are the unemployed criminals?

Secondly, Purnell is fond of obscuring the above issue. He tried to claim this was all some kind of Scandinavian plan (the better to hoodwink Labour supporters). That failed. Now watch out for references to pre-1st World War socialists who talked of all having to labour (those who do not work shall not eat). Reservation: I didn’t  know that Keir Hardie and, say, Blatchford wanted the workless to toil, at below any conceivable market wage, at the behest of their supervisors’ whims, for the benefit of  employers and (in this case) Lord and Lady Bountiful (that is, a tranche of the ‘voluntary’ sector which no more recognises workers’ rights than the worst bosses)? Anyway, if these figures are such an authority, why not adopt Hardie’s teetotalism. (Note to self: shouldn’t have said that, some health fanatics in the Cabinet would no doubt like to).

Thirdly, these measures will affect some of the most vulnerable people in society. Much will be said about lone parents and the disabled. Hell knows they will suffer. But one group which I estimate will get little attention are those with psychological problems. These ‘invisible’ incapacities can be crippling. But they vary, as people go ‘up and down’, sometimes able to cope, sometimes utterly devastated.

I speak with some bitterness about this. A friend, Chris (I’m sure he won’t mind me citing his name), that I met about four years ago, is one of them. Despite a long history of mental difficulties (euphemism), he was obliged, as a former regional newspaper reporter, to do the New Deal. This alone brought about a collapse: he spent his time filling in literally hundreds of job applications, writing reports, and badgering the patently ill-equipped staff at the ‘training’ body charged with him.

Chris once gave me a cassette recording of a Radio programme about idleness, in Praise of it, that is. He reckoned that his role model was Bartelby the Scriviner. This is a character of a  short story by Herman Melville. Bartleby, the Clerk of the tale, gradually refuses to do anything at all. He retreats completely not just from social life and work, but from everything. And fades away. His motto, when asked to do anything was “I would prefer not to.”

To no-one’s surprise Chris disappeared at one point and tried to live as a hermit in Rendlesham forest.

 

These are the people Purnell wants out cleaning the streets and other types of ‘community service’  under the watchful eye of his army of overseers.

 

Campaign For a Marxist Party: Letter from A-Near.

 

 Our Glorious Past. Our Spendid Future?

 In the Weekly Worker  ‘Mary Godwin’, reports.

“The Campaign for a Marxist Party has been disbanded. This is a necessary step backwards, if we are to go forward on a serious basis in 2009. The 2008 annual general meeting, held in London on December 6, agreed a motion proposed by the national committee to dissolve the campaign. As the motion explains, some members of the CMP intend to establish a committee in the new year with the aim of promoting the study of Marxism and the unity of Marxists as Marxists. Not the unity of Marxists in yet another crazy halfway house project. ”

It is hard to envisage exactly how this initiative could have succeeded. Being a Marxist, in the sense the CMP at least publicly defined it on ocassion, is a matter of defining oneself as a Marxist.  Or rather not. The actual principles of the CMP are as follows,

1. We are in favour of a planned, democratic socialist society and against the market.

2. Socialism will be achieved in a single step when the working class seizes power over society; there are no intermediate ‘democratic’ or other ‘stages’.

3. The campaign is against the destructive incubus of Stalinism and will seek to make clear the counterrevolutionary and anti-human nature of the Stalinist regimes and parties. Stalinism was responsible for mass slaughter, brutal incarceration and the atomisation of the people of the countries under its control. In addition the Stalinists were responsible for the most cynical and costly betrayals of the working class everywhere from Germany to South Africa – no party which has as its aim the liberation of humanity can do other than condemn the Stalinist current and seek to undo the damage done to Marxism by it.

Let me point out that this excludes any conceptualisation of the ‘transition to socialism’ – a rich lode of theory, developed by figures such as Nicos Poulantzas and Charles Bettelheim. It condemns not just Stalinism, but left Eurocommunism, a variety of ‘centrist’ organisations and Marxisant social democracy, and market socialists who consider themselves Marxist inspired (cf Marx on co-operatives). Without serious analysis to boot. It puts beyond the pale those who consider that a lengthy radical democratic class struggle in the social relations of production and the state are conditions for the introduction of socialism (communism in fact). That those who believe these reconfigurations and transformations are a process not a “single step” are outside the fold. No doubt the fact that the CMP’s definition embraces the SPGB is a step in some direction or other, but not in my view a particularly positive one.

Furthermore though its criticism of Stalinism is welcome the assertion’s relation to the actually existing world’s left is unclear. Only, say, isolated lunatics in the Stalin Society, who don’t have the current to run a torch bulb,  would own up to being Stalinists. But what is meant by  Stalinism in the CMP’s list of principles? Given that the reform-minded South African Communist Party is gracelessly (not to say, obscenely) lumped together with Mass Terror in the Soviet Union we can assume it’s a pretty wide category, covering parties from the Official Communist (Comintern) tradition and later ‘Maoist’ organisations.  Given such origins the assumption appears to be  that such an  ”incubus” does not die. So what remains of it? Does it equally live on in some fashion in amongst Orthodox Communists who are, very partially,  critical of Stalin, such as the Communist Party of Britain (Brezhnevites), The Parti Communiste Français, the entire Marxist-Leninist movement, the Dutch Socialistische Partij , which was M-L  at its origins (one of Europe’s most important left groups) Italy’s Partito della Rifondazione Comunista  (part of which has a Stalinist background) , the Communist Party of India (Marxist)  and Die Linke’s PDS (ex-Communist) wing.  To name but a few. Opps and the CPGB’s own background itself…..

Another issue is defining exactly what Marxism is. It can be strongly argued that its heart is Historical Materialism (the explanatory concepts that unravel how the capitalist mode of production and social formations operate). Its essential couple is the political practice of working class parties inspired by the broad stream of Marxist writing and debate (though by no means exclusively: truth needs no brand-name) to advance a strategy of transforming capitalist social relations into a communist mode of production. But obviously beyond the generalities there is both the vast ‘continent of history’ (as Althusser said) to study and a whole new strategic debate about the means to create present-day Marxist parties.  The whole area is so rich and complex, as any reader of the main Marxist academic theoretical journal, Historical Materialism, can see, that there is definitely a need for a ’study’ group – to say the least – that can relate these conceptual innovations to real politics. In my own opinion this would require breaking with the nostalgia for nationalism and past left movement’s (prevalent in the UK). It would be grounded on a grasp of the neo-liberal regime of accumulation (and crisis) the ‘market state’,. Instead of the Trotskyist or Leninist party form this would mean a mass political force, spiraling across countries like the helix on a snail’s shell. A minimum programme would advance the objective of European Social Republic; a maximum, Democratic (Self-Managed) Communism.

But I digress.

The Democratic Socialist Alliance  has vented its anger at this dissolution. The principal opposition to the CPGB/Weekly Worker has come from the Trotskyist Tendency.  John Pearson rails against “CPGB hijackers” who have unleashed a torrent of “lies, smears, abuse and character assassination”. Now whether they are right or wrong, such in-fighting is highly unpleasant and justifies the wariness many felt at the CMP’s inception (aware of this potential from long years of left activism).

The Weekly Worker notes the statements of Comrade Macnair from the national committee.

“He said we have to recognise that the CMP has failed. Partly because in the current objective conditions the farcical results of the attempt to act as a proto-party discredits the idea of a Marxist party; and partly because of the profound political differences between the DSA minority and the CPGB, which make it impossible for the two groups to work together in such an organisation.”

So that’s it. The differences do seem pretty severe. I can’t say that the CPGB’s principal opponents use of the strident name, Trotskyist Tendency, inspires much affection. It appears to raise a mental drawbridge that doesn’t seem likely to be lowered for some time. Meanwhile, then,  study is always welcome and sometimes calming. Perhaps both sides can have their own groups to do this. But in practical terms I shall continue to back ‘mass’ initiatives, campaigning against the Destruction of the Welfare State and broader movements that are attempting to create a real left presence, such as the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party. My own template remains: The First International. That is a combination of workers’ organisations, oppressed groups, and intellectuals, which began to combine theory and action. But then again that had quite a few bouts of in-fighting….

 

Appeal for Another Europe.

Will the Appeal link up with these Forces?

Appeal for Another Europe: French List for the 2009 Euro-Elections.

This will have wider implications for the European Left.

Les politiques de l’Union européenne ont lourdement contribué à la crise financière, économique, sociale, écologique et démocratique. Elles ont sur nos vies des effets désastreux.
Plus que jamais, il est nécessaire de remettre en cause cette Europe libérale et de construire autrement l’Europe, avec les Européens, et pour eux. En 2005, les peuples français et néerlandais avaient rejeté, par référendum, le traité constitutionnel européen (TCE), sur la base de leur expérience, et après un très large débat sur le contenu et les conséquences de ce traité.

The policies of the European Union have heavily contributed to the economic, social, ecological , democratic, and financial crises. They have had a devastating effect on our lives. More than ever we have to put into question the  neo-liberal Europe, and construct, through other means, another Europe, by Europeans and for them. In 2005 the French and Dutch people rejected the European Constitutional Treaty, on the basis of their experience and after a broad debate on the content and consequences of that Treaty.

Un projet d’Europe sociale, écologiste, démocratique et de paix, c’est-à-dire de coopération et non de concurrence entre les peuples, en Europe comme dans le monde, avec les changements des institutions et des traités internationaux que cela implique. Avec une harmonisation des droits par le haut, favorisant une meilleure répartition des richesses.

We need a project for a social, ecological, democratic and peaceful Europe, based on co-operation not competition between the peoples, with all the institutional changes and new international treaties that this implies. With equality of rights brought up to the highest level, to encourage a better distribution of wealth.

.. alors qu’au sein du Parti socialiste dominent les forces favorables au traité de Lisbonne et à l’Europe libérale, dont la crise montre la nocivité et l’échec.
Pour sortir de cette impasse et rendre possibles d’autres choix, nous appelons toutes les forces de la gauche de transformation sociale et écologiste à faire front commun.

Inside the Socialist Party those who favour the Lisbon Treaty and a neo-Liberal Europe, are in charge. The crisis shows how noxious these policies are. To get out of this dead-end and to make way for other strategies, we appeal to the whole radical and ecological left to come together in a common front.

That is for a national united French Left List for the 2009 European Elections.

Jean-Jacques Boislaroussie, responsable des Alternatifs ;
Patrick Braouezec, député (PCF) de Seine-Saint-Denis ;
Marc Dolez, député du Nord, cofondateur du Parti de gauche ;
Annie Ernaux, écrivain ;
Jacques Généreux, économiste ;
Susan George, présidente d’honneur d’Attac France ;
Robert Guédiguian, cinéaste ;
Gérard Mauger, sociologue ;
Michel Onfray, philosophe ;
Christian Picquet, membre du courant Unir de la LCR ;
Yves Salesse, responsable des Collectifs unitaires ;
Denis Sieffert, directeur de Politis.

For more Information see: Politis and compare the programme with the interesting Platform of the European left.

Reflecting on this: perhaps a political log-jam on the Left is being broken in France. This Appeal is signed by a broad range of figures, from ‘altermondialistes’ (‘anti/other-globalisation), greens, alternatives (self-management left), Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Parti de Gauche, anti-liberal collectives (from the ‘Non’ campaign in 2005), the independent  left weekly Politis, the Parti Communiste Français, the famous atheist writer, Michel Onfray,  and last, but not least, Christophe Picquet of the ‘Unite’ tendency of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire.

Apparently the so-called ‘liquidationists‘ (that is,  the independent-minded democratic and republican left, like Picquet) are well on the way to building a campaign of practical unity. One awaits the PCF’s response to the Appeal, which may be favourable. As with others from the galaxy of left of the Socialist Party ex-Communist, Republican left and alternatives, initiatives, clubs and associations now expanding exponentially. Meanwhile it will be interesting to see how the LCR reacts to this call. Do they intend to ride alone when they found the Nouveau parti anti-capitaliste (NPA)? or co-operate? I have heard strong indications, from good authority, ordinary LCR members, that the number of supporters who will join the NPA is far lower than the 11,000 claimed. More in the range of 6,000. That may weigh on their decision.

Spokesman: Ken Coates For the European Left Initiatives.

Just a quick note: Ken Coates has sent out a mailing to his contacts (got it this morning) with material about the new French Left Party (blogged below) and Die Linke.  The documents inside include an article by Oskar Lafontaine (Left Parties Everywhere) , and an English translation of a speech the German Socialist gave to the French Parti de Gauche initiative. Another print-out is the programme for the Euro-elections by the European Left (Link). He ends by asking, “Will there be an answering response to the developments on the Continent?”

The Spokesman (100) has a special issue, he announces, dedicated to the subject. Nothing as yet on the  Bertrand Russell Foundation site about the latest developments. (Here)

Support for a Common Front with Mélenchon in the Euro-Elections Grows in French Communist Party.

PCF: Still Searching for a Reason for its Existence?

Last weekend the Parti Communiste Français (PCF)  held its Congrès. 900 delegates, representing  its 130,000 members, debated the Party’s future. With only 1,93% of votes in last year’s French Presidential elections, and its Parliamentary representation down to 19, the PCF faces a serious crisis. Nevertheless the Conference gave its support to the Head of the reigning team led by Marie-George Buffet, at 67,72% of ballots cast. The organisation now faces the task of implementing their new ‘common basis’ – which calls for a profound transformation of PCF structures enthused by campaigning and radical energy.

Though one must comment that this document does not exactly shine with clarity and rigorous analysis. Thus:a key principle is that faced with a deep economic and political crisis, the PCF and the left have to open up to «des chemins concrets aux politiques de changement transformatrices » (concrete paths to the policies of transformative change). So be it.

The ‘Communistes unitaires’, who advocate alliances with the radical anti-globalisation Left (though wary of  the LCR’s project of a New Anti-Capitalist Party, NPA)  got 16,38% for their List for the PCF National Council. Despite earlier accusations of a purge directed against them they will be represented on this body on a proportional basis.  The ‘orthodox’ currents (there are no formal tendencies in the PCF), got 10,26% and 5,62%. The ‘Unitaries’ accused Buffet, despite her announced intention to run the Party on a ‘collegial’ basis, of forcing through over her critics’ heads, concessions to these remnants of classic French Official Communists. The former Communist Chief, Robert Hue, is setting up his own group outwith (calling it a party would be too kind) and  has distanced himself from any alliance with radical forces to the left of the Parti Socialiste (here).

Libération reports today that  Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s appeal for a common left front for the 2009 European elections was heavily applauded on Saturday by the delegates. (Libération) This adds to the already significant forces aligned for this new initiative. It hardly needs emphasising that the PCF’s membership dwarfs any other group’s on the radical left, and with its links with the union federation the CGT (looser than in the past it is true), it remains a force within the working class movement. Considerably more, to say the least, than the NPA, for all Olivier Besancenot’s undoubted popular appeal.

If the alliance for the European Elections succeeds (even if only in drawing in the left) we will see further evidence of  a Continent-wide trend towards a new radical democratic left pole. That is neither ‘third way’ capitalism, failing social democracy, Gordon Brown’s Workhouse and Market State, the Green alliances of vain self-seeking liberals and harmless cranks, or maximalist Trotskyism.

Or so Tendance Coatesy says in its most jargon ridden moments.

Political Personality of the Year: Nominate Purnell and Mandelson Now!

It’s Time to Back James and Mandy.

It’s that time of year again. Channel Four has issued the call for its Annual Political Awards (here).  It is appropriate that us commoners will not be the ones to vote on all the much-coveted prizes, that’s for our betters to decide, but we can make Nominations and cast our ballots for the Channel 4 News Political Impact Award 2009.

James Purnell  is the obvious first choice. A tireless campaigner against fecklessness, idleness and sloth,  he is slated to make a compulsory impact on the lives of millions of people. Charming, well-spoken, with a background at the ‘coal face’ of advising, and Corporate Planning, an expert on Private Equity and Venture Capital, this former Parliamentary dogsbody is well-placed to sort out the problems of mass unemployment. Nominate this worthy successor to Sir William Beveridge now.

Peter Mandelson  (Baron Mandelson). Already running in the category of  Politician’s Politician. But Mandy would not say no to an extra prize, would he? With a few new E-Mail addresses (easy-peasy on Hot Mail) we can get him in the above race. His Baronship  could squeeze out any competition to James Purnell.

New Parti de Gauche: Policies in Question.

 

 Who Ate all the Greens’ Pies?

This morning on France-Inter Daniel Cohen-Bendit was the political invite of the day. He waffled about his success in convincing the, shrinking,  French Parti Vert (Dominique Voynet, Presidential candidate in  2007 got 1,57% of the vote in the First Round) to set up a broad list for the European Elections. This campaign has drawn in José Bové (who should have known better) and a motley crew of liberals, self-publicists (the telly presenter, Hulot) pure ecologists and the kind of people Danny works with in his capacity as leading figure in the  European Parliament Green Group – otherwise known as snotty self-important believers in marrying Greenery and the market. The Ecology Manifesto for next year’s election campaign centres on: ” la mutation écologique et sociale comme colonne vertébrale de la communauté de destin des peuples européens, l’Europe deviendrait le moteur d’un nouveau foyer de civilisation.” (ecological and social change, as the backbone of the European community of fate.  Europe will become the new home of civilisation. N.B. it reads as badly in French as this so don’t blame my lousy translation).

So it was with no surprise that one heard Danny le rouge arrogantly dismiss criticism. The Interviewer put it to him that Jean-Luc Mélenchon  described him as “centre right”. With his customary finesse, or bumptuous bile, he opined that “je m’en fous” ( couldn’t give a toss) about what Mélenchon says about anything. Then the dagger went in: these people are “Eurosceptics” and we are far a real democratic Europe.

Danny, hard as it to admit it, has a point.

There are important political difficulties about the Parti de Gauche project. Samy Johnsua in the LCR’s Rouge  has, quite rightly, pointed to a number of ambiguities. There is the question of the PG’s acceptance of the possibility of a post-electoral agreement with the Parti Socialiste – something for reasons of their own, a desire for utter purity perhaps, the LCR rejects. Then there are more fundamental disagreements. These concern the attempt to join together a ‘going beyond’ capitalism with an acceptance of the mixed economy, and the PG’s support for representative democracy. Personally I have no problem with either: a minimum programme must recognise that the first priority is to reestablish a commanding public sector, but let a large swathe of commercial  enterprises co-exist with this, while introducing measures for self-management and direct (internal) consumer power in both sectors. On the other area it is important to support reforms in representative democracy, but direct democracy is best  a local, limited, arrangement in the first instance. The idea of reconstructing the state on a soviet model is frankly ludicrous (and anti-democratic since it excludes non-workers). So unless the LCR is proposing to bring everything, up to hot chestnut sellers, under social ownership, and replace the Assemblée National with a new series of Communes, I suggest they shut up on this.

However, there remains a very vexing issue: a social Europe can’t be built without having a positive programme outlining how to replace it. Otherwise you simply break it up back into strongly sovereign capitalist states – even more at the mercy of the world market and its financial flows. That is the aim of the Sovereigntist (Euro-sceptic nationalist left, such as France’s Lambertists, the Parti Ouvrier Independent - their current name in case you’d missed that one). Or as Johnsua puts it, we ought to say,  ”non au nom d’un repli sur les frontières nationales, mais d’une ouverture internationaliste, européenne et mondiale” (a no to  retrenching inside national borders, instead an internationalist opening, European and worldwide).

Quite right comrade.

In fact one can say that the choice between campaigning for a social Europe and the nationalist retreat to (old or new) State Fortresses should be confronted by every section of the European Left, including in the U.K.

SWP: The Spirit of Sects.

“ Yesterday upon a Site,

I saw a Line that that wasn’t Right,

It wasn’t right  again Today,

I wish that Line would go away!”

                  Emily Thribbs (aged eight).

This extract is from a Tendance Coatey forthcoming Magnum Opus,

On the Spirit of Sects.

“Those who have the least character to spare can least afford to part with their good word to others; a losing cause is always the most divided against itself.”

 On Jealousy and the Spirit of Party. Richard Hazlitt.

 

Political factionalism is, intrinsically, no more damaging or a threat to social order than cabals in golf-clubs, cliques in 18th Century coffee-shops or feuds in football. On condition, naturally, that their supporters are not armed, or bent on inflicting violent physical damage on their opponents. For all of Hazlitt’s dismissal, I would think it more appropriate to praise people’s ability to find fault with others while sticking with their own group, to split, to gossip, to fight, to reconcile, and to weigh everything up to the light of their own party’s standpoint. The nature of factionalism lies in the springs of decision-making and the dialectic of loyalties and side-switching – or betrayals from another viewpoint. A person without a party, or more precisely a faction, is a person without any political ability. To be deeply immersed in politics is to take sides. A person above factions is the worst enemy of democracy, someone who refuses to take her opponents seriously enough to dislike them, a reconciler who cannot in reality admit contradiction at all. The worst political sectarians are those who claim to loathe all sectarians.” 

**********

Naturally a major source of this great work’s research is the Socialist Unity site. This has offered the highly entertaining spectacle of Respect tearing itself apart, the rise of the MP for Woolies, George Galloway (unaccountably not performing as Puss-in-Boots at Thogmorton Pier), and the delightful scene of the SWP ripping itself to shreds.

 

Here are some random comments.

From Neil Davidson’s analysis of the crisis in the SWP. Is there a difficulty in that the core SWP membership is composed, amongst some fine individuals, of waifs, strays and it is led by sociopaths? Apparently not:  “the party is full of extremely talented individuals.”

“The problem is rather that there seems to be a limit beyond which the Party is unable to grow.”

Build the Party.

“We are the only real revolutionary party in Britain, but let us not be so complacent as to imagine that other forces, with superficially plausible arguments and strategies, will not seek to take advantage of a new upsurge, if we are not there to put our arguments.”

Note to self: Must Recognise that the SWP is the only real revolutionary Party in Britain.

Davidson concludes with a Timely Warning: one response to our (SWP’s) crisis may be “that our internal discussions may find their way into the websites and publications of the sectarian left, once rightly described by George Lichtheim as “tiny ferocious creatures devouring each other in a drop of water””.

Further note to self: must not devour any more little angry creatures this morning.

Then we turn to an old favourite, Chris Harman, “Underlying the discontent is a clear sense that the CC failed to prevent some of its members making mistakes in the building of Respect, in dealing with Galloway’s decisions to smash it if it did not suit his own purposes, and then in coping with the aftermath of the split.”

Galloway, poor much-defamed man, simply wanted a well-paid stage in which to parade his ego. It was cruel to have tried to deny him that pleasure. The SWP was rightly punished. It has now, nevertheless, learnt its lesson:

“We need a unified CC, capable of acting decisively. That is the only way the party can respond to sudden changes in the objective circumstances as the crisis develops—and it is the only way the party as a whole can judge whether the leadership is responding correctly.”

Get rid of the Opposition! Remove the Spavined Splitters! Unity, Unity, what Benefits are due to thy name!

Ex-Leader of French Socialist Left Under Police Investigation.

Who’s Got an Account to Settle with Dray?

A Rough Guide To  How French Politics Work (Part 227).

Julien Dray, former Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire student activist and until recently a leading figure on the French Socialist Party Left,  (Gauche Socialiste) is under police invesitagation (here). The Socialist M.P. (deputy) for  l’Essonne was visited by the Police at his Paris home this Friday. It is alleged that a total of 351.017 euros was paid to his funds, from bank accounts belonging to the association of  Les Parrains (sponsors) de SOS Racisme and from the Fédération indépendante et démocratique lycéenne (Fidl) – a secondary school student union. That this is a case of money-laundering. The affair has been marked by a  series of leaks to the Media which have led Dray’s lawyers to protest that the Deputy has nothing to hide, and that these reports undermine the presumption of innocence. (Le Monde)

Observers of the French left will note that there are long-standing cases of the anti-racist organisation, SOS-Racisme, being used by the Parti Socialiste. That there is an equally lengthy history of French student and lycéen associations being tapped as a source of cash by Parti Socialiste politicians who have emerged from that background (one a few years back  in particular involved ex-Lambertists). And that there is a big mobilisation underway of secondary-school students against Sarkozy plans to ‘reform’ the education system, which accusations against the unions organising them might weaken.

Not to mention the fact that Julien Dray’s decision to throw in his lot with Ségolène Royal has not made him universally popular.

Secularist Sunday Notes.

Radio Four’s interminable religious programme Sunday this morning was more than the usual pile of cretinous cack-handed cackling. There was a bloke defending Rowan Williams criticism of ”unbridled capitalism”  and a vision of a market society based on social justice, free of exploitation. Whatever. An Islamic banker claiming that the Qu’ranic based rules would have prevented the global financial crisis  and that the rentier states that follow them are saving the West’s economies. It’s hard to see why there are still people who haven’t recognised that religion is there to feed the hungry, end poverty and stuff our faces with gold.

No-one who’s a major player on the god-botherer front, apart from some admirable Methodists, seems to have got round to criticising the Purnell ‘reforms’ of the Welfare State. These will leave millions on shrinking benefits languish in the limbo of half-cocked ‘training’ schemes, or in obligatory ‘voluntary’ labour, exploited by razor-tooth usurers (the proposed private providers of the ‘Social Fund’).  I notice that Catholics are more vexed at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill than this assault on human rights. Still you must give them a prize for consistency. The Vatican has always been concerned with human life, come what may. One only has to look at the role the Catholic clergy  of Rwanda played in the genocide to see how far they are willing to stretch an arm and a limb (and skulls, fingers and torsos) to see this carried out.

Meanwhile Spain is witnessing the biggest confrontation between secularists and the Church since the 1930s. The issue at present dividing the country (after tussles over ending the Catholics’ privileged tax regime, same-sex marriage, euthanasia and other ethical subjects)  is Civic Education. That is the José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero government’s attempt to introduce universal school courses (with no exceptions for the massively subsidised Catholic private sector) explaining equality, democracy and human rights – not to the taste of those crusty old Cathos. Where they have been, with admirable determination, introduced into confessional schools, the ecclesiastical have incited parents to boycott the lessons.

Honi soit qui mal y pense!

Callinicos, SWP: Chief Big Heap?

SWP Maître à Penseur.

“Blackmail”, “recklessness and unaccountability”  “the unrelenting struggle of an undeniably talented comrade to shield himself for being held to account for the mistakes he has made”. John Rees is well put in his place by the SWP’s leading theoretician and international Marxist leader, Alex Callinicos.

Why does he stoop so (or rave) to conquer? Here’s a man who’s led a sheltered academic life, who produces readable and sometimes stimulating tomes on subjects such as Postmodernism (1991: Against Postmodernism: a Marxist critique (Cambridge: Polity Press). Marxist historical research (1995: Theories and narratives(Cambridge: Polity Press) political theories of Justice and Equality (Rawls, communitarianism etc), 2000: Equality (Themes for the 21st Century)(Cambridge: Polity Press). a substantial critique of Blair, Mandelson,  and Gidden’s ideological pretentions 2 002: Against the Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press). and some engaging, if largely off -the-wall, wishful thinking, anti-globalisation stuff, 2003: An anti-Capitalist manifesto (Cambridge: Polity Press). 

Most people would be satisfied with that. They would have no wish to be (as the Weekly Worker calls them) Philosopher Kings. Not so Callinicos! He truly seems to think that his position at the head of  the band of waifs and strays he represents makes him an organic intellectual. The chap sees no reason to limit his good advice to the theoretical sphere. He is, or at least, thinks he is, engaged in real politics, albeit of a curious kind in which he considers himself a Delphic Oracle for the World’s Left.

So, he has seen fit for a long time to criticise Le Monde Diplomatique and the ATTAC movement, no doubt on the justified grounds that they told his lot to piss off when they tried to do a bit of entryism. More recently Callinicos has scolded the French left for its failure to adopt the successful SWP approach to Islamicism. He denounces the embrace of militant secularism and republicanism by many of them (Marxists, Muslims and Religion: Anglo-French Attitudes Historical Materialism. Vol 16. No.2. 2008). Written before his own comrades attacked the de facto Respect alliance with right-wing Islamicists, he defends the record of that body (though does not explicitly cite their dealings with the Jamaat-I-Islami in the East End, and the Moslem Brotherhood and its satellites  in the StWC’s campaigning). In another recent case Callinicos has taken upon himself to offer rulings to the Fourth International (LCR variety) on their(admittedly cretinous) support for the Sinistra Critica during the last Italian elections. No doubt Besancenot is waiting with bated breath for the next tonne of SWP’s comradely instructions on how to build the Nouveau parti anti-capitaliste (NPA).

Now the Trotskyist tradition has long dealt in what one might called divination  by necromancy: calling up the dead spirits of Trotsky and Lenin to settle disputes. But Callinicos has his peculiarly obnoxious addition to an already revolting practice: he shrouds the results in bile.  According to reliable accounts AC  resembles Charles Hawtry’s character in Carry on Cowboy: the mild mannered Indian Chief Big Heap. After a few glasses of firewater, total transformation: CBH  is ready to massacre the palefaces!

So, one minute Callinicos is all gentle theoretical musings; the next, after a stiff draught of Party-Line,  it’s: Shoot the slavering hyenas!! 

Just a point: the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire has for many years made the main lines of its  internal discussions available to anyone interested. The Web forum associated with them (Forum marxiste révolutionnaire) posts wide-ranging discussions, from virulently critical to hard-line supportive, of its politics. Apparently it is beyond the wit, or the intention, of the SWP to permit such freedom. So we rely on ‘leaked’ documents on the Socialist Unity site.  And oracles.

Christmas Comes Cassoulet.

Tendance Marxist Christmas: all the Ingredients Made by Workers!

 

Tendance Coatesy is celebrating the festive season for a few days. We will be plotting, thinking of the next snide and uncalled for attack on the glory that is  Britain’s Government and certain elements on the British left, not to mention any other left groups around in the Solar System and beyond.

 Look on our works ye mighty, and, if it’s not too much trouble, despair.

Que la fête commence!

Darfur: the Easily Forgotten War

Wrong Skin Colour?

I post on this for one simple reason: the Israeli attack on Gaza, wholly unjustified,  will obscure the far greater war crimes being carried out by the Sudanese Islamicists against the people of Darfur. The janjaweed militas can be compared to the Hutu murderers, and indeed to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

I realise that for a certain type of European the dislike of Israel is paramount. For all Islamicists it is an article of faith that the  Tel Aviv State is a monstrous aberration that must be wiped from the map. For certain leftists, to their shame, ‘Zionism’ is a word describing some kind of nest of conspiracies.

I have only the words on this clavier to condemn the killings in Gaza.

Would that a few more would do something to alleviate the suffering of the people of Darfur.

But they are black, and perhaps count for little.

Praise for Human Rights Activists.

And at Last Comes the Age of Kant!

Kant said somewhere that he was not sure of the existence of god, but that of one thing he was certain: he knew that there were people of good will. There truly are good people in this world. Here are some.

 

Praise be to them!

Awami League Wins Landslide in Bangladesh.

 

Bangladeshis say NO to Galloway-style Politics!

Good news, really good news, comrades. The secular left-leaning (backed by the Left bloc) Awami League has won a landslide victory in the Bangladesh General Elections. 

The grand alliance has clinched two-thirds majority with 261 seats compared to the BNP-led four-party alliance’s 30, down from 217 in 2001.

The cause of the peoples is not yet dead!

 

The fascist organisation, Jamaat-e-Islami, a central ally of Galloway’s Respect in East London, got the following result:

Jamaat-e-Islami, the BNP’s key ally in the four-party alliance, has seen its once-proud seat tally plummet from 17 in 2001 to a humiliating two, in what appears to be a wholesale rejection of the party by the voters.

 

Funny I don’t see a mention of this on the Respect Renewal site.

Jamaat Condemens.

 

 Is it Diversity Training Again?

LAHORE, Dec 29: Jamaat-e-Islami ameer Qazi Hussain Ahmad has said that Israeli bombing on Gaza and massacre of Palestinians is shaking Ummah’s conscience but the delay in calling meetings of OIC and Arab League is the worst betrayal with the innocent blood of Palestinian Muslims.

 

George Galloway  concurs: “We stand in solidarity with the protests called by diverse groups across Britain.”

It is true that every socialist and leftist should be against the Israeli actions. They are frankly unpardonable.

Just a point though but Galloway’s mates in the Jammat seem to think that there are no such people as Palestinian atheists, or indeed Christians.

 

Diversity? Problem sorted!

Tommy Sheridan and Big Brother: Exposed!

Sheridan and a Fellow Media Star.

I thought Ian Bone was, well, like taking the piss when he announced on his Blog  that Tommy Sheridan was going to be on celeb Big Brother. Turns out it’s bleeding true!

Apparently though oor Tommy has a few issues with the Polis to sort out while he performs (here).

I wonder what other non-UK European lefties who inhabit the Blogsophere think of the Tartan Tosser winding up on the same the path as Kitty Galloway.

What was the Burn’s line about a parcel of rouges in a nation?

Here is some of it here (I cut the anti-English cack):

“What force or guile could not subdue
Thro’ many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor’s wages.”

Well said my good man.

Why I Shall Not Be Demonstrating Today.

They Murder our Comrades.

The Israeli assault on Gaza should be condemned by all progressive humanity. I have few words to express my feelings when I saw the Channel Four broadcast with a Palestinian woman showing how she was reading her children the story of Cinderella when the bombs fell. That is a reality.

I cannot demonstrate against ‘Zionism’ today because I will not and will never align myself with Hamas, and its British Islamist supporters.

 

Ever.

Parti Socialiste: Self-destruction Spiral.

 

 From Chartist, just published. (It is from the Print-Edition not the reduced On-Line one).

PARTI SOCIALISTE: IS PARIS WORTH THIS MESS?  ANDREW COATES.

 

 “Psychodrama”, “Sadness”, even “the Night of the Long Knives”. Words that crop up in the wake of the French Parti Socialiste’s (PS) November Reims Conference. The fight for the key post of General Secretary, which ended as a duel between Ségèlone Royal and Martine Aubry, was extraordinarily vicious. When the initial results came to a difference of 42 votes (in Aubry’s favour) there were threats of legal challenges to alleged fraud, even a demonstration outside the Party’s HQ. A final party Commission decision, taken in an atmosphere described as that of the Supreme Soviet, was reached on the 26^th of November gave Aubry victory with an advance of 102 ballots (134 790 had been cast). Royal accepted defeat but announced that her “battle will continue” (Le Monde 27.11.2008). The new leader, Mayor of Lille, now faces an uphill task to rebuild Socialist confidence, and prepare for the 2012 Presidential elections.

 

How have the Socialists found themselves in such a mess? The roots lie in the disastrous score PS leader, and former Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, got in the 2002 Presidential contest with Jacques Chirac. Jospin was eliminated in the first round with only 16%, which led to a run-off between far-right Le Pen and the Gaullist – the latter won the Presidency comfortably. In 2007 Ségolène Royal did much better, with 25, 87%. She lost however in the second round to Nicolas Sarkozy: 46,94% to 53,06%. Proving himself an adroit politician Sarkozy toned down his hard-line image by recruiting centre-left ministers (such as Bernard Kouchner), and several women of a North African background. Initially a neo-liberal the President has proved flexible enough to denounce ‘laissez faire’ capitalism during the recent crisis. While the Socialists have done well in local elections they have been unable to mount a serious national challenge. While their traditional rivals on the left, such as the Parti Communist Français (PCF) have declined to electoral insignificance, a new rival, Olivier Besancenot’s Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste (NPA), has made its mark. The Trotskyist ‘postie’ scored up to 12% voting intentions in opinion polls (roughly half a PS candidate’s).

 

The run-up to the Reims Congress revealed a vacuum at the heart of the Socialists. It exacerbated their long-standing tendency to split around personalities (the famous ‘elephants’ of the party). The future shape and of the party divided these figures. In 2006 there were measures to recruit ‘supporters’ at a reduced subscription rate (not too dissimilar to some Labour proposals), which resulted in 100,000 new members. This formed the base of Royal’s support. But while the PS has backing amongst the working class (24% in the Presidentials first round) a major weakness of the organisation is that less than 5% of its adherents are blue-collar workers. Indeed apart from support amongst public employees it is hard to identify exactly any definite class stratum supporting them. Ignoring this problem Royal wants to recruit on an even looser basis, and make decisions by internal referendums rather than through the traditional highly structured sections (branches).  Hence an underlying clash has emerged between two conceptions of the party: Aubry has repeatedly accused Royal of wanting to transform the PS into a “party of supporters” (Le Monde 18.11.08).  A pop-star style rally in September of 4,000 of her admirers at the Zénith stadium increased this suspicion. Doubts about the ex-Presidential candidate increased when she appeared to advocate an alliance with the centrist party, the MoDems of François Bayrou.

 

Ideological divisions have declined. The new PS Declaration of Principles in April 2008 talked of democratic socialism in terms of the heritage of the Enlightenment, defined themselves primarily as republicans, though admitted a ‘critique of capitalism’. This blotted out, almost without debate, the Socialists’ own (largely verbal) references to class struggle and a rupture with capitalism. A flurry of books by leading PS figures this year, such as Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë began to talk of being ‘social-liberals’ rather than socialists (Aubry noticeably attacked this, considering her moderate socialism was democratic and needed no extra qualification). Recent criticisms of finance capitalism have not seriously reconnected the PS with its left heritage.

 

The Socialists’ central body, the Conseil National, is proportionally elected, on the basis of votes for ‘motions’: platforms of its different ‘currents’. This year their content was more than usually opaque. A Kremlinologist would feel at home. All proposed some form of state intervention to make France more egalitarian, ecological plans, anti-poverty measures, and international financial regulation. Benoît Hamon (motion, Reconquêtes), who called for some strong state economic intervention and resented the party’s left, won 18,52% This encouraged the former Young Socialist Leader to stand in the first round for Party secretary where he got 22,6%. He eventually backed Aubry. However the left had halved its support. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, one of its historic leaders, resigned on the eve of Congress. He asserted that the PS had lost all sense of direction and was drifting towards becoming a party of the centre-left. He announced his intention to set up a new left party, based on the German Die Linke, that would try for a common platform with the non-PS in next year’s European elections. (Le Monde. 14.11.2008).

The task now is to integrate Royal’s backers into Party positions. All the signs are that the Aubry-Royal clash is far from over. There appears to be a degree of mutual loathing between the two camps that is unlikely to dissipate. Added to the burning sauce is the enmity between Royal and her former partner, outgoing PS General Secretary, François Holland. It is a measure of the Socialists’ confusion that the supporters of each include personalities from every side: Ségolène’s lieutenants include Pellion, from the right, and Dray, a former Trotskyist (LCR) student leader. Aubry, who is pro-European, is backed by those who actively campaigned for a ‘Non’ vote in the vote on the European Constitutional project, such as former P.M. Laurent Fabius, as well as the social democratic ‘Second Left’ leader (a current she has been close to) Michel Rocard. Not to mention Hamon and the ‘hard left’ Henri Emmannuelli.

 

Such a political kaleidoscope may bedazzle the activists. It blinds the electorate. This at a time when Sarkozy is taking personal control of the State, and subordinating the public media to his will. At one point, at the start of new millennium, it seemed as if the Parti Socialiste would offer a way of combining a degree of left-wing principle with practical progressive reforms. Now the worst features of the old SFIO (the PS’s predecessor) – clans, naked power struggles, high-flown rhetoric and low blows – appear to have been revived. Alternative democratic socialist voices are splintered in a variety of parties of which Mélenchon’s is but one. This can only strengthen the hand of those calling for Besancenot’s maximalist programme.

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Have Mixed Feelings About the Anti-War Demos.

 

I Could Never be on a Demo with Them.

 

(apart from the fact that I have physically fought Khominists in the streets of Paris).

 

Israel’s Attack on Gaza: this revolts. Respected comrades, such as Modernity, Dave Broder and Enty, have expresed their views, elsewhere and on this Blog . Posted extensively   on the Blogosphere, views are so numerous no-one can keep abreast of them. Still: very valuable thoughts.

 

Saw Bianca Jagger on the telly on Saturday. Since she is one of the doughtiest fighters for human rights in the world, she almost convinced  me it was right to stand at the front of the pro-Palestinian demo with likes of Galloway.

With the racist supporters of Hamas?

Lobby and Dave make the weighty point that if we do not fight the attack through the demos that were organised, what else do we do?

 

One of the ideas of Blogging is that we sail out views. We  try to respond to these whatever is said.

When I checked the Blog last afternoon in Ipswich Library a mate of mine, a black guy (not that that’s totally relevant execept he dresses with Dreadlocks and so forth) very militant during the attack on Iraq, saw me. Came over and was staring at the Site. Said, “Yes, That’s exactly why I’m hesitating about joining these movements: I can’t stand these anti-gay, anti-women Islamists  - in fact I hate their guts (and he added something about dope and beer of less political interest).

I was at a loss what to say.

Don’t Bother with Big Brother: Gail to Sheridan.

A Real Working Class Hero with one of Tommy’s Ain Folk.

From the Scotsman, today,

 Don’t Bother with Big Brother ye puir auld numpty ! (quote with some elaboration)

By MARTYN McLAUGHLIN

“(Gail Sheridan’s encouraging words to her husband before he entered the Celebrity BB house)

TOMMY Sheridan was warned against taking part in the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother, by his wife.

Gail Sheridan told the former MSP he was at risk of being deliberately misrepresented by the show’s producers, adding that his political beliefs might win him few fans among viewers.”

There I was hoping Tommy’d do a Rab C. Nesbitt and down some swallies in public (like Rab he’s taken the Pledge they say but those who watched the BBC Documentary on Rab know how long that lasts) and grab a few luscious ladies. All we get is some poncing around in a lefty-T Shirt and a few words of ..er, of what?

More amusing seeing that LA Rapper (whatever his name is)  getting totally out of his depth and telling  Terry Christian that he had a thick accent!

Ipswich Port: Gateway to Hell. Brits Thinks Animals More Important than, er, Everything Else.

 

 

Cuddly Green Ian Bone’s Comrades?

Ipswich Port: Gateway to Hell (today EADT and Evening Star). Everything you need to know about animal rights’ protesters is in this story. The Evening Star reports (here). Bear in mind, these are yer fluffy lot, who don’t (‘in principle’) go in for writing hundreds of letters to neighbours accusing animal researchers of being paedophiles,  and bring misery to some fine scientists, and their families.

Apparently our town’s port may (or may not) be allowing the export of live animals. The local animal rights lot are such incompetents that they once had a demo outside the Co-Op for the old canards, despite the fact that store doesn’t sell delicious duck. So who can judge, as yet?

Now maybe Mary’s Little Lamb,  may dread a sea voyage. Maybe Veronica the Veal likes ‘em. I neither know nor care. Nor about animals, raised by farmers, to die, dying. As if I could even compare that to scenes of horror we see on the telly every night and the plight of the human victims. That brings  to all our eyes something really important about human existence and what we should be fighting for, or rather against.

All I know is that with what’s happening in Gaza, Central Africa (the one that always gets ignored by the left), Iraq, and Afghanistan, not to mention Latin America, and indeed our own Land of Gradgrind and the Workhouse, might have thought of other priorities than standing in the Whertsead Road screaming hysterically about the plight of a few beasts.

I didn’t  notice any well-known ‘anarchist’ faces in the paper, or their mates the Greens, but they may well have been there.  The harmless cranks of the so-called East Anglian Social Forum will be lending their backing. or some of them. No doubt. Even Ian Bone, in his dotage, has taken to loving fury creatures (okay in his case he loathes Upper Class Hunters but he has posted somewhere, if I could be arsed to find it, joining some animal rights’ demo in London).

Here’s to me tea of foie gras and chips!

Un journaliste viré (kicked out) d’une conférence (lecture) de Tariq Ramadan

Is this most boring duplicituous book ever written about Islam’s Founder?

LIBERTÉ DE LA PRESSE -Hier soir, un journaliste de la Voix du Nord, Lakhdar Belaïd, a été éjecté d’une conférence publique à la mosquée de Lille-Sud sous les yeux de ses confrères. Tariq Ramadan s’y exprimait surla Palestine. Le recteur de la mosquée, Amar Lasfar, a justifié ce geste devant l’assemblée en l’accusant d’avoir écrit «des mensonges», et précisant que «tout journaliste qui joue de la sorte avec nous, nous saurons lui dire que nos portes ne lui sont pas ouvertes» (Libération: 8.1.2009, read more here)

 

“Press Freedom. Yesterday a journalist of the Voix du Nord, Lakhdar Belaïd, was ejected, in the presence of his journalist colleagues,  from a Public Lecture  at the Southern Lille Mosque given by Tariq Ramadan on Palestine. The Head of the Mosque justified this act in front of the audience by saying the reporter had written ‘lies’, and that “any journalist who plays around with us should know that our doors are not open to him.”

Tariq Ramadan is presented in Britain as the voice of reasonable Islam. A pompous and fairly unreadable one (as anyone who has glanced at his portentous writings knows). His website, written in American, is on a par. This figure is lauded by those seeking  a progressive Isalmicism (on the grounds that Ramadan has vaguely criticised the financial crisis of globalisation and calls for something called ‘justice’ – not explained in detail). Oh and he calls for some moratorium on Sharia punishments (not their abolition Nota Bene).

He also  associates with people who take such exception to a journalist who has upset the Mosque, that they take it upon themsleves to prevent him from doing his job. Because, apparently, he wrote something which they didn’t like and they consider him a ’social-traître ’(needs no translating).  I wonder if many democratic organisations would fling out a journalist from their public meetings on such grounds?

Will Ramadan stand up for that journalist’s write to report in liberty? Or will it be taken that Mosques have a special right to hold public events and only allow reporting that is favourable to them?

New Left Review Shall be Beaten on its Interlingual Internationalism.

 Tendance Coatesy Manifesto.

The latest issue of New Left Review contains a review article by something which has long claimed to be a Marxist, Fredric Jameson. No doubt a decent geezer, kind to his geese, but this ill-written piece contains more idiomatic German phases and  words, without translation, than the normal chippie user can grasp. 

As an internationalist organisation with deep roots in the expanding multi-disciplinary, anti-colonial, feminist and gender studies  that are leading  the proletariat to victory, we would like to point out certain polices of Tendance Coatesy. All members must have:

 

• Fluency in Hittite (old Kingdom).
• A Degree in Natural Science.
• Composed a Poem in Attic Greek.

 

One hopes that these levels of achievement will be shared by the revolutionary working class. In the meantime: New Left Review:  you ain’t even started on the level!

Why I am Glad I did not Demonstrate with Hamas Yesterday.

No Comment.

I was talking to my sister on the phone early last night. Subject comes up: what are we to do about our opposition to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. I said I feel very strongly that the Israeli actions are wrong,politically,  and on the most basic level of humanity. But who are our allies? Who do we defend? Should we participate, come what may, with reactionary religious forces in the name of a greater cause? I have had this kind of discussion with  a bloke I really admire, David Rosenberg (of the Jewish Socialists’ Group), before, and I gave the same argument to me Blister that I gave to him in May:  I could absolutely never never demonstrate with Hamas.

David said that they had to be there on these marches. I dissented.

Too bloody right was I: see pics and reports on Harry’s Place today.

The filth who marched with these obscene anti-Semitic banners, which were not torn down and ripped into shreds (as they would have been in most European Capitals – by the left) should be shunned by all progressive humanity. Those who wallow in the SWP calling on ‘Zionists’ to “Go back to New York” are racist scum.

Opposition to Israel’s actions, profound and based on respected arguments made by some of the best people on the planet, Bianca Jagger to the fore, is mired forever by association with this.

 

Is David having second thoughts?

Street-Fighting Anti-Zionist Man.

 

Would these Comrades have Fought for Islamicists?

 There is loads to say, so much space to say it in.

On the Saturday Demo against the Israel attack on Gaza that is. There is a ‘report’ on the Commune site which fair stirs the hackles of an ageing street-fighting man. Behind the chant of  “Allahu Akbar” they marched, “ This spirit of international solidarity, structured by religion though it is, is nonetheless stronger than that held by any other component of British society.” (Or in other words a sense that being a Muslim  is more important than any other identity).

Apparently they got a bit of a mob up, some fisty-cuffs with the coppers, did a bit of shop trashing, really puffed up in front of the Polis, and, hey bébé, there was somethink goin down in Paris at the same time a bit like this.

This shows that, “The movement continues.  The militant demonstrators yesterday drew a line in the gravel, as well in their own hearts. We know which side of that line we are on.”

Soit. You are backers of the enemies of the real Paris Commune. That stood for militant secularism.

The Communards would spit on the face of those who work with the Islamists.

 

Or so I bloody well think.

East Anglian Stuff: Towards the End of the EADT.

A Heimat under Threat.

I realise that on the scale of things this is minor. But for us East Anglians (not always by birth,but by naturalisation)  this News is pretty bad:

Plans to cut about 20 jobs at the two main daily newspapers for Suffolk have been announced.

Editorial and photographic jobs will go at the East Anglian Daily Times, which covers Suffolk and north Essex, and the Evening Star.

These papers play a very important part in our part of the world.  They are, dare say I, an absolute stem of our being. They have figured in my life: reporting my resignation from the Labour Party, the deaths of loved ones (giving a full page to one of them, Anthea), and more recently devoting two pages to Lee Chadwick, a Communist in Leiston(married to artist Paxton) and a family friend. Oh, and giving my photo and quotes on the big Feb anti-Invasion of Iraq Demo. When I went to a funeral of a beloved person a few years back the EADT had a stringer listing the names of those attending. Any other East Anglian could give you tales like these: it is so much part of our lives that we forget to men