Archive for the ‘Colonialism’ Category
Solidarity with the Victims of Communal Violence in Delhi.
Delhi Riots: Mosques and Huts Burned, Children Attacked, at Least 2 Dead in Mustafabad
Naomi Barton and Avichal Dubey
At least two mosques in the northeasrt Delhi neighbourhood have been vandalised and attacked with stones, reportedly by a Hindutva mob. Elsewhere in the area, masked men shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ torched Muslim huts.
New Delhi: The Mustafabad area in north east Delhi also saw violence on Tuesday evening as a Hindutva mob attacked the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protest site, injuring sevhttps://twitter.com/SAsiaSolidarity/status/1232951475896307712?s=20eral people including children.
According to residents, a mob of around 50 men gathered in the area and began to pelt stones.
At least two mosques in the area have been vandalised and attacked with stones, by the same mob.
Residents told The Wire that men armed with rods and pistols gathered outside the mosques in the area and attacked them. At the time, several children were inside the mosque and were attacked.
The locals rescued several children from the mosque and some have severe injuries. The Wire saw a 15-year-old boy with severe head and leg injuries being rescued from inside the mosque. He was unable to walk and claimed that he had been attacked by rods.
According to locals, around 20 people have been injured in the violence at Mustafabad. Several people have received gunshot wounds. At least one person has died and was brought dead to a local clinic while two others were brought injured. The Delhi high court was told that a second person has also died in Mustafabad.
The Wire has visuals of the dead and the injured at the clinic, but is refraining from publishing them at this time.
In the area, several houses and shops have been set on fire and continue to be ablaze.
AAP member Amit Mishra tweeted a video of violence from Mustafabad, which was later retweeted by the region’s AAP MLA Haji Yunus.
There is this outrageous reaction, News 18.
Delhi Violence LIVE Updates: Union Home Minister Amit Shah, in his first comments since the deadly violence broke out in Delhi earlier this week, on Friday accused the opposition of provoking riots over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). “Congress, Mamata Banerjee, SP and BSP are all opposing the CAA,” he said. “They are saying this will take away the civil rights of minorities. Why are they all lying?”
Shah’s statement came at a rally in Odisha even as the death toll in Delhi rose to 42.
Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS)
India: WSS strongly condemns the State Sponsored Hindutva Violence in Delhi!
In light of the extraordinary situation with which we are confronted, WSS strongly and unequivocally condemns the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal led violence. We also condemn the inaction and silence of the state and central government in the wake of the violence. We demand:
1. Immediate restoration of law and order, de-escalation of violence, and fulfilment of the duties of law enforcement agencies.
2. The Delhi government must immediately begin serious efforts to restore the right to safe living of the Muslim community – men, women, children – in these violence-wracked neighbourhoods and across the city. All efforts must be made to ensure that those who have been forced to flee are able to return and live in their homes safely.
3. The Supreme court should take suo moto cognisance of the violent situation and act urgently to contain the violence.
4. The state should be providing immediate medical relief on site, in homes of the injured, and ambulance services to those injured. People trapped in these areas should be provided rations by the state government, in light of the destruction of their homes, livelihoods and property.
5. Immediate and stringent action against BJP ex-MLA Kapil Mishra for inciting violence, as well as all individuals and policemen seen engaged in stone-pelting and beatings.
6. The ongoing violence should be investigated by a SIT.
7. Immediate resignation of the Delhi Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik, Delhi LG Anil Baijal and Home Minister Amit Shah.
UK’s Corbyn condemns violence against Muslims in Delhi
Labour chief and leader of the opposition in the British parliament, Jeremy Corbyn, has condemned violence against Muslims in Delhi by extremist Hindu groups linked with the ruling Bhartya Janata Party (BJP).
In an exclusive interview with Geo News, the Labour leader said he’s saddened and shocked at the killing of innocent Muslims in Delhi riots, initiated by the extremist Hindutva groups linked with Narendra Modi’s government.
“I am totally shocked by what has happened and totally deplore the killings that have happened. I stand by those who have protested for their rights. They have the right to protest and they have the right to disagree, that’s what a democracy is all about,” he said.
“The basis of international law has to be the universal declaration of international human rights which of course guarantees and protects the right of religious freedom and assembly and the right of equality before the law of citizenship,” he added.
When asked about his views on the ruling party BJP supporting a progrom against Muslims, the Labour leader said all faiths are equal and no faith has the right to attack others.
“There has to be a basis in every society that there is no supremacy of one faith or ethnic group over another. That’s what a democracy is all about, equality before the law irrespective of your ethnicity of your faith.”
Finally there is this:
And this:
Solidarity with Iraq and Iranian Protests.
Tahrir Square Baghdad: In Iraq Iranian Backed Militias Now Killing Protesters.
Iran is an active player, that is the leader, in the fight against the recent Iraqi people’s protests.
Last week:
Two days ago (Guardian)
At least 15 people stabbed after Hashd al-Shaabi supporters march to Tahrir Square.
More than a dozen people have been stabbed in a Baghdad square that has become a focal point for anti-government and anti-Iran protests after supporters of an Iranian-backed militia flooded the area.
Thousands of men waving sticks, Iraqi flags and the insignia of the Hashd al-Shaabi armed group descended on Tahrir Square on Thursday morning in apparently coordinated marches from across the capital.
Anti-government protesters who have been occupying the square for several weeks, some of whom are critical of Iranian influence in the country, said at least 15 people were stabbed before the militia-linked marchers withdrew by the late afternoon.
Today: (BBC)
The unknown attackers raided key protest sites in the capital sending demonstrators fleeing into the streets.
The unrest in Iraq began in October, fuelled by anger over corruption, unemployment, poor public services and the influence of Iran.
More than 400 people have been killed since the protests started.
Witnesses described chaotic scenes from the latest attacks, which happened overnight on Friday.
Armed men on pick-up trucks are said to have driven through areas that have formed the centre of the protests in Baghdad, forcing demonstrators to flee from bullets.
It is not clear who is responsible – state television called the assailants “unidentified men”.
Earlier this week several people were stabbed in Baghdad after supporters of an Iranian-backed militia swarmed into a square occupied by protesters.
In another development, a drone dropped a bomb on the house of the influential Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr, a source within his party said. He was out of the country at the time.
The Iraqi Prime Minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, has resigned over the protests but those who have taken to the streets want a fundamental overhaul of the country’s political system.
Iraq uses a quota-based system that allocates positions to political parties based on sectarian and ethnic identity.
But many Iraqis say it only encourages patronage and corruption and there is particular concern over Iran, the dominant Shia Muslim state which has close links to Iraqi Shia politicians who have been running the country since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
Iran itself has seen protests against the Islamist theocracy grow.
The Islamists have used extreme violence.
It is well known that the Khomeinist regime consolidated its power under the banner of ‘anti-imperialism’.
Many of the Iranian left, and the left internationally, bought this line.
Today we see the same anti-progressive positions being peddled by some anti imperialists like the Stop the War Coalition and their allies in other Western countries.
Their priority remains fighting against imperialism.
This have been many counter-voices from the Iranian left.
In the context of the present-day protests against the Islamist reactionaries, – one that could be extended to their actions by proxy against the Iraqi people, and across the near east through their alliance with Assad in Syria and sectarian forces in Lebanon) Mina Khanlarzadeh now offers an important analysis of the unfolding fight against the Hassan Rouhani clique that has implications for these other crises.
First of all Khanlarzadeh offers some serious ideas about what kind of solidarity we should offer those fighting for their rights in Iran.
She writes in response to the US petition, “Letter Against US Imperialism”, “As anti-imperialist activists, scholars, artists and lawyers located in the United States, we stand in solidarity with the peoples of Latin America, Africa and Asia in their calls to end imperialism, sectarianism and neoliberalism, and we view the recent protests in Iran within this broader international context of resistance.”
The people of Iran are resisting the economic, political and militaristic violence imposed on them both by international and domestic elites. The majority of the Iranian people do not seek regime change because they have already lived through two monumental events that destabilized their lives – the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War that lasted from 1980 until 1988. The elder generations can still recount the horrors that followed the toppling of Prime Minister Mossadegh during the U.S. and British-backed coup of 1953.
Iranians seek economic and political stability, and above all, they seek to maintain their national and individual dignity. We stand by them and their calls for domestic reform, and as people in the United States, we demand the end of the sanctions regime and U.S. and Israeli interference in the lives of the Iranian people.
In a detailed response to this declaration (milder than some of the rhetoric coming up from some ‘anti-imperialists’ who fight shy of direct backing for any form of protest seen to further US interests, “Imperialist powers intensify pressure on Iranian regime in wake of protests“) states
“The petition pretends to know what Iranian people want: “The majority of the Iranian people do not seek regime change because they have already lived through two monumental events that destabilized their lives […] Iranians seek economic and political stability, […]. We stand by them and their calls for domestic reform [….]” The petition claims Iranians want stability, but who are these Iranians who want stability? It’s certainly not the protesters who shouted for the fall of the dictator (Ayatollah Khamenei) in the streets and actually destabilized the country by forcing the government to use maximum force to silence them and to the surprise of the petitioners, kill more than 200 of them. The violent politics of stability has, in fact, been employed by the government to silence any cry for transformation towards improvement.
As Khanlarzadeh says, these forces position reminds one, of “the famous Ayatollah Khomeini quote, “All the anger you have accumulated in your throat must be screamed at the US.”
At a time when even the Communist Party of Britain has called for solidarity with the Iranian protests, some clarity on the issues is welcome.
Morning Star November.
Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths wrote to the Iranian ambassador yesterday to express grave concern.
Mr Griffiths said: “While our party has campaigned against the imposition of sanctions by the United States, we deplore and condemn the suspension of civil rights, the indiscriminate killing of demonstrators and mass arrests which have taken place over the past week.”
Codir is calling on individuals and organisations to show their solidarity with the Iranian people “in this their darkest hour.”
Anti-Imperialism As An Intellectual Trap
L’Histoire refoulée. La Rocque, les Croix de feu, et le fascisme français. Sous la direction de Zeev Sternhell. Review: Fascisme à la française?
L’Histoire refoulée. La Rocque, les Croix de feu, et le fascisme français. Sous la direction de Zeev Sternhell. Les Éditions du Cerf.
Zeev Sternhell is a reference point amongst historians of Fascism. L’Histoire refoulée focuses on the Croix de Feu (CDF, a movement, originally largely of Great War veterans, led by Colonel François de la Rocque. In 1936, after anti-parliamentary street violence led to the dissolution of the “leagues”, they became the Parti sociale français (PSF) with membership of around three quarters of a million. Opinion has been divided about how far La Rocque’s troops were properly fascist, with some dismissing them as nationalist “boy scouts”. The contributions by Sternhell, “Anglo-Saxons” Caroline Campbell, Kevin Passmore and Chris Milligan with Laurent Kestel and Didier Leschi and Samuel Kalman aim to show that during the 1930s important parts of French society were tempted by “les aventures fascists” and that the CDF/PSF was not a “mass party of the right” but infected with fascist ideas.
Didier Leschi and Lauren Kestel refer to Michel Dobry’s claim that there is a consensus that France was “immune” and “allergic” to Fascism (Le mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme. 2003). In this view, taken up anew by Sternhell the minimising of the CDF/PSF is a case study in how a 1930s a fascistic movement is downplayed. Present targets include Michel Winock, who questioned this classification, noting that, apart from its backward looking debts to 19th century the Caesarism of Boulangism, has said in his own works, that the “term “fascism” cannot be applied to all movements supportive of right-leaning authoritarianism, the so-called national right, or the far-right” and that the “Croix-de-Feu and the PSF cannot be called a fascist party unless, of course, we disregard semantic precision altogether.”(1)
“Refoulée”, in psychological terms, is to repress, to push back into oneself, to refuse to acknowledge an impulse. The intention of L’Histoire refoulée is to bring out from this collective subconscious the existence of French fascism as an independent political force in the 1930s. It equally contributed to the National Revolution of the Vichy regime and the Collaboration. The importance of this task is highlighted, the authors argue, by the resurgence of a xenophobic extreme right that has reinvented a French nationalist tradition without fully recognising its debts to fascism. .
General readers, many of whom are familiar with the historian of Vichy, Robert O Paxton (La France de Vichy. 1973, in English, Vichy France : Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944) , will be surprised to learn that the domestic responsibility for the Pétain regime continues to be ignored. Not long ago the polemical historian Éric Zemmour violently attacked the anti-Vichy ‘doxa’ (established opinion), also known as the « révolution paxtonienne », led by “notre bon maître”, the American (nationality underlined) in the best-selling Le Suicide français (2014). The far-right writer became instantly notorious for defending the care shown by Vichy towards Jews of French nationality. His claim that De Gaulle was a child of both the far right and left Catholic patriotism, “un enfant de Maurras et de Péguy” could also be said to be attempt to blur the lines between fascism and French republicanism. L’Histoire consigns Zemmour to a footnote of the Leschi and Kestel Introduction – on his more recent Destin Français (2018).
The Revolutionary Right.
In La Droite Révolutionnaire, (First Edition, 1978) Sternhell proposed that late 19th century and pre-Great War France was the cradle of fascist ideology. France was, in Sternhell’s eyes, an ideal field for studying pre-fascism, and, full blown, “neither left nor right” fascist thought. This developed earliest in the country with “exceptional intellectual quality. Ni droite ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (First Edition, 1983), surveyed anti-parliamentarian nationalism (the ‘ligues’), “planiste” sections of French social democracy (Marcel Déat), the Monarchist and anti-Semite Action française, the mass parties of the later 1930s, the Parti Social français (PSF), the Parti Populaire français (PPF) of the renegade Communist Jacques Doriot, and a mixed bag of admirers of National Socialism and Mussolini. This indicated that fascism was a synthesis of socialist ideas and nationalism. An earlier work had marked out in the literary and polemical figure of the nationalist Maurice Barrès and his appeal to La terre et les Morts, the homeland heritage and the living memory of the dead. (Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français. 1972). In the years preceding the Second World War these movements drew together calls to “workers of all classes” against banking “hyper” capitalism, drew on the romance of the nation, and opposition to the liberalism of the Enlightenment and the elites of the Third Republic. (1)
Culturally acute, plunging straight through the confusion reigning in European politics of the 1930s, Sternhell had an immediate and lasting appeal. It did not take long for his thesis to come under attack. The writer of a landmark study of George Sorel (L’illusion du politique.1984) Shlomo Sand was one of the first off the mark. Ni droite ni gauche was the “most completely a-historical than one can possibly imagine. The author never puts things in their context. He gives fascism such a vague definition that you can stick onto it anything whatsoever.” Sand goes into some detail on the faults behind this conception. His summary could equally stand for other critics. In L’illusion du politique the Cercle Proudhon, a key ‘red-brown’ movement for Sternhell in which extreme-right monarchists met syndicalists inspired by Sorels’ revolutionary anti-parliamentarism, was put into its real, marginal, barely noticed, context. Sorel ended his days an enthusiast for the Bolshevik Revolution, not nationalism. (2)
The meat of the argument against Sternhell is that, as a field of observation, France, like Great Britain, was marked by victory in the Great War, and did not know the crisis of regime that afflicted Germany. This has implications for any study of movements born amongst those who fought in the conflict. The Croix de feu, which had nobody with experience of anything resembling the far-right civil war fighters of the German Freikorps nor, as many argue, did its vaunted “dispos” (men ready for action), who wore no uniform but the occasional Trilby hat, resemble anything like the Sturmabteilung (SA). France neither knew the kind of turmoil and use of violence against the left that proceeded Mussolini’s power grab. Threatening a coup, but never united enough with the other major forces of the far right like the Parti Populaire français (PPF) to carry one out, was not the same carrying one out.
The major difficulty is that a broad sweep of far-right ideas, focused on intellectuals in countries where they did not control the state, ignores what for many historians is the crucial aspect of fascism and Nazism. They were doctrines of regimes with totalitarian power.
Settling Accounts.
Many readers of L’Histoire refoulée will have these thoughts in mind as they open its pages. Sternhell pursues the ideological well-springs of fascism, and the ideological confusion of the 1930s, which drew some parts of the left towards the extreme right. ”. At the end of the 19th century France saw two traditions battle it out, the tradition of the Enlightenment faced a “tradition organiciste, antirationaliste, historiciste, nationaliste, antisémite, la tradition de la terre et les morts très proche de la tradition völkish en Allemagne.” (Page 40 – 50) This, he asserts, was the “motor” of Vicky’s National Revolution. The intellectuals prepared people’s minds; it was up to mass movements and the Disaster of the War, to give them life. The PSF’s call for Travail, Famille, Partie, became the motto of Vichy.
Sternhell does not always stay on this abstract plane. He peppers his contributions with revelatory attacks on liberals and moderate left wingers, like the ‘organic intellectual’ of the Radical Party Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier), now known to have written anti-Jewish and pro-German comments in his war-time notebooks, Bertrand de Jouvenel (who launched a successful libel case against Sternhell in the 1980s for suggesting that he had been pro-Hitler), Maurice Duverger, the political scientist, dammed for his favourable writing for the Vichy government. His principal target is the already cited Michel Winock, a specialist in the same area, and author of the indispensable history of the journal Esprit (Esprit, des intellectuels dans la cité 1930 – 1950). 1996). Once a supporter of Sternhell’s early work he is damned not only for refusing to accept that groups like Les Croix de feu were full-blown fascist but also for his tenderness towards the Director of Esprit, Emmanuel Mounier. In a contemptible attack Sternhell lets it suggested that the left Christian personalist and anti-totalitarian was an admirer of Hitler for brief favourable comments on the invasion of the Soviet Union. (Page 83)
The serious nature of these claims is obscured by their anecdotal presentation, which recalls Bernard-Henri Lévy’s catch-all accusations of fascism in L’idéologie française (1981) rather than thorough historical research. This aspect of L’Histoire refoulée has led some to suggest that the book is intended to settle old scores (this review barely scratches the surface) rather than offer new insights into the history of French fascism. The final chapter, Réponse à Michel Winock, which drags up grievances going back decades, does not diminish this impression. (4)
Sternhell should not overshadow L’Histoire refoulée. Laurent Kestrel tackles the issue of the PSF “republican” claims, La Rocque’s prejudices and dislike of freemasons, the presence of anti-Semitism in the movement, and compares it to Doriot’s PPF. Kevin Passmore compares relations with the German regime, always difficult given deep-rooted French nationalist traditions of Germanophobia, and Italy. He notes that he disappointed those who encouraged him to attempt a coup d’État. (Page 211). Carline Campbell explores both the way La Rocque defended the higher civilisation of France and melded it with racial ideas. Perhaps her most interesting pages develop research into the social basis of the CDF/PSF, its policies, and the way it became an astonishing large movement. Chris Millington reminds us of the violence between left and right in 1930s French politics, culminating in the Limoge shootings of 1935.
The quality of these, and other contributions, brings us back to the initial questions. Is this part of French history willingly forgotten? Is this because to talk about La Roque, the most “republican” of the 1930s far right, would be to tarnish the idea that France was “immune” to fascism? This is not just a conceptual dispute about the nature of fascism and French history. Readers of Michel Winock will know that far from denying the long-standing existence of a powerful extreme right in the Hexagon he is one of the foremost historians and opponents of “la tradition contre-révolutionnaire” and its present day “avatars” “national-populisme”. If there is one thing about L’Histoire refoulée that rankles it is an implication that suggests otherwise. (5)
***
- Revisiting French fascism, La Rocque and the Croix de Feu. Michel Winock Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire. 2006/2 (No 90)
- Page 405. La Droite Révolutionnaire. Zeev Sternhell. Edition de Seuil 1978.
- Written in 1983 and cited Page 144. La Fin de l‘intellectuel français? Shlomo Sand La Découverte. 2016.
- Une guerre de trente ans Sonia Combe En attendant Nadeau. Notably on, in her view, the “l’équipe Serge Berstein-Jean-Noël Jeanneney-Michel Winock qui continuait à alimenter le mythe français déconstruit par Sternhell. “
- Page 297. Conclusion.Histoire de l’extrême droite en France. Sous La Direction de Michel Winock. Editions du Seuil. 2015 (New Edition)
Brexit Party Backers George Galloway and CPGB M-L Unite to Denounce “Hong Kong phooey” of pro-Democracy Protests.
Galloway’s New Best Friend: Ranjeet Brar of the CPGB-ML.
The friendship between George Galloway (once the leader of one of the biggest post-war ‘left’ parties in the UK, Respect) and the micro groupuscule the CPGB (M-L) began when both called for a Vote for the Brexit Party during this year’s European Elections.
CPGB-ML.
When George Galloway declared his intention of voting for the Brexit party in the 23 May European elections, many on the fake left were up in arms, calling him a ‘fascist’ for even considering having anything to do with banker-turned-Brexit-campaigner Nigel Farage.
But as Galloway himself pointed out: “The left-wing predilection to call everyone to the right of you a ‘racist’ or even a ‘fascist’ is not just juvenile, cretinous, but totally counterproductive, driving the [working class] irredeemably beyond your political grasp …
…
The Brexit party’s arrival on the scene in time for this European election has presented workers with an opportunity to express their anger and let the ruling class know that they won’t be content to sit back and watch the Brexit vote be betrayed.
A VOTE FOR THE BREXIT PARTY IS A VOTE FOR BREXIT!
Bonds have since bloomed.
The latest flower is this: China
Hong Kong protests: Ranjeet Brar speaks to George Galloway on RT
‘The history of Hong Kong is one that mirrors the history of British imperialism.’
Comrade Ranjeet Brar (which oddly reminds us of Harpal Brar, his dad? and father of Joti Brar , ‘vice-Chair? see note below *) of the CPGB-ML speaks with George Galloway on his show Sputnik about events unfolding in Hong Kong.
Who are the protestors? What are their demands? What is the role of British and US imperialism and the corporate ‘mainstream’ media? Why have British and US flags been appearing in the hands of demonstrators?
- “Harpal Brar (born 5 October 1939) is an Indian communist politician, writer and businessman, based in Britain. He is the founder and former chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist), a role from which he stood down in 2018. Brar was appointed Eternal Honorary Chairman of the Party in August 2019. “He, along with his daughter Joti Brar, is an active member of the Stalin Society, the website of which contains articles disproving alleged Soviet wrongdoing in the Katyn massacre, the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor), and the Moscow Trials which they blame on the Nazis, dismiss as propaganda, or describe as fair process, respectively.”
Galloway doesn’t go for half-measures:
“These foreign-funded and guided organisations are carefully stabled Trojan Horses chomping their British and American supplied hay until the time came for them to be told to gallop, and gallop they now are.
This is all Hong Kong phooey! No other country in the world would have shown such forbearance in the face of foreign-sponsored rioting destruction and sabotage of the national economy as China has. If in the days to come China’s patience runs out, it will not be before time so far as the great majority of Chinese citizens, including Hong Kong citizens, are concerned.
China signed up to the one country, two systems in the territory. It did not agree to two countries, two systems. Not one inch of Hong Kong belongs to anyone but China. The days when foreign countries could impose their will on China are long gone.”
Hong Kong phooey! Would you like any hypocrisy with that? RT.
Who is behind the Hong Kong protests?
Comrade Ella Rule features in this Kalima Horra debate, hosted by George Galloway.
Galloway has a pat on the head from the Chinese state:
Here is Galloway’s other stunt:
Allegation that ‘Syrian Truther’ heads Chris Williamson Fund Raiser to Sue Labour Party.
Syria ‘truther’ heads fundraising campaign to sue British Labour Party
Brian Whitaker.
Bristol University professor David Miller – a member of the “propaganda professors” group which defends the Assad regime against accusations of chemical weapons use in Syria and disputes Russia’s use of a nerve agent against the Skripals in Britain – is behind a new campaign to sue the British Labour Party.
Miller is director and sole shareholder in a company called Campaign for Chris Williamson Ltd, which was registered on 17 July.
Williamson, MP for Derby North, has been suspended from the Labour Party over allegations of antisemitism and Miller has launched a crowd-funded campaign through his company to take legal action against the party. The aim is to raise £75,000 to cover the costs.
Miller is a prominent member of the quasi-academic Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which claims that chemical attacks in Syria have been “staged” by rebels in oder to falsely accuse the Assad regime (see previous blog posts). Miller is a co-author of the group’s latest article which claims the OPCW’s investigation into alleged chlorine attacks in Douma was “nobbled”. The group also disputes that Russia was responsible for poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury last year.
The convenor of the Working Group is Piers Robinson, who until recently was a professor in the journalism department at Sheffield University. Last year Robinson wrote a review of a book by two 9/11 truthers, describing it as a “diligent and painstaking work”. His name appears on the book’s back cover, endorsing it as “authoritative and carefully argued”.
Robinson and Miller have worked together on various articles produced by the Working Group and both are directors of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, a non-profit company which “facilitates and conducts rigorous academic research and analysis of propaganda”.
Wikipedia entry:
Brian Whitaker has been a journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian since 1987 and was its Middle East editor from 2000 to 2007.
He studied Arabic studies at the University of Westminster and Latin (BA Hons) at the University of Birmingham. He is currently an editor on the paper’s “Comment is free“.[1] He also writes articles for Guardian Unlimited, the internet edition of the paper. He runs a personal, non-Guardian-related website, Al-Bab.com, about politics in the Arab world.
Brian Whitaker: 2018.
A university-based group is seeking funds for what it claims will be “rigorous academic research and analysis of propaganda”. The project sounds academically respectable — it has official recognition from the University of Sheffield in Britain and has enlisted the famous American professor Noam Chomsky as an adviser — but it also has links to conspiracy theorists, including a 9/11 “truther”.
Last November the group set up a non-profit company called Organisation for Propaganda Studies (OPS). The registration documents say its purpose is to carry out “research and experimental development on social sciences and humanities”, plus “higher education” at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Articles written by members of the working group dispute almost all mainstream narratives of the Syrian conflict, especially regarding the use of chemical weapons and the role of the White Helmets search-and-rescue organisation. While they are critical of western governments, western media and various humanitarian groups they show little interest in applying critical judgment to Russia’s role in the conflict or to the controversial writings of several journalists who happen to share their views.
The activities of this group were the subject of an investigation published by The Times newspaper on Saturday. A strongly-worded editorial headlined “Assad’s useful idiots” said:
…
Robinson has decribed the Russian propaganda channel, RT, as a source of “useful insights” and is frequently quoted in its programmes. Another member of the working group, Dr Tara McCormack of Leicester university, has a regular slot on Russia’s Sputnik News.
Rather oddly, the only “research” so far posted on the Syria working group’s website has been two articles (here and here) casting doubt on a Russian role in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain.
Defenders of the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media
The Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media is made up of academics and PhD students from a variety of UK universities. It was convened by Piers Robinson. It is critical of the UK commercially-controlled media reporting about Syria, and has in turn been criticised by them.
Corporate media response
Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of the Guardian wrote on 26 February 2018 that the group (which then numbered three professors, two lecturers and three postgraduate researchers) seemed “more like a propaganda exercise than a serious academic project.” Two days later Jonathan Cook write in an article entitled The Authoritarians Who Silence Syria Questions that Whitaker was “using every ploy in the misdirection and circular logic playbook to discredit those who commit thought crimes on Syria, by raising questions both about what is really happening there and about whether we can trust the corporate media consensus banging the regime-change drum.”[2]
The Times wrote that the group was “spreading pro-Assad disinformation”. Tim Hayward wrote that “a question thoughtful readers will likely be asking is why The Times has gone the trouble it has to give such prominence to a small group of critical academics.”
Recent Miller Tweet:
Perhaps this might explain the link between Miller and Williamson.
Bob From Brockley. What’s wrong with Chris Williamson? 2019
The time Williamson promoted a Syrian war crimes denier
For me, one of the most unforgivable things Williamson has done, last summer, was promote Vanessa Beeley, a war crimes denier and fake news merchant. Here is an extract from Oz Katerji in the New Statesman on this incident:
Williamson, who was attending the Beautiful Days festival, tweeted of his “privilege” in meeting Vanessa Beeley, a blogger who described meeting the Syrian regime’s war criminal president Bashar al Assad as her “proudest moment” and has waged a relentless campaign of lies and distortion to promote the Assad regime abroad… Responding in kind to Williamson’s endorsement, Beeley said in a Facebook post “Hats off to Chris Williamson, Labour MP – a genuine human being.”…
Williamson’s tweet provoked immediate condemnation, drawing a strong response from James O’Brien, who called Williamson a “disgrace” and referred to Beeley as “Assad’s very own Alex Jones.” The Washington Post’s Middle East correspondent, Louisa Loveluck, responded to Williamson’s endorsement of Beeley’s “reporting” with: “Beeley has justified the use of incendiary weapons against civilians, recycled and championed debunked conspiracy theories, and described a meeting with Assad as her proudest moment. This is cheerleading, not reporting.”
Noting that Beeley has viciously slandered the late Jo Cox (Beeley “has shamelessly accused her of being a “warmongering Blairite” and “al-Qaeda advocate” endorsing a policy of “wholesale devastation” on Syria.) Oz argues that the Labour Party has a choice between being the party of Jo Cox or the party of Chris Williamson.
The times Williamson promoted fake news about chemical weapons in Syria
As Katerji put it when writing about Williamson’s support for Beeley, “This is not Williamson’s first dalliance with pro-Assad trutherism, having voiced doubts over allegations that Assad was responsible for the gas attack on Douma while addressing a protest outside parliament in April 2018.”
More recently, Williamson has taken up a particular version of Douma trutherism: that the chemical attack was a managed massacre by rebels and the civilians White Helmet civil defence first responders, and that this is somehow proved by a dubious document (read all about it here) leaked from the OPCW chemical weapons watchdog, probably via Russia, to some pro-Assad activists in the UK called the “Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media“, with which Beeley is connected.
Williamson is so obsessed with the “leaked document” that he has asked several questions in parliament about it, worded in completely dishonest ways. The theory holds that chemical weapons in Douma were not dropped from above but staged by Syrian rebels or their civilian first defenders, the White Helmets, i.e. that the rebels massacred dozens of their own family members. In my view, this conspiracy theory is borderline Islamophobic, based on the idea of Syrian rebels and civilians in rebel territories as savage, bloodthirsty jihadis.
Tony Greenstein, a Man with Experience in Barrack Room Lawyering, backs Chris Williamson – in black T-Shirt, not the youth in the Stalinist Red.
John Ross, from International Marxist Group and Ken Livingstone, to denouncing ‘arrogant’ democracy Hong Kong protesters.
John Ross, from Student Revolutionary to “China has the best human rights record in the world.”
“When I say ‘China has the best human rights record in the world’, it’s not meant to make China feel good… it was an objective statement,” Ross told the Global Times. “If somebody doesn’t agree with that, let’s have a discussion on who has a better human rights record, and why. And you will find out during the discussion that [the idea that any country has a better human rights record than China]is not true,” he concluded.”
More recently,
“the CPC is a Marxist Party and China is a socialist and not a capitalist country. Those ‘China experts’ who doubted that, thinking they knew better than the CPC, have just been proved to be wrong.”
What is a great pity is that parts of the Western left followed, and were influenced by, Western ‘China experts’ into falsely believing that the CPC had abandoned Marxism and China had become a capitalist and not a socialist country.”
Xi stresses importance of The Communist Manifesto
“, the US House of Representatives would be well advised to pass a resolution congratulating China for its unequalled contribution to human well-being in lifting over 600 million people out of poverty, establishing an enquiry to find out why US-supported economic policies in the rest of the world have made no such contribution to human rights, and publicly apologizing for the hundreds of thousands of people it has killed in its wars – including the thousands of ordinary US soldiers.”
John Ross. British scholar defends China’s human rights
( Xinhua ) Updated: 2014-06-12 17:11:20
Now he is telling Hong Kong residents not to get so uppity.
And making conspiratorial claims against pro-democracy protesters.
Global Times suggested in 2014 that Ross could be included amongst the “expatriate American and British ‘academics’ who make a living telling China what it wants to hear about itself. Not specialists on China, or speakers of Chinese, or indeed scholars at all, they easily find cushy university posts from which they write blogs and columns about the superiority of the Chinese system.”
John Ross, a former director of London’s Economic and Business Policy to ex-London Mayor Ken Livingstone and current Senior Fellow with the Chongyang Institute, also at the Renmin University, is one of a number of foreign academics on the receiving end of attacks by some netizens for his open criticism of liberal “public intellectuals” that, Ross says, do not really “understand” democracy. On June 12, Ross published an op-ed in China saying that the US is clearly wrong over China’s human rights record.
“The attempt to reduce human rights to a Western-style political structure, as though having a parliamentary system were the most important question facing human beings, is ridiculous,” Ross wrote. He argues that the idea that China has “raised” 630 million people out of poverty – more than the population of the United States – is more important than having access to Facebook.
Ross says his chosen headline was “China has the best human rights record in the world.” The op-ed has been published three times in China so far, both in English and Chinese; none have used his original title.
“When I say ‘China has the best human rights record in the world’, it’s not meant to make China feel good… it was an objective statement,” Ross told the Global Times. “If somebody doesn’t agree with that, let’s have a discussion on who has a better human rights record, and why. And you will find out during the discussion that [the idea that any country has a better human rights record than China]is not true,” he concluded.
Our Man in Beijing: Or Is He Theirs?
Background on Ross,
Ross joined the Trotskyist International Marxist Group (IMG) in the late 1960s. He worked with Bob Pennington to form the IMG Opposition Group. Ross was a central figure in the leadership of the IMG in the early 1980s when it became known as Socialist Action, but he gradually lost the support of much of its membership.
Ken and the rise of Socialist Action
Chapter 18: 1985-1994. Ken and the rise of Socialist Action, 1985-1994)
In their early years, members of Socialist Action churned out him hundreds of agendas, documents and other discussion papers which I have been able to obtain. They tell the remarkable story of how the group absorbed itself into the Labour Left and became a major force within it; as well the efforts it made to disappear from view as an organisation. Socialist Action made a concerted attempt to cultivate Ken Livingstone back in 1985 in the wake of the failed rate capping campaign. John Ross, the leader of the group, interviewed Livingstone for its relatively new paper, also called Socialist Action. Livingstone had already heard about Ross as the author of a small book called Thatcher and Friends which predicted the terminal decline of the Tory Party.[4] ‘I recognised this was someone with formidable intellect,’ says Livingstone. ‘After the rate capping fiasco, when most of the rest of the hard left were boycotting me, he turned up and did an interview and we started talking about economics and I realised this was somebody who could give me the grasp on economic policy which I didn’t have, So when I became an MP I retained him to actually do that’.[5]
John Ross’s influence grew from that moment; he became Livingstone’s most important advisor from 1985 onwards. After Livingstone, he is the most influential personality in the mayor’s office. The rates farce stripped Livingstone of most of his Left contacts and friends. Ross supplied Livingstone not only with the support and network he needed to continue but also the education necessary to tackle the Labour leadership on the vital battleground of economic policy. For 20 years, Ken Livingstone has really been a double act; John Ross and Socialist Action have been the silent partners.
Ross worked as a lecturer at Enfield Polytechnic and once he fought the Newham North East parliamentary seat as the candidate for the International Marxist Group, the forerunner to Socialist Action.[6] By the time Ross met Livingstone, he had emerged triumphant from an internecine struggle within the International Marxist Group, or IMG, one of Britain’s main Trotskyist parties. During 1982, the IMG split over strategy: how to bring about that elusive revolution. That split led to the creation of Socialist Action.
The IMG was built fundamentally out of the student movement of the late 1960s and helped organise some of the biggest protests against the Vietnam War in London.[7] During the 1970s its revolutionary strategy was focused on industry and the unions, which made sense during this period of economic instability and intense industrial unrest. Members, often highly educated, were encouraged to get blue collar jobs to play a role in encouraging the workers to turn towards revolution, ‘The Turn’.
An internal IMG note in 1982 reiterated, ‘…it is vital that we are rooted among the industrial workers, going through joint experiences with them and drawing common lessons. Any other perspective will only alienate us from the forces who will be key in building a revolutionary party and expose us to class pressures’.[8] Jobs were often advertised internally: ‘London Transport are taking on bus drivers at Stamford Hill; contact Wood Green Job Centre’; or ‘Jobs available in small chemical factory in Hounslow; we have a comrade who is a convenor.'[9]
But the IMG had always been hopelessly confused about its approach to the Labour Party: to enter or not to enter. ‘We hopped into the Labour Party around 1975,’ wrote member John Marston, in his exasperated letter of resignation December 1982, ‘and then out again in 1977 for the joys of regroupment and Socialist Unity. Any pretence of a strategic perspective, vanished.'[10]
- (← p. 258)
In late 1982, the IMG split over whether or not to join the Benn crusade within the Labour Party, or the ‘Bennite Current’. Apaper presented to the IMG’s conference in December 1982 stated: ‘It is clear that, at the leadership level, fundamental differnces are emerging as to the nature of the party we are trying to build and how to build it. A gulf is developing between those who, basing themselves on the positions of the 1981 conference, wish to build an independent combat party rooted in the industrial working class, and those who are moving towards the idea of an ideological tendency operating in the Labour Party as left critics of the Benn current.'[11]
John Ross was at the forefront of the internal struggle to ditch the industrial strategy and get all IMG members to join the Labour Party en masse and then seek to control the Left bloc within it. Supporting Ross was another key figure in Livingstone’s political career, Redmond O’Neill. At the December 1982 conference, Ross carried the day and over the next few months IMG members joined the Labour Party. A minority who disagreed with the policy of ‘deep eritryism’ split away and formed its own party, the International Group which became a political irrelevance. Despite becoming Labour members, the Ross majority still remained organised as a separate political organization. They decided to rebrand themselves as the Socialist League, and to establish a newspaper called Socialist Action. Like Militant, the group became known by the name of their paper rather than as the Socialist League.
‘The.next steps towards a revolutionary party comprise a fight for a class struggle within the Bennite current,’ said one discussion paper at the time. ‘For this a new newspaper is necessary – one that is seen as the voice of revolutionary socialists within the Labour Party and which can thereby give political expressions to the mass struggles of workers and youth who in the next period will seek overall political answers within the Labour Party. ‘… Socialist Action will fight for leadership within the Bennite Current.'[12]
The Socialist League/Socialist Action met for the first time as a central committee at the Intensive English School in Star Street near Marble Arch for the start of a two-day conference on Saturday, 22 January 1983. The official launch of Socialist Action took place the following morning[13] and it first appeared on 16 March. The group’s old paper, Socialist Challenge, ceased to exist.
Comment.
This is disgusting. Chinese people – and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters – are great. How the fuck can the leading figure of the IMG end up supporting that ruling class.
For the Fourth International, which Ross once supported, there is this, very different position,
Sunday 11 August 2019, by
Hong Kong has justified its existence as an interface between Western neoliberal globalism and China’s statist authoritarian capitalism. China no longer needs the city to play that role; Hong Kongers desperately need an alternative.
A tiny border city of 7 million people cannot singlehandedly dismantle the hegemonies that ensnare it. But its struggle at this critical moment should be an urgent call for all leftists to help undo those structures—while rethinking the organization of societies beyond the capitalist model of nation-states. Then, perhaps, the people of Hong Kong would be able to join in building what Bernie Sanders has called the “international progressive front“—and, as he writes, “do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other.” From the death of this neoliberal city, an emancipatory new history could be born.
Brexit: the Slippery Slope of Left Sovereigntism, from Modern Monetary Theory to Spiked.
An Ideology Now at the Centre of UK Politics.
Sovereigntism, the assertion of unique national sovereignty, is at the centre of British divisions over Brexit.
In French souverainisme has been used for some time to describe hostility to the European Union (“Doctrine des défenseurs de l’exercice de la souveraineté nationale en Europe”) expressed by parties and intellectuals from the extreme right to the left. There is even a party, “République souveraine” led by Djordje Kuzmanovic .
During the presidential campaign of 2002, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who had founded the radical left Centre d’études, de recherches et d’éducation socialiste CERES in the 1970s, had been a Socialist Minister in the first Mitterrand government, and served under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, presented himself as the “man of the nation”, above partisan cleavages. As an opponent of the Maastricht Treaty, Jean-Pierre Chevènement appealed in the new millennium to a new Gaullism of the left. In many respects Chevènement can be seen a trail-blazer for the evolution of socialists from a kind of Marxism on the left of the French Parti Socialiste (CERES, responsible for the claims that they would create a “rupture” with capitalism) critics of Mitterrand’s ‘modernising turn’ in the 1980s (expressed on the journal En Jeu) to, outside the Socialists, republican socialism (1992, Mouvement des citoyens (MDC), to openly nationalist sovereigntist politics which calls for an aligmement of La France insoumise with these right-wing anti-globalisation ‘patriots’. In this vein in 2015 he participated in the debates organised by the hard right Debout la France.
The former socialist has even endorsed a degree of protectionist economics.
Sovereigntism can in this career alone be seen as a major source of political confusionism.
It rests on the idea that there is an entity called the ‘nation’, and the people, which, like Rousseau’s General Will, exists beyond all the different classes and political factions of a country. Populism, the claim to strand for the ‘real’ people against the ‘elites’ who frustrate their will, out of the self-interest of the oligarchies. In place of international bodies such as the European Union, a sovereign Parliament, can solve all the problems in the land, by exercising full power.
Left sovereigntism claims that the same machinery, if captured by the right party, can do what it likes. With power in the hands of a left Labour Party,a People’s Brexit, a Lexit, can “Bring back control” to the people.
Sovereigntism blurs the political lines and leaves the way open to more resolute forces who occupy the same terrain, all claiming to “take back control”. It has helped open the door to,
Exclusive nationalism and nativism, identity politics, critiques of globalisation and internationalism, and calls for democratic re-empowerment of the demos have converged politically on a new locus of inflated territorial, indeed ‘border’ sovereignty, aligning the call of ‘taking back control’ on behalf of a radically re-defined community (‘we’) with a defensive re-territorialisation of power along existing fault lines of nation-statism.
Red-Brown Spiked (Italy: Salvini speaks to the gut of the nation) writer Thomas Fazi is perhaps one of the best known people who have argued for a “progressive vision of national sovereignty“.
History attests to the fact that national sovereignty and national self-determination are not intrinsically reactionary or jingoistic concepts – in fact, they were the rallying cries of countless nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist and left-wing liberation movements. Even if we limit our analysis to core capitalist countries, it is patently obvious that virtually all the major social, economic, and political advancements of the past centuries were achieved through the institutions of the democratic nation state, not through international, multilateral, or supranational institutions, which in a number of ways have, in fact, been used to roll back those very achievements, as we have seen in the context of the euro crisis, where supranational (and largely unaccountable) institutions such as the European Commission, Eurogroup, and ECB used their power and authority to impose crippling austerity on struggling countries.
In a book written with William Mitchell Reclaiming the State, Fazi has argued, as an uncritical notice on the Counterfire site states, that,
The authors suggest that the left needs to provide a powerful alternative to neoliberalism, based around the state reasserting its supremacy over markets, and using its monopoly power over currency creation to introduce policies that favour the great majority. The insights provided by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) show how such an alternative strategy is possible for countries with their own sovereign currencies, but is not available for those who have ceded their power to supranational agencies (e.g. Eurozone nations who have relinquished monetary control and placed it in the hands of the ECB).
Fazi continues to push the line.
It is as plain that as Boris Johnson sets out the only actually existing Brexit plans, that ‘taking back control’ is a smokescreen for hard right attacks on rights and deference to the stronger – US – partner in any independent trade deals.
But what of this plan for monetary control?
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – this writer has attended lectures on it and read some of less technical materiel – offers at first sight an appealing alternative to financial austerity.
Now James Meadway, an left wing economist,offers some devastating criticisms of NMT. He also sheds light on the reactionary politics behind the idea, politics which help to explain by Fazi now appears in the Red Brown Spiked.
This is his case:
James Meadway is a former advisor to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Previously, he was the Chief Economist at the New Economics Foundation and he is currently writing a book on left wing economics. In his interview with this website, he outlines the principles of Corbynomics, discusses a Green New Deal and explains why he thinks MMT would be such a misstep for the left.
Meadway outlines with appealing clarity the economic strategy of the Labour Party.
John McDonnell summarised the aim when he said “we want nothing less than an economy that is radically fairer, more democratic, and more sustainable, where the wealth of society is shared by all.” As the Shadow Treasury team has developed that since September 2015, I’d say the principles are:
– A rejection of the neoliberal premises that private ownership and markets will always be the best way to organise society;
– A belief that deep changes are required for our economy to begin to move it in a direction that benefits the great majority, including making it more sustainable;
– The principle that ownership and control of productive resources are the decisive factors determining economic outcomes, and that both should be decentralised, democratic, and collective as far as possible.
Instead of rhetoric about elites and globalisation, Meadway offers a basis for a critique of ‘neoliberalism’,
I’d argue this shift in production relations – transferring ownership and reasserting the power of capital over labour – is at the core of neoliberalism in practice, but it can sit alongside the continued provision of welfare and other “consumption” provision by the state, in one form or another.
Labour, he argues, has begun to tackle this with the first Manifesto under the new left leadership.
So to the extent that the 2017 manifesto aimed to restore spending cuts and improved public service provision, it was essential – the damage done by austerity since 2010 has been both appalling, and entirely unnecessary – but not radically transformative. To the extent the 2017 manifesto went further, and posed the issue of correcting the colossal error of privatisation, it was more radical, because it began the process of reversing forty years of neoliberalism, but it didn’t point at something beyond what is common enough across the developed world. Likewise, [Labour’s] £250bn National Transformation Fund would be a huge increase in public investment for the UK, but would move us to around the average level of investment (relative to GDP) of the developed economy OECD group. To a significant extent, Corbynomics is Make Britain Normal Again.
Furthermore,
The second, underlying even this, is the transformation of ownership. This is more than only correcting the mistakes of the past by reversing 1980s and 1990s privatisations: it means broadening the scope of collective – not government – ownership across the whole economy, from renewable energy production (which, given the technologies we have, will largely need decentralisation), to worker ownership, to areas that we’ve only just begun to think about, like data. There are huge opportunities here to break out of the zero-sum games that neoliberal capitalism is forcing us into.
The interview is recommended to anybody with a serious interest in Labour economic policies, proving some solid foundations have been built.
The core of the interview is taken up by a critique of Modern Monetary Theory.
In an a earlier article in Tribune, Against MMT, Meadway stated,
Unfortunately, however, MMT’s reassertion of a number of macroeconomic truths has been swamped by its distinctive contribution to theory — which is a rehabilitation of what is known as chartalism. Chartalism holds that money receives its value fundamentally as a result of its use to pay taxes — that, in the words of leading chartalist Georg Knapp, ‘money is a creature of law’. This is dubious as a historical claim, since money has existed in many different forms throughout history, and only some of those forms have arrived with the stamp of the state — and dubious as a description of reality today, since most money is created by private banks when people take out loans, whose relationship to the state is (at most) indirect.
This is the crucial political aspect:
MT’s grand claim is that money derives its value from its ability to pay taxes and, therefore, governments can exercise ‘monetary sovereignty’ by setting the value of money as they see fit. But the economy is not an island, it cannot be isolated from others in this way. Trade matters, as do the financial relationships between different economies — and both of those will depend on the value of the different currencies that economies use. MMT understates the amount these relative values can vary over time. As anyone using the pound since the Brexit referendum will have seen, these variations can be quite large. Countries running a deficit on their current account (meaning, broadly, that they import more than they export, counting goods, services, and flows of income) like the UK — which has a deficit funded from abroad — will always be vulnerable to demands for foreign currency that they cannot immediately meet. This is a significant impediment to sovereignty.
Meadway concludes,
Worse yet, in a country so profoundly and obviously overstretched internationally, with a major financial centre that we know to be a major vulnerability, MMT promotes a blasé indifference to the real relationships of power and patronage that sustain the world economy. To the extent that it disorientates activists, peddling simplistic monetary solutions to complex problems of political power, it is a barrier to a genuinely transformative Labour government. We need to build an organised and educated mass movement that can see the problems such a government might face. MMT cannot help us do this — in fact, it will hinder us in that mission.
Without pretending to grasp the technical details it is clear that McDonnell would not have spent so much time consulting respected advisers on taxation reform if the Shadow Chancellor believed that using MMT would magic away the problems of raising revenue for Labour’s spending plans.
This is more in the line of the introduction to this post.
Meadway states,
There’s something I didn’t cover in Tribune, but the underlying politics of MMT are worth spending some time on. The core MMT policy agenda has strikingly little to do with the left: support for dollar dominance; indifference (at best) to redistribution from the rich through taxation (usually argued as taxing the rich being “unnecessary”); and labour market authoritarianism via the so-called “Job Guarantee”. There’s not much in here that is recognisably of the left, if we think the left is basically about freedom and equality – there’s quite a different political tradition at work.
This comes through in many different ways. For instance, Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi described it (in Reclaiming the State, p.10) as “tragic” that the left adopted the causes of anti-racism, women’s rights, and LGBT rights in the late 1970s. Worse, they claim this is as “equally tragic” as the acceptance of neoliberalism by parts of the left over the same time period. Now this is reactionary garbage, however you look at it, and should be firmly rejected – but it’s an important indicator as to where MMT is coming from.
MMT is not an authentic programme of the left; it’s a programme for economic nationalism that, currently, is trying to attach itself to the left. Historically, economic nationalism has arrived in left or right variants, and there has been slippage from one side to the other. So at different times MMT’s proponents have used different arguments to gain a hearing – claiming in the 1990s that a “Job Guarantee” would help drive down wages, for instance, whereas now they claim the Job Guarantee is a good way to deal with climate change. MMT advocates are reportedly advising Matteo Salvini in Italy, and Bill Mitchell thinks his government should “lead” other European countries. Mitchell and Fazi approvingly cite the monetary policy of Nazi Germany before the war in their book. I could generously call all this a bit slippery. There are ways to end neoliberalism globally that are not progressive, and this will (increasingly) be the terrain the left is fighting on.
Put simply, neither industry nor money can be successful in modern attempt to create autarkies, worlds self-sufficient for themselves.
Does this monetary sovereignty lead to autocratic regimes?
That is far from established but it looks as if it lacks the capacity to perform the miracles Fazi and his side claim for it.
But as for slippery slopes, Fazi’s support for the Full Brexit, and now, collaboration with Spiked, shows he is already on one.
