mapping utopia

2012-01-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

Leon Trotsky – a revolutionary’s life
By Joshua Rubenstein
Pubs. Yale University Press
Hdbck
Trotsky was a man much traduced, and his reputation has not been enhanced by the ideas and actions of many of his devoted followers. This new biography, in the series Jewish Lives, is written neither by an admirer and follower like Deutscher nor by a denigrator like Robert Service. It is a view very much coloured, as the series indicates, by the idea of ‘Jewishness’ and a Jewish self-understanding, but manages to give a fairly objective and useful, if very brief, portrait.

Trotsky was a tragic figure of mythical proportions. A dedicated – one could say fanatical – devotee of the ideas of Marx and the Russian revolution, which consumed his whole life. He was persecuted unmercifully by Stalin, who had all his immediate family killed, alongside his many associates and former comrades.

Once expelled from the Soviet Union, Trotsky’s intransigence and unremitting calls for world revolution left him marooned in a no-mans-land without safe refuge.

Alongside Lenin, he was indisputably the most capable and influential figure of the Bolshevik revolution. He was broadly educated, an eloquent writer and magnetic speaker. Ironically Stalin, after Lenin’s death, was able to outmanoeuvre and sideline him because of his lack of ambition and refusal to conspire or join in political intrigues. While he undoubtedly had serious flaws in his character and could be just as callous as Stalin if he felt it furthered the ends of the revolution, he was a selfless and dedicated revolutionary.

In retrospect it beggars belief that such a key figure could have been reduced to a pathetic and isolated renegade in such a short space of time and that Stalin’s clever propaganda machine was able to convince not only communist parties throughout the world, but also many leading liberals and left-wingers that Trotsky was a malevolent cancer in the international communist movement. As this book reveals, this denigration was facilitated by a virulent and entrenched anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe as well as by its more genteel form in the West.

2012-01-26T04:41:00.000-08:00

Once again, back in the USA!
Buffalo NY Jan 2012
Every visit to the USA only seems to confirm my already prejudicial viewpoint. I promised myself that I would never fly long distances again, and certainly not to the USA. But Siski’s impending birth gave me little choice; she needed help in the immediate post-parturition phase, at least. Although the plane across ‘The Pond’ was not full, and I could bag a couple of seats to myself, the flight seemed interminably long and tedious.
Arriving at JFK in New York, I had to join the long queue through immigration and customs. The notices informed passengers that the officials who vetted them would be their first experience of the US, and they would be friendly and courteous. Well, the latter maybe, but with the former they must be expressing a sense of irony after all: the officials seem bored out of their minds and singularly lack any vestige of humour; try cracking a joke at your peril.
After an hour, I was through unscathed, but still faced a four-hour wait for my connection to Buffalo. Although this is the most prestigious US airport, it had the distinct feel of a rather outdated post war building; not exactly scruffy, but slightly shabby at the edges. The shops and cafes all seem to have been transported from one of those small town urban shopping malls, with the attractiveness of aged prostitutes. I forewent the culinary joys on offer and stilled my hunger with a stale roll I’d brought off the plane. There was nowhere I could sit and be out of earshot of the ubiquitous ceiling mounted TV screens or the regular announcements warning everyone not to take items from strangers into our luggage etc. Nevertheless, I tried to doze. The time approached for my flight, but we were then told that it had been delayed – oh the joys of flying! Eventually, I arrived at around 11.00pm local time, 3.00am home time.

Siski and Jose live on the outskirts of Buffalo. Not an unpleasant place, but like almost any other ‘middle class’ suburb in the USA: long streets of large, clapboard houses in ‘colonial style’, with largish gardens (actually just grassed areas) with no fences or hedges, and each house plonked alongside the next, as if on an open stage with no privacy from each other.
Although their little street is quiet, the nearby main street, with all the shops, is a six-lane highway with continual traffic and with no central reservation – a nightmare to cross. Apart from the odd jogger or dog-walker, you see no one out and about; only cars. No wonder there is so much obesity. Apart from the numerous pizza outlets and other fast food joints to cheaply satisfy your hunger, there are drive-in pharmacies and drive-in banks, so why bother getting out of your car at all?
They have so much land in the USA, that towns just spread out, which means not just acres of monotonous suburbia, but shopping streets that go on for ever as well. It’s impossible from Siski’s place to simply walk around the corner and do most of your shopping; the main street goes on for miles and miles.
The local supermarket is just that – super sized – like an enormous factory warehouse with so much choice that you are mesmerized by the superfluity. There are even British and German sections where you can buy specialist products. However, they sell beer but no wines or spirits. And even to buy a couple of bottles of beer you ‘may be asked to provide and ID’ to show you are an adult, but rather than be selective, everyone is challenged, so Jose and I, both with greying hair, are asked to show that we are over 18!
Walking past the bakery department in the store, I saw all the staff doing synchronised group exercises on the spot – felt for a moment I might be in North Korea.
As I’ve said previously the US is a land of incredible contradictions. The house on the corner near Siski’s has Ron Paul posters in their garden – he’s the right-wing libertarian Republican presidential hopeful. People might be right wing politically, but can be as friendly as apple pie on a personal level. One neighbour offered to lend Siski their car and offered to take Lili while Siski was in hospital; the couple across the road just popped in to ask if it would be Ok for them to cook a meal and bring it across tomorrow, so that Siski wouldn’t need to cook. That would be rare in Britain, I suspect. The same family has their own personal, petrol-driven snow blower to clear their small drive! Almost everyone greets you and even tried to strike up conversation – great if you want contact, but can be annoying when you just want your own peace and quiet.
Williamsville, the Buffalo suburb where Siski lives, prides itself on being ‘a village’ and relishes the connotation, displayed on every shop and sign, although it is really only a suburban corridor between Buffalo proper and elsewhere.
Lili loves her new little sister and spends long periods just gazing at her and holding her hand or stroking her. I have now become demoted to second-best friend. She trots off to bed obediently for her nap every midday even though she is not at all tired, and can spend half an hour or more ‘reading’ aloud to herself. Constanza sleeps most of the day and night and only seems to be discomfited if her nappy is full. You would hardly know she is here most of the time; she just sleeps quietly in her cot in the living room, oblivious of the daily noises around her.
Weather here now seems like in Britain – after heavy snowfall the other day and very cold temp., today is drizzly and very mild and the snow is melting rapidly. Despite rain, went for a short walk. Despite tis being built-up suburbia, only five minutes from Siski is a ‘creek’ i.e. small but fast-flowing river, and some rough woodland. This morning had lovely views of three large deer at the edge of the wood – they stood for a few moments just watching me – then excellent views of blue jays, cardinals, song sparrows and black-capped chickadees; also mourning doves, an American robin and excellent views of a lovely belted kingfisher. There were plenty of woodpeckers about: northern yellow-shafted flicker and hairy woodpeckers. Lots of grey squirrels, of course, and rabbits. So no shortage of wildlife, despite it being part of a big city.
Today the belted kingfisher was on a small pond in the park and flew back and forth with annoyance once we approached. We got excellent views. A number of American goldfinches with song sparrows and chickadees in the park. It’s trying to snow again and the temperature has dropped. Lili and I went for a short walk but couldn’t walk along the river because it is now in full flood after the melt and has flooded the path. Lili is good company and sings songs along the way and makes no complaints.
Yesterday afternoon Becky, Siski’s friend (her son used to go to the same nursery as Lili) popped in. She immediately offered to clear the snow from our driveway, while her daughter played with Lili. She then came inside for a drink and chatted, or should I say kept up a fast flow of chatter, almost a monologue. Why do so many US-Americans talk so much, and in such loud voices and at such a speed that you have a headache afterwards? Siski reckons they talk so much and so loud because they are mostly full of self confidence, engendered in school from an early age by being encouraged to talk to the class. Even Lili does it in nursery – every child has to bring something in each week and talk about it.
Then the neighbour popped in and brought us our evening meal, plus presents for Lili and the baby! They’d cooked us chicken pie with broccoli and brownies as a desert. It’s surprising what they spend on presents, too, 40-100 dollars is not excessive; very generous.
Friday 20 Jan. Had a good fall of snow once again yesterday evening. Today bright and sunny so Siski let Lili miss school and we both went tobogganing. We had the little park and slope all to ourselves and had great fun sledding up and down. Lili even ventured down by herself. Tomorrow I will have the dubious pleasure of accompanying Lili to a friend’s birthday party at ‘Rolly Polly’s.
Rolly Pollys turns out to be a great place for children, founded by an entrepreneurial couple (one a former teacher) who found that children didn’t know what to do when they had break-time at school and had become so sedentary, so they came up with this idea of making a business out of giving children exercise. It is a spacious children’s gym with bouncy castle, trampolines, pits full of foam rubber, ladders and swings etc, so the children spend an hour really expending physical energy, then have a piece of birthday cake and watch the birthday girl opening her presents before going home. The birthday cake looked like something out of a science fiction book – a large slab of dark, gooey cake covered in the most vile multi-coloured icing. The children all get given a bag to take home with a sugar lolly and bits and pieces! No wonder they all grow up to be obese. The birthday girl got given numerous presents – Barbie dolls, dressing up clothes and other assorted ‘cheap’ toys. She was totally overwhelmed by it all.
The bottle recycling point at the supermarket is called the ‘Beverage container redemption centre’. Sound like a place on a Biblical college campus!
Today, Sunday, we all drove out to the Iroqois wildlife reserve, but apart from a far-off view of a bald eagle and a few more Am. Goldfinches and Am tree sparrows, nothing to be seen or heard!
Lili is fascinated by the song that Siski maintains my mother sang to her and Gali at bath time (can’t imagine it!). It’s an amusing Cockney music hall song, called, ‘Your baby has gone down the plughole’ or as it is really sung (and Lili does a great imitation to the amusement of all): Yer baeby ‘as gorn daan the plug’ole!
Monday 23rd, the day before my return to London, and my toothe ache was getting worse, so decided to visit Siski’s dentist. It was about a mile away, the weather was dry and mild, so I walked not that I had much option, as Jose was at work and there is no public transport on this route). I didn’t see another walker all the way. The dentist was very friendly, wanted to know where I was from and then spoke about Dickens. He did three x rays and located a rotting wisdom tooth which he recommended extracting, so I decided to wait till I got home. He said he could email the x-rays to my dentist if they wished and then gave me a photo copy of the x ray and refused to take any payment!
On my way home, again no one else about, I heard a police siren and the cop car slid alongside me and the bullet-headed cop got out. I thought I was going to be questioned again simply because I was walking – an odd thing to do in this country – but he wanted to know if I’d been ringing on someone’s door bell. I said, ‘no’ but I did see two dubious-looking characters who were ringing a door bell, a block down the road. He replied that they weren’t there when he drove by. Not my problem, I thought, but didn’t say so, as his face had a distinctly unhumorous mien. He demanded my ID and where I lived, then to back in his car and drove off, without so much as a thank you. The contrast of the USA once again: generosity and friendliness vs. stony-faced officialdom.
At the check-in desk at the airport in Buffalo I asked if I could check my bags through to London. The lady said OK but could I tell her where London is!

2012-01-26T04:39:00.000-08:00

The UCS Work-in captured the imagination of the people
Bob Starrett and George Kerr were workmates in the Yarrow Shipyard on the Clyde in Glasgow. They were both there when the 40th anniversary of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in was commemorated last year. That event became legendary in British labour movement history.
Bob doesn’t look his 73 years. Despite a shock of white hair, he looks like a fitness trainer at least ten years younger; George, too, still has the optimism and combativeness of a much younger man.
For Bob and George, the work-in could have happened yesterday as it is still vivid in their memories. It saddens both of them that that heroic battle for the right to work is today for many only a distant memory if at all. Most of the leaders and indeed many of the men who took part in that struggle are no longer with us: Jimmy Reid, Jimmie Airlie and Sammy Gilmore are all dead.
Bob worked as a painter in the Yarrow Yard, but his talent for caricature and cartooning was discovered early on. He’d been drawing since he was a boy growing up in Maryhill in Glasgow. Once the work-in was underway, it became essential to keep workers informed of what was happening day-by-day, but also to explain their case to the wider public and win them over. Good communications were vital, so Bob's talents were soon put to good use as the UCS’s resident cartoonist. He later donated the archive of his work to Glasgow's Caledonian University UCS archive, and his work was shown at Glasgow's Mitchell Library, and also featured in a Channel 4 film made by Ken Sprague about worker artists. ‘They thought cartoons would be a good way to present some of the complex issues in a concise way,’ Bob says. When Bob’s daughter Tanya was born in the year of the work-in, ‘the sleepless nights proved perfect for helping him get down to the necessary cartooning work,’ he says with a laugh.
The historic work-in by the 8500 workers of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders to save the yards from closure began in 1971. Jimmy Reid and other leading stewards realised that a strike would be counter productive and be immediately seized upon as an excuse to close the yards. They hit on the idea of a work-in instead. This would demonstrate that they were still viable and that the workers weren’t a group of work-shy layabouts. Their stand captured the imagination not only of people throughout Britain, but worldwide.
George was outfitting convenor at the yard and an activist in the electricians’ union. He was also a leader of a tenants’ campaign to prevent a polluting incinerator being built near the estate where he lived. When Pinochet’s bloody coup took place in Chile, George and his wife took two Chilean exiles into their small council house and slept on the sofa for four months so that the Chileans could have their bed. The two of them didn’t just talk solidarity; they practised it.
Both talk of their time in the yards with warm affection despite the incredibly hard and dirty work it was. The banter and story-telling was a feature of the workforce and the tight-knit community they lived in. One guy’s stories were so enthralling that if he hadn’t finished telling one before the siren went at the end of the day his workmates would make sure they were back at the crack of dawn just to hear the rest of it.
The Heath government wanted to shut the yards because they were deemed no longer competitive, mainly due to a lack of investment over the years by the owners who just creamed off the profits. They belonged to what were termed ‘lame duck’ industries. This was the start of Britain’s deindustrialisation, subsequently completed by Thatcher. The work-in continued for 18-months and, Bob and George stress: ‘without a single arrest, no vandalism, no hooliganism, no malice, no hatred.’
Edward Heath's Tory government refused to put government money in to save the yards, but he was eventually forced to cave in by the enormous support for the work in galvanised throughout the country and the government came up with a belated £35million to help the yards modernise. MP Tony Benn was one of the chief supporters work-in.
Bob left the shipyards in 1979, after being offered a temporary job as a sign-writer for a small film company. He then took himself off to Italy, earning his keep by "minding a palace" in Tuscany, before going on to art school and eventually work as a set painter and carpenter in the film industry.
Although Bob has since met a whole number of high profile Hollywood stars, he says unequivocally that none of them come near the leaders of the UCS work-in like Jimmy Reid, Jimmie Airlie and Sammy Barr as real heroes. ‘They were superb at what they did,’ he says, ‘I could listen to Airlie over and over again. Jimmy Reid I knew a lot earlier and he never let you down in terms of the clarity of his analyses.’
Despite mixing with the glitterati of the film industry, it has in no way eclipsed his strong attachment to his roots. I met him again by chance in London at last year’s big demonstration, suffering from jet-lag after returning only the day before from working with his partner, the Oscar-winning costume designer Lindy Hemming, in New York on a new Batman film. But there he was demonstrating with public service workers demanding pension protection and an end to public service cuts.
‘When the Tory Government took on the Clyde they imagined they would be dealing with a few ignorant and backward workers, but if they had done their homework properly they would have realised these guys were real intellectuals.’ But they could be blunt too. Sammy Gilmore, one of the UCS leaders, once told the Secretary of Industry, Keith Joseph to shut up - told Heath to cut the commercials’, when he refused to get to the point.
Despite its impact, however, the UCS has been forgotten to a large extent which is why Bob and George welcomed the 40th anniversary commemoration - for which Bob provided the artwork. They both believe the lessons learned in the UCS will have to be learned by the younger generation again. ‘The things that caused UCS are more glaring now, the contradictions get sharper each year,’ Bob says. George is putting together a travelling presentation to go around Scotland’s’ schools so that the valuable experience of the UCS work-in can inspire new generations.
‘Physically,’ Bob says, ‘I worked in films but mentally, I remain in a time warp with the UCS because I've witnessed what ordinary people can do when given the chance to do it.’

2012-01-01T06:55:00.001-08:00

What Chance for Progress in 2012?

The Year 2012 will be one of continued crisis and severe hardship for the many. Despite a virtual implosion of global capitalism, the left and progressive forces nowhere seem able to mount a serious challenge, never mind topple the rotten system which also becomes ever more capable of fragmenting, integrating or redirecting whatever opposes or challenges it.

The arguments for a non-capitalist form of society are ever more pressing and increasingly obvious. However, without a party or organisation strong and magnetic enough to give focus and leadership, this awareness will not be translated into meaningful action, despite the many welcome and heroic city square occupations, demonstrations and pickets outside banks.

Most would agree that some sort of radical change of the present bandit capitalism is necessary if humanity is to progress and flourish. Facing environmental catastrophe, widespread poverty and inequality, increasing unemployment, crises in our healthcare and education systems, lack of adequate pensions, a severe housing deficit and rising crime levels, few could argue that the present system is fulfilling society’s needs or that it offers a stable future. Such a crisis in the past would have spurred an enormous development of the left, but this is not happening. Trade unions remain on the defensive almost everywhere and working people, by and large, appear to acquiesce to the blackmail of economic crisis and budget deficits. Most of the new social movements reject organisation, ideology and politics as they have known them in the past and as they present themselves today. While we need new thinking, it cannot be reduced to ‘revolution via the internet plus blogging and tweeting…a refusal of politics, the demand for power from below, a revolution without the seizure of power may contain partial truths, but runs the risk of becoming merely a fossilized subculture,’ as the recently deceased Italian communist Lucio Magri wrote.

Why has this profound crisis not produced a resurgence of the left? The answers are complex, but there are undoubtedly a number of central ones.

Marx and Engels clearly saw that outmoded productive forces would become fetters on the development of more advanced production relations, and that has become more obvious than ever, but it hasn’t led (as the two predicted) to the overthrow of the old relationship; we have not witnessed a growing proletariat with increasing class consciousness challenging the status quo. In fact, in the western world, the industrial productive forces (as described by Marx) are becoming increasingly less significant numerically and socially, and their contribution to GDP has also diminished. Relations of production are now more fragmented, less cohesive or socially significant than ever. We have also seen a profound set-back in the development of class consciousness – avidly promoted over the years by the media. Our society today is more fragmented than ever, on the social, cultural and political levels. Certainly class and class interests are no longer as clear or black and white as they were decades ago. For the left to bang on about the ‘working class’ as if nothing had changed since the height of 19th century capitalism, is a refusal to recognise this new reality.

The Political Map has changed
The role of the mainstream political parties has changed too. They no longer clearly represent different class interests in society, but have become self-perpetuating and self-selecting elites content to argue over which one can best manage the same system. None has a mass membership base any longer, or strong local parties that truly represent their populations; there dwindling memberships are also ageing. They have become electoral machines geared to the reproduction of governing castes and turning out their dwindling votes once every few years.

The overwhelming majority of the population has become so disillusioned with politics as a whole that it has switched off. This is a dangerous situation, because the political elite will continue to govern and make policy, with or without popular mandate. Already in the highly developed north we have seen how an increasing rejection of politics can open the way to a spiral of revolt and repression (viz. the recent riots). The concentration of social injustice in marginalised sectors and zones has also made social conflict less unified and transparent and has removed the cohesiveness of organised masses that for decades breathed life into political democracy. This runs parallel with a wider ideological crisis linked to general social attitudes, the decline of mass parties as activist organisations capable of unifying and mobilising interests and behaviour in a common culture or project.

But worldwide, despite an impending environmental catastrophe, a system in chaos and leaderships in denial, most people are continuing their daily lives as if little has changed. Of course there are continual protests, but like the recent ‘anti-capitalist’ occupation movement, they are undertaken by smallish groups that have been able to galvanise much public sympathy, but this has not led to an expansion of the movement itself. The big exceptions have been, of course, the heroic uprisings in the Arab world.

Within this whole debate we can’t ignore the key role of the media. Their role has become key in moulding consciousness, and in counteracting and negating a class consciousness developed in daily work and social relationships. What is also new is the leap in the manipulative power of these media and their close inter-relationship with the major centres of economic power. They are continually reshaping the common sense of the times, moulding cultures, lifestyles and values, especially among the subaltern sections of society. This lends public opinion a confused and indecisive character and leads to political apathy. Education itself is being supplanted by fast-moving mass media and their message of passivity.

What role for the Labour Party and Trade Unions?
The Labour Party was created by the unions in 1900 in order to ensure working people had adequate representation in parliament. We don’t have to go into details of Labour Party history to argue that, today, it can hardly be said to represent those interests any longer. The fact that parliament itself has also become a largely impotent force in the context of our globalised economy and the power of the banks and multinationals means that the representatives we elect to sit there have little power. Traditional parties are, today, characterised by a less representative and ageing membership. A conception of the party as the exclusive locus and instrument of politics is no longer valid. The political system as a whole has entered a new crisis and impotence as the role of nation states has declined and spawned institutions divorced from democratic input

The trade unions and the left in general, today, have to look beyond parliamentary representation if they wish to promote a shift towards implementing policies and changes in society commensurate with the needs and goals of their members and constituents. Those needs and goals can no longer be channelled or indeed implemented through the sort of political party we have traditionally assumed represented working people, and certainly not through an impotent parliament. There is also a general ossification in the organisational forms of the workers’ movement. Traditional forms of organisation and methods of waging the struggle for better pay and working conditions are no longer effective, particularly within the context of the complex legal restrictions on workers’ rights. Working people now find themselves in a losing battle to defend things like public services, pensions, job security as well as living wage levels that most of us thought had been won for good. The present functioning of the economic system has proved incompatible with long-standing social gains, a universal welfare system, stable full employment and elements of participatory democracy in the most advanced societies.

A secure future for working people will depend less than in the past on trade unions, but more on a defined and clear political project and on forging instruments that directly impact on the structure of the state, the economy, technological strategies and educational apparatuses. Trade unions, in the past could rely on the power of a collective labour force, but that is no longer the case, due to a fragmentation of workplaces and workforces, increased mobility of labour and the instability and temporality of the work-place itself. These factors are continually subtracting from the vanguards, i.e. working class grass-roots organisations and leaderships are continually being dismantled or destroyed.

It is today perfectly feasible to reduce the hours of the working day and thus create more jobs and provide people with more leisure time, but who’s making the demand? Unions and the left need to look beyond the horizon of paid work; without free time, paid work becomes a hollow and frustrating state of restlessness.

The political institutions of capitalism in the present post-industrial phase have also changed. Parliament once formed the nerve centre of decision-making, the instrument of powerful hegemony, but has now become an empty ritualised instrument for rubber-stamping what has already happened, a mediation and administrative support for a power that exists elsewhere, in the citadels of finance and transnational corporations.

A party of unity and concensus
Today we have a whole range of organisations independently pursuing aims of social change, but each alone is weak and incapable of forcing through such change, yet there is little consciousness of the need, nor willingness to attempt, to focus on those goals through closer co-operation with others. A strong party of the left could perform that role, but it could only do so by reconstituting itself in a different way, sloughing off much out-dated traditional thinking and party political baggage.

Such a party, even more so today, would need to work openly inside the various progressive organisations, but at the same time recognising the other’s autonomy; the party would need to engage with them, not just ‘represent’ them. It would have to become a unifying force, an agent and organiser of society, whose role is to promote struggle and stimulate intellectual and moral reform. In the past, in many countries, the Communist Party played such a role and could still do so.

It would have to work with and through these many organisations, whether they be environmental, trade union, feminist, racial or social, not to impose its own ideology, but to listen and learn, to offer organising and ideological advice, to help promote consensus and effective action, to invigorate new generations of activists and the concerned to take political action together as the only means of challenging the present hegemony of big finance and corporate power.

The chronic effects of short-termism
The very nature of capitalism (and this includes the subservient governments administering the political system) means that the necessary long-term decisions are not being made; everything is based on short-termism. This includes not only decision-making on a factory or organisational level but at the highest levels too. This is reflected in the prevailing model of consumption and the extreme concentration of powers in research planning, technology and growth strategies, which is in the hands of decision-making centres remote from the regions and populations affected by them. They are controlled by the companies and organisations whose priorities are short-term profit rather than social good. Reality shows that the choices of investment and location are not taking us in the direction we need to go if humanity’s survival is to be guaranteed.

The environmental question offers good ground on which a communist project could base its critique of the system and could also provide a momentum to transform and qualitatively enrich that critique, taking it beyond economistic or utopian ways of thinking. The environmental question needs a communist project and organisational form to unite the many different social subjects and interests, to identify the real roots of the problems and to assert a power capable of addressing them as a whole as well as helping to change people’s minds.

Some growing social needs are of unquestionable importance - healthcare, education and urban planning – and can only be properly satisfied in the form of collective production and consumption. This is why government attempts to privatise these services at the behest of the big conglomerates, is leading to such chaos and seriously deficient services. The present attacks on the welfare state, benefits and pensions are reversing years of achievements won in struggle, and annulling post-war consensus politics. Despite strikes and vigorous campaigns the unions have this time been incapable of reversing the process.

The great historical merit of capitalism has been precisely its ability to channel much of the surplus product into accumulation; this made it possible to accelerate the development of productive forces. But the history of capitalism has not been one of ever widening prosperity; indeed it has led, in many parts of the world, to forms of inequality and more brutal and widespread exploitation than before. We have seen how capitalism has led to the growth of mega-cities with sprawling suburbs in the less developed countries, we’re also seeing a ghettoisation of city centres in the developed north, both leading to a chaotic degradation of life.

To view all these pressing social issues as manageable with a reformed or recuperated capitalism or capable of being addressed by means of welfare and aid, is to misunderstand the depth of the crisis and the underlying, deep fracture in the system. However, on an ‘ultra-modern’ terrain there is a possibility of reviving communist thinking and struggle. There is an organic link between the large mass of the marginalised and impoverished and the traditional workers’ movement and new sectors emerging from the qualitative contradictions of post-industrialism.

At the peak of capitalist development, the workers’ movement found favourable terrain for its struggles and managed to wring important concessions from the capitalists. That is now changing for the worse. Prosperity is diminishing and inequality is increasing. On a world scale the gap in living conditions has widened inexorably between north and south. In the highly developed world income differentials are widening again after a period of narrowing, and a significant fringe of society is once again falling beneath acceptable thresholds of minimum existence. The less industrialised south is now largely trapped between the pressures of increasing population and the break up of traditional forms of self-sufficiency; its economies are spiralling downward to below subsistence level. The region is over-burdened with foreign debt and its environments have been degraded. The present forms of injustice and new poverty are expressed in the less developed world particularly as a cumulative process of marginalisation creating a broad social stratum without hope and being pushed towards degenerate cultural forms (e.g. fundamentalist fanaticism or racial conflict and barbarism).

Does the Chinese model offer a lesson?
Finally, in this whole context the Chinese experience is illuminating. Faced with the implosion of the socialist world, after 1989, China realised that capitalism was the only show on the road, but its inherent contradictions and solely market-oriented strategies were incompatible with its population size and largely rural population. So what has arisen (something never envisaged in either Marxist or capitalist thinking) is a country led by a Communist Party with centralised planning and strict regulatory mechanisms overseeing a mixed, but largely capitalist economy. This has enabled the country to attract foreign investments and to rapidly industrialise; its population has experienced rising living standards and a broad satisfaction of consumer demand. It has meant that the ruling party has been able to direct, monitor and adjust investments and infra-structure projects, tightly control its own banking system and set the country's priorities with little outside interference. Of course, this transformation has not been a smooth one or without its problems – there is an increasing gulf between a small elite of super-rich and a mass of still relatively poor workers; there has been environmental degradation on a massive scale and there is still widespread corruption and restricted democratic freedoms. But it appears to be working better, in terms of stability, than the capitalist world elsewhere. Can this model be sustained? Is it one to emulate? It is undoubtedly too early to answer those questions, but it deserves a more intense scrutiny. Japan, too, has a system without political alternation, resting on a committee of all the country’s major economic powers, it also has, like China, a high degree of conformism among the mass of the people. Its economy, despite recent environmental catastrophes and the world economic crisis also appears to be weathering the storm.

(This article owes a great debt to the writing of the lately deceased Italian communist Lucio Magri, whose historical reflections in his book ‘The Tailor of Ulm’ is a great source of ideas for the left)
END

2011-11-20T02:58:00.001-08:00

Why capitalism likes us to behave irrationally
It’s a great irony that although human beings, as distinct from other animals, are characterised by their ability for rational thinking, so much of our behaviour is irrational. This contradiction has been unashamedly exploited by big businesses in marketing their products as well as by politicians trying to persuade us to vote for them. We are sometimes our own worst enemies because of this.

Understanding in what way and why we are irrational would help us avoid the worst pitfalls. It has been amply demonstrated that most of us, under no outside pressures, would behave according to social norms we have learned from the society around us. Thus most people in most circumstances wouldn’t steal, aren’t dishonest and would express solidarity with others. This was very well demonstrated in the former socialist countries, where social behaviour was the bedrock of society and the sudden introduction of market values after 1989 came as a profound shock. People were no longer sure how to behave and became easy victims for unscrupulous exploiters.

Most of us can be persuaded to abandon our social behaviour under certain circumstances and adopt irrational ‘market norms’. Let me demonstrate this with a key example. Few of us today can be unaware of the potential dangers of climate change to the very existence of mankind, however many if asked by pollsters on the street whether petrol should be taxed more will counter vociferously and argue isntead for a cut in petrol taxes and for the maintenance of cheap airfares. Instant gratification (our animal instinct) takes precendence over essential long-term planning (what our rational mind should be telling us).

Human beings also have a strongly inbuilt reluctance to kill or harm their fellow humans, and in order to overcome such essential social behaviour, these deep feelings have to be ‘deconstructed’. This is what armies have to do in order to train soldiers. That’s why they first destroy a recruit’s individuality, his civilian value system and sense of self-worth. It’s also the reason they show or allow recruits watch violent and pornographic films to desensitise them and turn them into killing machines. Brecht demonstrated this so magnificently in his play ‘Man is Man’. Irrational violence replaces feelings of human solidarity.

As Freud pointed out, we all internalise certain social values and these will normally hold good in most circumstances unless we come under undue pressure and temptation. Doing good stimulates the rewards centres of our brain, but this profess can be overridden given the right triggers.

Coalition cuts now being made to childcare, pensions and working conditions also come at a heavy cost to our social fabric. Additionally, they affect workers’ productivity as well as their sense of collective responsibility and of service to society. Workers are often prepared to work longer hours or increase production if it is seen as for the good of society and their fellow workers, but if they are treated only as mercenary employees, they will then behave as such. For the duration of our lives we continuously enter into social relationships, but on occasions we also enter into purely ‘market relationships’ i.e. when we buy goods or someone buys from us. Our behaviour will be conditioned by whichever.situation we think we are in.

Since Thatcher, who notoriously said ‘society doesn’t exist’ relationships that were primarily social have become increasingly transformed into purely impersonal monetary ones. Whether in education, healthcare or even in soliciting help or advice, all is being reduced to a financial transaction and the social element becomes marginalised. Performance-based salaries, targets, test scores and league tables for schools, all undermine social relationships, replacing them with monetary or statistical values.

Organisations, businesses and institutions used to talk of corporate loyalty, which was important to them. Most workers in the health service or education carry out their jobs as a public service they are proud of that. Of course they are paid for doing their jobs, but payment is often less than they could earn elsewhere in the private sector. It is their sense of public service, the rewards they received in terms of social status, gratitude, warmth, collegiality and generosity that gives them their sense of worth. Once you reduce all that to a purely ‘market’ relationship any sense of a wider loyalty will go by the board.

Even Ed Miliband in a recent speech (Guardian 18 Nov) stressed that ‘the morality of markets is fast becoming the next battleground of politics’. He went on to argue that a more moral, less predatory capitalism is also a more efficient one. This is undoubtedly true, but capitalism by its very nature, based on the profit motive, cannot become ‘moral’. The independent High Pay Commission in a recent report also stressed that inflated rewards for top bankers and businessmen lead to an ‘erosion of trust in the private sector’. Social behaviour is, of course, based largely on trust; once that is eroded, we do have a breakdown of such behaviour.

Capitalism plays on our irrational urge of wanting immediate gratification. Although we know rationally that by taking credit we are only delaying the painful payment process, and being required to pay more in the end, but our irrational selves take over and we do it anyway if the temptation is made attractive enough. Like ‘free trial’ periods for goods. The sales people know that once we have an item in our possession we are unlikely to give it up and send it back, whereas if we were told we had to pay upfront, we would seriously consider whether we actually want or need the item and also if we can afford to pay for it.

The sophistication of marketing today, with all the latest psychological insights at its disposal, can turn almost anything into a tempting opportunity – a must have possession. Advertising aimed at children and their parents implies that if you don’t purchase a particular toy for your child, then your love is deficient, thus manipulating our consciences and sense of love and duty towards our children.

In his book ‘Escape from Freedom’ Eric Fromm wrote that in a democracy people do not lack opportunity, but a confusing abundance of it. We are continually reminded that we can do anything and be anything we want to be. The problem is living up to this dream.

Although we all are fundamentally rational, our deeper-seated animal instincts can be played upon to ensure we make irrational decisions, particularly by those forces that see a quick profit in such irrationality. The only way to counter this anti-social system is to start in schools by helping students develop strategies and tools for making better and more rational decisions in their lives.
END

2011-11-07T07:29:00.001-08:00

4 November 2011

If there were any doubts remaining about Poppy Day now being a largely jingoistic exercise, the present British Legion poster campaign will settle them. They portray celebrities like Helen Mirren saying: ‘The true stars are our troops’, and Katherine Jenkins:’ It’s our unsung heroes who deserve the applause’. It has always been said that 11 November is a day to commemorate those soldiers who died fighting to defend their country (primarily in the First and Second World Wars). I was unaware that it now means cheerleading for British troops under any circumstances. Those now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing in Libya as well as those who humiliated and murdered innocent Iraqi civilians can hardly, I would submit, be termed ‘stars’ or be deserving of applause. I’ll be wearing a white poppy to commemorate all those, both civilian and military, killed in wars. It is the only possible honest and meaningful statement.

2011-11-04T04:42:00.001-07:00

Exploiting our leisure time
How do companies like Diesel build a £1bn business on selling new jeans which already look worn out? How do junk food manufacturers convince consumers, against all scientifically-based health advice, to buy their products?
Despite the recession, sportswear group Nike beat analysts' forecasts to post a jump in quarterly profits for 2011 of 13.8% to £371m. Firms like Nike, with aggressive advertising, even manage to target children as young as seven, who already want that tick on their clothes.
Profits also jumped at fashion company Burberry. The group saw a 49% rise in first half pre-tax profits to £129m. They are just two of such ‘brand’ companies seemingly defying the recession. Slick and well-targeted advertising is the key to their success - what we buy and what we wear gives us status, particularly when these products are associated with the names of film and sports stars and other assorted ‘celebrities’. Global firms like McDonalds and Coca Cola realised ages ago that the key to bumper profits is to make your product as cheap as possible, but keep your advertising huge.
The intensity and pace of work is now at an unprecedented level and is unsustainable in the long-term. However the damage done in the meantime to workers’ mental and physical health, to communities, family life and leisure is enormous.

Have you noticed how the share price of public companies rises every time sackings are announced? This seemingly contradictory fact only demonstrates that the more intensively you can exploit your workers, the more profitable you are likely to be, so fewer workers working harder is the goal of the system. The facts and figures, however, don’t reveal the underlying dire sociological alienation that is buried under the welter of economic data.

The monopolisation of ownership of the media, the means of mass distribution and dispersal beyond previous geographical, cultural and political boundaries also has a profound impact on the way big companies operate; it is not just workers in the producing countries that are shamelessly exploited but so are the duped consumers, who are conned into valuing brand labels before quality.

Marx eloquently described how we become alienated from our own humanity by the exploitive capitalist system. Alienation from the work we produce and from our fellow workers or producers. Capitalism, he points out, reduces labour to a commercial commodity to be traded on the market, when it once was primarily a social relationship between people involved in a common effort for survival or betterment. Citizens are dehumanised by being valued for the function they perform, as surplus-value-generating units, rather than the all-round beings they are.

The competitive labour market in industrial capitalist economies is designed to extract as much value as possible from those who work, to fill the coffers of those who own the enterprises and control the means of production; these days largely anonymous equity companies, pension and hedge funds rather than individuals.

Not only are the producers alienated from their product – they have little control over the production process, the final product itself or its sale - they also become alienated from their fellow workers and their class. Worker becomes pitted against worker and their mutual goal - to get the best out of their employer, through combining in solidarity - becomes blurred. The owners of capital also control the mass media, so that we are fed a diet of trivia and titillation. The effect, if not the aim is to turn us away from politics, deprive us of real information about the world that could help us understand it and thus think about changing it. This produces an effect Marx called false consciousness: we fail to see ourselves as we are, as exploited and manipulated beings.

Alienation is not only profound at work, but also in our leisure activities. Exhausted from the working day, we come home to unwind, but often have little energy for mental or physical activities; it’s so much easier to push a button and have our means of relaxation piped into our homes. In the era before mass electronic communications, people did make their own entertainment and their leisure was enjoyed with family, friends and neighbours in an active participatory way. In the post-war era, with increased incomes, cheap consumer products and increased leisure time, a rich potential source of profit opened up. The result has been a radical commercialisation and leisure activities have become based more on passive consumerism than active participation. So that we now face a double form of exploitation and alienation, as workers and consumers.

This alienating process is, of course, not limited to industrial workers, but to every working person. Cultural workers – those who produce our entertainment, works of art, books and music – are also victims of the same process. Today, with the unprecedented mechanisation of reproduction, together with electronification, the process of cultural production has engendered an alienation far beyond that which Marx could have imagined.

Whether in television, music or film, there is now a globalisation and simultaneous downward levelling of taste. The creative input of cultural workers now resembles more a car assembly line than an artistic process. Television is dominated by cheaply produced game shows, soaps, and competitive gladiatorial competitions like X-factor, The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den, Master Chef etc. which perpetuate the worst aspects of an individualistic capitalist system: we are passive onlookers as individuals fight it out for fame and fortune. Soaps create virtual communities, based on the real ones of the past as well as a nostalgia for those that have been destroyed; there is a substitution of real life discourse for a virtual one.

Film is dominated by horror, violence and escapist fantasy stories, and music is monopolised by the big record labels, that promote bland, soporific muzak instead of real individual voices. Even in those leisure areas, where there is a level of participatory activity, like sport, we see a domination of designer labels and aggressive individualism over-shadowing the sporting activity itself. Football teams have become little more than global advertisers of consumer goods, while the players are live capital to be bought and sold like any other asset. Of course, there are still examples of genuine artistic creativity, participatory sport and individual voices, but they are marginalised niche activities.

Only by consciously rejecting ‘junk-food-entertainment’ and instead becoming more involved at a local level in community activities, in organising and re-connecting with our neighbours and our own humanity will we begin to overcome the worst effects of this alienation.
END

2011-11-04T04:40:00.000-07:00

1 November 2011

Dear Sir
Stephen Pinker (If it bleeds, it misleads: why the Cassandras got it wrong; Guardian 1 November 2011) sets up an Aunt Sally to press a dubious argument. Surely the task today is not to solve the impossible and rather pointless conundrum of whether more people are killed by wars today than in previous eras, but to rail against the iniquity of war itself as a means of solving the world’s problems. Body counts, even if accurate, can never reveal the true horrors of war. The fact is that the world today is devoting inordinate and unafordable amounts of wealth on weapons of war instead of on education, health and well-being - that is the real horror. In a report for the British American Security Information Council, the US alone is planning to spend $700bn on nuclear weapons over the next decade. This is how real destruction and killing takes place today.
What Pinker ignores is that all wars in history have, in essence, been fought for economic reasons. Today’s power-brokers have other means at their disposal than actual invasions or killing with weapons hardware. Hundreds of thousands are dying of hunger and poverty as a direct result of the wastage of weapons spending and imperialist policies of imposing imbalanced trading mechanisms; guns are a last resort to be used on those few incalcitrant nations that refuse to toe the line.

John Green

2011-10-19T06:57:00.003-07:00

Penny Red – Notes from the New Age of Dissent
By Laurie Penny
Pbck. £12.99
Pluto Press

Since her blogs form the front line of the student demos in 2010 and her column in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny has becomes the unofficial voice of the recent youth rebellion. This is a selection of her published blogs and articles.

She writes with a visceral, often unrefined, but eloquent style, full of righteous indignation. She encapsulates the frustrations and anger of a generation abandoned by the political elite, those being forced to pay for the mess these and the bankers have created.

Her reporting from the thick of the student demos of 2010 is reporting at its very best, conveying the fear, exhilaration and blow-by-blow chronology of events, while also reflecting on their significance. It is not the refined and honed journalism as written from the comfort of a newsroom or TV studio; it is raw and clearly experienced first-hand. She provides an antidotal and revelatory narrative to the ‘mindless thugs’ put-down of the mainstream media.

Penny is foremost a feminist and a number of articles here confront the commodification of sex in our society. She demolishes the idea of phenomena like burlesque and lap-dancing as empowering women. They only serve to objectivise and define women as sexual objects. She demonstrates time and again how capitalism warps the values and ethical base of society. You may not agree with everything she says, but her commitment, her passion and anger, but also understanding of what is cancerous in our present society cannot be questioned. Her succinct take on the infatuation with princesses and the adulation of Kate Middleton is exemplary. ‘She is the perfect modern-day princess,’ she writes, ‘in that she appears essentially void of personality, a dress-up dolly for the age of austerity.’

This book is an invaluable commentary on our times. If Penny doesn’t get sucked into the circles of the comfortable commentariat, she promises to become one of the best journalists of this era.

2011-10-19T06:57:00.001-07:00

Remaking Scarcity – from capitalist inefficiency to economic democracy
By Costas Panayotakis
Pubs. Pluto Press and Fernwood Publishing
Pbck. £18.04

This book is an invaluable addition to any catalogue of modern Marxist economic thought. Panayotakis delivers a devastating critique of neo-liberal economic dogma and at the same time provides an up-to-date analysis of capitalism’s inbuilt destructiveness.

He lucidly demonstrates, giving detailed sources, how the capitalist system creates and exacerbates scarcity. It is often argued that capitalism, if nothing else, is efficient (particularly vis-à-vis socialist economies), but Panayotakis demonstrates that it is in fact the opposite. He also provides a cursory explanation of why the Soviet system collapsed without resorting to simplistic labelling or knee-jerk clichés. He also underlines what many forget, that despite all its weaknesses the socialist world not only provided a bulwark against the worst ravages of capitalism, but also pressured capitalism into making concessions to the working class; ones that are now being rapidly demolished.

He also polemicises against those who argued that socialism would usher in an era of super-abundance and unlimited productive capacity. Whatever the system, he argues, we have to live with scarcity in order to ensure an environmentally sustainable world.

The unprecedented lobbying power of big companies has led to an abject subservience of governments and states to their dictat, as seen in Greece and elsewhere. Panayotakis argues that this corrosive relationship can only be broken by struggling for and extending economic democracy alongside political democracy.

He concludes by offering useful pointers to a way forward – not a blueprint or quasi manifesto – towards what he sees as the key to change: economic democracy. Economic democracy for him means everyone having a say in setting society’s economic priorities and the way wealth is distributed. He sees the world social forum, popular budget-setting as practised in Porto Alegre and in Kerala, as well as worker take-overs of factories in Argentina and Venezuela, as positive examples of people power. He emphasises, though, that successful local struggles or isolated examples of co-operative action will not, of themselves, bring about the necessary changes at national or world level. Panayotakis’s prose can be dryly academic, sometimes repetitive, with the flow interrupted by an over-abundance of source quotes, but despite this minor caveat, this is an insightful and illuminating read for anyone wishing to better comprehend the present crisis and the mechanisms of capitalism. He is also strong on environmentalism and the importance of the feminist project. In his concluding chapter he examines several ideas for future organisation and illustrates these with examples from around the world, without donning any particular sectarian or ideological straitjacket.

2011-09-20T03:41:00.001-07:00

Jesus is a macho man
Since Bush and Blair began their ‘crusades’ against terrorism and invoked god as their leader, Christianity entered a new era. They’ve managed to do for modern Christianity what Judas did for it in its early days and he isn’t much loved either.
This new form of macho Christianity has now been taken up with gusto by the Christian right. They feel that the idea of Jesus as a Palestinian Jewish wimp is a historical conspiracy, and argue that he was more a combination of Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger. You probably don’t believe in the idea of Jesus being the son of god anyway and aren’t that much interested in arcane theological debates. But for the Christian Right the image of Jesus is a hot issue.

Most of us, in the western world grew up with images of Jesus as portrayed in the soft hues of Renaissance paintings or El Greco’s lurid sanctimoniousness and then that romantic image, so beloved of the Victorians, of a trans-gender figure, bathed in ethereal light, by Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt that used to hang on the wall in every school in the country. All these images were of handsome bearded, mild, fatherly figures. Such images were not fortuitous, but intended to reinforce the church hierarchy’s teachings of subservience, loyal obedience and acceptance of one’s lot in life. The last thing they wanted was for Jesus’ revolutionary and rebellious spirit to be communicated.

It’s not easy to wage a battle against Islam and ‘communistic atheism’ and also to promote and defend the US role as a Christian crusader, with imagery and a message that calls for tolerance, turning the other cheek and even, god help us, pacifism. That’s why some key figures on the Christian Right have decided that Jesus needs a face-lift, an image make-over. They don’t want a feminised wimp as their icon, no ‘Jesus meek and mild’, and have set about creating their own Jesus, not in god’s image but their own fantasy one – a long-maned, Terminator-like figure, resplendent with Christian tattoos, more reminiscent of a handsome Hell’s Angel than a peaceful evangelist.
Such a figure is being promoted in books from the Christian Right with such alluring titles as: ‘No More Mr. Christian Nice Guy’, ‘The Church Impotent – the feminisation of Christianity’, ‘Why Men Hate going to Church’ and ‘No more jellyfish, chickens or wimps – raising secure assertive kids in a tough world’. Paul Coughlin, author of ‘No More Christian Mr. Nice Guy’ hosts a radio show in Southern Oregon and his writings and talks receive wide coverage in the USA. He is also a ‘life coach for passive men’. To give you a flavour, chapter two of his book is titled ‘Jesus the bearded woman’.

Artist Stephen Sawyer is also tapping into these new demands by offering a new iconography. He has his own website ‘Art for God’, and is instrumental in promoting Jesus as muscular Titan. What’s more alarming is that such an outlook is gaining ground in Britain too. Women have always outnumbered men in their adherence to the church and fundamentalists want to redress that balance. Eric Delve is one of those in Britain calling for a more macho image for males to follow. He is founder and chairman of both the Spirit and the Bride Trust and Revival Fire Conferences Ltd and vicar of St Luke’s, Maidstone. Others prefer to use poetry to get their image across, like this ‘poem’ posted online, titled, ‘Jesus Was A Macho Man’:

‘Some, even though Christians, feel that Jesus was a wimp
He taught of love and had to turn the other cheek
I'm here to attest to his mighty strength
And to say that he was not weak…
He could have saved his very own hide just to rebuke the word
But he took the cross on his shoulders because Jesus was a macho man.’
So forget ‘Wesley’s popular hymn ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,’ and start re-learning Monsell and Boyd’s 1863 hymn: ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might - Christ is thy Strength, and Christ thy Right’!
END

2011-08-23T03:47:00.001-07:00

Murder in Notting Hill
By Mark Olden
Zero Books
Pbck 196pp
£11.99

‘Sunday May 17 1959. It was late when the phone rang at the Sunday Express. Frank Draper, a junior reporter on the night shift, reached for it. When he was interviewed by the police five weeks later, this was how he described the conversation that followed; “Are you interested in a murder?”’ That’s how Mark Olden’s investigative Odyssey begins. It could be the opening of a classic detective novel, but this is no fiction.

On that early summer day, a young Antiguan carpenter called Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death on his way home in Notting Hill. Only a year previously the infamous race riots had given the area a new notoriety. Cochrane’s name, like that of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, soon became symbolic for the state of race relations in Britain as well as a rallying focus for campaigns to free Britain of race hate.

Kelso Cochrane’s murderers were never caught. Mark Olden, TV producer and writer, undertook the arduous task of trying to do what the police failed to: discover the truth about his murder. He had already made an investigative documentary about Cochrane’s killing for the BBC, but with this book he has now turned that into a more in-depth analysis. It is un-put-downable read and, like any good detective story, follows a riveting forensic trail. However, Olden does not just tell the story of a murder, but places Kelso’s killing within a vividly painted social and political context: of Rachman’s infamous slum landlordism in the area, in the wake of the Tory’s abolition of regulated rents, of police corruption, of youth unemployment and a heady mix of new black immigration into an already volatile social milieu.

As with many killings of black people before and since that of Kelso Cochrane, many black people believe that if these murder victims had been white, then the investigations would have been pursued with vigour and more prosecutions would have followed. The chief investigator on Cochrane’s case was Ian Forbes-Leith – an ex-RAF officer who wore a bowler hat to work and whose very traditional, upper crust background seemed particularly unsuitable for an investigator put to work in a deprived working class area of which he would have little understanding or sympathy.

While much has changed in Britain since the late fifties - Britain as a multi-cultural society is now accepted by all, bar a marginal few, and the police have undergone serious race-relations training - a latent racism is still deeply embedded in the psyche of our society. A deterioration of the present economic crisis, rising unemployment and an exacerbated housing shortage could at any time, one feels, awaken that atavistic racism.

Interestingly it was the Labour MP, Barbara Castle, who immediately spotted a possible connection between this racist killing and the treatment of Mau Mau detainees in Kenya. ‘If the British people are going to allow those responsible for the beating of 11 detainees to death in the Hola concentration camp in Kenya to go untraced and unpunished we shall have given the green light to every “nigger-baiting” Teddy Boy in Notting Hill,’ she said. Does that not resonate with Iraq and Afghanistan today, as well as the recent demands for compensation by Kenyan victims of Britain’s imperial brutality in the fifties?

At times, as Olden’s investigation proceeds, it reads as if he were really talking about today. Payment of the police by the media is not apparently, as some may believe, a recent issue. Olden relates how there was corrupt and intimate liaison between top police officers and the media already then, there was also a refusal by the authorities to see this murder as racially motivated and a political elite was desperately trying to put a lid back on the tinderbox. Political myopia is also something common to most governing elites. Olden illustrates how deprivation, unemployment and disaffection by sections of white working class youth fuelled racial hatred and played into the hands of Moseley’s resurgent fascists and Colin Jordan’s abhorrent White Defence League.

Olden also shows how a small anti-racist movement was active even then, led by such figures as the black Communist Claudia Jones. He illustrates how the Conservative government, in cahoots with right wing Caribbean Uncle Toms, attempted to smear the left anti-racist campaign rather than damn the right over Kelso’s death.
While Olden can’t quite prove who the murderer was – many witnesses had died in the meantime, including the putative killer – he leaves little doubt as to who he was. This book is not simply a look back at the past, but a useful historical document that still has resonances for us today.
Mark Olden’s documentary: ‘Who killed my brother, Kelso Cochrane? Was broadcast on BBC 2 in April 2006.
END

2011-08-23T03:45:00.001-07:00

World turned upside down

What is happening out there? Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with the New York Times, called for the ‘mega-rich’ like himself to pay more in taxes. Is this a rare case of turkeys voting for Christmas?
Buffett noted that the mega-rich pay income tax at 15 percent on most investment income but practically nothing in income tax. Most workers in the USA pay between 15 and 25% in income tax. Buffett says he knows many of the mega-rich well, and most wouldn't mind paying more in taxes, especially when so many of their fellow citizens are suffering. He also said he has yet to see anyone shy away from investing because of tax rates on potential gains. ‘People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off,’ he said.
Then we have Nouriel Roubini, a New York University professor, arguing that Karl Marx's critique of capitalism is being played out in the present global financial crisis. ‘Karl Marx got it right,’ he says, ‘at some point capitalism can destroy itself. We thought markets worked. They're not working.’
He characterises the free market as: ‘The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few’. Roubini earned himself the nickname ‘Dr Doom’ for being one of the first economic commentators to declare that there was something rotten and the core of the world's economic system.
These are not isolated cases. Leading newspapers in many countries are today discussing Marx, only a few years after the ‘end of history’ was declared with the demise of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
However, the real power brokers - most global financial institutions and political leaders are still advocating wholly orthodox approaches to managing budget deficits and economic instability. The truth is perhaps too scary for them to contemplate. Either that or the temporary winners in the current system are simply filling their pockets with as much as they can before the next even bigger crash.
While the recent riots can hardly be described as working class uprisings, they do reflect the dire situation the present capitalist system finds itself in despite their inarticulacy and wanton vandalism. Those, like Cameron and his fellow Bullingdon boys, who regard these riots as ‘criminality pure and simple’ will see no connection between Roubini's declaration that Marx was right and young people from the inner cities lifting TVs and brand labelled goods from high street shops.
Few would argue that those who took part in the riots were motivated by any higher sense of political insight, but for many it was probably a gut response to a system that pampers the richest and most privileged while ignoring their concerns. They might not be able to list the reasons for their anger and preparedness to simply rob to get what they want, but the unashamed greed, corruption and venality at the top of our political system cannot have completely passed them by.
Schools Minister Michael Gove raged against ‘these criminals’ on Newsnight. This is the same Michael Gove who confused one of his houses with another in order to avail himself of £7,000 (or £13,000, depending on which house you think was which) of taxpayers’ money to which he was not entitled.

Or take Salford MP Hazel Blears, who was loudly calling for draconian action against looters. Is there any ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the robbery carried out by the looters? She cheated apparently forgot which house she lived in, and benefited to the tune of £18,000. Then there was Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television. And I could go on listing many more offences committed by our ‘outraged’ leaders. We have to ask who the real looters in our society are.

Even the police, charged with preventing crime and prosecuting criminals are up to their necks in corruption. Former Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman thought nothing of enjoying free champagne dinners with those he was meant to be investigating, and then joined Murdoch’s company on leaving the Met. Or Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson who accepted £12,000 worth of health spa treatment from Champneys, which had an ex-executive editor of News International on its board. Nothing wrong with that, he claimed with outraged dignity. Can these people really be surprised when the country’s culture is swamped in greed and a lust for consumer goods of the most base kind?
We also have the chief political commentator of the Daily ‘Torygraph’, Peter Oborne, in his commentary on18 August, giving his readers a rare dose of home truth. What is the world coming to?

In his piece he said, ‘the moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.’ He went on: ‘there was also something very phoney and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them. I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.’
He wrote of the ‘feral rich’ who live in their safe enclaves of Chelsea and Kensington. Surely this must be like writing a suicide note? It will certainly have had the dowagers and city gents spewing up their croissants as they read his words over breakfast.
Rotherham MP Denis MacShane remarked that, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from the man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops, but of course, as an MP he obtained them legally through expenses.
Cameron speaks of morality, but only as something to be applied to very poor: ‘We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate,’ he intoned.
As Oborne put it, ‘These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.’
No, the recent riots are not the early sparks of a coming revolution, but they are the pus seeping from the ulcers of a system in terminal decay.
END

2011-08-14T02:37:00.001-07:00

Karl Marx and World Literature
By. S. S. Prawer
Pbck £16.99
Verso

Prawer makes clear he is not attempting to discuss Marx’s theories of literary criticism, but to illuminate the role literature played in Marx’s life and development of his thinking. It is an absorbing and accessible investigation. He reveals a sensitive and highly perceptive approach to Marx’s relationship with world literature and the way it helped shape his world view. He has a deep understanding and sympathy for Marx’s political thinking and an exceptional knowledge of Marx’s work, and is thus able to make the relevant and appropriate connections.

As recipients of a solid German secondary school education, both Marx and Engels gained a thorough grounding in the classical literature of Greece and Rome as well as Biblical Hebrew, alongside the greats of the European enlightenment - Voltaire, Shakespeare, Goethe etc. While the future political ideas of both men would challenge some of the most determinedly held assumptions of western establishments, they found much of their inspiration in the literary works of the past.

As a young student Marx was more interested in literature than history or philosophy and one of his earliest dreams was to become a writer and he toyed with the idea of publishing his poetry. Even in his earliest literary efforts as a teenager one can find the germs of his later thinking. He identified closely with literary figures who were men of action, ‘world changers’, like Prometheus and Odysseus. In his own poems he expresses an overpowering drive to action, for ‘praxis’, rejecting romantic contemplation. A whole number of Marx’s mature ideas appear to have found their nascence in key images from literature. Certainly the evocative and fiery language used in the Communist Manifesto testifies to Marx’s eloquent command of language.

Much of his early writings are littered with preconfigurations of his later mature thinking. In the poem ‘Human pride, written as a 19 year-old, he evokes the ‘alienation’ and oppressiveness of a modern city, but emphasises that the city’s buildings did not create themselves, but were made by human ingenuity i.e. human labour. Even though strongly influenced by European romantic writers, he very early on rejects romanticism as a road to understanding society. He sees writers, poets and painters as ‘producers’ of works, in the same way that craftsmen and women are; not in the first instance as a different species of humanity - ‘creative beings’.

Marx recognised the dialectical connection between aesthetics and content. It was often the case, as with Balzac and Dickens, that the authors themselves were not political militants, but captured essential truths about the societies they wrote about. He and Engels were among the first to recognise that literature and indeed all the arts were dialectically related and connected to the societies in which they were produced. Marx considered literature a means of establishing complex connections between humanity’s economic and cultural activities. He made clear that not only economic and social struggle matter, but demonstrated how artistic works can and do enrich our world. He never fell into the trap of praising writers who held progressive ideas, but were poor writers.
Many crude Marxists have attempted to establish direct causal links between works of art and the economic system. Marx always emphasised, though, that the base-superstructure relationship between the arts and the economic system was not a mechanical one; works of art don’t simply reflect the societies in which they were given birth, but are refracted and may have only a tenuous link with the economic base. Only in a communist society, he argued, will everyone be in a position to express themselves creatively; as long as class society exists, the ruling classes will maintain their hegemony over creative labour.

2011-07-05T08:43:00.001-07:00

5 July 2011

Dear Sir,

Erecting a monument to Ronald Reagan in London is an offence not only to Londoners, but to all humanity. This small-time actor, a one time Nazi sympathiser and anti-Semite climbed the career ladder by shopping his fellow actors and film-makers to the House Un-American Activities Committee. It is a terrible comment on our times that someone like Reagan, with a political mindset stuck in the McCarthy era, ignorant, simplistic in his thinking and an inveterate liar could be elected president of the USA. His avuncular charm masked his sclerotic cowboy imperialist mentality. He used secret drug money to fund an illegal war (according to the findings of his own country’s judiciary) against revolutionary Nicaragua which wiped out the cream of that country’s young leaders and professionals. He also led the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada with the excuse that Cuba was building a missile base there. Reagan’s championing of a massive US re-armament campaign under his paranoid Star Wars initiative would almost certainly have led us into a third world war if Gorbachov had not thrown in the towel. It was Gorbachov who ended the Cold War, not Reagan.

2011-06-22T09:04:00.001-07:00

Is your job killing you?

Most of us are defined by the job we do. It’s usually the first thing strangers ask: ‘What do you do for a living?’ We used to talk about pride in our work too, but now with Britons spending more time toiling than ever, and stress levels at record levels is this still the case? The average working week in the UK is now three hours longer than the European average according to TUC figures.

You only have to look at recent surveys and sociological investigations to recognise that people’s job satisfaction levels have also plunged. Alienation in the workplace is the most characteristic and chronic symbol of the present phase of capitalist development. And, on top of that, take home pay is at its lowest since 1981 according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Alienation was an aspect of capitalism that Marx highlighted, but it receives little exposition. Battles till now, particularly those waged by the trade union movement, have been fought over the need for jobs and the right to work, rather than the issue of what sort of jobs we want. Of course, having a job is still the bottom line as far as survival is concerned, but perhaps we should now be addressing more strongly what sort of jobs we want in a civilised society.

The logic of capitalism is to squeeze out of the worker as much surplus value as possible. This is done by forcing down wages, by making us work longer hours and by using fewer workers.

Perhaps some readers will remember the Harold Wilson era when the government talked excitedly about the impact of technology and how it would free us from mundane work and we would need to be educated to utilise the enormously increased leisure time that would be generated. Books and learned articles were written about the issue. Today we have a technology far more sophisticated and labour-saving than those gurus of the Wilson era could have dreamt of, but what has happened to all the leisure promised? We are now working longer hours and more intensively than ever. Jobs have become even more routine and robotic. We now have more part-time working and a massive increase in low-skilled service jobs; workers are increasingly placed under electronic surveillance, their every move observed and monitored. Even the most mundane control over our daily working lives is being taken from us. Even the promises of a proper work-life balance seem to have been forgotten.

Work, as Marx so eloquently expressed it, should not be like that and in a better organised society, ‘Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.' Alienation and stress at work takes an enormous toll on the lives of workers and their families. The resultant ill-health is also a drain on the health service, and it shortens as well as destroys lives.

Stress has consistently been the second most commonly reported type of work-related illness, according to the HSE. In 2009/10 an estimated 435, 000 working people in Britain suffered stress caused or made worse by their work. This equates to 1,500 per 100, 000 people (1.5%). But these figures only cover illness, not stress itself. Work-related stress is one of the biggest causes of sick leave. In a 2006 HSE survey, one in six working people in the UK reported that their job was very or extremely stressful and that figure will no doubt be even higher today.

Diana Holland, assistant general secretary of Unite, underlined the consequences of stress at a TUC disability conference in May: 'This time of cuts and fears about the future is causing tremendous anxiety for working people. For many workers these are very uncertain times. Higher targets, increased workloads, more pressure and less staff are placing an unbearable strain on workers.' She added: 'The good news though is that stress at work is avoidable. If management carry out risk assessments and act swiftly to put action plans in place, work-related stress can be tackled. This is why Unite is calling on all its workplace representatives to conduct Stress at Work surveys.’

Even mild stress has been proven to lead to people being unable to work, health experts say. Research carried out by the University of Bristol and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden reveal that even mild stress increases the chance of someone being on disability payments for physical problems by 70 per cent, and more than doubles the likelihood they will suffer psychiatric problems. It also found a strong relationship between increasing levels of psychological distress and the likelihood of being awarded a disability pension within five years. One in four benefits for physical illness, such as high blood pressure, angina and stroke, and almost two-thirds for mental illness, were attributable to stress.
The TUC has said that jobs are the single biggest cause of stress, and this can be caused by a variety of factors, such as overwork, bullying, low job satisfaction, job insecurity, new ways of working, poor management, pace of work and lack of control over the job you are paid to do. Mental symptoms of stress range from sleeplessness and listlessness through to clinical depression and suicide. The physical effects range from appetite loss and nausea through to heart damage and stroke. Stress is, above all, a symptom of alienation.
Cary Cooper, Distinguished Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School, says that the growing long hours culture is symptomatic of unmanageable workloads and that the stress of this is directly related to medical problems and long-term absence form work.
Research on effects of long-hours working among civil servants reveals that working more than 11 hours a day increases the risk if heart disease by 67%. The increase in retirement age being brought in by this government will mean even more people becoming ill while at work
Returning to Marx once again, he says, alienation is a systemic result of capitalism. His theory is founded on his observation that, ‘within the capitalist mode of production, workers invariably lose determination over their lives and destinies by being deprived of the right to conceive of themselves as the director of their actions, to determine the character of their actions, to define their relationship to other actors, to use or own the value of what is produced by their actions.’ Workers become autonomous, but are directed into activities dictated by those who own the means of production in order to extract from them the maximal amount of surplus value. ‘Alienation in capitalist societies,’ he says, ‘occurs because workers can only express this fundamentally social aspect of their individuality through a production system that is not collectively, but privately owned, a privatised asset for which each individual functions not as a social being, but as an instrument.’
In response to the present coalition-imposed job cuts and lower wages, we need to challenge the whole concept of work in this context. We are not born to be wage slaves all our life. We must demand humane working conditions, jobs that provide satisfaction and allow adequate time for leisure. The technology and know-how is there to make this possible immediately. Only the system needs changing!
END

2011-06-12T05:51:00.000-07:00

Marx Was Right
By Terry Eagleton
Pubs. Yale University Press
Hdbck £16.99

This is no abstract argumentation, but an eloquent, fact-based rebuttal of the usual criticisms of Marxism; Eagleton buttresses his own arguments using Marx’s own texts. He takes aim at ten of the most standard criticisms and systematically shoots them down like an accomplished clay pigeon marksman. Leavened with Brechtian wit, his argumentation is succinct and to the point.

‘Rather as a bout of dengue fever makes you newly aware of your body,’ he writes, ‘so a form of social life [capitalism] can be perceived for what it is when it begins to break down. Capitalism is uniquely in crisis, the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon it is.’

Eagleton stresses Marx’s dictum that the collapse of capitalism will not automatically take us to socialism, but could just as easily lead to barbarism if we are unable to build strong political, socialist movements. In confronting reformism, he quotes R.H. Tawny - very apposite given the shambles social democracy now finds itself in – ‘you can peel an onion layer by layer but you cannot defeat a tiger claw by claw!’

Referring to Lenin, Eagleton points out that unfortunately revolutions are most likely to break out in places where they are hardest to sustain, as in Tsarist Russia or feudal China. He underlines that people will only be prepared to undertake revolution when they indeed have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. As long as capitalism can offer a measure of satisfaction and fulfil many of our needs, there will be no clamour for changing the system.

He knocks down the well-worn argument that ‘Marxists believe in an all-powerful state’. Marx’s ideal model of government, he points out, was the Paris Commune. Workers cannot, in any case, simply take over the state, as its structure has been refined for the purposes of the ruling bourgeois class. Marx writes that ‘instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes.’ The Commune, Marx concludes, was essentially a working-class government.

Eagleton knows the writings of Marx inside out and also doesn’t ignore Engels or Lenin, in his argumentation. Unfortunately he does, though, continue to peddle the myth of Engels as a ‘philanderer’. He needs to remember that it was Marx who made his housekeeper pregnant, not Engels! But that is a minor quibble about a volume that is thought-provoking, optimistic and which you can chuckle over. He is a writer who believes passionately in what he writes. His words often slash like razor blades, and with dialectical panache he can suddenly illuminate dark corners with unexpected bolts of lightening.
END

2011-05-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

Letter publishewd in Guardian 24 May 2011 on Labour Party policy
Ed Miliband says he ‘has listened’ to what the electorate wants, but his latest policy statement is nothing more than a rehash of his acceptance speech after winning the Labour Party leadership. So what has he learned by listening? ( ‘Why I’ll never hug a husky’; Guardian 21 May)
He says the last Labour government ‘made mistakes’, but it wasn’t mistakes it made by adopting its ideological obsequiousness to big business. It accepted the precepts of the global financial institutions and believed, sailing blithely on the wave of incontinent consumer spending, that ‘boom and bust’ were of the past. It is its failure to understand the incendiary characteristics of casino capitalism that has led us into the present ongoing crisis.
His language, too, shows that he hasn’t understood the need for ideological change. Giving people a chance to ‘get onto the housing ladder’, as he writes, reveals the same blinkered thinking that characterised New Labour. Housing should be a right, and most people want simply that: a decent place to live. The ladder concept is a Thatcherite one and implies buying to invest, moving up the property and status chain, and it is that sort of thinking which created the housing bubble in the first place.
Until the Labour Party is able to offer people an alternative vision to outdated capitalism and imbue them with realistic hope of a society based on justice, fairness and stability, they will be doomed to repeat the sad history of social democracy throughout Europe.

2011-05-25T01:02:00.000-07:00

The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance
By Robin Tudge
Pubs. New Internationalist (2011)
Pbck £7.99

In Berlin recently I happened to drive past a new building site which looked like an enormous prison complex or brutalist housing estate. Curious, I read the sign and learned that this will be the new HQ of the quaintly-named Federal News Service (BND) - the German equivalent of our own MI5. It is a salutary reminder of the central power such spying agencies occupy in our societies today. In his book, Tudge offers numerous examples of the epidemic-like spread and tentacular reach of surveillance systems everywhere.

This is the 12th in the excellent New Internationalist series of guides to vital subjects ranging from Islam to human rights, from global terrorism to Green politics. Tudge demonstrates how seemingly innocuous TV shows like Big Brother help inure us to the idea that surveillance is merely entertainment, with no insidious purpose. He takes us on a historical rollercoaster of how surveillance systems have developed from our earliest historical beginnings. God, of course, is the prototypical ideal of omniscient surveillance. Tudge demonstrates how ruling elites throughout history have developed and refined systems of surveillance as a means of controlling their underlings.

His research is meticulous and comprehensive, but he does, inexplicably, call the Tsarist secret police, the Ochrinka instead of its correct name Okhrana. It is a good read, not short on black humour, but also much useful detail. My main criticism is that it builds a scary scenario of a future ruled by TV cameras, data banks and ID systems, in which we will all live permanently on a ‘Big Brother’ planet, but he offers no suggestions as to how to combat or avert such a scenario.
END

2011-05-02T01:52:00.001-07:00

The Banker who knows his Kapital
Edgar Most has recently retired from his position as a director of the Deutsche Bank in Berlin, but still works a full week using his banking and financial skills to argue forcefully for an end to jungle capitalism. His outlook and career are unique in the financial world. In GDR times he was Vice-president of the State Bank and knew the socialist economy inside out. With the demise of the GDR and its incorporation into the Federal Republic, he immediately founded German Credit Bank – the first private bank on the territory of the former GDR. By doing so he was able to secure the jobs of 13,000 ex-GDR bank employees who would otherwise have ended on the scrap-heap. When this bank was taken over shortly after unification by the big Deutsche Bank, he was made a member of the board.

Most makes no secret of his former membership of the Socialist Unity Party or his pride in what the GDR achieved. Born during the war, the son of a Thuringian miner, he was given every opportunity by the GDR state to gain the necessary qualifications for a career in banking. His abilities and commitment to the socialist state saw him rise rapidly to become, at 26, the GDR’s youngest bank director and later Vice-president of its State Bank.

‘My father was a simple man with a high sense of morality and ethics. Today in our society I miss that. This society produces so much immorality. Politicians are corrupt, many lawyers feel no obligation to justice and law. There is fiddling, chicanery hustling, tax fraud is an everyday sport and even doctors can be bribed by pharmaceutical companies. I know that making such criticisms is deemed populist, but it’s still true that this latent immorality brutalises and perverts society.’

‘I don’t have dreams of a communist utopia any longer,’ he says, ‘the new human beings that would require are simply not there. I’m a pragmatic thinking person, who has genuinely studied his Marx. I completely agree with his analysis of capitalism - how it becomes deformed once you loosen the reins. But I too, as a left-thinking person, have not given up seeking ways to bring about a more just society in which everyone has the freedom to develop their potential. However, ‘without capital human society can’t function,’ he emphasises, ‘but of itself it is not fair, democratic or scrupulous. In the world of capital, there is no constitution, no submission to an electorate and no moral code. Capital is oriented towards profit maximisation and becomes an explosive mixture that threatens the stability of states, economic systems and societies.’ Of course many people are now asking how this crisis was caused, was it bank managers, corrupt rating agencies, dilettante regulation or are politicians to blame or, as I maintain, capitalism itself.

For Most the central question is how the state can rein-in jungle capitalism, to prevent it devouring itself. The vital need, he argues, is for the relationship between capital and state to be re-structured. He is optimistic that it can be done and very clear that what we are now experiencing is not simply a financial crisis but a crisis of the system itself and, he says, it demands a new ordering of the world-wide economy. Part of his solution is to break up the big banks, nationalise the ratings agencies and introduce a global currency. Sadly, the strongest symptom of the continued crisis is the mass flight of the so-called elite from any sense of responsibility, he says.

‘The effects of this crisis can only be controlled to a limited extent by individual governments or institutions. There can be no return to the previous situation; we have to look to the future and deal with the real problems and introduce the necessary regulatory mechanisms commensurate with a globalised economy. The World Bank should be placed under the governorship of the UN and an attempt should be made to introduce a global currency with strict regulatory mechanisms in place, under uncompromising oversight. If we wish to puncture the balloon of casino capitalism and its system-endangering speculative bubbles, then we have to go down this road.’

He has written two best-selling books ‘Funfzig Jahre im Auftrag des Kapitals’ (Fifty years working for capital), a form of autobiography and ‘Sprengstoff Kapital’ (Explosive Capital) in which he is interviewed about his ideas.

He feels that with his experience at the top of a socialist bank for 26 years and then working in a capitalist bank, has given him unique insights which he is determined to pass on to others.

When he first started working for Deutsche Bank, he says his new ‘West German’ colleagues saw him as an oddity and felt themselves superior. They didn’t take kindly to his criticisms and suggestions for improvement. He tried to tell them that in the GDR they had dealt with a number of social and economic problems that the new Germany and Europe as a whole were now facing, but that only irritated them. The GDR, he says, was more conscious of these problems and offered better solutions.

He vehemently refuses to accept that the GDR was, as the German government and the mainstream media describe it, as an ‘Unrechtsstaat’ (an unjust and illegal state). He makes no secret of his feelings of affection for the GDR which he still views as his real homeland. Of course there was good and bad in the GDR and he had his own difficulties battling the bureaucrats and officialdom, but he was ‘nevertheless hundred percent behind the state and what it stood for’. Most blames Gorbachov for what happened with the GDR. He maintains that the country could have survived in a different form and most of the industries and jobs could have been saved if there had been no rush to impose the West German currency and if Gorbachov had not preferred a quick agreement with Kohl the conqueror rather than one with his defeated comrades in the East.

‘Here in Europe we are confronted with appalling levels of imbalance. There are also the inequalities in wealth distribution. The numbers of badly paid and short-term contract workers is mounting in the so-called ‘wealthy’ countries; German salaries have been almost static or sinking for years. These widening disparities of income and wealth are not only socially corrosive and unjust, but signify a decreasing purchasing power.

Instead of re-investing in productive capital what would make economic sense, many big firms have accumulated financial capital and use it for speculation, much of it abroad, and in the deficit countries of the EU (Portugal, Ireland etc). Today the financial conjurors are borrowing low interest money from the European Central bank and lending it to these countries that are in deep trouble at interest rates of 8, 9 or 10%. That’s great business!’

‘For a long time now I’ve been of the opinion that the term “worldwide financial crisis” is not a proper description. It’s abundantly clear that we are facing a crisis whose root causes lie within the system itself; in that sense spending millions in order to rescue banks is only tinkering with the symptoms. In the system that rules at the moment, finance and the real economy have become de-coupled. More and more capital flows into financial instruments instead of into the real economy. That’s happening not only in the USA where Wall Street’s contribution to the Gross National Product, in comparison with the producing sector, has increased enormously. The stock exchanges have speculated with borrowed money – there are a few winners and countless losers. Economic experts have calculated that the total indebtedness within the global financial markets between 1970-2005 rose by a factor of thirty times and the monetary value of shares rose by a factor of forty. In the meantime trading in the financial markets at 4,400 trillion dollars annually is larger by a factor of seventy than annual worldwide economic output. That signifies an incredible expansion of income from financial and property transactions, making it only logical that the contribution made by the productive sector has, in comparison, continually decreased.

‘With the power of the dollar and its military the US wanted to prevent the spread of socialism in the world. What during the Cold War was masked under the cloak of ideology and was accelerated by the collapse of communism, is very clear today: money became a thing to be traded in its own right.’ What was a symbol for expressing value, a simplification of the bartering process, took on a life of its own. Money was no longer the oil keeping the wheels of real industry and commerce turning, but a means of reproducing itself.

‘For years the sanctity of deregulation and reducing the role of the state to a minimum has been preached along with the theory of the self-regulating market with, in Most’s opinion, devastating consequences. Capital and the market became the rulers of the system and began to determine economic policies, politics and social processes. Capitalism was given a totally free rein. But Capital is not of itself ‘social’ and cannot be.

If the political powers only tackle symptoms of the crisis instead of fixing the structural deficiencies in the system, then capitalism will destroy itself in the short or longer term,’ he says categorically.

‘Our society is as sick as the banking system – individual states have profited from a financial system that is now seen as obnoxious. In the USA and UK for instance the financial sector now accounts for at least a third of GDP. This makes me furious because the consequence of their shameless financial greed and the crash is that there has been and is an ongoing redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, from the many to the few, from individuals to capital conglomerates. But in the end the bankers and financiers have only taken the opportunities opened up by the politicians in a de-regulated market.’ This crisis has also exposed the vacuousness of the establishment economic theorists.

‘From my experience as a GDR state banker,’ he says, ‘I have always said that internationally we need to control the amount of money in circulation and enforce limitations if it increases beyond the values created by society. In the GDR we had long debates on the question of credit and inflationary tendencies and felt that credit needed to be tightly controlled.’ In the West the opposite approach was taken. ‘Money-making machines can always be set in motion, he says, ‘but the products and consequences of this are seldom recognised or understood. Because we in the GDR had a non-convertible currency and a reasonably insulated market so we were able to regulate the amount of money in circulation and keep inflation under control.’

‘In the East, we took some steps in this direction. I wouldn’t want to spread illusions, but Comecon was set up to regulate trade between the USSR and the other socialist countries and for this purpose the ‘Transfer Rouble’ (as a common trading currency) was introduced and the system functioned very well over many years. But many view such examples only through ideological blinkers and reject them out of hand. What is also vital is that the political sphere reasserts its primacy over the economy and re-orders the relationship between state and capital. After all, the end goal is that capital serves the needs and requirements of society. If politics can’t achieve that – and on a global scale – than the financial world will continue to be unregulated and will carry on as before. Every day over 4 billion dollars are being traded around the world in currency speculation and the profits from that end up in private pockets. One doesn’t know what the immense credit and credit card deals mean for the banking system, let alone the exorbitant state debt that has brought whole countries to the edge of bankruptcy.’

Finally, he says, perceptively: ‘I take care not to make money my ultimate goal; then you become a slave to it. Because you don’t have the freedom to handle money but continually worry how to make it grow.’

Most quotations are taken from the book, Sprengstoff Kapital by Edgar Most in an interview with the journalist Steffen Uhlmann Pubs. Das Neue Berlin 2011.

2011-04-06T08:55:00.001-07:00

Dancing with Dynamite - social movements and States in Latin America
By Benjamin Dangl
AK Press
Pbck. £12.00

History teaches us that one of the central problems of any successful revolution is that once revolutionaries gain power they become conservatives or, even worse, congeal into authoritarian regimes. How can we ensure that a revolution maintains its momentum for change and radicalism? How can the grass-roots movements that brought about the change ensure that they are not neutered and absorbed into the new power structures? Mao was very much aware of this dilemma and the Chinese Communist Party’s Great Leap Forward, followed by the Cultural Revolution were attempts to maintain a ‘permanent revolution’ and prevent ossification happening.

Dangl takes seven Latin American countries that have recently experienced radical grass-roots movements that have successfully led to progressive governments. He examines the relationship between these movements and the new governments in the context of how radical and democratic grass-roots movements can maintain their momentum without undermining the progressive governments that are fulfilling many of their hopes.

His is an anarchist perspective, but he knows Latin America well and he provides a clear and sympathetic account of the tectonic changes that have happened there over recent decades. In a mixture of factual narrative, vivid description and interviews, Dangl gives us a comprehensive overview of what has been happening and poses some apposite questions.

In Venezuela, for instance, he shows how a radical restructuring of political power, never before seen in Latin America, has transformed the country. On the other hand power is very centralised around Chavez and clientism is still inherent in the system. Chavismo could easily be transformed into even more of a personality cult than it already is. Dangl, while fully supporting the present governments, certainly doesn’t wear rose-tinted spectacles and pinpoints the potential problem of charismatic leaders like Chavez, and Morales in Bolivia, who are the repository of people’s hopes and aspirations, and wield enormous power. They won power on the tsumani of a mass movement of the poor and dispossessed, but they still have to build the effective power structures to maintain their revolutions. Since coming to power, Chavez has devolved an enormous amount of power to the people and encouraged participatory democracy at grass-roots level, but will that be maintained? Some elements in the government undoubtedly do see local movements and organisations merely as transmission belts of state policy (similar to what happened in the socialist countries) A dependency upon such central and powerful figures holds its own dangers.

The anarchist solution to radical political change probably places too much faith in the effectiveness of local autonomy and fully devolved power, but a highly centralised state system is certainly not the answer either, as has been well demonstrated. A useful and thought-provoking book.
END

2011-04-03T07:04:00.001-07:00

Letter to NS

The description of many socialists and social democrats as being essentially conservative is a not a new concept, but conservatism needs to be properly defined. Maurice Glasman (NS 3 April 2011) seems to confuse this with ‘blue’ Conservatism. Many on the left wish to see the reinstatement of the essential human values of community, solidarity and equality of opportunity – all conservative values. The so-called Conservatives are the real revolutionary wreckers because they are prepared to destroy any sense of society, of social cohesion and human progress in their worship of market forces and the profit motive. We have allowed them to hijack the conservative idea with our own amour fou for revolution. The majority of citizens want, above all, stability and security in their lives, not revolutionary turmoil. The Conservatives can never offer that because their belief in the sanctity of market forces means that life will be continual turmoil, marked by financial crises, job insecurity and destructive individualism. Socialism, based more on co-operatives than state-run enterprises, can offer that security and stability, as long as the necessary checks and balances are in place to prevent state domination, as happened in Eastern Europe.

2011-03-24T03:03:00.001-07:00

Libya and the myth of humanitarian aid
Once again military intervention, this time in Libya, is justified on the basis of ‘humanitarian concern’. Despite the recent devastating experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, lessons have not been learned.

I, like many Star readers no doubt, was shocked to see that all but 15 MPs, including a number of left-wingers, voted with the Con-Dem coalition in support of military intervention in Libya. Why do so many blindly accept that this is justified? They argue that ‘we’ cannot just stand by and see innocent civilians being murdered by a despot, but they don’t ask why it is apparently all right to do so in the many cases of other despotic rulers. Why has Gaddafi been singled out?

There are few, if any, examples in the whole history of mankind when states have intervened militarily in other countries’ affairs for humanitarian reasons. In the past, nation states always undertook military adventures for pure economic gain, even if these were masked by slogans of imperial glory and of ‘liberating’ the natives. In the more recent past, with nation states superseded by globalised financial capital, we have been witnessing supra-national interventions, still for economic gain, but now in the interests of global capitalism rather than individual nation states.

Even the war against Hitler, upheld as a fight of good against evil, of democracy versus fascism, was waged for economic reasons – Hitler threatened British world dominance. Yugoslavia is the most recent aggression to be cited as a successful ‘humanitarian intervention’ and used to justify the same in Libya, but again this obscures the real reasons. Professor Gibbs of the University of Arizona pointed this out recently in his article in the Guardian where he said that ‘The idea that Kosovo is a model of humanitarian intervention in Libya is based on a series of myths’. Before military intervention, Yugoslavia was still nominally a socialist country and refused to kow-tow to European Union dictates and open up its country to neo-liberal privatisation. Its break up was essential to bring all European countries under the one umbrella of global capitalism. Germany, in an unprecedented move, began the process by unilaterally recognising Croatia. Serbia, in a desperate attempt to hold the federation together, began a counter offensive. Atrocities were committed, but not on a large scale to begin with – these only escalated after armed NATO intervention. Once Muslim mercenaries were brought in to fight on the side of the Kosovans, and NATO began its bombing, things deteriorated rapidly. Subsequent atrocities and ethnic cleansing of the Serbs by Kosovans have elicited few words of condemnation and no calls for international intervention. So much for humanitarian concerns.

The left opposing such wars is accused by the warmongers of knee jerk reaction: of blindly condemning anything the USA or Britain does. There may be some who react in this way, but to dismiss all opposition to such ill-planned military adventurism in this way is no argument. What this dichotomy of views really reveals is that some understand the dynamics of social change, and politics as a class-based struggle for hegemony in the world and others see things through class-neutral glasses. If you fail to understand the underlying economic and class mechanisms of social movements, then you fail to understand the principles of history and will always be in danger of falling into the trap of supporting ruling class action, believing the fig-leaf justifications, rather than looking for the underlying motivations.

The supporters of Cameron and Sarkozy’s gung-ho Libyan intervention should ask themselves why the West has not called for intervention over the killing of civilian protesters in Bahrain or Yemen on in Israel over its bombing of unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip, but there is only an embarassing silence.

The reason Libya has been targeted is that Gaddafi, despite a recent rapprochement with the West, was always a maverick and not an easily controlled puppet like those ruling other Middle-East oil-rich countries. Of course he is a dictatorial leader, but little different from the dozens of others with whom the west has very close relations.

The real knee-jerk reaction here is that of NATO forces imposing a no fly zone and bombing Libya with no thought-out long-term strategy, with no political solutions on offer. It is simply another example of a member of the awkward squad being taught the lesson that you stand up to western imperialism at your peril.
END

2011-03-17T02:17:00.000-07:00

Letter to Guardian

Garton Ash offers the Arab countries advice on overcoming their dictatorial pasts by holding up Germany as a model: ‘out of the experience of dealing with two dictatorships contemporary Germany offers the gold standard for dealing with a difficult past’ (Guardian 17 March - Germany can show reborn nations the art of overcoming a difficult past). His description is a good example of how not to conduct Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with history). His amnesia or ignorance of the way West Germany dealt with its Nazi past is astounding. Hitler’s chief of counter insurgency became the Federal Republic’s top intelligence agent, Nazi generals like Hans Speidel continued to serve in the top echelons of the army (General Bastian, who became a leading Green and peace campaigner was forced out of the Bundeswehr by unreconstructed Nazis still in positions of power); leading judges, doctors and academics who served the Nazis with ardent commitment continued in their former posts while those who had fought the fascists were often persecuted, had their pensions docked and were treated as lepers. The present meticulously orchestrated campaign against the GDR state security forces has more to do with extirpating any remaining ‘nostalgia’ for the GDR and of the idea of an alternative to capitalism than it does with a genuine desire to overcome the past.

2011-02-24T08:09:00.001-08:00

Greenland
Lyttelton Theatre at the National
Plays until April 2011

A play about climate change doesn’t sound like a thrilling subject for the theatre. Theatre can deal easily with grand concepts, but not with abstract ones. Here four of Britain’s brightest young writers - Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne – have been given the task of bringing the clock-ticking issue of global warming home to us in a series of vignettes that are only related in terms of subject matter. A small ensemble of versatile actors plays all the various roles. They achieve this seamlessly and with real verve. This is not theatre in the traditional sense, more like Peter Brook’s anti-Vietnam war drama, ‘US’ - a kind of agit-prop. It raises many of the questions we all encounter, not least the head-in-the-sand behaviour of, ‘I don’t think it will affect me and the science is dubious anyway’. The issues of the sustainability of mass consumption with food being flown into our supermarkets from all over the world; the role played by the big oil and gas companies in frustrating climate control measures; which forms of active protest to adopt - all are explored through the intimate interaction of individuals. The play manages to avoid an over-earnestness and the writers inject plenty of humour to lighten the apocalyptic vision, symbolised by thunderous noise, frenetic strobe lighting and on-stage chaos. I particularly liked the advice given on where to buy a house to be safe from rising sea levels – choose one near Hinckley Point, as the government is bound to do all in its power to stop a nuclear power station being flooded, but not to save Brighton or Bournemouth! I also like the appearance of an incredibly realistic and very hungry polar bear that traumatises a camp of arctic researchers. It is a short, two-hour piece and, despite imaginative and effective direction by Bijan Sheibani and a strong commitment and persuasiveness by the actors, you feel it wouldn’t be able to hold your attention for much longer. It is, though, a very worthwhile dramatic polemic for young people and those still sitting on the fence. The National is to be congratulated on trying to address burning contemporary issues in this way, and judging by the packed auditorium of mainly young people, it is succeeding splendidly.
END

2011-02-24T08:08:00.001-08:00

Marxism Today
By Phil Collins
BFI Gallery
4 Feb- 10 April

Phil Collins, a Turner Prize short listed artist, here looks at the legacy of the German Democratic Republic from the perspective of today in the midst of a capitalist economic meltdown. He has found three former teachers of Marxism-Leninism in the GDR (interestingly all three women) and he interviews them about their past and what the demise of the GDR has meant to them. He has made two short documentaries that run back-to-back at the BFI’s gallery on the South Bank. One film allows one of the women, who has a Ph.D in economics, explain to a class of sceptical students the basis of Marxist economic theory, particularly the idea of surplus value. She is a vivacious and very articulate communicator and gives a highly convincing and graphic demonstration. The other film is made up of interviews with the three ex-teachers, intercut with GDR-made documentary material, as well as shots of the bronze sculpture of Marx being (temporarily) removed from Berlin’s Marx Engels Platz during its renovation. What a welcome blast of fresh air to have here a young artist determined to search for a truth at variance with the mainstream narrative of a Stasi-run state where everyone was oppressed and unhappy. These three women relate how fulfilling their lives were in the GDR and how much they believed in the system. How the GDR’s disappearance was a traumatic shock in their lives, forcing them to retrain and cope with the exigencies of a capitalist system for the first time. One of them relates how the then Chancellor Kohl came to East Germany and offered bananas and Coca Cola to the naively celebrating crowds. ‘That’s why I no longer eat bananas or drink Coca Cola, she says forcefully and with dignity. These films should be seen by anyone who wants to understand that the GDR also had its supporters and why they believed in socialism. It is a highly effective antidote to the Stalinist caricatures that are usually peddled.
It is also beautifully filmed, mostly in close-up with an unusually static camera, and with no intrusive interrogation by the interviewer to interrupt the flow of what the three women have to say. Almost all of it is in German with excellently translated English subtitles, although one of the lecturers gives her interview in very good English.
END

2011-02-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg
Ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis & Annelies Laschitza
translated by George Shriver
Pubs. Verso
Hdbck
£25

This volume of 230 of her letters was published to commerorate the 40th anniversary of her birth in March 1871, based largely on the German selection, Herzlichst, Ihre Rosa, and published by Dietz Verlag in the GDR in 1989. This is the first volume in English of what is hoped will eventually be her complete works in 14 volumes.
Verso is once again to be congratulated for publishing this collection for the first time in English, in an excellent translation by George Shriver. What is also invaluable is a glossary of personalities mentioned in the letters and very informative footnotes.
Luxemburg has always been a controversial figure on the Left, but was revered in her day and was undoubtedly one of the alltime leading thinkers of the socialist and communist movements.
She famously clashed with Lenin on the tactics adopted by the Bolsheviks and was always clear that socialism at the expense of democracy was not a road she was willing to take.
Like all collections of letters not originally intended for a wider readerhsip or publication, much here is concerned with the daily trials and tribulations of friends, comrades and lovers and observations of a purely personal nature. They do, though, give a unique insight into her character, her deep humanity as well as her passionate commitment to the struggle for socialism. Her unsuccessful attempts to reconcile her need for personal love, stability and homely pleasures with the enormous demands of the struggle would be ideal material for a dramatist.
She was often imprisoned by the German authorities who feared her fiery rhetoric and popularity, and included here are some of her prison letters. Despite the harsh conditions and frustration at her incarceration, she always dismisses her own deprivations to enquire about the health and well-being of friends outside and always attempts to cheer them up and reignite their commitment to the cause. She can be severely critical, uncompromisingly militant but also warm and compassionate. Her resilience in the face of great odds, her thirst for knowledge and breadth of interests, as well as her self-sacrifice and sense of humour are still inspirations for us today.
The odd quirky Americanisms grate a little but are minor: ‘Kuchen’ is hardly ‘Cookie’ and ‘Titmice’ will sound archaic to an English readership.
END

2011-02-15T09:19:00.000-08:00

Interview with Gesine Lötzsch – Co-Chair of Die Linke Germany
Gesine Lötzsch, the first woman leader of Die Linke, the Left Party in Germany, is widely seen as representative of the ‘pragmatic wing’ of the party and, when Oskar Lafontaine resigned the leadership (for health reasons) she called on party members to maintain unity, as only this could ensure a continuation of the party’s successful struggle for social justice.

She is comfortable with her leading position and can count on a strong local party organisation. She is recognised and respected as an excellent trouble-shooter, helping to heal arguments and reach consensus.

In the difficult period between 2002 and 2005, when the PDS failed to jump the 5% hurdle for automatic party representation, she was one of only two PDS representatives in the Bundestag. There Lötzsch has the reputation of being a very competent commentator on economic affairs and someone who can articulate clear positions.

The left in post-war Germany has never had a female leader. I remind her that here we had Margaret Thatcher and Germany has Angela Merkel, also a politician who grew up in the GDR. Neither, I suggest, is an ideal of political progress. Will she be different?

‘I certainly hope I can be’, she says emphatically, ‘they were probably role models for the political right, but I hope I can be a role model for a more progressive political agenda.’

I wonder whether growing up in the GDR provided a useful background and if it had been in any way a positive experience. ‘Yes it was,’ she says, ‘it gave me a sense of collective responsibility and heightened awareness of what building a more just and socialist society is all about – both in a positive and a negative sense.’

In the GDR Ms. Lötzsch became a qualified teacher of German and English and later obtained a doctorate in philology. She became a member of the Socialist Unity Party and, after the demise of the GDR, remained a member of its successor party, PDS and then Die Linke. She was elected to the German parliament (Bundestag) for the PDS in 2002 and has been re-elected ever since. In the last national elections she won 47.5% of the vote in her Berlin constituency.

She remarks with a smile that she remembers reading the Morning Star as a student, when it was used to help improve students’ English. It was the only British newspaper available in the GDR and she imagined it to have a mass circulation.

Recently, she came under concerted attack in Germany for comments she made about communism in an interview for the paper 'Junge Welt’ in the context of a commemorative conference on Rosa Luxemburg.

In her contribution she said: ‘We can only find a path to communism if we actually choose a path and try it out, whether in opposition or in government’. This created a furore in the mainstream media and among right-wing politicians, with hysterical and McCarthyite demands for her party, Die Linke, to be investigated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the country's internal security agency, and accusations that she wants to ‘re-introduce Stalinist terror’. The general secretary of the right-wing CDU actually suggested her remarks constituted ‘a danger to democracy’, but she hasn’t let all this worry her unduly or divert her from pressing political tasks.

She says, ‘Everyone in Die Linke has signed up to a programme of democratic socialism; without social justice there is no freedom. My political goal is democratic socialism, as I described it in the article: a peaceful and democratic society for all people, free from exploitation.’

I wonder if the virulence and hysterical tone of these attacks was because the German ruling elite still fears communism as a ‘spectre haunting the continent’. She responds by saying that, ‘any party demanding social justice and calling for the redistribution of wealth, together with a change in property ownership is bound to be attacked by the upholders of the present system. Communism is a utopian idea,’ she says, ‘which people have thought about and discussed for centuries. The writer Thomas Mann said that “anti-communism was the idiocy of the epoch”. My aim is to help create a community living in freedom and equality, characterised by dignity and solidarity.’

‘The snarling fury unleashed by my comments illustrate how insecure the establishment is when alternatives to the capitalist system are raised. In the face of the dire financial crisis they have been rattled and are no longer certain of their ideology and that’s why they’ve reacted so hysterically to a debate about how to create a more just society.’

‘I took up the challenge of the subject,’ she says proudly, ‘and argued for left reforms and for a democratic socialism based on the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. I called for us to leave the old cul-de-sacs and not view them as courageous paths to communism. The road to communism is a long and stony one.’

Lötzsch also makes clear that she was not in any way suggesting a return to Soviet-style communism as her detractors have impugned, but has always distanced herself and the party from the crimes of Stalinism, committed in the name of communism.

‘I also made it absolutely clear that for me politics, and specifically the politics of Die Linke stand firmly in the challenging tradition of social change and realistic radical politics,’ she says. ‘We have put forward our concept for dealing with the economic crisis and for surmounting the ecological challenges. Present problems, as in the Middle East or Afghanistan can’t be solved by military means.’

‘We are calling for a democratisation of the German economy. I quote Luxemburg in her differences with both Lenin and Trotsky, when she says, “you can make decrees from on high in terms of deconstruction and implementing something negative, but you can’t decree the implementation of positive action and construction” - that has to come from the bottom up.’

No doubt the viciousness and hatred of these attacks also reflect the fact that Gesine Lötzsch is extremely popular. She has an easy charm, a finely-tuned sense of humour and doesn’t fit the cliché caricature of a Molotov-cocktail wielding urban guerrilla.
She forcefully rebuts the right-wing’s attempts to stigmatise her as “a closet agitator for the violent overthrow of the democratic order”. She is quietly spoken, unpretentious, calm but with a determined conviction.

‘I believe all problems in society can be solved in a peaceful manner, ‘she says, ‘and in my contribution I referred to Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of freedom. Individual freedom and social freedom don’t have to be seen as contradictory, and we must always take the freedom of the individual as our starting point. Rosa Luxemburg memorably said that, ‘freedom is always freedom for the dissenter’ in her 1918 essay, The Russian Revolution, penned as part of a critical debate with the Bolsheviks. And that is still a vital principle for us.’

‘Die Linke,’ she emphasises, ‘is fighting on a platform demanding a change in property relationships. We want a radical renewal of democracy that also includes decision-making at the economic level and for all property relationships to be subjected to emancipatory and ecological standards.

‘We are fighting for a broad transformatory process of social change, for a democratic socialism of the 21st century. This process will involve many small and some large steps of reform, of ruptures and revolutionary changes.

We want to see large undertakings taken out of the hands of the capitalists and transformed into social property, in the form of state or local ownership, co-operatives or employee-run enterprises, but this can only be decided in democratic process.’

I ask her what chances Die Linke has in forthcoming elections. She is mildly optimistic but won’t be drawn into detailed prophecies. ‘When the SPD was part of a government coalition they introduced Agenda 2010 which incorporated a general attack on the welfare state and involved cuts in pensions and unemployment benefits. This led to a haemorrhaging of their support and, as Die Linke was the de facto left opposition, it brought us significant electoral gains and a foothold in the western parts of Germany where our party had previously been weak or electorally non-existent.’ Since returning to the opposition,’ she says, ‘the SPD has ‘rediscovered’ its radical roots. This will undoubtedly have a negative effect on the electoral chances for Die Linke.’

I wonder how close relations are between Die Linke and the trade unions. She says the German trade union movement has traditionally been close to the SPD, but ‘relations between Die Linke and the unions are steadily improving and at grass roots level a number of officials are members of or close to the party.’

Berlin offers a good example of what can be achieved if Die Linke has a say in power. There it has been in coalition with the SPD since 2001. It’s been able to make a decisive impact on the capital city’s politics. It helped create 120,000 new jobs and prevented the introduction of student fees. It also substantially increased the number of nursery places in the city as well as more free places for the less well off; it has introduced an ongoing educational reform programme and implemented new forms of direct citizen participation in many areas, making them very much the norm.

Germany has not been so badly hit as other countries by the world economic crisis, so what are the campaigning priorities for the party?

She agrees the country is, at the moment, in better health than some other countries, but the establishment is nevertheless trying to roll back the welfare state. ‘Although unemployment is not high, many are working in part-time jobs or for low wages. Young people, particularly, face a bleak future.’ Die Linke hopes its comprehensive programme for a social alternative will, in the end, convince enough people to give it a mandate to implement measures which will help it turn vision into reality.

information box:

Die Linke is the fourth largest party in Germany. It has over 77,000 registered members. It is represented at all levels of government. It has 76 members of parliament, 193 seats in regional parliaments and 8 seats in the European parliament.
Gesine Lötzsch was elected chair of Die Linke, in 2010 together with co-chair Klaus Ernst, a former trade union official. Die Linke came into being after a merger between the PDS – a party based in eastern Germany - which emerged out of the former GDR Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the WASG, a West German grouping of leftists, comprising disillusioned ex-members of the SPD and others close to the trade union movement. The joint Chair-persons were elected to ensure a leadership representative of the areas of the two former Germanies with their different political and cultural backgrounds.
The emergence of a national German party of the left was no easy birth. The experience of those who grew up under GDR state socialism was very different from that under capitalism in the FRG, and creating a consensus out of such different experiences and perceptions was no cake-walk. It was facilitated by the fact that two former leaders, Gregor Gysi from the east and Oskar Lafontaine from the west, both charismatic and experienced political figures, took up the reins and were determined to make the new party work.

2011-01-26T01:48:00.001-08:00

Letter to Guardian

26 January 2011

Dear Sir,

Ian McEwan is either being extremely naïve or disingenuous in his justification for accepting the Jerusalem prize (letters 26 January). To compare his action with that of Daniel Barenboim completely misses the point. Barenboim is actively bringing together Palestinians and Israelis to work for a common purpose and to begin a dialogue with each other through music. He has been vilified for his efforts by the Israelis. If McEwan thinks the Israelis will see his visit as a gesture of opposition to their policies he is living in cloud cuckoo land. They will rightly see it as an endorsement of the legitimacy of their policies. Like McEwan, many used similar arguments in relation to apartheid South Africa, but such so-called ‘dialogue’ didn’t work, but the boycott did. He thinks ‘literature can reach across the political divide’ - not by collaborating with oppression it can’t. The names of other writers who accepted the Jerusalem Prize he lists to justify his decision did so at a time before Israeli politics took on its present extreme belligerence, inhumanity and arrogant rejection of international law and opinion.
Please think again Ian.

2011-01-13T03:54:00.000-08:00

Full letter to Guardian (pblished in a truncated version)

Yet again a case of the police spying on environmental activists (Guardian 10 Jan - Undercover officer who spied on Green activists quits Met). With the ongoing terrorist threat and government cut-backs in police funding, serious questions need to be asked about why the police are squandering valuable resources on keeping legitimate democratic organisations under surveillance. As far as I am aware, no environmentalist organisation has ever been accused of countering or undertaking action that endangers life or threatens the democratic state. At the most extreme, such organisations may have trespassed and perhaps, at times, caused minimal damage to property – actions that can be pursued through the normal legal process. These organisations are not clandestine and make no attempt to hide their views. Of course, when undertaking actions for maximum publicity they will sometimes have to keep exact plans secret. This is no reason to treat them as the ‘enemy within’ or like terrorists.

More sinisterly, it reveals a mind-set at the top of our police forces belonging to the bad old days when the duty of the security services was seen to be serving a governing elite that was intent on maintaining its own class privilege and conservative concept of government. In such a context it is little wonder that many ordinary policeman see brutality against student, environmental and political demonstrators as legitimate because they are ‘the enemy’.

2011-01-12T02:41:00.000-08:00

The war crime that they want to hide

Only a few years ago the media were full of discussion about ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ – the mysterious illness affecting British and US troops who had taken part in the Iraq invasion. Then the media went suddenly quiet and nothing more was heard. The concern related only to allied troops, but in Iraq among the civilian population an even more alarming incidence of unexplained illnesses came to light. The renowned German film maker Frieder Wagner was the first to investigate this phenomenon, but his findings and his films about them have run up against a wall of silence. He agreed to tell me about his experiences in an exclusive interview.
‘Prof. Horst-Siegwart Günther, a German tropical medicine specialist and epidemiologist, working in the university hospital in Baghdad was the first to notice, in 1991, an increasing number of patients with, up till then, unseen symptoms such as serious dysfunction of kidney and liver function. He also saw increasing numbers of horrendously deformed babies and children coming to his clinic. He had the awful suspicion that these symptoms could be connected with exposure to radioactivity, perhaps as a result of the increased use of depleted uranium by allied forces. At this time the allies had denied using depleted uranium munitions. To check his theory, he took a small fragment of one of the depleted uranium shells back to Berlin to find out from experts if it was in fact radioactive.’
‘The conclusion came back: yes it was radioactive. It became clear to him that exposure to such radioactive and chemically toxic munitions could lead to a collapse of the body’s immune system and the breakdown of kidney, liver and lung functions. In addition aggressive tumours could develop and genetic damage caused. These symptoms were also seen among soldiers of the invading forces as well as in Iraqi soldiers, but particularly among the civil population.’
Once it had been established that depleted uranium was being used, allied forces then maintained that the level of radioactivity was minimal and innocuous. What they didn’t explain was what happened when the uranium was vapourised in the explosion and distributed over wide areas.
Mr. Wagner says: ‘The fine and deadly dust released by these munitions after use is then blown by winds all over the place and when inhaled, the residual radioactivity is more deadly than ever. The western allies used around 320 tons of depleted uranium alone in the 1991 Gulf War. Despite Prof. Günther’s findings, his worries were simply ignored.’
When Frieder Wagner, heard about Prof Günther’s findings, he felt it was so important that he decided to make a television documentary film, based on them. He already had a good track record in the field and had made a number of well-received and prize-winning investigative television documentaries.
Depleted uranium is a radioactive substance that is difficult to dispose of and is been used to make military shells heavier in order to increase their ability to penetrate. It was used by US and British forces first in Yugoslavia in 1992 and then in the first Gulf War in 1990-91 and again in 2003. Israel has also been accused of using depleted uranium munitions in Gaza.
Frieder Wagner was the first to document the horrendous consequences of using this type of munition by the US during the Gulf War. That was in 2007. But there has been a conspiracy of silence surrounding this pioneering discovery. Powerful forces appear to be at work to prevent the information receiving the coverage it deserves.
I imagined that Mr. Wagner’s film would have had a sensational impact.
‘No,’ he says, ‘my film didn’t have a sensational impact because the subject of uranium munitions, since the spring of 2001, has been made a taboo subject – and that’s Europe-wide. My film, ‘The Doctor and the Radioactive Children from Basra’, was shown on German television (WDR) in 2004 but that was more of an accident and it was not given a repeat showing and ‘disappeared’ into the archives. Before January 2001, western media took an intensive interest in the so-called “Gulf War Syndrome” and later (after the war in Yugoslavia) what was called “Balkan Syndrome”, particularly as the Portuguese KFOR troops stationed in Kosovo were already experiencing deaths from aggressive cancers and leukaemia just like veterans from the first Gulf War. Then the Pentagon and NATO General Secretary George Robertson declared the subject taboo. It had to be taken out of the media spotlight because the use of uranium munitions and their horrendous effects was too uncomfortable a truth.’

‘To begin with neither the military nor the government reacted to my film. But in November 2008 and again in June 2010 I and some German-based scientists were invited by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the consequences of using uranium munitions, together with other scientists who had contrary views to ours. After about two hours of, at times heated argument, the chair from the Foreign Ministry summarised our discussion as follows: “Both parties presented good arguments and these were impressive but they are in the first instance humanitarian arguments and it is impossible to convince the Americans with humanitarian arguments! (Herr Wagner’s emphasis) It was unbelievable,’ he says.

I asked him if he’d been able to find a distributor for his film.
‘No, since that first showing, I’ve not been able to find a distributor. That could be because every distributor thinks the subject matter is not an interesting subject because the big media are not talking about it. It could also be because if these people check the internet they could become worried about possible negative repercussions if they included such a film in their catalogues. The film says very clearly that the use of such weapons by the USA is an undoubted war crime. And, since that film was shown in April 2004 I’ve not had a single commission from publicly-funded channels in Germany, although that film won a European television award and for previous films I won the Adolf Grimme Prize in silver and gold (Germany’s most prestigious TV award). If you ask me whether I can prove that there is a connection between the subject matter of my film and this ‘blacklisting’, I have to say no, but I am convinced there is. When one realises that the political powers, with the help of the big media concerns, are staying mute about the effects of these weapons then it’s not particularly surprising. A colleague from the German magazine Der Spiegel, who had reported on this subject long before me, took early retirement some time ago because the top editors there censored such articles, time and time again. So you can see there is a logic there.’

I wondered if his films were available in English language versions.
‘I’ve had an English version of the film Deadly Dust available since 2007, but the film’s Munich distributor has only been able to sell it to the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. That’s unfortunate because I wanted this suppressed truth to reach a wider public as soon as possible. Now there is the danger that it will only come into the public domain once the wives of the soldiers who were stationed in Afghanistan, Kosovo und Iraq start having deformed babies and begin pushing them around in their prams. I wanted to spare these women such a fate.’

But Mr. Wagner is not taking this lying down. ‘I was determined not to let them silence, and that’s why I and my wife raised private finance to make it into a cinema film. I’ve been showing it in independent cinemas and I discuss the issues raised in the film with the audiences afterwards. Up to now we’ve managed 226 showings to around 18,000 people who will then go away and raise the issue with others. In June 2010 I also wrote a book: Uranium Bombs and the Secret Weapon of Mass-destruction, and in this way the subject is slowly being aired. A truth like this can’t be suppressed for ever.’

I asked him if he agreed with John Pilger (in his recent film The War on Truth) that the media have been compliant over the ages as far as war and its consequences are concerned.

‘I agree completely with John Pilger. All wars in recent times began with lies. In the Kosovo war, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan we were led into these wars by lies. And it is a complete mystery to me why we elect these same politicians and representatives who are responsible for these lies, time and time again. Bush and Blair, who took us into these wars of aggression and gave the green light for the use of such weapons, should be hauled before an international war crimes tribunal. After 1945 top Nazis were justifiably convicted in Nuremberg, so why not these modern war criminals?’

I wondered if Mr. Wagner had considered using the internet to publicise his findings. ‘All my films on the subject of uranium weaponry can now be accessed via the internet and I’m pleased that this opportunity exists to publicise such hot topics. In this way we can by-pass the imposed silence by the establishment media. In the meantime many thousands of people have seen these films and that’s wonderful. In this way the many lies and subterfuge by politicians and big business are exposed to the light of day.’

‘The main message of my film is that the deployment of uranium munitions and uranium bombs constitutes a war crime. Their use leaves behind toxically devastated areas. This depleted uranium is dispersed once it becomes vapourised during detonation and this is what makes it so toxic.
These weapons continue to be toxic for years afterwards, affecting the environment and the civilian populations. Such use clearly contravenes the Geneva Convention on the conduct of war’.
Prof. Günther, who is the central protagonist of Mr. Wagner’s film, Deadly Dust, was even imprisoned in Germany, not because he demanded the outlawing of these weapons, but because he imported a 300gm fragment of such a shell into Germany in order to test its toxicity. He asked researchers at three Berlin universities to investigate its toxicity. A Berlin court subsequently fined him 3,000 Euros for the crime of ‘releasing ionising radiation’. Because the western allies in Iraq had released several hundred tons of this material and went unpunished, he refused to pay. As a result he spent five weeks in prison.
‘Isn’t that absurd? Mr. Wagner asks rhetorically, ‘a doctor and scientist who is so concerned about children in Iraq dying unnecessarily of leukaemia after playing with pieces of shrapnel from such munitions, that he brings a small piece to Germany to have it tested, and ends up as the criminal. Even three years after this, the allies were still denying that these munitions even contained uranium.’
‘I’ve been lucky; I haven’t been put in prison, but since making that film, which won a European Television Award in 2004, I’ve received no more commissions from the publicly-supported broadcasting channels. I asked a former colleague, an editor at one of the national TV channels about this and, after a long silence, he replied: ‘In the meantime you’ve acquired a reputation at the company as a difficult guy to deal with; your subjects are considered difficult too.’
‘Many areas of Iraq today are de facto uninhabitable. On one battlefield at Abu Kassib near Basra we measured levels of radioactivity in the shell holes of the Iraqi tanks that had been destroyed in the war. These were 30,000 times higher than expected normal background levels. That’s why it is to be feared that renowned scientists like Rosalie Bertell, Asaf Durakovic, Lennard Dietz und Siegwart-Horst Günther are correct when they say that during the next 15-20 years, in Iraq alone between 5 and 7 million people will die from aggressive cancers and leukaemia. That would be a new holocaust.’
‘I’m ashamed for our allied friends. Since George Bush announced victory over Iraq in 2003 and where freedom and democracy were supposed to blossom over 1 million innocent civilians have been killed, particularly women and children, most killed by US soldiers. 1.2 million Iraqis have been maimed and 5 million are refugees. Is that what democracy and freedom looks like? In the last 200 years no Muslim country has attacked a western one. The terror of war will always lead to a war of terror. You can’t build a democracy with oppression, war and bombs, maimed and deformed and dead children. Particularly in a period of weapons of mass destruction, of atomic weapons and against the background of international terrorism and the continuously provoked crises, John F Kennedy’s words of warning now take on a prophetic significance. He said: “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” In the Declaration from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1945 it states: “To initiate a war of aggression ..... is the supreme international crime, only different from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of all the others. To initiate a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify”. The war of aggression against Iraq was such a war crime.’

A study published early in January by a team of international researchers confirms what Prof. Günther and Frieder Wagner have been saying for years. The results have been published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It sheds new light on the massive surge in post-war birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, and argues ‘that an epidemic of reproductive abnormalities is likely to have been caused by residues of munitions used by American armed forces on the city in 2004’.
A total of 547 births in Fallujah General Hospital showed that 15% of babies born in May had massive birth defects, compared to the world average of 2-3%, according to the study, and the rates rose sharply in the first half of 2010.
The study, which surveyed a total of 55 families with seriously deformed newborn babies in May through August shows that metals are potential sources of contamination causing the defects, especially in pregnant mothers within the city, and concludes that they "could be due to environmental contaminants which are known components of modern weaponry." Predictably, Washington has officially denied the claims of the study and there has been little coverage in the world’s media.
END

2010-12-29T02:55:00.003-08:00

New hope for socialist advance in 2011
While 2010 was a horrendous year in so many ways, 2011 presents the Left with new hopes and opportunities. We can draw succour from the fact that the time has never been better for a revival of socialist ideas and renewing our vision of a socialist society. This new opportunity is also being noted and commented on by a number of leading thinkers.

Capitalism is going through the sort of fundamental crisis that Marx and Engels predicted and which they were deeply convinced would usher in socialism. Only through a massive and unprecedented rescue of the world’s banking system could the ruling class temporarily prevent global capitalism from tipping over the brink. With outrageous impertinence they are now attempting to make working people pay for rescuing them from a catastrophe instigated by the bankers and their political helots.

2011 will undoubtedly be another difficult year, but it is also pregnant with opportunity for meaningful struggle and holds the promise of real revolutionary change. The anti-austerity demonstrations in many countries and now students taking action are merely precursors of intensified mass action in the coming year.

If the Left is to have any real input and provide leadership in this coming struggle. It should also use this time for reflection and reassessment of deeply held shibboleths in order to avoid missing opportunities, drawing false historical parallels or misinterpreting and miscalculating the forces for change.

With the virtual implosion of the financial system, here in Britain we are facing the dismantling of the welfare state, and could be forgiven for thinking we are threatened with a return to 19th century values. For the first time in the post-war period, as a population, we face a real reduction in living standards, the returning fear of job insecurity, homelessness and poverty. Globally, we face an apocalyptical environmental catastrophe with global warming, large geographical shifts of people, population growth and diminishing raw materials. As individuals we face increasing alienation in our jobs and in society, where communities have been destroyed and continuous labour mobility is demanded. On top of that, we are witnessing a tectonic shift in global economic power towards countries like China, India and Brazil which will have an even more serious impact on jobs and living standards, with unforeseeable consequences. In Britain we have enjoyed privileges based on our colonial and imperialist past. With the export of manufacturing and jobs elsewhere, those days are over, and working people now face draconian attacks that have already been flagged up by the present government..

The need for a rethink
It is perhaps, on reflection, no surprise that socialism in the Soviet Union collapsed. Marx and Engels themselves, towards the end of the 19th century, were very reluctant to recognise a revolutionary potential there and even when Engels was persuaded that there was (Marx was already dead), he was sceptical of the outcome because he knew that a highly developed capitalist system was essential before socialism could be successfully constructed.

Many of us who lived through the colonial liberation movement of the sixties onwards and witnessed the liberation of one country after another by nationalist and socialist leaders were convinced that these countries would go on to build successful socialist societies. (The consensus of the world’s communist parties then was that national liberation struggles would lead almost automatically to socialist transformation). That vision and those hopes have been thrown back in our faces. Today, particularly in Africa, we see only internecine wars, ingrained corruption on an unimaginable scale and an almost total destruction of social infrastructures.

Although Marx, and later Lenin, recognised clearly that finance capital would eventually become predominant in any capitalist system, they couldn’t have foreseen how the enormous expansion of speculative activities, at the expense of productive activities, have diminished the relative weight of real economy and seriously eroded national sovereignty. This in itself makes nation-based protest and struggle more difficult than ever.

The changing face of the proletariat
Conditions in Britain today are, of course, very different from those when Marx and Engels developed their theories. The proletariat they described as the revolutionary force that would usher in socialism exists no longer – it has shifted to China, India and other industrially previously under-developed countries. We no longer have a large and recognisable middle class either. Apart from the few very wealthy, 90% of us earn a wage, experience job insecurity and a degree of workplace alienation. Of course some earn very good wages and some are poorly paid, but all of us in this group are subject to the same mechanisms of the system. We won’t all think of ourselves as ‘workers’ but that’s what we are. That is why even traditional ‘white collar’ sections and higher status professionals in society find themselves taking strike action, picketing and fighting to protect their working conditions and jobs. This has led to a gradual ‘quasi-proletarianisation’ of increasing numbers of wage- and salary-earners. As a consequence of these changes, the 19th century concepts of working class and middle class, in a British context, are no longer particularly useful as differentiating factors, or in helping us understand how society works. Even the strong cultural differences that separated and identified these classes in the past have now largely disappeared. Across the class divides people watch X-factor and Strictly Come Dancing; young people go to the same discos and clubs, listen to the same popular music and buy clothing from the same chains; social differences are now mainly ones relating to income differentials.

In the absence of real industrial communities, very often, today, ‘working class’ is used to refer to those marginalised by the system, the neglected and forgotten in the old industrial centres and those ghettoised on council estates. While it is important to include such people in our struggle for justice, we must realise that they are not the mainstream and are hardly potential revolutionary forces. We have to stop identifying overwhelmingly with the dispossessed, the marginalised and extremely poor. It is essential that we focus on, and try and win over, those in the mainstream, often in well-paid jobs, who are becoming aware of the increasing threats to their own lives and welfare and will be looking for trade union support and allies.

These changes need to be reflected in our thinking, our analysis of society and our proposals for progressive change. We can no longer seek ideological refuge in repeating the mantra of the revolutionary potential of the ‘working class’, without better defining what it is and what we mean by it. By continuing to over-emphasise the role of the industrial working class (now hardly existent in the UK) in this way, potential allies and supporters who don’t see themselves as proletarian become alienated and feel excluded from the struggle; and many of these people may be very progressive, active trade unionists and even socialists.

New world forces
We are also seeing the seemingly impossible and contradictory situation of China, led by a communist party, overseeing a capitalist expansion on an unprecedented scale. Something no one would have thought possible on either side of the ideological divide in the past. How do we explain that? How can we interpret it? There is nothing that I know of in mainstream Marxist theory to begin to explain such a development.
Then, in Latin America we have progressive and socialist governments attempting to build socialist societies, but on a base that was scarcely developed in terms of industrialisation or civil democracy (hopefully we won’t see a reprise there of what has already happened in Africa).

In addition to the economic challenges, we are also facing a world increasingly divided more by religion than class. The rise of fundamentalist Islam in the East and Middle-East has filled the vacuum left by the communist parties and secular national liberation movements and is seen by the masses in those impoverished and war-ravaged areas as the revolutionary force to combat western domination and the imposition of capitalist values.

The severe impoverishment of many countries as a direct result of imperialist rapacity has also led to an increase in mass migration which is destabilising many countries and seen as a potential threat to the social stability of many western capitalist nations, which are now erecting walls to keep out those seeking an escape from poverty and injustice. All this has intensified the contradictions and conflicts, with the dominant capitalist forces prepared to resort to violence and localised wars to contain the problems and suppress any forces opposed to them.
In this context, we also have to recognise that, despite all the positive potential, on the level of consciousness and ideology, this crisis also provides a fertile ground for the revival of extremism (racism, chauvinism and religious fundamentalism). There is a big potential for developing protest movements that take on anti-capitalist content, but there are also ideological and political challenges that face every effort to achieve the necessary alliances and unite the diverse strands in a coherent current that will become effective in opposing the retrogressive demands made by imperialism and take society forward to socialism.
It is the job of the Left to ensure that the right wing is prevented from capitalising on the increased fears, alienation and wider social breakdown. It can be done, but only if we are able to build and maintain a unity on the Left and develop clear and attainable goals, jettison the anachronistic ideological baggage of the past, hold on to that which is still useful and prepare to adapt our thinking and tactics to the new realities, rather than refight old battles. Let’s make 2011 the year of socialist renewal.
END

2010-12-29T02:55:00.001-08:00

If He Hollers Let Him Go
By Chester Himes
Pubs. Serpent Tail Books
Pbck £7.99
Pps 259

Himes was one of the leading black writers of his generation and this, his first novel, was first published in 1945. He is, though, most famous for his series of Harlem-based detective stories. Growing up during the first half of the twentieth century he experienced the unremitting hatred and discrimination of blacks in his native country. This novel takes place over several days in the life of a young, black shipyard worker in California whose anger, outrage and a determination to take revenge on those oppressing him bursts onto the page like molten lava. Bob Jones, the hero, is a skilled ‘leaderman’ on the docks, but is slowly destroyed by the daily humiliations, degradation and even violence meted out by the whites he encounters. The claustrophobic situation makes him respond with violence too, an expression of the hatred that eats away inside him. Today the book won’t have the same shock value that it no doubt had then, but Himes’ direct and vivid, everyday language lends it a raw validity, turning it onto a compulsive read. It has the quality of a Greek tragedy in which the terrible fate of the hero is a foregone conclusion. For a black man in 40s USA there were two choices: submit to slavery or fight it head on.

As a black male, Himes would never find true recognition for his writing in the USA, In the 1950s, he emigrated and settled in France permanently, a country he liked in part due to his popularity in literary circles. There, Himes' fitted easily into the expat community that included fellow black artists like the communist political cartoonist Ollie Harrington and writer Richard Wright, as well as James Baldwin. An interesting essay is appended in which Himes calls for a Communist world revolution.
END

2010-12-29T02:54:00.000-08:00

The Comrade from Milan
By Rossana Rossanda
Pubs Verso
Hdbck £29.99
400 pages

Rossana Rossanda, now in her eighties, was a leading Italian communist for over half a century. She was expelled from the party in 1969 because of her opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She went on to found the renowned Italian left newspaper Il Manifesto and has been a regular contributor to New Left Review.
Born into an impoverished lower middle class family in the 1920s on the Italian-Yugoslav border, she grew up in a protective and apolitical family and politics only entered her life during her university studies and, in 1943, she joined the underground Italian resistance to fascism. After the war she worked in many positions in the party, and rose to become a member of its central committee.

Her autobiography is a history of those turbulent times in Italy, a vivid portrayal; of the communist movement and at the same time, but more importantly, an interrogation of her own past in the context of that wider historical tapestry. However she doesn’t use a broad brush but filters this process through her own personal experience. As a convinced communist she is understandably more concerned with the mistakes and weaknesses of the movement than dealing with the machinations and political tactics of the movement’s opponents. Thus many sentences are questions, rather than answers.

The Italian party tried to steer its own course. As the largest western communist party it was on the threshold of power for over 40 years; only the machinations of the Catholic Church and USA prevented the party forming a government. The party’s powereful position and strength made it almost part of the establishment and this, in the end, led to a certain complacency and accommodation with the status quo. The party also refused to submit to Moscow’s centralised control and hegemony, albeit behind the scenes. She underlines how the Italian Communist Party was undoubtedly a strong democratising force in post-war Italy, and was also instrumental in drawing up the new post-fascist constitution.

Rossana addresses issues that every politically-engaged person has to face: how far am I responsible for what happens in my lifetime? ‘The dividing line between what we are and what we are made into,’ she writes, ‘is very thin.’
She asks herself how she could have been ignorant of or ignored what was happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Czech show trials and the Hungarian uprising.

During the fascist period and throughout the whole latter half of the twentieth century, life was messy, not black and white, there were few genuine heroes – factors undoubtedly true for any historical period. But, she writes, at that time the communists stood out: ‘Being a communist meant belonging to the most resolute party’.

She says, of her decision to join and stay with the communists: ‘They were the only ones who rejected the inevitability of inhuman behaviour’. Her own humanity and genuine identifiaction with working people shimmers through this honest account. It is an informative, provocative and fascinating read, as well as a valuabel contribution to the hsitory of the communist movement. The translation, too, is excellent, although there are instances of mis-translation and sloppy editing which can sometimes lead to confusion.
END

2010-12-21T05:16:00.001-08:00

Letter to Guardian on misuse of langauge by USA (not published)
20 December 2010

Dear Sir

So, ‘WikLeaks founder is high-tech terrorist,’ says Biden (Guardian 20 December). Even by the most elastic definition, ‘terrorism’ involves the imposition of extreme fear on a person or population, through the threat of dire consequences and violence. By no stretch of the imagination can the release of confidential diplomatic exchanges be construed in this way. Biden’s comments are another irresponsible attempt by the US to conceal its anti-humanitarian policies, along with its use of other Orwellian terms like ‘extraordinary rendition’ for illegal kidnapping, ‘coercive counterintelligency’ for torture and ‘humanitarian intervention’ for the invasion of other countries etc. Bernard Shaw memorably said that the USA and Britain were two nations divided by a common language, and that has never been truer. But, what is even more serious is that we are now divided by our concepts of morality.

2010-12-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

Unpublished letter to Guardian after its attack on Unite Gen Sec Len McCluskey

Dear Sir

The Guardian leader (Leading Nowhere 20 Dec. 2010) compares Unite’s newly elected General Secretary, Len McClusky with being ‘like the Bourbons who have learned nothing and forgotten everything’. A more appropriate historical comparison would be of the leader writer with Neville Chamberlain who thought he could appease a determined, ideologically-motivated dictator. How does the Guardian propose that trade unions and the many ordinary people should fight the present draconian cuts that were singularly absent in the coalition parties’ manifestos? With a trade union movement more shackled by restrictive legislation than any other in the western world, outside the USA and the immediate threat of thousands losing their jobs, a roof over their head and many other financial blows, a wait-and-see attitude by the trade unions would be to to submit.

In McClusky Britain has a trade union leader prepared to work with others to seriously challenge government policies that have not been approved by the electorate and if fully implemented threaten to destroy what is left of the social fabric of this country after Thatcher’s onslaught.

2010-12-02T09:25:00.001-08:00

WikiLeaks – champion of the truth
The release of 251, 287 United States embassy cables by WikiLeaks is the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents are giving people around the world an unprecedented insight into the policies and activities abroad of the US government. WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington.
Unbelievably a lone, lowly-ranked US soldier - Private First Class Bradley Manning – pretended to sing along to Lady Gaga songs while downloading thousands of classified documents from military computers. He was then able to pass these on to WikiLeaks. He was an intelligence analyst, and had access to an amazing amount of sensitive data.
According to friends, Manning was frustrated because of a career that he perceived was in a rut as well as with his personal life. Manning—who grew up in Oklahoma and then moved to Wales as a teenager — reportedly was teased and bullied at school because of his sexuality. However, his prime motivation seems to have been altruistic; he asked for no financial reward for the information. After reading some of these documents he felt so strongly that they should be in the public domain and so decided to leak them.
Despite the incandescent rage in Washington, the documents don’t reveal anything that could really endanger people’s lives or national security. What they do, though, is to show up the duplicity and cynical subterfuge of leading politicians and governments. The fact that Putin’s Russia is largely run by a business mafia or that there is widespread worry about Pakistan’s nuclear programme and that the country’s security services have close links to the Taliban are hardly revelatory. The documents also reveal that the spineless British government bowed to US pressure to let it keep its cluster bombs on British territory despite an Act of Parliamentary banning them. And it reveals the political interference of Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, despite his supposed political neutrality. OK, not earth-shattering titbits; in fact only items of high-level gossip, but highly damaging nevertheless to the ruling elites.
WikiLeaks’ founder, the Australian Julian Assange, has now been put on Interpol’s ‘most wanted’ list as a result of his publishing these documents. Coincidentally, he is also wanted in Sweden on a probably trumped up charge of rape. Freedom of information is clearly not meant to be taken seriously, particularly, in the USA, the land of freedom, where the WikiLeaks site, hosted by Amazon, has now been removed from the web as a result of pressure from the administration. But Amazon now faces a backlash from free speech campaigners, who say it should be punished with a boycott at what is its busiest trading period of the year. There is also a demand by backwoodsmen in the Republican Party for Assange to be executed for treason.
Only a short while ago WikiLeaks was lauded as a beacon of freedom. It won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist New Media Award In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won an Amnesty International’s UK Media Award for its 2008 publication, Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, about police killings in Kenya. In May this year, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of ‘websites that could totally change the news’, and it’s certainly done that.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video of an incident in 2007 in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US forces. In July of the same year, it released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the war there. In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called ‘Iraq War Logs’ in coordination with major media organisations. It is no wonder the US government is after his scalp.
Julian Assange is now in hiding in Britain and the demands by the USA for his extradition should be vehemently rejected. Far from being a criminal, he should be celebrated as a most courageous journalist and publisher, more deserving of a Nobel Prize than being put in jail. He has done more to disclose the obsessive secretivity of governments and the blatant distortion of the truth by mainstream media. It is essential for everyone who values truth and openness to defend Assange and WikiLeaks from the bloodhounds now salivating for the kill.
END

2010-12-02T09:23:00.001-08:00

Contribution to Compass/New Statesman debate on the way forward
This is a very useful contribution to the ongoing debate about the way out of the crisis. But I feel, in suggesting solutions, it falls short of what is needed. The term socialism, like communism, has been so degraded and misused during the last and present centuries, that even adding the prefix ‘New’ (also a term that has been thoroughly eroded) can hardly save it. Socialism does need a redefinition, but Harris and Lawson seem to be using it as a synonym for ‘Social Democracy’. If it has to have meaning at all it has to be defined in contradistinction to capitalism not as capitalism with a human face. Any attempt to ‘manage’ or ‘regulate’ capitalism is doomed to failure as past experience has clearly shown, even if amelioration of the system’s raw brutality can be achieved, it is always only temporary.
Capitalism in its present guise is supra- and trans-national and involves interests more powerful than the world has ever experienced. These powerful interests are able to buy up governments and corrupt peoples with ease. Only by neutralising these powerful individuals and companies and restoring some form of national autonomy, will we be able to begin rebuilding our societies along more just, egalitarian and sustainable lines.
As the recent upsurge of opposition to the cuts has shown, there are many people out there, including the ‘self-centred and solipsistic’ youth, who are willing to actively oppose government cuts.
The Labour Party is impotent at present because its policies were and are only slightly less draconian than those of the Con-Dems. What is not being addressed is the deeper underlying reasons for the present chronic illness of capitalism because, as the authors say, there is also a lack of intellectual debate and an understanding of the mechanisms of economics and social change.
I completely agree with the two authors that any idea of a rerun of a party-imposed or top-down form of socialism is a non-starter. I also feel that any idea of the state playing a leading role in any transformation is misguided, although it will have to play a contributory role in the interim.
I welcome this debate, but it needs to be widened to involve left intellectuals, trade unions and other Left and Green parties.

See my recent interview with Prof. Eric Swyngedouw on the idea of resuscitating the ‘hypothesis of communism’: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/97726

2010-11-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party phenomenon

The recent mid-term elections in the USA were a predictable setback for the Obama administration, but what has been the most significant aspect has been the rise of the Tea Party. This supposedly grass-roots organisation has been ridiculed by the Left and a number of its leading lights lampooned as clowns, but it deserves to be taken more seriously. I know we are in a completely different historical context, but its rise, not disimilar to that of its less dangerous UKIP counterpart here, has resonances with the rise of Hitler ad the fascists in Germany.
Hitler and his nutters were also seen as extremist outsiders to begin with, but with a deepening economic crisis and a bankrupt political system, the ruling elite soon tunred to the nazis as saviours.

Today we are in a similar situation. The world capitalist economy is in total disarray and the future highly uncertain. The general public has lost faith in traditional parties. However, rather than directing their ire at the capitalist system itself, the business-owned media has cleverly manipulated opinion and diverted blame to individuals and governments. So we blame Brown or Obama and ‘big government’. This lets the real cuplrits – the banks and multi-national conglomerates – off the hook.

In the USA, Fox News’s extremist anchor man, Glenn Beck recently made the same comparison, saying that the current situation is similar that of the Weimar Republic in Germany. He said he had spoken with his ‘deep throat’ in the White House and this guy told him: "Glenn, everybody I know is reading about the Weimar Republic.” He said, “the money that is being pumped in is staggering and I don't know how we'll ever pull that money back." He added, “we're all reading the Weimar Republic”.

Mark Fisher in his must-read book, 'Capitalist Realism – is there no alterntive?' explains very clearly how the ruling class has been able to shift blame from the capitalist system onto government. How it is also manipulting the war on terror and whipping up fear of outside terrorists to divert attention from the real economic terrorositrs who threaten our planet.

The Tea Party movement is known as the tea party because members compare themselves to American colonists who revolted in a tax dispute with Britain in 1773 and emptied barrels of tea from British ships into Boston Harbour rather than pay taxes on it. This is a very populist image, harking back to US founding history.
But the modern Tea Party is far removed from the popular, grass-roots uprising that it is portrayed by the media. It is a movement motivated by hate, fear and prejudice. Its racist and vitriolic hatred of a black president also underpins those feelings.

How has this ‘grass-roots’ movement grown so quickly and how is it financed? The money to support Tea party candidates, Jane Mayer (New Yorker magazine) and others report, comes through such conservative organizations as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. FreedomWorks is a conservative group led by former House Republican leader Richard Armey. Armey’s group has its own influential network, and has supported Tea Party candidates. FreedomWorks is is a top down organization, based in Washington – hardly grass roots.

The Christian Science Monitor says: ‘The tea party movement may have all the appearance of being genuinely grassroots, but just beneath the surface are professional fund-raisers, foundations, and political action committees – some of which have been around for years – pushing a conservative-libertarian agenda.’
In the recent investigative report in the New Yorker magazine, quoted above, Jane Mayer details the links between billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch and the tea party movement. She writes:
"By giving money to 'educate,' fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, 'The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who [care] about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.' With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, 'everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there – people who can provide real ideological power.' The Kochs, he said, are 'trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.'"

Another major source of tea party funding is the Tea Party Express, which poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the successful GOP primary senate campaigns of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska. The Tea Party Express is a group formed by a long-time California Republican consultant that has raised more than $5 million and financed about $2 million in advertising to help candidates. The organization is an offshoot of a political action committee created to support John McCain’s Republican presidential run in 2008. The Tea Party Express is run by Sal Russo, a Republican fund raiser and public relations guru who began his career working for Reagan. Russo is also the chief strategist for “Our Country Deserves Better,” a political action committee (PAC) formed to defeat Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

“As a pivotal player in the ‘tea party’ movement, Russo has helped drive its cause by raising millions of dollars and crafting caustic ads about its opponents,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “There's no question that Tea Party Express, the political action committee Russo runs out of his Sacramento-based firm, is the advertising muscle behind the tea party insurgency.... As the only tea party group making significant advertising buys, Tea Party Express has become one of the most potent forces in the protest movement.”

Our Country Deserves Better, another right-wing organisation backing the Tea Party, launched the first Tea Party Express bus tour last year, and raised and spent just over $1 million in the 2008 campaign year. So far in 2010, it’s raised and spent more than $5 million. Large chunks of that went to the GOP primary campaigns of tea party favorites Christine O’Donnell ($237,000) and Joe Miller (nearly $600,000).
So much political funding in the US comes from anonymous donors or is channelled through innocuous-sounding organisations. The problem for those trying to ferret out where the money comes from – and for Obama and Democrats as they seek to toughen campaign finance reporting in the wake of the Citizens United court decision – is that it’s getting harder to do so.

“Federal campaign spending by groups other than candidates and parties in this election cycle has far outpaced similar spending from the last mid-term election and could rival the 2008 presidential campaign,” the New York Times reports. “But with recent decisions by the Supreme Court and the Federal Elections Commission, it has become harder to know whose dollars they are.”

The reason the Tea Party has been even more successful in the USA than UKIP here is that the economic crisis is much deeper in the USA and the election of a progressive black president has put frighteners on the business elite and red-neck sections of the population. This elite has found it quite easy to tap into the fears and prejudices of ordinary Americans, particularly the disaffected, poor working class and small business people. The parallels with pre-Hitler Germany are alarming.
END

2010-11-03T10:09:00.001-07:00

Looking For The Grave Of Garcia Lorca
release date: Oct 2010
Label: Vida
EGEA Distribution in association with Spitz Records.
Looking for the Grave of Garcia Lorca is the latest album by London-based singer-song-writer Joe Wilkes, and dedicated to the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, killed by Franco’s fascists during the Civil War in 1936. Wilkes is a great admirer of his poetry and clearly his politics too.

Wilkes is an accomplished acoustic guitar player in the Bert Jansch mould and a gravelly-voiced troubadour. As you can hear from these songs, his politics are firmly Left, but he doesn’t use them as a vehicle for propaganda or political pamphlets. They are deeply personal and his politics only emerge, through the fissures, in the odd word or phrase.

It’s difficult to categorise Wilkes’s music – part blues, a dash of Dylan, part country/folk and, in its instrumental mix, has at times a chamber music or free jazz quality, but it all bears the unmistakable stamp of Joe Wilkes himself.

The title track - Looking for the Grave of Garcia Lorca – is hauntingly evocative: ‘you can’t hide the truth; it’ll come out in the rain’.

In Settling the Score the singer contemplates the legacy of Wat Tyler’s peasant revolt after visiting Blackheath and the song has the militant refrain: ‘What happened back then we’re going to see some more and next time we’ll settle the score’

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he sticks vehemently to acoustic instrumentation and aural under- rather than over-statement. When you read the amazing mix of instruments used on this album - organ, flute, oboe, cor Anglais, violin, viola, cello, harmonica, clarinet and sax as well as guitar – you image an almighty cacophony, but the players are all extremely competent and their interweaving so well mixed that it all comes together as a smooth texture, underlining and complementing the vocals. A cracking album.

2010-10-28T06:20:00.001-07:00

The Rise of the Green Left – inside the worldwide ecosocialist movement
By Derek Wall
Pubs. Pluto Press
Pbck

The term ‘ecosocialist’ is a relatively new one. Today it might seem almost unnecessary to attach the ‘eco’ prefix as hardly anyone in the socialist movement can be unaware of the urgent ecological problems facing us. However, as we know to our cost from the past, many socialists believed the new system would triumph by producing more and outperforming capitalism in terms of industrial expansion and ‘taming’ nature. Few would think that way today.

Derek Wall, as a regular Star columnist, hardly needs any introduction as a clear and fervently committed socialist as well as environmental campaigner. Here he puts forward a compelling case for socialism but with an essential ecological core. He begins by defining what he means by ecosocialism and in doing so returns to Marx and Engels. He goes on to formulate an ecosocialist manifesto and outlines the challenges both socialists and environmental activists face in a world of globalised capitalism.

He answers those who ask: ‘why can’t we just be Green?’ and shows how almost any environmental initiative is only welcome to capitalism if it promises to generate profit and this corrupts what, in a different social context, would offer genuine progress. He points out that ‘ecosocialism is to a large extent also a battle over property rights.’ Under capitalism enormous, transnational corporations dominate national economies and lifestyles, and land ownership - still in the hands of a tiny minority – mean that democracy itself has become nothing but a withered fig-leaf.

Wall doesn’t shy away from criticising those Green Parties (as in Germany and Ireland) which have joined governments only to jettison many of their cherished principles in their embrace of a share of power and capitalism. He reiterates how it is impossible to be really Green if you don’t challenge capitalism itself.

In one chapter he gives a valuable and succinct overview of ecosocialist initiatives around the world, from Venezuela to New Zealand. He examines recent experiences in Latin America and the advances made there in terms of ecosocialism. Cuba’s agricultural system, he says, offers us an excellent example of where property is held in common, and where organic methods are widely used and recycling advanced.

He concludes his book with suggestions on what action needs to be taken to ensure that ecosocialism takes hold of the public imagination and how we can go about challenging the present power structures. He also lists a whole number of organisations which are involved in environmental/political campaigning. He points out that there is even already a Green-Socialist international: the Ecosocialist International Network, launched in 2007. He avoids getting bogged down in sectarian thinking on the left and steers a clear course between the various factions and parties without being over-cautious or timorous.
This is a slim book - Wall doesn’t believe in unnecessary prolixity - he makes his points clearly and succinctly. All in all, a very useful guide to where we are at in terms of environmental and socialist advance. It underlines once more the vital need for a broad alliance of the left and the Greens if we are to move forward.
END

2010-10-28T06:19:00.001-07:00

A Painter of Our Time
By John Berger

Verso
Pbck £9.99

Berger’s classic portrait of an artist was first published in 1958 and Verso is to be congratulated for re-issuing it now, along with two other of his books: A Seventh Man and Corker’s Freedom.

This novel is written in the form of a posthumously discovered diary written by the émigré artist, Janos Lavin, with additional commentary by the author himself. Although a purely fictitious portrait it is closely modelled on Berger’s friend, the Hungarian-born artist Peter Peri. Of course socio-cultural novels like this are not unaffected by the passage of time, and Berger’s portrait is very much of the immediate post-war period. Then, hopes of fundamental social change were still very much alive, despite the devastating stories emerging from Stalin’s Soviet Union and the onset of the Cold War.

Janos Lavin is a Communist and painter who was involved in the establishment of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, but later forced to flee his homeland. He eventually settles in Britain and marries a middle-class English woman who has sufficient income to keep them from starving. Although not well off, the couple live a relatively comfortable, if very modest, existence. His safe and sheltered life gives Lavin a guilty conscience, as he knows that other comrades stayed behind to continue the struggle. His best friend becomes a government official in the post-war Hungarian Socialist Republic, only to fall foul of the Stalinist clampdown on artists considered dissidents. He struggles to come to terms with what he accepts as a necessary party discipline, but at the same time deplores the bloody sacrifices it seems to demand.

By cleverly reproducing selected entries from his fictitious diary, Berger weaves a clear but complex portrait of a man torn between active political intervention and dedication to his art. By placing a central European Communist in a western capitalist setting, he also draws out the conflict between honest dedication to ‘artistic truth’ and the pressures of the commercial art world and gallery culture, as well as the tug of political activism.

Lavin is a dedicated painter; it is in his blood. That’s what he needs to do and what he does best, but he is also only too aware that painting canvases won’t change the world and could even be considered as a cowardly opting out of the ‘real’ struggle. The novel raises questions and issues that are still valid today, about ‘truth’ in art, about its purpose, about abstraction versus realism and about the artist’s role in society. In that sense, it is as apposite today as it was in the fifties when Berger wrote it.

Everyone recognises that Lavin’s work is supremely competent, if not highly talented, but his paintings are often monumental and figurative, whereas the post-war trend in the West was towards total abstraction. Lavin is thus seen as quaintly old-fashioned. He, his wife and his friends know that he needs to show in the galleries if he is to sell and make a proper living, but he resists this with every sinew in his body. For him it means ‘selling out’, betraying his comrades. Berger’s perceptive descriptions of the gallery scene with its wealthy patrons and obsequious art critics are, however, as accurate today as they were then.

In the end Lavin does is offered an exhibition in an up-market gallery and even sells a number of his paintings to patrons who merely wish to decorate their mansions and, he feels, have no appreciation of what his art is about. He would have preferred commissions from factories, schools or public institutions. It is all too much for him. He leaves the gallery and very soon after disappears. The novel concludes with a letter sent by him to the author, in the form of a goodbye note, informing him that he is ‘going home’ to Hungary. What happens to him there is left to the imagination of the reader, but there is a possibility that he may have been killed by his erstwhile comrades, before the big post-Stalin thaw had begun, as all trace of him is lost.
END

2010-10-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Interview with Wu Ming
Wu Ming are at the moment undertaking a tour of Britain, to introduce audiences here to their unique story-telling technique and radical take on history. They agreed to talk to the Morning Star.

They have been characterised as a ‘mysterious guerrilla group of novelists’, but the two members sitting opposite me look far from mysterious and not at all warrior-like. Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 (they reject the celebrity cult built around novelists, preferring anonymity) dismiss the ‘mysterious’ tag, but don’t allow themselves to be photographed and emphasise that they dislike the idea of them and their work being mediated by others. They feel this would take away their right to have direct contact with their readers – something vitally important to them. Simply put: they want no limit placed on their public image.

What are their aims, other than to subvert the commercialised literary world, I ask. They reply, laconically, that their aim is simply to tell stories which they love doing. Yes, but your stories are not mainstream, I counter. ‘We write stories about conflict,’ they respond, ‘we look at the key turning points in history and focus on those. We are interested in modernity and how we arrived at the place in which we now find ourselves. So we are not concerned with ancient history but in the history that defines us today’.

‘We are attempting to draw a map of where our generation came from. We try to retell history from new perspectives, from uncanny angles. Thus in our novel ‘54’ we begin with a group of nightclub dancers obsessed with Cary Grant, but the novel examines the relationship between US and European politics. Our forthcoming novel, to be published in Britain shortly, is ‘Altai’ which looks at Europe’s relationship with Islam, based during the historical period of the huge clash between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe from the 13th century onwards, but written from the point of view of the Turks.’

How far are your novels fictional and how far fact-based, I ask.
Wu Ming 1 uses a vivid metaphor. ‘If you think of history as a big piece of Gruyère cheese, where the solid cheese is the history that has been documented, and the holes are the gaps in the narrative, then we squeeze our fictional elements into those holes; we try and illuminate those dark spots.’

Writing is usually a solitary and individual undertaking, so how does the Wu Ming collective work?
‘We have no fixed method,’ Wu Ming 1 tells me, ‘but a subject or period of history is suggested and, once agreed, we discuss it and then undertake an enormous amount of research so that we gain a great deal of knowledge about the subject matter we wish to examine. We begin with what we call ‘lumps’ of narrative matter and once we have enough we develop an outline fro the story. Each of us then writes a chapter which is circulated, altered, added to and changed. The first draft is very free and each of us adopts his chosen style in complete freedom, but a more homogenous style emerges as the drafts develop and evolve.’

Wu Ming describe the process as incredibly exhilarating and emancipatory. Rather than each being stuck in their own ivory tower, ‘like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we experience the joy of writing together’, they say. ‘Being on the road together, we are like kids again, enjoying the childish naivety of making up stories, but it is also hard work. There is a lot of fun, and we learn from each other, grow together. Each novel teaches us something new’.

So what’s the downside of working collectively? ‘The fact that we only get a quarter of the royalties we would get as an individual writer,’ they reply sardonically.

What is also unusual in their methods of working is that they actively promote the use of the internet to interact with their readers. They are not interested in appearing on TV talk shows or having their work mediated by others; they say the physical shared experience of interacting with their readers is vital for them. They attend more than a hundred such events each year. On their website, through their blogs and twitter they communicate with their readers and encourage the latter to get involved in the creative process. So what does that involve? ‘We get hundreds of emails each day, readers send us ideas or their own short stories and comments, even cartoons or pieces of music which they feel could complement or accompany our stories. We have also involved readers as narrators with mixed results, but now readers are doing things by themselves, ‘they say.

Wu Ming have certainly made a deep impact on the cosy world of modern literature with their unusual hybrid brand of popular novel cum historical epic. They offer a radically new perspective on history and on the art of story-telling itself. Once can only hope that British readers are as fascinated by their books as their Italian compatriots already are.

Do they really feel that their approach to novel writing can really have an impact on the commercially-dominated literary world, characterised by celebrity culture? ‘We don’t know,’ they reply, ‘but ethically we have a duty to counter the current trivialisation of everything. We feel like tightrope walkers, constantly trying to find a balance between popular fiction and more demanding literature, and it is very difficult to maintain that equilibrium.

Who is/are Wu Ming?
Wu Ming (‘anonymous’ in English) is a collective of four left wing radical Italian authors, based in Bologna. They grew out of the Luther Blisset Project (named after a black British footballer), which was, as they explain it, a ‘cultural guerrilla’ exercise. The collective’s first novel Q, was a historical spy novel set in the period of the Reformation, and became a best-seller. It is about the Radical Reformation, asking why Müntzer has inspired radicals for almost 500 years. Their third novel Manituana focuses on the US war of independence seen through the eyes of the Iroquois nation which was almost eradicated by the colonial and imperial struggles.

Wu Ming explain that their work is an attempt to demystify authorship, to subvert the cult of the celebrity author and a consumerist attitude to literature. They are also trying to bridge the gap between popular fiction and serious literature. ‘Our books,’ they say, ‘are readable on two levels: as complex political allegories, and as pulp fiction or adventure novels.’

Wu Ming encourages a ‘communitarian’ use of the internet and their official website: http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/englishmenu.htm provides more information about them and their novels and gives links to their other sites. It enables the worlds of their novels to be enriched and expanded, offering background information and invitations for fans to make their own contributions.

Books by Wu Ming published in English so far are: Q, 54 and Manituana, all published by Verso.

END

2010-09-30T04:46:00.001-07:00

Rethinking Communism for the 21st Century
With the increasing realisation that capitalism cannot solve the world’s problems, there has been a resurgence of interest in the concepts of justice, equality and, yes, even the taboo one of ‘communism’. With books like The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling we are seeing more and more intellectuals questioning the basis of the present system. In 2009 over 1000 people came together in London to attend a sell-out conference on “The Idea of Communism”.
The title of Prof. Swyngedouw’s recent paper published in the radical geography magazine, Antipode, is perhaps a little off-putting: The Communist hypothesis and revolutionary capitalisms: exploring the idea of communist geographies for the twenty-first century. It is an academic paper and not intended for a wider audience. However, what is surprising and significant is that here we have a mainstream academic – a professor of geography at Manchester University - calling for a revival of the “communist idea”.

His paper begins with the words: ‘This essay starts from the presumption that “the communist hypothesis” is still a good one…’ He goes on to argue that ‘the idea of communism requires urgent rethinking in the light of both the “obscure” disaster of twentieth century really existing socialism and the specific conditions of twenty-first century capitalism.’
Like fellow iconoclastic academic, Slavoj Zizek, he argues that we need to look again at the idea of a communist society as a viable alternative to a capitalism that is intellectually as well as in practice bankrupt. He agreed to explain the ideas underlying his paper to Morning Star readers.
He says that the persistent outlawing of the name “communism” and its erasure from the pages of self-respecting journals over the past two decades has been so effective that even its utterance is looked upon with suspicion and distrust.
So why has he decided to utter it at this time?
He says that since the student rebellions of 1968 even the study of geography became radicalised and more academics realised that politics and economics also take place in specific geographical contexts and couldn’t be ignored.
‘In an age in which anything and everything can be discussed,’ he says ‘the very idea of communism as a positive injunction seems to have been censored and scripted out of both everyday and intellectual vocabularies. It is only tolerated in sensationalised accounts of the “obscure disaster” of twentieth century “really existing socialism”, or in romanticised Hollywood renditions of communist heroes like Che Guevara.’ He talks about the “obscure” disaster of 20th century communism because, he argues, the neo-liberals have only condemned it in its totality, as a dystopia, and the left hasn’t undertaken a proper critique of the experience. Although we have to learn from that experience, he is adamant that we have to completely rethink the concept of communism in the light of the profound changes that have taken place in capitalism itself and the imminent threats to our environment and indeed life itself.
What does “communism” signify for him, I want to know?
Swyngedouw sees equality and democracy as the central concepts that define communism; communism without them is a contradiction in terms. He argues that these principles can only be achieved through self-organisation and self-management. He sees no roles for a coercive state or a ‘leading’ party.
He argues, perhaps controversially, ‘that the key markers of twentieth century communist politics – state, party and proletariat – require a radical reworking. I would insist,’ he says, ‘that neither state nor the party are any longer of use to think the communist hypothesis.’ He doesn’t deny that the state and political parties have roles to play, but they cannot be the main actors or means to achieving communism he insists.
‘The idea of communism retains a subversive edge,’ he notes, ‘and in spite of the failed experiments it still evokes the idea that a different world is not only imaginable but is also practically possible. But it must be a communism that is egalitarian and allows the self-development of each, and then it will retain its great mobilising potential. To work towards such a goal, political organisation needs to be rethought.’
So how can we rethink communism for the twenty-first century, I ask?
‘The communist idea is nothing,’ he says, ‘without the will to do something new, without the will to become political subject ie as an individual acting upon and transforming our environment. The majority of people,’ he argues, ‘are unhappy with the present situation and want change, but are not sure how to go about achieving the changes they desire, because they are told over and over again that capitalist neo-liberalism is the only option.’
‘While we need to come to terms with the disaster of twentieth century communism, it is also necessary,’ he emphasises, ‘to undertake a critique of the repressive state capitalism in “the West”. Capitalism,’ he says, ‘reinvented itself in the seventies and recaptured the imagination of the majority – capitalism could deliver material wealth and well-being. Many lost hope; there was no political controversy and neo-liberalism appeared to be the only show in town. Conservative restraint was replaced by the imperative to enjoy. Liberation was experienced as the search for surplus value as well as surplus enjoyment. Political equality faded as a central concern; demands for equality became defined as the equality of difference, and justice became the right to enjoy one’s own individual freedom. Democracy itself became synonymous with the freedom to exercise individual choice, and consuming became the highest freedom; market equality replacing political equality.’
He maintains that neo-liberalism also ‘wiped out working class politics’. The triumph of neo-liberalism represented ruling class victory. This victory has also been accompanied by the tactics of de-politicisation of the people with the media now so concentrated and providing a basic fare of triviality and non-political gossip alongside the cultivation of fear.
He quotes Marx on the domination of capitalism by the financial sector and argues that capitalism’s resurgence is closely connected with the geographical transfer of basic exploitation to regions like SE Asia, but also the privatisation of the environment, water, gene pools, minerals and intellectual property. However, with the recent collapse of the banking system the whole edifice of capitalism was threatened with collapse. Only unprecedented state intervention, characterised by Newsweek as: ‘we are all socialists now’ has temporarily saved it.
‘In the final decades of the twentieth century industrial labour lost its hegemony in the “North” and,’ he says, ‘in its stead “immaterial labour” emerged, ie labour that creates immaterial “wares” like knowledge, information software, communication resources etc. Industrial labour has been transferred elsewhere, and it is there where new industrial (class) struggles are emerging and will intensify. In the global “North” new forms of struggle will and are emerging which do not revolve around ownership of the means of production but directly around the ownership of the products of this immaterial labour, as we have seen in the battles over free downloads and access to internet resources.’
He doesn’t see democracy – as so often narrowly defined in the West, as a set of political institutions and their associated political procedures, such as ‘free’ elections – as the solution, but argues that it must be a democracy that involves everyone participating in society on an equal basis. Equality, he stresses, is the very premise on which a democratic politics has to be based. However, he stresses, political democracy is not about expressing demands to an elite to rectify injustice, but in conquering freedom and equality for ourselves. For Swyngedouw this means that the ‘place of power is kept structurally vacant’ ie power remains with the people and is not vested in or ‘handed over’ to some representative body or individual. He envisions a situation where the state is replaced by self-organisation and self-management. He says the very name of communism invokes the egalitarian concept of ‘being in common’ and this includes the idea of the ‘commons’ ie that all natural resources, including land, and indeed life itself, belongs to us collectively and should be collectively stewarded. We need to think beyond resistance towards transformation. He sees the communist idea as a transformation of the commons. This, of course, raises vital questions of property relations in respect to common resources.
‘The key task,’ he finally underlines ‘is to rethink communism again and this will require serious debate about what an equal, free and self-organising being-in-common for the twenty-first century might be all about. It will, he argues, ‘require a restoration of trust in our theories, a courageous engagement with painful histories and geographies, and, above all, abandoning the fear of failing again…There is no alternative!’, he stresses adamantly.
Prof. Swyngedouw’s essay is also available in the book: The Point is to Change It, edited by Castree N., Chatterton P., Heynen N., Larner W. and Wright M.W. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

2010-09-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Secret Affairs – Britain’s collusion with radical Islam
by Mark Curtis
Pubs. Profile Books Ltd
Pbck. £12.99

Mark Curtis’s book should be on the book list of every educational institution’s history curriculum. In this detailed historical journey, he charts Britain’s intimate involvement in the promotion of Muslim individuals and Islamic states as tools for its own imperial ambitions. It used Islam in a blatant divide and rule tactic, from the time of the Raj onwards. Curtis amply demonstrates a continuous and intimate marriage of convenience between Britain and various Islamic forces over three centuries.

After Britain’s long-time support of the Ottoman Empire, as a bulwark against Tsarist Russia and to protect its East Indian trade routes, it soon sought alternative allies once the Turks had unexpectedly entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Britain then proceeded to find a suitable and subservient proxy from among the tribal groups of central Arabia. In the 1920s it found Ibn Saud as an ideal candidate for leadership and gave him sole control over Saudi Arabia which he proceeded to assert in one of the most bloody repressions the region had experienced, killing over 40,000 Arab tribesmen and women and amputating the limbs of 350,000 more. This led to the complete domination by the Saud family in the region to this day. It assured Britain of a steady flow of oil and the Saudi family complete support from Britain in the maintenance of its brutal ad obscurantist regime. It also led to the spread of the divisive and backward-looking faction of Islam called Wahabism (the founding ideology of modern jihad).

Throughout the region Britain has always propped up elements of the ruling classes against the democratic and nationalist aspirations of the people. Curtis provides a long list of such tactics from Egypt, Afghanistan and Persia to Turkmenistan. This history is little known and rarely discussed in historical circles. It will come as a surprise to many to see how Britain has meddled in Islamic affairs over such a long and continuous period. And, although it would be silly to blame Britain solely for the present resurgence of Islamic extremism or terrorism, it’s certainly not the innocent bystander it paints itself.

Britain has continuously covert support to Muslim guerrilla forces to counteract the spread of Soviet influence in Persia, Turkey and Afghanistan to Kosovo (does that sound like more recent history?).

Curtis concludes with the present day chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing how Britain and the USA are very much to blame for what unravelled there even before they chose to invade. He names those ‘heroic Afghani guerrilla leaders’ who fought Soviet forces, who were backed and armed by Britain and the USA, only to then set up the Taliban regime and become ‘the enemy’. Pakistan was also given massive military and financial support over many years as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the region and to counteract India – seen as pro-Soviet and unreliable. This policy and Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan has also contributed to the present political instability and violence there.

A fascinating, well written and researched book – a must read for anyone who wishes to better understand the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Britain’s key role.
END

2010-09-02T03:56:00.000-07:00

In the prison industrial complex
Most of those even vaguely familiar with the size, scope and character of the US mass imprisonment scheme know that the US leads the world in incarceration, both in sheer numbers and per capita.
They know too that the US, with 6 per cent of the world's population, holds nearly a quarter - 24 per cent - of all the prisoners on earth.
As stunning and perhaps shocking as these figures are, they fail to adequately paint the full picture of what this project means in the lifescapes and hopes of millions of people in US ghettos where black and brown people dwell.
Indeed, truth be told, most black folks aren't even aware of this thing, because it is rarely discussed in public and rarely addressed in the corporate press.
With the recent publication of the work of a young black scholar, law professor Michelle Alexander, that may be changing.
Alexander's new book is ground-breaking in several respects - first in that she addresses the plague of mass incarceration and second in how she analyses the social and political ramifications of such a project.
In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age of Colour-blindness (The New Press), Alexander places the present mass incarceration binge in its historical context, comparing it to the infamous post-civil war period, after the brief span known as reconstruction.
This era saw the rise of racist terrorism against blacks by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, who were often composed of former Confederate troops, the denial of black voting rights and the institutionalisation of the black codes - laws which targeted blacks for behaviour such as insolence which were not criminal if committed by whites.
The creation of the convict lease system allowed the economic and political elites to exploit "free" black labour again - in essence to establish slavery in everything but name, with the blessing of the national government.
Alexander recounts that historical period to provide insight into the present, while over one million black men and women are imprisoned and millions more live cribbed, encumbered half-lives because they have a criminal conviction on their records.
What such a record means is that a person, even when "free," may not vote, can't live in public housing, can't receive a government grant for college studies and is barred from a growing range of the professions. In other words, as in the past, "free" doesn't mean free.
And as federal government grants to states in fields like education, transport and housing is driven by population, and most US prisons are situated in distant, rural and predominantly white districts, those areas acquire the benefits of their large black prison populations counted in the US census as "residents" of these regions, and urban districts lose such federal resources respectively.
Thus ghettos are not just depopulated but they are concomitantly deprived of resources to help make communities whole and healthy.
As discussed above, criminal convictions in most US states work to disqualify millions of people from voting for life.
What does such a disqualification mean in reality? In the pivotal US presidential election of 2000, George W Bush reportedly won Florida by fewer than 500 votes.
Without a win in Florida, Bush would've lost the presidential election. At least some 50,000 former felons in Florida were disqualified from voting and, as many of them were African-American, it's certainly a safe assumption that the vast majority of them, if able to vote, would have voted for the Democratic candidate.
If so, US history would've been dramatically transformed, and perhaps world history as well. Prof Alexander, writing of the impact of the mass incarceration project on black communities, notes: "The collapse of inner-city economies coincided with a conservative backlash against the civil rights movement, resulting in the perfect storm.
"Almost overnight, black men found themselves unnecessary to the American economy and demonised by the mainstream media.
"No longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labour in factories, lower-class black men were hauled off to prison in droves. They were vilified in the media and condemned for their condition as part of a well-orchestrated political campaign to build a new white, Republican majority in the south.
"Decades later, curious onlookers in the grips of denial would wonder aloud: 'Where have all the Black men gone'?
"The prison industrial complex was the capitalisation of the incarceration nation. It marked the continuation of the grim era known as Jim Crow."
This article was written by Mumia Abu-Jamal exclusively for the German socialist youth paper Junge Welt and is reproduced here by its kind permission and that of the originating reporter Jurgen Heiser.
About Mumia Abu-Jamal
He was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. His trial was a farce and he was clearly framed because of his political activities. He has been described as "perhaps the best-known death row prisoner in the world" and his sentence is one of the most debated today.
Before his arrest he was a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP), an activist, part-time cab driver, journalist and broadcaster and became president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.
Since his conviction, his case has received international attention and he has become a controversial cultural icon. During his imprisonment he has published several books and other commentaries, notably Live From Death Row.
In his own writings, Abu-Jamal describes his adolescent experience of being "kicked ... into the Black Panther Party" after suffering a beating from "white racists" and a policeman for his efforts to disrupt a 1968 presidential campaign rally for segregationist George Wallace.
Abu-Jamal lived in New York City and in Oakland, living and working with his BPP comrades. He was subject to FBI Contelpro surveillance during the '70s.
After leaving the Panthers he returned to his old high school, but he was suspended for distributing literature calling for "black revolutionary student power."
He also led protests to change the school name to Malcolm X High.
In 1999 Arnold Beverly claimed that he and an unnamed assailant, not Abu-Jamal, had shot Daniel Faulkner as part of a contract killing because Faulkner had been interfering with graft and pay-offs to corrupt police.
While in prison Abu-Jamal was engaged by National Public Radio to deliver a series of monthly three-minute commentaries on crime and punishment. The broadcast plans were cancelled following condemnations from the police force and right-wing senators. The commentaries later appeared in print in May 1995 as part of Live From Death Row.
With occasional interruptions due to prison disciplinary actions, Abu-Jamal has for many years been a regular commentator on an online broadcast, sponsored by Prison Radio, as well as a regular columnist for the German youth socialist paper Junge Welt.
In litigation before the US Court of Appeals in 1998 he successfully established his right to write for financial gain in prison. The same litigation also established that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections had illegally opened his mail in an attempt to establish whether he was writing for financial gain. When, for a brief time in August 1999, he began delivering his radio commentaries live on the Pacifica network's Democracy Now! weekday radio news magazine, prison staff severed the connecting wires of his telephone from their mounting in mid-performance.
His publications include Death Blossoms: Reflections From A Prisoner Of Conscience, in which he explores religious themes, All Things Censored, a political critique examining issues of crime and punishment, and We Want Freedom: A Life In The Black Panther Party, which is a history of the Black Panthers drawing on autobiographical material.

2010-08-09T03:14:00.001-07:00

Dias Lourenço –legendary leader of the anti-fascist struggle in Portugal

António Dias Lourenço the legendary Portuguese communist leader and editor the party’s paper, Avante!, died on 7 August in Lisbon at the age of 95.
He was born in the village of Vila Franca in 1915 and became a lathe operator, joining the party as a 17 year-old in 1932. Portugal was at the time suffering under the iron fist of fascist dictator Salazar – which would become the longest surviving fascist dictatorship in the World. Dias Lourenço was responsible for the illegal publication of the party paper Avante! from 1957 until 1962, under the dictatorship, and became its editor from the day of its first legal issue in 1974 until 1991.

He was imprisoned twice under Salazar in 1949 and in 1962 and spent 17 years in fascist prisons. He made a spectacular escape from the notorious prison fortress of Peniche in 1954. This damp and formidable medieval fortress, on the western coast, is lashed by the sea and from which it was believed impossible to escape. But Dias Lourenco managed to hide in the prison, before jumping off the high wall into the freezing Atlantic waters and swimming to safety. While in prison he was viciously tortured to reveal party secrets, but kept silent.

When I was filming in Portugal only a few months after the momentous 1974 April revolution, we made a portrait of Dias Lourenço for GDR television. We accompanied him to Peniche prison where he related his story. While filming in his old cell, now holding former fascist guards (in very liberal conditions I might add), he rushed out, feeling nauseous. We wondered what had happened and he told us that one of those guards was had been his torturer during his own incarceration.
He took an active part in the reorganisation of the party in 1940/41 in the area of the Baixo Ribatejo and was elected to the regional committee. From then on he led a life of clandestine political activity, responsible for party publications and their distribution. Together with the party’s general secretary, Alvaro Cuñhal and others, he was able to forge close links between the country’s progressive intellectuals and workers, thus building the party’s unique standing throughout the country and giving the anti-fascist struggle a broader base.
He was elected to the central committee in 1943 and remained until 1996. He was one of the chief organisers of the mass strikes of July and August in 1943 and in May of 1944. He also led the struggle for the eight-hour working day for agricultural workers.
António Dias Lourenço was elected a member of parliament after the revolution 1975-87. He also wrote several books about his experiences under fascism and in the party.
He was a man of incredible courage, passion and commitment. With an unassuming modesty and love for his country and its working people. He will be sorely missed by progressives in Portugal and internationally.
END

2010-08-07T03:31:00.001-07:00

Injustice – why social inequality persists
By Daniel Dorling
Policy Press
Hdbck. £19.99

This book is a must read for all those looking for an evidence-based demolition of free-market capitalism. It is a fine complement to The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Wilkinson and Pickett. It is a combination of passion, compassion and astute factual argument.

Dorling, who is Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield University, argues that there are five tenets underpinning injustice in our society: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair inevitable. He amasses a whole gamut of compelling facts and statistics to make his case. These tenets were central to the Blairite agenda and Con-Dem agenda. Dorling provides us with one of the most incisive analysis of society’s ills to be published for a long time.

He argues that in affluent countries ‘social injustices are now being recreated, renewed and supported by new sets of beliefs which need confronting’. His central thesis is that inequalities in our society are more rampant than ever, despite our living in an era of labour saving technology, abundance and wealth. This fact, he says, demands a complete change in the thinking we all to some extent hold.

‘Greater equality is easily possible,’ he writes, ‘even in the US. In 1951 the communist-hating soon-to-be consumer society and nuclear-powered USA taxed the rich at 51.6% on earnings.’ Today the rate is between 10-30%, although Obama has recently undertaken a redistributive budget in an attempt to haul the country out of recession – only a year earlier an unimaginable step for a US government. Here in Britain, on the contrary, our government is doing the opposite.

Incredibly, ‘in countries like Britain people last lived lives as unequal as today, measured by wage inequality, in 1854 when Charles Dickens was writing Hard Times,’ he says. Inequality is plastered over by having more police to enforce state power, building more prisons and prescribing more drugs. Interestingly, too, the most unequal of rich countries were the most willing to go to war since 1939. That’s another way of taking people’s focus away from inequality and injustice at home.

Dorling, though, is adamant that injustice and inequality can be successfully fought, but it requires rethinking and concerted action by the supposedly powerless. Almost every time there has been a victory for humanity against greed, he writes, it has been the result of millions of small actions mostly undertaken by people not in government. ‘Resistance has always been most effective when exercised by those taught that they were the most powerless.’

He is in no doubt that ‘the human condition is fundamentally social and the modern preoccupation with individuality is really just a fantasy, a form of self-delusion.’

In conclusion, Dorling makes no attempt to offer facile solutions or utopian vistas, but says we can change this system if we all take some responsibility and don’t leave it up to others. In other words those in power can only continue to hold and abuse that power because we let them. He also illustrates how easy it would be to redistribute wealth, given the will to do so.

In this book he combines his skills as a human geographer with a sound understanding of economics and sociology. He has an easy, informal, yet authoritative style – essential reading for everyone concerned with social justice.
END

2010-08-04T03:18:00.001-07:00

Time to celebrate our own revolution?

The French are proud of their bourgeois revolution and celebrate it. Why do we pretend we never had one and why do we vilify the man who led it?
Today, on 3 September, 352 years ago Oliver Cromwell died. Despite being the leader of the English bourgeois revolution – the first in the world - which transformed Britain’s historical trajectory, he is someone we appear to want to disavow like a disreputable relative. British historians still insist on calling our revolution the ‘Civil War’(1642-51). Every year the French celebrate Bastille Day - the anniversary of the symbolic storming of the Parisian citadel on 14 July 1789; the rallying call of that revolution was adopted as their national anthem. They are proud of that legacy and celebrate it, despite the fact that it unleashed unprecedented violence and the bloodbath of the ‘Terror’. We are ashamed of our revolution so we prefer the euphemism ‘civil war’, which bowdlerises that momentous event. Novels and most historical narratives written about the period since glorify the Cavaliers and romanticise the aristocracy while denigrating the ‘vulgar and brutal’ Roundheads and the ugly and ‘tyrannical’ figure of Cromwell. The old ruling classes, despite their defeat, were able to impose their interpretation on the narrative. There are only two statues or monuments to his memory (one in front of Parliament and one in Manchester) and none, as far as I am aware, to the revolution in the whole of Britain.
Few leaders and no revolutions are pure, ideal or completely virtuous; what matters is their historical significance and the role they have played in changing society for the better. Cromwell we know was certainly no paragon in this respect. His suppression of the really radical elements within the revolution and his, later, brutal oppression of Catholic Ireland sullied the ideals and aspirations of the revolution. He also became increasingly reactionary in power and turned on the more progressive elements in the New Model Army, extirpating any attempts to build a truly more just and egalitarian country. All that, though, should not blind us to the extraordinary changes he did usher in and the role the revolution played in releasing those bourgeois forces which later made possible Britain’s industrial expansion, transforming it into the ‘factory of the world’. He was the founder of the Republican Commonwealth – England’s first Republic. He was certainly no dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary, even from the outset, nor was he a leader of the oppressed, but he did have a strong sense of the injustice prevailing in the country. As late as 1650 he said, ‘the law as it is now constituted serves only to maintain the lawyers and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor.’ We perhaps also need to remember, as another positive example of Cromwell’s rule, that in 1656 he was responsible for re-admitting Jews into England for the first time since they were expelled in 1290 under Edward I.
In order for the merchants, traders and gentry to push through the radical changes they desired, they had to enlist the support of the general populace if they were to achieve success, but it was an uneasy alliance. Well before 1642 piecemeal enclosures had forced thousands off the land, excessive taxation and exploitation had also played their parts in driving people from the countryside into the cities. These were people full of anger, frustration and class hatred who readily embraced the Cromwellian revolution as a means of getting even with their oppressors and ushering in a more just political system. They formed a sort of masterless, anarchic army of the poor with no roots and nothing to lose. Cromwell’s New Model Army was the most democratic army the world had seen, with ‘agitators’ appointed to regiments (comparable with the Commissars in the Bolshevik Forces). The army became a university for the soldiers – there were avid debates, radical political groupings and fiery preachers. Officers were obliged to win the respect of their men if they didn’t wish to be demoted or removed.

As the historian Christopher Hill points out, there were actually two revolutions taking place during the sixteen forties - a revolution within the revolution. From around 1645 to 1653 ‘there was an overturning, questioning and revaluing of everything in England,’ he says.

Cromwell was the man who created the conditions that allowed the common people to express their own ideas for social change. The revolution provided the space and opportunity for the expression and development of radical and truly revolutionary ideas. Ideas which had been fermenting among the people for decades before Cromwell’s rule now began frothing in earnest. Groups like the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters attempted to impose their own solutions on the problems of their time. The fact that Cromwell led a successful revolt against the corrupt and privileged feudal aristocracy and wrested power from the king, demonstrated to the people that radical change was possible. With each Parliamentary victory, the people saw that their oppressors and even the monarchy itself could be defeated; the world could be ‘turned upside down’.

Although the Parliamentary Army was made up of officers largely from the bourgeoisie, many of the foot soldiers were ordinary men who were fighting for other things - justice and equality and a better quality of life for their class. It could be said that this army was more representative of a cross section of the population than any other national body before or since.

The revoloutionary period of the 1640s was also a time of unprecedented religious debate. The church, whose hierarchy identified with the king, was as hated as the aristocracy itself. It was corrupt, autocratic and levied its own taxes through the tithe system. Already before Cromwell, there was a strong tradition of fiery anti-clericalism and the revolution only provided it with more oxygen.

It was a period, as Hill describes it, ‘of glorious flux and intellectual excitement’, when everything must have seemed possible. The brief years of the revolution ushered in the most extensive liberty of the press, more than had been experienced before or would be afterwards. It brought with it a complete breakdown of censorship and the demise of the hated church courts. Judges no longer went on circuit for fear of their lives. This anti-clericalism and explosion of radical thinking laid the foundations for the ideas of revolutionaries like Tom Paine and the Chartists, generations later.

Despite his maltreatment by history, Cromwell was voted one of the ‘top ten Britons of all time’ in a 2002 BBC poll. However, he and the English Revolution need to resume a place of honour in our history books and their achievements given due prominence.

In a couple of decades we will be coming up to the 400th anniversary, so surely now is the time to renew the campaign to have England’s Civil War renamed as the English Revolution and ensure that it is celebrated as something for us all to be proud of – the precursor of our present day freedoms and parliamentary democracy and as a needful reminder that we once lived in a republic and perhaps now is the time to reignite the campaign for a new one!
END

2010-08-04T03:14:00.000-07:00

Crack Capitalism
By John Holloway
Pluto Press
Pbck £17.99
Since the ideas of socialism were first debated there has been conflict between reformist and revolutionary advocates; those who feel justice and equality can be achieved through piecemeal reform and those who argue that only a single momentous revolution can accomplish that goal. Holloway tries to bridge this apparent contradiction. He maintains that we need to create pockets of resistance, islands of alternative life styles or, as he prefers to put it, create ‘cracks’ in the system. In a sense he is also advocating what has been termed the ‘second culture’, ie a culture in opposition to and alongside the hegemonic capitalist one.
He offers 13 theses in what he hopes is a clear and accessible guide to moving beyond capitalism by creating mini-revolutions in our own individual lives, in our localities and communities. He argues that the dangers facing humanity are so urgent that we can’t wait (do revolutionaries wait?) for the revolution but must work to undermine the system where we are. He says ‘…the idea of a future revolution has become the enemy of emancipation.’ The practice of the left has been ‘to repeatedly commit suicide …by ignoring or destroying lines of continuity [between small victories and the chief goal]; by condemning reformism, by using language that only the initiated understand, by the use of violence in a way that alienates many people.’ While that may be partially correct, it is certainly not the whole picture; most revolutionaries I know fight actively for local and partial victories, but these don’t lead irreversibly or smoothly to the overthrow of the system.
We have to think the world through our ‘misfitting’, he argues. We must see capitalism not as something solid, as dominant, but in terms of its cracks, its crises, contradictions and weaknesses. Of course we have to protest against the system, he says, but if we only protest, we allow the powerful to set the agenda.
The long section on abstract labour is unfortunately very complex and highly theoretical and will have little relevance for the reader looking for concrete ways forward. Although it is a valid discussion, it seems that Holloway is advocating opting out of the labour process altogether as the only real means of challenging and overcoming capitalism. In today’s complex society in which we rely on sophisticated commodities this may seem utopian. It could be better discussed in terms of alienation, I feel.
This book is an attempt to answer the question: what can we do? We know taking state power is not an option at the present time. We cannot hope for the great revolution, we have to start creating something different here and now. Moving from capitalism to socialism is qualitatively different from that of feudalism to capitalism. Socialism cannot arise within the interstices of capitalism but only when the world of capitalism is overthrown. It seems, however, that Holloway is arguing for building the new system within the interstices or cracks in the system. A challenging and useful book, but does it offer a solution?
END

2010-07-25T07:24:00.000-07:00

No time to sit and wait - countering the Tories
It is no exaggeration to state that working people and the trade union movement under this government are facing the most ferocious onslaught in recent history. However, while the Tory-Lib coalition unleashes its Blitzkrieg with incredible ferocity, the public appears to be mesmerized like rabbits caught in car headlights. Of course, that’s not entirely true. There are those who saw this coming and who are now desperately sounding the reveille, but the government has stolen a march on us.

How has this Eton crowd been allowed to get away with diverting the widespread public outrage at their banking friends for dragging us into the present financial mess? All of a sudden the solution to the crisis, they say, is to be found in attacking public sector pay and pensions, welfare and benefits. While the previous Labour government was complicit, it was the finance capitalists who engineered the crisis, but the Tories are managing to make Labour the scapegoat. So, how can we mount an effective resistance against their attacks?

There is a widespread awareness that old methods of struggle either on an individual workplace or single union basis will not be sufficient to withstand this rogue wave of Tory policies that threatens to engulf us.

Despite the transformed social and political tapestry, trade unions, by and large, are still dependent on the same well-worn last resort method to fight their corner: the strike. While these can still be effective, they lost much of their clout once sympathy and solidarity action was outlawed under Thatcher’s anti-union legislation. The other downside is that – particularly those strikes involving the public sector – they can very often become counter-productive, as they involve inconveniencing ordinary citizens, causing anger and irritation. Methods of struggle need a thorough rethink in the present climate. We can’t afford to alienate large sections of the general public – our potential allies. We may also have to face even more restrictive anti-union legislation if the Tory right-wing gets its way.

A transport strike or one by local government workers hit the general public hardest; they impinge on their daily commute to work, their holiday plans or mean their benefits are not paid etc. Even if there is initial sympathy with the striking workers, this can soon wear thin, the more the public’s lives are affected and the longer time the media have to implement their insidious work.

Can we try subtler methods? During a recent rail strike in France workers chose to let people travel but refused to collect ticket money or check passengers’ tickets. This was very popular with the public and very effective in bringing the employer back to the negotiating table. Could such action be taken here?

One thing is certain, and a number of union leaders have realised this and are already taking action, that in trying to reverse the devastating attack on the welfare state and our other social achievements, action by individual unions alone will not be effective. There needs to be much more widespread and better co-ordination of action against Tory policies, despite the trammel of anti-union legislation. There is an urgent need for a unifying strategic programme in the form of a pro-active defence. We are, though, still somewhat hamstrung by a legacy of inter-union rivalries and, on the left, a clash of personalities and sectarianism that renders us effectively leaderless. The TUC should be playing the central role here, but don’t hold your breath. Trade Councils, too, can play unifying and co-ordinating roles.

Individual unions are of course already mounting their own campaigns but these will necessarily remain limited in their effectiveness. In this connection our trade union movement could learn something from our brothers and sisters in the USA who have had to fight even more draconian anti-union legislation than we have over many decades. They were forced to look at methods of struggle other than strike action. They have actively sought support and solidarity in their communities and from the general public which has usually worked. If you can get the public on your side, half the battle is won. Without the widest possible alliances, an effective riposte to the Tory coalition government will be impossible. Allies can be found in the churches, among activist groups, the left in the Labour Party, the Greens and even those leftists among the Liberals as well as progressive celebrities as long as we are prepared to accept difference as something not necessarily negative, and reject sectarianism and vanguardist ambitions; we cannot afford to be exclusive. The miners’ strike in 1984/85 demonstrated how communities and individuals could be mobilised across an enormously wide spectrum to support what was clearly seen as a monstrous injustice.
Unite’s Health B4 Profit Campaign is aimed at educating and empowering local health sector activists to challenge the fragmentation and privatisation of the NHS. The union says: ‘The NHS ‘should not be carved up for the benefit of private profit and this must be the time for us to fight for our Health Service and ensure that people come before profit. We want NHS staff, service users and the wider community to work together to challenge the policies that will lead to large amounts of public money being siphoned off into private company profits, rather than on delivering health care.’
UNISON’s library workers are defending their jobs and library provision by recruiting support from their local communities and readers, rather than closing the libraries with strike action. UNISON has its own campaign. ‘Everyone needs libraries for facts, for fun and for the future,’ it says. ‘A good public library service is at the heart of the community.’ It has won well-known writers like Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Alan Gibbons and Roger McGough to sign up to its campaign.
Unite has joined forces with PCS, and other unions and political organisations to call on the government to urgently rethink its welfare reform plans. It also has ongoing campaigns on house building and similar issues. The RMT is campaigning for rail renationalisation. Other unions are doing similar things, but they are mostly one-offs, not part of an overall and co-ordinated strategy, often by single unions. Outside the confines of a small activists’ circle they are often unknown.
Unions also need to utilise the media more effectively. It is no use simply putting out press releases and hoping newspapers will print them or offering sound bites to TV interviewers. The need is to be pro-active and win over the public before the establishment can put over its case and queer the pitch. The case for defending jobs, pay and public services needs to be communicated clearly and effectively, addressing public concerns and emphasising trade unionists sense of social responsibility. Campaigns need to be imaginative and events need to be eye-catching and headline-grabbing. There have been some very effective advertising campaigns in the past, particularly by UNISON, in defence of public services, but we should have more of these. They can be expensive to mount, but their impact is significant. More use could also be made of sympathetic celebrities, musicians and artists.

Above all, though, union activists have to ensure that they achieve or maintain a strong density of membership in all workplaces, but particularly in the public services. Without high union membership densities the government and employers will not listen as readily. Now is an ideal time to recruit when jobs, wages and conditions are under serious threat. That should become the number one priority for all union members.
END

2010-07-11T02:02:00.001-07:00

Re BBC News on One Friday 9 July.

I wish to complain about your news coverage on Friday 9 July BBC1 10.00pm news. You had only three items: the main one (which took up almost a qare of an hour – half the time) being a report on the hunt for Raoul Moat. The second item was on the football world cup and the third on the London Olympic Village. That is, two items on sport and one on the hunt for a lone gunman – hardly ‘news’ in the real sense of the word, whether world or British.

The fact that the police hunt for a lone gunman in Rothbury was given almost half of the total news coverage is pandering to tabloid-type sensationalism and demonstrates a gratuitous infatuation with crime. It may have deserved a mention but surely not more coverage than a major world catastrophe would normally receive. The police were clearly keeping all outsiders away from the focus of their hunt and were divulging few details of what was happening, but such a lack of genuine information did not stop you milking the story even though it was dry. Your journalists talked of being ‘only 100 yards from the scene’ as if this is of relevance to their story. They interviewed ‘experts’ about ‘what might have been happening’ (because no one knew apart from the police officers involved). This is not news but empty speculation and imparts no information or understanding to the viewer.

The fact that a lone gunman on the run after killing one person was now being hunted by a heavily armed police force in an operation almost unprecedented in peacetime outside Northern Ireland or in connection with serious terrorist offences, elicits no interrogation by you is incredible. You don’t question the use of such force; you don’t question the use of draconian powers to close off civilian areas and impose a curfew on ordinary citizens – actions of doubtful legality or legitimacy. Now tht would be proper investigative journalism!

BBC News has become increasingly obsessed with individual acts of crime, giving gratuitous coverage of little informational or educational value. This is ‘bread and circuses’ of the worst kind and not the sort of intelligent news coverage one expects from the BBC with its mandate to inform, educate and entertain.
Let us have real news please!

2010-06-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

It is a total nonsense to demand that people move where jobs are. This destroys families, communities, local solidarity and friendships. In a rational world, jobs should move to where people are, not vice versa. This is what happened under socialism and should happen here. Of course, as society progresses, industries and jobs disappear or change but they should be replaced by other jobs. It is up to governments to regulate and organise such processes and to provide retraining where necessary. Moving people and families to where jobs are is disruptive, cruel and counter-productive, as people may have to move again and again as jobs vanish, particularly in recesssions. Economics needs to serve people not vice versa. We have been cajoled and brainwashed to accept that we are servants to economic forces. That attitude only serves the wealthy elite who are protected. Duncan Smith's post Tebbit demands must be resisted.
John Green

Football - opium of the people

2010-06-16T01:31:00.001-07:00

I remember at my secondary school we weren’t allowed to play football. The headmaster had illusions of grandeur and he followed slavishly the examples of the big public schools: one played rugby and cricket - football was a working class sport not suitable for young gentlemen! Yes, in those days football was primarily a working class sport, played and watched by working people. The teams – even at the top of the league – were made up largely of men from the locality and their wages were little better than a well-paid manual worker. The game was followed avidly but not with the fanaticism and obsessional fervour of today.
The pundits invariably resort to the terminology of world war and national destiny, whipping up xenophobia and confirming national stereotypes. The Sun writes about ‘Krauts’ and features Nazi helmets when discussing German teams – beloved targets. Even Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s manager, responded to United’s elimination from the Champions League by branding Bayern Munich’s players as "typical Germans" for what he saw as deliberate attempts to injure Wayne Rooney.
Football today has nothing in common with the game of those days apart from it being a game where eleven men kick a ball around. It has been hijacked by big business and turned into a money-spinner as well as a convenient soporific for the masses. It is today what ‘bread and circuses’ were for the Romans: a refuge from life’s problems, from serious discussion and real politics. It substitutes for clan, community and national spirit. Even presidents and prime ministers are obliged to acknowledge its hold on the masses and worship at its shrine. Football has become Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ‘happiness drug’. It rules many men’s lives (yes, it is invariably men), can give them their orgasms, their highs and lows and transport them out of their mundane lives onto the fairy-tale world of the soccer pitch.

The excessively rewarded top stars have nothing to do with the teams they play for or the places in which they are based. They too are in it for the money and will go where they are highest paid. Clubs once firmly rooted in their localities and supported by small businesses and individual fans are now the play-things of the super wealthy. Two of our top teams are now owned by US businessmen who have been deprived of such opportunities in soccer-starved USA. The Glazer brothers own Manchester United and Gillet and Hicks own Liverpool.

Most of the cash used by Glazers to purchase Manchester United came in the form of loans, secured against the club's assets, incurring interest payments of over £60 million per annum. The remainder came in the form of loans, which were later sold to hedge funds. The club has a gross debt of £520 million with £45 million in annual interest payments. It is argued that they are milking the club and will leave it heavily indebted and in a parlous state.
Gillet and Hicks acquired Liverpool in 2007. The deal valued the club and its outstanding debts at £218.9 million. There have been rumours since that a Dubai company was also interested in buying it. Kenneth Huang, a former Wall Street broker, is at the head of a group who also want to buy the club for around £500m. In May, accounts were released showing the club to be £350 million in debt with losses of £55m and its auditor warning 'This fact indicates the existence of a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt upon the club’s ability to continue as a going concern.' Belatedly, greedy individuals and companies are now vying with each other to tap into this incredibly lucrative global money-maker.
In April 2008, Forbes business magazine ranked Liverpool as the fourth most valuable football team in the world, after Manchester United, Real Madrid and Arsenal. The club was valued at £605m, excluding debt.
The concentration of wealth among the few top teams in the world is distorting and in fact ruining the game as a truly national sport. Money is being siphoned off in dividends and inflated pay for players, leaving the smaller and less renowned clubs struggling to survive. Money for the training of new generations of players and for essential sports facilities where young people can train and enjoy playing as amateurs is almost impossible to come by. In South Africa we can see magnificent new stadiums and a country celebrating its selection as World Cup venue, but afterwards the kids from the townships will still be barefoot, kicking around a ragged ball on a dry strip of township land. The wealth generated by the spectacle will not filter down to them.
This year’s World Cup again underlines the psychosis gripping the nation. It was calculated that, at its peak, over 20 million people watched England’s first game on ITV – an unprecedented audience for any programme. On big game nights the cities and streets throughout the country become dead as if the population had been wiped out. Pennants fly from every second car and flags hang from windows, as if we really were at war, as if the destiny of our country depended on the outcome of the world cup. When England’s goalkeeper fumbles the ball it is front page news in almost every paper and football pitches of newsprint and hours of television time are devoted to the game – the real world ceases to exist. Everyone is sucked into this hyped-up hysteria. Conversations revolve around little else.
Football is a great game, but it is only a game for god’s sake! Its links to the working class are, today, as close as those of Tesco to a community corner shop. How aficionados can maintain interest and loyalty to teams divorced from their communities and in the face of the game’s clear manipulation by a wealthy capitalist elite is beyond me.
END

2010-06-10T01:37:00.001-07:00

Shortly before it was announced that Barbara Kingsolver had won this year’s Orange Prize for her novel, The Lacuna, on the McCarthy period she told me what motivates her as a writer.

Kingsolver is one of the leading social-realist writers in the English language today and has written, or collaborated on, 13 books, most of which are novels, but she has also written poetry, short stories and essays. Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for ‘literature of social change’.

Her books have been widely praised both for their passionate moral commitment and for their evocative writing style. Every one, since Pigs in Heaven, has been on The New York Times bestseller list.

At the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1990, she was so horrified by the gung-ho militarism gripping the nation that she emigrated temporarily to retain her sanity.

She agreed to answer a few questions exclusively for the Morning Star.

Her novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998) won her international acclaim. It is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fanatical evangelical minister who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

This was a time of great turmoil for Africa –the height of the Cold War – with the collapse of colonialism, revolutionary movements were determined to win control of their countries. It is the time of Lumumba’s murder and the suppression of a genuine anti-colonial movement. The West was determined to stop ‘the spread of Communism’ and the Eastern Bloc was supporting the revolutionary forces. The book’s complex and compelling characters clarify, as scarce another novel has been able to, the processes that unfolded there. By placing a US missionary family centre stage it also ensured that the reader in the West was obliged to recognise the links (and perhaps a certain responsibility too) between his/her privileged and sheltered way of life and the oppression, inhumanity and war unfolding in the Congo.

Kingsolver’s other books have taken up similar controversial social issues. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989) is based on interviews with strikers and their families. It is an account of eighteen months, during the 1980s, of a strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. In particular, the book is about the women in these towns: how they answered the challenge set before them, and how they changed.

In The Bean Trees, she tells the story of a family of Guatemalan immigrants whose daughter is taken by the government in an effort to force them to speak out about their underground teaching circle. They were forced to escape torture and death in their home country, but forced to evade the authorities in the United States. The sequel to this novel, Pigs in Heaven, examines the conflicts between individual and community rights, through a story about a Cherokee child adopted out of her tribe.

In Animal Dreams (1990), the American sister of the main protagonist is kidnapped by US-backed Contras while working to promote sustainable farming in Nicaragua. It intertwines the issue of indigenous culture and its marginalisation in the USA and that country’s support fro the Contras in Nicaragua.

I asked her about her latest novel, The Lacuna, which continues the tradition set by her previous ones of tackling large social themes. It takes as its subject matter perhaps one of the most politically controversial periods in US history – that dominated by the activities of The House Committee on Un-American Activities and Senator McCarthy. What led her to choose this subject matter now, I wondered. Does she see any parallels in today’s society or was she simply interested in that period for its own sake or because of its impact on the lives of so many creative and progressive individuals?

“I don’t think of myself as having established a tradition of ‘tackling big social themes,’ she replies, ‘I construct novels around questions that seem compelling to me, but they need not be ‘big’ or ‘social’. Sometimes I write about family and community. My previous novel, Prodigal Summer, explained in fictional terms a handful of crucial biological principles that are confusing for non-scientists. My only persistent tradition is to keep working at the edge of my powers, in terms of both theme and craft. I love challenges.”

“I’ve wondered for many years about why art and politics have such an uncomfortable relationship in the U.S. I suspected that if I looked deeply into the events surrounding the so-called ‘McCarthy era’, I would find some interesting fictional territory. That period has left a strong imprint on the political identity of my country, in which patriotism is now widely defined as resistance to change. That seems a strange position for a nation founded by revolutionaries. I wondered when and why we made that huge shift. I assumed others would also be interested in that question, and it seems to be so.”

She has expanded this idea in her collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson, where she writes: “We’ve created for ourselves a culture that undervalues education (compared with the rest of the industrialized world, to say the least), undervalues breadth of experience (compared with our potential), downright discourages critical thinking (judging from what the majority of us watch and read), and distrusts foreign ideas. “Un-American,” from what I hear, is meant to be an insult…If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider horizons will be fatal.”

I mention her most acclaimed novel The Poisonwood Bible and wonder if, as a writer, she feels that her role (as well as crafting good stories, believable characters and providing an enjoyable read) is to make a social/political intervention.

She replies: “The sole pact I’ve sworn with myself is to be the best literary writer I can be. The greatest work will always come from passion – writers work hardest at whatever thrills and intrigues us. That might be murder or romance or whatever, artists pursue what we love. In my case, I happen to be a person with strong convictions about human justice and more than an average curiosity about how things get to be the way they are. Like every other writer on earth, my work reflects my world view. Why critics want to make hay over that, I’ll never know.”

“It’s a curious risk, fiction,” she writes in an essay, “Some writers choose fantasy as an approach to truth, a way of burrowing under newsprint and formal portraits to find the despair that can stow away in a happy childhood, or the affluent grace of a grandfather in his undershirt. In the final accounting, a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address. The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world. Given that I cannot look away from the painful things, it seems better to invent allegory than to point a straight bony finger at Scrooge’s mute Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, declaring: ‘Hee you will end, if you don’t clean up your act.’ By inventing character and circumstance, I like to think I can be a kinder sort of ghost, saying: ‘I don’t mean you, exactly, but just give it some thought, anyway.’”
Kingsolver doesn’t usually receive the sort of publicity that some of her more esoteric and cynical counterparts despite being an international best-seller. This is perhaps not altogether surprising as she doesn’t fit comfortably into any mould but is very much a mould-breaker, particularly those so beloved of the mainstream media. She cannot be labelled or put into any easy category; she stays true to herself and her deeply held principles. She is a somewhat ‘old-fashioned’ writer in a positive sense. She writes tightly structured, allegorical novels, without readers feeling they are being lectured at. Her characters are believable and well-rounded; her stories grip. She has an eloquence of language and keen sense of humour, a powerful and vividly descriptive style combined with an unfettered imagination, but rooted firmly in reality. Community, economic injustice and cultural difference and a strongly feminist stance inform the themes of her work.
The majority of Western novelists today have adopted a largely post-modernist, disengaged or solipsistic position in their writing. I ask her if she feels that the fact that she takes on important social and political subject matters (e.g. the rights of indigenous people, responsibility for a sustainable world, international solidarity and the wider role of the USA in the word) could be considered ‘old-fashioned’ harking back to writers like Upton Sinclair, Irving Stone, Howard Fast and Theodore Dreiser. Would she reject such an association or is she comfortable with it?

“I agree with you, as a writer I might claim more kinship with Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser than with many modern novelists in the U.S. But I’m disinclined to call that “old fashioned,” because I labor to belong to a tradition that’s absolutely alive elsewhere in the world, a wildly diverse club that’s anything but antique. Let me name a few names: Nadine Gordimer, Arundhati Roy, José Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.M. Coetzee. Let’s throw in the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, just for good measure, and I’ll rest my case. Worldliness may go out of fashion in the U.S., but that doesn’t concern me. I’ve lived in a lot of other countries.”

In a world increasingly dominated by the electronic media, of sound bites, ‘junk food’ culture and the demand for quick and easy fixes, can literature such as Kingsolver’s have any discernible impact on the politics, thinking and attitudes of the present generation, I wonder.

“Can ‘literature such as mine’ still have an impact in a sound-bite world? You may as well ask that question about literature in general. Does anyone under 30 still read literary fiction? As it happens, the answer is yes, I hear from younger readers all the time. A small but impressive cadre.”

“I would venture to guess that the percentage of the population that reads literature has held fairly steady since the days of Cervantes. Centuries ago, few people read great books because few had the privilege of education and literacy. Now we have a higher literacy rate, and also more options, so it evens out. But the novel, as a form, has remained basically the same for 400 years, which suggests it will persist as long as humans do. I don’t mean the paper or electronic pad or whatever it’s delivered on, that’s immaterial, I mean the novel itself: the word charged with purpose, the narrative arc, the taste of connotation on the palate, the capacity of a reader to enter other lives and come away changed. Some portion of us will always need that.”
She questions accepted US shibboleths and interrogates lazy thinking and simplistic philosophies. Her essays are particularly illuminating and outspoken, often laced with a winning self-deprecatory humour. She has said, ‘If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.’ And you feel she would genuinely be happy to go down this road if she felt her books really made no difference.
She is clearly a writer of the left and unusually for US writers doesn’t even shy away from mentioning Marx or Engels with whom she is clearly familiar. In another of her essays she explains the significance of Engels with relation to property ownership:

“Engels,” she says, “examined our history under the lamp of a new paradigm set forth by his contemporary Charles Darwin. Engels also had access to the prodigious work of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Countless modern scholars have addressed the history of private property, but it’s hard to beat the elegance of Engels’s simple outline of social evolution, laid out in his wonderful classic The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” And later, she adds: “What a relief, to relinquish ownership of unownable things. Engels remarked at the end of his treatise that the outgrowth of property has become so unmanageable that ‘the human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.’ But he continues on a hopeful note: ‘The time which has passed since our civilisation began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come…A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind’.”

Despite all the deeply divisive and threatening issues she deals with in her books, Kingsolver, too, retains hope for humanity and that is what comes through forcefully in all her novels. Her characters may be up against enormous odds, but they remain resilient and that also gives the reader hope.
The Lacuna – her first novel in nine years – is now out in paperback.
END

2010-05-03T02:28:00.001-07:00

In A Strange Room
By Damon Galgut
Atlantic Books
Hdbck £15.99

A young, diffidently gay man wanders through Africa, to Europe and India seeking companionship and perhaps even love. On his way, he tags on to various individuals or groups of white tourists, but the encounters remain fleeting and fruitless. The protagonist, also called Damon (perhaps the author himself?) and of whom we learn little, laconically describes the landscapes through which he travels, the small towns and hotel rooms in which he finds himself during these rather aimless peregrinations. It is a solipsistic post-modernist novel, dovetailing into our contemporary pre-occupation with self. In this novelistic tourist diary, the author/protagonist irritatingly interchanges the ‘I’ form with the ‘he’ form as a means, one assumes, of self-alienation. The author is a white South African, but apart from a few obligatory references to poverty and post-colonial arrogance on the part of white European tourists, he reveals little of the pulsating life-blood of Africa.
END

The Long Twentieth Century – Money, power and the Origins of Our Times
By Giovanni Arrighi
Pubs Verso
Pbck £14.99

Arrighi was professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and an authority on world systems analysis and historical sociology. In this volume he attempts to demonstrate the origins of modern capitalism as a logical development from the rise of the city states, through nation states, colonialism and imperialism.

He makes three main propositions: 1. that the financial expansion characterising the global economy at the end of the twentieth century is not a new phenomenon but a recurrent tendency of historical capitalism from its very beginnings; 2. Financial expansions are not merely recurrent but also moments of fundamental re-organisation of the regime of accumulation, and 3. The dynamic of world capitalism has not only changed over time but has made the financial expansion of the twentieth century anomalous in key respects, one being the bifurcation of military and financial power. These theses may be controversial, but Arrighi arrays a mass of factual evidence. The more relevant question is, though, how far such ideas could enable us to better comprehend the present impasse and, perhaps, help us predict probable outcomes.

He argues that US dominance and hegemony is now on the wane and the centre of global equilibrium is shifting to South-East Asia, primarily China. He suggests that the USA could possibly recover its position if it were prepared to adapt (as it did after the cataclysmic thirties crash) but the examples set by the policies of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush regimes would indicate the opposite – rather an ossification.

Although this is an updated version of his 1994 book, with a new postscript, it is unfortunately still couched in dense academic language with copious references and will be off-putting for the general reader. The author takes 400 odd pages to put forward a relatively straightforward thesis that could have been done much more succinctly. Harry Shutt’s book ‘Beyond the Profits System’ (Zed Books) is a much more accessible and clearly argued book examining the options for the global economy today.
END

2010-04-30T02:41:00.000-07:00

How Shall I Live My Life – on liberating the earth from civilisation
By Derrick Jensen
PM Press 2010

How can we be real citizens in a globalised world? The more ‘global’ our world becomes, this book argues, the more dysfunctional our societies.

Jensen is dubbed the ‘philosopher poet of the ecological movement’ in the USA. Here he interviews ten leading thinkers on ecology and the dilemmas facing our world. Only one is British, the others are from the USA - I know none of them – but that could be due to my ignorance rather than their importance. They range from a Catholic priest to a Buddhist, a shamanic magician to a reformed oil big-wig. If that puts you off, don’t let it. They all have thought-provoking things to say and force us to re-assess and rethink our modes of living and what we take for granted. They all ask us to reconsider our human-centred view of life on the planet and instead to see ourselves as part of an interactive relationship with our surroundings and co-inhabitants. Some make seemingly outrageous statements like: we need to stop international trade or all road-building, but when they develop their arguments it becomes clear how such demands make sense. They all argue that the only solution is in a more social, equitable and even socialistic or communistic society without once mentioning those dreaded words (understandable in a US context). Carolyn Raffensperger explains vividly how capitalism increasingly externalises its true costs and leaves governments i.e. the public to pick up the tab. Lower costs of production, she demonstrates, only increase the public cost in terms of ill-health and environmental degradation.

The present financial crisis and those to come are all based on capitalist greed. We have already overshot the world’s carrying capacity in terms of long-term sustainability because of the way we have used cheap oil. In other words our world is slowly dying and is doomed unless we reverse this process quickly. The Indian philosopher Vine Deloria says: ‘If you see the world around you made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, it is inevitable that you destroy the world by attempting to control it.’

Sometimes the interviewees are a little precious, and all, I imagine, live quite privileged lives, but this shouldn’t be allowed to invalidate their basic arguments. A book well-worth reading.
END

2010-03-24T15:58:00.001-07:00

Born in1891 in Kiev, Mikhail Bulgakov is best known for his magical realist novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously. It is the best example of his wildly surreal and satirical writing. The book was available underground as samizdat for many years in the Soviet Union, and it led to international appreciation of Bulgakov’s writing.

In 1916, he served in the White army alongside his brothers. After the Civil War and rise of the Bolsheviks, most of his family emigrated but Mikhail remained. He remained ambivalent towards the Soviet government: while mocking it in some of his works, he also wrote the play Batum glorifying Stalin's early revolutionary activity. Much of his work remained in his desk drawer. He published a number of works through the early and mid-twenties, but by 1927 his career began to suffer from criticism that he was too anti-Soviet.

The White Guard in its original form was a novel and first appeared as a serial in the Soviet literary journal Rossiya in 1926, but was never fully released. Instead it was turned into a play The Days of the Turbins, and became a big hit, enjoying a long run at the Moscow Arts Theatre before eventually being banned. Bulgakov then wrote to Stalin personally to be permitted to leave the country, but instead Stalin gave instructions for him to be given a job at the Moscow Arts Theatre, where he was still working when he completed The Master and Margarita, before he died in 1940. His widow partially published The White Guard in the literary journal Moskva in 1966, and the entire novel was only finally published in 1973.

The play is set in the Ukraine during 1918, and depicts the fate of the Turbin family as the Civil War rages around them - the Whites, the Reds and the remnants of the German army are fighting for the city of Kiev. Real historical figures such as Petlyura and Skoropadsky feature as the Turbins are caught up in the turbulence of the Revolution.

White Guard contains many autobiographical elements. The younger Turbin brother is modelled after Bulgakov's own. The house of the Turbins is an exact description of the one lived in by the Bulgakov family in Kiev.

The play gives us a portrait of an upper-class Ukrainian family wedded to an outdated system. During the final days of the First World War, the Ukrainian regime’s protectors, the Germans, are in retreat and the Bolsheviks are at the gates of Kiev.
It is in essence a Chekhovian situation and – handled with subtlety and historical acumen – the production could have teased out the tragedy as well as the comedy encapsulated in this family’s doomed situation. Instead it is played almost entirely for laughs and becomes more Whitehall farce than Cherry Orchard. One wonders what motivated the NT to resuscitate the play in this new adaptation by Andrew Upton who seems more fascinated by Stalin’s apparent love of the play and Soviet censorship of it, than with Bulgakov’s central concerns. Upton was also responsible for the NT’s version of Gorky’s Philistines.
The actors here perform well but are straitjacketed by the over-emphasis on the farcical and are left little space to develop multi-faceted characters. It is directed by NT Associate Howard Davies.
END

2010-03-21T15:57:00.001-07:00

There is more to the British Airways strike than media headlines reveal. It is the first all-out strike by cabin crew for 13 years. This time the vote for strike action by cabin crew – not noted for militancy –saw 9,000 members out of the 11,000 balloted backing strike action in the row over staffing cuts and proposed changes to working conditions - an unprecedented percentage. Clearly staff were sufficiently enraged by the bullying tactics of BA management and the drastic implications of the proposed cuts that they saw no alternative to strike action.
BA’s share price soared last Friday, despite the strike announcement. Clearly the establishment is convinced BA and its pit-bull, Willie Walsh, will win and the union will be defeated.
On the first day of the strike BA maintained that half of staff had reported for duty, however, Unite insisted that 80% of its 11,000 members supported the first day of this three-day walkout. Walsh described the industrial action as ‘another cold-blooded threat’ to the holiday plans of their passengers. He attacked Unite, claiming they were ‘militant activists’ who had ‘cynically misled’ and coerced the company’s staff, who are among the highest paid in the industry.
BA suffered a loss before tax of £342m for the nine months to the end of December 2009 and says it needs to cut costs in order to survive, but this could have been achieved by negotiation. The Unite negotiating team lent over backwards to find a compromise and were willing to consider a range of options, including a two-year pay freeze, a partial repeal of staffing reductions on flights and an agreement to create a ‘new fleet’. Why did BA put an offer on the table which the unions were prepared to consider, only to then withdraw it?

Walsh’s deliberately aggressive and provocative stance vis a vis the union’s conciliatory attitude seems to indicate a deliberate attempt to provoke a strike. One has to ask why he wasn’t prepared to compromise. BA will be losing even more millions over this period and will hardly lead to an improvement of its already precarious financial situation, unless it is able to smash the union.

The last thing the new Labour government wanted so soon before a general election is a strike like this, and it has done everything it can behind the scenes to avoid it. The strike is likely to rebound on New Labour and will only benefit the Tories. That’s why Brown and his courtiers have done all they can to ensure it didn’t happen, but they failed.
Walsh seems the perfect man to take on the unions; he is the archetypal shop steward promoted to foreman. He became a pilot at Irish flag-carrier Aer Lingus, and during his time there acted as chief negotiator for the Irish Airline Pilots Association (IALPA) and was quoted at the time as saying that ‘a reasonable man gets nowhere in negotiations’. He is now putting that credo into practice and clearly wishes to outdo his Irish compatriot, loud-mouthed union-basher-in-chief, Michael O'Leary of Ryan Air.
BA's management has not faced up to the consequences of cut-throat competition among airlines and Walsh now wants to ensure that the unions take the blame. With imaginative and co-operative policies it could have carried the workforce and their unions with it. Walsh, though, is attempting to conceal this failing behind his crude anti-union strategy.
Governments too need to face up to the consequences of a completely de-regulated airline system. A fight to the bottom is taking place, resulting in underpaid and under-trained staff, overworked pilots and cabin crew with potentially serious repercussions for passenger safety, comfort and service. Governments need to recognise the crisis facing all airlines and work towards an internationally-agreed and more rational regulatory system embracing pricing, environmental issues, passengers' needs and a closer co-operation between all who work for the airlines and their unions. There are obvious parallels here with what has taken place in the financial world.
The establishment media have gleefully recycled the old headlines about too much union power and the unions bank-rolling the Labour Party. You’d think we were back in the seventies when the unions still had considerable power. Despite Thatcher’s union-shackling legislation still in place and the unions jumping through all the hoops of a regulated ballot and still winning a massive turnout and yes vote, a new round of union bashing is firmly on the agenda.
There may not be a conspiracy, it may be just fateful co-incidence, but with the recession showing little sign of improvement, and a determination by both main parties to impose cuts and wage-freezes, a militant trade union movement is the last thing either wants. Giving Unite a bloody nose at this time would send a strong signal to others, just as Thatcher’s defeat of the miners did in 1984.
END

2010-03-13T03:01:00.001-08:00

10 March 2010

Dear Sir

It is easy to point the finger at other nations, but few countries are willing to admit to reprehensible collective acts committed during their history – some do, but only many decades later (Guardian 10 March: La Rafle confronts wartime stain on French history - Film attempts to recreate the terror of the 1942 Rafle du Vel d'Hiv, in which 13,000 Jews were rounded up in Paris). The Turks are still refusing to admit their genocide of the Armenians and we have still not addressed the role of HM representatives in the Channel Islands during the Nazi occupation. Few today realise that the Nazis actually occupied a part of Britain and that the police and island administrations co-operated willingly with the Nazis, deporting Jews and accepting the slave labour and ill-treatment of Russian POWs. No one has been asked to account for this; it has been brushed under the carpet. The Governor of Jersey was even knighted for services to the Crown!

2010-03-03T00:55:00.000-08:00

Tweedledee and Tweedldum once again!
It seems we’re already experiencing the post-election blues before we know what the outcome is! The Local Government Association, dominated at present by the Tories is already talking of slashing 25,000 jobs nationally. Prof. Tony Travers of LSE is predicting that it could be even more. The BBC, after relentless pressure from the commercial sector, led by the Murdoch mammoth, is cutting its services with considerable job losses. We sure know what we are in for whoever wins.
The late Fenner Brockway records the widespread disappointment and even sense of betrayal when the first Labour governments in 1924 and 1929 under Ramsay MacDonald refused to challenge capitalism but decided to manage it instead. That position has characterised Labour governments ever since, despite Clause VI of its pre-Blair era constitution in which it stated unequivocally that the aim of the party would be: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’
The men and women and trade unions which founded the Labour Party at the turn of the century saw it as a means of ‘furthering the cause of labour’ and of justice and equality to counter jungle capitalism. Those aims are as far away now as they ever were, despite the amelioration of conditions for many.

At the close of the Second World War, the electorate was avid for change and was determined to make a clear break with the past. If ever the Labour Party was given a virtual mandate to introduce socialism, 1945 was the year. The subsequently elected Labour government did nationalise vital sectors of the economy and bring in a national health service; this was the most far-reaching political and economic shift in power carried out by any government that century. However, since then successive Labour governments have retreated from those earlier laudable achievements until we now have a country in which finance capital rules our economy and calls the shots; social inequality in Britain is now higher under Gordon than at any time since modern records began in the early 1960s. The incomes of the poor fell while those of the rich rose in the three years after the 2005 general election. Both Blair and Brown were more than content to ‘manage capitalism’; they had complete faith in capitalism as the best system for delivering social justice and stability, even though the facts prove otherwise and their much vaunted financial system came crashing down around their ears.

Ministers in the Labour governments of Harold Wilson during the sixties and seventies were so convinced of capitalism’s potential for progress that they saw the increasing introduction of new technology as freeing workers from mundane work and giving everyone more leisure time. It saw the country’s future dilemma, not in terms of class struggle or a collapse of the system, but in terms of how we would be able to cope with the increased leisure time the success of capitalism would grant us. How ironic now that despite all that technological innovation, we are all now working longer hours with less leisure time than before and are more stressed and less happy in our jobs. In the post-war period, a considerable numbers of workers have of course enjoyed increased wealth, particularly during the seventies and eighties, but a social price has been paid for that. It is sometimes forgotten that many families before the war relied on one income – the man’s – now it is virtually impossible for a family to cope on one income alone. A family without two full-time incomes is hardly able to maintain a reasonable standard of living. A recent survey by Employment law firm Peninsula reveals that more of us are even having to take on two jobs in order to keep our heads financially above water. Many people have also gained in monetary terms, often immensely, simply by owning property and watching prices rocket. That bubble has now burst, and we are faced with the most acute housing shortage since just after the war.

In the wake of the world financial crisis, rising unemployment, shameful economic inequality and increasing social breakdown this coming election should be focussing on a discussion around a real choice of policies, however, that is hardly the case. Where is the vision, the bold ideas, the challenge to big business? Unlike in 1945, we have a widespread disengagement by many, a deep-rooted political apathy and a general uninterest in politics altogether. Instead we have the two main pro-capitalist parties slugging it out over who will make the deepest public spending cuts and who can best bandage-up the financial crash case. There is a total lack of visionary ideas, of political courage and of potential leaders. We have an army of colourless political clones, chosen from a middle class elite who are slaves to their respective party systems and as blindly-loyal as limpets to their chosen rock. We can only hope that the deepening recession and political paralysis within the major parties will galvanise grassroots struggles and that a new generation of leaders with a new vision and firm principles will emerge.

2010-03-03T00:54:00.000-08:00

Zapatistas – rebellion from the grassroots to the global
By Alex Khasnabish

When the Zapatista movement exploded onto the political stage on New Year’s Day in 1994 it seemed to have emerged from nowhere. It captured the headlines of the world’s media and fired the imagination of rebels everywhere with its audacious exploits. The poetic words of its charismatic, masked and pipe-smoking spokesperson, Sub-comandante Marcos became the new credo. It appeared to be a new type of movement, eschewing old dogmas and traditional forms of guerrilla struggle. There were no hierarchies of command – only horizontal networks - and the movement identified with the aspirations and wishes of the Mexican indigenous people; they offered no blueprint for others, merely averring that their ways were developed to suit Mexican reality. It took its name from the legendary Zapata, who was a peasant leader of the first Mexican revolution in 1910.

Sickened by decades of virtual dictatorial rule by the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party and its brutal oppression of the indigenous people, they were orientated toward shorter-term objectives and local movements rather than the longer-term, strategic goals of conventional political actors like parties and trade unions; indeed the Zapatistas declared they were not interested in taking state power.

Their philosophy as expounded by Marcos, in his replies to hypothetical accusations is more an intangible dialectical credo than a real policy or manifesto. It emphasises the movement’s more anarchist than Marxist basis. The Zapatistas see modernisation as representing the obliteration of all that is ‘backward’ ie indigenous in Mexico.

Khasnabish is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University in Canada, and gives an excellent depiction of the roots of ‘Zapatismo’ and relates how the moment evolved. He may be somewhat in thrall to its romantic aura but he doesn’t cross the line of becoming its mouthpiece. He emphasises the world-shattering effect of the Zapatistas, but one has to ask brutally what the movement has in fact achieved on the ground.

It is a very informative book and certainly provokes a rethinking of traditional attitudes and modes of struggle on the Left.

2010-02-17T01:16:00.000-08:00

Letter in Guardian 17.02.2010
A tighter regulation of advertising as advocated by Jackie Ashley (Let’s take on the ads that fuel such waste, debt and misery, Guardian 15 February) could have a real impact on the way we live. It is ironic that she also suggests that Karl Marx, if he were alive today, would call for a ban on advertising. In the country which claimed to be his legacy it was indeed the case. I lived in East Germany during the sixties when there was virtually no advertising at all (apart from a few political slogans).

That’s why it was a shock for any visiting westerner and labelled ‘grey and boring’. Grey it may have been, but hardly boring. You soon adapted to the lack of garish colour and the dictatorship of ‘in your face’ advertising. Instead your eyes were attracted to buildings, to people and places; it also evoked an air of tranquillity and rest for the eyes, something impossible to find in our cities with their dazzling and seductive/offensive advertising culture. These tell you nothing about a product, merely stimulate your sexual/consumer urges.

The other upside of no advertising in East Germany was that products had little symbolic status value and young people didn’t compete with each other on the basis of what they could buy. A natural, relaxed and unhyped sexuality pertained, with no sexual objectification of women, no epidemics of anorexia, bulimia or concepts of corporeal inadequacy.

2010-02-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

A tighter regulation of advertising as advocated by Jackie Ashley (Let’s take on the ads that fuel such waste, debt and misery, Guardian 15 February) could have a real impact on the way we live. It is ironic that she also suggests that Karl Marx, if he were alive today, would call for a ban on advertising. In the country which claimed to be his legacy it was indeed the case. I lived in East Germany during the sixties when there was virtually no advertising at all (apart from a few political slogans). That’s why it was a shock for any visiting westerner and labelled ‘grey and boring’. Grey it may have been, but hardly boring. You soon adapted to the lack of garish colour and the dictatorship of ‘in your face’ advertising. Instead your eyes were attracted to buildings, to people and places; it also evoked an air of tranquillity and rest for the eyes, something impossible to find in our cities with their dazzling and seductive/offensive advertising culture. These tell you nothing about a product, merely stimulate your sexual/consumer urges. The other upside of no advertising in East Germany was that products had little symbolic status value and young people didn’t compete with each other on the basis of what they could buy. A natural, relaxed and unhyped sexuality pertained, with no sexual objectification of women, no epidemics of anorexia, bulimia or concepts of corporeal inadequacy.

2010-02-12T03:43:00.002-08:00

The onward march of religious fundamentalists in the USA
The Left is often accused of being anti-American simply because it often pillories the stupidities of right wing fanatics and the power they wield in the country, but they do hand it us on a plate sometimes.

Only last week the news broke that a science teacher, John Freshwater, in a school in Mount Vernon, Ohio was under the spotlight for telling pupils that ‘evolution follows theory and not fact’. In one of his lessons he scattered a few Lego blocks on a table and told pupils that however long you left them there they would not build themselves into anything more complex. He also apparently had posters of the Ten Commandments on the classroom walls. Following his sacking, he has been vociferously upheld, as a Christian martyr, by religious fundamentalists throughout the state.

The infamous 1926 ‘monkey trial’ formally known as State v. Scopes case in Tennessee, was an American legal case that tested the Butler Act making it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals" in any Tennessee state-funded school and university. This trial was given a powerful evocation in the film Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy. But such battles are, amazingly, still being fought in a number of states and counties today. A whole number of states have either banned books in schools on evolution or have demanded equal prominence for those advocating wacky creationist theories.

Democracy US-style means that local legislators, who have much more power than their British equivalents, can decide on anything from rubbish collection to the books allowed in school libraries or bought by schools. Visitors to the USA are often bemused or horrified by the amount of ignorance of many ordinary North Americans about the wider world. We wonder why there are so many religious fundamentalists and right-wing pundits. But if you see what brain fodder many grow up with it is hardly surprising.

The battles are ongoing. On January 27 this year the Texas Education Board accidentally banned a popular children’s author in an amusing but sinister episode. The Board was determined to change the state’s social studies curriculum to marginalize progressive authors and ideas.

What do you imagine the authors of the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common? Both are by an author called Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to the Texas schoolbook list. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram revealed that the popular children’s author Bill Martin Jr is among the latest to be accidentally axed.

In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards, the State Board of Education rejected children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section book list. A Board member cited books Martin had written for adults that contained “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by a different Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

But wait, it gets even better. For months, the Texas State Board of Education has been hearing from “experts” about the direction of the state’s social studies curriculum and textbook standards. The advice to the 15-member board — which is composed of 10 Republicans — included a demand for more references to Christianity and fewer mentions of civil rights leaders, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. Its motto seems to be: out with civil rights leaders and in with national conservative leader, Phyllis Schafly and the infamous Joe McCarthy.

The State Board of Education took up these recommendations in a lengthy and heated debate. Here below some highlights of what the Republican-leaning board ended up deciding and the debates that went on:
It decided to add ‘causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s to the curriculum’, including the right-wing Phyllis Schafly and organisations like Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association. It voted against requiring Texas textbooks and teachers to cover the Democratic late senator Edward Kennedy, the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayer, and leading Hispanic civil rights groups.

An amendment was carried to include documents that supported Cold Warrior Senator Joe McCarthy and his contention that the US government was infiltrated with communists in the 1950s.

Another Republican board member, unsuccessfully this time, tried to delete the names of monkey trial attorney Clarence Darrow and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey from the standard texts. Asked by another member about her opposition to Garvey, the board member explained that her concern was that ‘he was born in Jamaica and was deported’. The board also included a requirement ‘for students in U.S. history classes to differentiate between legal and illegal immigration.’

This debate in this School Board was important not only because it dictates how the state’s 4.7 million schoolchildren will be taught social studies, but also because Texas is one of the nation’s biggest buyers of textbooks. Publishers are often reluctant to produce different versions of the same material, and therefore create books in line with Texas’ standards. Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list. This is how the right wing determines not just what is bought and read in their state, but what publishers actually publish. No publisher is interested in producing books that will be banned, so they play safe and avoid anything that could be considered controversial.

These attempts at blatant censorship and brain-washing are not, unfortunately, confined to Texas. Similar battles are taking place in most states. Only recently Californian Schools were banned from stocking the Merriam Webster dictionary, which had been used for a number of years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to ten). A parent's complaint over a 'sexually graphic' definition has seen dictionaries removed from southern Californian schools because a pupil had apparently looked up the definition of oral sex. In Menifee Union school district, it has been pulled from shelves over fears that the ‘sexually graphic’ entry is ‘just not age appropriate’, according to the area’s local paper.
While some parents have praised the move – ‘it's a prestigious dictionary that's used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern,’ said one. Others have raised concerns: ‘It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground,’ ‘You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?’ others said.

A panel is now reviewing whether the ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, were included in the American Library Association's list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

I am reminded of Mark Twain’s wise words: ‘I never let my schooling interfere with my education’. If only more US students took that to heart.
END

2010-02-12T03:43:00.001-08:00

What do you expect a best-selling novelist to be like? Perhaps with an inflated ego and over-conscious of their new celebrity status, somewhat condescending. Marina Lewycka certainly defies any such expectations; she is disarmingly modest and cordial with a Northerner’s down-to-earthness. On the other hand, it is perhaps not so surprising, as she found success as a novelist only in her late fifties, after years of hard work as teacher and lecturer. She’s clearly not letting things change who she is. She has kindly agreed to give the Morning Star an hour of her time to talk about her writing before taking her train back home in Sheffield.

After dozens of rejections from publishers for her previous attempts at novel writing, she decided to stop trying to write for a publisher and just do it for fun. The result was A Story History of Tractors in Ukrainian. It was not only published, but became an overnight best-seller and has been translated into 32 languages. She went on to write a second successful novel, Two Caravans. Both deal with the experience of immigrants to Britain. But they are not heavy political or social tracts; she prefers to let ideas trickle down through the lives and adventures of her colourful characters. Her novels maintain a fine balancing act between subtle irony and gentle humour allied with a keen sympathy for the underdog, and a sensitivity to human foibles and weaknesses, and she gives expression to people’s hopes and dreams.

How did she start writing? Even as a child she enjoyed making up stories with her dolls, she tells us, then later, as a mother, she would fabulate bedtime stories for her daughter and now wishes she’d written them down.

Marina came to Britain as a small child. Her Ukrainian parents had been deported by the nazis from the Ukraine to work as forced labourers in Germany, where Marina was born in a British refugee camp in 1946. Soon after, the family moved to Britain. So, as immigrants, how did her family experience Britain? ‘We were given a very warm welcome by most people’, she says, ‘but I did suffer some taunting at school. It was the early fifties and memories of the war were still very much alive and the Soviet Union having been our ally, meant that we were associated positively with them. The Cold War had not yet taken a deep psychological hold; people were curious rather than oppositional.’ Today’s immigrants undoubtedly encounter a more hostile and challenging environment, vividly reflected in her novels.

Many Ukrainian émigrés to Britain after the war were anti-Communist and staunchly conservative, so how comes that she has a very different outlook? She explains that her family come from the Eastern Ukraine, where there is an Orthodox, rather than a Catholic religious tradition and where the population has felt closer historically to Russia than western Europe. And, after all, her family had been victims of nazi persecution themselves. But her progressive ideas were also forged in the turbulent sixties, when as a student at Keele University she became radicalised by the feminist movement and student politics. ‘It was a wonderful time to be alive,’ she says, ‘we had a real sense of empowerment and felt we could change the world’. At the time, she even began a PhD on the Diggers and Levellers and the English Revolution because, as she puts it, ‘that was also a time when ordinary people felt a new sense of their own power’.

Is she still a radical? ‘Well, my ideas have changed over the years. I’m a member of the Labour Party but severely disillusioned with New Labour and the ballot box political system. It has disempowered people. I now feel a better way forward is perhaps through single issue campaigns rather than through formal political party structures. The great Stop the War march, before the outbreak of the war on Iraq was a tremendous coming together of people with so many shades of opinion and from diverse cultural backgrounds; it was an expression of widespread public anger, but it didn’t stop the war and that was a big disappointment.’ Despite it all, she still, remains an optimist and retains a basic faith in people which shines through the pages of her books.

In the blurbs, her novels are described as ‘hilarious’ and ‘uproariously funny’ and there is no doubt they do make you laugh, but wouldn’t a better description be ‘tragi-comic’ we ask? She agrees: ‘We all have our tragic and comic sides and I try to capture those in my characters. No one wants to be depressed by a novel, they want to be cheered’. And her novels certainly do that without descending to the banality of a TV game show ‘life is just one big laugh’ mentality.

Are her novels primarily for entertainment or is there a more serious purpose? ‘Novelists can’t solve political problems, nor make policy, but they can bring about a change in the human heart and where better to start doing that than with fiction? Converting experience into narrative is a human instinct,’ she feels. What she tries to do is to show a side of reality through her own experience or knowledge that many of her readers will not know about and in this way allow them to see through the eyes of others or even, as she does in Two Caravans, through the eyes of a dog.

A supreme example of this different vision is her description of a battery chicken farm in Two Caravans. It is a graphically horrendous picture. Immigrants form the core of the workforce and the way they are treated is, in a way, mirrored by the treatment doled out to the chickens. It forces us to draw uncomfortable comparisons. One or two readers have been so horrified by this description, she says, that they have refused to continue reading after this scene. But even here she is able to alleviate the horror by picking out comic moments in what is, essentially, a barbaric situation.

In the book’s acknowledgments she pays tribute to the work of the TUC on immigrant workers and even has a small but significant character part for a trade unionist in the novel. That is certainly unusual if not unique for modern British novels, which invariably ignore the trade union movement. Perhaps the fact that she married a trade union official played its part, but she fully realises, she says, that trade unions play a life-saving role and are certainly vital in defending the rights of immigrant workers.

While doing research on the internet for her first novel, which is a portrait of a Ukrainian family living in post-war Britain - and clearly has strong autobiographical elements - she discovered other family members in the Ukraine. She visited them and found great pleasure in hearing Ukrainian being spoken on a daily basis. She also discovered the realities of life in the post-Soviet era. ‘People in the former Eastern Block realise that while they have gained new freedoms, they have also lost some positive aspects that a socialist society offered, things they would like to regain but don’t know how’, she says.

She is also perturbed by the rightward trend being taken by the new governments in Eastern Europe and sees the siting of US military installations there and the drive to incorporate former Soviet states into NATO as a dangerous and unnecessary revival of the Cold War. She hopes that a fuller integration into the EU – one in which Russia should also be a part – can provide an antidote to this trend.

So, is there a new novel in the pipeline? Yes, a big departure from her previous two in the sense that it will not be about Eastern European immigrants this time. It is a novel that deals with the intractable problems of the Middle East, but centres on an old woman with a dark secret, living alone with seven smelly cats in a crumbling old house in North London…but we’ll have to await publication to know more.

2010-02-09T06:57:00.000-08:00

US novelist Barbara Kingsolver doesn’t receive an awful amount of publicity despite being an international best-seller. This is perhaps not altogether surprising as she doesn’t fit comfortably in any mould but is very much a mould-breaker, particularly those so beloved of the mainstream media. She is a somewhat anachronistic writer in a positive sense. She writes tightly structured, allegorical novels with a strong social and political commitment, but without the reader feeling that they are being lectured at. Her characters are believable and well-rounded; her stories grip the reader. She has an eloquence of language, a wonderfully ironic sense of humour, a powerful and vividly descriptive style combined with an unfettered imagination, rooted in solid soil. She questions accepted US shibboleths and interrogates lazy thinking and simplistic philosophies. Her essays are particularly illuminating and outspoken, often laced with a winning self-deprecatory humour. She has said, ‘If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.’ And you feel she would be happy to go down this road if she felt her books really made no difference.

She is very much a writer of the left but has largely been able to elude simplistic labelling or categorising. She has written, or collaborated on, 13 books, most of which are novels, but she has also written poetry, short stories and essays. Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for ‘literature of social change’.

At the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1990, she was so horrified by the gung-ho militarism gripping the nation that she emigrated temporarily to retain her sanity.

Her books have been widely praised both for their passionate moral commitment and for their evocative writing style. Every one, since Pigs in Heaven, has been on The New York Times bestseller list. Community, economic injustice and cultural difference inform the themes of her work.

Kingsolver was born in Maryland and grew up in Kentucky but spent some of her childhood in Africa where her father was a medical doctor, and it was there that her best-known book, The Poisonwood Bible was set.

Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988. Her subsequent books were Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (non-fiction); a short story collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989); the novels Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992); the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002) Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, prose poetry with the photographs of Annie Griffiths Belt; and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007), a description of eating locally. The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2000, Kingsolver was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton.

In The Bean Trees, the main character acquires a child named Turtle and meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants whose daughter was taken by the government in an effort to force them to speak out about their underground teaching circle. They were forced to escape torture and death in their home country, but are also forced to evade the authorities in the United States. The sequel to The Bean Trees, her 1993 novel Pigs in Heaven, examines the conflicts between individual and community rights, through a story about a Cherokee child adopted out of her tribe. In Animal Dreams, the American sister of the main protagonist is kidnapped by US-back Contras while working to promote sustainable farming in Nicaragua In The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver looks at early post-colonial Africa (The Congo) at the time of Lumumba’s murder and the suppression of a genuine anti-colonial movement. She does this through the eyes of the wife and daughters of a fundamentalist US preacher, charting the way their strongly held beliefs are challenged by the realities of Africa and colonial oppression.

Barbara Kingsolver now lives on a farm in Emory, Virginia with her husband Steven Hopp, their daughter Lily, and her daughter Camille from a previous marriage.
Her latest novel, The Lacuna – her first in nine years, came out this year. See review below.

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
Pubs. Faber & Faber
Hdbck. £18.99
507 pp.

Anyone who has read any of Barbara Kingsolver’s previous novels, but particularly her classic The Poisonwood Bible about a US missionary family’s confrontation with the brutality of neo-colonial politics in the Congo, will value her work. She is one of North America’s leading social realist novelists. Her most recent work takes the form of a fictional diary written by a young man who worked for Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky during the latter’s exile in Mexico. It provides us with an imagined account of the tempestuous relationship between the trio, against the background of pre-war world politics. All Trotsky’s children and most of his former comrades were bumped off by Stalin and he himself is in constant danger.
Although I find the diary form unnecessary and at times irritating, Kingsolver’s spare but concise prose, laden with evocative imagery always keeps the reader involved. Her witty descriptions of the main protagonists, their daily spats, their passions and tragedies are riveting. Only at the end does she reveal the reason she chose the diary form in a clever twist to the story.
The first half of the book is set entirely in Mexico, up until Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, after which our diary writer and protagonist, Harrison Shepherd returns to the United States, the home of his estranged father, and becomes a successful novelist.
He unwittingly finds himself entangled in the nascent anti-Communist witch-hunt and becomes a victim of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Kingsolver chillingly describes how the post-war US state played on people’s fears to gain tighter control; anti-Communist hysteria swept the country, and the lives of many, including our protagonist’s, are destroyed by the witch-hunt. It becomes a cancer infecting the whole of society. It made the US an even more insular society, with a fear of outsiders and with a fixed idea of what the USA is. The present demonisation of Muslims and the way the events of 11 September have been used to whip up a terrorist hysteria are uncomfortably reminiscent of that era.
The title of her book,’ The Lacuna’, refers to many things, but primarily to the holes and gaps that are left out of our historical narratives: for the post-war West Germans the nazi period became a blank and for the USA the genocide against the Indians, the period of slavery and the hysteria of post-war anti-communism all became historical black holes. ‘The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know’, she writes in the novel.
The McCarthy witch hunt is portrayed in all its petty-minded viciousness and the way it penetrated the interstices of a whole of society – it was a ‘Stasi state’ with neighbours spying on neighbours, friends shopping friends and lives destroyed. It is a powerful reminder of that dark period in US history – a period many wish to forget – but also, by implication, a warning, by demonstrating how easily it could happen again with centralised control of the media, advertising agencies running election campaigns and intimate linkage between government and big business.
END
1230 words
John Green

2010-02-07T00:59:00.001-08:00

Listening to Grasshoppers – field notes on democracy
By Arundhati Roy
Hdbck. £14.99
Pubs Hamish Hamilton

If anyone truly deserves both Nobel Prizes - for Peace and Literature - it is Arundhati Roy. She is one of those very few people who campaign fearlessly and eloquently for human rights and at the same time possess a sharp and insightful understanding of Real-Politik, class forces and economic pressures. She also commands respect and admiration because she does not allow herself to become captive of any single political movement, pressure group or lobby; she is who she is.

Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for ‘God of Small Things’, which established her as a writer of consummate skill. In her non-fiction writing too, she manages to forge her language as a campaigning tool while at the same time maintaining its poetic magnitude. Her prose is a sobering antidote to the poisonous Orwellian newspeak that dominates elsewhere.

This collection of essays deals centrally with the catastrophe that is overwhelming India after its departure from the non-aligned movement, throwing itself into the arms of the US and neo-liberal economists. However, Roy shows how India’s problems are also the mirror image of our own decrepit system and how the issues facing the world today are indeed global and only to be solved globally, even if we can only act locally.

She highlights the dark side of Indian ‘democracy’ which the mainstream press ignores, whether the genocidal military campaign in Kashmir, the rabid anti-Islamic policies of the BJP or the persecution of the Maoist Naxalites. She shows how all the mainstream parties demonstrate cowardice when confronted with race, religious or caste discrimination, either by ducking the issues or joining the perpetrators.
While China is vilified as a totalitarian state, responsible for the Tiananmen Square killings, the ‘the world’s largest democracy’ is condoning the torture and murder of thousands each year. She reveals the hollowness of its claims of being a truly democratic state.
My only quibble is that as the essays in this collection have appeared elsewhere, there is a certain amount of repetition which takes the gloss of what are seminal and illuminating analyses.
END

2010-02-07T00:58:00.001-08:00

Michael Mansfield – Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer
Pubs. Bloomsbury
Hdbck £20

Michael Mansfield, the larger than life barrister, renowned for his defence of the victimised, despised and marginalised, here provides his own account of events. As an outsider, even though from a Conservative, lower middle class family, gaining entrance to the hallowed cloisters of the legal profession was an almost insurmountable task. A broad and liberal education at the then (in the sixties) innovative new university of Keele certainly broadened his horizons but didn’t make him a left-wing firebrand. He did though emerge with a healthy distrust of authority and the police as well as a disdain for an arcane and class-dominated judicial system. To challenge all this was, in his early years as a legal practitioner, was more mischievous fun than ideological conviction.

He did join the cloisters of the renowned left-wing barrister, John Platts Mills, for a short time and I’m sure the latter must have made a deep impression on Mansfield the young lawyer, but he says little about this and doesn’t even mention Platts Mills’ own fascinating memoirs in his bibliography which is inexplicable.

By challenging some of the sacred shibboleths of the legal profession and taking up unpopular cases like that of the Angry Brigade in the sixties, he soon found himself cast as the ‘subversive red under every legal bed’. He says, ‘My first brush with radicalism had aroused only a spirit of enquiry rather than conversion,’ but even this was sufficient to alarm the establishment. Since then, of course, and particularly through his work defending miners’ pickets during the ’84 strike, he became politically evermore radicalised.

He gives fascinating accounts of a number of his more famous cases and illustrates how justice can go awry and ‘scientific evidence’ can be far from scientific. He demonstrates how easy it is to arrive at lazy conclusions which are often erroneous, and how easily we unquestioningly take on prejudices. Perhaps even more importantly, he reveals how social causes are very often at the root of so much crime, but are invariably ignored. He also demonstrates the social and economic context of most trials. He reconfirms that the law should not be left to lawyers alone – it is not above society but part of the whole and should not be divorced from social care and social understanding. He tears away the veil of secrecy over state collusion in the capitalist system and reveals the hollowness of police impartiality. No wonder the establishment hates him.

Talking of the present crisis, he says: ‘None of this is the result of unpredictable international forces, but rather a consequence of deliberate policies aimed at bolstering the institutions of capital, and readily explains why striking mines were demonised as the “enemy within”.’

His final chapter, ‘Yes, we can!’ is fired with inspiration, hope and a deeply-felt humanity rarely found, particularly perhaps among lawyers. We have to be extremely thankful and proud that we have lawyers like Michael Mansfield willing to stand up to the forces of authority in the name of the people and, like his hero Tom Paine, challenge ingrained class hegemony and injustice.
END

2010-02-07T00:57:00.001-08:00

Thinking Hands – the power of labour in William Morris
By Phil Katz
Pubs. Hetherington Press
Pbck £10

Do we need another book on William Morris? So many - good and bad - have been written about this giant of a man. Among them, the much lamented Ray Watkinson, a stalwart of the William Morris Society, left us many excellent essays and a book on William Morris, which are still obligatory reading for any serious Morris student today.

However, the simple answer has to be, yes, we can always do with another book if it adds something new to the already copious Morris literature. Phil Katz’s book certainly does that in a number of ways. The present era is characterised by the hegemonic domination of globalised capitalism. With the demise of the former socialist countries, we have, according to some pedants, reached ‘the end of history’. There is no alternative, we are told incessantly; we must learn to live with capitalism. By reminding us of the rich legacy of William Morris, of his idealism, his vision of a socialist future, Phil Katz gives a resounding riposte to such Jeremiahs. Never has the need for an alternative social model been more pressing than today if we are to regain our humanity and save our world for future generations. And on these issues, Morris still has valuable ideas to contribute, as this book reveals.

Katz explores much ground covered by other Morris scholars, but he does so with a freshness, a very readable style in a superbly designed volume. He establishes the clear connection between the Victorian industrialisation and mechanisation of life and the concomitant devaluation of human labour. Morris was angered by what he saw as the deskilling of craftsmen by industrialised production. Work and labour largely defines who and what we are, he emphasises; it gives us a sense of social purpose, dignity and satisfaction. But if we become mere cogs in the wheels of production, our labour only valued in terms of quantitative accumulation, then we become alienated and dehumanised. With today’s call centres, computerised offices and factory assembly lines, this principle has hardly changed.

Morris had an abundance of ideas about work and society which are as challenging today as they were in the 19th century. ‘To him, work was central to life. It determined both its character and quality. It was the prism through which people came to discover social relations and develop an understanding of nature and the place of people in it.’ Katz writes. He deals also with Morris’s relationship to the social movements of his era, with the general impact of machinery and monopoly, as well as the fraught subject of nation building. Morris also had considerable impact on our whole aesthetic and on post-Victorian architecture. This was admirably demonstrated in the classic tome: William Morris und die Sozialen Ursprunge der Modern Architektur (William Morris and the social roots of modern architecture) by Edmund Goldzamt, published in the sixties. I mention such sources because an unfortunate ommission in this otherwise excellent book is an index and, more importantly, a bibliography.

Morris saw clearly the duality of technological innovation as, on the one hand, a potential release from the drudgery of labour but, on the other, that under capitalism it can only mean deskilling and increased exploitation. Readers may remember how, at the height of the Wilson era, with its emphasis on ‘white-hot technology’, we were encouraged to learn how to utilise our soon-to-be increased leisure time. We would be released from drudgery and long working hours by technological advance. Today those exhortations sound like a very sick joke.

Katz’s chapter on Morris and nationalism is also of particular interest for us in view of the present passionate debate around national identity. ‘Morris loved his England’ but abhorred imperialism’, Katz says. Morris’s fidelity, however, was not to the state but to its working people and landscapes.

Morris was a leading light in the main socialist organisation of the time: the Social Democratic Federation. However, he very soon had an acrimonious disagreement with Hyndman, its chief ideologue and, shortly afterwards, left to form his own Socialist League. Hyndman, he felt, wanted to turn Marxism into a schema, a credo. Morris saw it rather as a historical method and viewed education of working people as central to building socialism. In his copious writings for the magazine Justice, his books, essays and lecturing tours, Morris made a considerable contribution to that end.

How was it, many of Morris’s contemporaries wondered, that one of Britain’s greatest craftsmen and cultural icons could jump the capitalist ship?’ At the time, he was viciously attacked as a class traitor. For us, he remains a giant alongside the other pioneers of justice and socialism: Thomas Paine, Robert Blatchford, Engels and Marx. He is much more than the quaint designer, craftsman and cohort of the Pre-Raphaelites, as so often depicted.
This book by Phil Katz is an excellent introduction to the ideas and thoughts of William Morris, set in the context of his times, but revealing his continued relevance for our world now.
END

2010-02-07T00:56:00.001-08:00

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
Pubs. Faber & Faber
Hdbck. £18.99
507 pp.

Anyone who has read any of Barbara Kingsolver’s previous novels, but particularly her classic The Poisonwood Bible about a US missionary family’s confrontation with the brutality of neo-colonial politics in the Congo, will value her work. She is one of North America’s leading social realist novelists. Her most recent work takes the form of a fictional diary written by a young man who worked for Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky during the latter’s exile in Mexico. It provides us with an imagined account of the tempestuous relationship between the trio, against the background of pre-war world politics. All Trotsky’s children and most of his former comrades were bumped off by Stalin and he himself is in constant danger.

Although I find the diary form unnecessary and at times irritating, Kingsolver’s spare but concise prose, laden with evocative imagery always keeps the reader involved. Her witty descriptions of the main protagonists, their daily spats, their passions and tragedies are riveting. Only at the end does she reveal the reason she chose the diary form in a clever twist to the story.

The first half of the book is set entirely in Mexico, up until Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, after which our diary writer and protagonist, Harrison Shepherd returns to the United States, the home of his estranged father, and becomes a successful novelist.

He unwittingly finds himself entangled in the nascent anti-Communist witch-hunt and becomes a victim of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Kingsolver chillingly describes how the post-war US state played on people’s fears to gain tighter control; anti-Communist hysteria swept the country, and the lives of many, including our protagonist’s, are destroyed by the witch-hunt. It becomes a cancer infecting the whole of society. It made the US an even more insular society, with a fear of outsiders and with a fixed idea of what the USA is. The present demonisation of Muslims and the way the events of 11 September have been used to whip up a terrorist hysteria are uncomfortably reminiscent of that era.

The title of her book,’ The Lacuna’, refers to many things, but primarily to the holes and gaps that are left out of our historical narratives: for the post-war West Germans the nazi period became a blank and for the USA the genocide against the Indians, the period of slavery and the hysteria of post-war anti-communism all became historical black holes. ‘The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know’, she writes in the novel.

The McCarthy witch hunt is portrayed in all its petty-minded viciousness and the way it penetrated the interstices of a whole of society – it was a ‘Stasi state’ with neighbours spying on neighbours, friends shopping friends and lives destroyed. It is a powerful reminder of that dark period in US history – a period many wish to forget – but also, by implication, a warning, by demonstrating how easily it could happen again with centralised control of the media, advertising agencies running election campaigns and intimate linkage between government and big business.
END

2010-02-03T08:56:00.001-08:00

Advertising is not bad for your health according to new Labour

Few will be aware that the Department of Culture and Sport has recently undertaken a consultation on product placement advertising in television which closed last month. How such so-called consultations are used as a fig leaf is demonstrated by the statement in the consultation document that: ‘The government is currently minded to permit product placement on UK television.’ In other words it has already made up its mind.

With the recession and the diminishing returns from presently permitted advertising on commercial television, the multi-nationals have been lobbying harder than ever for governments to permit ‘product placement’ as is already the norm in the USA and several other countries. If the government allows this here it will hand television programming over to big business. They will then largely determine programme-making and this will badly compromise artistic and journalistic integrity. Such advertising is insidious because with advertising breaks at least you know when you are being ‘got at’, but by surreptitiously placing products within programmes we are taken unawares and can never be sure what is simply a director’s decision or what the result of the backing company’s marketing strategy.

You can imagine updated television versions of Shakespeare: Lady Macbeth crying, ‘Out damned spot’, as she tries to wipe Duncan’s blood off her hands, is then undercut by a close-up of a strategically-placed ‘Instant Stain Remover Cream’ on her dressing table, or when Juliette asks, ‘Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ we see him hurriedly taking a packet of Durex from his codpiece. These are frivolous examples but this sort of thing, on a different level, will be happening in every programme you watch.
We only need to look at the USA to see how product placement has warped programme-making and unduly influenced film-makers. There, big commercial advertisers are often involved from the early stages of programme development, scripting and editing to ensure the best and most effective placement of their products. To argue that such placement would not affect artistic creativity and freedom is ingenuous. Any creative artist or broadcaster who wishes to challenge their proposals should beware. Product placement only helps the big global players, as they are the only ones who can afford the high advertising fees. So we would have product placement for the likes of MacDonald, Coca Cola and other junk food producers as well as the big drinks and drug manufacturers.
The arguments about the need to protect children, and excluding children’s programmes, as the consultation documents suggests, is spurious, as most children also watch adult programmes. The repercussions on health – obesity, alcoholism particularly – would be enormous. Sleight-of-hand product placement is, in reality, blatant propaganda and to pretend, as the apologists do, that it would have no affect on artistic creativity or influence programme content, is cynical obfuscation. It would also mean that even fewer minority interest programmes are made, nor those on controversial subjects, as big advertisers would not want to have their products associated with such programmes. Television programming is already based on the ‘lowest common denominator’ policy and audience ratings are central to any discussion; these factors would be even more paramount once advertisers call the shots. We would very soon end up with the sort of trash programming that they have in the USA of unwatchable soaps and sitcoms and populist, right-wing chat shows.
For what it’s worth, I did express my opposition to the government’s proposals as part of its consultation exercise. Below is an abridged version of the Department’s reply.

‘Thank you for your recent letter to the Secretary of State, Ben Bradshaw, about product placement on television. He announced in September 2009 that he wanted to change the approach to product placement on television since most of the rest of the world, including the United States, other English speaking countries and many European countries either already allow product placement or intend relaxing their rules in the light of the recent EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive.

Were the UK to retain the status quo of prohibiting product placement on television, our programme and film makers would be at a serious competitive disadvantage with their foreign competitors. Our film, television and other creative industries are a major part of Britain’s economy and we lead the world in many of these sectors.
In considering changing the approach to television product placement, we recognise the need to weigh the potential economic benefits, for broadcasters and advertisers, against potential health and viewer concerns in respect of, for example, the placement of alcohol and fatty foods and the possible loss of editorial integrity for programme makers. Ministers plan to make an announcement shortly on how we intend to proceed.’

I find this reply preposterous. It emphasises how our creative industries are a major part of the British economy, but fails to appreciate how such interference by the marketing industry will undermine that creative edge.

The proposed safeguard of not allowing placement on children's programmes is inadequate. According to Ofcom, 71% of the television watched by children is outside dedicated children's programming, so would not be covered by the proposed "safeguard". It is particularly hard to protect children when product placement is integrated into programmes and will not be recognised as such. Health experts have also warned that allowing TV product placement can only fuel childhood obesity and worsen other health problems.
The British Medical Association (BMA) warned that allowing alcohol, gambling and unhealthy foods to be advertised through product placement will fuel obesity and alcohol abuse: 'The BMA is deeply concerned about the decision to allow any form of product placement in relation to alcohol, gambling and foods high in fat, sugar or salt as this will reduce the protection of young people from harmful marketing influences and adversely impact on public health,' the BMA said in a submission to the Department. Opposition is also coming from public health experts, scientists, broadcasters and the general public, but this government isn’t listening. I am also appalled that the question of ethics or morality appears not to be part of the Department’s deliberation.
That the USA already has such a system is certainly no argument in its favour, as it is perfectly clear that television programming and quality in the USA is, with few exceptions, very poor and centred around selling products rather than having, as a priority, educational and/or entertainment goals.

As far as competitiveness is concerned, Britain has always been competitive on the basis of the high quality of its programmes and why should this not continue; to compete on the basis of who can best advertise products is to let the commercial market dictate. Surely we have learned through the recent banking scandal that to let everything be determined by markets is the road off the cliff. I believe strongly that television programming should be based on clear ethical, educational and artistic criteria and not be subject to the undue influence of powerful corporations and lobby groups.
END

2010-01-20T08:54:00.001-08:00

So Cadburys has thrown in the towel. The company board has recommended the latest £11.7 billion takeover from US conglomerate, Kraft, after one of the bitterest takeover battles in recent corporate history. What this demonstrates clearer than ever is that global financial interests now wholly dictate the fates of millions of workers and can ignore governments at will. It begs the question of why we elect national governments if they are prepared to abrogate their role of acting in the country’s interest. This takeover should also kick-start the old debate over the susceptibility of British industry to foreign takeovers. It also demonstrates that this government has learned nothing from the recent banking debacle: until the big financial institutions are properly challenged by government and brought under state control, we will remain helpless in the face of these rapacious monsters.
Despite some resistance from Cadbury’s board to the initial offer, Kraft was able to persuade large institutional shareholders to accept their increased bid. Unite says that this increased bid, an estimated £12 billion, and the continued exclusion of workers and key shareholders from the takeover consultation, means its concerns for Cadbury's future and the future of nearly 7,000 workers in the UK and Ireland remain.
Cadbury, the iconic chocolate firm started by the eponymous Quaker family in Birmingham around 186 years ago, apparently gave way after Franklin Templeton, the US mutual fund with a 7% stake, joined hedge funds in revealing that it would accept the higher Kraft offer equivalent to 850p a share.
Professor David Bailey from Coventry University Business School in a recent issue of the Birmingham Post points out that, ‘more than a quarter of Cadbury shares are now held by hedge funds which bought the shares to make a fast profit in a takeover situation. That effectively undermined long-term shareholder commitment.’
Cadbury now joins the long list of British firms gobbled up by foreign takeovers, from BAA, Boots, Corus, ICI, Jaguar Land Rover, P&O, Pilkington, Scottish Power etc.
Despite Mandelson’s belated crocodile tears for the company and its workers, the government is effectively powerless to act once a takeover has been agreed. The Blair government removed the 'public interest' clause of UK competition policy regarding takeovers in 2000. This had given governments the power to block takeovers that threatened jobs, the national economy or essential regional development etc, but Stephen Byers the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry thought that was all too-interventionist. EU legislation has also made it increasingly difficult for national governments to intervene to protect national interests. So, after disarming itself of even the modest weaponry it had, the government is now impotent to act.
Unite warned that as many as 30,000 jobs could be put at risk by the deal, with Kraft facing the need to service over £20 billion in debt after the takeover. Analysts predict that Kraft will be seeking to generate up to $1 billion in savings through mass redundancies and restructuring, Unite says Kraft must give commitments on a set of minimum employment protections, including no compulsory redundancies and protections for the workers' terms and pensions. However these are unlikely to be given, as the real reason behind the takeover is precisely to shed jobs, divest assets and pull in the cash. Unite also underlines this by pointing to Kraft's aggressive track record on cost-cutting, shedding some 19,000 jobs between 2004 and 2008 and closing 35 plants.
With the role of hedge funds highlighted in the Cadbury case, there will be questions about whether they should be stripped of voting rights in future takeover situations if they have bought in during a takeover situation and have held shares for, say, less than a year. However the lobbying power of these hedge fund companies makes this very unlikely. And of course such takeovers rarely work; the majority of deals waste shareholder value and lead to huge disruption - and that's before considering the wider social and economic damage.
The people who really make money out of takeovers are the investment bankers. The Cadbury takeover will generate a fees bonanza in London and New York, with advisors at Lazard (lead advisor to Kraft during the whole affair), Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS making around £120 million. Cadbury’s financial adviser, UBS also stands to make a killing on the deal.
These financial advisers and consultants are the real beneficiaries of such takeovers. The Cadbury workers have no say in all of this, anymore than the British electorate does.
Jennie Formby, Unite's national officer for food and drink, said: "We have very real fears about how Kraft will repay its debt, particularly as it has ratcheted it up still further in order to purchase Cadbury. Whatever good intentions Kraft may have towards Cadbury's workforce, the sad truth is there will be an irresistible imperative to pay down their debt, and this raises real fears for jobs and investment in this country.
"There are huge lessons to be learned from this takeover for UK business. Short-term City interests and institutional shareholders have dictated this process from the outset with little thought to the impact this sale will have on jobs, the supply chain or Cadbury's future. Unless our takeover regulations are changed, there is nothing the government or employees can do to prevent this happening again to another UK company.”
END

2010-01-11T04:15:00.001-08:00

11 January 2009
Dear Sir (Guardian)
Surely no coincidence, with energy supplies low and pressures to build a new generation of nuclear power stations increasing, that a new attempt is launched to belittle the dangers of radiation. (Radiation threat overstated – Oxford professor; Guardian 11 January). The problem with radiation, like other forms of ‘invisible’ pollution, is the difficulty of accurately measuring individual doses over a lifetime. What none of the so-called experts takes into consideration is that we are no talking simply of radiation from external sources, but also about radiation caused by ingested radioactive elements – a far more serious threat. The terrible consequences of ingesting radioactive dust have been extensively documented in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia where the US and Britain used depleted uranium weaponry. The radioactive dangers from nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties came from ingested Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. Animals at the top of the food chain, like humans, tend to accumulate such elements in their tissue and this is what constitutes the greatest danger. Any increase in the amount of radioactive material in the atmosphere is potentially very dangerous. If the nuclear industry can guarantee that won’t happen, then it would be a different ball game.

2010-01-10T02:53:00.002-08:00

Return to family values is way out of crisis say the Tories
You can always rely on the Tories to blame anyone and anything for a systemic crisis, other than the system of capitalism itself. In the Victorian era it was the rabbit-like sexual promiscuity of the working classes undermining bourgeois stability, under Thatcher it was feckless single mothers getting pregnant to obtain a council house. Now we have the new leader, David Cameron, pointing the finger at family breakdown as the cause of the malaise in society.
Cameron was mildly criticised recently for allowing television cameras to film his wife and children at breakfast. Like a genuine hard-working father, he could say: "Everyone feels they can't cope any more with getting up at 4am. Everyone runs around in a panic in the morning getting the kids ready while making breakfast and ironing a shirt."
He went on: "I know what some of you might be thinking: 'All this family-friendly stuff he's going on about, it's not really very Conservative, is it?” But it is, “It's seriously Conservative. If we Conservatives want a smaller state and lower taxes we have to have a serious plan for making it happen...The real costs of government are the social problems that cause public spending and the state to grow and grow." He then cleverly wove together the repugnant example of bankers’ greed with the small guy fiddling a few pounds from the benefit system, as if they are the same, saying that the culture of relying on others and thinking only of oneself "must end".
In a speech to the Welsh Conservative conference in Cardiff, he expanded on his new ‘family-friendly policies: "We've seen too many of the ugly things that happen when people duck responsibility: the father who leaves a mother and child to fend for themselves, the banker who clamours for his bonus when he's bust the bank. The healthy welfare claimant who thinks it's OK to live off benefits paid by others or the businessman who puts profits before the planet. All this irresponsibility must end. Families are the most important institution in our society. We have to do everything in our power to strengthen them." His short memory allows him to forget the attacks made by previous Tory administrations on benefits, the virtual abolition of council housing and state aid for nurseries, all prime contributing factors to social breakdown.
As if that were not enough, we then had Tristram Hunt in the Guardian wading in and taking a side-swipe at the left for its traditional ‘hostility to family and marriage’ which has, he announces, produced ‘some profoundly unprogressive results’. It was because the Tories and Labour had similar policies, he continues, that there was a ‘reaction to such institutionalised sexism that many on the metropolitan left embraced a Marxist hostility to marriage and the family as a political end in itself...in doing so it aligned itself with an ethos of social hedonism with profoundly unprogressive consequences for the offspring of generations of unstable households.’ No that’s not a Cameron quote, it’s Hunt.
Throughout history the socialist movement has always had its advocates of ‘free love’ and relationships based on personal choice rather than state or church sanction. However, extreme examples of this – communal living, children cared for in the community, polygamy – have always only been advocated by tiny minorities. What most socialists, men and women, have argued for has been freedom from state or church interference in matters of personal relationships and for relationships to be based on free choice not financial necessity. People choosing to live in a partnership or not should not be subject to sanction or force. To sweepingly accuse ‘the Left’ of hostility to marriage is simply inaccurate and hardly based on historical evidence.
As Engels pointed out for the first time in his seminal work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the oppression and subjugation of women came about and was reinforced by the rise of the concept of private property. In order for fathers to pass on their wealth to their children, they had to be sure they whose they were, thus women were corralled into restrictive family structures to ensure monogamy. Of course, the church played its part too in providing the philosophical and religious underpinning of such policies. In the sixties, the new feminist movement took up Engels’ theories and used them to demand economic and personal freedom for women.
Interestingly in the former socialist countries, although marriage was the norm, sexual relationships outside formal marriage were not condemned, nor was illegitimacy, and divorce was made easy and affordable; in fact many chose to ignore formal marriage structures and neither they, nor their children suffered any discrimination as a result. Given that most women worked and enjoyed pay parity with men, the situation allowed women a greater degree of freedom than most of their sisters in the West. Women in the West had been traditionally, and still are, often trapped in unhappy marriages for lack of the financial means to escape.
In the end the essential discussion on family and marriage comes down to economic security. Cameron and the Tories pontificate about social breakdown and blame the Left’s opposition to ‘family values’, but it is precisely Tory (and sadly new Labour often following in their footsteps) policies which have made family breakdown inevitable. Any marriage counsellor will tell you that financial problems are the root cause of a large proportion of family breakdowns. We can be certain that Cameron’s new interest in and support for families will not include better state benefits, help for single parents or a continuation of Labour’s excellent Sure Start schemes, but these are the sort of policies which will prevent family breakdown not rhetorical appeals to ‘traditional values’.
END

John Green

2010-01-10T02:53:00.001-08:00

The bearers of dreams

All prophecies tell us
That man will be the cause of his own destruction
But the centuries and life which is eternally renewed
Engender, too, generations of lovers and dreamers
Men and women who don’t dream
Of the world’s destruction
But of building a world of butterflies and nightingales
Since childhood they came marked by love
Behind their everyday appearance
They guarded tenderness and the midnight sun
Their mothers found them weeping over a dead bird
And again much later
Found many of them dead like birds
They call them deluded, romantics, utopian dreamers
They say their words are out-dated
Those who accumulate wealth fear them
And launched their armies against them
The bearers of dreams spoke of an era of butterflies and nightingales
In which the world doesn’t have to end in a suicidal sacrifice
And, on the contrary, scientists would design fountains, gardens, enchanting toys
To make human happiness even more pleasurable
They say that the earth after giving birth to them unleashed a rainbow sky
And blew fecundity over the trees’ roots
We alone know that we have seen them
We know that life brought them forth to guard itself against the death foretold in the prophecies.

LOS PORTADORES DE SUENOS
Gioconda Belli
Poeta Nicaraguense
(extractos)
Todas las profecias cuentan
Que el hombre creará su propia destruccion
Pero los siglos y la vida que siempre se renueva
Engendraron también una generación de aniadores y soñadores
Hombres y mujeres que no soñaron con la destrucción del mundo
Sino con La construcción del mundo de las mariposas y los ruiseñores
Desde pequeños venian marcados por el amor
Detrás de su apariencia cotidiana
Guardaban la ternura y el sol de medianoche,
Sus madres Los encontraban llorando por un pájaro muerto
Y más tarde,
también los encontraron a muchos muertos como pájaros
Los llamaron ilusos, romanticos, pensadores de utopias.
Dijeron que sus palabras eran viejas
Los acumuladores de riquezas les temian
Y lanzaban sus ejércitos contra ellos
Los portadores de suenos hablaban de tiempos de mariposas y ruisenores
en que el mundo no tendria que terminar en la hecatombe
Y, por el contrario. los cientificos diseñarian fuentes, jardines, juguetes sorprendentes
Para hacer más gozosa La felicidad de la humanidad
Dicen que la tierra después de parirlos desencadenó un cielo de area iris
Y sopló de fecundidad las raices de los árboles
Nosotros solo sabemos que los hemos visto
Sabemos que la vida los engendró para protegerse de la muerte que anuncian las profecias.

2010-01-08T06:56:00.000-08:00

Common Wealth
By Martin Large
Pubs Hawthorn Press
Hdbck. £15 (285pp)

This book is a valuable contribution to the discussion around the crisis of capitalism and the necessity of sustainable development if our planet is to survive. Martin Large is an experienced facilitator in the field of community, individual and organisational development, and he also has a wealth of experience working with and advising local community projects in his home town of Stroud in Gloucestershire. He argues forcefully for a view of the world which sees land and resources as ‘common wealth’. He says we have recently seen a new wave of ‘enclosures of common land’ in the sense that public property, water and energy and land, as well as rights to the human genome and life-saving drugs have all been handed over to private, profit-making companies. His book, he notes, ‘is about reclaiming our common wealth in order to help bring about a more free, peaceful, equitable, mutual and sustainable society’.

He is particularly informative when he writes about land ownership, arguing for a Community Land Trusteeship to overcome land speculation and housing shortages. In this wide-ranging volume, he also covers education, culture, the arms industry, the state and the key role of civil society. Much weight is given to local and community initiatives –where he has much first hand experience – and the potential of individual creativity.

Large clearly articulates the immense damage rampant neo-liberalism has done to the world, as well as the supporting role the media have played in ignoring the many positive examples of people taking their own initiatives to counter this domination and centralisation.

He likens society to a three-legged stool, whose legs are government, business and civil society. His main thesis is that ‘civil society’ should become a leading motor for change, challenging the over-domination of business interests and excessive and authoritarian government. However, what constitutes this ‘civil society’ is unclear (how, for instance, is it different from society as a whole?). The key role of economic class interests receives scant attention.

He fails to appreciate that capitalism (in his tri-polar metaphor referred to as ‘business’), whose very essence is profit-making, will always be antagonistic to the long-term public interest. And, as Marx and Engels so clearly articulated it, ‘contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction’. Tragically, today, we now have to recognise that ‘its own destruction’ undoubtedly means that of the planet too, unless we are able to act fast and decisively.

I am also surprised that the ideas of Britain’s most celebrated democrat, Tom Paine, receive no mention. Nor does Large see any mileage in evaluating the experience, both negative and positive, of ‘real existing’ socialism – which represented, after all, the first attempt at creating a ‘Common Wealth’ since the early communistic communities were destroyed by feudalism and later capitalism. Nor does he look at the newly emerging versions of socialism in Latin America.

Despite the above cavils, Common Wealth is a very useful, provocative and imaginative contribution to the central debate of our generation.
END

2010-01-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

Product placement – why we should be worried
Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw is not only putting increasing pressure on the BBC to share its licence fee income with the private companies, but is now proposing to lift the ban on ‘product placement’, in line with most other EU nations. Bradshaw argues that a partial lifting of the ban might help commercial broadcasters survive the downturn in advertising revenue. They are sniffing succcess at last after their long campaign for the deregulation of advertising.
This is yet another example of new Labour ministers bowing to big business pressure. With the continuing economic crisis, commercial TV companies have found their advertising revenues plummeting and are desperate to get their hands on BBC licence fee money but also have their hands untied to turn programmes into wholly advertising exercises. Should we be worried? Yes, certainly. Blurring the line between editorial content and commercial messages sets a very dangerous precedent and is not in the interests of the public or programme-makers. It would also damage any remaining trust there is in the integrity of journalists, broadcasters and film-makers.
One only needs to look at the USA to see how product placement has warped programme-making and unduly influenced film-makers. There, big commercial advertisers are even involved in the early stages of programme development, script-writing and editing to ensure the best and most effective placement of their products. To argue that such placement would not affect artistic creativity and freedom is a nonsense. Any creative artist or broadcaster who wishes to challenge their proposals should beware. Product placement only helps the big global players, as they are the only ones who can afford the high advertising fees. So we would have product placement for the likes of MacDonald’s, Coca Cola and other junk food producers as well as the big drinks and drug manufacturers. The arguments about the need to protect children, and excluding children’s programmes is spurious, as most children also watch adult programmes. The repercussions on health – obesity, alcoholism particularly – would be enormous. Sleight-of-hand product placement is, in reality, blatant propaganda and to pretend, as the apologists do, that it would have no affect on artistic creativity or influence programme content, is cynical obfuscation.
The British Medical Association (BMA) warned that allowing alcohol, gambling and unhealthy foods to be advertised through product placement will fuel obesity and alcohol abuse: 'The BMA is deeply concerned about the decision to allow any form of product placement in relation to alcohol, gambling and foods high in fat, sugar or salt as this will reduce the protection of young people from harmful marketing influences and adversely impact on public health,' the BMA said in a submission to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on the plan. Oppostion is also coming from public health experts, scientists, broadcasters and the general public, but this government isn’t listening.
The fact that most advertisers insist on their products being advertised only on ‘family-friendly’ programmes or those with big viewing ratings also has enormous potential repercussions. It would leave minority programming, the arts, serious documentaries or political film-making out in the cold, as few advertises would be prepared to have their products associated with them as it could prove too controversial. We have already seen this process happening in the mad race for top viewing figures, s the only criterion of success. This seems to be the only factor that broadcasting managers and governments respond to.
I’m no uncritical admirer of the BBC, but you only need to look at those countries with no genuine public broadcasting system to see how standards plummet, with viewers offered only non-stop garbage. One of the reasons why the BBC’s output is much admired worldwide is that you can watch or listen to programmes unadulterated by ad-breaks.
Surely we have to challenge the commercialisation of the last free corners of our society? We already live in one where profitability, commercial success and cash criteria have come to dominate public policy. It is time we fought back and insisted on central social values such as caring, solidarity and a public service ethos be reinstated at the centre of government policy. A principled opposition to the further deregulation of advertising and a deeper commercial penetration of the media have to be a part of that fight-back.
END

Christian Lorenzen

2010-01-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

Christian Lorenzen - confronting a legacy of official terror
In February last year, 18,000 Guatemalans, mostly survivors or relatives of victims of the state-sponsored terror of the 1970s and 1980s, gathered in Guatemala City, to commemorate the "Day of Dignity for the Victims of the Internal Armed Conflict." They heard President Alvaro Colom publicly accept the UN report that documented the terror. That report recorded that 200,000 people had been killed and 50,000 more ‘disappeared’ in that period. It defined the violence as genocide against the country's Maya majority, and it attributed 95% of the massacres and violations of human rights to Guatemala's armed forces. There are now hopeful signs that this genocide is being recognised by the Gutaemalan authorities, but sadly, killings are still taking place in this, the msot violent countries of Central America.

For the first time, a president has accepted the UN report and has honoured the victims of the conflict. Alvaro Colom, President of the Republic, said: “I ask for pardon." This marks a dramatic break from the past - a clear articulation of the government's responsibility for massive human rights violations, genocide, and ethnocide. It is also part of a broader programme promoted by Colom to recover Guatemala's historical memory and to begin offering symbolic and actual compensation to the victims of violence. The government has also opened the National Police Archives, announced plans to open the military archives, and promoted memorial events, conferences, and publications honouring victims. It has also overseen a controversial programme to compensate victims with funds and housing.
I have a personal interest in this process, as three close student friends were active in the struggle to overthrow the brutal oligarchy – all our now dead.
This is how ‘Porfiro, one of the local Maya jakalteco indigenous people, begs permission from the ‘Heart of heaven and earth’ to forgive us the injury we are about to inflict on the sacred soil and lights candles at the four cardinal points. Each of us expresses what we feel. Felipe speaks of the sacrifice and says that the comrades interred here gave their all for the goal of achieving a better form of society; Leonor explains to us that in the Mayan calendar today is symbolic for fire and death, and death represents the end of a cycle: the seed dies in order to give life to the plant. To find the remains of our comrades would allow us to close the endless circle of pain and uncertainty.

Around mid-morning, while we’re excavating, men from the nearby village of Pico de Oro arrive. They are understandably suspicious and wish to establish that we are in fact looking for the remains of relatives and not robbing the ancient site. They come armed with machetes and rifles and expressions of mistrust on their stony faces. After an intense conversation, we manage to assuage their fears.
At one end of the trench we dig, we come across carved stones, revealing that we are excavating in an area of an ancient Mayan settlement. By two o’clock we find the first fragments of bone wrapped in a plastic sheet. We soon recover a complete skull and then virtually the whole skeleton. Miguel, one of Christian’s close comrades, has no doubt the bones are Christian’s. We also find the remains of another comrade remembered only by his nom de guerre, Clemencio. This had been the burial place for comrades killed in action, among them, some of the first indigenous guerrilla fighters.”
That is a summary of the report I received recently via an old friend from the former GDR, from Christian’s son.
When I was studying at the national film school in the GDR in the late sixties my fellow students in the class were all from developing countries, a number from Latin America. They were learning how to make films, so that they could return to their homes to help document their peoples’ struggles for liberty and freedom from imperial domination.
One student who made a deep impression on me was a young Guatemalan comrade by the name of Christian Lorenzen. Unusual for Central Americans, he was over 6 ft tall, slim, handsome with dark curly hair and intense chestnut eyes. He was always exceedingly serious, very committed to his studies and not easily approachable. When I asked him about his unusual stature and name, he revealed that one of his great grandparents had come from Scandinavia.
I lost contact with Christian over the years and only this month did I learn the tragic reason why. Another friend and comrade was the renowned Guatemalan poet Rene Otto Castillo who was killed in action by the Guatemalan army, trained and armed by US and Israeli forces.
Christian, like Rene Otto, was one of those who were determined to dedicate his life to the liberation of his people and in those heady days of the late sixties, when the example of Che Guevara and the armed struggles then unfolding in Latin America and elsewhere were magnetic.
He left the GDR abruptly, directed by the Guatemalan party to undertake military training in the North Korea and Cuba in preparation for a guerrilla campaign in his native Guatemala.
In the early seventies Christian became one of the founders of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres or EGP). But, for various reasons, he was not among the fisrt armed units to enter the country.
Eight years later, in early March 1980, only a few months after being elected to the command of the EGP, he joined his comrades in the field. Some weeks later when marching along an arduous mountain path in Chiapas, hindered by a dense tangle of vegetation Christian began suffering serious health problems – he was coughing blood and running a high fever. He thought he simply had an attack of malaria and was determined to keep going, but it was more serious than that. He died on that march; he was just 35 years old.
In 2002, his remains were taken to Guatemala City and, in the presence of his parents, family and former comrades, were given a dignified burial.
The Guatemalan Interdiocesan Recovery of Historical Memory organisation is also carrying out ongoing exhumations initiated in the era of the 1996 peace accords. The bones disinterred in massive, clandestine burial sites provided testimony to the nature of the violence in Guatemala. Although faded and deteriorated, victims' clothing retained the distinctive woven colours and patterns of those worn by Maya campesinos. Broken toys and babies' bones provided devastating, silent testimony that the targets of the military were not just armed guerrillas, but unarmed civilians - men, women, and children. The testimonies presented by victims gave voice to the silent dead, exhumed from mass graves.

President Colom, Guatemal’s new president, has now given an official apology on behalf of the Guatemalan government and armed forces. It is rumoured that the government intends to promote a public memorial and possibly even a historical museum as part of its programme of memory and compensation, in conformance with the recommendations of the long-rejected UN report.

However, the current situation of violence in Guatemala in which an average of 17 people are murdered daily and some 60,000 have been killed since the signing of the peace accords in 1996, makes a mockery of the government’s claim that "never again will we repeat this tragic, perverse, and bloody history." As Rosalina Tuyuc, founder of the National Association of Guatemalan Widows observed, "tragically the patrones of the violence of the past and the present are the same."

It can only be hoped that the ultimate sacrifice of young men like Christian Lorenzen and Rene Otto Castillo is not forgotten but continues to inspire future generations of revolutionaries who will come to share their noble aspirations. As the Nicaraguan poet, Giaconda Belli put it: ‘they were the carriers of our dreams’.

The period of the Cold War between the US and USSR, had an immense influence on Guatemala. From the 1950s through the 1990s, the US government directly supported Guatemala's right wing governments and its army with training, weapons, and money.
In 1954, Arévalo's freely elected Guatemalan successor, Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. In the 1954 coup, Colonel Armas was installed as president and ruled until assassinated by a member of his personal guard in 1957. Substantial evidence points to the role of the American United Fruit Company as instrumental in this coup, as the land reforms of Jacobo Arbenz were considered a threat to the company's extensive interests in Guatemala and it had direct ties to the White House and the CIA.
In the election that followed, General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes assumed power. He authorized the training of 5,000 anti-Castro Cubans in Guatemala. He also provided airstrips in Guatemala for what later became the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961.
In 1966, Julio Montenegro was elected president of Guatemala under the banner ‘Democratic Opening’. Montenegro was the candidate of the Revolutionary Party, which was far from revolutionary. It was during this time that rightist paramilitary organizations, such as the ‘White Hand’ (Mano Blanca), and the Anti-communist Secret Army, (Ejército Secreto Anticomunista), were formed. These organizations were the forerunners of the infamous ‘Death Squads’. Military advisers from the US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) as well as Israeli specialists were sent to Guatemala to train troops and help transform its army into a modern counter-insurgency force, infamous for its ruthlessness and use of torture - it became the most sophisticated and ruthless in Central America. As a result of the Army's ‘scorched earth’ tactics, thousands were massacred and more than 45,000 people fled across the border into Mexico.

In 1982, The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca or URNG) emerged as a united guerrilla umbrella organisation out of the four armed revolutionary groups active in Guatemala.
This unification came about in response to the successes of the Salvadoran guerrilla FMLN and the Nicaraguan FSLN (Sandinistas) in order to create a more effective opposition to the military dictatorship. In 1996 after the peace process following the cessation of armed struggle it became a legal political party.
Today Guatemala enjoys a fragile democracy, but the scars of the armed struggle, the systematic ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population and mass exodus of the seventies and eighties still reverberate.
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2009-12-18T02:36:00.000-08:00

That the CIA has been involved in the training of torturers in the Palestinian security forces should come as no surprise (Special Report Guardian 18 Dec). The CIA has a long history of training foreign security forces in torture techniques even though they were forbidden in the US itself (until Bush and Cheney decided it was time to remove the ‘pansy’ kid gloves). The CIA helped train the Shah’s notorious SAVAK secret police, the Pakistani secret services and a whole list of para-military forces in Central America, among others. During its war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, its infamous training manual, demonstrating the use of torture techniques, became public and caused widespread outrage. If Obama wishes to retain any humanitarian credibility, he should clean up the CIA and outlaw all torture techniques and their export.