Practically Insurgent

Believing your own propaganda

The "surge" has been, apparently, a resounding success. We know this because the enemy, such as it is, admits it: "We lost cities and afterward, villages... We find ourselves in a wasteland desert," says Abu Tariq, a sector leader in Anbar province. On the Right-Wing blogland they thrust these words in the face of their enemies: they crow, "just last August Barack Obama was branding the war a complete failure!"

Now, I'm gonna front up as the pathetic liberal that I am and state that it's a good thing that Al-Qaeda (or whoever got the franchise in those parts) are getting a kicking in Iraq, and I'm pleased that violence against civilians is down. I'm a collaborating Islamophobe like that.

But let's look at this "not a complete failure" stuff, or "the surge is a success" even. To start with, and I won't labour this point, I'd have to accept that anything, absolutely anything could undo the massive damage already done to Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the destroyed infrastructure, the sectarian political and security apparatus, the unleashing of a myriad of toxic evils on the country, from our radical Islam (the stuff our warmongers approve of, leave entire cities in control of) to their radical Islam (which doesn't pre-date the invasion, and clearly drew a great deal of strength from it).

Even were I prepared to accept that this was a necessary price for the limited stability that marks Iraq at the moment, doesn't anyone at the State Department or in the US military have the imagination to conclude that they could be building themselves up for the mother of Tet Offensives? Al-Qaeda is in retreat, but then, only the US public really believes that the bulk of the insurgents were Al-Q anyway. Through spending most of their time trying to promote sectarian conflict through random killing, it's not surprising that ordinary Iraqis have turned against them, taking whatever support was on offer. Yet all the research on the Iraqi resistance has concluded that for the most part they aren't Al-Q, and they aren't engaged in indiscriminate anti-civilian attacks, they were attacking the US forces and their proxies.

Where have they gone? I've not seen any evidence that they've been physically smashed. So presumably, they, and their weapon, are still about, presumably rather pleased that their flaky, nihilistic former allies are getting a kicking, making them the only show in town. The surge, as the name implies, won't last forever, and these people are likely to come back with avengeance.

In fact, you have to wonder who exactly the US have been handing out weapons to exactly. Check the Fox News report quoted above: they've got 15,000 anti-al-q volunteers working in Iraq, most effectively in a quarter that had a large anti-american demo the other day. So, they'll keep out the nutters, but they'll permit large demonstrations to go on unfettered on their own patch. Sounds like some funny allies to me.

The bottom line of course is that the majority of Iraqis still want the US out. They've wanted the US out for a long long time. They'll keep going until that happens (and the US have no intention of ever leaving, as their plans for permanent bases in the country make clear), which means anything in between is just a lull. All that can happen between here and withdrawal is a massacre or a mass uprising.

Assumptions

I'm a time delay blogger, me. I'll usually think of something intelligent or original to say about a topic a good two days after it's in the news. So, Caroline Flint's "kick a scrounger whilst they're down" policy. First off, can I say, I warned you about these people. Secondly if you've had even a cursory involvement with the housing system then this plan has to be the most absurd thing you've ever heard.

That out of the way, I want to comment on one thing - the really convenient theory of human nature that this government (and other right-wing types) have managed to invent. The real genius of it is how everything serves to give more money to the rich and less to the poor.

Let's take this first very simple example: All human beings are motivated by material incentives. All seems very straightforward, we all want more things, so we do whatever necessary to get them (it's contentious but let's go with it). Except these economic motivations only work in very specific ways. Like, poor people appear only to be economically motivated by "the stick", that is, they only work harder if you threaten to make them less well-off. The shiftless bastards are definitely not roused out of bed by the thought that getting a job might lead to themselves and their loved ones having a better life. No, they only become bothered if you threaten to take their benefits away, or kick them out on the street, or get them harassed by the benefit agency.

Rich people on the other hand are very different. In fact, they have the polar opposite motivation to the poor. If you make it easier for a rich person to get even richer this does not (unlike the poor) lead to them becoming complacent and working less. Not at all, apparently this motivates them to work even harder in pursuit of these new, readily available rewards. On the other hand, if you punish them, by say, raising taxes ,or forcing them to pay better wages to their workforces, they apparently become all belligerent. Amazingly, being "punished" doesn't drive them forward to become more productive and take up all that slack, they just shrug their shoulders, start pouting and becoming all belligerent. "What's the point, eh? They'll only take half of it off me in tax!" "Bah, I'm off to Jersey" they cry.

Isn't that wonderful? It doesn't just work for motivation either. It's the same with investment! If we invest money in the poor this also makes them lazy. As all that cash flows out of the public teet, everybody gets all complacent and ambitionless, spending all that money on booze or crack. You aren't helping them, giving them the resources to make their lives better, you're just teaching them to leech off you (and remember, they're poor and thus not motivated by being better off, like the rich are). But as every little Friedmanite knows, the easier you make it for the rich to make more money, the less you force them to surrender to workers or taxes, the more they have spare to make even more money! Happy days!

What a brilliant thought. Increasing social inequality isn't just good for business, it's the moral thing to do!

Ex-Minion

Given the quantity of mithering I do about my job, no doubt you will be all as delighted as me at hear that as of 2pm Tuesday, my ass was terminated. Impressively this will be the 4th time that I've been sacked in the past 4 months (to be expected, being a temp with low motivation...)

The reason this time was a little bit special. Being children of the 21st Century you will all be familiar with the email sig; the bit that goes at the bottom of every email, usually outlining your name, role, organisation etc. One day on a call I told a customer, "I'll ask someone to do that for you, but me, being a mere customer service minion, I can't do it". It amused me. The days are long, the rewards are meagre, and moments of amusement are rare.

Some days later, I changed my email sig to read "Jack Ray, Customer Service Minion", just to give myself a little chuckle now and then. Then, being a bright sort of boy, I included my new "hilarious" tag line in an email to a customer, that I'd CCed to a manager.

Cue my being called into a meeting room and being interrogated by a furious manager (the Encomendado from previous stories). This shit just summed him up. He was bright red by this point, so angry he could barely contain himself. There is a man who will keel over with a stress-induced heart attack aged 50.

As he frog-marched me out of the office, he shook his head, tapped his feet impatiently as I packed my things and put on my coat, in the lift down to reception (he escorted me down), he asked desperately "but why would you do it? I can't understand why would you do it?"

Being in a belligerent rather than thoughtful mood at that point, my retort was "I don't see why I should explain after you've sacked me". But in retrospect I wish I'd told him: "Isn't it obvious? Can you not even comprehend why? Amusement. It's a boring job that takes up the majority of my waking life. It comes with no job satisfaction, no respect from one's peers, with the condescension and contempt of your management staff, with the need to kow-tow to idiots who base their self-respect on their domination of others. You can't imagine the relief it is to get sacked, to escape from the part of my life that tries so hard to make me feel completely worthless. The bigger question here is why this makes you want to explode so. Your customer service is appalling, it takes a minimum of a month to process refund, you routinely instruct your staff to lie to customers, your courier company loses things, your warehouse sends out wrong items. Your call centre peon's email sig is the last of their concerns.

No, the reason you've turned that funny shade of red, and your eyes are so wide and hateful, is not because I've cost you any money, or because I've damaged the company's prestige. It's because everything that you are, everything that you value about yourself is centred on your role in this company, your sense of self-importance derived from petty authority. When people don't give a shit, when they don't respect you or your company, when they don't give the dues you think are coming your way from being Lord of this particular manor, it makes you so angry you could punch through a wall."

When he dropped me at reception, I sent him back to fetch some stuff I'd forgotten. He instructed the security guard not to let me back upstairs. Imagine that? I'd left the building of my own free will, I'd shown no signs of resistance or making a fuss. What did he imagine I was going to do? Set the place on fire? Run into the office spreading my subversive ideas in 30 seconds?

He might be the boss, he might earn more than me, but most authority figures are so busy worrying about what they think is owed them, they forget to derive any happiness out of it. As I walked down the road I laughed to myself, turned, then flashed him a massive grin.

Bourgeois Yoof

Derek Conway is trying very hard to become the most detested politician in the country. If it hadn't been for George Galloway bullying Jodie Marsh on Celebrity Big Brother and the fact that most people don't read the newspaper, then I think he'd be a pretty comfortable winner.

Every day he seems to raise the bar just that little bit higher. If you have something against the shamelessly greedy, then you hate Conway. If he paid anyone £40k a year to open his mail, it would be a scandal, paying three members of his family to do it is a little corruption cottage industry (or "graft" as you might call it where this any state in Sub-Saharan Africa). Then he has the brass neck to claim he's done nothing wrong!

What really sent me off the deep end was this gem that appeared in the Sunday papers: "An MP is paid less than the sous chef at the Commons. Many people may think 60 grand is the right level for an MP – most MPs would not."

Now, I must confess, I'm an evil subversive with a deep, possibly pathological, loathing of the ruling classes. So I might be naturally prone to being overemotional about this sort of thing. But why, having been caught giving his sons (and their mates!) tens of thousands of pounds to do essentially the same job I do for £6p/h, would you exacerbate the situation by claiming to be underpaid?

If there's one thing that pushes my buttons, it's when people are not only massively wealthy, but are also so detached from the world that they don't even comprehend how privileged they are.

In what experience of life could anyone look at the world and conclude that £60,000 per year, with travel and housing expenses, without the obligation to actually do anything, with full expenses, enough free time to take other work (!) and the freedom to pay your assistants basically whatever you like, then conclude that they're underpaid?!! Then imagine that the Commons sous chef gets more! The cleaners at parliament get minimum wage for god's sake!

Most MPs would do well to remember that the purpose of a wage for parliamentarians is so that working class parliamentarians could support themselves without wealthy backers, not so fat fuckers like Conway could stick themselves and their god awful children on the public money gravy train. What happened to joining politics for the principle of it? Of just feeling you could do good work as the democratic representative of your people?

(nb. Now that we've established with Mr.Conway that the going rate for a secretary is £40,000 per year, can we expect him to lobbying hard for public sector administrators to get a massive pay rise at the next round of wage talks?)

Friday

I can't go anywhere without being interfered with by politics. Such is the rapid degeneration of our country, signs of its decay and dissolution won't leave me alone. Perhaps it's just me. Maybe I'm the only one who cycles home past a fleet of taxis coming back into town to pick up drunkards thinking "look at all those taxis, think how bad the bus services round here must be?" or "Look how many people have drunk their memories of work into a hazy, barely recognisable mental bricolage...".

This morning's bus journey was worse. I started early today, so I got to fall out of the front door at ten past seven, into the dark and this morning's biting, cold wind. It wasn't just me. 7.10am on a Manchester morning has to be the most miserable time and place to exist. It was full of other condemned souls shuffling their way to various appointments. There was a young lady with a pram presumably going in search of her child's creche before continuing on to her workplace. She was clearly enjoying that wonderful development, whereby feminism gets used to steal a family's right to look after their own children, thrusting them into fulfilling yet more paid employment rather than getting men and women to share the responsibilities of the same workload more equitably.

I picked up the free paper on the bus, safe in the knowledge that they usually never have any stories that are of any significance to anyone. They'd decided to conspire against my morning by informing me only 1 in 10 white working class children achieve the national standard at GCSE, compared to 45% for the Chinese and Asians from similar backgrounds. See, there's a reason why people love producing research like this. There's nothing that our government loves to do more than maintain race as the primary problem in our society. See, if everything begins with race (and school achievements is a good place to start), then all the solutions are racial. The issue is not the level of resources, or the system as a whole, it becomes a question of shifting resources from one group to another. So, all our race relations advocates and activists can make a tidy living saying "look, my group is disadvantaged in education" and another says "my religion is discriminated against" or "we get looked over for top jobs". Some or all of which may be true in any given case. But nevertheless this isn't a problem to the government, just move some resources here and there and show how much you've invested in this or that community. Meanwhile, the group you've just taken it off gripe about positive discrimination or political correctness, or whatever. You can keep this sort of pork barrel politics going forever, continuously reinventing it without changing one little part of the system. I can't think, off the top of my head, what the reason for school achievement being different among ethnic groups is, and frankly I don't really care. The issue is the total level of resources available to and the general level of political power wielded by working class people in this country. The gap between the working class and middle class is a far bigger issue than which ethnic group is rockin' the exam boards.

So I got off the bus.

Past the Polish builders climbing out the back of a Recruitment Agency van on Devonshire Street, then the armour-plated, barbed-wired, 24-hr-surveilled Ardwick corner shop, on to the statue of John Ashton Nicholls, who apparently was enough of a “friend of the working classes” to merit a monument in his honour (but not enough for me to have ever heard of him), finally arriving at [place of work removed for sensible reasons]. Quarter to eight it was. QUARTER-TO-EIGHT. People already sat around, beavering away at their work. You can guarantee none of them were being paid; all of them putting in the hours just to get a hold of the workload, sneaking out of the house past the dog and the kids, out into the darkness to make sure that the stock database works, or that marketing pitch is ready.

As a people, we have an urgent need to learn exactly what we can let slide, and in turn exactly what we need to raise hell about. As it is, we have them completely arse-about-face.

Occupation is Always Prison

I've struggled for a few days to think of exactly what I wanted to say about what has been happening in Gaza. I wanted to express it in a way that was clear-headed and concise. This was what I came up with:

Neither side's violence is more legitimate than the other. Both engage in deliberate, or callous, targetting of civilians. Their conflict has gone on too long for one group to claim to be motivated by particular incidents. Palestinian people no more deserve to be punished for Hamas' attacks on Israel, than regular Israelis should be punished for the actions of the IDF.

The question is of peace and of justice. If one is an Israeli, then your nation takes everything, the best land, water and resources. Your people live freely, but must accept that some of their number will be hurt and killed by random attacks from their enemies. The war imposes on your life in terms of intermittent violence.

If you are a Palestinian, you are likely to live in a refugee camp, you are likely to be no more than one generation removed from having your home and property taken from you by force. Your life is in the hands of the occupier, subject to their arbitrary whims. Your daily existence is shaped by the occupation, affecting everything from your personal dignity to your material comfort. If there was a complete ceasefire tomorrow, your life would still be shaped in this way by the occupation. Peace is not the only thing that you lack, it is justice, and also freedom.

And that is why you would be unlikely to stop fighting. Why Olmert's call for collective punishment for the people of Gaza is a call for never-ending war and occupation. Because so long as the people of Palestine experience occupation, what exactly do they have to lose?

NuPoliticians

Quick look at the four young politicians recently promoted in the cabinet re-shuffle; number without an university education - 0, number not educated at Oxbridge - 1, number who had a career before politics/policy wonkery - 1, number of former trade union activists - 0, number who had been on the Left of the Party at any point of their career - 0.

So the promotions amount to four people who, for the most part, spent their entire working lives in paid political positions. None of whom had ever engaged in any serious dissent against the dominant party faction, nor seem to have any association with any social struggle whatsoever (oh, wait, as a 14 year old Andy Burnham joined the party to "support the miners").

Professionals. Groomed, polished, preened, all so they can emerge fully formed as identikit politicians. Careerists, unable to muster a single controversial moment in the entire political life between the four of them.

Now, I'm sure they're all very clever, talented people. But is this the sole demographic that new MPs represent these days? Are there not talented people who have had working lives that the rest of the population could comprehend? Who have had political experiences that go beyond simply fighting to advance through the party?

Over on Luke Akehurst's blog, he's busy crowing about the Right blitzing the NEC elections and wiping out the Soft Left, making him optimistic for the future. But how long can the Labour Party continue to narrow its constituency and still function? As it recruits more and more people like these four, and more of its traditional activists continue to pour out of the party, how can it maintain the pose of being something more than a group of third-sector apparatchiks and policy wonks on the make?

Being a Peon

(with apologies to actual bonded labourers)

One of the things that work does to us is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. We gradually come to accept some things about our lives are reasonable, that they are acceptable requests from benign employers. We get upset when our bosses' demands become excessive or degrading.

So, I've come to terms with the fact that my employer will take 45 hours of my waking life, every week, Monday to Friday, that only thirty-seven and half of those will count toward my pay cheque (the other seven and half being spent travelling to and from work, or waiting during my lunch break for work to resume). I understand that any enjoyment derived from this will be accidental on their part. Finally, as an agency worker, I've come to accept that I'm fair game for any vaguely productive task they want me to do.

Now, it's the petty things that make me furious. The overspill from those accepted limits to their authority. My attitude is nothing about what you do for living inherently makes you a better person, nothing about it gives you a divine right to boss me around. In short, being a manager makes you neither a feudal lord, a slave owner, nor an army officer.

This does not stop some people. For some, their position makes them the hacendado to my £6p/h peon. Like the conquistador landowners, their role makes them more than simply the administrator of free labourers, they are their vassals, they own them body and soul. They can abuse them as freely as they like, being great exalted chiefs, rather than mere serfs such as the myself. They can order me around not because it has anything to do with their business, but because they are the king and I am the peasant.

So the little things that wind me up: entering an open door and being shouted at for interrupting a meeting, whilst doing a task another manager had asked me to do, being banned from using the internet for personal reasons even during my lunch break (the time in which, I am at work unpaid, apparently off-work), being looked at like I'm stupid with every single request, question or suggestion. This is a list I could never complete. All of them are massively petty, none of them should get to me, but they all have in common the fact that they achieve nothing for their business. They don't make or save a single penny, they don't add to the sum of human production. They just satisfy the Lord's ego, the self of self-importance, grounded in their knowledge that somebody is their little bitch. It's idiotic, these bastards steal half your waking life, and you end up wanting to stab them to death with your pen for ordering you out of a conference room.

That's how they get you, by the end of it you stop dreaming about throwing the whole bloody lot of them out the window, and just wish that one day, or even just once, they'd treat you with a little dignity and respect, as an intelligent individual with a personality, ideas, creativity and dreams.

Psychos

In the Guardian today, a report by 5 senior NATO strategists produces the Orwellism of the day:

"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

That's right boys and girls, the way to prevent the use of WMD is to drop one. You. Couldn't. Make. It. Up.

Nick Cohen, nasty little red-baiting scumbag

Over the weekend, The Times and then The Guardian decided to break the story that Ken Livingstone lets Trot microsect Socialist Action carry his bags in exchange for lucrative public sector jobs. I must say I was pretty surprised when this happened, because, well, this has been relatively open public knowledge for a very long time. It's not actually a breaking story at all. If you'd have asked at any point in the last two years, "who are socialist action", I would answer "that Trot sect that fetches and carries for Red Ken".

There's an election looming, so The Times gets to publish a nice story with the wonderfully sinister title Ken Livingstone’s aides ‘in secret Marxist cell’, win-win for the pro-Tory newspaper. Par for the course really. Then, Nick Cohen weighs in with this and it is far from pretty. Obviously a Trot must have bullied him at school of something, but he has this kind of fury at the Far Left that usually only out-and-out fascists can sustain (Tories usually treat them as fairly laughable then drag them out as convenient scapegoats from time to time, whereas Fash tend to think we run the country).

The rant starts in familiar territory for Cohen, outlining the lunacy of the Workers' Revolutionary Party : "In return for supporting the Arab dictatorships, it embraced the fascist conspiracy theory. Its newspaper announced that Jews secretly controlled American foreign policy, the Labour party, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, the BBC and bureaucracies as obscure as the Manpower Services Commission. They ran everything - except the Workers' Revolutionary party.

The cult's main purpose, however, was to worship the personality of its great leader, Gerry Healy, a squat, bombastic Irishman and a rapist as near as damn it. In 1985, 26 women members accused him of 'cruel and systematic debauchery' on party premises. "

No doubting that the WRP was a disgusting organisation, guilty of all the above. But you have to ask, why are these details included here. None of this is original research, the same stuff appeared in Cohen's recently published book. In fact it appeared in the exact same fashion, part of a disjointed attack on an assortment of variably related left wing groups. The point, of course, is to imply that all of the far left and the individuals contained therein, are exactly the same. Use the WRP as a preface, then start talking about your Red target of choice.

This time, it's sinister entrists Socialist Action. Nevermind actually examining their politics, or their political behaviour (they function openly, being named after their magazine which publishes their opinions, their support and links to Livingstone being clear enough to anyone who bothers looking), just write about the WRP and smear everyone by association.

The essence of the case against McCarthyism and red-baiting in general is this. I'm entitled to hold whatever extremist views I like about the world and in a free society, it should be up to my conscience whether I choose to hold revolutionary views and whether I want to promote them. Livingstone's politics (and for that matter, those of Socialist Action) should be judged on their own merits, on what he's done (or not done) for Londoners, not on their being inherently appalling because they are *gasp* Marxists (how Marxist the SA are these days, given their and Livingstone's behaviour is debateable). Using the epithet "fellow-traveller" to smear people by association with ideas, rather than actually engaging with their own views is a coward's trick, a cheap attack by a commentator who makes his living as a pathetic shill for the right of the Labour Party.

I don't like Livingstone, nor Socialist Action. But here, Cohen basically implies that all revolutionaries are as low as fascists, that all the Reds are beneath contempt. All the hard working, sincere and committed socialists and trade unionists are as bad as Nazi bootboys. All the people who've done more for democratic socialism than a thousand sneering liberal journos ever could. Those people will continue to take risks for people around them (like the still sacked Karen Reissmann), whilst Cohen continues to pocket his no-doubt generous Guardian salary, to the cheers of the Decent Left blog circle-jerks.

Sweet Sweet Justice

I do not live in the most pleasant of areas. Reading this article about Salford, I couldn't help but feel that I recognised at least some of the circumstances, even if their case was more extreme. An occupational hazard of wandering round where I live is getting bothered by seemingly fearless kids. Everyone under 16 to me seems potentially to have that toxic lack of both morality and consequential thinking. The other night I was walking home on my own and spied two boys aged around 10/11. I could tell what would happen when they were still 20 metres away. Swaggering along, arms flying, putting on their best hardman gait. The littler one bumped off me as they came past, I turned and the slightly bigger one exclaimed "I'll bang you out!"

Now neither of them had done me any real harm, besides the fairly feeble threat of violence. But it brought me back to that lack of consequential thinking. Ordinarily any human being that threatens to hit a bigger, stronger person, should expect to be swiftly taught a thorough lesson in who they should and shouldn't mess with. But these kids were just continuously learning the lesson that they could basically do whatever the hell they liked. Now, obviously it's wrong to dole out punishment beatings to little'uns, but I couldn't help thinking that getting them to associate petty thuggery with getting a decent kicking would be a community service. Still, long term, we're just teaching the lesson that might makes right.

The Left has a fairly major schizophrenia about crime, justice and violence. For many the starting point is that crime is a social creation, that revenge is an unworthy component of the justice system, and that rehabilitation should take priority over punishment. On the other hand, we have the fetishisation of violent retribution in political action. Almost every revolutionary I have ever met (including myself) can outline lurid fantasies of exacting revenge on our enemies come the big day. You could just put this down to good old fashioned frustration fuelled bloodlust, but I think there's something deeper to it than that. No one puts a theoretical opposition to execution up against the righteous fury of the people when they dealt with say, Mussolini, or Ceaucescu. Both criminal dictators, they inflicted far more suffering than could ever be visited upon them in revenge.

Isn't there an instinctive justice to those slayings? On some level didn't they give the communities he wronged satisfaction? They definitively paid for their respective crimes and it must of (emotionally at least) helped to heal some of the wounds of the people he wronged. Anyone with an appreciation for what he did can only feel comfort from knowing his demise.

Similarly, think of all the bastards who escaped scot free, the Pinochets, the Duvaliers, the Gonis of this world, people who lived on in power or even past their tyrannies, people who were never made to face their crimes. All those Nazis reintegrated into postwar Germany, all those Italian fascists that were never made responsible for their actions. It offends the soul, it creates a sincere, deep anger when you think about it. But what? The people too unimportant to make Nuremberg never again ran concentration camps, they weren't repeat offenders in the invasion of Poland. They were rehabilitated. The only purpose in punishing them would be to make us feel better.

Punishment. Revenge. These are acts to assure the community that balance has been restored, that an injury has been inflicted to even the score. They are for the benefit of society's soul, rather than the promotion of our collective material well-being. In retrospect, rehabilitation is a very individualistic notion of justice. It places the perpetrator at the centre of the process, asking, "what can we do to make this human being function properly?" The benefit to society is the hope that they will henceforth treat us better, but the choice remains with the perpetrator.

Crime, where it is worthy of the name, is committed against wider social solidarity, it is betrayel of one members responsibility to refrain from harming the rest of his community. What has occurred is a breach of our collective moral contract. Why would socialists defend an individuals right to this kind of harm, any more than we would defend the system's right to it? We owe nothing more to the anti-social criminal than we do to the scab, and as society becomes increasingly atomised, and social solidarity breaks down, the political choices that the left makes on crime, will increasingly come to define how seriously it will be taken in our communities.

Neo-Luddite and Proud

Any well-informed socialist will not need to be educated in the historical injustice done to the followers of King/Captain/General Ludd. Remembered in the perjorative "Luddite", they will go down in popular myth as representing the irrational and self-interested hatred of progress. Those that stand immemorial in opposition to the betterment of the human species.

Yet Luddism represented a noble progressive spirit. They smashed machines not because technology enslaved them, but because men did. Who could truly stand in opposition to the development of productive forces? It should be an unambiguous good that a human being should become able to produce necessities and luxuries with greater ease, hopefully freeing us from the drudgery of satisfying our means of subsistence, releasing the unspent creativity of leisure.

Yet 200 years later humanity continues to tread the same path, the more we invent, the greater our productivity, the more human beings we are determined to throw on the scrap heap. When we invent time-saving devices, people go in search of the dole queue, if we develop tools to connect us to the world it just means we can knock out another couple of hours more work on the daily commute.

The true Luddite blames not the marvellous technology that we have access to, but the system by which these creations are rendered an affliction rather than a blessing. We demand that instead of laying us off, you give us all another hour in bed. Instead of working for free on the train, we want that time taken off our normal working day. What we want, what we demand, is that the development of humanity works for us, not for the people who own the world already.

I'm proud to be a Luddite, an ardent enthusiast for new technology, it's ultimate defender in the face of all those that would abuse it. I hereby found the New Luddite Army of Liberation and invite you all to join.

General Ludd, on behalf of himself, Rob Ray, Alice Kershaw and Joni Smit.

hat tip: Thomas Pynchon in 1984

On the Payroll

On the whole, I find it difficult to bother following political scandals. Partly this is because as a weirdo ultra-leftist politicians in general are all written off as careerist, corrupt scumbags. The system when it functions "correctly" is so brutal, so pro-rich and anti-working class, that when the media goes silly over someone breaking the rules my first reaction is to think "is that the worst you've got on him? Seriously?!? He supported the war for fuck sake!"

There's another reason actually. Besides giving our political class a pass on their official activities, the media always misses the point in corruption scandals. Take Peter Hain's recent trouble. The impropriety the papers have got their teeth into is the way he received the money, funnelled through this strange "think-tank" and not declared it to the appropriate bureaucrat. Take the Guardian as an example:

"A defiant Peter Hain made clear last night that he has no intention of resigning over missing donations totalling £103,000 that were used to fund his campaign for Labour's deputy leadership, despite questions about a shadowy think-tank that provided the funds."

The problem that Hain faces according to the Guardian was the donation process, not that he received the money in the first place. So when Hain says "just an administrative error", he's right. According to the rules of the game, he's allowed to take the money, that's not the scandal. So what would he have to win by hiding it? Fuck, the ability to solicit funds from wealthy businessmen is probably a vote winner in today's Labour Party!

But, hang on, what the hell is Isaac Kaye, the former chairman of NHS drugs supplier Norton Healthcare, doing giving him £200,000 for his Deputy Leadership bid? What the hell does some random businessman care who wins that contest?

There are legitimate reasons for individuals to donate money to political parties and politicians. If you agree with their policies and want to support their electoral activity, then that's your choice. The problem comes when elected representatives can be bought and sold by the highest bidder.

Putting aside the ludicrous assertion that Mr.Kaye really really agrees with Hain's politics, and thinks it so important that he win this relatively obscure race, that he'll fund it to the tune of £200k, what does he want in exchange for his money? When he pops in to congratulate his mate Pete on his victory, or commiserate the cabinet minister's defeat, what is the next topic of conversation?

Kaye wants influence in the cabinet. Hain is a channel for that. The latter might well delude himself that the support comes free of strings, but Kaye sure as hell won't. He's engaged in a very expensive form of networking, and what he gets in exchange is going to be the kind of access that the average constituent or welfare recipient could never expect. A fair and friendly ear to every question and suggestion he sends Hain's way.

British politicians being for sale is off the political agenda, it is barely ever at the heart of these stories. With the cash for honours scandal (as I wrote at the time) the focus was on legal impropriety.

That time, in defence of Blair, Roy Hattersley wrote he "would be astonished, as well as mortified, if he had committed any of the crimes and misdemeanours about which there is so much dubious speculation... But much as I disagree with many of his policies and most of his political philosophy, I have not the slightest doubt about his personal probity. He is instinctively too respectable to break the letter of the law, and too sensible. Why risk his place in history by suggesting that a prospective peer and party donor falsify his submission to the Lords’ scrutiny committee? [my emphasis]"

But so what? Our ex Prime Minister gave favours to people who gave him money. It takes an astonishing amount of credulity to believe he hasn't been bought. It requires the reader to invest in the fantasy that it was mere coincidence that Labour happens to think its wealthy donors are worthy of peerages (or, perhaps, that donating money to the Labour Party is, in itself, an action worthy of national recognition in their eyes!). Technically breaking the law should be the least of our worries. Fact is, you can buy politicians in this country, and the likes of us haven't got that kind of cash.

Hang Your Head London

Worryingly, around 44% of London voters apparently intend to endorse Boris Johnson for Mayor. Consider that the man's sole redeeming feature is that he's a bit of a clown. His politics, on the rare occasions that he expresses them, are rank, the kind of reactionary shite uttered by Home Counties Colonel Blimps up and down the country.

But of course, Boris' policies aren't why his poll numbers are so high (far higher than the first preferences garnered by his slightly less daft predecessor). He's doing well because he's a celebrity, a famous well-liked buffoon, who puts on a turn as a charmingly befuddled weirdo on the television. The state of politics in the capital has been reduced to mass admiration of one man's comical eccentricity.

But, then, you could argue that once upon a time the incumbent, Ken Livingstone, benefited from this kind of attraction. Between his last stint on the GLC and becoming Mayor, Red Ken more than matched Boris in the kitsch celebrity politician stakes, appearing numerous times on the show that made the latter famous; Have I Got News For You. He's even on a Blur song for Christ's Sake. The fuss about the Labour nomination for Mayor was at least in part fuelled by Ken's high profile as celeb loveable cockney, a Lahndahner's Lahndahner. He was seen as the natural candidate, the one that was most London, the one who deserved it. When Labour fiddled the selection process to keep him out, he came out looking the victim.

When he'd won it, Ken had the chance to change all that. To put aside all the comedy cockney bollocks and try forcing some real political change. If you think about it, no political figure has had a bigger chance to challenge this Labour Party from the Left. Having won just about the most important political position outside the cabinet, and historically, doing so outside the Labour Party, and being clearly positioned to their Left, who else had a better chance of building an alternative to them?

And what did Red Ken do with this opportunity? Well, he jettisoned the vast majority of what made his politics distinctive, marched straight back into the contemptible Labour party and did his very best to look like a respectable careerist. Of course, the leadership of that party will never trust him with anything more significant than the Mayorship, for which their backing is more of a liability than an asset.

Livingstone has downgraded the political element of his role. As a Labour loyalist, he has become just another administrator. His job becomes implementing government policy as efficiently as possible. Trouble is "competence" as a political quality is pretty vague, it easily becomes a sort of proxy for "personality". Of course, everyone wants their representatives to be good at their jobs, but when it comes to political positions really what they should be doing is communicating the political aspirations of their constituents.

Ken versus Boris is the contest that Livingstone's politics over the past few years have brought about, rather than a meaningful contest over what people want for the capital. And if you end up engineering a popularity contest, rather than a policy discussion, you surely take your chances?

Scared yet?

Well, I'm certainly scared of Rudy Giuliani anyway...

yet another individual case

My ongoing disgust at this government's asylum policy knows no limits. I could quite easily post every single day on somebody that this system has let down or persecuted. So I won't dwell on this individual case, where the 3 year old daughter of a Nigerian Human Rights Activist is being threatened with deportation to the US (where she was born), after 10 months separated from her mother.

I just want to comment on the Home Office response, a familiar refusal to comment on individual cases. Why is it that the government, the author of UK immigration and asylum policy, the people putting pressure on the courts to deport more people and deport them faster (a system that has already got people beaten and even killed), gets to avoid discussing the effects of their callousness? Why should they be allowed to stick to boasting about x number of people being deported, or dropping asylum applications, without dealing with the fall-out, the human cost of what they're doing?

ethnic elections

My knowledge of Kenyan politics is fairly limited, but can anyone else feel the contempt expressed by rich world commentators in describing the supposed ethnic backgrounds/allegiances of the participants? It's a multi-purpose set of imagery, portray everything as being the product of irrational pre-historic inter-tribal conflict, and then bemoan the inability of African nations to form competent, corruption free governments. Thus they paint the picture of a normal political constituent apparently too lacking in sophistication to separate their interests from some "tribal elder" (who, surpise! Looks, acts and speaks like any western politician, quite free from the regalia you would assume such a position to necessitate).

None of this constitutes analysis, and is usually based on spurious assertion, rather than any kind of rational discussion with participants. The media just re-explores the same set of stereotypes, based on some kind of immutable law of ethnic war, like as soon as someone adopts any given identity they immediately place themselves at the disposal of their leaders to mobilise for genocide.

Luckily for us, the media has a simple formula for all disputed elections so we can all understand where to file the results:

In Eastern Europe, all elections feature: (a) A pseudo-Soviet strongman sympathetic to Russia versus (b) a liberal democratic pro-western moderniser. If (a) wins, the result was rigged, if (b) wins hail a new era of openness and development.

In Africa, all elections are more or less rigged, because all African leaders are corrupt, however, if the winning candidate is a favoured neo-liberal, this corruption becomes "some concerns were raised about the poll". If the rigged election is contested raise the prospect of civil war motivated by tribal allegiances.

In South America, all candidates are either pro-US or anti-US. The latter will be a dangerous populist and demagogue, exploiting the poverty of his people to stir up hatred, thus illustrated by a photo of them with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

This saves us the trouble of dealing with the particular political and social histories of all those pesky foreign countries. Which handily means we can ignore the impact of rich world countries on their history, meaning we don't have to question the impact of colonial policy on Kenya, or how de-colonisation was deliberately managed in such a way as to promote tribal conflict, starting with how Britain accumulated colonial bureaucrats and functionaries, promoting systems of feudal patronage and nepotism. Then, the way in which "responsible" groups were found among these administrations through whom international finance could retain control, whom could form a political class, distributing wealth and power according to their own loyalties, creating divisive notions of exclusion and favouritism. The same networks through which they rig elections, so they can continue to support the same corrupt system.

The smiley-beardy face of capitalism

Richard Branson is your perfect sort of New Labour capitalist. The sort of smarmy, smart-casual, PR savvy wanker that populates the modern world. We're supposed to like him, because he's all young and exciting, gives to charidee and all that bollocks. So when he says stuff like this:

"For some of you, more pay than Virgin Atlantic can afford may be critical to your lifestyle and if that is the case you should consider working elsewhere"

To employees who are striking for the industry's average wage, somewhere in my little materialist brain a little fellow keeps shouting "I told you so!" However genial your face fuzz, when the eyes are fixed on the bottom line you cut a liberal and he'll bleed like a tory. Just like the late Anita Roddick, the union-busting hippy, or Starbucks' questionably sourced beans.

He can stick his "smaller, friendlier company "up his arse.

Temp life

Over the course of being a student, and then being a graduate with first one, and then a second almost entirely useless degree, I have had a great deal of experience in being a temp. In the last half decade I've been a postal worker, shop assistant, cleaner, van driver, secretary, customer service agent, just about everything you could think of.

For me, one advantage with temping was that employers generally expected a degree of incompetence and lethargy from you. The only real exception to this was in the event that you wanted the job on a permanent basis, in which case the promise of stability was held over your head by management as long as they felt they could get away with.

For all this the social content of agency work should be obvious to anyone. Any worker dependent on their wages to survive has no rights in the face of an employer who can sack them with no reason. Any slack existing in the system will inevitably, over time, tighten.

When I started, back in sleepy Suffolk, it appeared to me that temping was regarded by most employers as an aberration. A temp was brought in because someone permanent was not possible or necessary. It did not form part of their usual hiring policy (not least because of the extra expense entailed). However, what employers will tolerate during a brief hiatus almost certainly won't do in terms of their long-term strategies. So when I began temping in Manchester earlier this year, I noticed some new arrangements.

Workloads were larger; permanent members of staff have job descriptions, which if fulfilled constitute an adequate job performance, but temps belong to everybody, if they finish the tasks to which they are nominally attached they are supposed to go in search of further work. Now, I like the feeling that if I work hard and complete something then it's done with, Nothing more distressing than the knowledge that there is a never ending supply of chores, no matter how furiously I labour. And, since I'm not naturally pre-disposed to skiving, and therefore unskilled at stringing out tasks to avoid further ones, I tend toward brief spurts of activity followed by long periods of avoiding authority figures. Managers work this out after a while, and after a couple of weeks I was terminated.

This was followed by evaluation by my employer. Now, bear in mind the rights of the permanent employee here. Referees are not allowed to give prejudicial references, they can only indicate dissatisfaction by omission. Nor am I obliged to allow future employers access to potentially damaging referees. As a temp though, the evaluation system gives employers the chance to further punish workers by damaging their future employment prospects, by souring their record with the agency, a sort of round-about-way of blacklisting.

So, following a 2 week placement in which I was never made entirely aware of what exactly I was supposed to be doing, where my employer made no attempt to discuss any problems, I was basically placed on a final warning. Another poor performance and I would be placed on the agency blacklist and never offered further work (a small disaster in that the pay was roughly 50% higher other city agencies). When I was given another, largely unsuitable placement, with a manager with unrealistic expectations (he wanted to be sent a housing officer, and instead received a secretary), who terminated my placement after I called in sick, I was struck-off the agency's list, never to be offered work again.

At this point I received a further eye-opener. Signing up for a large multinational, commercial recruitment agency, I was given a pep-talk by one of their agents. The expectations in temping, he said, had changed. Once upon a time people were cut a bit of slack, as befitted people being badly paid, untrained employees. These days, as temps were an integral part of hiring strategy, employers wanted more. What they really wanted was the following: temps never to be sick, temps never to be late, temps never to slack-off, temps not to attend job interviews, temps not to finish their placements before the agreed dates (the agent informed me that his temps had been terminated for all these reasons).

All the advantages of “flexibility” were to cut one-way. The employer was to be flexible to terminate you whenever they liked, for whatever they liked, for reasons that, should they treat permanent employees in a similar way, would see them in front of an Industrial Tribunal, and the temp was essentially free to do exactly as he was told. All whilst receiving the paltry wage of £6 an hour.

Temping then is pretty Victorian, barely a step above gathering workers each morning in the town square and pointing out the lucky few who get work today. This kind of hiring is increasingly the norm as companies discover that these days they can maintain agency employees for cheaper than permanent ones, even with the contractor's mark-up. In my first placement for the new agency, every single member of the team was a temp, and management openly talked about making us compete for the promise of a proper contract. Subsequently, two days before setting off home for the Christmas break, I was once again terminated, this time apparently due to over-staffing (at least, I wasn't given a negative review this time).

So, over the course of 4 placements, it was made clear to me, both verbally and by illustration, that I could not expect to maintain employment whilst feeling entitled to take unpaid sickdays, unpaid holiday, indulge in any degree of idleness at work, attend interviews for permanent positions or quit any position before the agreed period (though, of course, management felt free to terminate me at any time, regardless of the supposed length of placement).

This insecurity is not just an issue for those of us unfortunate enough to be without permanent work. Every temp is one less person in secure employment, one more person proving to employers what their leverage over the casually employed really means.

Organisation, what dragged much of the working class out of these conditions over past decades becomes increasingly difficult, not because the temp is worse off than his predecessors, but because not everybody shares the same conditions, making solidarity across entire workplaces trickier.

Over time, we will all be swamped by this rising tide, unregulated labour market competition has always and will always suit the employer more than the worker, tending toward the worst conditions and the worst pay. The question is how far will we travel down this road before somebody makes a meaningful stand?